Free White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

her cheek. She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she cared about the offer. She was just trying to feel this for me.
    Dad read the letter, then put an arm around Miri’s waist and drew her to him. He kissed her forehead. “My clever, darling girl,” he said. Miri smiled at last. When Dad looked at me, I looked at the wall. I wanted to leave, but told myself, stand still, stand still. The floor below, the ceiling above. I stood there until they felt uncomfortable.

 
     
     
THE GOODLADY
     
    “is very beautiful, Miranda, but very strict. Everything she does is necessary, and she makes no exception to any rule. She’s what I had instead of a mother, much stricter than any mother. She’s like tradition, it’s very serious when she’s disobeyed. She’s in our blood. And she’s told me that if I can’t get you to eat, she will. You must eat real food, and you must eat as much as you can manage, or you might end up with the goodlady for your mother. Wouldn’t you rather have me?”
    “Of course. Always you, always. How can you even ask me that?”
    Lily wasn’t even an hour into her final trip abroad when Miranda fell into conversation with the goodlady herself. There was an essay due for key skills. The topic was suicide, and the essay was to be a discussion of the ethics of ending one’s own life. Was suicide wrong, right, or a value-free choice? Was it even a choice in some cases? And so on.
    Eliot was writing his own answer to the question next door in his room. Both Miranda and Eliot understood that they were expected to argue that suicide was wrong. Their school was that sort of school. Eliot would probably argue in favour of suicide. He’d write that suicidewas a terrible, wonderful thing, a gift from the intellect to the body. Miranda wanted to give the correct answer. She would say that suicide was wrong, wrong, not a good idea at all, terrible in fact. She just had to hope that such an answer would emerge as the result of proper consideration and would thus be conscionably correct.
    She sat at her desk in the psychomantium, pushing her feet in and out of her shoes and sighing as though stricken. She had no idea where to begin. She thought about her mother, gone away again, and she thought about her renewed promise to eat full meals, and she thought about her mother’s forgotten watch. A sharp pain arrived in her stomach and stayed small, like a sting. If she stayed healthy she would live for decades, and there were so many meals left to eat. But she had to keep going, otherwise Eliot would never forgive her. He hated her pica, she knew. She would eat for Eliot, not for Lily, who couldn’t really care all that much if she was always on her way to somewhere else.
    Miranda’s hair poured over her face and onto her paper and pen, and she pushed it back so that it all fell to the base of her chair. She turned to a new page in her notebook and began writing questions. Beneath the questions she wrote answers, in a hand as different from the one the questions were written in as possible.
    Goodlady, are you really good?
    yes
    Even when no one is looking?
    of course
    But do you understand your nature?
    my nature?
    Did you choose to be good, or were you so created?
    i chose to be created
    Is that really an answer?
    yes
    Miranda’s elbow slipped against the pages of her book, and the paper cut her. The room rolled like a dice. No matter how much she pretended bravery Miranda couldn’t stand the sight of blood. She reared back, a hand to her elbow, too late—a bead of blood fell and grew into a large full stop in the middle of her open page, an ending to a sentence she hadn’t written yet. She went in search of cotton wool and a plaster, and when she came back the stain was even bigger—she feared it might smother the page, the entire book.
    You are not good
, she accused.
    The answer she wrote unnerved her because the handwriting was truly different from her own. It was handwriting she’d seen before in