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“Have you read it, Comet?”
I nodded. I’d painted the words To Thine Own Self Be True above my headboard in my bedroom.
He smiled back at me and then continued on, handing out the play to everyone.
I flipped open the copy, hoping the lure of Shakespeare would be enough to distract me from the beautiful boy behind me. This was English class. The only place at school I felt at home.
Tobias King wasn’t going to fluster me or divert my attention from Mr. Stone and a class I loved.
* * *
Considering how disturbed I was by the thought of having a crush on a boy at this school, I was almost grateful for what happened next.
It was after lunch and I was heading to history. The wide corridors were filled with students milling around or walking to their next class. As usual I was slipping through the crowds anonymously when I saw him coming toward me.
My heart started racing in my chest.
He really had the most gorgeous smile.
And then I realized who he was smiling at.
Stevie Macdonald. And with Stevie were his crew of borderline delinquents.
Huh.
That surprised me. To be honest it surprised me Stevie was still in school. I’d have bet everything I owned that he would have dropped out as soon as he turned sixteen. His friends, too. But nope. There they were.
What surprised me about Tobias hanging out with Stevie was the fact that Tobias had to have achieved good grades at his old school to have been accepted into my Spanish and English classes. Stevie and his crowd weren’t exactly high achievers.
But there they were, messing around like they’d known each other forever.
As Tobias neared me, my breath once again seized in my throat.
And then it was expelled with force when Stevie shoved Tobias and he clobbered me, nearly knocking me off my feet. Thankfully the new guy had fast reflexes. Almost as soon as he hit me, he turned and grabbed my arms to steady me.
“Sorry,” he apologized, and for a moment our eyes met.
My skin burned beneath my shirt where his fingers gripped me, and I found myself entranced by the flecks of gold and blue in his eyes. They were more blue-gray than light gray like I’d thought.
The heat in my skin traveled all over me, and I knew my face was probably on fire.
Damn my pale skin!
Just like that, he let me go and turned to laugh at whatever Stevie had said. I stumbled a little, turning in shock to watch him stride away as if he’d never even touched me, talked to me.
Tobias King was not book boyfriend material! A book boyfriend did not knock the heroine quite literally off her feet and then walk away once they made eye contact.
“Nice,” I muttered, infuriated.
It had been silly of me to think my intense reaction to Tobias King would be returned. He’d been here a day and was already the most popular boy in school.
This was the wake up I needed to shake me out of my stupid insta-crush.
After all I was just Comet Caldwell.
Great big bloody snowy dirtball.
* * *
“I was thinking we could ‘study’ at yours instead,” I air-quoted as I fell into stride with Vicki.
The end of day bell had rung five minutes ago, and I’d caught sight of my friend weaving through the crowds heading out of school.
For some weird reason, Vicki looked unsure. “Why?”
I knew the girls liked hanging out at my place because my parents never bothered us and because I was right on the beach. But I was feeling unexplainably prickly toward Carrie today and really didn’t want to breathe the same air as her. “This morning Carrie either pretended to or genuinely forgot that I’m sixteen years old and have been for a while.”
“What?” Vicki wrinkled her nose. “Babe, she gave you a birthday card. With money in it.”
“No, apparently, Kyle gave me a card with money in it and signed Carrie’s name.”
“That’s rubbish. I’m sorry.” She wrapped an arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “Okay. Come to mine, then. I’m sure Mum won’t mind, because today was her day off.”
Vicki’s mum was a general practitioner at the local doctor’s surgery but ever since Vicki’s younger brother, Ben, was born she’d worked part-time. Ben had been a surprise—a happy one—arriving nine years after his big sister.
“Well, if you’re sure.” I wasn’t going to argue.
Vicki’s house was on the way to mine, about a ten-minute walk from school and just a few blocks from the main street in Portobello.
Portobello, or Porty as it was known locally, sat on the east coast of Edinburgh, about a twenty-five-minute car journey from the city center. It used to be a beach resort with fun fairs and rides, but now it was more about volleyball, kayaking, sunbathing, swimming, dog walking and the arts. Years ago, as part of an art event, a steel tidal octopus sculpture had been installed on the beach. During low tide he was completely visible, but during high tide you could see only a tentacle or two.
We had independent stores, cafés and restaurants in Porty, and a Victorian swimming pool with an original Aerotone and Turkish baths. It was a village with identity and personality, and it had a laid-back vibe with a socioeconomic mix of low-to-mid income and mid-to-high income families. There were people who spoke with a more anglicized Scottish accent, like me and my friends, and those like Stevie who spoke in thick Scots. It was a mishmash, and for the most part I loved that.
But that came with problems. I knew some kids who were bullied for having less money than other kids, and kids like me who were bullied for being posh and a swot—a geek, a brainiac, a nerd. Our school had its “good” kids, its overachievers, and then it had the “bad” kids, the disrespectful kids, the troublemakers and the underachievers. Overall, I didn’t interact much with the “bad” kids, as I wasn’t part of their circles, and I liked living in Porty.
That didn’t mean I didn’t have every intention of getting as far away from here as possible when I went to university. And I meant far. My dream university was in the US of A. The University of Virginia. It was really well-known for writing, for its literary magazines, poetry workshops and for its Pulitzer Prize–winning graduates. If that wasn’t enough, the awesome Tina Fey graduated from there! Yes. If it took my blood, sweat and tears, I would become a proud alumna of UVA and no one, not anyone, was going to get in my way of seeing that dream come true.
“You’re quiet,” Vicki mused as we strolled in silence toward her parents’ house.
I shrugged. “Just first day blues, I guess.”
“Or...” She nudged me and grinned. “I saw you checking out the new guy.”
I blushed crimson and shook my head frantically.
“Fine.” She turned stone-faced. “Keep your secrets.”
Frustration gnawed at me. Vicki took it personally when I kept things to myself, but it wasn’t personal. I just wasn’t a sharer. Not wanting to hurt her feelings, however, I sighed. “Fine. He’s good-looking. That’s a fact. Nothing more.”
“Really?” She beamed at me. “Because I thought I saw your tongue roll out of your mouth when he walked into Spanish.”
“Yeah, well, he ruined any illusions I might have had over his crush-worthiness when he nearly knocked me off my feet in the school corridor and then walked away.”
“He didn’t apologize?”
“Well, yeah, but it was like—” I grabbed her arms to demonstrate. “Sorry,” I said indifferently, let her go and strode away quickly. Stopping I looked back at her. “I may as well have been a traffic cone.”
She burst out laughing at my dry tone and hurried to thread her arm through my elbow. “I bet that’s not true. You’re really pretty, Comet. It’s just this uniform does nothing for you. For any of us.”
“Well you always look amazing.”
“He needs to see you as the real Comet.” She squeezed my arm, grinning at me. “He won’t be able to take his eyes off you then.”
It was sweet of her to try to reassure me, but I was over it. “It doesn’t matter. Did you see who he’s hanging out with?” I wrinkled my nose in disdain. “Stevie Macdonald and those idiots. Ugh. No thanks.”
“Stevie’s not so bad,” Vicki disagreed.
“He’s disrespectful to teachers,” I argued.
“God forbid.”
I frowned at her sarcasm. “Your dad is a teacher, Vicki. It should bug you, too.”
“It would bug me if Stevie was disrespectful to my dad or to any of the teachers that give a crap, but I’ve only seen him wind up the ones that clearly are just there to pick up a payslip.”
Realizing we disagreed entirely on the matter, I stayed silent.
She laughed. “Not all of us are afraid of authority figures, babe.”
I wasn’t afraid of authority figures. I just... I respected the adults in our lives who made time to talk to us, teach us things.
God... “I’m such a geek,” I groaned.
Vicki started to shake with laughter, setting off my own, and we giggled all the way to her house.
When we stepped inside the whitewashed bungalow, Mrs. Brown kissed her daughter on the cheek in greeting and then turned to me. “It’s lovely to see you, Comet.” She engulfed me in a hug, one that I soaked up.
I could hear sounds of cartoons coming from the living room, and I could smell something amazing cooking in the kitchen.
Mrs. Brown let me go and smiled at me, taking me in. “You get prettier every day, Comet.”
I blushed furiously, unused to such compliments, and she reminded me of Vicki as she laughed at my reaction. Vicki was a gorgeous blend of her mixed heritage. Where her mum was Caucasian with light hazel eyes and golden-brown hair, her dad was British Black Caribbean with dark umber skin, dark brown eyes and dark hair he always wore close-shaven in a fade.
“Can Comet stay for dinner, Mum?” Vicki asked, and I was surprised how tentative she sounded.
It had never been a problem before for me to stay over for dinner.
Frowning, I watched uneasiness flicker in Mrs. Brown’s eyes before she nodded. “Of course.”
“Will Dad be home?”
Again, Vicki’s tone surprised me.
“He hasn’t said otherwise.”
They shared a look I didn’t understand, and the sudden tension between them made me feel like an outsider. “I really should probably just go home.”
“Nonsense.” Mrs. Brown smiled brightly at me. Falsely. “But you girls must be hungry now. Let me make you a snack,” Mrs. Brown said, striding down the hall toward the kitchen in the new extended part of the house. As she passed the living room, she raised her voice. “Ben, volume.”
Almost immediately the noise from the television lowered.
I wouldn’t want to disobey Mrs. Brown either. Although she was always kind to me, she had that matter-of-fact, authoritative personality that seemed so prevalent in GPs.
We followed her, not having to respond to her offer because she knew from experience that we weren’t going to turn down a snack. I shot a questioning look at Vicki as we walked, but she didn’t meet my gaze. Hmm.
I waved at Ben, who looked up from the couch as we passed and waved back so enthusiastically that I paused. Vicki’s little brother was quite possibly the most adorable human being in the world, and the only child I’d met thus far in my short life to make me wish my parents had given me a sibling.
“Hey, Comet.”
“Hey. How was school?”
He made a face. “It was okay.” And I assumed my opener failed to pass muster because that was all the attention I was going to get. He returned to eating a banana and watching his cartoons.
I found Vicki and Mrs. Brown in their large, modern kitchen. Whereas our kitchen was the same ugly 1980s-looking disaster that had been in the house for decades, Mr. and Mrs. Brown had bothered to update theirs, and it was all clean lines, white and shiny.
The smell of pot roast made it the most inviting space despite its starkness.
Already in the middle of putting a banana, a sandwich and a cookie on a small plate each for us, Mrs. Brown smiled up at me. “Vicki said you had a particularly good day at school today. What happened?”
I shot a dirty look at my friend and then quickly covered it with a bland smile. “Mr. Stone is teaching us Hamlet in English. Vicki knows how much I love Shakespeare.”
Vicki snorted. “Right. Shakespeare.”
Her mother shook her head, smirking. “I know I’m missing something here, but from the look on Comet’s face she doesn’t want to talk about it so I’m going to let it go.” She slid a plate over to me and then handed the other to her daughter, leaning in to cuddle her as she did so. “Stop teasing your friend about boys.”
While I blushed again at her perceptiveness, Vicki huffed. “It could be about something else.”
“Not at sixteen.”
“Know-it-all.” She rolled her eyes as she moved to the fridge and grabbed us each a bottle of water. “Thanks, Mum.”
“Yeah, thanks, Mrs. Brown.” I took my water from my friend so she could take hold of her own plate and then I let her lead the way to her bedroom at the front of the house. Ben’s was just behind hers, and her parents’ bedroom was in the new extension near the kitchen.
Vicki’s room, much like my own, had barely any wall space left uncovered. Film posters, posters of her favorite rock bands and high fashion magazine spreads were pinned to every available space. She had two dresser mannequins, one wearing a half-finished corset-top, the other an almost completed steampunk-inspired dress. A bookshelf beside them held bolts of fabric, pins, scissors, papers and trays filled with beading, sequins and ribbons. Attached to the wall behind the mannequins was a corkboard and pinned to the corkboard were her designs.
My friend was wicked talented.
There were different-colored candles everywhere, and a bed with Moroccan-inspired jewel-tone, multicolored bedding with a ton of Indian silk cushions scattered over it. I kicked off my shoes and got comfy on her bed as she settled at her computer desk and immediately bit into her sandwich.
