The Boyfriend Dilemma

 

 

 

About the Author

 

Fiona Foden grew up in a tiny Yorkshire village called Goose Eye. At seventeen she landed her dream job on a teenage magazine in Scotland, and went on to be editor of
Bliss
,
More!
and
Just Seventeen
magazines. She now lives in Lanarkshire, Scotland, with her husband Jimmy and their children Sam, Dexter and Erin.

 

When she's not writing, Fiona likes to play her sax and flute and go out running with her mad rescue dog, Jack.
The Boyfriend Dilemma
is her fourth book for teenagers.

 

 

 

Also by Fiona Foden

 

Life, Death and Gold Leather Trousers

Cassie's Crush

A Kiss, a Dare and a Boat Called Promise

 

 

 

 

For Esme and Orla with love.

Contents

 

Cover

Half Title Page

About the Author

Also by Fiona Foden

Title Page

Dedication

 

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter twenty-seven

Chapter twenty-eight

Chapter twenty-nine

Chapter thirty - Four months later

 

Copyright

Chapter one

Ever had
one of those days
? I have no idea that it's going to turn out to be one of them when I wake up. In fact, everything feels pretty perfect. The sky is a brilliant blue and, although it's 8.15 on a Monday morning, there's no Monday feeling at all. It's the Easter holidays and I have a whole day with my best friend Layla ahead. What could be better than that?

But first, duty calls. Mum, who's a plastic surgeon, has been called into work for an emergency, so I have to take my little brother Matty to holiday club. I pull on jeans and a plain white T-shirt and call for Matty to get up. When no reply comes, I yell, “MATTY! Mum had to go to work so I'm taking you to holiday club. C'mon!” Still nothing. I march towards his room, pulling my hair back into a ponytail with the band from my wrist. Holiday club starts at nine so there's no time for messing about.

No Matty in his room. I know he's already up, though, as his bed's been made with the duvet smoothed over (Mum is
horribly
strict about things like that). He must be hiding somewhere; at nine years old, he still finds it hilarious to bounce out from his hiding place, roaring like a monster.
Will he ever grow out of this?
I actually think his main ambition is to give me a heart attack. Then he'd get my room, which he reckons is “better” because the big window opens out onto a balcony. “Matty!” I shout. “Come on – we've got to
go
.”

Still silence. I check the upstairs bathroom and peer into Mum's bedroom, even though it's unlikely he's in there – she keeps it so perfect you feel like you're messing it up just by breathing. If that makes her sound scary, she's not at all – just immensely organized and crazily busy being the best paediatric plastic surgeon in Britain. She treats kids who've had horrible things happen to their faces or bits of their bodies, and she's been in the newspaper and even on TV.

I could kill Matty for messing me about. It's now half eight and I still have his packed lunch to make. It's horribly tempting to make him something like, I don't know, an anchovy sandwich – just to get my own back. “Matty!” I keep shouting, starting to actually worry now. Has something happened? He might be the most annoying nine year old ever to have walked the earth, but he's still my brother and he's always having freak accidents. When he fell off his bike and broke his arm, he had a long, thin piece of metal inserted into it, like a tent peg. My throat starts to tighten as I check the garden. Nothing. I march back into his room, my gaze skimming his bed, his shelf with the empty fish tank still sitting on it (Jaws died last year) and his boxes of toys on the floor.

That's when I spot it: a small, pale arm poking out from behind his wardrobe. It's flopped out on the carpet, lifeless and covered in blood. My mouth falls open but no sound comes out. Some of the blood is bright red and looks wet, while other parts are darker, nearly black, where it's dried into scabs. “Matty,” I croak, forcing myself to step forward. “Oh my God, what happened…?” My heart seems to stop as I reach the wardrobe and peep behind it.

And … there's
nothing there
. No dead brother – not even an injured one lying in a pool of blood. It's just a plastic arm, from a shop mannequin by the look of it, splattered in paint. “April fool!” Matty bellows behind me. I spin around to see him laughing his face off in his baggy Darth Vader underpants.

“You're
sick
, you know that?” I grab the arm and wave it at him like a truncheon, managing to cover myself in paint.

“You thought I was dead!” he guffaws.

I glare at him. “Wait till I tell Mum. Where did you get this anyway?”

Matty smirks. “Found it.”

“Oh, right, 'cause there are always plastic body parts lying about in the street…”

“It was in a skip,” he adds, “outside that old ladies' dress shop.”

See how warped he is? He must've figured that it'd be ideal for tormenting me. As if I need this, at the start of the Easter holidays, after the terrible time I've had at school lately. Seriously – the past couple of weeks have been hell, ever since Mum appeared on TV. She was on this science programme, being interviewed about the amazing operations she's been doing, using fake skin that's grown in a laboratory. Sure, I think she's amazingly clever – but d'you know what happens when your mum's on TV? You're no longer an ordinary girl in a smallish town where nothing much ever happens. All of a sudden, you're “spoiled”, a “snob” and “think you're something special
because of your famous mum
”. As if she's a pop star or an actress who spends all her time going to celebrity parties and movie premières.

I wanted to shout, “I'm still
me
– the same person I was yesterday – and my mum's only a doctor. It's no big deal…” But I couldn't – not when Carla Jamieson had started the whole thing. Carla calls herself CJ because she thinks it sounds hard, and although I hate to admit it, she actually is. She hacks at her own hair with kitchen scissors and roams around with her big sister Toni and their mates, looking for people to torment.

Toni is even scarier than CJ. She has an electronic tag on her ankle so the police know where she is all the time. It's like radar, but instead of being for boats or planes, it's for tracking a seventeen-year-old girl who's been in trouble for starting fights and setting fire to bins. So, the Jamiesons – let's just say it's a good idea to stay out of their way. Anyway, I wasn't about to report CJ for calling me a snob.

“Just rise above it, darling,” Mum advised, so that's what I've been doing: imagining myself as a cloud, about to gush freezing rain all over CJ's head. I've also considered giving myself an “initials” name of my own – but that would be ZH, for Zoe Harper. As well as being pretty awkward to say, it's not exactly intimidating. Anyway, I've been counting the days until the Easter break. Even though I'm bound to run into CJ at some point, at least I won't have to sit in classes with her every day and have her hissing, “
Your
face looks like it was made in a laboratory, snob.”

In the kitchen, Matty is still sniggering over his genius prank. It's so fantastically amusing that he's even forgotten to moan about our gravelly muesli like he usually does. So at least I'm spared that. But I still want to ping him into holiday club as quickly as possible and head over to Layla's, where life is normal. No twisted pranks, no mum on telly talking about cow skin – Layla has no idea how lucky she is.

By the time we arrive at the sports centre, all the kids have been dropped off. There's a rowdy game of softball going on in the main hall, so I grab my brother's hand and find a friendly-looking helper. “Sorry we're late,” I say. “This is Matty Harper—”

“I got her with an April fool,” he blares out, still delighted with himself. “I covered a fake arm in paint mixed with soil so it looked scabby. She thought I'd been murdered, haha!”
Go on, Matty. Tell her some more in case you haven't convinced everyone that our family's completely weird…
I force out a laugh to prove I can take a “joke”.

“That was clever,” the girl chuckles, searching for his name on her clipboard. “Matty Harper … ah, here you are.” She turns to me. “How old are you?”

“Er, thirteen,” I reply, realizing with a sickening feeling what's coming next.

“Sorry, you have to be over sixteen to sign him in.”

“Please,” I say quickly, dreading the thought of looking after Matty for eight life-sapping hours. “Mum was meant to bring him but she was called into hospital. She's a doctor—”

“A famous plastic surgeon,” Matty says proudly.

The girl tilts her head. “ Was she on that programme about cow skin?”

“Yes, that was her,” I murmur, hoping no one else has overheard.

The girl's eyes widen. “It was amazing. I mean, cow skin! It's kinda…” She shudders. “It's a bit
eugh
, but then, if it helps children who've been burned or whatever…”

“Cow skin?” sniggers another helper, marching towards us, her shiny plaits bouncing above her shoulders. “You mean like beef? Or burgers?” My face is blazing now.
No
, I want to shout.
Mum doesn't fix kids' faces with
burgers
.
She uses stuff that looks exactly like human skin, but is grown in Petri dishes from cow proteins…
Oh, never mind. I don't fully understand it myself, being a schoolgirl and not a world-class surgeon who spent about a hundred years at university…

“Let her sign him in, Kate,” the plaits girl says, grabbing the clipboard and pen and handing them to me. “No one'll know.” She smiles down at my brother who's busily picking wax from his ear. “Got your packed lunch, love”

He looks up at me. “Where's my packed lunch?”

“Oh, I … forgot.”

“But I'm here all day!” he gasps. “I'll
starve
.” He clutches at his stomach as if he's about to collapse.

“I'll buy you something,” I snap, figuring that I'd rather spend pretty much all of the five-pound note in my pocket than have to go home and make him something when I could be at Layla's. The sandwiches in the newsagent's over the road look pretty sad, but I buy one anyway, plus a bottle of apple juice and some crisps.

Matty glares at his sandwich as if I'd scraped it up off the pavement. “You know I hate tuna,” he yells as I race for the door.