Chocolate Box Girls: Sweet Honey (18 page)

The beach cafe is busy, but Lola lets me
sit at the counter even though she knows very well I should be in school. I’ve
downed three Cokes by the time Ash turns up to start his shift, and I feel jittery
and giggly like a hyperactive child. Injustice and anger slosh around inside me like
poison.

‘You should go home, Honey,’
Lola says as she leaves. ‘Chill. I know you’re upset … but
trust me, it’ll all blow over. Whoever said schooldays are the best days of
our lives was definitely having a laugh.’ I drag up a smile and Lola hugs me
quickly, hangs up her apron and hands the till key to Ash.

‘What’s up?’ he asks
me as soon as she’s gone. ‘How come you’re here before me? How
long
have
you actually been here?’

‘Don’t ask,’ I tell
him. ‘Am I a bad person? A mad person? OK, so I probably shouldn’t have
written those things, but they were my private thoughts, right? They were never
meant to be seen by anyone else!’

He frowns. ‘Honey? Have you been
crying?’

‘No,’ I growl. ‘I
never cry. It’s just that my eyeliner smudged, OK?’

Ash takes my hands. ‘Look, I know
something’s wrong,’ he says. ‘It’s just that I have no clue
what you’re talking about –’

‘Fine,’ I bark, pulling away
from him, stepping behind the counter and scanning the shelves. ‘Is there any
cider in that fridge?’

‘You know there
isn’t.’

‘God, you’re so
boring
!’ I huff. ‘This whole place sucks! Doesn’t
anybody around here ever have any
fun
?’

‘Look, Honey,’ Ash says,
trying to take my arm and steer me out from behind the counter. ‘I don’t
know what’s wrong but I know something is. Why don’t you go home, like
Lola said –’

I turn on him, blazing. ‘Oh, sure,
why don’t I?’ I snarl. ‘That would be much more convenient.
You’d be rid of me – you wouldn’t have to worry about my car crash of a
life. You wouldn’t have to worry about anything. That’s right, push me
away, chuck me away, shove me in a corner out of sight so I’m somebody
else’s problem. That’s OK. I’m used to it. It’s been
happening for years …’

The whole cafe is silent and staring,
but I’m too angry now to care.

‘I’m not pushing you
away,’ Ash says, exasperated. ‘That’s the last thing I’d do.
If you don’t want to go home, stay here with me. Sit up by the counter, talk
to me –’

‘Who says I want to talk to
you?’ I fling back. ‘I don’t. I don’t want to talk to anyone
– whatever I say will just get twisted anyhow. Everything’s ruined. So hey,
don’t let me distract you from your job. You have a cafe to look after, and
ice-cream sundaes are clearly more important than friends in trouble. Get lost,
Ash!’

I turn on my heel and walk away, out of
the cafe and along the beach, hands over my ears so I can’t hear Ash’s
yells telling me to come back.

It takes about ten minutes’
walking for me to calm down again, and by that time the beach cafe is just a dot in
the distance behind me. I kick off my hated brown sandals, peel off the knee-high
socks and abandon them on the sand so I can walk along the water’s edge
kicking at the surf.

I am an expert at toddler-style
tantrums, drama-queen strops, but now I’ve cooled down I feel worse than ever.
I went to the cafe to see Ash because I thought he was the one person who might just
understand; instead of giving him a chance to do that, I yelled at him, flung every
shred of kindness and sympathy back in his face.

What can I say? Today has been a losing
friends kind of a day.

I am an expert at giving up, running
away. Sometimes it feels like freedom, but today I know it’s just defeat, pure
and simple.

I leave Sunset Beach behind, clambering
over rocks and following the tideline into another cove, less pretty, more shingly,
almost deserted. My rucksack is annoyingly heavy; I ditch a maths book to make it
lighter, then turf out my pencil case, my gym shoes, my French dictionary and
finally the rucksack itself. I don’t even care any more.

I spot a bonfire in the distance, up on
the dunes, a bunch of backpackers gathered round it. The thin plume of smoke reminds
me of Tanglewood, of hope. I pull off the yellow neckerchief and throw it into a
rock pool, heading towards the sound of laughter, the smell of woodsmoke.

By the time Ash finds me there, two
hours later, I am happy again. I am the life and soul of the party, dancing,
flirting, smoking, drinking. My throat aches with the harsh burn of cigarettes; no
amount of lager can wash the stale, sour taste away. Two or three of the boys are
hanging on my every word, and that feels good. The backpackers are mostly from
Britain and France, students on a gap year; soon they will be heading on again, some
for Brisbane, some to New Zealand, some for Thailand. I am seriously considering
tagging along.

When I see Ash walking towards me in the
falling light, hope leaps inside me; then I see his face, grim, unsmiling. He walks
up to me and takes the ciggy from my lips, grinding it into the sand with his heel,
prising the can of lager from my fingers, throwing the contents across the
dunes.

‘Hey!’ I yell, outraged.
‘What are you doing? Leave me alone!’

‘You’d like that,
wouldn’t you, Honey?’ he growls. ‘Then you could carry on with
your little self-destruct jag without any hassles. OK, you’re upset – but this
isn’t going to help! As for you guys … what are you even doing
giving her drinks and smokes? Are you crazy?’

My backpacker friends seem slightly
bemused.

‘Hey, hey,’ one of them
says, challenging Ash. ‘What’s it to you, anyway? Leave the girl
alone!’

‘She’s just a kid,’
Ash says. ‘She’s fifteen, OK?’

‘Oh, great,’ I snarl.
‘Thanks for that, Ash. What does my age have to do with anything? And what
does my life have to do with you anyhow? Get lost!’

‘I won’t,’ Ash says.
‘I care about you, OK? I’ve been worried sick!’

‘Well, you can stop
worrying,’ I snap. ‘I’ve had a change of plan. Australia’s
not working out for me, so I’m going to travel –
Thailand … India … right?’

I look at my new friends for backup, but
they are shrugging, turning away. Only one boy sticks up for me. Perhaps he’s
hoping that the lager and ciggies he’s been feeding me for the past two hours
might still buy him a moonlit snog on the dunes. It won’t, though. Not
now.

‘You heard the lady,’ he
sneers at Ash. ‘Back off!’

In the fading light he looks kind of
seedy, sinister.

‘Look, it’s OK,’ I
say, defeated. ‘Ash is a friend.’

The backpacker boy rolls his eyes,
disgusted.

Ash takes my hand and leads me away from
the bonfire, and the fuzzy, light-headed bubble I’ve been hanging on to
deflates abruptly like a burst balloon. Reality floods back. I insulted Ash, yelled
at him, embarrassed him in front of a cafe full of customers. Yet the minute his
shift was over he came looking for me. Clearly, he is the crazy one around here.

‘How did you find me?’ I ask
as we trudge across the dunes. ‘How did you know where I’d
be?’

‘You left a trail,’ Ash
says, holding up a bulging, dripping, sand-encrusted rucksack. ‘Sandals,
socks, books, neckerchief. It was like a treasure hunt, only without the nice
surprise at the end. And I could only find one shoe …’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘I
hated them anyway.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘No!’ I say, outraged again.
‘Of course I’m not! I only had one can.’

‘You sound drunk,’ he huffs.
‘And you smell like an ashtray.’

I sit down on a rock, gloomy.

‘What about the kids?’ I
ask. ‘Aren’t you babysitting today?’

‘Supposed to be,’ Ash says.
‘I rang my sister, told her something came up. She said she’d get a
neighbour to sit with them.’

I wasn’t sure that anything could
make me feel worse, but that does.

‘See?’ I say in a small
voice. ‘I’m trouble. I have seriously messed up. Someone posted a page
from my online diary on to my SpiderWeb wall, and now Tara and Bennie aren’t
talking to me. Actually, nobody is talking to me. Nobody wants me – I’m
useless, worthless, a walking disaster area. I told you before, everything I touch
turns to dust.’

‘You’re touching me,’
he points out, pressing his palm against mine. ‘I’m still here,
aren’t I? You’ve yelled at me, sworn at me, pushed me away, but
I’m still here.’

‘I know,’ I admit.
‘That’s the bit I can’t work out.’

‘Thing is, I can see you,’
he says. ‘I can see past the goody-two-shoes act, past the tough-girl act, the
self-destruct act, the drama-queen act. You’ve got about a million masks,
Honey Tanberry, but none of them work on me. I can see
you
. And I think
you’re brave and strong and lovely.’

A salty tear slides down my cheek and
Ash wipes it away gently, leaning his forehead against mine. He is so close I can
feel the warmth of his breath, the flutter of his lashes. My eyes close and I think
the world might slide away as his lips touch mine, softly, slowly, carefully. My
fingers trail against his skin, tracing his cheekbones, the faint sandpaper stubble
of his chin. I want to hold on and never let go, but as unexpectedly as it began,
the kiss is over.

You might think that only bad things,
sad things, can hurt you, but you’d be wrong. Lovely things can hurt you more
because they thaw out the bits of your heart that you thought would be frozen
forever. I can’t help wondering if it might not be safer to stay frozen.

The trouble is, I think it’s too
late.