Not So Stuck Up Now, Eh?

Cal

It was really confusing, how one minute Coraline (or Corrie) was one of my best friends, and would play with us, and the next minute got her letter, went to school, came back for Christmas, and had become CoCo, the girl who sometimes came and played with us, but thought reading was lame and was far more interested in her super cool school friends, and super cool school; went back to boarding school in January, and didn't write to me or Taya for the entire time. We didn't know what we'd done, but it was hard to play without Corrie.

When we were little, Corrie and Taya were my best friends. We lived next door to each other, in a village called Llangynidr, and our parents were friends, being the only magical folk in the area. My parents had moved to Llangynidr to escape the amount of attention our last name got, my great great uncle Ronald had defeated a dictator of sorts, and my Grandmother, Lucy, decided she was tired of all that and moved from Devon to Wales.

I think Taya's family have strong roots in Wales, you can trace them back for centuries, plus they have the last name Jones. Taya says you can't get much more Welsh without breeding sheep, and CoCo says she wants to move somewhere cool, like Cardiff or London. Corrie didn't. Corrie loved Llangynidr and it's fields and sheep and the lake. We called it Lake Of Shining Waters, like in Anne of Green Gables.

  We used to play Anne of Green Gables a lot, we all wanted to be Anne, and would spend ages fighting over who got to be her. I said I should be Anne because we both had red hair. Taya thought she should be Anne because she had read the book before either of us. Corrie said she should be Anne because she was the eldest. Normally Taya won, simply because I got bored of arguing really fast, and Corrie was happy to be Mr. Phillips or Gilbert or Josie Pye, whichever was most necessary in our playing. I grew rather fond of being Dianna or Ruby, but I absolutely refused to go in the water, I hate the feeling of water on my skin, it's all cold and silky, and feels like you can hold it but you can't and ugh. It's the same with mud actually, it's all slimy and slippery and sticky, I refuse to go walking in the fields without my wellys. 

We also played Heidi (Corrie was Heidi, Taya was Peter, and I was Clara) in the winter, pretending the hills were mountains and occasionally Taya would become a goat. In fact every time Taya or I discovered a new book we liked we would read it aloud together, and then play it, before deciding if we liked it or not. 'Little Women' was a no, too many characters and no one wanted to be Meg, 'The Secret Garden' was a no because no one wanted to be Colin, 'Pollyanna' was good at first when we decided to all be Pollyanna, and play 'oh I'm so glad' about everything, but it got a bit boring after a while, being all good and glad isn't much fun when you are allowed to run free in the hills. We liked 'What Katy Did', Taya was Katy, and Corrie loved bossing us about as aunt Izzie, and I became a sort of Cecy and Clover highbred, but reading the books was better than playing it, because there were so many characters, and only three of us. I still read all those books, and more.

Corrie Jones left for Hogwarts on the train, promising to write us loads of letters about the common rooms, and magic, and all the exciting things that happened. She wrote us a long letter on her third day about being sorted into Gryffindor, and how we would love it, and how good the food was, and how she had met a girl called Amelie.

Her next letter, two weeks later, read;
Dear Cal and Taya,
Me and Amelie have managed to persuade an older girl to put a few highlights in our hair, and give us makeovers so we look super cool. They are all lovely, and Amelie has a little sister your age called Geena. Please send me a hair sleeking kit, you can get them up on Trevingsky Road in Cardiff, but if I don't have one everyone will think I'm lame and I'll probably die.
CoCo.

Then the letters stopped. It wasn't because we didn't get her the hair kit and she died, because we would have been told.
Taya said that if maybe we asked her lots of questions in our letters she would reply.
Taya said that if maybe we told her about a new book she would reply.
Taya said that if maybe we pretended to be fighting about who got to be Anne again and we needed her to resolve it she would reply.

Taya was wrong.
CoCo didn't reply.
Corrie was gone.
And we missed her.