Chocolate Box Girls: Sweet Honey (13 page)

My messed-up, jet-lagged head decides to
fall asleep just when everyone else is getting up, and I sleep through the
alarm.

Emma shakes me awake at eight, and Dad
calls out that he’ll give me a lift to school if I can be ready in ten minutes
flat. I dive into the shower, drag on my uniform, grab my bag and sprint out on to
the driveway just as Dad is backing the car out. I realize I’ve forgotten my
mobile and my pencil case, but too bad. I fall into the passenger seat and hook the
seat belt across just as the door slams shut.

Any hopes of a nice father–daughter
bonding moment after Dad’s angry outburst the other night are quickly
squashed.

‘Planning, Honey,’ Dad says,
without a trace of irony. ‘If you want your life to run smoothly, plan in
advance and always allow enough time to get to where you want to be. These things
make a difference.’

I try to smile, but it’s not easy
while applying lipgloss in a moving car and listening to Dad’s life lessons at
the same time.

Does he know how hard it is to listen to
this kind of thing when your life is a train crash?
If you want your life to run
smoothly, choose parents who stick together through thick and thin and boys who
turn up when they say they will
, I think.

‘Just a blip,’ I say out
loud. ‘My sleep patterns are still out of sync – I had about an hour’s
sleep.’

‘You look awful,’ he says,
and I sigh and pull out the concealer to wipe away the dark shadows under my
eyes.

Dad brakes suddenly to let a van out
from one of the side roads, and I drop the concealer and have to scrabble on the
floor for it. As my fingers fumble around, they close on something small and cold
and metallic, and I open my hand to reveal an earring, silver and expensive-looking
with a red stone. Emma usually wears simple gold hoops, but she must have gone flash
for a special night out.

‘Emma’s lost an
earring,’ I say, holding it up.

Dad swerves the car in towards the kerb,
a hundred metres away from the school gates.

‘It’s not
Emma’s,’ he says, holding out his hand. ‘I think it might belong
to that Malaysian client Emma and I took out to dinner the other week. I’ll
see it’s returned.’

A memory stirs, something niggling and
just out of reach from long ago. The lost earring reminds me of something, but I
can’t figure out what.

‘Honey? The earring?’

‘Oh … right,’ I
say, handing it over. ‘No worries. Thanks for the lift. See you later,
Dad!’

School is agony. Tara and Bennie are
lying in wait, demanding all the gossip on my date with Riley. I tell them that he
didn’t turn up, trying to turn it into a joke, but my eyes mist over as I
speak and after that they treat me like some sort of injured kitten, to be stroked
and protected and spoken to in hushed whispers. It makes me want to scream.

I stumble through the day as though
I’m wading through porridge. My head is fuzzy from lack of sleep and wisps of
memory tease me, hinting of something forgotten and significant. I just can’t
hang on to the thoughts for long enough to make sense of them.

Worse, something weird is going on with
my classmates. It’s not everyone, but a few of the girls are looking at me
strangely, disapprovingly. It’s like there’s some kind of joke at my
expense, only nobody is actually laughing.

‘Did you blab about Riley?’
I ask my friends. ‘Because people are giving me some really odd
looks.’

‘Of course not,’ Bennie
frowns.

‘We wouldn’t,’ Tara
chimes in. ‘Promise. There’s always some silly rumour going around in
this place, but it won’t be anything to do with you.’

I can’t help worrying, though.
After study group, a couple of maths quiz girls, who have been quite friendly to me
up till now, hang around on the school porch and tell Tara and Bennie there’s
a team meeting down at the beach cafe.

‘OK,’ Tara says. ‘You
coming, Honey?’

I’d rather go home and sleep for a
week, but I don’t get a chance to reply.

A girl called Liane, who sits next to me
in art class, steps forward. ‘Sorry,’ she says, giving me the same
slightly sneery look I’ve been getting all day. ‘Quiz team people only.
We’re discussing tactics for the Christmas quiz against the boys’
school. I know you have your own tactics for dealing with boys, Honey, but in the
maths quiz it’s all about brains, not sleaze.’

‘Sorry?’ I echo, slightly
stunned. ‘What did you just say?’

Liane raises an eyebrow, then turns to
link arms with her friends; they are already walking away.

‘What just happened?’ I ask
Tara and Bennie. ‘Do those girls have a problem with me?’

‘Ignore them,’ Bennie says.
‘They have a problem with everyone!’

‘I don’t think she meant to
be so rude,’ Tara adds, looking baffled. ‘She’s
just … tactless. We should go, if it’s about the maths quiz, but you
should come too, Honey, no matter what Liane says.’

I think there is more to this than a
tactless comment. A feeling of unease unfurls in my stomach, a feeling that’s
been building all day. Something’s wrong, but Liane’s words have stirred
up the rebel in me. I’m not going to let some crazy maths geek tell me what I
can and can’t do.

‘I’ll come,’ I say.
‘Who does she think she is? The cafe’s a public place!’

We walk along to the beach together, and
I try to shake off the foggy, muddled feeling that has plagued me all day. I’m
listening to Tara and Bennie talk about how Liane is totally out of order when I
zone out again, and the long-ago memories begin to link up.
We were driving home
through the lanes near Tanglewood, after a picnic on the moors, everyone
laughing and talking at once; getting out of the car, Coco held up an earring
she’d found trapped in the corner of the back seat, a small gold hoop. The
atmosphere turned frosty then, and later on, once we were safely in bed, an epic
row blew up between Mum and Dad …

‘Honey?’ Tara is saying,
waving a hand in front of my face. ‘Hello? You were miles away!’

We’re at Sunset Beach, crossing
the boardwalk that leads to the cafe.

‘I was remembering
something,’ I tell her. ‘From years ago. Nothing important really;
something that happened this morning must have triggered it …’

‘OK,’ Tara says.
‘Look, we’d better sit with Liane and the team. Are you coming
over?’

‘I don’t think I’m
very welcome somehow,’ I reply. ‘I’ll see you after your meeting,
OK?’

‘OK,’ Bennie says with a
grin. ‘No flirting with Ash, mind!’

‘As if!’

The chances of my flirting with Ash are
actually zero after his brush-off the other day. Compared to Riley’s
rejection, it’s fairly minor, but I seem to be missing a few layers of skin
these days because it really hurt. I’d planned to ignore Ash and ditch my
after-school trips to the cafe, but here I am again, just asking for trouble.

I dump my schoolbag on the counter. Ash
is out on the veranda, delivering a tray of Cokes to Liane’s gang amid lots of
laughter and banter. I see Liane glance my way and I give her the fingers because it
seems a little bit less childish than sticking my tongue out. She pretends not to
see, which is even more childish in my opinion.

Ash comes back through, and when he sees
me his face lights up. It’s hard to stay frosty with him, but I do my best,
and when he gets to the counter I tell him not to mess with my head because I am
having a bad day and the last thing I need is more hassle.

‘You’re mad at me,’ he
says. ‘Is it because I couldn’t come over to see your film? Because
I’d have loved to, only it just wasn’t possible. Family stuff,
y’know.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I
reply. ‘Or, actually, don’t because I’ve had as much of it as I
can take for one lifetime. OK?’

Ash holds his hands up. ‘OK,
OK … but I’m sorry, anyway. I would have explained, but I was
serving about a million people at the time and you kind of stormed off. And then you
vanished from the face of the earth. Thought I’d scared you away.’

‘Trust me, you’re the least
of my troubles,’ I say. ‘So what if you don’t want to hang out
with me? Nobody else does either, not even my own family. At least you were upfront
about it.’

‘I do want to hang out with
you,’ Ash argues. ‘I can’t do evenings, that’s all. I live
with my sister and her husband, and they work regular night shifts at the hospital.
I have to look after my nieces and nephew most nights. My life is pretty much
school, then job, then babysitting, with occasional library visits shoehorned in. I
have no social life at all, except for this place.’

I bite my lip. ‘You
were … babysitting?’ I say. ‘Honestly? It wasn’t
personal?’

‘Why would it be personal?’
he asks.

‘Because my life is a
disaster,’ I tell him. ‘And trust me, it’s always personal. I am
just the kind of girl who attracts trouble. Everything I touch turns to
dust.’

Ash laughs. ‘That’s
rubbish,’ he says, holding out his hand. ‘Go on, try
me … guaranteed not to turn to dust.’

‘You don’t
understand!’

‘I do,’ he says. ‘Go
on, touch and see. I’m not trouble, and I’m not made out of dust.
See?’

He presses his hand flat against my
palm, warm and strong, and his fingers twine round mine, brown and white together.
Nothing turns to dust except for the anger inside me. My heart beats hard. I look at
Ash and his eyes hold mine for a long moment, and then I untangle my hand, untangle
my eyes.

‘I’ll have a bit more time
in the holidays,’ he says carefully, ‘if you still want to hang out. And
I don’t think you’re trouble. Not at all.’

‘You’re wrong about
that,’ I say.

‘I’m never wrong.’

I smile, and wonder why a boy like Ash
who is serious and kind and hardworking would choose to believe in a girl like me,
when hardly anybody else in the world does. It’s a mystery.

‘OK. If you’re never wrong,
explain this to me. If you find an earring in your dad’s car and he says it
doesn’t belong to his girlfriend but to a client … would you believe
him?’

Ash shrugs. ‘Maybe. I guess it
depends on your dad.’

‘I guess so,’ I tell him.
‘Something about it’s been bugging me all day. It reminded me of when
Mum and Dad were still together, and my sister found an earring on the back seat of
the car, and there was one almighty row. And a little while later, they split
up.’

‘Because of the earring?’
Ash wants to know.

‘No … well, possibly. I
don’t know. Perhaps Dad was having an affair. I was only eleven or twelve, I
didn’t really ask questions.’

An ancient surfer dude comes in to order
a complicated baguette involving layers of ham, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and
pickle, and Ash takes a while to concentrate on the construction of it.

‘Are you thinking that your dad
could be seeing someone else now?’ he asks carefully, once the surfer guy has
gone. ‘Like history is repeating itself? That’s got to be
tough.’

‘He has been working late,’
I consider. ‘And there’s a bit of tension between him and Emma. Maybe
that’s what’s bothering me. But I just keep thinking I’ve missed
something … something obvious.’

Like history repeating itself
,
I think, and suddenly I understand. Dad really was having an affair back then, and
that was why he and Mum divorced. I’ve spent a long time telling myself it was
Mum’s fault, but the facts were there all along; I just didn’t want to
see them.

A gold-hoop earring found in the car. A
gold-hoop earring, the kind Emma likes to wear.

I grab my bag and head for the door.

‘I have to go,’ I call back
to Ash. ‘Tell Tara and Bennie something came up.’

I head out across the boardwalk and on
to the sand, and then I break into a run.