Among Others

friend. I sighed and went off with her. The toilets were painted red and had a mirror with a row of bright bare lightbulbs over it. Karen checked her make-up in it—although make-up was just as strictly forbidden on Saturdays as any other day, she was caked in the stuff.
    “Craig, that’s my boyfriend, says he saw your boyfriend with another girl at the disco last night; Shirley who works in the laundry at the school.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “I could hardly go to the disco with him, could I?”
    “You don’t care?” She sounded incredulous.
    I did care, of course I did, but I wasn’t about to let her know that. I just smiled and pushed the door open and went back to the table.
    Wim was still there, which I had briefly wondered about. I sat down and took his hand, because I knew Karen would be watching. “Let’s go,” I said.
    “What did she say to you?” he asked.
    “You know better than I do that in this town everybody knows everybody’s business,” I said. I stood up and put my coat on.
    His face fell, but he also had a look of calculation. “Mori, I—”
    “Come on,” I said. I wasn’t going to talk about it in there, in front of an over-appreciative audience.
    “How is this supposed to work anyway if I can only see you at book club and on Saturday afternoons, and for a couple of hours on Thursday hanging around in Shrewsbury?” he asked, belligerently, as we walked up the hill, past Smiths and BHS. “You couldn’t ever go to a party with me.”
    “I can see that,” I said. “I can’t help being stuck in school. Maybe it isn’t going to work.”
    “So you could break up with me because I went dancing with Shirley?” He looked down at me inquiringly.
    “More because I don’t want to be humiliated about it, than because you did. I mean, obviously, even if I wasn’t stuck in school I couldn’t go dancing.”
    “It isn’t that,” he said, very quickly. “I don’t care about dancing especially, it’s just something to do.”
    “And you don’t care about Shirley either, she’s also just something to do?” I asked, cattily.
    “Or I could break up with you because I can hardly ever see you and it’s too inconvenient,” he said, in a strange musing tone.
    We had come to the corner by Thorntons, where we’d turn down if we were going to the bookshop and Poacher’s Wood. I stopped, and he stopped too. “Are you supposed to be making any sense?” I asked, exasperated. Boys are weird.
    “Do you agree that we could break up right now, on this corner, and never say a kind word to each other again?” he demanded. The wind was blowing his hair back, and he had never looked more gorgeous.
    “Yes!” I said. I could imagine it all too well, saying things at book group about books and never looking at each other.
    “Then it’s all right. If we could break up right now then whatever magic you did didn’t make it destiny that we would be together,” he said.
    “What?” Then I got it. “Oh.”
    He grinned. “So if we’re not together because the magic forced us to be, that’s all right.”
    It was the most backwards way of looking at it that I could imagine. “So, what, you were doing a scientific experiment with Shirley in the disco?”
    He did have the grace to look a little abashed. “Sort of. I hate the idea of being forced into things. I hate the idea of True Love and Finding the Right One and you know, being tied down, marriage, and the thought that the magic had made me—”
    “Wim, I admitted I kind of like you,” I said. “When you asked me . I did not and would not say anything about destiny, true love, marriage, ever after or any of that crap. That is not what I am looking for, that is not what I want. I want friends, not True bloody Love. I don’t plan to marry ever, and anyway not for years and years.”
    “That’s you,” he said, starting to walk again, so I started to walk too, downhill now. “That’s not the magic. I like you, I really do. But I thought if we could break up, and you agreed we could, then it wasn’t doing that, and it would be all right.”
    “So you don’t actually want to break up?”
    “Not if you don’t,” he said.
    What I know about magic that he doesn’t is how tricky it is, and how much easier it is to get people to do things they want to do anyway. It would only prove anything if we did break up, not if we just agreed that we theoretically could. But … I didn’t want to. “I don’t want to,” I