Fairies and Felicitations (Scholars and Sorcery) by Eleanor Beresford

to my surprise, Esther and Cecily are waiting for me by the gap in the hedge. We slip back into the school proper together and cross the playing fields, an arm slipped into each of mine. It’s somehow warming to have the company, that they thought of me.
    There’s no doubt that my time at Fernleigh Manor has been made terrifically easy for me because Cecily and Esther took me up, as—well, as a kind of hobby, I should say. I’m in the privileged position of being a bit of a favoured and indulged pet of these two. I’ve enjoyed the position since not long after I first turned up at Fernleigh Manor as a sullen, lonely waif of a second-former, determinedly hostile to the indistinguishable girls in gym slips who shared the bell-regimented life in which I found myself—so different to my home, overrun with children, animals and magical beasts. I had snubbed every offer of friendship from what seemed to me incredibly stupid girls in order to spend my time in the first form science classroom, attempting to communicate with the almost mindless fairies in the aviary. It was only when I successfully summoned a Cait Sith kitten to the Blue Dormitory that I discovered that that least two of the silly creatures weren’t so bad. Cecily, kind enough to wake the bad-tempered newcomer for a midnight feast, found Meggs returned to full visibility and curled up asleep on my stomach.
      There’s just something about trying to hide a magical feline in a boarding school dormitory that breaks down the most stubborn of barriers between collaborators. By the time Meggs was discovered by a prefect and shipped home to my parents, leaving the three of us with enough lines to keep us busy all term, Cecily and Esther had adopted me as their own particular concern. Esther began including me in the practical jokes with which she plagued the mistresses, Cecily urged me to try out for hockey, and all of a sudden school did not seem such a purgatory after all.
      I squeeze their arms affectionately.
    “So, did I miss anything? Any word on who is Head Girl?” I ask, lifting a meaningful eyebrow at Cecily. The Head Girl and the Games Captain are generally from School House—not entirely fair, I suppose, but it always seems to work out that way—and Cecily is very much our shining star. She sometimes tops even Esther in class, is brilliant at games, and popular with everyone from her classmates to the little ones, to whom she has all the glamour of a wild Colonial girl.  
    She shrugs carelessly, although she looks straight ahead without turning to look at me. “It won’t be me, I think,” she says, and I don’t think it’s entirely false modesty. Cecily really doesn’t ever seem to realise her standing in the school. “They’ve given me a good run, lower fourth form and fifth, and I suppose they’ll give someone else a shot this year. Maybe it will be our dear Esther,” she adds, a little malice in her tone. “After all, she’s our most shining scholar.”
    “What, a bad influence like me?” Esther opens her wicked eyes wide. “Surely they won’t risk the snowy morals of the school to my tender mercies.”  
    Cecily frowns, as if she doesn’t quite find that quite as funny as Esther does, and I can’t think of a single reply. I don’t even understand the joke. Esther can be a little less than straightforward sometimes, and I don’t always understand her sense of humour, but I’ve never known her to do anything really bad. I brush the exchange aside as something unimportant.  
    Instead, I ask: “Any new girls?”
    It’s really just something to say, not with any real expectation of a positive answer. It’s rare to take new girls into the upper forms, and even though Blue Dormitory has dwindled a bit in number over the last few terms, I don’t really expect a replacement.  
    The other two exchange one of the quick, sideways glances that always leave me feeling uncomfortably excluded, as if they are communicating in ways