My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(25)

Today it all started with Elsa’s scarf. Or at least Elsa thinks it did. She has started learning who the chasers are at school, and how they operate. Some only chase children if they prove to be weak. And some chase just for the thrill of it; they don’t even hit their victims when they catch them, just want to see the terror in their eyes. And then there are some like the boy Elsa fought about the right to be Spider-Man. He fights and chases people as a point of principle because he can’t stand anyone disagreeing with him. Especially not someone who’s different.

With this girl it’s something else. She wants a reason for giving chase. A way of justifying the chase. She wants to feel like a hero while she’s chasing me, thinks Elsa with unfeasibly cool clarity as she charges towards the fence, her heart thumping like a jackhammer and her throat burning like that time Granny made jalape?o smoothies.

Elsa throws herself at the fence, and her backpack lands so hard on her head when she jumps down on the pavement on the other side that for a few seconds her eyes start to black out. She pulls hard on the straps with both hands to tighten it against her back. Hazily she blinks and looks left towards the parking area where Audi should show up at any moment. She hears the girl behind her screaming like an insulted, ravenous orc. She knows that by the time Audi arrives it’ll be too late, so she looks right instead, down the hill towards the big road. The trucks are thundering by like an invading army on its way towards a castle still held by the enemy, but in the gaps between the traffic Elsa sees the entrance to the park on the other side.

“Shoot-up Park,” that’s what people call it at school, because there are drug addicts there who chase children with heroin syringes. At least that’s what Elsa’s heard, and it terrifies her. It’s the sort of park that never seems to catch any daylight, and this is the kind of winter’s day when the sun never seems to rise.

Elsa had managed just fine until lunchtime, but not even someone who’s very good at being invisible can quite manage it in a cafeteria. The girl had materialized before her so suddenly that Elsa was startled and spilled salad dressing on her Gryffindor scarf. The girl had pointed at it and roared: “Didn’t I tell you to stop going around with that ugly bloody scarf?” Elsa had looked back at the girl in the only way one can look back at someone who has just pointed at a Gryffindor scarf and said, “Ugly bloody scarf.” Not totally dissimilar to how one would look at someone who had just seen a horse and gaily burst out, “Crocodile!” The first time the scarf caught the girl’s attention, Elsa had simply assumed that the girl was a Slytherin. Only after she’d smacked Elsa in the face, ripped her scarf, and thrown it in a toilet had Elsa grown conscious of the fact that the girl hadn’t read Harry Potter at all. She knew who he was, of course, everyone knows who Harry Potter is, but she hadn’t read the books. She didn’t even understand the most basic symbolism of a Gryffindor scarf. And while Elsa didn’t want to be elitist or anything, how could one be expected to reason with a person like that?

Muggles.

So today when the girl in the cafeteria had reached out to snatch away Elsa’s scarf, Elsa decided to continue the discussion on the girl’s own intellectual level. She simply threw her glass of milk at her and ran for it. Through the corridors, up to the second floor of the school, then the third, where there was a space under the stairs that the cleaners used as a storage cupboard. Elsa had curled up in there with her arms around her knees, making herself as invisible as possible while she listened to the girl and her followers run up to the fourth floor. And then she hid in the classroom for the rest of the day.

It’s the distance between the classroom and the school gates that’s impossible; even a seasoned expert can’t be invisible there. So Elsa had to be strategic.

First she stayed close to the teacher while her classmates were crowding to get out of the classroom. Then she slipped out the door in the general tumult and darted down the other flight of stairs, the one that does not lead to the main gates. Of course her pursuers knew she’d do that, they may even have wanted her to do it, because she’d be easier to catch on those stairs. But the lesson had finished early, and Elsa took a chance that lessons on the floor below were still in progress, so she had perhaps half a minute to run down the stairs and through the empty corridor and establish a small head start while her pursuers got entangled with the pupils welling out of the classrooms below.

She was right. She saw the girl and her friends no more than ten yards behind her, but they couldn’t reach her.

Granny has told her thousands of stories from Miamas about pursuit and war. About evading shadows when they’re on your tail, how to lay traps for them and how to beat them with distraction. Like all hunters, shadows have one really significant weakness: they focus all their attention on the one they’re pursuing, rather than seeing their entire surroundings. The one being chased, on the other hand, devotes every scrap of attention to finding an escape route. It may not be a gigantic advantage, but it is an advantage. Elsa knows this, because she’s checked what “distraction” means.

So she shoved her hand into her jeans pocket and got out a handful of coins she kept there for emergencies. Just as the throng of children was starting to disperse and she was getting close to the second stair towards the main entrance, she dropped the coins on the floor and ran.

Elsa has noticed one odd thing about people. Almost none of us can hear the tinkling sound of coins against a stone floor without instinctively stopping and looking down. The sudden crush and eager arms blocked her pursuers and gave her another few seconds to get clear of them. She made full use of the moment and bolted.