Chapter Four #2
Mae had once mentioned how much of the holiday place Mum had paid for since Dad was the only one of them with a job. She’d been grounded again after that. Mae spent a lot of time grounded.
Luna wasn’t thinking about any of that now, though.
She wasn’t even thinking how relieved she was that the journey was over, since that was always by far the worst part of the holiday.
Her family didn’t do well in confined spaces.
No, instead, Luna’s brain couldn’t think of anything other than the fact that Emmett was right here.
Emmett, as usual, was waiting on the front step, reading a battered old National Geographic magazine.
Luna’s seatbelt was unbuckled before they’d even rolled to a stop.
‘Luna, we’re still moving!’
Luna heard her mum kicking up a fuss but she didn’t care. All she knew was that she’d throw herself out of a moving car if it meant that she got to Emmett as soon as possible.
It was a new sensation, this urge to be near him. Maybe she’d think more about it later, when she wasn’t marvelling at the fact that he was standing up and smiling and the whole thing was making Luna’s brain run a sort of static, as if her thoughts were scattered to the wind.
‘You got so tall!’ Emmett wasn’t as tall as Luna. ‘And you got your braces off.’ He was studying her face. Luna wanted to draw him. ‘Your teeth are really straight.’
Emmett’s teeth weren’t straight. Some of his side teeth were a bit twisted. Luna liked it. She thought it made his face more interesting.
Luna was especially pleased to see Emmett’s face this year, to see all of him in fact.
It made sense. Even though they only saw each other for six weeks of the year, Emmett was Luna’s best friend, aside from Mae that is.
Her first summer, Luna had seen Emmett on the beach with Earl.
She’d walked right up to him and asked if he wanted to be her best friend and that was that.
It’s really odd though, because this year she felt especially pleased to see him. And that strange feeling in the bottom of her stomach was back, the same as when she looked at The Kiss. Yearning.
Luna looked at Emmett and tried to make sense of it all, but making sense of it felt like trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from different boxes.
Emmett wouldn’t like how long his hair had got.
It was black and curly and Luna wished that she too had a nice normal hair colour.
Something brown. Not that the rest of Emmett was normal.
He had green eyes and long eyelashes. He was interesting to look at but not bad interesting. Good interesting.
‘Watch out, coming through.’ Luna’s dad barged through the middle of them, carrying a box high above his head.
‘Afternoon, Emmett, here so soon,’ Luna’s mum said.
‘Yes, Mrs Banks, I wanted to see Luna right away.’
‘How lovely,’ she answered in a sickly-sweet way that let Luna know she didn’t really mean it.
It felt unfair. Even if Emmett sometimes got into fights, he was always super nice and polite to Luna’s mum and dad.
‘Get a room already, you two.’ Mae slid up to the pair of them. Luna was fairly certain that the stain on her T-shirt, which might well be a pyjama top, was dry sick. The Frosties Tiger face was all stretched out.
Luna noticed the red patches high on Emmett’s cheeks as he hugged Mae. Another piece of the jigsaw that she didn’t know where to place.
‘Later losers.’ Mae saluted them. ‘I’ll go keep the Terrifying One occupied for a bit.’
Luna’s dad was still going backwards and forwards to the car, his arms full of boxes that he carried easily, so Luna and Emmett moved down the side of the cottage.
Even though it was much smaller than their other house, Luna thought of this cottage as home.
It was 300 years old, with roses climbing up the wall.
She loved to draw it. She’d sketch the stones and wonder about the lives of the people who’d laid them.
She’d imagine their hands, their faces, what their lives might have been like.
She wondered how they’d died. She’d wondered if this was exactly normal.
By the side of the cottage, Luna and Emmett were protected from the wind.
It was always windy in Northumberland, even when the sky was blue like on this day.
The wind only added to the appeal for Luna.
She liked the fact that it was such a beautiful part of the world and also so wild.
It made it interesting. And Luna loved interesting things.
‘Hi,’ Emmett said again, now that they were on their own. Luna didn’t precisely know why she was smiling so wide it felt like her mouth was all stretched. Or how it had come to be that the warm feeling in her stomach was back so strong that it made her feel woozy.
‘Hi,’ she answered, running her tongue over her teeth because it was quite strange not having a brace. ‘I missed you.’
‘I missed you too.’
Emmett looked so much more grown up this year.
He was older than Luna, despite the fact that they were in the same year at school.
He was born in September and Luna in August. Emmett was fourteen and Luna thirteen.
So far, she wasn’t sure that being a teenager was a lot of fun.
It seemed to come with a whole heap of feelings that Luna had to work hard at, if she wanted to make sense of them.
Like the fact that she felt something for Emmett, something that was different to how it had been before.
‘How’s your year been?’ she asked, still studying Emmett’s face.
‘Fine, you know,’ he shrugged. ‘Same old, same old.’ Emmett looked at the ground, where his trainers scuffed the dried earth. Luna knew that Emmett’s life here was hard… with his mum… where they lived. She wanted to be able to do more. Maybe this summer she would.
She took a step towards him, acting on instinct. She was about to ask about his mum when her own started shrieking from the front of the cottage.
‘Luna, LUNA, where have you got to?’
And then her mum was there, frowning and taking a deep breath as if she were about to start shouting.
‘We were just catching up, Mum. I’ll see you later, Emmett.’
She twisted round and smiled at him, even though her heart was beating super fast, trying to let him know that everything was okay. Emmett didn’t need Luna adding to his worries.
He smiled at her, and she felt woozy again. ‘Usual time and place?’
‘Definitely.’
Luna’s mum was holding her by the top of the arm, digging her fingers into the muscle there.
‘What’s gotten into you?’ Luna knew that she’d be hearing about this for the rest of the afternoon.
‘And I don’t know where you think you’re going later, but you’ll be taking Mae.
You’re not running off with some boy all over the place. ’
Luna wasn’t sure which part of what her mum said was the most ridiculous. One, that she thought Emmett was just some boy instead of… well everything, or the fact that she reckoned that taking Mae would keep Luna out of trouble. Mae, who just last week tried to give herself a tattoo.
As she let herself be led into the cottage by the top of her arm, Luna disappeared into her own head.
Sketching, drawing out the lines of Emmett’s face.
The way his cheeks had a high dimple on them, the way his curls curved around the top of his forehead.
It settled her, kept her calm. She felt happy, despite her mum’s lecture, and that happiness wasn’t some mysterious jigsaw that she couldn’t complete.
That was tied as much to seeing Emmett as it was to being back here for the summer.
So, she let herself continue to sketch in her mind.
Emmett. Emmett. And as she sketched, she wondered what, exactly, the summer might have in store.