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then who was she?

4
The Museum of Unfinished Stories

    W HEN I GOT BACK TO the house, mum was sniffing around in the living room.
    ‘Was it next-door’s cat?’ she asked, coming into the kitchen.
    ‘Oh, er . . . yeah,’ I said.
    Mum picked up the water-spray bottle that she used to mist her pot plants. ‘Well, I can’t smell anything. But if you see it again give it a squirt with this.’ She went into the
living room with her cup of tea, leaving me alone.
    I stood for a moment, trying to calm down. My breath was coming too quickly, like I’d just run really fast, and my knees felt all shaky. I put a hand out in front of me and saw it was
trembling. Who was the girl I’d just seen, the not Alice?
    After a minute, I went into the living room. Mum was sitting down with Twitch curled up on her lap. I blinked, remembering the reason I’d gone outside in the first place – Tabitha
– and wondered if she would come back, half wishing I had shut her in the attic. I pushed the thought away. Talking cat or not, this was more important.
    ‘Mum?’ I said. My voice came out thin and squeaky. I coughed. ‘Mum, something strange just happened.’
    Mum dunked a biscuit in her tea. ‘What’s that, love?’
    ‘When I went outside just now, I saw Alice. Only it wasn’t Alice.’
    ‘Is this one of your riddles?’ Mum said through a mouthful of biscuit. ‘Because you know I’m hopeless—’
    ‘It’s not a riddle.’ My hands were clammy with sweat. ‘There was a girl standing on the corner by the shop who looked like Alice. Exactly like Alice. Except for her eyes.
They . . .’ I hesitated.
    Could it have been a trick of the light? I’d been so sure of what I’d seen a few minutes ago, but now I was starting to doubt myself.
    ‘They what?’ said Mum.
    ‘Maybe I imagined it.’
    Mum waited, saying nothing.
    ‘They were green.’
    Mum rolled her eyes. ‘People’s eyes don’t change colour, Midge. Maybe it was someone who just really looked like Alice.’
    I shook my head. ‘You don’t get it. She was Alice. Everything about her, except her eyes. Her hair colour, the way she frowned. But . . . it wasn’t her.
She didn’t know me, didn’t recognise me. And she said she wasn’t Alice.’
    ‘Oh, Midge, don’t be daft. Of course it was her,’ said Mum. ‘Playing a trick, or doing some sort of weird research for whatever story she’s working on. She’ll
come whizzing through that door in a minute and shut herself up in the attic, writing for hours. You know how she gets.’
    ‘But her eyes—’ I began.
    ‘Contact lenses,’ said Mum. ‘Although she shouldn’t be messing around with those when her vision is perfectly good. I’ll be having words with her about
that.’
    Mum took another biscuit out of the tin and crunched it, dropping crumbs on Twitch’s head.
    Perhaps Alice was just messing about. I wanted to believe what Mum was saying, but she hadn’t seen Alice last night. I went upstairs, chewing my lip as I looked at the ladder up to the
attic. Then, before I really knew why, I started to climb it, pulling myself through the hatch.
    I went to Alice’s desk. On it were college prospectuses, with some pages bookmarked. Mum had been on at Alice for months to pick a course, but so far Alice had hardly looked at them.
She’d decided to take a year out between school and college to write, and I knew Mum was worried that she might not go at all.
    I reached for a stack of notebooks, flicking through a few. Some were dog-eared and grubby, filled with pages of character notes, story settings, spidergrams, flow charts and stories, each with
Alice’s trademark ‘THE END’ printed and underlined where a story finished. A few were blank and unused. I put them back and lifted up a folder. The knot of worry tightened in my
tummy when I saw what was underneath it.
    Alice’s purse. I picked it up and opened it. There was some money, her bank and library cards, and a little photo of the