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Authors: Caroline Green

Tags: #Teen & Young Adult, #Mysteries, #Literature & Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Mysteries & Thrillers, #Fantasy & Supernatural

Hold Your Breath (3 page)

BOOK: Hold Your Breath
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She looked around again. A couple of Sixth Formers who were laughing at something on a mobile phone walked towards her. She waited until they passed, pretending to adjust her earring. Then, when
she was sure no one was watching, she gently pushed the door open with a cautious finger. She didn’t know why she was doing this. It was definitely weird behaviour. And ‘weird’
was a place that she, Tara Murray, was trying to leave behind. But still she looked.

There was nothing much to see though. The inside of the door held a poster of an actor from a gruesome vampire show on telly, all shirtless and glistening with oil. A body spray lay on its side
and its musky aroma clung to the space. It reminded Tara instantly of Melodie and, for a second, the sensation that she was close by was so strong that Tara swung round to look behind her. But no
one was there. She turned back to the locker. A single pink sweet had melted against the metal wall. Some sort of paper was wedged at the back, all bunched up. Tara tentatively poked her hand
inside and reached for it, giving it a pull to free it from where it was trapped by the metal casing.

A strip of photo booth pictures showed Melodie, her hair piled on top of her head, messy but attractively arranged. She was with an older boy with a small dark beard and a wolfish expression.
The first three pictures showed Melodie laughing and sticking her head close to the camera or making faces, the boy in the background smiling indulgently. The final picture showed him with his face
buried in Melodie’s neck, kissing her while she looked at the camera with a cat-got-the-cream expression.

Suddenly feeling stalkerish and pervy, Tara dropped the photo. There was something else in the locker . . . a tiny silver earring shaped like a treble clef. She picked it up and ran her thumb
over the smooth metal. The spicy body spray aroma became stronger now and then something else took over: the artificial strawberry smell of the melted sweet clung to the insides of her nostrils,
cloying, choking. The interior of the locker went dark and then Tara was all nerve endings. Smells, colour, tastes all battered her and intricate patterns swam before her eyes. Staggering
backwards, she barely felt the sharp corner of the locker door scraping the soft flesh of her inner arm. She stumbled until she felt the wall and she sat heavily on a bench, hands over her eyes.
The jumbled pictures and white noise started to clear into an image in her mind. And then it was blindingly detailed, like a screen where Tara could see every individual pixel.

A gloomy room. A single lightbulb swaying above her. A rotten, dank smell. Hard to . . . breathe . . . I’m scared . . .

‘Tara?’

A blinding white light seared across her vision and then cleared to reveal the craggy, concerned face of Mr Ford, peering down at her.

‘What’s wrong? Are you ill?’

‘No!’ Tara’s voice came out thin and small as she struggled to her feet. ‘I’m all right . . . Oh.’ Something warm hit the skin of her upper foot. She looked
down. Blood plopped from her arm and trickled down her foot in a crimson rivulet.

‘You’re evidently not all right, young lady! You’re bleeding!’ Mr Ford took her gently by the other arm and passed her a large cotton handkerchief, which she pressed
against the cut. ‘Now come with me to the medical room.’

‘But —’

‘No buts!’

Tara let herself be led down the corridor, through the fire doors at the end, and up two floors to the medical room. The nurse/secretary had gone for the day, so Mr Ford busied himself with
antiseptic wipes and plasters on a roll while Tara meekly waited, wishing she didn’t feel so sick and that the throbbing in her head would stop.

He expertly cleaned and bandaged her arm. She managed to avoid meeting his eye throughout the whole process, although he was close enough for her to smell coffee on his breath.

‘There,’ he said after a little while. ‘That should do it.’

She looked up and met his kind hazel eyes.

‘Want to tell me what happened?’ he said.

Tara’s head whisked a fast ‘no’. ‘Nothing happened,’ she said quietly. ‘I just stumbled against my locker.’ For a second she held her breath, convinced
he would reply, ‘But it wasn’t your locker, was it?’

There was a pause.

‘Okay, well, you’d better be off home then,’ said Mr Ford. ‘But if you need to talk then I’m —’

‘I’m fine,’ Tara said, relief blooming inside. ‘Really. Thanks for sorting my arm out.’

She got up and hurried down the corridor. She could feel Mr Ford’s gaze all the way to the main doors.

As soon as Tara got out of the school gates, she stopped and looked down at her opened fingers. The tiny treble clef was still there, squashed into her sweaty palm. She should have dropped it
when she had the chance. Looking at the earring made her throat constrict and spots dance in front of her eyes. Tara looked around for a bin but there wasn’t anywhere she could put it. It
felt wrong to throw it on the ground. Sighing shakily, she stuffed it into the very furthest corner of the messenger bag she used for school.

Tara headed for the river to walk home. It was longer that way but she needed to clear her head before Mum saw her and sensed something was up.

The warm day had become muggy now and tiny flies floated in clouds around her head. Tara’s thoughts raced and flitted like the flies as she tried to take slow breaths and work out what had
just happened.

The cold terror. The choking sense of panic. The desperate need to be found before something awful happened. For a few moments she’d been absolutely certain – as certain as her own
name was Tara Elizabeth Murray – that Melodie Stone was in some kind of terrible danger.

There was only one time she’d felt like that before.

When Tyler Evans went missing.

But she’d been so wrong then. Horribly, disastrously wrong. She’d thought she was helping, and because of her a life was wasted.

Tara bit her lip and squeezed her hands into her eyes, making the world a kaleidoscope when she pulled them away.

Her insides lurched at the memory of her parents’ faces. The way they’d avoided her eyes for days and said things like, ‘Let’s just try to forget all about
this.’

But she knew she would never forget.

Tara tried to push the memories of February away. This wasn’t going to happen. Melodie Stone had gone to live in Brighton. She was perfectly all right. It was nothing to do with Tara, and
anyway, Tara’s ‘visions’ weren’t even to be trusted, not when it came to people.

She couldn’t – wouldn’t – put herself through that again.

She was going to be normal.

It didn’t seem a lot to ask. She wasn’t asking for fantastic hair or to be the most popular person in the school.

She just wanted to be normal.

C
HAPTER
3
S
HINY

T
ara was watching morning television, her empty cereal bowl on the coffee table in front of her. She’d slept better than she expected to, and
there had been no bad dreams. What had happened yesterday nagged at her now she was up though. It was taking all her mental energy to focus on the feature about fake tans on the telly. She looked
at her phone, which was lying on the coffee table. Someone from an unknown number had tried to call her yesterday evening.
Probably a wrong number
, she thought.

Beck thumped down next to her and simultaneously crossed his legs on the table, his four slices of toast nearly skidding off his plate. His big, pale feet were almost obscuring the television.
Tara smacked his leg.

‘Urgh,’ she said. ‘Move your horrible hairy toes out of the way. I can’t see.’

Beck lifted a leg so his foot dominated the screen and she shrieked and battered his leg with ineffectual slaps.

‘Mum!’ she yelled. ‘Will you tell this hairy idiot to just stop!’

Mum came into the room, putting in one of her earrings.

‘Stop, hairy idiot,’ she deadpanned. ‘Tara, it’s time to go anyway. Come on.’

Tara got up and Beck instantly stretched along the sofa, thin white ankles and feet hanging off the end. Tara shot him a disgusted look and he grinned and folded a whole piece of toast into his
mouth at once.

‘God, you’re foul,’ she said and picked up her school bag, suppressing a tiny smile at the same time. ‘How you ever got a girlfriend is one of life’s
mysteries.’

Beck just grinned again and reached for the remote control.

He was really called Jack, but Tara had called him Beck when she was a toddler and it had stuck. He seemed to sail through life in a way Tara deeply envied. She didn’t sail. She felt as
though she constantly got snagged on sharp things, like a kite caught in the branches of a tree.

Today was one of Mum’s working days, so she gave Tara a lift into school. Her mother had a frightening ability to know when something was wrong, so Tara tried to think of
a topic of conversation to head her off at the pass. But she wasn’t quite fast enough.

‘Are you all right, Tabs?’ said Mum, using the pet name she’d used since Tara was tiny. ‘Only you didn’t eat much of your dinner last night.’

‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ said Tara, flicking a bright smile and then looking straight ahead again.

‘Really, really?’ said Mum.

‘Really, really.’

The car slowed and she felt her mum’s glance grazing her cheek. She kept her face turned the other way.

‘Is everything going okay at school?’

Tara sighed, inwardly. ‘Yeah, it’s all good,’ she said.

‘I know it’s not easy settling into a new school,’ continued Mum, ‘but it’ll come, you’ll see.’

Her mother’s soft, kind voice had the most annoying effect of making tears burn her eyes. She nodded briskly and grunted. When the car stopped at the side of the road, she got out without
saying goodbye. She knew Mum would be hurt, but if she told her about last night and how, for a few horrible moments, she had been convinced that Melodie Stone was lost somehow and in danger, it
would have sent her mother into the stratosphere with worry.

All the same, it didn’t seem fair she should have to deal with this . . . whatever it was . . . alone.

The thing that really sucked was that Tara’s freaky ‘trick’ used to make people happy. Lost your keys? Ask Tara. Can’t find where you left your wallet? Ask Tara.

It had started on the way back from a big shopping centre when Tara was two and a half. Tara had heard the story so many times, she fancied now that she remembered it all herself. As
they’d driven home, Dad had noticed that his watch wasn’t on his wrist. It was an expensive diving watch, which had been a special gift from his parents years before, and the strap had
needed adjusting because one of the links was loose.

He had been trying on suits for an upcoming wedding in lots of different shops while Mum had taken Tara and Beck to get new shoes and ice creams. The shopping centre was huge and the watch worth
a lot of money, so Dad was worried it was gone for good. They’d rushed back and Dad had started to ring the shops he’d visited but nothing had been handed in.

Tara had been whiney all the way home, repeating something over and over again and becoming increasingly agitated. She went into a full meltdown in the house and, finally, Mum realised she was
trying to say something.

‘Daddy wash in da shiny shop!’

The ‘shiny shop’ was the big department store, which had a striking display at the entrance of glass baubles that caught the light and sparkled like jewels.

There was a call from that very shop, minutes later. Dad’s watch had been found underneath one of the displays.

Her parents had been delighted by their clever girl, but no one could understand how she’d known. Tara had never been in the shop that day.

As she got older, Tara’s gift for finding lost things was her party trick, even though it gave her a bit of a headache after it happened. No one minded it. It was just a bit of fun.

But it turned out that lost watches and keys were one thing, and lost little boys something else entirely.

Walking through the school gates that morning, past jostling, yelling younger kids and huddles of older ones talking, texting and laughing, Tara kept her head down. Maybe she
could pretend the powerful sensations she’d felt by Melodie’s locker meant nothing. If you forced yourself to believe something was true, maybe it became a kind of reality in time. That
was what she was hoping, anyway.

The school day passed slowly. At breaktime, Tara noticed a battered old sports car near the school gates, its engine idling. She couldn’t see the driver. Then she saw Karis from her form
group looking around in a sneaky way before going over to the gates and letting herself out.

A man got out of the car. He looked familiar. Young, good-looking, with longish hair and a little beard. He wore skinny jeans and a T-shirt. She couldn’t place where she’d seen him
before. He started to talk to Karis, gesticulating and saying something in a heated way. After another brief exchange, he got back into the car and drove off.

Karis came back into school, eyes fervently darting around. Instead of going to find her cronies, Karis sat down on a bench, her back to some Year Sevens giggling on the other end.

‘Oi!’ The voice came from just outside the gate. Beck was grinning at Tara from outside, hands in his pockets. His jeans and the skin of his tanned arms were covered in splashes and
flecks of white paint. She felt a rush of affection for her brother, who seemed like something warm and comforting in a hard, cold place.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Tara, walking over to the gate. She saw Karis’s head whip up so fast she might crick her neck and a small tingle of pride went through her at
her good-looking, funny brother, who everyone always liked. It sometimes felt as though all the charm and charisma had been handed out at once when Beck was born, leaving none for her when she came
along, twenty months later.

‘I’m on my way home,’ he said, ‘and I was passing because I had to drop something off down the road. Saw you standing there all alone and thought I’d say
hello.’

‘Oh, cheers.’ Tara blushed, wishing Beck hadn’t seen her looking like such a loser.

BOOK: Hold Your Breath
13.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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