Lauren has never been to New Look. Jenny always dresses more like the older kids at the back of the bus. She looks up to Diane and her friends who wear a lot of dark eyeshadow with bright nails. Lauren wonders if Jenny has only made friends with her because she knows Diane. She knows next year when Jenny starts the secondary school, she will be smoking with those girls at the bus stop in Strath Horne.

‘See that old lady who lives across from me,’ says Jenny. ‘I think she’s a witch.’

‘How?’

‘She scares me. Vairi Grant was over at hers the other Sunday and we heard these noises coming from her house. Cackling.’

‘Maybe they were just chatting?’

Jenny tips her dark curls back. She leans closer to Lauren, her baby-blue nails catching the fluorescent light as she cups her hand to her mouth conspiratorially. ‘We knocked on her door once and all these cats came out? She is like’ – Jenny changes her voice to a reedy old lady’s – ‘He-l-l-lo … Ca-n I hel-p y-ous?’

Lauren giggles, but really she feels nervous. She can’t imagine what Jenny would say if she ever found her granny’s book. People think she and her father are weird enough already.

‘I think that Vairi Grant is in on it too. Think they hexed me. You’re to watch out for them. Hu-bble bu-bble …’

‘Och, quit it.’ Lauren says this good-naturedly, as though she isn’t really bothered. She turns and wipes a patch of the misted window. In the pane along someone has written GRANT MACBRIDE IS GAY I.D.S.T. which stands for If destroyed, still true. Lauren draws a stick man that begins to trickle lines of water from his body.

The bus passes black goats on the steep hillside. A buzzard hovers high over an empty field. An abandoned croft with a rusty roof sprouts tufts of grass. In the distance the hills rise into mountains and the rocks grow bigger and more jagged. They stop at the Murrays’ farm and Eilidh Murray climbs on to the bus. One girl is telling someone, over three rows of seats, that she has 205 pets: ‘Two dogs, two cats, a rabbit … and two hundred sheep.’ Lauren starts inking stars on her pink rucksack until she feels sick. She always wears a grey skirt and green sweatshirt for school, with any T-shirt she likes underneath. The T-shirt she is wearing today is midnight blue with a wolf standing on a crag in the moonlight. Another wolf, made of mist and stars, looms large in the sky behind it.

A hand yanks her plait from behind. She turns towards the seats behind her and sees Maisie MacAllister and another girl from her class looking carefully out of the window.

‘Em, what are you looking at?’ Maisie says. ‘Mind your own beeswax.’

Her classmate, Katie, laughs beside her. Lauren turns around and sinks back into her seat.