Read Skeletal for Free Online Page B

everywhere. Dancing around my head. Spreading out across the floor.
    The mirrors were a thousand beads of light reflecting across the walls, the floor, the ceiling. And I was part of it all. I could no longer tell where the floor stopped and I began.
    And then I blinked and it was gone.
    I looked at the mirror again, and saw only my reflection staring back at me.
    I washed my hands and then quickly ran to my class. I was a few minutes late, but that was all.
    The entire episode only took a couple of minutes from beginning to end.
     
    ***
     
    I didn’t say anything to anyone. I followed Vila to her house after school, not even bunking off. That experience was put right out of my mind.
    Vila may have said that her parents didn’t have the money to pay for a tutor, but after seeing her house it was harder to believe. It was huge. Not only huge but full-on opulent. When I walked between the Roman pillars (bloody pillars!) into the two storey entrance hall I felt like I was the downstairs part of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ and I was out of bounds.
    Even the street on the way into the house seemed magical and clean to me. There were concrete walls sweeping their way into the main street, Northgardens written a foot high on each side. The light fittings looked like gas lamps from the twenties. Wrought iron with tiny panes of glass.
    ‘Showhome,’ Vila whispered to me. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but my parents are renting and they got it cheap ’cause half the neighbourhood treks through each week. You should see the list of chores they have to do each day so it looks lived in, but not too lived in.’
    I could handle chores.
    The kitchen was all shining stainless steel and glassy marble. Beige carpets that no one would ever think about stubbing their cigarettes out on spread out across the floors, dotted with landing pads of varnished wood.
    Not like my state house by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t even know if they should have the same noun to describe them.
    Vila put some plain biscuits on a tray, along with a couple of slices of some cake heavy with fruit, nuts and chocolate, and then pulled a bottle of coke out of the fridge.
    She lifted her eyebrows at some glasses behind a display pane of leadlight glass, and I picked up two and followed her back through the entry area, and then upstairs to her bedroom.
    It was also clean and big. Vila spread out a plastic rug on the floor and then put the food and drink down on it.
    When I raised by eyebrows, she said, ‘I can’t run the risk of spilling anything. Mum’d kill me. And we’d get kicked out.’
    Okay, so maybe not so ideal.
    I helped her with the maths questions from the day. We’d started to work through the beginnings of algebraic manipulation, made harder by Vila’s inability to add, divide, subtract or multiply in her head. She whipped out the calculator so often that I started to get confused myself. But when I suggested doing it in her head she just looked at me with a startled expression as though I was talking another language.
    ‘Vila? I’ve fixed up your kilt.’
    We’d left my damaged skirt on the ironing board in the lounge.
    There was a tread of feet on the stairs coming up, and I tensed, waiting for a glorious mother from a thousand sitcoms to come through the door and find her daughter’s new friend lacking.
    Instead, a mess of curly dark brown hair and thick obscuring eye glasses came through the door. An old cardy in a patchwork of colours that really shouldn’t go together – David Bain anyone? – covered a T-shirt with the neck stretched out and black cords.
    ‘Mum,’ Vila said as she jumped up, ‘Heard of knocking?’
    ‘I called out. Who’s this?’
    She peered at me, took in my half-naked state and handed across my kilt. I stood up as well, took the skirt, and extended my other hand. Vila almost killed herself laughing and I nudged her in the ribs and pulled my hand back without shaking anything.
    ‘I’m Daina. I’m in