White Is for Witching Read Online Free PDF Page A

knight too
.
    Now she looked at him, at the awkward length of him, so carefully arranged to fit the space in the front of the car. The sleeves of his jumper and coat were rolled up to his elbows and he was goose-bumping under the cold. He would get into Cambridge, of course he would go.
    She said plaintively, “Is it too late to apply?”
    She felt Luc and Eliot not looking at each other.
    “I didn’t know you even wanted to go there. If you want you can apply next year,” Luc offered.
    Miranda waited, then said, “But what will I do for a whole year?”
    Neither of them answered her. She supposed the answer was, Getbetter. The thought of a slow and measured crawl back to health filled her with black sand. She said, “I want to try.”
    Eliot twisted around in his seat. “Look Miri, it’s not . . . you can’t just . . . you need to really think hard about it. There are all these different colleges and you’ve got to pick a college, a course, everything.”
    Miranda spun the combination locks of her suitcase. “Well, what course are
you
applying to? What college are
you
applying to?” She looked at him and waited, she refused to pick up the thread of any other conversation.
    Luc didn’t make a sound, but he looked into the rearview mirror and she saw the groan on his face. Eliot breathed out through his nostrils. His glance was disbelieving, sent her way to check that she was serious. “What the fuck,” he said. Finally, in tones of outrage, he told her. Miranda noted the name of the college on the back of her hand so she wouldn’t forget. Eliot said something about her having to write a personal statement. Suddenly she wanted to make him angrier; it took everything she had to stay quiet and not ask him to help her write her application.
    Eliot passed her a newspaper,
The Dover Post
, rolled up. It took her a second to get her eyes focused, then she read of the stabbing of the fourth Kosovan refugee in three weeks. Three had died in hospital. Her gaze could only touch the page very lightly before it skittered away. She said, “Someone is going around stabbing these people?” She didn’t want to say “refugees.” She didn’t want to say “Kosovans.” She didn’t know why. Or maybe it seemed feeble somehow, like making a list of things that were a shame, grouped in order of quantity—
shame number seventy-three (73): loss of four (4) Kosovans
.
    The main picture was of a boy a little older than her. He was wearing a denim jacket that looked too snug across his shoulders. His eyes were nervous blurs. He was dead. His face was so smooth; he was oldenough to shave but young enough to still be excited about shaving and thus meticulous.
    She was not sure how to pronounce his name, not even in her head would the sound make any sense. She had to look away to stop herself from making up more stories about him. Also because from the page he said, Look away, look away from me, what can you do, nothing so don’t. The article commented on the silence of the local refugee community. No one was naming names, or even suggesting any.
    Eliot told Miranda that it was a sign of the community closing to protect its own. “It’s refugees killing other refugees, man. I know you can’t believe it, I don’t want to believe it either, but, you know what . . . it’s far too simplistic to assume that just because they’re escaping similar troubles and are from the same geographic location, that it’s all love and harmony when they get over here. There are a bunch of differences between these people that precede their status in this country. Some of them really hate each other. I’ve seen kids openly spit at each other because of differences in language and what speaking a certain language means.”
    Miranda slumped in her seat. What Eliot was saying made sense but it didn’t. There was an untruth to it that made her tired. “Like, some Armenians who speak only Armenian consider Armenians who speak Turkish to be