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Authors: Keris Stainton

Emma hearts LA (2 page)

BOOK: Emma hearts LA
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‘“Hey, Girl,”’ I say, in my best fake Ryan Gosling voice, ‘“I know you’re scared about moving to LA. Would it help if I met you at the airport?”’

Jessie snorts and then sighs. Neither of us has any idea of what Ryan Gosling’s really like, obviously, but we’re both in love with the internet’s version.

‘I remember you telling me on the way to New York that it was the place to find a boy,’ she says. ‘And you were right, weren’t you? I bet LA is teeming with hot boys—’

‘Yeah, and surgically enhanced women. I’m not sure grumpy and pasty is going to go down all that well.’

She laughs. ‘Oh, you never know. Grumpy and pasty might be the new hipster thing… And you don’t look pasty anyway. You look great, as usual.’

I pull a face. ‘I don’t. I’m pale and spotty.’ I point to a spot under my chin. Jessie looks fantastic – her long, wavy hair is glossy and she’s so much more groomed than when she lived in Manchester.

‘Well, there you go!’ Jessie says. ‘You need some sun.’

‘And I’m certainly going to get some.’

We’re both quiet for a few seconds, then Jessie frowns and I know exactly what she’s going to say.

‘Have you talked to your dad about it?’ she asks.

Yep. Knew it.

‘Not yet,’ I tell her.

‘But you
are
going to?’

‘I don’t know. He’ll want to see us before we go, obviously.’

‘Em, you really need to talk to him,’ Jessie says.

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know what to say to him.’

‘Just tell him how you feel. You said that to me when me and Mum weren’t really speaking and you were absolutely right. I can’t believe you’re doing the same thing now.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I will speak to him, honest.’

‘Things won’t get any better if you keep avoiding him,’ she says.

‘They’re not going to get better anyway, are they? They’ll still have split up. He’ll still be with someone else. We’ll still be thousands of miles away.’

‘I know. But you’ll feel better about it. I promise.’

 

After we’ve talked for a while I go downstairs to find Mum. She’s sitting at the kitchen table and writing a list on one of the big yellow notepads she loves. She looks up at me and for a second I’m startled – she looks like she’s been crying. It could just be that she’s rubbed all her mascara off, but I give her a hug just in case.

‘I’m sorry I was such a cow,’ I say. ‘Shall I make you a cup of coffee?’

She sighs, making the pages of her pad flutter. ‘Yes. Please. Although I don’t think I’ll get much sleep tonight anyway. Coffee’s the last thing I need.’

‘I could do you a hot chocolate…’ I say, opening the kitchen cupboard, forgetting that the door’s loose. It crashes down onto the countertop and Mum jumps.

‘We should just take that one off the hinge,’ she says.

‘Sorry, I should’ve remembered it’s knackered.’

I get the jar of hot chocolate out and spoon it into Mum’s favourite mug (it has
THE PHYSICS IS THEORETICAL, BUT THE FUN IS REAL
on it and it’s so geeky it always makes me smile) before filling the kettle.

‘That was Michael on the phone earlier,’ Mum says. ‘He’s found us a house.’

Michael got Mum the job and he also happens to be Dad’s best friend. He and my parents worked together at the Jodrell Bank Observatory and then he got a job at UCLA and moved out there with his wife, Jackie, and their son, Oscar. And then Michael and Jackie split up too and Jackie moved to somewhere near San Francisco. Oscar stayed with his dad in LA because he was happy at school there. Michael and Jackie are still really good friends, apparently – they’ve even been away on holiday together. Mum and Dad used to joke about it, before they split up too.

Mum pulls her hair out of its low ponytail. ‘It’s near his house and he says it’s a wonderful area. Says you two girls will love it.’

‘So you’re going to be working with Michael? And we’re going to be living next door to him?’ I stir the hot chocolate. ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

Mum snorts. ‘God, no, nothing like that. I’ve known Michael since university! And it’s not next door, it’s just nearby. He’s been a really good friend to me since your father…left. And you’re friends with Oscar, so…’

I roll my eyes. ‘I haven’t even spoken to him for about five years!’

‘I know, but you always got on so well. It’ll be nice for you to have a friend out there.’

I put the hot chocolate down in front of Mum and start making one for myself.

Oscar and I were quite good friends for a few years, but it was one of those friendships you just grow out of. I started spending more time with Jessie, and Oscar was always such a dork. He never wanted to do the same things we did – he was always doing projects based on his dad’s research – so we just kind of stopped hanging out. I sent him a card when his parents split up and I always meant to email him, but I never got around to it. And then it just seemed like I’d left it too long. I wonder what he’s like now. I bet he’s exactly the same.

Chapter Three
 

I put it off all weekend, but I promised Mum I’d do it before the end of the week, so on Sunday evening, I ring my dad’s mobile. It rings six times – I count – before being answered with a scuffling noise, as if he picked it up and immediately dropped it.

‘Emma?’

It’s not Dad. It’s Clare. Exactly who I’d been trying to avoid by ringing his mobile.

I’ve only just managed to say ‘Yeah…’ when Clare says, ‘He’s just upstairs. Hold on. I’ll get him. I know he’s really keen to…he’s really looking forward to talking to you.’

‘OK.’

She doesn’t chat as she goes off to find him, which I appreciate. She seems like a nice enough person, but we’ve only met a couple of times at the customary ‘getting to know the children/new girlfriend’ lunches, so small talk seems a bit pointless.

I hear her go up the stairs and I try to picture where his study is in their house – Clare’s house – but I can’t quite remember. I’ve only been there once. I know it’s a box room that Clare used for an exercise bike and a rowing machine before Dad moved in, but she put them in the garage and now she parks her car on the street.

I hear the music, so I know she’s getting closer – it’s ‘Venus’ from Holst’s
The Planets
. Mum always laughed at him for listening to it so much – she said it was the cheesiest thing for an astrophysicist to love – but he always has it on when he works. He says it helps him focus. It’s how I always knew whether or not he was at home when I came in from school – no Holst meant no Dad. I haven’t heard it since he left.

If Clare says anything I miss it because the music stops and the next thing I hear is Dad’s voice, saying ‘Emma?’

I feel a painful clenching in my stomach and then the pain’s replaced by butterflies. I never thought I’d get butterflies talking to my dad. Never.

‘Hi,’ I say, and it comes out in a whisper.

‘How are you?’

‘I’m…fine. Thanks. How are you?’

‘Good, thanks. Sorry, I left my phone downstairs. I’m working on a protostar study and practically everything else has gone out of my head.’

I nod. He was always like that. They both were – he and Mum. Me and Bex used to call them ‘spaceheads’.

‘So,’ he says. ‘LA.’

‘Yep.’

‘Sounds very exciting. It’s an incredible opportunity for your mum.’

‘So she keeps telling me,’ I say. ‘And for Bex too, I think. She’s already talking about meetings with agents.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Bex told me.’

I always forget that Bex talks to him much more than I do. Bex is more resilient, that’s what I heard Mum say on the phone one day. Bex takes things in her stride. The suggestion being, I suppose, that I don’t. But there are some things that are too big to just accept, aren’t there?

‘How do you feel about it?’ Dad asks.

‘I’m getting used to the idea,’ I tell him. ‘Mum and Bex both seem really happy and, you know, we can always come back if it doesn’t work out.’

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘You know you don’t have to go if you don’t want to? You know you could come here?’

My eyes fill with tears and I have to swallow a couple of times before I can speak.

‘Emma?’ he says. I picture him with his elbows on his desk, frowning into the phone, and I can’t believe he’s living somewhere else with someone else. It just seems impossible.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I want to go.’

Chapter Four
 

It takes ages to get through LAX and we’re all yawning as we queue at immigration. I’d thought I’d be able to sleep on the plane, but I was freezing – they turned the heating off when we went through some turbulence because it stops people being sick, but after they turned it on it took ages to warm up again – and I just couldn’t manage to get comfortable. Mum and Bex both slept on and off while I watched random episodes of
The Big Bang Theory
and
How I Met Your Mother
and thought about how long it was taking. LA really is the other side of the world.

I can’t quite believe we’re going to be living so far away from Dad. Not that I particularly want to see him at the moment, but it just seems wrong. What if something happens to him? What if something happens to one of us? It’s almost a day away. I keep thinking of when I was little and I fell over in the playground at school and hit my face on the kerb between the concrete and the grass. It knocked one of my teeth out – it was a baby tooth and it had been loose anyway – and burst my bottom lip. I remember sitting on the ground and wailing. I was really shocked that the blood was so warm, running down my chin. I remember seeing one of the teachers running across the playground towards me, which made me cry even harder because she looked so scared, and then the next thing I remember is sitting on my dad’s knee in the Head’s office. He was holding a paper towel with ice in it to my face and whispering in my ear that I was fine, everything was OK.

It must have taken him at least ten minutes to get there, even if he’d been working at home, but it had seemed to me that I was hurt and then Dad was there. Almost instantly. And I felt better. And now he’s tens of thousands of miles away. If I could’ve told my six-year-old self, sitting on the playground, that one day Dad would fall in love with someone else and leave us, she wouldn’t have believed it. I still don’t believe it, and I’m ten years older.

 

‘You’re quiet,’ Mum says to me, as we finally make it through immigration – which is intimidating: the officers wear dark glasses, and we have to be fingerprinted and have our retinas scanned.

‘I’m tired,’ I tell her. Which is true, but not really why I’ve been quiet.

She stops walking and looks at me and Bex.

‘Are we ready for this?’ she says. Her eyes are sparkling, so I know she is.

‘Absolutely,’ Bex says, grinning.

‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ I say.

 

Michael is waiting for us in Arrivals, holding a piece of card with
WELCOME TO LA
written on it.

Michael hugs Mum and then just looks at me and Bex. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘You girls are growing up.’

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘It happens.’

‘Is Oscar with you?’ Mum asks, ignoring me.

He shakes his head. ‘He wanted to come, but he had to work. He’s really looking forward to seeing you all, though. Shall we go?’

Michael grabs the luggage trolley and wheels it towards the automatic doors. And I don’t move. I feel like I’ve been punched. We look like a family. If anyone was watching they’d think we were his wife and daughters joining him in LA. They’d think Mum and Michael were married. They’d think Michael was our dad.

I see Bex turn as if she’s going to say something and then she realises I’m not there and turns around. She frowns and heads back towards me.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Look at them,’ I say. I point, limply.

‘What?’

‘We look like a family.’

Bex puts her arm through mine and squeezes. ‘Em, Michael is Dad’s best friend. He’s Mum’s friend. He’s not trying to replace Dad.’

I know she’s right. It’s not that I think there’s anything going on between Mum and Michael, because I don’t, but it still seems wrong. We used to be two families: Michael, Jackie and Oscar, and Mum, Dad, Bex and me, and now we’re all blown apart. Why does everyone have to move on all the time? Couldn’t we at least just stay still until we’d got used to everything? It’s like I’m on one of those moving walkways in the airport. I’ve stopped, but everything else is still moving and I’m going to get thrown off at the end, flat on my face.

We go through the double doors and the heat hits me like a wet towel in the face – a hot wet towel, like the ones we got on the plane after dinner…or was it breakfast? I start sweating immediately and I can feel my face getting redder and redder. I’m so not cut out for this place.

‘Isn’t it glorious?’ Mum says, turning her face up to the sun.

We wait outside in the shade while Michael goes to get the car.

It’s really busy. Cars swerve and honk and a series of car-hire transfer buses pull up nearby. On the other side of the road there are palm trees, which seems strange among all this concrete.

BOOK: Emma hearts LA
13.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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