“Not this early. If she mentions the time, my mother will know something’s wrong. She’ll know we played hooky—”

“Oh, forget it,” Cassandra said carelessly. “She won’t even remember. If your mother does ask questions tomorrow, make something up. Say one of the teachers was ill. Who cares? It won’t matter by then.”

“What if my mother calls tonight?”

“She’ll get the answering machine. We’re going to the theater, remember? In Bath. With my mother. It’s a long drive, we’re meeting friends for dinner afterward, then my mother’s driving us back. We won’t be home until after midnight… Come on, Mina, it’s a perfect alibi. Not even your mother can crack it.”

“What if someone at Charlotte Flanders’s mentions your mother’s away? What if she told someone in the village that she was going to New York?”

“No way,” Cassandra said with a shrug. “She doesn’t bother with people in the village. She calls them the peasants. Anyway, it was a last-minute thing—she just took off. Just relax, Mina, let’s make this place look occupied. Then we’ll eat, all right?”

Cassandra ran up the wide staircase that led up from the hall and turned off to her right. Mina followed more slowly. She tried to persuade herself that she was not having second thoughts about this scheme of Cassandra’s. After all, Cassandra had been to raves before, and she said they were amazing, just great. The one at Glastonbury last summer, the one outside Cheltenham just before Christmas, and now the one tonight.

Cassandra had told her all about it, what it would be like: a huge barn up in the fields, miles from the nearest house; hundreds of cars, buses, trailers bringing kids and new-age travelers from all around. Music and dancing and stars so bright and seeming so close you could reach out and touch them. And the man called Star. Cassandra had told her all about Star.

Mina mounted the stairs and turned left. She entered a succession of opulent, overfurnished bedrooms, all advertisements for Cassandra’s mother’s skills as an interior decorator. Mina switched on lights and drew chintz curtains as Cassandra had instructed her to do. Cassandra’s mother was so careless; just taking off like that for New York, leaving Cass alone in a large house. Her own mother seemed to forget that Mina, too, would be sixteen in a few months. She continued to treat Mina as if she were ten: she worried about everything—men, parties, cars, smoking, drinking. She saw the world as a dangerous place filled with pits ready to entrap her daughter, but the nature of these traps embarrassed her. She would try to discuss them with Mina, and then she would become flushed and confused. Sex and drugs were the two things she most feared, but she could never quite bring herself to use those terms, so she would talk about “boys” or “pot,” or clip little scare stories from the newspapers about unwanted pregnancies or heroin addiction and leave them on Mina’s desk. The transparent subterfuge made Mina angry. She would ball up the clippings and throw them away unread.