One time Luna had
spent a whole lunchtime sucking on chocolate eggs, getting herself sticky with
caramel. She stood in the bathtub with raindrops falling while Mummy scrubbed
her down, and thought: chocolate eggs, caramel insides, sticky faces, angel hands
washing her clean.
She called the lunchtime Mummy's Unsticking. The theme.
For her sixth birthday Mummy gave her a dark blue diary covered in a fabric
that felt like the skirt of Mummy's best Sunday dress. Luna pasted a silver
star on the inside cover and wrote all her themes in it every day.
One time Luna came down the stairs in her green and grey pyjamas that didn't
look nice on her at all, and saw another little girl on whom they would. Her
name was Ginny, she said, and she had come to play.
Ginny Weasley was small and freckled and Luna's friend. Friendship wasn't a new
concept to Luna. Sometimes Mummy took Luna into town, where purple-cloaked
strangers would shout and point and glare. Mummy said that they were friends,
friends who hadn't learned yet, but Luna would always cling to Mummy as they
went by.
She wondered if Ginny Weasley had learned yet.
She had, Luna decided at the end of the day. Coiled up into a ball on her bed
with her diary at her side, she thought: crouching treacherously on tree
branches biting into unripe green apples, playing pretend with Ginny Weasley as
the princess, cracking open Daddy's big dusty books and carefully sounding out
each syllable.
Luna chewed on the end of her pencil. My Learned Friend, she decided
finally, and copied it down in her loopy, little girl version of Mummy's
perfect cursive.
One time Luna came down the stairs in Grandma Ellie's old pyjamas that didn't
fit, and saw someone on the sofa on whom they would. Mummy was stretched out
over the patchy pink cushions, her legs over the side because she was so tall.
Luna called for Daddy, who called for a man in a white coat, who cleared his
throat and said that Mummy was dead.
Luna disappeared into her room, and tried very hard to make her brain think
about her learned friend Ginny Weasley instead of things she didn't want it to.
At the end of the day she sat on Mummy's bed, and thought: glassy blue eyes
that didn't blink, their kitchen all filled with strangers' cakes, Daddy curled
up in Mummy's closet, raindrops on his glasses and clutching patchy lace and
cotton.
The Worst Day, she wrote in her diary, and the page was wet.