3: Chocolate Box Girls: Summer's Dream (15 page)

I know better. Those foods aren’t for dancers.

I like making those things, though, and perhaps if
Grandma Kate sees me cooking and baking, she won’t notice I am not actually eating the end results. It’ll take willpower, of course, but I have plenty of that.

I watch from the hammock as Harry comes out of the workshop in a chocolate-streaked apron to greet the postman, collecting a handful of orders for Paddy’s luxury truffles. Even my new stepdad peddles high-class junk food, fat and sugar parcelled up in pretty boxes. No wonder I’m fat. It’s a miracle the whole family aren’t the size of hippos.

I list down meal ideas to make for my sisters: pizza, pasta, nachos, quiche … apple tart, trifle, tiramisu. My mouth waters just thinking about them. Next I list practice times and lesson times and times to swim and chill out with my sisters and my friends too. I will not let Aaron Jones or anyone else accuse me of being obsessed or boring, of having a one-track mind. I will not let him tell me that I need to get a life. I will show everyone, myself included, that I can do it all. I will toughen up, learn to hide my fears – I will not lose it in front of my friends, let them see me upset.

‘You’re the sensible, organized one,’ Tia has always told me. ‘You’ve got everything under control.’

Yeah, right. The trouble is that when your friends and family are used to seeing you succeed, they don’t always notice when you start to fail. Maybe they just don’t want to see. Well, fine. I may not have been much use as an extra in the film, but I have pretty good acting skills all the same. I show people what they want to see, hide the stuff they’d rather not know about. So what if the mask has slipped a couple of times?

I will just have to try harder at keeping it in place.

I wake up to the sound of Fred barking. The sun is high, my library books have slipped on to the grass and Humbug the lamb is chomping her way through Mum’s herb garden.

I stretch and yawn and peer over the side of the hammock, and there is Alfie Anderson walking across the garden towards me. I gather up the books in a panic, stuffing them under the hammock cushions and leaning back on them to make sure they stay hidden.

‘Skye’s not here,’ I say, as he approaches.

‘I know,’ he grins. ‘I came to see you.’

I struggle to sit up. ‘I’m fine,’ I tell him brightly. ‘Thanks
for looking out for me the other day … I think I had a bit of a bug. That’s why I hadn’t eaten, why I felt woozy for a little while. It was kind of you to sit with me.’

Alfie flops down on the grass beside the hammock, his face unreadable. I’m not sure the lie has fooled him.

‘It wasn’t kind of me,’ he shrugs. ‘I wanted to. I’m glad you’re feeling better. How’s the dance practice going?’

‘Great,’ I say, with a little more enthusiasm than necessary. ‘Really good.’

‘How many days till the audition?’

‘Twelve days, twenty-one hours and fifteen minutes,’ I grin. ‘Not that I’m counting.’

Alfie nods. He looks thoughtful, sitting under the trees in the dappled sunlight, his floppy mid-brown hair freshly washed after its midweek gel-fest, face scrubbed clean of everything but freckles. I suppose I am not the only one growing up – Alfie has shaken off the scruffy, slightly deranged look I have always associated with him. He is tall and stylish these days in band T-shirts and rolled-up jeans, his grin wide and easy.

‘No eyeliner today?’ I quip.

‘I’m trying out the natural look.’

About a lifetime goes by, or possibly just a minute or two, with me swaying in the hammock and Alfie sprawled across the grass. I think about telling him I am busy, that he should go, that I have a dance class in town or have promised to help in the chocolate workshop, but the words won’t come.

I pick a daisy from the grass, pierce the stalk with my thumbnail and thread another one through. I loved making daisy chains when I was little. I’d make bracelets and necklaces and daisy earrings … I loved the way each tiny flower was perfect on its own but better still linked together. It was the way I felt about Mum and Dad, about Skye and Honey and Coco, all the people I loved.

‘Hey,’ Dad said once, one warm day when I’d made a crown of daisies for my hair. ‘My little princess.’

I really felt like a princess that day. That was before Dad left, of course. I may have been Dad’s little princess, but it didn’t stop him breaking the family up. Daisy chains are pretty fragile, and it turns out that families are too. Sometimes we love people who just don’t love us back – or at least not enough.

‘I can’t do it,’ Alfie says, watching me make a circle of daisies. ‘Too clumsy. I’m all fingers and thumbs.’

I hang my circle of daisies from Alfie’s ear. ‘It would have looked better with eyeliner,’ I say. ‘But still, not a bad look.’

Alfie laughs. ‘You just don’t take me seriously, do you? Still, anything that takes your mind off the audition has to be good …’

‘Nothing can,’ I shrug.

‘It’s your dream, I suppose,’ Alfie says quietly. ‘Dancing.’

‘Totally. Major dream. Always has been …’

‘I’m not sure I have dreams like that,’ he says. ‘I used to want to be Superman, when I was a kid. Then I thought I might be a stand-up comic, have my own show on the TV and all that. Not sure about that either any more. I’m fed up of acting the clown.’

‘You get trapped,’ I say. ‘People start to see you a certain way. They get so used to it that they stop actually looking, even if you’re not that way any more.’

Just like I dismissed Alfie years ago as the most annoying boy in the western hemisphere, and never bothered to check that the label still fitted. It doesn’t seem to, not any more. I wonder what people see when they look at me. Little Miss Perfect, Tia once called me when we’d fallen out briefly over a team project at school. At the time, I’d been torn
between hurt that she was angry and pride that the word ‘perfect’ could be applied to me, even as an insult.

Is that what they think? That it all comes easily?

‘I’m considering alternative careers,’ Alfie says. ‘I was thinking maybe a TV chef, but after the eyeliner experience, I’m not sure I’m cut out for the cameras. Maybe I’ll just run a very cool organic restaurant or something.’

‘Are you kidding?’ I ask.

He holds his hands up. ‘Deadly serious,’ he says. ‘In fact, I made something I thought you might like … just a little sweet treat …’

No, no, no
, roars the voice in my head.

‘Alfie,’ I say carefully, through gritted teeth. ‘You were kind to me the other day, but really, I promise, I’m fine. I don’t need you or anyone else to look out for me.’

Alfie shrugs. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘I can’t stay anyhow … but I may as well leave this. No worries if you don’t like it. It was just a thought.’

He takes a small Tupperware box out of his rucksack and hands it to me, getting to his feet. ‘See you around, Summer.’

He walks away and I fight the impulse to throw the box at the back of his head. Just when I was starting to see him
as a friend, I can see that he is no friend at all – he’s just like Jodie, a busybody trying to sabotage my eating.

I rip the lid off the box, expecting to see chocolate cake, trifle, sticky toffee pudding. Instead, I see chunks of pineapple, halved strawberries and dark red raspberries sprinkled with fresh mint. My mouth waters, and I start to smile.

21

I force myself to start eating three small meals a day, fruit for breakfast and tuna or chicken or cottage cheese salad for lunch and tea. It’s worth it if it keeps people off my case, and the fancy dinners I am preparing to help Grandma Kate out are a pretty good distraction too. Nobody seems to notice that I’m not eating anything much myself, or that Fred the dog is getting podgy on all the extras I feed him under the table.

The dizzy spells stop, so I push myself harder. I plough my energy into my dancing, and find that the fog has lifted and I can move freely again, spin and leap and pirouette. The fear of failure begins to retreat slightly.

I try yet again to choreograph my expressive dance. I think myself into the mind of one of the enchanted
creatures bewitched by the firebird, dancing madly to their destruction, and this time, finally, the sequences flow. Miss Elise says the dance is starting to come together, and relief floods through me. If I practise, work really, really hard, I might still manage to do this. I cross the days off the calendar: twelve, eleven, ten.

Mum texts from Peru to say that she and Paddy have left Cuzco and are trekking up to Machu Picchu. Hard work, she says. But amazing views. How is the practice going? Everything OK?

What can I say? I wouldn’t even know where to start.

All well, I text back. Don’t worry – everything is under control.

Well, almost.

Honey has discovered that her geek-guy mate, Anthony, is home alone for the whole weekend while his parents visit an aged relative in Wales. She swings into action, planning a party.

‘He lives out on the edge of the village,’ she says, ransacking the freezer for burgers and frozen bread rolls. ‘No neighbours … we can really let loose!’

‘Does Anthony actually know?’ I ask, as my big sister sneaks a bottle of fizzy wine out from the rack and drops it into her bag.

‘He suggested it,’ she shrugs. ‘At least he said I should come over for a barbie, and that’s just about the same thing …’

I raise an eyebrow. Anthony came to my birthday party in February and trailed around after Honey while she flirted with every boy in the place. She threw him just enough smiles to keep him sweet, and I am guessing she will twist him round her little finger this time too.

‘Come on, Summer,’ Honey says. ‘His idea of a good social life is playing non-stop online war games with other random geek-boys. He needs a bit of real-life fun for a change. I’ve asked everyone. Apart from Aaron – I told him not to show his ugly face!’

‘Thanks,’ I sigh. ‘But are you sure you want us there, Honey? You never used to invite us places.’

‘It’s different now,’ Honey shrugs. ‘You’re more grown-up. Besides, if we all go, Grandma Kate won’t start thinking I’m up to something!’

‘Are you up to something?’

Honey’s eyes widen. ‘Of course not!’

Anthony’s party is in full swing. The garden is stuffed with people – someone has opened a window and set up speakers on the sill and the
thud-thud-thud
of R & B booms out above the smell of charred meat and smoke.

I should be practising, I know, but my friends and sisters have dragged me along and now, to top it all, Alfie appears at my elbow.

‘You again,’ I sigh.

‘Me again,’ he grins. ‘How’s the practice going? Not long now, right?’

‘A week tomorrow it’ll all be over,’ I say.

Anthony ushers us over towards the barbeque where JJ and Honey are cooking sausages, burgers and sweetcorn cobs cocooned in foil. ‘Enjoy yourselves,’ he gushes. ‘Honey’s awesome – she organized all this! I didn’t know how many friends I really had until now!’

I am not sure that the kids crowded round the barbie are Anthony’s friends, though. They don’t seem to notice him at all.

Honey waves and hands me a burger loaded with salad and relish and melting cheese, wrapped in a soft, white
roll. ‘Ditch the diet, little sister,’ she whispers. ‘Live a little.’

I flinch at her words. So even Honey has noticed I am eating less? That’s worrying. I abandon the burger on a nearby picnic table when nobody is looking.

‘It goes to show,’ Anthony is saying, looking round the garden. ‘You don’t have to be one of the cool kids to have friends. Who’d have thought that someone like your sister would want to be mates with me? OK, I’m just helping her with schoolwork, but still, people sit up and take notice. Some of the lads used to pick on me, but now I’m friends with Honey, all that has stopped. Look at me now!’

I look at Anthony, a small, stocky boy with pasty skin and glinting eyes that look a little too intense behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. His gaze drifts over to Honey with that same puppy-dog loyalty I noticed back in February. She has him dangling on a string like a human yo-yo. One minute she is reeling him in with a winning smile and a flutter of her lashes; the next minute she lets him go again and he crashes to the floor.