Chocolate Box Girls: Sweet Honey (9 page)

‘Did you get your laptop?’
she asks, tucking a strand of hair behind one gold-hooped ear. ‘Is it nice?
Where’s Greg?’

‘Change of plan,’ I explain.
‘Dad texted – he’ll sort the laptop at the weekend because something
came up at work. He won’t be home for dinner … said he’d get a
sandwich at his desk.’

Emma’s face falls.
‘But … I’ve gone to all this trouble,’ she says
helplessly.

I bite my lip. ‘I was supposed to
tell you, but I went to the beach with Tara and Bennie. I didn’t know you were
making something special. I’m sorry!’

‘It’s not your fault,’
Emma says. ‘He should have called me himself. He promised he’d make an
effort, spend more time at home.’

I jump to defend Dad. ‘It was an
emergency,’ I assure Emma. ‘He’d never have let us down if he
could help it. He works so hard!’

‘Too hard sometimes,’ Emma
sighs, but then she wipes the frown from her face and fixes on a smile.
‘You’re right, Honey, it’s a high-pressure job with a lot of
responsibilities. It does mean late nights sometimes. Greg works hard so we get to
enjoy a certain kind of lifestyle – a house with a pool, luxury holidays, meals out;
of course, he has to support you and your sisters too …’

It’s my turn to frown. Before
Paddy was on the scene I remember times when we were scarily short of cash, and even
now, it’s not like we could afford half the mod cons in this place.

‘Oh, well – we’ll make the
best of it. Let’s have a girls’ night in!’ Emma says.

We watch a DVD called
10 Things I
Hate About You
, a teen movie from Emma’s youth that is actually quite
cute, curled up on the sofa, eating as we watch. The meat is charred on the outside
and raw on the inside, and the carefully prepared sauce cold and lumpy, but neither
of us comment, and the pudding, ice cream with chocolate sauce, is much better. We
watch the screen and laugh and say ‘awww’ at the slushy bits.

‘Bring your new friends over any
time,’ Emma says. ‘This is your home too – you could have a sleepover or
a pool party or a movie night.’ She looks childishly excited at the idea, and
it strikes me that for all her gorgeous house and privileged lifestyle, she is
actually a little lonely.

When the film is over I help to wash up
and tidy the kitchen, then head to my room. When I go to check SpiderWeb, to my
surprise there’s a message from Surfie16, posted just a few minutes ago.

Hey, gorgeous … just
wanted you to know you’re on my mind.

I grin and a moment later another message
flashes up.

So, how’s school? Bet
you’re popular with the boys!

I laugh then type.

It’s an all-girls’
school. Besides, I don’t have time for boys … I’m way too
busy with my studies. I am a model pupil!

xxx

A reply pops up almost at once.

Yeah, that’ll be right! I bet
they don’t know what’s hit them!

I frown. I was on my best behaviour that
day at the beach, so why is it so hard for Riley to believe I could be a model
pupil? Sometimes I think I may as well have
bad girl
tattooed across my
forehead because no matter how hard I try, people label me that way. It’s kind
of depressing. I type, a little huffily.

It’s true. I’m fitting
in just fine.

There’s a pause, and then an answer
appears.

Just teasing, OK? Gotta go, but
we’ll talk again. I’m always here.

I click away from SpiderWeb, relieved
that Riley didn’t mean anything by the comment – the fact is, he’s out
there, and he’s thinking of me. I open up a school book and try to focus on
homework, but my mind keeps drifting back to last Sunday at the beach. What if
I’d said yes to Riley’s invitation? Would that have been so very
bad?

It’s late when I hear Dad come in.
My homework is long finished and I’m curled up in bed in the dark, balanced on
the edge of sleep. I hear Emma’s voice, a rising howl of anguish.
‘Can’t you at least tell me when you’re going to be this late?
It’s past midnight, Greg. It’s not fair, you know it’s
not!’

‘It was unavoidable,
sweetheart,’ Dad says soothingly. ‘Shhh, now. We don’t want to
wake Honey.’

I let go, sliding helplessly into a
world of dreams.

I lie awake at four in the morning and
stare at my bedroom ceiling. There is nothing much to look at; just plain white
plaster, shadowy in the lamplight. At Tanglewood, my ceiling was a faded sky blue,
collaged with little gold stars made out of sweet wrappers. The year I was nine, Mum
spent a week painting the ceiling while I made the stars, folding, cutting, glueing.
We stood on ladders to stick them up there and the end result was beautiful, a
child’s picture of the sky, infinite blue.

‘If you ever feel fed up, you can
wish on them,’ she’d said.

I don’t believe that sweet-wrapper
stars can chase away your troubles, of course, but I found them comforting. I wished
on those stars the year Dad left, and again when Shay ditched me for my stepsister.
They didn’t work, clearly, but still.

My mobile says it’s 04.03 on
Friday 8 December, and I am wide awake. Again.

I don’t know if I can call it jet
lag any more, not almost three weeks in, but who cares? Jet lag, insomnia, it all
adds up to the same thing. At least for the last few days I’ve had more to
distract me than maths homework and French translations.

The middle of the night is when I talk
to Riley.

When I can’t face another equation
and the sky outside my window is still ink-black, I click on to SpiderWeb and,
almost always, Riley is there. I think he is nocturnal too. Sometimes he’s
just home from a party, sometimes he’s been up all night writing a last-minute
essay, another time he’d woken early to go for a run along the beach. Not
Sunset Beach, sadly. He lives way out on the other side of Sydney, which is why I
haven’t bumped into him again.

A SpiderWeb romance has its limitations,
though, and I’m the kind of girl who likes to keep her options open. If my
early mornings are all about flirting with Riley, my afternoons are about chilling
with Ash. I have taken to calling in at the beach cafe on my way home from school,
and most afternoons he is there, reading or studying or serving customers. I buy a
smoothie and sit up on one of the tall bar stools at the counter, and we talk and
work and flirt a little.

So yeah … life in Sydney is
cool. I went shopping on Saturday with Tara and Bennie, admired the giant Christmas
tree in Chiffley Plaza, the trees hung with fairy lights, the department stores
piping Christmas carols into cool, air-conditioned interiors when outside the heat
was stifling. It was weird to be Christmas shopping in shorts and a T-shirt, but I
picked out the perfect presents for Mum, Skye, Summer and Coco. I even bought nail
varnish in an especially nasty shade of mustard for Cherry and a packet of TimTam
chocolate biscuits for Paddy, and the whole lot was wrapped and posted off days ago.
I imagine that parcel, making its way round the world to Tanglewood.

School is no picnic, of course. I have
years of skiving to make up for, but at least now I have a shiny new laptop to help
with the task. Dad brought it home last Saturday to make up for the mix-up and him
having to work late.

Tonight it is especially hard to make
myself finish the maths study sheet I’m working on. Every question seems
harder than the last, and although I keep plodding on, going through the steps Mr
Piper showed me, I’m not sure my fragile pre-dawn brain can handle it all.
Staying power is not a concept I have ever applied to schoolwork before, and by the
time I finish, I feel like I’ve scaled the Blue Mountains in a pair of
flip-flops and planted a flag of pride on the summit. What’s on the flag? A
new leaf, obviously.

I put the maths folder away, open up the
laptop and click on to SpiderWeb. Sure enough, a message from Riley is waiting.

You awake, beautiful?

My lips twitch into a smile and I type
back.

Don’t you ever sleep? You
party so hard it’s a miracle you ever make it into uni. What did you say
you were studying again?

xxx

An answer bounces back almost at
once.

Wouldn’t you like to know? I
take classes in surfing, drinking and sleeping till midday, but messaging
beautiful girls in the middle of the night is my speciality.

I’m still grinning at that when the
next message comes through.

So … how is my favourite
insomniac today?

I tap out a reply.

I’m good, how about you? Did
you just get in?

xxx

I click Send, and a minute later
Riley’s answer appears.

What can I say? Maybe I’ve
started to set my alarm to 5 a.m. to chat online to my favourite English girl.
Or maybe I’m a no-good party animal, destined to haunt the after-dark,
cider-stained backyards of the Sydney suburbs, searching for true love night
after night and finding nothing but heartache.

My fingers fly over the keyboard.

I think I can guess which.
So … good party? Meet anyone cool?

xxx

A reply appears.

Several dozen meat-headed bozo surf
kids, a handful of clueless students, three girls who looked like extras from a
Frankenstein movie and one scrounging mongrel who ran off with my burger.
I’m not lucky in love.

That makes me laugh out loud. I type
back.

I know the feeling. I have a knack
of picking the worst boys ever. At least, I did … I have turned over a
new leaf.

xxx

Riley’s reply appears.

Snap. Only with girls, obviously.
Hey, let’s liven this up. Truth or dare?

I shake my head. There’s no way I
am going to pick dare – I can just imagine Riley daring me to skinny dip in
Dad’s pool or cycle along the street in my PJs singing Christmas carols. Not
happening. I type a reply.

Truth. Maybe!

A minute later, my challenge arrives.

So, tell me about the boys
you’ve dated in the past. The good, the bad, the ugly …

I bite my lip. This is not my idea of
fun, but Riley is not to know that.

Do I have to? Like I said,
I’ve turned over a new leaf. I’m off boys.

A reply appears almost at once.

Even me?

I type back.

You’re different.
You’re one of the good guys, right?

Even as I type, I’m not sure if
that’s what Riley is. When I met him on the beach, he seemed like a surfer-boy
version of Shay Fletcher, wholesome and sporty and cool. His messages are different,
though, giving an impression of a hard-partying bad-boy.

He answers quickly.

You wouldn’t be interested if
I was one of the good guys, admit it. Either way, here is my past history, so
you know you’re not alone. The good: a girl from my old high school who
had my heart for years, but didn’t even notice I was alive. The bad: too
many to name. The ugly: see above. And then there’s you. Hoping you might
fit into the ‘good’ category … a guy can dream! OK, your
turn now!

I blink. No wonder I can’t
pigeon-hole Riley; he is a mixture of good and bad, exactly like me. Maybe we both
just need the right person to break the old patterns and be the best we can be? I
start to type; I’m not sure my message is the whole truth, but there’s
enough there to let Riley know I’ve had a messed-up past. He likes trouble
too, I am pretty sure of that.

The good: a boy I dated back when I
was thirteen or fourteen. He ditched me for my stepsister, so I’m guessing
he didn’t feel the same way. The bad: hmmm, it’s a long list. Teen
biker, Year 11 heart-throb, farmer’s son, film student, tattooed
fairground boy … just a few of the edited highlights. The ugly: I
don’t do ugly, unless you count the lovesick nobody who got me chucked out
of school a while back, and … I don’t. So
yeah … there’s a vacancy in the ‘good’ category
right now if you want to apply? Just sayin’.

xxx

I wait for a response, but the minutes
slide by and the fizz inside me goes flat, like Coke left out in the sun. I was
trying to pick up on Riley’s flirty, teasing tone but it’s harder to get
the pitch right in an online message than it is in real life. Have I said too much?
The silence leaves me confused and embarrassed.

I add another line quickly.

Joking. We’re just friends,
right?

An answer comes back almost at once.

Friends? You kidding me? I do not
set my alarm to five in the morning to talk to my friends. Just
sayin’.

Relief washes over me as I type back.

Hey. There was me thinking you were
playing hard to get …

xxx

I wait for a reply, but nothing
arrives.

I smile, imagining Riley stretched out
on his student bunk, still in his party clothes, drifting into sleep as the Sydney
dawn drags its finger along the windowpanes. I imagine his laptop glowing bright in
the half-light until, finally, it blinks and sleeps too.