The Strawberry Sisters (2 page)

When we finally made it to the hospital, we all bundled out of the car, but Mum stopped outside the main entrance. Since my parents split up (one year, four months and sixteen days ago), there
are lots of places that my mum doesn’t come inside. Like Granny’s house, and my dad’s new house where he lives with Suvi, and the leisure centre where Dad takes us swimming.
Instead, she just drops us outside. It seemed like the hospital was Dad’s too.

‘He should be here,’ Mum said.

Amelia nodded. ‘He’s so unreliable.’

Chloe pulled a face at Amelia. ‘Maybe Dad’s waiting for us inside.’

Mum looked at her phone. ‘He said he’d meet us here. Lucy, what are you doing?’

People always think Lucy is adorable because she’s tiny and has reddy-gold curls, but if you watch her for two minutes you can see that, even though she looks like an angel, she
isn’t one. At this moment, she was scratching under her arm with one hand and had the other one stuck up her skirt.

‘I can’t help it,’ she said. ‘These shorts are making my bottom wiggle.’

‘You look like you’re trying not to pee,’ Chloe said.

‘You don’t pee with your bottom! Your bottom is for p—’

‘Your bottom will be kicked if you don’t stop embarrassing me,’ Amelia said. She pulled her black hat further down and held her book up over her face. I think she was
pretending she wasn’t with us.

‘There he is,’ Mum said.

I could see Dad through the big glass windows, making his way between people in the crowded reception area. He’s really tall, like me, and his legs extend in these long, smooth strides
that make him look like a dancer or an athlete when he walks. Not like me.

Mum pushed her bag up her arm. There was a long trail of tissue paper and the sleeve of a cardigan hanging out of it. ‘Your dad said he’d drop you back at the house. I’ll see
you all later.’

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ I asked. I knew she wasn’t, but sometimes you have to ask a lot of questions to get even a little bit of the real answer.

Mum shook her head.

Amelia scowled. ‘Can’t I come home with you?’

‘No, your dad wants you all here. Anyway, I’m not going straight home. I’ve got some things to do.’

‘I’ve got things to do!’ Amelia snapped.

‘Yeah, she needs to lie on the sofa, eating crisps and telling us how stupid we are,’ Chloe said.

Chloe and Amelia always say rude things to each other. It used to make them both laugh, but now it just makes them cross. The rude things haven’t changed, but maybe Amelia and Chloe
have.

Amelia opened her mouth to say something mean back, but then Dad came out of the double doors. ‘Hello, girls!’

Chloe threw herself on him.

‘Louise,’ Dad said, looking at Mum and ruffling Chloe’s messy ginger hair. ‘Thanks for bringing them.’

Mum smiled with her mouth, but not the rest of her. ‘How’s baby?’

‘She’s gorgeous. Looks just like Suvi.’

Mum’s forced smile fell off her face.

‘She’s managed to avoid my nose anyway.’

‘Wish I had,’ Amelia muttered.

‘So everything all right then?’ Mum said, half turning to go.

‘Yes, brilliant, marvellous.’

Mum nodded. ‘Bye then, girls. Be good.’

I wanted to hug Dad, but Chloe still had her arms round him.

‘Is the baby tiny?’ I asked. ‘Has she got a name yet? What colour is her hair?’

‘Slow down! You can see for yourself in a minute. Amelia, are you coming or do you want to hang about in the car park looking moody all day?’

Amelia’s eyes were fixed on Mum’s disappearing back. ‘You don’t actually mean staying in the car park is an option, do you? Because if it is I’ll definitely do
that.’

Dad’s lips twitched. I couldn’t tell if it was a nearly-laugh or a nearly-shout, but it turned into A Look. When my dad gives me A Look, it makes me squirm like Lucy wearing pyjama
shorts instead of knickers, but Amelia just shrugged and followed slowly. We walked into the hospital and over to a row of lifts.

Up on the fourth floor we found Suvi holding a very small baby with a fuzz of blonde hair. Nobody said anything.

‘Wow,’ Chloe said eventually. ‘Is that a drip in your hand? Does it hurt when they stick it in? Josh Williams in my class had to have a thing in his arm and they stuck it in
the wrong place and he had a bruise the size of a cowpat an—’

‘This is your new sister,’ Dad interrupted, using the same voice as when he showed us our bedroom in his new house.

Nobody had liked that much either.

Amelia looked out of the window.

‘She doesn’t look like me,’ Lucy said quietly. ‘Her hair is the wrong colour.’

I felt sorry for the baby. She seemed like quite a nice baby and when she got a bit bigger I was sure she’d be brilliant. It wasn’t her fault that we were cross with Dad.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘She’s cute.’ The problem with ‘ahs’ is that they have to just come out. If you do them on purpose, they sound stupid.

Amelia obviously thought so because she gave me her you-sound-stupid look.

‘We’ve decided to call her Kirsti,’ Suvi told us.

‘Oh,’ Lucy said. ‘I thought you’d call her a crazy Finnish name, you know, like Suvi.’

‘Kirsti is a Finnish name,’ Suvi said.

‘Are you sure?’ Chloe asked. ‘Because it sounds completely normal.’

‘Can I hold Kirsti?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Dad said.

‘Maybe later,’ Suvi said. ‘She’s just got to sleep. And it takes a long time to get her off. She’s a fusser.’

‘How do you know?’ Amelia asked. ‘You’ve just met her. You can’t know anything about her.’

The rest of our visit was Dad oohing and aahing and taking photos to show us how great everything was, and Amelia’s face telling us it wasn’t.

Later that night, when I was in bed, I started thinking about Suvi and Kirsti and wondering what the others thought about Dad having a new family. To me it seemed like it had
all happened very quickly.

Chloe and Amelia used to share a bedroom, but, after Mum and Dad split up, they kept falling out so Chloe moved in with me and Lucy. I sleep on the bottom of the bunk beds and Chloe sleeps on
top. Lucy was already asleep on the other side of the room so I stretched up a leg in the direction of the top bunk and poked Chloe’s mattress with my foot.

‘What?’ she whispered.

‘Do you mind that Dad doesn’t live here any more?’ I whispered back.

‘We didn’t see him loads when he did live here. He was always at work.’

‘But do you wish he still lived here?’

Because my dad has been gone for less than a year and a half, sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, I think for a moment that I can hear him in the bathroom or running down the stairs.

‘He doesn’t live here,’ Chloe said. ‘He’s not going to move back, Ella.’

She didn’t sound sad.

‘Do you like Suvi?’ I asked.

‘She isn’t exactly the one I would pick.’

‘Who would you pick?’

She thought for a moment. ‘An ice-cream van driver. A rich one. Who was really good at rugby.’

‘I can’t even imagine Suvi eating an ice cream.’

Suvi mostly seems to eat raw vegetables and things with seeds in.

Another thing my nana used to say was that when life gives you lemons you should make lemonade. That means doing the best with what you’ve got. But it’s quite hard to think of a
bright side to the person who your dad decided to love instead of your mum.

‘She is quite tough,’ Chloe said after a while.

‘Suvi?’

‘Yep. Most people cry when Amelia is mean to them; Suvi hardly notices.’

Chloe was right. Suvi doesn’t seem to get worked up about anything. Amelia says she’s cold; she calls her the Ice Queen.

‘And she’s strong. She does all that yoga and she’s got quite muscly arms. Basically, if we ever get attacked by aliens, I think she’d be a good person to have
around.’

I sighed. Even though I know she’s not trying, sometimes I think Chloe is better at looking on the bright side and making lemonade out of lemons than I am. When life gives her a frosty
stepmum, she makes her into a soldier for her army against aliens.

‘I got new knickers for everyone,’ Mum said the next day at teatime. One end of the table was completely covered by a castle Lucy was making out of a cardboard box
and Pringles tubes and yoghurt pots so we were all squished up at the other end. Mum was eating peas while tapping at her laptop which was wobbling about on her knees.

‘Why are you allowed to have that at the table, but I can’t have my phone?’ Amelia asked.

‘I’m working,’ Mum said.

‘You’re always telling us not to leave things to the last minute,’ Chloe said.

Mum still had tons of work to do before she went back to teaching Year Two next week.

‘I know, but I didn’t want to waste the holidays on work when I could spend time with you girls instead.’

We had a brilliant summer. We stayed in a caravan in Cornwall, then we visited my cousins, and even when we were at home my mum thought up theme nights and competitions for us. She’s
really good at finding fun things for us to do.

Mum picked up a folder and a load of bits of paper fell on the floor. She isn’t so brilliant at being organised.

‘Did you get the rest of my new uniform?’ I asked her.

‘Uniform? Um, yes, it’s on your bed,’ Mum said. ‘Except tights, but I’ll get those really soon. I absolutely won’t forget.’ She wrote TIGHTS! on a
Post-it note and stuck it to her laptop.

On Monday, I was starting Year Seven at St Mark’s where Amelia and Chloe went. The bright side of going to secondary school was that my two best friends would finally get to meet each
other. I didn’t exactly have loads of friends, but I did have two brilliant ones and I wanted us all to be friends together more than anything. If you have friends then people don’t
laugh at you. Or, even if they do, you don’t care so much because you’ve always got someone to be nice to you.

When I was little, we lived in London and I had two best friends. It was fantastic: we did everything together and, even when one of them was ill, I still had someone to play with. But then we
moved here. I think it’s safest if you go to nursery and primary school and secondary school all in the same place; that way you always know someone. It’s quite a stupid idea to arrive
in the middle of Year Three when everybody has already got their own group of friends, but nobody listened to me when I said I didn’t want to move.

Amelia and Chloe had no problems fitting into our new school. Chloe is so friendly and energetic that no one can help liking her and Amelia is so smart and funny that people feel lucky to be her
friend. I don’t really stand out like they do. I never know what to say to people when I meet them. For the first two weeks at our new school, I hid in the bushes at playtime. Then one day
this girl called Kayleigh tapped me on the shoulder. She had brown, shiny hair like a conker, which was falling out of a ponytail. She smiled at me and said, ‘Let’s play
unicorns.’ So we did. Everybody liked Kayleigh and I kept expecting her to go off with someone she liked better, but she hasn’t yet.

After we’d been mates for a while, I asked her why she was my friend. ‘Don’t you think I’m a bit quiet?’ I asked.

‘Not with me,’ she said.

And it’s true. Kayleigh is so good at having ideas and getting excited about things that it isn’t hard for me to join in. I don’t even mind being silly with Kayleigh because
she’s always much sillier and she never, ever laughs at me. She’s also the only person I ever sing in front of. I haven’t got an amazing, swoopy voice like Amelia, but I do like
singing. Sometimes me and Kayleigh get dressed up like pop stars and borrow her mum’s karaoke machine. I get the giggles a lot, but it’s really good fun.

My other good friend is called Ashandra. I met her six months ago when I was at my dad’s new house (we stay there every Wednesday night and every other weekend). Ashandra lives in the
house next to his. One day I was sitting in the garden so that I didn’t have to listen to Amelia shouting at Dad and Ashandra leant over the fence and said, ‘How long have your parents
been divorced for?’ I thought that was a bit of a rude question, but then she told me about her parents splitting up and her mum getting married again and how her brother hates her stepdad.
So she is quite an expert on divorce. Ashandra’s also very smart and doesn’t think I’m weird because maths is my favourite subject. She’s tall (but not as tall as me) and
she’s always changing how she wears her curly Afro hair, but at the moment it’s in lots of little plaits. She’s also very understanding about missing your dad. Hers lives in
America so she only sees him twice a year.

Ashandra and Kayleigh were both my special friends, but they hadn’t actually met each other yet. When I found out that we were all going to be in the same tutor group when we went to St
Mark’s, I was really excited. I hoped that Ash and Kay would like each other and that we’d all be brilliant friends. It would be just like it was in London; I wouldn’t ever care
if someone was rude about my hair or my name or how tall I am because I’d always have a friend around.

I was also sort of hoping that, since this time I’d be starting school at the same time as everyone else, some other people in the class would be my friends too.