White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

the cliffs, but it felt like a long time before she’d walked long enough to glimpse the sea crashing and breaking against the shore, foam eating into stone.England and France had been part of the same landmass, her father had told her, until prised apart by floods and erosion.
    She was not sure what time it was; when she looked at the sun she could understand that it had changed position but she did not dare to say how much. There were cruise ships coming in, vast white curved blocks like severed feet shuffling across the water. She waved halfhearted welcome. She felt the wind lift her hair above her head. In daylight the water was so blue that the colour seemed like a lie and she leant over, hoping for a moment of shift that would allow her to understand what was beneath the sea. Was this where the goodlady lived? That was how you caught a magical creature, you found out where it lived and you laid traps for it.
    Her hands were pinned behind her and she was knocked down by a deft kick to the back of her knee. All this was done in complete silence. She lay and frowned into the grass, began to get up and was stopped by the fact of a knife held near her face. It was so sharp. Where it cut, her flesh would hang neatly but separated, like soft dominoes.
    “Oh God,” said Miranda. “Come on. Really?”
    A girl she recognised but had never spoken to was crouched by her, holding the knife. She was one of the Kosovan girls. The girl hissed at her. “Why don’t you stay away from our boys?”
    Miranda said, “May I get up, please?” She was lying on her front and it was hurting her neck to have to look up so steadily.
    “No, you certainly may not,” the girl said, mimicking Miranda’s accent. Then she grew serious again. “Did you hear me? I said, why don’t you stay away from our boys?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Another girl came into view, looking so much like the first girl that Miranda thought she might be hallucinating.
    “We saw you,” the second girl said. “You and Amir, you and Farouk, you and Agim, you and whoever. Then they end up getting stabbed.”
    Miranda thought about screaming. But she’d never been one for raising her voice, and an unpractised scream would just dissolve into seawater.
    Instead she said, “Listen, I really don’t know what or whom you are talking about. You have mistaken me for someone else.”
    Tijana appeared behind the first two girls.
    Miranda said, “Tijana—”
    “Agim is my
cousin
.” She said it flatly, and she said it in such a way that Miranda understood that these girls really and truly meant to hurt her. She struggled to her feet, and the girls were around in a tight circle, their arms linked. Their hair, which looked so rigid, was soft and greasy and synthetically perfumed. Miranda gagged, and they rocked her, the three of them, rocked her close enough to the cliff edge to make her stutter, “Don’t, please don’t.”
    “Agim is my cousin,” Tijana repeated.
    “Who is Agim?” Miranda asked, desperately.
    Silence and adamant eyes.
    “I’ve been away for months,” Miranda babbled. “Doing my lessons in bed. I’ve been . . . away. If you’re talking about the stabbings I’ve no idea . . .”
    Tijana looked into Miranda’s eyes and seemed, for the first time, unsure.
    “She’s lying, man. It’s her,” one of the other girls said, then, to Miranda, “Now you tell us how the fuck you’re involved with this or I cut you.”
    “Hold on,” Tijana said. “Maybe she means it. It may be. She wasn’t at school for months.”
    Miranda took a close look at the back of her mind while the other two girls considered. She thought she might faint. Whoever Agim was, she didn’t want him to come. Because if these girls thought she was someone else, then Agim would too. She had to get away. The girls lessened their grip on her while they argued, and Miranda stepped out of her shoes. Miranda bent over and retched and when they