‘Hiya,’ he said, looking at Kerry like he knew her. ‘What can I get you?’
‘Two sausage rolls and two cups of soup.’
I looked from one to the other.
‘Oh,’ Kerry said. ‘This is my brother, Luke. This is Anna. She hasn’t been at our school very long.’
‘Hi.’ I turned away to look at the fridge full of cakes, because I could feel my face warming up. He was kind of good-looking. On the way out, Luke grinned. This time I was sure it was meant for me and not for his sister.
We took the steaming cardboard cups of tomato soup and the oily packets of sausage rolls and we started our slow stroll back towards school. I began quizzing Kerry about Luke. He was seventeen and at the local Further Education college, but he worked part-time at the baker’s. When I pressed her, Kerry said he didn’t have a girlfriend right now.
‘He seems very –’ I hesitated. ‘Nice.’ Most girls would immediately start teasing me, but not Kerry. ‘He doesn’t really look like you, though, does he?’
Kerry shook her head. She was wolfing the sausage roll and making a bit of a noise as she ate. I tried not to cringe. ‘He’s only my half-brother really,’ she said. ‘My dad was married before.’
‘Right.’ For a horrible moment, I thought about my own dad and his girlfriend. Half-brothers or sisters? I pushed that thought away. ‘That must be awkward.’
Kerry shook her head. She had flaky pastry crumbs on her mouth and I wiped my own lips with a tissue, hoping she would do the same. She didn’t notice. ‘No, it’s really fine. Luke’s my best friend.’ She crumpled the greasy paper bag and threw it in a litter bin. ‘I don’t really have any others.’
Again, I didn’t know what to say. Kerry finally swiped her mouth with the side of her hand, with almost no effect on the crumbs, and linked arms with me. ‘Thanks for being kind to me,’ she said, making me wince a bit inside.
I put up with her arm in mine for a few minutes then wriggled away, pretending to do something to my shoe laces. I didn’t want to think too hard about what it must be like to be Kerry.
I felt quite pleased with myself afterwards, because I thought I’d done a good-deed-for-the-day. That should’ve been the end of it. Trouble was, the next morning Kerry bounced up to me and Zoe like she had the right to be there, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her to push off.
Every time Kerry spoke, Zoe just looked stunned, as if she’d been punched in the face. She finally got me on my own in the girls’ toilets at the end of break. ‘What the hell happened?’ Zoe demanded. ‘How come we have that big klutz following around like she suddenly owns us?’
I confessed about the cross-country walk.
‘You asked her?’ Zoe smacked her hand on her forehead and swore. ‘Are you mad? She won’t leave us alone now. She’ll think you’re her best buddy.’
‘She’s OK, really,’ I said. ‘I think she’s just lonely.’
Zoe shook her head and turned away from me. ‘You sap.’
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Have you seen Kerry’s brother?’
‘Pasty Boy?’ Zoe wrinkled her slender nose. ‘What about him?’
I followed her out into the corridor. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘We just saw him yesterday, that’s all.’
Zoe turned to me with eyes like tiny knives. ‘Tell me you don’t fancy him?’
‘Course not.’
‘You’ve gone red.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘It’s just hot in here.’
Zoe was right, of course, about everything. After that day Kerry clung to us like that sticky weed that attaches itself to your clothes and won’t be brushed away. And I did kind of like Kerry’s brother.
Funny, though. We thought we’d never get rid of Kerry. Now, it’s getting harder to see her real face in my head. Only the picture from the police posters is really clear.
3
And Jodie
I started spending all my Saturday mornings with Zoe, hanging around Dead Bouquet and the little cafe nearby, wishing we had more money. That’s where we met Jodie. That name didn’t suit her: it was too pretty and sunny. She was working at the shop one weekend when we went in and I sort of recognised her: she lived somewhere near us, because I’d seen her using The Cut. She was tall and skinny like a cardboard cut-out, her skin pale as if she’d been carved from a lump of grey-white candlewax. And the carver hadn’t taken much trouble: her nose was so flat it almost didn’t stick out of her face and her eyes were stone-coloured and lashless. She had a deep scar down one cheek that looked like someone had crumpled up her skin and forgotten to smooth it out again. Zoe called her Scarface, behind her back, of course, and to be honest, it suited her better than Jodie.
We’d got to the shop around ten o’clock in the morning when it had just opened up. No one else was in there. We did our usual routine of wandering round picking everything up, looking at the price in the useless hope that it had gone down since last week, then putting it down again. Sometimes we sneaked a sample of the tiny bottles of perfume oils, which you weren’t supposed to do because they weren’t testers like in the high street shops. And they were fearsomely expensive, with names like Dark Medicine, Death of Summer, and Absinthe Roses. We’d sniff them every week, make swooning gestures and sometimes get a dab on our wrists, if no one was looking.
But this morning, just after it opened, only we were in the shop and Jodie was watching us all the time. Eventually she said: ‘Is there anything in particular you actually
