Free The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

préfère faire du vélo que la voiture parce que cela est mauvais pour l’environnement
, I write absentmindedly.
    “Where does she fit into our story?” Bea asks the cards softly. She turns them over one by one. Then she is quiet.
    “What does it say?” Sam nods down at the cards.
    “It says,” says Bea slowly, “to trust.”
    “To trust Elsie?” Abandoning my worksheet, I crane my neck to see the cards the right way up from Bea’s side of the table.
    “To trust Elsie, to trust ourselves, to trust each other.” She rests her chin in the palms of her hands, her fingers just brushing her cheeks. “She has been through something—something she can’t get over. She needs us to help her find her way home.”
    “I said
quietly,
” Mrs. McCarthy calls suddenly from the front of the room. Bea quickly covers her cards with a folder, but Mrs. McCarthy still hasn’t looked up.
    “But why is she in all my pictures?” I hiss to Bea. “Is she following us?”
    Bea shakes her head. “I don’t know. See this card?” She’s pointing to a card with ten stars shining over a castle. “Ten of coins. It’s saying she’s like a mirror.”
    “A mirror? A mirror of what?”
    Bea cocks her head to one side, then shakes it so that her hair falls almost to her shoulder. “I don’t know,” she says again. I can tell it’s hard for her to admit.
    “Okay, class,” says Mrs. McCarthy, getting up from her chair. “Hand your worksheets up to the front of the room when you’re ready and take out your textbooks.”
    I’ve only answered every second question, probably badly, but I hand my worksheet to the girl in front of me anyway. “So where is she?” I ask Bea.
    Bea taps a card with four sticks stuck in the ground in a square. “At home, or wherever she feels that home is.”
    Sam looks around the crowded classroom. Worksheets flutter from hand to hand to the front of the room. People whisper as they take out their books. The morning sun streaks in through the dirty windows. “Not here, that’s for sure.”
    “So what do we do?” I ask. Mrs. McCarthy calls the class back to order and starts telling us which page to turn to, but her words hardly register.
    Bea turns a card to face me. It has three stars hung above an archway. “Three of coins,” she says. She points to herself, to Sam, and to me, then to the three stars on the card. She says, “We work together, we trust each other. We find her.”
    “And how exactly,” says Sam, “do we go about doing that?”
    Bea’s eyes glitter like the sea. “I have an idea.”
    Mrs. McCarthy’s voice cuts loudly through her words. “Miss Morris,” she says to me. “Mr. Fagan. If Miss Kivlan is distracting you with her magic spells, you can sit up at the front of the class.”
    Bea quickly hides her cards, but half the class has already turned around to laugh and stare.
    “Sorry, Mrs. McCarthy,” we mumble.
    Mrs. McCarthy turns to Bea. “Miss Kivlan,” she says. “We are not in Hogwarts, we are in fifth-year French. So you can now lead the class in a chant about irregular verbs.”
    The entire class starts to laugh. It might be my imagination, but the laughter seems less mean today than it usually does. Maybe the idea of magic spells is more appealing when the people doing them have invited everyone to a Halloween ball along with the most popular seniors. Bea gives me a small smile as she opens her book.
    ***
    After all our classes are over, we sit out on the steps of the main building and wait for the school to empty. Cars drive into the parking lot and drive back out (our mother’s is not one of them; she is working late at the studio but calls every half hour to make sure we are all well wrapped up, protected, not jumping in rivers or running with scissors). People walk home in twos and threes. Outside, on the road, the buses chugga-chug, waiting for everybody to come aboard. Teachers’ heels clatter past. Little brothers and sisters shout, dogs bark,