Chapter Sixteen #3
‘But what about Earl?’ she asked.
‘Hopefully, he’ll come to visit me. I’ve got to get away. I want to get away, Luna. You understand, don’t you?’
Luna was halfway jealous that Emmett got to conjure his dreams so easily and make a plan to follow them.
‘Maybe we could apply to unis in the same cities?’ he suggested and while Luna knew on an objective level that she wouldn’t just be able to finish college and move to Northumberland right away, the prospect of doing anything other than that filled her with dread.
If Emmett wasn’t here though, would Northumberland be the same?
Was Emmett Northumberland to her? Possibly, she needed to lay off the WKD ahead of conversations like this about the future.
Luna felt ill-equipped for this talk. She was also quite horny.
‘Exam results first, and then we’ll see,’ she told him. ‘Plus, we have two years of school left.’
He was so close to her. It was hard to concentrate on anything.
‘Exam results first,’ he agreed.
‘Mum is throwing me a party, you should come. You can fight her off when she tries to kill me for getting a ton of Ds.’
Emmett laughed. ‘You won’t fail. Is your dad coming back up for it?’
Her dad was doing his usual of staying two weeks and then going home to work. He’d be back at the end of summer to pick them up.
‘Nope, Mum has invited Eyebrow Clive. She’ll be so cringe around him, I’m warning you.’
‘Do you think she’d ever cheat on your dad?’
Luna had thought about it. A lot. Late at night when she was trying to sleep. It disturbed her sketching in her mind.
‘I doubt it, but you never know. I think that’s just what marriage is like.’
‘I don’t know why anyone would get married.’ They went up and down and round and round. It was a gentle ride, but after the Wheel of Doom, anything was a lot.
‘Oh really?’ The world beyond the carousel passed in a blur. Luna didn’t let on that the entire point of The Beauty Bible seemed to be to get thin and pretty enough to bag a husband.
‘Yeah, relationships always go wrong. Even if you really love someone, you’d end up losing them. I bet your mum and dad were friends once.’
Luna twisted around to look at him. He was right there. So close.
‘That is a… depressing way of looking at things.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s the truth, though. I’d never risk losing someone important by getting into a relationship with them.’
This felt big. If only her sluggish candyfloss brain could make sense of it all. It was as if Emmett was trying to tell her something. The way he was pressed to her. It was a lot.
‘What about sex?’ Luna blurted out, even though the most experience she’d had was one single kiss. Emmett must have more. He was sixteen. He was bound to have had more. Luna knew, via Zadie, that he’d lost his virginity to Cadence. She shifted on the horse.
‘You don’t need to be in a relationship for that, Luna.’
Luna was hot all over, and as the horse stopped moving, she was out of her seat and wobbling down the steps of the ride in a flash.
‘Sorry, it’s the WKD,’ she called over her shoulder when it wasn’t that.
It wasn’t that at all. It was Emmett being close to her, it was him having to spell out how he’d never get in a relationship with her because he was scared of losing her; it was him casually talking about sex.
Luna thought she might be done with it all. She wanted to be done with it all.
‘Luna, wait.’
Emmett caught up. ‘Sorry,’ she said, panting and halfway to crying. ‘There’s been a lot of spinny rides.’
Her phone started playing Big Girls Don’t Cry, the ringtone she downloaded especially for the summer. It was Zadie, telling her that Mae had been sick again. ‘I’d better get her home. Mum will go apeshit if she finds out Mae’s drunk. I’ve got to go,’ she said again.
‘Hey Luna…’ He caught her arm as she turned to leave.
‘We’re okay, aren’t we?’ And she thought how Emmett needed this.
He needed them to be okay. This is what he was talking about – people leaving him.
Luna thought about the dad he didn’t know, his mum in prison, even Cadence, who couldn’t cope with it all.
‘Yeah, Emmett, we’re okay.’ She swallowed it all down, buried her secret and smiled.
‘So, in summary, I think Emmett doesn’t want to risk our friendship on something more. Either that or he doesn’t like me like that. Which would be fair. But he did say that I was beautiful, so probably it’s the friendship thing.’
‘It’s chicken shit is what it is.’
Luna and Mae were in bed the next morning, a bright blue day peeping at them from beyond the curtains. Mae had them, and her eyes, firmly shut.
‘It’s not chicken shit, it’s perfectly sensible.
Think about it: neither of us knows one couple who actually likes each other, let alone loves each other.
Aside from Earl and Sebastian, who were in love half a century ago.
And even that went tits up when Sebastian disappeared.
It makes sense that Emmett wouldn’t want to risk what we have. ’
Luna was fairly certain that she was trying to convince herself as much as Mae.
Part of her even felt a little bad. It was comfortingly familiar, the sense that she had been wrong this whole time.
Emmett was probably right. Luna could hear her mum and dad arguing in the kitchen. Chances are, he was absolutely right.
‘Do you think they could hate each other just a little bit quieter?’ Mae groaned.
‘I don’t know, and I’m not going to ask.’
Mae tunnelled deeper into the duvet. ‘You could just tell Emmett, you know?’ Her voice was all muffled. ‘That’s what I would do.’
‘Tell him what?’
‘Just be like, look Emmett, I’m in love with you. I’m hot as fuck and you need to stop being a coward and get with me. Or I know, sing “Lady Marmalade” at him. That worked for me once. We could look for a feather boa in one of the charity shops in the village.’
‘You are insane. Of course, I can’t tell him. He must never, ever know.’
Mae muttered something that sounded like ‘your funeral’ as the bedroom door banged open.
‘Girls. Before your father leaves, he wants to go and see the puffins again, for some ungodly reason.’
‘It’s tradition!’ her Dad called, in a sing-song voice that forced their mum to close her eyes and breathe through her nose for a moment.
‘So get dressed so that we can go and see these awful birds for the millionth time.’ She shouted the last part back towards the kitchen, directing it at their dad.
And Luna thought that Emmett was surely right – because she would never, ever want them to get into a blinding argument about some birds.