The Honeymoon Sisters
Read The Honeymoon Sisters Online
Authors: Gwyneth Rees
Hi there,
I just wanted to say hello and tell you a bit about myself.
I live on the very outside of London near the River Thames, with my husband (who is Dutch and makes great pancakes!) and our two young daughters. We also have a Siamese cat called Hamish who came to us as a very timid rescue cat and spent the first few weeks hiding up the chimney! Now he is a real family cat and loves sitting on my lap (and trying to sit on my keyboard!) when I’m at my desk writing.
I’m half Welsh and half English but I grew up in Scotland. Before I became a writer I worked as a doctor, mainly with children and teenagers. From as far back as I can remember I’ve always loved stories in any form – reading books, watching films, playing make-believe games. As a child I always had one fantasy world or another on the go and as I grew older that changed to actual ongoing sagas that I wrote down in exercise books and worked on for weeks at a time.
I really hope you enjoy reading this – and that you’ll write to me at
[email protected]
to let me know what you think. I’d love it if you told me a bit about yourself too!
Best wishes,
For Eliza and Lottie, with love
Contents
‘Nice work, Poppy,’ our English teacher, Mr Anderson, told me as he handed me back my book report. ‘I especially like the way you discussed the villain – very thoughtful and insightful. Well done.’
‘Thanks,’ I muttered, feeling myself blush as I pushed my glasses further back on my nose. Mr Anderson has got to be the coolest – and cutest – teacher in our school, and I know I’m not the only one in my class to have a bit of a crush on him.
My friend Anne-Marie, who sits beside me, gave me a nudge with her elbow. I knew she was going to start teasing me about Mr Anderson as soon as the bell rang.
It was last thing on Friday afternoon and Mr Anderson had given us ten minutes to complete the task of making a sketch and giving it a title. We then had to pass our drawing to the person next to us, who would have to take
it home and write a poem to go with it to read out in class the following Friday. Mr Anderson is always coming up with stuff like that to do at the end of the day on a Friday afternoon. Normally I’d have been sketching away furiously along with everyone else, trying to make Anne-Marie’s homework task as tricky as possible, but today my heart wasn’t really in it. I couldn’t stop thinking about my foster-sister Amy and how much I was going to miss her. Then, with just a few minutes to go, I suddenly thought of something to draw.
‘Wow, Sadie!’ Mr Anderson was exclaiming as he reached the desk behind mine.
I twisted round to see what he was wowing about and saw that Sadie Shaw (who sits right behind me, unfortunately) had drawn a stuffed bird just like the one in our art department. It was beautifully drawn but she had used red pen to add an angry gash dripping with blood right across the bird’s neck. The title she had written was ‘
MURDER
’.
‘What are
you
looking at?’ she hissed when she saw me staring.
Sadie is new to our school, having started a few weeks ago, halfway through Year Eight. Despite the fact that we’re related, I have no memory of meeting Sadie before
her first day at our school. I wouldn’t even have known who she was if Mum hadn’t recognised her name when I told her there was a new girl. So far Sadie had mostly avoided talking to me and had made it perfectly clear that the last thing she wanted was to be my friend. I’d stopped trying to be nice to her after the second week, when she’d grabbed me in the girls’ toilets and threatened to make my life miserable if I told anyone the truth about us. I’d told her I didn’t want anyone to know either, so keeping it a secret suited me fine.
Sadie acted cold and aloof towards everybody and pretty soon all sorts of rumours were flying around the school about her. The most popular one was that she was the delinquent niece of our headmaster, Mr Jamieson, and had been expelled from her last school. This was because she looks a bit like him (they both have reddish hair and blue eyes and scowl a lot), plus she’d been seen going into his office a few times. There was also the more colourful rumour someone had started that her dad was a hitman! I’d gone straight home and asked Mum if that could be true and she’d said she doubted it, but since she hadn’t had any contact with Sadie’s dad in years she couldn’t tell me anything for certain.
Of course I know better than to believe rumours, but
Sadie certainly seemed a lot tougher than most of the kids in our school and nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of her. She’d recently moved to our fairly small grammar school from a big comprehensive school on the other side of town. Anne-Marie, who always seems to know everything about everybody, said she’d moved to one of the new houses on the other side of the park. (Mum was more interested in that fact than anything else, saying that she wondered where Sadie’s dad had got the money.)
Sadie might seem cold and detached on the surface but there were definitely a few things she was passionate about. The most obvious one was art. Ever since she’d arrived she’d been regularly impressing our art teacher with the work she produced, although the other day when Miss Hodge had brought out the stuffed birds for us to sketch, Sadie had left her paper totally blank, saying it was cruel to kill animals just to stuff them.
‘Maybe they died of natural causes and then they got stuffed,’ Anne-Marie had said with a grin.
‘It doesn’t even matter how they died!’ Sadie had blurted out angrily. ‘We don’t stuff humans and put
them
on display, do we? So why should we do it to animals?’
‘Same reason we eat animals and not humans, I
suppose,’ Katy Clarkson put in smugly. ‘Cos they aren’t so high up the food chain.’
It had started off a heated debate in our class and Miss Hodge had looked really relieved when the bell rang.
Mr Anderson perched himself on the edge of Sadie’s desk, enthusing over her drawing and asking her questions about it. To say that the rest of the girls in our class were jealous would be an understatement. (If there is one teacher in our school who you would want perched on your desk it is definitely Mr Anderson.)
‘Sadie’s clearly making a point here,’ Mr Anderson said as he held up her drawing to show to the rest of us.
‘Too right!’ Sadie agreed with him angrily. ‘Taxidermy is completely gross and the school shouldn’t allow stuffed birds – or animals – on the premises!’
‘O … K …’ Mr Anderson gave Katy and her friend Julia Munro a stern look to stop them giggling. ‘So, Sadie, I can see you feel very strongly about this issue. Perhaps you can get the school council to bring it up for further discussion.’
‘School council’s useless,’ Sadie scoffed. ‘We had one at my last school. Goody-goody teacher’s pets, all of them.’
Mr Anderson said something in reply but I didn’t really take it in because I was too busy feeling mortified and
sliding down in my chair. I had been elected as the Year Eight representative on our school council at the start of the year after writing an admittedly cringe-inducing statement about why I thought I’d be good at the job. Hopefully nobody would mention that right now.
Of course straight away Anne-Marie (who has a bit of a big mouth) announced, ‘Poppy’s on the school council.’
‘Shut up, Anne-Marie,’ I hissed, ducking my head forward and letting my hair fall over my face so nobody would see me blushing. (I have shoulder-length brown hair, which I usually tie back, but today I had a couple of spots on my face that I was trying to hide.)
‘Don’t tell me that’s your school councillor’s badge, Poppy.’ Sadie was pointing to the little felt flower brooch pinned to the lapel of my blazer, which was over the back of my seat. ‘Looks like it was made by a five-year-old.’
‘A four-year-old, actually,’ I replied fiercely. Amy had made the brooch as a goodbye gift and presented it to me that morning just as I’d been going out the door to school.
The bell rang and there was a massive kerfuffle and loads of laughter as people swapped their drawings and got ready to go.
‘You three swap with each other,’ Mr Anderson said, since Sadie didn’t have a desk partner. Sadie quickly gave
hers to Anne-Marie and I didn’t even get a look at Anne-Marie’s sketch as she shoved it straight into my bag. That just left mine, which I was obviously meant to give to Sadie.
I had sketched the face of a little girl with a wild Afro and called it ‘Amy’. Now I felt reluctant to part with it. I had visions of Sadie crumpling it up in a ball and trampling on it.
Sadie looked like she couldn’t care less either way, but unfortunately Mr Anderson noticed.
‘Is something wrong, Poppy?’
I suddenly felt teary as I remembered Amy wouldn’t be there to greet me when I got home.
I
so
had to pull myself together.
‘No,’ I mumbled as I handed Sadie the drawing and pulled a tissue out of my bag. I removed my glasses, which I only need for reading the board in any case, and quickly wiped my eyes.
That’s when I noticed Sadie staring at me. ‘What?’ I demanded crossly.
‘Nothing,’ she said with a small smile. ‘It’s just … you don’t look nearly as clever without your glasses.’
‘Gee … thanks,’ I grunted.
‘I’m just making an observation, that’s all. Glasses really
do
make people look brainier. It’s pretty weird
considering that they just mean you’ve got defective eyesight, right?’
I glared at her. I hate my glasses, but I made a point of putting them back on my nose rather than away in my bag like I usually do at the end of a lesson. I didn’t want her to think I cared what
she
thought.
‘Are you coming, Poppy?’ Anne-Marie asked impatiently. I’d almost forgotten she was still there.
I hurried to catch her up. Anne-Marie can be a bit of a pain sometimes but we were at primary school together and we’ve been friends for a really long time. We were never
best
friends, but when we transferred to the grammar school our other friends mostly went to different schools, so we’d ended up becoming closer.