Chapter Nine
THEN
For the first time in ten years, Luna didn’t want to go to the cottage that summer.
Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Part of her was desperate to get there.
To see Earl and the others. She remembered what Earl had said last year, about beauty and decay coexisting and she tried to see it, she really did.
She was just struggling to see the beauty.
Instead, the world felt marred in a way she’d never noticed before.
In her fourteenth year, Luna had become strangely angry at the world. At everything, in fact.
‘If you keep frowning like that, you’ll give yourself wrinkles, Luna,’ her mum said, catching her eye in the rear-view mirror.
Luna tried to relax her face; it would be easier if she didn’t feel so tense all the time.
‘What’ll we do this visit, girls? We could go and see the puffins?’
‘Yeah, Dad, let’s hit up the puffins,’ Mae answered after a long silence.
Luna was too lost in her thoughts to even think about an itinerary, too preoccupied with how she’d react when she saw Cadence and Emmett this summer.
On balance, she thought that she’d done a pretty good job of hiding how she really felt last year, depressing self-portraits aside.
But now, she feared that her newfound anger would make it impossible to contain.
It was as if her emotions were right there, simmering away just under the surface where she had no hope of concealing them.
There was an Andrex puppy advert on TV just last night that had made her weep.
A toilet roll advert. Her mum had threatened her with counselling.
‘I’m looking forward to some well-needed R instead she felt adrift, apart.
Even now, she felt like she wasn’t quite fully present in this scene.
It felt as if she was hovering above it.
Distant. It made her feel like she wasn’t in charge of her own life.
‘I wonder what Clive has been up to,’ Mum asked, oblivious to Mae’s sarcasm. Luna felt that there was something deeply troubling about people who didn’t understand sarcasm.
‘Hopefully he didn’t like die or anything. But then at his age, anything is possible.’
Even their mum couldn’t ignore the fact that Mae was trying to get a rise out of her.
Luna suspected that Mae was just bored. But now they all had to suffer through Mum telling them how Clive couldn’t possibly die because he’s super virile for his age.
Just the word virile grossed Luna out and made her irrationally angry at Clive.
And her mum. And the whole world, come to think of it.
She wanted to turn up the volume on her iPod, but it had run out of battery. Life was just so cruel.
The chat about Clive’s virility ended when they pulled up to the cottage.
Emmett wasn’t there. He wasn’t waiting on the step like he did every year. It’s not that Luna expected him to be there, since she hadn’t told him they were coming, but still, his absence stung.
‘You are like emitting hatred. Will you chill out?’ Mae muttered as they carried their bags into the bedroom. It felt smaller than before.
Luna was just so big. Broad, her mum called her, in a tone that made it patently clear that being broad was the worst possible thing a girl could be at fourteen.
Her dad said that she took after him, that she was just strong.
And it was true, she was strong. She could throw the javelin further than anyone else in her year. It didn’t exactly feel like a win.
‘Those puberty hormones really are playing you today, huh?’ Mae asked.
Luna didn’t know what Mae meant. So what if she was sat on the edge of her bed, clutching New Moon to her chest and crying silently because Emmett wouldn’t ever love her like Edward loved Bella.
Luna sniffed. ‘It’s not hormones.’
‘I don’t know, I don’t think jealousy is normally quite so stabby.’
Luna flopped back on the bed.
‘Will you please just trust in the plan?’
Like she did every summer, Mae had come up with a plan. Why she persisted in coming up with plans, since she was otherwise completely chaotic, Luna didn’t know. What she did know was that this year’s plan was called The Man Plan. And it involved no small amount of lying.
‘I just can’t see how—’
‘That’s because you have zero experience, which is a whole other level of tragic.
If I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: you could have been using this year to get some practice in.
Look at me – I let Liam in Year Nine touch my boob.
And I felt his dick through his trousers.
It was amazing.’ Mae paused for a second.
‘Well, it would have been if he wasn’t crying about England getting knocked out of the World Cup the whole time. ’
Mae sighed as if she were recalling some great love story as opposed to being groped by a weeping Liam round the back of the swimming pool.
While Luna’s teenage hormones were making her angry, Mae’s were making her horny.
‘Now let’s get changed and get out of here before Dad drags us off to look at the freaking puffins again. I can’t wait to see Earl.’
Luna unzipped her duffle bag. There was a lot of black in there. She picked out some jeans and a black vest top and added another several layers of eyeliner, just to be on the safe side.
‘You’re spiralling again.’ Mae was busy backcombing her hair.
She was wearing the mesh top that you could see her bra through, the one that their mum said made her look like a whore.
She’d added a set of decorative rosary beads.
Luna was certain that they either looked really cool or absolutely terrible. She couldn’t decide which.
‘I’m not spiralling.’
‘Good, come on. There better be some cute boys here this summer. Or girls. I’m not fussy you know. I wonder if Zadie and Ahmed got together.’
Luna rolled her eyes as Mae pulled her through the cottage. In some awfully selfish way, she hoped that Ahmed and Zadie hadn’t got together, since she couldn’t bear the thought of everyone being happy aside from her. Her misery wanted company.
She didn’t feel good about hoping that other people were miserable too, and she hoped that that counted for something. And anyway, she didn’t feel quite so miserable herself once she was out in the sea air.
They ran all the way to The Edge.
Luna was breathing in big gulps of fresh air, wondering if it was possible to feel drunk off the stuff when she saw them. Emmett, Earl and Emmett’s mum, Tanya. Zadie and Ahmed were there too, the group sat in a little circle on the edge of the cliff between the caravans.
Suddenly, it felt like the most stupid thing in the world to have avoided talking to Emmett this year.
Why didn’t Luna call him? Why didn’t she reply when he wrote her letters?
It felt like control at the time, but now she thought what a stupid thing to have done, to deprive herself of Emmett just because he didn’t love her like she loved him.
Cadence was there. Still beautiful, still bouncy. Luna just took a deep breath as Mae whistled loudly and shouted, ‘Surprise!’
They were surprised. Earl hugged them both, so did Tanya, her frail arms making it feel like a hug from a baby bird.
Ahmed quoted something that sounded like Shakespeare and Zadie said, ‘Alright,’ tipping her head back to get a good look at the pair of them.
Even Cadence bounced over and gave them a hug.
It was only Emmett who didn’t say a thing.
More chairs were fetched.
‘Looking good, Tanya,’ Mae said, as everyone shuffled back to widen the circle. Emmett’s mum smiled, cradling a mug of tea in her hands. She looked worn out and paper-thin, but she was here.
‘And you, Mae. You’ve grown, you both have.’ Luna knew this, since she was basically a giant now, but it made her feel uncomfortable. She went about squishing her legs together and sitting on her hands. She was trying, and failing, to make herself as small as possible.
It was a cloudy day. Big white clouds dominated the horizon, taking up an impossibly vast amount of the blue sky.
Luna wondered how it was possible for her to feel so much darkness in a world that was filled with something as beautiful and light as those clouds.
Maybe it was only here, maybe here was the place where she could recognise the dark and the light.
‘We’ve grown up, Tanya. In more ways than one if you get me.’ Mae winked and Luna felt unease welling up from somewhere deep inside her. The wink had felt like some sort of an activation code for The Man Plan. Luna shifted on her white picnic seat.
Earl laughed and went to get some cake from his caravan.
‘So, how’s things?’ Luna asked Emmett, her voice a tiny bit thin. She tried her best to ignore the fact that Cadence was sitting on his knee, fully draped around him. Like, why? When there was perfectly good grass right there.
‘Yeah, not bad.’ He wouldn’t look Luna in the eye.
‘Emmy got top of the year in his mocks.’ Cadence stroked his hair off his forehead. Emmy.
Mae slapped her thigh and Luna’s sense of unease increased a notch.
‘No. Way. So did Luna. Well, only in Art. But still, top of the year. She flunked Maths and Mum had a nervous breakdown. So now we both have to get a maths tutor. How shit it that? Mum thinks failure is catching.’
Luna couldn’t be sure, it seemed like there were hints of The Man Plan in there. But also, it was very much just Mae.
‘I didn’t know you were struggling with maths.’ Emmett looked… well, Luna thought he looked hurt. He was frowning.
‘Emmy’s going to be a doctor,’ Cadence told them all proudly.