White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi Page A

jumped clear, she ran.
    She pushed and kicked Eliot’s bike so that it rattled far ahead of her until the way was smooth enough for her to scramble onto it, nearly tipping it over, and she pedalled harder even than her heart was thumping. She didn’t know where she was going; she had forgotten the way home. She weaved through Market Square, narrowly avoiding riding straight into the fountain, then she passed through side streets that branched off the high street, slowing and remembering herself once she was sure she’d lost Tijana and the other girls. She made her way home and sat on the flint steps, freezing and mourning her beautiful, black pointy-toed court shoes, whose leather would be destroyed by the inquisitive tongues of the sheep that wandered on the cliffs.
    When she finally went into the house, there were three cardboard boxes on the staircase that led up from the ground floor. Sade, the new housekeeper, and her father were arguing and laughing in the dining room.
    “Sade. First of all let me tell you that you can’t put pepper in the baked beans, you really can’t.”
    “Why not? They don’t taste of anything.”
    Miranda looked inside one of the boxes, not knowing what she expected to see—garish prints, a Bible, a huge cross—but the box was packed solid with books. Dickens and the Brontës, even. She picked a couple of them up—each had a huge white
S
slashed across the title page.
    Two houseguests picked their way around the first of the boxes on their way downstairs. They were a black couple from London who had enthused about their love of British history while Miranda had swayed, glassy-eyed and dead on her feet, and drawn red circles around the Cinque Ports on a map of Kent for them.
    In order to avoid a repeat occurrence, she sidestepped into the sitting room and looked through the old newspapers for the issue of
The Dover Post
that Eliot had handed her when Luc had brought her back from the clinic. There was Tijana’s cousin’s name, Agim Hajdari. He’d sustained serious wounds but had recovered. He’d been found curled up in a ball between a wall and a tree on Priory Lodge road, arms crossed over himself. As if to hold his insides in, Miranda thought.
    After some time she noticed Eliot had come home. He was standing in the sitting-room doorway with his arms crossed.
    “I’m sorry I took your bike! But I think it was fated. Some girls tried to kill me,” she said, as soon as she saw him. “And the bike revealed itself as my trusty getaway steed.”
    By the time she’d explained properly, he was pacing the room worriedly. “We have to sort this out,” he said. “These girls sound deluded enough to keep coming after you, especially if . . . anything else happens.”
    “What shall I do?” Miranda asked.
    “Two choices. Number one—Martin and I go after these girls and beat them with sticks—okay, you’re not keen, fair enough—number two, we talk to Tijana tomorrow and meet this cousin of hers and get him to tell them that you’ve got nothing to do with all of this.”
    He stopped and looked at her carefully.
    “Because you haven’t got anything to do with this,” he reminded her. “I mean, what? The very idea of it is . . .”
    Miranda crumpled the sheets of newspaper on her lap.
    “I am very concerned,” she said, in a small voice, “that this will not end well. They seemed convinced that they’d seen me before.”
    Eliot pulled her to her feet. “There is no way, Miri,” he said. “No way in the world.” Grey eyes convince so well, burying the person they look at in truth like flung pebbles. But Miranda could never do that with her eyes; convince. Anyway she was never sure about anything.
    “Come and have some dinner,” he said.
    “In a minute,” she said. “Go. I’ll see you in there.”
    “The new housekeeper is interesting,” he said, on his way out of the room. “She asked Dad if he had any shirts he didn’t want, and now she’s slashing his old