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dismal season-to-date record of the football team. Steve marched up the broad stairs that Belladonna knew led to the science labs (scene offormer glories only that day), but he didn’t stop there. Without pausing for breath, he was up again, to the top floor. This was where the sixth-form common rooms were, and the smallest, dingiest classroom in the whole school, where Watson struggled in vain to instill an interest in history to cramped ranks of bored faces.
    Steve marched past the common rooms and to a tall, narrow door next to the classroom. He turned the handle. It was locked.
    “Oh, great,” said Belladonna, gasping a bit after all the stairs.
    Steve grabbed the handle again and heaved the old door up as he turned. There was a click and it swung open, revealing a steep, narrow staircase. He turned to Belladonna with a grin. “It’s a knack,” he said.
    “You’re going to end up in jail,” said Belladonna grimly, hoping he couldn’t tell that she was quite impressed.
    She stepped through the door and started up the stairs. Steve followed, shutting the door behind them and plunging the narrow stairwell into darkness. Belladonna hesitated for a moment, then noticed a dim gray light at the top, straining against the blackness. She started up the creaky stairs, hoping that this whole thing wasn’t going to turn out to be one of Steve’s famous practical jokes.
    As they climbed the stairs, the sounds of the school receded and a heavy silence seemed to descend, brokenonly by footsteps and creaks. Belladonna reached the top and stepped into the dim gray light of a long, narrow attic.
    “This is amazing!”
    The eaves of the building met in a cobwebby gloom above their heads, old ribbons and pieces of newspaper dangled from the rafters, and a few faded photos stared earnestly from the walls. At each end was a dusty circular window letting in a flimsy, filtered light. The old floorboards were dirty and marked with the remains of over a hundred years of spiders and their winged victims. Belladonna crept through the dangling, dusty webs to where a series of boards were stacked against the wall. She flipped them over. They were old posters promoting coffee mornings, tea parties, choir festivals, and Christmas concerts. All held at a time before her grandmother was even thought of.
    “That’s not it,” whispered Steve, as if anyone could hear them this far up.
    He beckoned her over to the far side, where two large trunks lay side by side. She flung open one of the lids while Steve tried to clean the window with the sleeve of his jumper in an effort to get a bit more light into the room. The trunk was full of clothes, the things that people wore back in the days when they changed for lunch and tea and dinner. The colors were muted, but the contrasts strong—pale coffee shades matched with dark chocolate, sky blue, and purple. The colors that people chose when they didn’t care what othersthought, when they set fashions and didn’t follow them.
    Belladonna held them up, wanting to mock them as tasteless, but secretly longing for the confidence to stalk the halls in yellow and black.
    “Not that one,” Steve turned around. “The other one. It’s full of papers.”
    Belladonna closed the lid of the clothes trunk and heaved the lid of the second one open. A hinge gave out with a crack and the lid fell against the wall with a resounding bang.
    They froze. Listening.
    Nothing. They were too far away for anyone to hear.
    The box was full of the sort of bits of paper that people put aside but never really look at again. Programs, dance cards, reports, essays, articles from the local newspaper about dances, charity balls, and teas. There were a few letters and invitations, all dated from the early 1900s through the late 1920s. Belladonna read them and wished that she’d lived then. Perhaps if she had, she’d know what to do and say; she’d know how to dance and what to wear. She gazed at a newspaper photograph of the