The Magpie Effect - The Magpie Chronicles Book 1 (#Wattys2015)

Chapter One

© 2015 Lee Newbery

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Chapter One

On the last day of summer, the dead girl came to me.

I was working the night-shift at The Old Curiosity, like I did every weekend. Five PM till close. Most of the tables stood empty, their candles flickering in the little jam jars that Bev always had us collecting and donating from our own kitchen cupboards.

"... The thing is, cucumbers just taste so much better when you grow them yourself," Trevor was saying. Trevor didn't have many teeth, but he had a pot-belly that he could prop up against the bar-top or use to rest his beer on if there were no other surfaces available. "All these commercialised multi-billion pound supermarkets, you just don't know what they put into their earth. Probably sprayin' them with all manner of chemicals instead of God's good rain."

"Uh-huh." I was pretending to listen. Every couple of seconds I had to nod, just so Trevor didn't notice that I wasn't paying attention. This sort of talk was normal for Trevor. I knew all about his cucumbers and his courgettes and his radishes, but he gave good tips when he was drunk.

Priorities, right?

Nevertheless, I could feel my face light up when the door opened and the September breeze flew in, carrying with it an opportunity for escape.

Unfortunately, it was the wrong opportunity. The sort that walked in troops of four, so rhythmic that it practically looked rehearsed. Bobbing blondes atop killer thighs.

"Kill me now," I muttered.

I'd have recognised those legs anywhere; I saw them more than I saw my own. Carmen Vespin was the leader of a group of girls that we - we, of course, being the collective pronoun for Debbie Pruitt, my self-appointed best friend, and myself - liked to call The Peroxides. She was gorgeous, even in that hot pink mini-skirt that she sported so swimmingly, and we never really saw eye to eye.

Probably because I was five-foot-two and pear-shaped, and she was nearing six-foot and stick-like, but that was beside the point. Carmen didn't mix with inferiors.

I watched as she breezed through the empty tables and selected one of the corner booths with her armada in tow. They were as close to clones as it was possible to get without being genetically engineered from a test tube.

"... But of course it's almost pumpkin season, and you know what they say about pumpkins-"

"Yeah, Trevor, that's great," I interrupted. He winced at me as I leaned across the bar and clicked my fingers at Harriet, who'd just emerged from the kitchen to collect some dirty dishes. Her arms were glistening with soap suds.

"Psst, Harriet!"

Harriet looked up, her lips crudely slapping together as she chewed a wad of gum. "Yeah?"

"You have to swap with me, Bev's had me on bar all night and I need a break."

Harriet flicked a perfectly plucked eyebrow. She was a couple of years older than me, but she was a bona fide hottie who'd left school at sixteen and been flitting between jobs ever since. I watched as she hoisted a tower of dirty plates onto her arms, a feat of waitressing athleticism that I'd envied for months.