“Maybe I do, and I just don’t know it?” Daisy pressed the buzzer for Room 34, and almost immediately a voice came out of the intercom.

“Password.”

“Put the bunny back in the box.”

“Oo-er . . .” Esther was so busy nudging Daisy that she almost missed the door buzzing open. “Are you sure this isn’t some other kind of club?”

“Esther!” Daisy was glad her mask hid her blush. “It’s a quote from Con Air.”

“A film that you’ve never seen . . .”

“I’ll see it tonight.”

“You are very determined to like Nicolas Cage, aren’t you?” The two of them spotted the door to number 34 at the same time, and they ground to a halt. Plastered across the wood was a range of Nicolas Cage faces, googly-eyed and shouting, each more manic than the next. It was almost impossible to pick out a single face, and one was left with the overwhelming horror of being swallowed up in a vortex.

“And you’re determined to give this club one last go before you decide whether it’s for you?” Esther asked, eyes averted from the many faces of the Cage.

Daisy nodded.

“Well, then.” Esther looped her arm through Daisy’s. “If it were anyone other than you, I’d have jumped out that window and run all the way home by now. Let’s go put this bunny in that box. And get you out of this club.”

6
THE FINAL HURDLE

The plan was going well, and, between them, Esther and Susan had successfully extracted Daisy from almost every society she’d signed up for. Esther had been in charge of any meetings during the morning or early afternoon—Susan’s course didn’t allow time for daylight hobbies—and Esther’s shameless ability to make a spectacle of herself was working out well. There were few people one could rely upon to willfully misunderstand the ethos of the Paper Clip Fanciers by loudly declaring a sexual attraction to stationery and rubbing herself up against a display of pastel-colored bulldog clips, moaning sensuously and shouting, “Daisy! Thank you so much for enabling my erotic predilections by inviting me to this orgy!”

Daisy had been ejected from the club, and an e-mail with Esther’s photo attached had been sent out to every stationery store in Sheffield warning employees not to let her in.