Free The Changeover by Margaret Mahy Page B

the shape of her legs. The glances exchanged at school for a year and a half had given them a certain power over each other, which was why Laura was here at all, but she found this particular gaze so close it was suffocating.
    Now she also found she could not ask him about Jacko as simply and directly as she had planned to do, and looked around the room at the books, at the skeleton, at the naked woman whose revelations seemed to her to cross some unspecified boundary and somehow made her shy. This woman had been photographed as if she were on her own in a private reverie over her own private skin, but of course she had agreed to be photographed, the photographer at least had been present, and the picture was intended to be looked at by men. There was a small snapshot pinned to one corner of it, but Laura could not make out what it showed and was almost frightened to look closely, at least while Sorry was watching her.
    "D-don't you like it?" Sorry asked her, watching her eyes. "The poster, I mean."
    "It isn't meant to be liked by me," she answered, and then added, "it's too personal, really ... like standing in the dark and looking in at someone's window."
    "But that's quite an interesting thing to do," he said. "And harmless, as long as people don't know you're there."
    Laura struggled with a difficult idea.
    "It still seems too private though, as if looking at her somehow lets you look at other people too ... who mightn't want to be looked at," she ended hurriedly. Sorry studied his poster and then studied Laura.
    "That's art, isn't it?" he said after a moment of silence and speaking as if he did not expect her to understand him. "Like dissecting a possum in biology — private occasions having their skins pinned out and their guts identified and labelled. You read, don't you? Unless you carry books around for the look of the thing! Do you think there are any private moments in art? Better still, tell me what you really want to talk about."
    "Whose bones?" Laura asked, moving on to the skeleton whose privacy was, after all, violated even more than that of the woman in the poster.
    "It belonged to my great-grandfather who was a doctor," said Sorry. "I've inherited it. It's called 'Uncle Naylor', but I've not managed to find out if it's just a name or if he really was a relation. I expect you know that, except for my chromosomes, I'm a recent arrival in the Carlisle family. Do you take science at school?"
    "I know what chromosomes are," Laura said primly. "More or less."
    "Chant, you can't have come to see me simply to talk about my skeleton and my poster," Sorry suggested.
    "No!" Laura agreed, looking at the bookcase. "Why do you read all those romances?"
    "For romance!" Sorry answered promptly. "Research and romance. There's not a lot of romance in being a prefect, you know." He pointed his fingers at her, making a gun out of his hand. "Stand and deliver, Chant. What are you doing here?"
    Laura stood up. "I thought you might help me," she said. "I need help, I think. And you're a witch, aren't you?"
    Sorry's face went quite blank as if every expression had been cleaned from it with a cloth, but she had the impression that he had become very angry and couldn't think why. Now it had become impossible to ask a favour of him, and impossible not to. She looked around the room again, at the indisputable seventh form homework, the skeleton, the poster, the photograph. Out of anxiety and confusion she made a half move to look at the photograph more closely, for it seemed as if it might offer another diversion, but Sorry took hold of her wrist and shook it slightly.
    "What do you want?" he asked and added, "I might provide a love philtre, but I don't do contraceptives."
    Laura felt herself colour, as much with anger as embarrassment. "You know it's nothing like that!"
    "How do I know? You won't tell me. Except you've come to consult a witch."
    "I need help for my brother," Laura said at last, and Sorry looked taken aback and then