I hissed after him. Then I strolled back to Henry’s door, sat on the doorstep, and devoted all my attention to licking my paw. My own door was right opposite, but I didn’t feel in the least like going back there, never mind how tired I might be.
I was being tormented by dreadful nightmares every night—nightmares in which Mr. Snuggles was alive and sobbing bitterly, or I myself put out roots and mutated into a bush, whereupon Mrs. Spencer, Florence, and Grayson all worked me over with a pair of scissors. Out here in the corridor, it was so much more peaceful than in my own dreams. And I had any amount of time to practice shape-changing.
With an elegant movement, I coiled the jaguar tail around my feet. Guilty feelings, shame, and rage were obviously just the thing to help with concentration, or my concentration, at least. The jaguar was one of my easiest tricks now, like the barn owl, and today I’d even managed to turn into a breath of air. Before that, I’d hovered invisibly along the corridors for some time, feeling pleased with myself. Past Mom’s door (MATTHEWS’S MOONSHINE ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS—OPEN FROM MIDNIGHT TO DAWN) and Mia’s door, which I recognized because at the moment it was guarded by a waist-high version of Fuzzy-Wuzzy. Fuzzy-Wuzzy was Mia’s ancient cuddly toy, a floppy-eared rabbit that she had loved to bits when she was a little girl. He looked that way, too, with his nibbled ears, only one eye (the other had been left behind in Hyderabad, India), and wearing faded dungarees that had once been yellow. Unfortunately he wasn’t at all cute blown up to his present size, but rather scary. The giant Fuzzy-Wuzzy was sitting outside a wooden door painted violet blue and, oddly, was holding a fox’s tail in one paw, maybe to frighten visitors off. I looked at him hard, wondering at the same time how come I could see all this when I was just a breath of air, and of course a breath of air doesn’t have eyes. I should have left that out (the wondering, I mean), because, oops, suddenly my sense of gravity was back and I dropped to the floor with a bump. Never mind, I knew now that I could do it, and I felt proud of that. When Henry came along, I’d show him right away.
Where was he this time? Hopefully no one was keeping him from sleeping again. In his family, his was always the first name to be shouted when they had a problem. And unfortunately they always seemed to have a problem just when Henry and I were embarking on a serious conversation. I stretched and began sharpening my claws on his doorpost. When Spot did that, someone always jumped up to let him out.
Henry had been a great comfort to me this week. To be honest, he was my only comfort. All the others were treating Mia and me like a couple of lepers, me even more than Mia because according to Mom and Lottie I was “the elder and more sensible sister and ought never to have allowed it.” Mia said she’d have done it, anyway, even without me, and I was inclined to believe her. All the same, of course Mom and Lottie were right.
At school, all the fuss about the topiary peacock had died down a bit by now, but Mia and I were still getting nasty looks or remarks from total strangers usually keen to tell a moving story about how they’d known Mr. Snuggles all their lives. Fortunately Secrecy had changed the subject in her blog by now, and Henry assured me that grass would soon grow over the whole thing again.
For the others, maybe, but not for Florence.
She was refusing to sit at the same table as me, just as she’d said she would, and had ostentatiously picked a place at the other end of the cafeteria. Of course Emily had moved with her, and I couldn’t say that really bothered me—on the contrary, it was good to have her leaving me in peace for once. The only trouble was that it meant Grayson didn’t sit with us either.
In view of the new developments, Persephone wasn’t sure whether going around with me would be bad for her own popularity, so at first Henry and I had our table all to ourselves at lunchtime, but on Wednesday we were joined by a couple of boys from Henry’s basketball team.
And Arthur.
“Who’d have thought it—our Liv a professional killer? A paid-up member of the front-garden Mafia,” he said, giving me a broad smile. “If you ask me, the general importance of clipped box is overestimated in this country. Why don’t we sit down?” (That was a rhetorical question, since he was already sitting down.) “We’re having a spot of trouble with a magnolia at home. Someone ought to teach it a lesson.”