Chocolate Box Girls: Bittersweet (2 page)

It’s not that my dad doesn’t believe in talent – I think he believes in it too much. He knows that fame and fortune can be very fickle things. It’s just that as far as Dad is concerned, all of the talent in our family belongs to my big brother.

Ben is a bit of a legend around here. He’s brilliant at sport, football especially … he was playing for Bristol City FC Youth Squad by the time he was fourteen, and Southampton FC scouted him when he was sixteen, but he had an injury and things didn’t work out. It wasn’t majorly serious, but it was enough to wipe out Ben’s chances of a premier-league football career.

Dad didn’t cope too well when it all went pear-shaped. He couldn’t believe you could play so well and work so hard and have it all end in nothing, and I suppose that has made him suspicious of chances and opportunities and promises of fame and fortune.

Anyhow, Ben went off to uni to study sports science and said it was the best thing he ever did. He went out every night and partied hard, doing
all the stuff he hadn’t done when he was younger because of training so hard, and this summer he graduated with a 2:1 degree and started working full time at the sailing centre. He works hard, but he parties hard too.

‘You’re only young once, Shay,’ he likes to tell me. ‘Take my advice – loosen up, little brother. Live a little!’

I don’t take Ben’s advice, though.

I haven’t done that since I was five years old. Ben had made a go-cart and he told me I could be the first person to test it out. I felt like the most important boy in the world as I followed him up the hill behind our cottage.

‘You have total control,’ he told me. ‘Just yank on the steering rope to turn left or right, or to slow down. You’re so lucky I chose you to be the test driver, Shay! It’s going to be epic!’

It was epic all right. I wedged myself into the driver’s seat and Ben pushed me off down the hill at about a million miles an hour. Three seconds into the ride, the steering rope came off in my hands and, of course, there were no brakes. By the time I got to the bottom of the hill I was yelling like crazy. A wheel came off as I sped across the yard and crashed into the cottage wall, and I fell out of the go-cart and squashed Mum’s flowers and broke my arm in two different places.

Ben was the first to reach me.

‘Don’t tell,’ he hissed into my ear as I lay in a mangled heap beneath the lupins. ‘I’ll get into terrible trouble, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?’

So I didn’t tell, not even when Dad shouted at me for taking Ben’s go-cart without permission, not even when Mum grumbled about the squashed flower beds, not even when the doctors at A & E prodded about at my broken arm and put a plaster cast on it. I cried a bit because I was only five, remember, and it hurt a LOT. But Ben told me not to make a fuss, so after a while I just bit my lip and tried to be brave.

‘How did you manage to get yourself into such a mess, Shay?’ Dad huffed. ‘Why can’t you be more like your brother?’

That’s the question they’ve all been asking, my whole life pretty much. I wish I knew the answer, but the truth is I am not like Ben. We are chalk and cheese, day and night, sunshine and shadow.

I sigh, prising the lid off a fresh tin of paint, dipping my brush neatly and stroking the foul-smelling stuff across the upturned hull of yet another dinghy.

It’s Monday evening, almost two whole days after the legendary moment that didn’t change my life. Things have continued to go downhill. Finch and
Nikki headed back to London along with Curtis, and with them leaving it felt like summer was well and truly over, all the fun squeezed out of it. I will miss Finch, miss the freedom of long hot days that blur into lazy nights of music and laughter.

It’s like Dad has slammed the door on all of that too.

To top it all, today school started up again. I managed to survive it, but only just – my mind switched off as the teachers began to talk about how important Year Eleven is, how hard we’ll need to study to pass our GCSEs and get that golden ticket to a shining future – it is hard to get worked up about exams right now. What’s the point? I will probably flunk my GCSEs and drop out of school to face a life of slavery at the sailing centre, scraping barnacles off boats and teaching little kids how to kayak.

I kept my head down and hoped that nobody was talking about what happened with Curtis, but word had definitely leaked out because at break a few kids asked if it was true I was going to be recording with Wrecked Rekords. I pretended not to know what they were talking about, but that just fuelled the rumour.

Wait till they get the whole story – the boy who was offered a record deal from Wrecked and turned it down? Yup, that’s me.

I’ll look like the biggest loser in the universe.

It is a relief to be back here, away from the gossip, away from the sad glances Cherry keeps shooting me when she thinks I’m not looking. Nobody likes to be pitied, right?

I dip my brush again and focus on painting.

So, yeah … my brother, the legend.

When I was seven, Ben scored three goals in the final match of the Under Thirteens’ Somerset football league and got his picture in the paper holding a shiny silver cup up in the air. Dad put up a shelf in the bedroom we shared to display the trophy, and when that shelf got crowded he put up another. When that one was full, Dad cleared my shelves so that Ben could use them too. It’s not like I was going to win any trophies – that sporty, competitive gene must have skipped me completely.

‘Shay Fletcher?’ a whole bunch of teachers have said over the years, usually out on the sports field. ‘Ben’s little brother? Goodness, you don’t take after him, do you?’

Ben is popular with the girls, of course. They look at his blond hair and his athletic build and his skin tanned golden from working outside at the sailing centre, and they swoon. There are always little gangs of them cheering him on from the sidelines at any given football match. All he has to do is smile and reel them in. He has a girlfriend from
uni, but she lives miles away in Sheffield, and that’s probably a good thing. At least she’s not around to watch my brother flirting with every female within a fifty-mile radius.

I do not have an athletic build or a budding career in football, but I have the wheat-blond hair and the sea-green eyes and the tan. It took me a while to suss that not every girl who asked me if I was Ben Fletcher’s little brother was angling for his mobile number. Some of them were actually interested in ME.

‘Way to go, little brother,’ Ben laughed, when I started dating Honey Tanberry back in Year Nine. I had my brother’s approval at last.

I probably wouldn’t have dated Honey for half as long as I did if it hadn’t been for that. She was hard work – behind the party-girl facade, she was all anger and hurt and hopelessness. Neither of us got along with our families, and for a while that kept us together. I thought I could make her happy, but it turns out I was wrong about that, and after a while her drama-queen stuff started to get to me a bit.

I couldn’t see why Honey lashed out against her mum, why she hated her new stepdad. They both seemed pretty cool to me, but when I said that she called me a traitor. After a while I started to feel like I was just some kind of cool accessory she liked to
have in tow, a boy with a guitar who was good for her image.

The two of us were just marking time, hanging out together until something better came along … at least, that’s what I thought.

It ended badly, of course.

I met Cherry, and that was it –
ka-boom
, it blew everything I’d felt for Honey right out of the water. Honey would never have forgiven me anyhow for ditching her for someone new, but I guess I didn’t make it easy for her. As far as she was concerned, I’d chosen the worst possible girl to fall for. I might as well have stabbed her through the heart, she raged at me – that was how cruel, how callous I’d been. It was bad, I admit – about as bad as it was possible to get.

Cherry was her new stepsister.

The whole thing was a nightmare, a mess, a massacre.

Honey screamed and yelled and threw stuff at me, and even now, more than a year on, she looks at me with such coldness I can feel icicles form in my hair, frost chilling my skin. Like I said, it’s a nightmare.

I finish painting the last dinghy, press the lid down on the paint and walk across to the storeroom to clean the brush. Over the last few years, I have turned the storeroom into a kind of den – there’s
an ancient, paint-spattered sofa and a kettle to boil water for a pot noodle or a hot chocolate. It’s a good place to curl up with my guitar, a place to think and dream and write songs in the evening without Dad breathing down my neck.

There are plenty of pot noodles on the shelf and half a bar of Dairy Milk left over from the weekend. I reckon I’ve missed supper already, and it’s not like I’ll be missing much if I stay out another hour or two. Just the odd cutting remark from Dad, a few frosty silences, the occasional pitying glance from Mum or Ben.

It’s almost sunset, and the September sky is streaked with pink and gold, but the storeroom is dark and shadowy as I step inside. I don’t notice her at first, and when I do I just about jump out of my skin.

Honey is perched on the worktop in the corner, half hidden in the shadows, her long legs swinging, her jaw-length blonde hair rumpled. Her eyeliner is smudged and the lashes that fringe her wide blue eyes are damp, as if she’s been crying.

‘Shay?’ she says, her voice small, uncertain. ‘I need your help. I’m in trouble – big trouble.’

Honey is no stranger to trouble, of course. It’s her talent, her skill. If there was an exam in it she would get an A* without even trying … she’s a natural.

I got used to mopping up the fallout, back when we were together; Honey messing up, me sorting things out – it was just what we did. Still, I cannot for the life of me figure out what Honey is doing here now.

‘OK,’ I prompt, one eyebrow raised. ‘What is it this time? Fire, flood, plague of frogs? Or have you just broken a fingernail?’

Harsh, I know, but you have to remember that Honey and I are not exactly friends these days. Her lips begin to quiver and her eyes blur with tears, and right away I wish I could take the words back. What if something really serious has happened?

Honey is crying harder now, her shoulders shaking, mascara running down her cheeks in ugly black streaks. I hate it when girls cry. I never know what to do.

‘Hey, hey,’ I say, patting her arm awkwardly. ‘It can’t be that bad!’

Honey burrows her head against my neck and I panic because this clearly means that things
are
that bad, or possibly worse. Me and my big mouth. What if Honey’s mum has been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or her no-good dad has finally gone bankrupt and topped himself by jumping off the Sydney Harbour Bridge? And here’s me making jokes about broken fingernails. Nice one, Shay.

Meanwhile, Honey is clutching on to my T-shirt and making a wet patch on my shoulder. I can smell her favourite vanilla and almond shampoo, the scent of peppermint from the gum she likes to chew. I put an arm round her, then withdraw it again because it all feels a bit too close for comfort. This is not good.

‘Shhh, Honey,’ I say gently. ‘Don’t cry. Why don’t you tell me about it?’

We sit down side by side on the beat-up sofa, the way we used to back when we were dating, and Honey dries her eyes with a corner of my T-shirt, leaving smudges of eyeliner and glittery shadow.

‘They hate me,’ she announces finally, her voice a whisper. ‘They really do. Just because I was a little bit late home last night …’

Back when I used to date Honey, her curfew was 11 p.m., earlier on a school night, but Cherry tells me that those days are gone. These days, Honey is
either ‘grounded’ or ‘ungrounded’, and right now I am pretty sure it’s ‘grounded’. Just a few weeks ago she accidentally set fire to a stable while sharing a forbidden ciggy with one of the boys from the film crew, and her sister Summer fainted while trying to fight the flames and ended up in hospital. How did Honey handle it? By taking a handful of cash from a kitchen drawer and running away. They found her at Heathrow airport trying to buy a ticket to fly out to her dad in Australia, and the last I heard she was grounded until Christmas.

Unless I am mistaken, it is not Christmas yet.

‘I stayed over with a friend, obviously,’ Honey is saying. ‘No big deal, right? I’ve done it before. And it was the last night of the school holidays – you’d think they’d give me a little bit of leeway!’

But Honey is the kind of girl who takes a little bit of leeway and turns it into a wagonload of chaos, as far as I can remember.

‘So I bent the rules a little,’ she goes on. ‘So what? I stayed with a friend and I would have gone straight to school from there, but I accidentally slept in. It was unlucky, sure, but it’s not a crime, is it? Only Mum had to go and call the school, then the police … you name it. Talk about overreacting!’

I frown.

‘Let’s get this straight,’ I say. ‘You stayed out all night and didn’t come home in the morning, and
then you skipped school too. Plus, three weeks ago you ran away from home … Honey, don’t you think your mum had reason to panic?’

‘No!’ she argues. ‘I didn’t skip school, I just slept in! And I was perfectly fine all the time, just staying with a friend, I told you! They practically had a search party out looking for me, I swear … crazy. So now I am in trouble at school and if that’s not bad enough, the police have been on my case, telling me I am treading a very fine line … what does that even mean?’

‘Dunno,’ I shrug.

‘I’ll tell you exactly what it means,’ Honey says, and her eyes brim with tears again. ‘It means they’ll get social services involved if I land up in trouble again. Can you believe that? SOCIAL SERVICES! Like I’m some kind of problem teen or something! It’s just TOTALLY unfair – I wasn’t even trying to run away! It’s all Mum and Paddy’s fault – they want rid of me! They’d be GLAD if I was taken into care!’

Honey is sobbing again now, and I am praying for rescue because I so do not want to be here right now. I spot a clean paint rag on the arm of the sofa and hand it to Honey to wipe her eyes, but she ignores it and burrows in against my shoulder again. Loads of boys I know would love to get up close and personal with Honey
Tanberry, but I am not one of them.

Not any more.

My mobile rings, and Cherry’s name and picture flash up on the screen. This is not the kind of rescue I was hoping for – I jump back from Honey as if I’ve been stung.

‘I don’t bite, you know,’ she says, looking hurt.

‘No. I know. It’s just – well – it’s Cherry.’

‘Don’t answer,’ Honey begs. ‘Not right now. Just give me five minutes, please? I know you don’t think much of me, Shay, but surely I’m worth that much? For old time’s sake?’

I hesitate, frowning.

‘Call her back later,’ Honey prompts. ‘Please?’

I let my mobile ring out. I feel bad, but I am not sure how I would explain to Cherry that I am holed up in the storeroom den with my ex-girlfriend, mopping up her tears with my T-shirt. It would sound a whole lot worse than it actually is.

‘Thanks, Shay,’ she says in a tiny voice. ‘I can talk to you – I always could. Nobody else understands. And … well, you don’t judge me.’

I’m not sure about that.

‘Look,’ I tell her, exasperated. ‘I can see why you’re upset, Honey, but you need to calm down, get a bit of perspective. This isn’t Charlotte and Paddy’s fault – they must have been worried sick when you went missing!’

‘I wasn’t missing!’ Honey sulks.

‘So they knew where you were?’

‘Well, no … but …’

‘Honey, you were grounded,’ I remind her. ‘You vanished without telling anyone where you were going, and you were out all night and most of the next day. You didn’t turn up at school. What were they meant to think?’

Honey hugs her knees, suddenly looking about ten years old instead of fifteen.

‘How come you’re always so smart?’ she whispers. ‘OK. So I messed up … but the point is, I’m in trouble. I have some sort of weird police record now for running away, and the threat of social services hanging over my head. That’s really not fair. And Mum and Paddy hate me, Shay, they really do! I may as
well
be taken into care because they’re threatening me with some kind of boarding-school boot camp anyhow. I mean, just shoot me now. Really. My life sucks.’

I shrug. ‘You think you’re the only one who’s had a bad day?’

Honey gives me a sideways look. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Cherry mentioned about that whole Wrecked Rekords thing. Not to me, of course … your little girlfriend doesn’t chat to me much, funnily enough. But … yeah, I heard. Bummer. Your dad’s still being his usual charming self then?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Basically, we’ve both been dumped on,’ Honey declares. ‘You just got offered the chance of a lifetime, the chance to make your dream happen – and your dad shot the whole thing down in flames. Nice.’

The anger I have been trying to keep buried all day comes bubbling up to the surface, seeping through my veins like bitter poison. It hurts, like an ache inside, a sickness. No matter how hard I work, I know I will never be able to please my dad or make him proud; Ben seems to do all of that without even trying.

Somehow, I am always second best. The things I want, the things I am good at, never count for anything.

‘My family want rid of me,’ Honey is saying. ‘Whether it’s social services or boarding school, they don’t especially care which. I might as well just run away … it’s like they expect me to anyway.’

‘They were just worried,’ I echo, but Honey’s eyes darken and gleam.

‘We could, you know,’ she whispers. ‘Run away, I mean. You and me. We could jump a train up to London and lie about our age and find a flat. You could record your songs with Wrecked after all, and play gigs … maybe you’d be famous. And I could be a designer or something, I could make
really cool dresses and have a stall in Camden, and perhaps I’d get spotted too …’

The tiniest spark of excitement, of possibility, runs through me before the cold water of reality extinguishes it. Running away is not about finding flats and getting famous, it’s about sleeping rough and going hungry night after night, and being dragged into a scary, predatory underworld. It would not be fun or cool or daring, it would be crazy, dangerous, totally disastrous.

Besides … Honey and me? I don’t think so. Where has that even come from?

‘Forget it, Honey,’ I say. ‘It wouldn’t work out like that.’

‘It might!’ she argues. ‘We could show them – our families, everyone – prove we can make it without their help. They’d be sorry then! And what have we got to lose?’

‘Plenty,’ I tell her. ‘Better to stay and grab some GCSE passes and maybe some A levels … that could be our passport out of here. I want to go to uni and study music. London or Leeds or Liverpool, somewhere miles from here. And you could go to art college, Honey. That used to be what you wanted, not so long ago.’

‘My grades aren’t so good lately,’ she admits sulkily. ‘And uni is still years away … we’re only fifteen. I don’t know if I can survive that long!’

‘If I can, you can,’ I point out. ‘Besides, if you run away the police will track you down. And what then? Social services will wade in, just like you said. That’s just what you
don’t
want.’

‘I guess …’

Her shoulders slump and she looks suddenly vulnerable. I’ve always known that underneath the stroppy, rebel-girl surface Honey Tanberry is just a kid, hurt and lost and angry because her dad went away and left her just when she needed him most.

‘What is it about us that’s so awful, Shay?’ she asks in a small, sad voice. ‘What makes us so difficult to love?’

‘I don’t know,’ I sigh.

This time, when she leans against me and drops her head against my shoulder, I don’t pull away.