Chapter Four
THEN
As they passed a sign declaring that it was a mere twenty miles to Bamburgh, Luna realised that she was fizzing. It was all the excitement, you see, because twenty miles meant that the journey was almost over. They were so close to their holiday cottage, so close. She was desperate to see Emmett.
She wouldn’t be this desperate if she had a phone. But Luna’s mum hadn’t relented on that front. She didn’t care that it might make Luna and Mae social outcasts, the only people in school without one. Luna’s mum said that phones caused brain rot. And cancer. Brain rot and cancer.
She wouldn’t even let Luna have MySpace.
Normally, these things really bothered Luna; she wanted to fit in with everyone else more than she wanted anything else in the whole world.
People like Mae, they were made for standing out, but Luna wanted to pass through the world without being noticed by anyone or anything.
She didn’t know exactly why she wanted to fly under the radar so much, except it just felt safer that way.
It didn’t seem to matter so much now, though – the phone thing or the MySpace thing or the becoming a social outcast thing. It didn’t even matter that she was wearing a skirt from Tammy Girl, even though all of their stuff was for babies, not now they were very nearly there.
‘You look lovely, Luna.’ Luna’s mum twisted round from her seat in the front.
Her mum didn’t often tell Luna that she looked lovely.
And while Luna wanted to pass through the world unnoticed, her body seemed to have a different plan entirely.
She’d grown so much this last year, her body tall and broad, with muscles that were hard to the touch.
Her mum said that Luna had her dad’s physique.
Looking lovely was their mum’s top priority, always. Luna was pretty certain that her mum thought that being scruffy was about as bad as killing someone. That was why Luna wasn’t allowed some Miss Sixty jeans because her mum said that they were for tramps, not for people who want to look lovely.
Her mum gave a pointed look towards Mae.
She’d cried when she saw what Mae was wearing that morning – a stretched-out T-shirt with the face of the Frosties tiger on the front.
It was more of a wail than a proper cry.
She’d thrown her hands up in the air and started shouting.
When she was little, Luna would sometimes hide under the bed when her mum started to shout.
She’d just lie there, on the carpet that was thicker than the rest of her bedroom, since it hadn’t been walked on, and wonder what it would be like just to disappear.
She could spend hours imagining how peaceful it would be to not be herself, just some spec of dust floating around, all the things she could see.
She’d draw it in her head, the things she’d see and do if she were unnoticed.
Except that she wouldn’t be able to hang out with Mae. Not Earl or Emmett either.
Emmett.
There’d been no time for thoughts of disappearing that morning, and anyway, Luna wasn’t sure that she’d fit under the bed anymore.
Mae said that Luna’s mum didn’t love their dad anymore because he was scruffy too. And really, Luna thought that it must be hard to live in a house full of scruffy people when looking lovely was all you wanted from your life.
Luna chose always the path of least resistance, which is how she found herself studying maths for almost the whole of the journey. Even though concentrating on the numbers in the textbook she had perched on her lap was making her feel sick.
Their mum clucked her tongue. ‘So scruffy, Mae.’
‘Come on, Jennie, she looks fine.’ Their dad answered.
Mae groaned loudly. They all knew that trying to defend the girls was pointless. It just extended the lecture they’d all get from their mum.
Luna took the opportunity to close the textbook. She sat on her hands to stop them from moving.
‘Fine! If you’re happy for your daughter to be out in public wearing hot pants and a T-shirt she found in a bin!’
‘It wasn’t a bin, Mum, it was a charity shop.’
Their mum ignored Mae. ‘I honestly don’t know what went wrong with her. She’s wild, Michael.’
Luna had to bite her lip, since Mae had started roaring like a lion.
Then everyone was shouting, everyone except Luna.
In her head, she was running along the beach so fast that she was drawing in big gulps of sea air.
She was running faster than she’d ever run before, her hair streaked out behind her.
Emmett was there, too, of course. It wasn’t summer without Emmett.
Luna let the argument wash over her, imagining each emotion as a colour. At the moment, they were hot and bright, but she could change them. She could water them down and make them light and delicate, a suggestion of colour across a page.
Calmer now, she focused her mind – for the millionth time – on the possibilities of summer.
In Luna’s humble opinion, Northumberland was the best place in the whole world.
Even their tiny village, Bamburgh, had a gigantic castle right on the seaside.
There were beaches and dunes and fields with grass was so long, you could get lost in it.
Every summer, a carnival came, and Luna would get sick and sticky from too much candyfloss.
Or else they’d go to Holy Island. Holy Island was one of Luna’s favourite places, an island you could only reach when the tide was out.
The rest of the time, it was lost to the sea.
Luna thought it was desperately romantic.
Mae didn’t think that Holy Island was desperately romantic.
She did think that Luna was desperately in need of a boyfriend, though, if she thought an island was sexy.
Luna couldn’t quite explain it, but she liked the thought of living on that island, cut off from everyone and everything else half of the time.
Not that Luna wanted to be cut off from everyone. Not Emmett, or Mae. Earl too. They could come and visit her on her island anytime they wanted.
So no, Luna didn’t think that she was desperate.
Except this one time, when she was looking at The Kiss by Gustav Klimt in an art book that Earl had given her, the way he was sort of leaning over her, cradling her a little bit…
Luna thought you called it yearning, that look you get when you want to kiss someone but aren’t kissing them yet.
Well, the yearning in The Kiss made Luna feel all warm in the bottom of her stomach.
Mae had taken this as confirmation that Luna needed to get kissing people stat. Any people, according to Mae.
‘That’s what I did,’ she’d said. ‘You need to practise so that when you get to kiss someone that you really like, you’re already decent. It’s all in the tongue action. You don’t want to be slobbering all over your one true love.’
Luna definitely didn’t want to kiss just anyone. She had thought a lot about Emmett this year, but that was normal. She always missed him when they were apart.
Their mum had overheard the conversation and grounded them.
She had left a book about puberty on Luna’s bed, about three years too late in Luna’s mind.
Plus, Luna’s boobs didn’t look anything like the cartoon ones, neither of them.
And she was sure she’d grown hair EVERYWHERE, not just in the places the book said that they were meant to.
Basically, between her muscles and her hair, Luna felt like Sasquatch.
And being Sasquatch, she felt it would be nothing short of a miracle to find anyone who wanted to kiss her.
Plus, she had ginger hair.
Luna’s mum was still talking.
‘And I don’t want you spending all of your time at The Edge this summer.
There’s so much to see and do, I imagine you’ll be plenty occupied.
’ Her mum hated The Edge as much as scruffiness, maybe.
A couple of years ago, Emmett had got into a fight.
Emmett got into fights quite a lot, but Luna’s mum had found out about this one and turned him into public enemy number one.
Luna had absolutely zero intention of staying away from The Edge, the caravan park where Emmett and Earl lived (next door to each other).
She shook her head at Mae, a warning not to argue with Mum. There was no point. After a few days, their mum always got too preoccupied with Eyebrow Clive – their neighbour who spent all of his time in Northumberland, not just the summers – to really care what Mae and Luna were up to.
‘Why do we need to stay away from The Edge?’ Mae asked as Luna sank further into her seat.
‘It’s just not good for you. For your future.’
Luna’s mum meant because the people there were poor.
‘Poverty isn’t contagious, Mum.’
‘I never said it was, Mae.’
A red stress rash began to work its way up Luna’s neck.
She never knew what to do in these situations.
She wanted to stick up for Earl and Emmett, of course she did, since she cared about them.
Sometimes, Luna thought she cared so much about them that it physically hurt.
Like a band around her chest being wound tighter and tighter.
But she didn’t want to argue with her mum either. Luna began to sketch, only in her head. She pictured the pencil, the way it slid across paper, almost effortless and smooth. Luna didn’t know if this was the best coping mechanism, but it was the only one that she had.
‘Plus, the caravans there are super clean. I only saw like three heroin needles tops last year. Isn’t that right, Luna?’
Luna had actually seen needles on the ground at The Edge, but she didn’t want to tell her mum this.
So she just laughed really loudly and tucked her hands even further beneath her legs.
Finally, finally the car turned into the cobbled path that led to their holiday home.
Luna’s mum described it as the ‘holiday place’.
That’s what she said when she told people what their summer plans were. ‘Oh, we’re off to the holiday place,’ she’d say.