Chapter Six
Luna wished she didn’t feel so much.
It would be much easier to watch things unfold with Tanya and Emmett if she didn’t feel so much. She wanted to wrestle her feelings into order and tuck them neatly into a box.
Luna nudged her hand against Emmett’s. ‘Best summer ever?’ she said. It was a promise that they made every year. Luna wanted it for Emmett more than herself.
He smiled back, but Luna could see that it was a weak smile, one that he didn’t really feel.
‘Best summer ever.’ He linked his little finger around hers as they walked and there was no wrestling with the feeling which overtook her then, like being dunked under water, fully submerged in it.
It was so intense; hot, powerful too, like a volcano about to erupt.
Luna didn’t have to grapple around to figure out what this feeling was, not like she normally did.
Oh no.
‘I did, er… I did have something to tell you, Luna,’ Emmett said, but Luna was distracted with trying to process what this feeling meant, what it could possibly mean. She already knew that it had the potential to change everything, forever.
In the distance, she could see the playground, and a couple of people hanging around it.
‘Luna?’
‘You do? I mean, you have something to tell me?’
Maybe Emmett had realised it too. How perfect it would be if they’d realised at the same time.
‘Yeah.’ He smiled a new smile, one that Luna hadn’t seen before. A bit sly, almost.
And if the other feeling, the one she’d just discovered, was red-hot and powerful; this feeling, hope, was light and bright. The sort of feeling that swept you up and carried you forward.
Luna couldn’t bear to wait anymore.
Up ahead, she could see the others coming closer now, coming to meet them on the path. Zadie and Ahmed, Emmett’s other best friends, and someone else too.
‘See, the thing is Luna, I didn’t want to tell you in a letter.’
‘Tell me what?’ she asked. Why was that girl running towards them? Luna recognised her. She was called Cadence and she sometimes, but not very often, hung out with Zadie.
‘It’s just that, well…’
But Emmett didn’t need to explain anymore.
Not when it was clear as day what was happening.
Cadence finished her run towards them and launched herself at Emmett.
They were kissing. Like proper kissing, with tongues and everything.
Luna had seen people kiss before, she wasn’t a total loser, but it looked to her like Cadence was trying to swallow Emmett whole like a snake.
Luna couldn’t help the stupid little giggle that escaped her, but her brain was struggling to compute. Emmett and Cadence. Cadence and Emmett.
But Emmett is mine. The thought hit her so hard, like a truck barrelling into her. Or that massive dog her neighbours had back home that charged at you and knocked you off your feet.
She watched as Emmett and Cadence devoured each other in a shockingly graphic manner.
Luna just stood there with her mouth gaping open. Catching flies, as her mum would say. She knew that she needed to say something, anything. Cadence was beautiful. So, of course, Cadence and Emmett were in love as Emmett was also beautiful. That was the way the world worked.
Oh no, Luna was going to cry.
She wiped her forearm over her face. ‘Sorry, wind,’ she said to no one even though it was as still as a mill pond.
‘Are you okay, Luna?’ Cadence asked, all sweet pastel colours with her bouncy blonde hair.
Luna sniffed. Already, she had a sense that she was being left behind somehow, as if Emmett and Cadence were sailing out to sea, leaving Luna on the edge of the cliff all alone.
But she couldn’t admit that, could she? She was sure that she was the only person alive who thought like that.
‘I’m fine, totally fine. I just have a bit of a cold.
But that’s great, so you guys are together, right? ’
‘What gave them away?’ Zadie asked, as she and Ahmed made their way towards them. Luna loved Zadie. She wasn’t all bouncy like Cadence. She was cool, without even trying to be cool. Like Mae, and unlike Luna.
‘Yeah, they’re really subtle about their relationship normally,’ Ahmed said. ‘Hi Luna.’
‘Hi Ahmed.’
Emmett just laughed and put his arm around Cadence. It was meant to be Luna, wasn’t it? She was the one who was meant to make him all happy. What would she do? Without that purpose, she was adrift.
Luna watched Emmett kiss the top of Cadence’s nose. She really did not feel fine about this. That hope, that lovely light and bright hope, had gone.
Why was that? Why did she feel so sad and heavy?
And why was Luna imagining, like shoving Cadence? Pulling her hair?
All she knew was this. Seeing Cadence and Emmett together made Luna feel broken. So broken that she wondered if she’d ever feel whole again.
‘And they just kept kissing, over and over. It was… I couldn’t stop looking, Mae. Am I a pervert now? Does that make me a pervert?’
Mae and Luna were lying in bed in the dark. With only a little thin white curtain across the window, everything was silver from the moon.
‘No, it doesn’t make you a pervert. Cadence is hot. Emmett is hot, in a sort of brooding bad boy type of way.’
‘He’s not a bad boy.’ Luna jumped to his defence. They were having to whisper since the wall behind them led right to their mum and dad’s room. Mae said it’s a really good job that they didn’t have sex anymore, since they’d undoubtedly hear them if they did.
‘I mean, I saw him smoking earlier but whatever. I just meant that objectively, if I didn’t feel all, like, brotherly towards him, I’d find him hot. But more importantly, Luna, how do you feel about Emmett?’
Mae turned onto her side to look right at Luna.
Emmett’s my best friend. That’s what Luna thought. As Mae had said, he was like a brother to them. But Luna hadn’t felt very brotherly towards him earlier. Earlier she’d realised that she desperately, more than anything else in the whole world, wanted Emmett to be kissing her.
‘Do you think I fancy Emmett?’ she asked her sister.
Mae let out a too-loud laugh at the same time a loud cough came from their parent’s bedroom.
‘Thank fuck we got there eventually.’
Mae had only just started swearing. But now, whenever she wasn’t around Mum, she swore as much as she could.
‘What do you mean?’ Luna’s heart was beating really fast, and she was warm and stuffy. Was this what liking someone entailed? Being all hot and sweaty and weirded out the whole time?
‘You’ve liked Emmett for ages. It’s good you’ve finally realised it.’
‘I have not!’ Now it was Luna’s turn to be too loud. Another cough. ‘I haven’t. I think I’d know if I fancied someone.’
‘No, you’re completely immature on that front, unfortunately. A late bloomer. Plus, you spend all your time studying.’
‘That’s because school is really hard for me. But that doesn’t mean… Do you think I really do fancy him?’
‘Head over heels, I reckon.’
Luna had twisted round to face Mae but now flopped back down on her pillow.
‘But what do I do? He’s with Cadence.’ A picture of Cadence, all cherub-like, popped into her head. She was so perfect. If Luna were to draw her, she’d add wings and little chubby cherub cheeks to her face. She’d put her in a loin cloth.
‘Cadence looks like her and I look like me,’ she finished miserably.
‘You and Emmett have a connection that goes beyond looks,’ Mae said, pretending to be an expert on romantic connections, when Luna had never even heard her talking about connections before.
‘Not that there is anything at all wrong with how you look, Luna. You let Mum get into your head too much. You need to block her out, with like, mental shields.’
‘She’s right though, I am horrible to look at. Why did I have to get Dad’s genes?’
‘You are not horrible. Stop that right now. You’re iridescent.
That’s mainly the eyeshadow, mind.’ Luna threw a pillow at her.
‘You’re perfect, Luna. Don’t worry about Cadence and Emmett, they’re what, fourteen?
No relationship lasts longer than a few weeks at this age.
I give it two weeks tops, and then they’ll be sick of each other. You wait and see.’
But as the summer passed, Emmett and Cadence didn’t seem to get sick of each other; if anything, they grew more attached. Literally.
Luna hardly ever saw Emmett’s face, aside from when it was glued to Cadence’s.
And when Emmett got into a fight again, with one of the men who came to his caravan to see his mum, it was Cadence who used a tea towel to clean his eyebrow cut, not Luna.
Luna was over here, getting taller and taller. Broader too.
She’d started doing this thing where she left a bar of chocolate out in the sun and then when it melted, she drank it down.
She couldn’t stop drawing either, even though the lead so stained her fingers that no amount of washing could clean them, and even though some nights, her hand cramped so bad that she had to rub it with her other hand to ease the throbbing there.
It was almost fevered in her, this need to create.
To get some of the feeling out of her head and onto the paper.
Even when she wasn’t drawing, she sketched in her head.
Over and over, she imagined the lines taking shape.
But no matter how hard she tried, the feelings wouldn’t leave her alone. And rather than escaping them, drawing seemed to amplify them. But still, she kept going. She honestly didn’t know what else she could do.
She’d been doing a self-portrait, inspired by Ophelia since Earl said that she was really good at drawing people.
Luna loved Ophelia, how she seemed to be hovering between two worlds.
But Ophelia was beautiful, and Luna had made her portrait horrid.
She’d drawn her heart on the outside of her body, all black and dripping with dark blood that ran off it in rivulets, pooling on the floor.