The Mixed-Up Summer of Lily McLean (11 page)

I try and glare at her, but she isn’t looking my way. She has Rowan and David in her sights and delivers a killer shot.

“Imran was out in the boat last weekend and he was followed around by a young dolphin that just wanted to play, and was leaping in front of the boat. He said it was the most amazing thing ever.”

I can’t believe I’m hearing this. She knows I don’t want to go on the boat. Ok, I haven’t given her much of a reason, but I’ve said no several times. I glare again, but Aisha is avoiding my eyes.

Rowan and Dave have no idea that I have vetoed the whole boat thing and think it’s a brilliant idea. When they see Imran, I know they will be even more convinced.

“I’ll go up and ask him,” says Aisha, still not looking at me. “I’m sure it will be ok. He said earlier he’d like to take the boat out now it’s such a lovely day.”

I open my mouth to say I don’t want to go, but I’m still trying to come up with the words when Aisha runs off into her close, and Rowan and David both turn towards me, beaming.

“This is going to be so good,” grins David. “I’ve always wanted to see dolphins in the wild. I saw them in a marine park when Mum took me to the Netherlands last Easter, but that’s not the
same at all.”

“Aisha’s great,” says Rowan enthusiastically. “She’s fun and she’s so pretty too, isn’t she?”

I look down at the ground, at the dried blobs of chewing gum on the pavement. I don’t want to talk about Aisha. I’m angry with her for forcing me into this situation and I’m trying to figure out what to do. Should I go on the stupid rowing boat and break my promise to the ghost? I was so looking forward to spending time with my friends, and how dangerous can a little boat be on a day like today? But if the ghost’s right, it could be the last thing I ever do.

David doesn’t answer Rowan either. He is watching as Aisha runs back down her stairway, closely followed by Imran, tall and impossibly gorgeous in blue jeans and a white t-shirt.

“Hi, landlubbers,” says Imran, grinning at us. “I’ll take you down to the jetty and we’ll have a quick row round the bay in
Seaspray
. I don’t start work ’til seven o’clock, so we should have three or so hours out there. I warn you though, when we get out of the shelter of the bay, the water can be quite choppy.”

“No problem, I’ve rowed on the Largs boating pond. Can’t be scarier than that,” says David.

We cross the road, pushing the bikes, and Imran strides ahead towards the jetty. I can see his little rowing boat tied up there, painted in blue and white stripes, with ‘
Seaspray
’ carefully written on the hull.

Imran jumps aboard and Aisha leaps in after him. The boat rocks wildly and I know without a doubt that I can’t go out to sea with them, however much I wish I could. Rowan and David clamber into the boat and it rocks to and fro again. The movement makes me feel cold and seasick and I’m still on the jetty.

“May the Force be with us!” yells David cheerfully.

“It’s a rowing boat, you eejit, not a spaceship,” laughs Rowan.

They don’t have a clue how I’m feeling.

Imran holds out his hand, and I step back so quickly that I stumble.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter. “I don’t want to come. I’m just going to stay here and wait for you. It’s not a problem.”

“Aw, come on Lil!” shouts David, in surprise. “It’ll be fun. Come with us, please. Don’t be daft!”

I look at his shocked face, and suddenly feel panicky. What if something awful happens to my friends? Maybe they should be staying away from boats too.

“Please don’t go,” I say desperately. “I don’t want you to go out in a boat. It might… it might capsize or something. You might drown. You’re not wearing life jackets. Shouldn’t you have life jackets?”

Rowan looks anxious and upset, while Aisha just looks irritated. “Lily, you really need to chill. Stop thinking that everything is a disaster waiting to happen!”

“I’m not going without Lily,” Rowan says, trying to stand up and causing the boat to wobble dangerously.

“Don’t worry, Imran knows what he’s doing,” says Aisha firmly. “We’ll be back in no time! If Lily really isn’t keen, she can entertain herself for a bit and meet us after. Can’t you, Lily?”

“Sure,” I say, trying hard to smile and look relaxed. “Course I can. Sit down, Rowan, before you fall in! Have a good time. I’ll see you all soon.”

There’s no way I can convince them that I’m genuinely worried without having to explain that I’m being pestered by an angsty, insistent ghost telling me over and over again not to go near water.

I turn and stride down the jetty, doing my best to hold my head high. I can hear the splashing of oars, and a shriek of laughter from Aisha. They are going without me.

Things I’m surprised about:

• When I’m really upset, I sulk like Jenna.
  
• Marshmallow ice cream can’t fix everything.
  
• I may not survive this holiday.
  

For a while I cycle round and round Millport, in fast furious circuits, until my legs are aching and I am gasping with thirst. Then I go and sit in the Ritz café for nearly an hour, hunched moodily among all the loud day-trippers, with their screaming toddlers and whining children. I stick coins in the jukebox and put on all the saddest songs I can find. I order a coke and a marshmallow ice cream with raspberry sauce. The ice cream tastes delicious, but it isn’t making me any happier. I remember that I haven’t bought Jenna a present yet and wander around the gift shops, but I can’t see anything she’d like. Perhaps I’ll give her my water lily charm. It’s not bringing me much luck.

I am worried sick, and sick of my own company. But I am also fizzing with rage. Why did Aisha have to go on about Imran’s boat when she
knew
I didn’t want to go out in it? I couldn’t have made it any clearer, could I?

And why did Rowan and Dave agree so readily to go with her when this is supposed to be our day out together? They are totally disloyal and I feel betrayed by them all. I wish bitterly that I had never met Aisha. She has stolen my friends. She has ruined my
holiday.

“It’s not fair!” I grumble, kicking out at a railing, and then feel instantly embarrassed. I’m acting like Jenna in a strop, or the boys in mid-tantrum.

“Grow up!” I hiss furiously at myself. “Act your age, not your shoe size.”

I look out to sea and see the little boat bobbing far off in the water, its colours blending in with the sea foam and sky. It looks very small and fragile. What if something awful does happen to them all? I should have tried harder to stop them. I close my eyes, imagining the boat capsizing, imagining my friends being thrown into the choppy, grey water. It’s a horrible prospect… but it isn’t very likely to happen, is it? It’s the Firth of Clyde, not the Atlantic Ocean.

Maybe Aisha is right and I need to stop thinking that disaster is lurking around every corner. I should be out there in that boat, having a lovely time with my friends. And I would have gone, if it wasn’t for that ghostly girl, tormenting me with her gloomy warnings.

I cycle down Stuart Street towards the old pier and the George Hotel. When I get to the little harbour, I stop and dump my bike against the sea wall. The tide is low and so the slope leading down to the harbour is dry. I sit there on the stones, away from the busy street and the crowds of noisy day-trippers. The harbour smells of seaweed and engine oil.

An enormous grey gull waddles over to see what it can steal, and for some reason this is the final straw. My anger boils over.

“Get lost,” I shout fiercely, flapping my arms to make it go away.

“There’s no need to be so horrible!” says an affronted voice. “I’m only trying to help you – to help us!”

I turn and see my ghost sitting on the harbour wall. I scramble to my feet and go and sit by her side. She no longer frightens me
at all.

I can see her quite clearly now, as if she is a photo on a computer screen which has been rendering before coming suddenly into focus. Now that she has more colour, I can see that she has gingery hair and pale, freckled skin. Her eyes are as wide and grey as they always were. She is wearing shorts, and a t-shirt with Hello Kitty printed on the front, and she is clutching a tatty, stuffed toy lion with a pink fluorescent mane tightly in her arms.

I know her now.

“Summer?” I whisper, my voice trembling.

She nods sadly, reaches out a hand and strokes my face, but I can’t feel it. She has no substance at all. My little sister is my ghost but she’s not from the past at all. She’s from the future. I can’t process this.

“What’s going on?” I say desperately. “What are you doing here, Summer?”

“Mum didn’t get over losing you,” she says.

I go cold. What is she talking about? Nobody has lost me. I’m not even mislaid. I’m with Gran, on holiday in Millport. I’m having a bad day, that’s all.

“She didn’t cope at all and Gran was no better. Gran blamed herself and had to move away—”

“Blamed herself for what?” I interrupt, a bit rudely, but I’m really anxious to understand what exactly is going on here.

Summer’s voice sounds a bit like Mum’s, a little like Jenna’s, probably like mine, too. No wonder it seemed so familiar.

“She blamed herself for your accident, of course. She was in charge of you, and you died. Mum didn’t manage without her once she moved, of course.”

“Hold on, hold on,” I stutter. “I actually died? I’m going to die?” I shake my head dumbly.

“Nobody ever talked about it in detail, but I know you drowned
on holiday when I was two…” she says sadly. “That’s when everything started to go wrong.”

There’s one question I’m desperate to ask, but I’m almost too afraid to say it.

“Are you a ghost?” I stammer.

“What? No, I’m not dead! I told you before.”

I’m so relieved I could laugh, despite all the worries and questions whizzing round my head.

“But things are bad, Lily,” she continues, “after Gran left, our wee family fell apart.” I imagine all the food emergencies, the failed appointments, the unsigned permission slips, the unwashed laundry. “Jenna went completely off the rails. I don’t know where she ended up – Mum kicked her out when I was four. I’m sorry, Lily. I hardly remember her.”

I want to cry, thinking of how sad and scared Jenna must have been, being told to leave her own home. Jenna can’t help being angry. Mum should realise that she’s responsible for some of it by bringing that awful man into our lives, I think furiously. I promise myself I’ll be kinder to Jenna, if I make it off this island alive.

I take some deep breaths to calm my thudding heart, and remind myself that this hasn’t happened yet. It’s all in the future. Right now, Jenna and baby Summer are at home with Mum and the boys. Everybody is fine. I just need to change the future, so that these horrible things don’t happen. It can’t be that difficult, surely. Can it?

“What about the wee boys?” I ask, torn between needing to know and not wanting to know.

“Bronx and Hudson are in all kinds of trouble with the police,” says Summer, looking as if she’s afraid to tell me such bad news. Does she think I don’t know them? Without Gran and me bossing the boys around and keeping them in order, they’d run wild, like little feral cats.

“Bronx is in a Young Offenders Unit at the moment. Hudson drinks too much. He copies Dad.”

“Dad?” I shout the word and it echoes off the harbour wall. Surely she doesn’t mean my step-dad. Does a restraining order not count for anything these days?

“Dad came back into our lives when I was about five. Mum needed help. But he just made everything so much worse.”

I feel suddenly furious with Mum. How could she have let that happen? She promised we would never have to see that man again. I can imagine, though, that if my mum was desperately unhappy and lonely without Gran, Jenna and me, he would have been able to worm his way back into her life.

“He scares me when he’s drunk,” Summer whispers. “He shouts and falls and breaks things.”

Summer’s face is clouded in misery and I can’t bear to think about her having a dreadful, neglected childhood. I think of my baby sister’s cheerful grin every time I lift her out of that awful playpen. I think of her waving her cute little chubby hands as I wheel her along the sea front.

She doesn’t deserve a future like the one she’s describing, and neither do my little brothers, or my big sister.

Summer wraps her arms tightly around the scruffy little lion. “I only know that if you hadn’t died, everything would have been different. Mum says that you were the only one who really had any time for me. You gave me Roary. I need to save you. I’ve been trying to warn you. It’s just really difficult to get noticed.

“How…” I croak, still unable to deal with all this information. “How are you doing this?”

She hugs the lion close to her chest. I feel oddly pleased that it means so much to her. The animal really is in the most awful state: filthy, with mangy orange fur, one plastic eye and a threadbare pink mane.

“Since I turned eleven, the age you were when you died, when I hold Roary really tightly like this, and close my eyes, and think about how I felt when you first gave him to me, somehow I’m able to communicate with you,” she explains. “At first I wasn’t sure if you could hear or see me. I even thought that I was just imagining you, because I was wishing so hard that you hadn’t drowned. But then you started answering me back. Once I realised what was happening, I did everything I could to warn you… though you weren’t very friendly,” she adds, a bit crossly.

“Well I couldn’t see you at first, could I? You have no idea how creepy it is to be spoken to by a disembodied voice. And when you started to become visible, you were so faint that I thought you were a ghost.”

Everything that has happened over the last few weeks begins to make sense. Why I recognised her but didn’t recognise her, why she changed her clothes, why she was as confused and surprised as I was to be crossing through time and space to talk to me.

“Summer, you need to tell me what happens to me so I can stop it.”

Summer grips Roary tightly. Tears fill her large grey eyes. “All I know is that you drowned on holiday on June 26
^th
. Mum loses it every year on that day. So I have been trying to change our future by changing your past. I have no idea if that’s possible, Lily.”

It had better be possible, I think furiously. I have no intention of drowning this week or any other. The 26
^th
is today, and I already chose not to go on the boat. All I have to do is get through today and everything and everybody will be ok.

But what if the boat sinks whether I’m on it or not? My friends are still out on the choppy water!

“What about my friends?” I blurt out. “Was it just me who died?”

“I’m sorry Lily, I don’t know,” she sighs. “Like I said, nobody
ever talks to me about it.”

I should have pleaded with them to stay on dry land. I should have told them why I was so reluctant to go on the boat. I picture police and search helicopters, and Mrs Forrest’s face when I have to tell her I let them get on a boat without life jackets on. I feel sick with fear and panic, but upsetting Summer even more isn’t going to help any of us.

“Well,” I say as calmly and as big-sisterly as I’m able, “I’m not dead and I’ve no plans to die just yet. By tomorrow I’ll be back in Largs and I promise I’ll take good care of you all and be the best big sister ever. I’ll even forgive you for haunting me.”

I can’t believe I’m looking at my brave, grown-up little sister. I reach out to give her a hug, forgetting that she is as insubstantial as mist. She looks at me with her wide, sad eyes and then as I watch, she fizzles, colours dissolving, like a popping bubble. I am sitting on the wall by myself.

The June sun is still bright although it’s nearly evening. I stay on the wall in the sunshine and try to sort out my jumble of thoughts. Maybe this is just a particularly weird nightmare and I will wake up in the caravan and Gran will be frying sausages for breakfast and nobody will be talking about death, except maybe Gran, as its one of her favourite subjects.

But all of this is real. Too real. And the little boat containing my best friends in the world is nowhere to be seen.