Free The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) by Sophie Nicholls Page A

together, bottom protruding at a comedy angle as if he were wearing Katrina’s too-tight too-short skirt and her shoes with the not-quite-allowed-at-school high heels.
    She knew his feelings were hurt.
    ‘You know where I live, right?’ Katrina was saying. ‘It will take about ten more minutes to get there. I haven’t got the car today because mum’s out. As usual.’
    ‘That’s OK. I like walking.’
    Ella kicked a pebble along the pavement in front of her. Secretly she was relieved. The idea of sitting in the back of that car whilst that strange man drove them had seemed a bit creepy. Rain had started to fall, spotting her shoes and the sleeve of her coat.
    As they passed up The Mount, she sneaked glances at pianos and dolls’ houses artfully framed behind large sash windows. She admired perfectly sculpted box hedges and zinc tubs of topiary spirals and enormous wrought-iron door knockers.
    Then they turned into a sweep of gravel driveway and tall trees that hung down to form a damp green tunnel. Between the dripping leaves, a house emerged, a white house that looked like a wedding cake with layers of windows stuck to its walls like jellied diamonds and icing-sugar columns flanking the front door.
    Katrina scowled. ‘Home sweet home.’
    Ella stood in the huge hallway, looking around. It was beautiful. She wanted to run her hands over the plaster borders that twined around the walls, their raised pattern of flowers and vines, or step between the coloured pools of light – ruby and emerald and sapphire - that fell across the polished floor from the stained glass windows on the landing high above her.
    Then she stopped. She’d felt, very faintly, something cold rush through her, a clammy feeling that made her pull her coat closer around her.
    Something on the very edge of her awareness began to vibrate, gently at first, then louder, louder. Blue and red squiggles. Hard jagged white lines. The Signals. She blinked hard, trying to blank them out.
    She turned and smiled at Katrina.
    ‘It’s a lovely house,’ she said.
     
    *
     
    ‘So what’s it like, then, up at the Big House?’ said Billy, as they sprawled across the sitting-room carpet, supposedly doing maths homework.
    Ella thought of Katrina’s bedroom, her dolls carefully arranged on her bed, the dolls’ house that was an exact replica of the house that contained it, right down to the lion-head door knocker, the stained-glass windows, the curved staircases and the furniture in all the rooms.
    She’d tried not to stare at Katrina’s enormous four-poster bed in the centre of the vast pink rug, draped with gauzy pink curtains and fairy-lights, and the en suite bathroom with its mirrored wall and rows of luxurious bottles and jars and piles of softly folded white towels.
    All the time, she’d felt Katrina’s eyes on her, watching for her reactions.
    Then she thought of Leonora, bringing them tea on two small trays and how they’d sat and ate in the matching pink leather armchairs in the room that Katrina called ‘the playroom.’ This room was Katrina’s too. There was a perfectly tidied desk and an enormous flat-screen computer monitor and life-size studio photos of Katrina on the walls, soft-focused with bright white backgrounds. There were boxes of computer games and DVDs stacked neatly on the shelves and a pile of magazines on the pink perspex coffee table.
    She thought of how large and full of creaks and echoes the house had felt and how there was no one to ask them about their day and what homework they had to do, just Leonora shuffling off into the shadows in her stained slippers.
    ‘It’s very, very big,’ she said. ‘And expensive – you know, stuff everywhere – and in places it’s very pink… I mean, really pink…’
    She watched as Billy relished this information, rolling his eyes.
    ‘And it’s sort of… sad. Despite all the pink. You know, it doesn’t feel like a happy place. If that makes sense…’
    ‘My mum went there