Strawberry Sisters (9 page)

Later, when we were in bed, Chloe whispered, ‘Suvi says I shouldn’t give up on getting girls on the rugby squad. Do you think she’s crazy?’

I do think Suvi is a little crazy. I used to think that she was crazy-mean and that she’d stolen my dad away from my mum; now I know that’s not true but I still think she’s a
bit crazy; she doesn’t eat sugar and she likes maths and she says TV is bad for you, but I don’t mind those things so much any more.

‘You’d have to be crazy to want to be a part of this family,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but I mean about the rugby squad. She says that I should make them put girls on the squad; I can’t do that, can I?’

I wriggled further down under my duvet. ‘I don’t know. Can you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe you should find out.’

The next morning, Milly actually managed not to make any comments about Lauren during drama. But somehow that was even worse. She was wearing a special face like she thought
she was being all saintly and gracious because she was being kind enough not to point out the fact that Lauren had let us all down.

I wondered if Lauren really was still ill or if she was just avoiding me. I sort of wanted to call her, but I couldn’t quite get my thoughts about the whole situation to make sense. Part
of me wanted to say sorry, but a bigger part of me thought that she ought to apologise first.

I still hadn’t sorted things out in my mind when Chloe, Ella and I got to Dad’s house. Lucy was sprawled on the stairs, arranging My Little Ponies in a battle scene with various
home-made weapons and sucking a lollipop.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

‘I made it out of a Smarties tube.’

‘Not the pony bazooka. The lollipop.’ Suvi never usually allows anything that sugary in the house.

‘Emily gave it to me.’

‘Evil Emily?’

‘Yep. Evil Emily’s got a grandma who buys her lots of sweets because she knows that it annoys her mum.’

‘I suppose that’s the best kind of Evil Emily.’

Lucy slurped happily. ‘And I’ve got a packet of Maltesers from Rose.’

‘Why are your friends being so generous all of a sudden?’

Lucy shrugged and squished a blob of Blu-Tack on to a tiny plastic hand grenade so she could stick it to a pony hoof. ‘Cos I’m nice.’

I stepped over the battlefield to go upstairs. ‘It can’t possibly be that.’

Before we went to bed, Dad told me and Chloe to put all the recycling out on the kerb.

I wasn’t in the best of moods. ‘Why do we have to do it?’ I asked.

‘It’s important for you to learn life skills,’ Dad said. ‘Next week, I’m going to teach you how to change a tyre.’

‘I can already do that,’ Chloe said. ‘Thunder’s uncle showed us.’

‘What about you, Amelia?’ Dad asked. ‘What are you going to do when you find yourself with a flat tyre by the side of the motorway?’

‘I’ll ring Chloe.’ I folded my arms. ‘Anyway, what has this got to do with recycling?’

Dad sat back and opened his paper. ‘I told you: life skills.’

‘I’m pretty sure I can carry some cardboard boxes without any practice, but I can see that even a short walk might crumble your elderly bones so just this once I’ll do
it.’ I followed Chloe to the garage before he could say anything. I didn’t really mind that much about moving some recycling; I just felt so fed up about Lauren.

The recycling is supposed to go in a little green bin in the garage, but that quickly gets full up. Some people, like Suvi and Ella, neatly stack the extra stuff round the bin, but other people,
i.e. everybody else, just open the door from the kitchen and toss it into the garage. Which means, when it’s collection time, you have to crawl about in the cold garage, fishing yoghurt pots
out from whatever they’ve rolled under.

I tried to pick up an armful of plastic bottles, but they escaped my grasp and clattered all over the concrete floor. I huffed.

‘Why don’t you make up with Lauren?’ Chloe asked.

‘Who says I need to make up with Lauren?’

‘Well, it’s obvious you’ve fallen out with someone. And, since you haven’t been spending hours and hours on the phone to her, I’m pretty sure it’s
Lauren.’

My skin prickled. Infuriating. I’d put so much effort into not taking my bad mood out on my family, but obviously I hadn’t done a very good job. I bit my lip.

‘If you make up with her then you could stop being super grumpy all the time and just go back to being your normal level of grumpy.’

I couldn’t help giving Chloe a black look. ‘If Lauren wants to make up, she knows where I am.’

‘Yeah, but you said she’s poorly. Why don’t you go round? You could do it tomorrow after rehearsal.’

‘I’m not going back there; it’s bad enough that her mum makes me feel unwelcome, but if Lauren doesn’t want to see me then I won’t set foot in that place
again!’

Chloe stomped on a juice carton to make it pop. ‘Yeah you will.’

‘I won’t. I’m furious.’

‘I know you are. But you get furious about things all the time; you were furious this morning when I used your toothbrush.’

I stared at her. ‘Was that you? You said it was Lucy.’

Chloe went on gathering up packaging. ‘I said Lucy had used it, which was true, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t use it too. It’s the only one that’s ever in the
proper place. I don’t have time to remember what I’ve done with my toothbrush the night before when I’m trying to get ready for school.’

I made a growling noise in my throat.

‘Anyway, the thing is that you were angry then, but you’ve completely forgiven me now, haven’t you? Especially since I’m offering you such good advice about
Lauren.’

‘Who I am still furious with.’

‘But what I’m saying is that you get cross with people about ten times a day. You like it. You’ll have forgotten about it by tomorrow.’

‘Maybe. But I’m pretty fed up of her not being a very good friend.’

‘She is ill though, isn’t she? She keeps being ill. She had all that time off before half-term.’

‘That wasn’t all being ill,’ I said. ‘She had to go to a wedding and some days she had to go to the orthodontist.’

‘I didn’t know they let you have a whole day off for that. Anyway, she seems pretty sicky. She always looks dead pale when I see her. What exactly is wrong with her?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. But in my head I could hear Lauren saying,
I’m really sick
. ‘She just gets tired sometimes,’ I said. ‘It’s because of when she
had glandular fever.’

‘I thought she had that ages ago.’

I wished Chloe would stop going on. ‘She should just go to the doctor and get them to give her something for it,’ I said, shoving the garage door open a lot harder than necessary.
Chloe carried out the jam-packed green bin while I followed with a cardboard box crammed with the rest of the recycling.

‘Maybe there’s nothing the doctors can do,’ Chloe said. ‘Remember Nana?’

It was awful when they told us that there wasn’t anything they could give Nana to make her better. ‘This is completely different. Lauren’s not really that ill and she
isn’t going to die.’

‘But still, sometimes even doctors can’t make people completely right again, can they?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘And school are letting her not come in, aren’t they?’

I remembered Lauren saying that school had sent home our drama play for her to read.

Chloe upended the little green bin into the big green bin. ‘You’d have to be pretty pigging sick to get old Iron Hair to let you off school.’

‘I suppose.’

Chloe flipped the lid of the big bin closed ‘See? You’re not furious now, are you?’

She was right. I wasn’t cross any more. I was worried.

I fretted about Lauren all the next day. Finally, I decided that I’d go round to see her after rehearsal. While we were waiting for Mr Garcia and Mr O’Brien, I sat
with Milly, Olivia and Bethany. Everyone was talking about Nathan’s haircut. Last week, when Mr Garcia announced he’d got a solo, Nathan was flicking his shoulder-length hair about, but
now he’d had it all cut off so short that he looked like he’d joined the army. We were still staring when Mr Garcia clapped his hands for quiet and got us started on warm-up
exercises.

I wasn’t concentrating on singing as hard as I should have been. I lost my place a couple of times when we were singing the group songs, but luckily Mr O’Brien didn’t notice.
It was probably a good thing that Mr Garcia had told me and Bartek that we wouldn’t be working on our duet until next week.

Bartek was sitting behind us and, while Mr O’Brien was hunting for some music, he leant forward and said, ‘We’re going to sing great, yeah?’

I turned round. He was grinning at me and I couldn’t help smiling back. Bartek always looks so cheerful. I bet he doesn’t tie himself in knots worrying about stuff. ‘If we
don’t sing well I’m pretty sure Mr Garcia will tell us,’ I said.

‘I hear he is very angry with bad singing.’

‘Yep.’ I nodded. ‘He screams and pouts and dishes out horrible punishments.’

Bartek slowly moved his eyes sideways. I followed his gaze; he was looking at Nathan. ‘Maybe Nathan isn’t singing so good and Mr Garcia . . .’ He mimed a pair of scissors.

I burst out laughing.

‘We must be good,’ he said. ‘Because this is nice.’ He tugged my hair. ‘And this . . .’ he ran a hand through his shiny black hair in a silly shampoo ad kind
of way, ‘is even nicer.’

Mr O’Brien crashed some chords to get us to be quiet at that point, but I thought that rehearsing with Bartek was going to be fun.

On the way to Lauren’s house, I tried to plan what I wanted to say. I was going to start off with what I knew I’d done wrong: I shouldn’t have made such a
fuss about not going bowling and I should have been more understanding about her being ill. Except I was a bit confused about just how ill she was. I felt like I should have asked her about it
more. But I had
tried
. Mostly she just kept saying she was fine. What if Chloe was right and there was something seriously wrong? I was getting in a tangle again. Once I’d said sorry,
I really needed some straight answers from Lauren.

I rang the doorbell and waited. Through the glass panels I saw Lauren’s mum coming towards me. For a minute, I wished I was Jasveen: she’s one of those nice, polite girls that
parents always love; she’d know the right way to start this conversation off.

Lauren’s mum opened the door and I hesitated. It seemed quite formal to say ‘Hello, Mrs Anderson,’ but she’d never asked me to call her by her first name so I
didn’t feel like I could do that either.

‘Hi,’ I said eventually.

‘Amelia,’ she said. Not even ‘Hello, Amelia’. Just my name in a cross, teacherish sort of voice.

I swallowed. ‘How’s Lauren?’

‘Asleep. She’s worn out.’

‘Oh. I was hoping to talk to her.’

‘That’s not possible right now.’

I wanted to leave a message, but something about the way Lauren’s mum was glaring at me made my words clog in my throat. I was going to have to sort this out by phone away from
Lauren’s mum’s accusing eyes. I half turned to go.

‘And Amelia?’

I looked back at her.

‘All this . . .’ she cast about for the right word, ‘. . . drama,’ she said as if drama was the most revolting thing she could think of. ‘This friendship drama
isn’t helping Lauren. She was extremely upset after you phoned her on Monday. You know she’s really very ill and she needs rest. If you can’t be a reliable friend then it might be
best if you spent less time with her.’

What did she mean Lauren was really very ill? I was so shocked by what she’d said that I was completely robbed of speech. She’d got it all wrong. Lauren had said she was ill that one
time and after that she kept playing it down as if it was nothing serious, but I was so upset and confused that I didn’t have the words to explain this to Lauren’s mum. All I could
think of was that I had to get away as fast as I could. For some stupid reason, I said politely, ‘Goodbye, Mrs Anderson,’ as if her opinion of my manners meant anything now. She’d
obviously got me down as the worst friend in the world. I walked blindly back up their drive and towards my house.

The more it rolled around in my head, the more bewildered I was. Lauren’s mum thought I was a horrible person and that I was rowing with Lauren when she was sick. Why hadn’t Lauren
explained to me properly? What exactly did ‘really very ill’ mean? Ill like glandular fever or was it something worse?