By Any Other Name (28 page)

I feel something. I don’t know what it is, but it’s new and so strong that I am engulfed by it. I don’t want this kiss to stop. Every cell in my body hums with life, with
awareness of me and of him.

It’s . . . beautiful.

I feel stupid for being so . . .
mushy
. . . but it . . . he . . . is so different to how it’s been with every other boy I’ve kissed.

It’s that rightness thing again.

He pulls back and looks at me with dark, dark eyes. How could I not notice how amazing his eyes are? And it seems like he’s just as amazed by me.

‘I thought this was never going to happen,’ he whispers.

‘Did you want it to?’ I whisper back.

‘Yeah,’ he says with a snort. ‘Of course.’

‘Since when?’

He flushes red. ‘Since I saw you outside your house that day you were moving in.’

‘You gave me evils then!’

He grins at me. ‘Yeah, but I still wanted you.’

I give up attempting to understand and kiss him again, and again, and again.

S
o the coach was buzzing about me and Joe all the way home from the theme park. Well, it was pretty obvious. I was snuggled up to him for the whole
journey. He even stroked my hair while I fell asleep on his shoulder at one point and he didn’t care who saw.

He walked me home and kissed me goodnight on the doorstep and it was as awesome as it is in the old films they put on at Christmas.

Tasha would shriek if she could see me with him. I’d get so lectured about not letting him get the upper hand and thinking he had me where he wanted me. But for the first time I
don’t care. I want us on an equal footing. No games. I like it like this.

‘What really scares me,’ I told him as we walked home, ‘is the trial. It’s in August and I’ll have to stand up and testify against them and go through it all
again.’

‘And after that?’ He held me tight as if he was afraid of the answer.

‘After that, I’ll still be in witness protection. It’s a forever thing for us all. But it’ll be better after the trial because that won’t always be at the back of
my mind. I can move on but I’ll always be Holly now and never who I was before.’

‘What was your name?’

I hesitated for just a fraction of a second before I said, ‘Louisa.’

He stroked the hair off my face and looked at me. ‘I like Holly better.’

And I smiled at him. ‘So do I. Now.’

Once the exams start, it’s pretty heavy going from day to day. They’re broken up by half-term, but that’s not a holiday, just an extended last blast of
revision before the final slog. I have 17th June, my last exam, circled in red on my calendar and the 19th is in purple because that’s when Joe finishes.

Mum comments on how we’re hardly apart, but she’s not complaining because we’re working so hard. Although I have to admit, hourly revision breaks have got more interesting
lately and I haven’t at all changed my opinion of how he kisses.

If I was mailing Tasha now, I’d tell her that being with him is so easy; he makes me happy; I like being his girlfriend. I’m pretty close to liking everything about him. Except the
music. I’ll never like the music. He’s still not feeling the love for Beyoncé either.

When an exam feels like it didn’t go too well, he’s there with a hug to make it better. When I’m so tired my head hurts and I can’t keep my eyes open any longer, he takes
the English book off me and reads it to me because I won’t give up until I’ve been through it one more time for tomorrow’s exam.

He’s awesome.

And when I remember what I thought the first time I saw him, I have to laugh. How screwed up wrong can you be?

When we finish our exams, Dad pays for us to go out for a meal at the newly opened Chinese restaurant in the village, and he buys us a bottle of champagne to share later.

Joe makes me laugh in the restaurant by pulling my chair out for me and holding my coat for me to put on when we leave. He ignores me when I giggle – he doesn’t care and he’s
doing it anyway because that’s how he wants it to be between us.

We take the champagne down to his place and lie in the orchard on a rug, looking at the stars and swigging from the bottle. I don’t care if champagne’s supposed to be drunk from the
right-shaped glass etc. Drunk like this, it tastes of starlight and happiness and Joe.

‘You know what?’ he says, twisting a strand of my hair round his finger, ‘I kinda think I love you.’

‘You know what?’ I say back, ‘I kinda think I love you too.’

W
e’re curled up in Joe’s bedroom and it’s dusk outside. He’s going through his music collection to find something
I’ll like, which is really an impossible task, but he’s trying anyway.

And that’s when I decide to tell him the rest of my story. It’s the end of June and so there’s only one more month standing between us and August. And the trial.

I need to have talked about this before the trial.

‘I never told you what happened to me after Katya.’

He puts his iPod down and looks at me. ‘You mean the witness protection stuff.’

‘Kind of. There’s a bit more to it, but I didn’t feel up to talking about it before.’

He turns over and settles his head on the pillow, looking at me expectantly. I’m gathering myself to tell him when an owl hoots outside and makes me jump. He laughs at my nervousness and
puts his arms round me. That’s better – I should have known it would be easier to tell the story nestled up against him.

‘After the kidnapping, we went home to London. I went back to school and pretended everything was normal. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened, not even Tasha, my best friend. I
just couldn’t. The police didn’t have any idea who they were dealing with at that stage. Katya’s dad had gone into hiding and it wasn’t until he finally tried to get in
touch with his family that he found out they weren’t safe in Cornwall where he thought they’d be. Then he was too scared the men after him would do even worse so he wouldn’t tell
the police anything at all. I carried on as if nothing had happened and waited for them to catch the men who did it. But the police didn’t and then
They
found me instead.’

I tell Joe about the night I walked home from my violin lesson, how the man dragged me into the car, and then what I heard them saying about shooting me. He’s tense against me and I can
feel his anger through my body.

‘I pretended I’d passed out against the seat. They didn’t talk much as we drove out of London. I knew we were in the countryside when the amber glow in the car from the street
lamps changed. You know?’

I glance up and he looks a bit blank. I kiss his mouth.

‘Trust me, you do. Eventually we turned off down a bumpier lane. The driver slowed the car down to a crawl and I heard a click as he turned off the headlights. And I knew we’d not
got far to go. And it was like when they came for Katya – headlights off. I knew I had to be totally focused on getting away, to be open to any chance I could take because I wouldn’t
get a second.

‘I shut down and I was like a robot or something. I don’t remember feeling anything other than this determination to get out of there and it was . . . I dunno . . . kind of cool and
logical. I guess I’m weird.’

‘Yeah, well, don’t knock it because if it hadn’t been for that you might not be here now and that would be . . . I don’t even want to think what that would be,’ Joe
whispers.

But I don’t want to stop and think about that either. I just want to get this story finished because this is the part that really haunts me at night.

‘When the driver pulled the car up, I knew this was it. The guy in the back jerked me upright as his boss in the front pulled a gun and leaned over the seats. “We’ll get her
out here and you’re going to do the business. Time to prove yourself
 
!” he said and then got out and came round to the rear door to drag me out of the car. There was my one chance. He
began to open the door and I twisted my legs around and I kicked the door as hard as I could. He swore and something crashed to the ground and then I heard him scrabbling in the dark,
swearing.’

‘Did he drop the gun?’

‘Yes, and I think he might have broken some fingers from the way he was cursing. The guy next to me went to grab me back so I slammed the heel of my hand up into the base of his nose
– my uncle taught me how to do that.’

‘What does that do?’

‘Smashes the nose up completely. Ask Matt – I bet he knows about it. My granddad and uncles are in the forces. Dad was an army brat – he and his brothers grew up moving around
bases. Uncle Nick thought I needed to know some self-defence to look after myself living in London so he taught me when I was about thirteen. And thank God, it worked. So then I ran for it before
the driver had a chance to join in. I shot out of the car and I just ran and ran.’

‘But it was night. How did you see where you were going?’

‘I couldn’t, but they couldn’t see me either. I hid in the undergrowth at one point and they almost walked over me and I thought they were going to find me for sure, but they
didn’t. And then they went off in another direction. I guess they gave up in the end and just got out of there. I was bumbling around in the dark when they’d gone and didn’t see I
was coming to a steep bank. The leaves were slippy on the ground – it was November – and my feet slid from under me. I went crashing down the bank and hit my head on a tree root at the
bottom. A dog walker found me in the morning.

‘When I came round, I was in hospital and my mum and dad had already agreed for us to go into witness protection. I had to wait until they discharged me to see them.’

‘You’re incredible, do you know that?’ And Joe looks like he really means it.

But I don’t feel incredible when the nightmares come night after night. I feel useless, helpless, weak . . . I don’t tell him that though. I want him to keep thinking I am
incredible. Nobody’s ever said that to me before and I want to keep that feeling for a little longer. Maybe if somebody does think you’re incredible then you are just a little bit.

S
ummer. A long summer of freedom from exams and revision and work. OK, not free from stress due to the great big
thing
hanging over my head
in August. The thought of the trial makes GCSE results seem pretty unimportant sometimes.

I say as much to Mum when we’re in the garage sorting out the laundry.

‘But those results
are
still important to you, darling. They’re about the rest of your life, not what happened in the past.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘How are you feeling about the trial?’

‘Nervous. Stressed. But strong.’ Joe told me I sounded strong about it, and until he said that I hadn’t realised I am. He said it was because I was so sure that testifying was
the right thing to do and I wasn’t going to let them get away with what they did to Katya. That made me strong because I have belief.

‘We’ll be there for you.’ Mum drops the washing and hugs me. ‘Don’t forget Dad and I will be with you the whole time.’

Tim W-P told me that they’d given my family the option to send me into witness protection without them. They’d told him no straight away – I was not going alone. At times I
forget how lucky I am to have them.