Page 35 of The Edge of Always

Chapter Nine

THEN

Luna was 14

Emmett was 15

For the first time in ten years, Luna didn’t want to go to the cottage that summer. Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Part of her was desperate to get there. To see Earl and the others. She remembered what Earl had said last year, about beauty and decay coexisting and she tried to see it, she really did. She was just struggling to see the beauty. Instead, the world felt marred in a way she’d never noticed before. In her fourteenth year, Luna had become strangely angry at the world. At everything, in fact.

‘If you keep frowning like that, you’ll give yourself wrinkles, Luna,’ her mum said, catching her eye in the rear-view mirror.

Luna tried to relax her face; it would be easier if she didn’t feel so tense all the time.

‘What’ll we do this visit, girls? We could go and see the puffins?’

‘Yeah, Dad, let’s hit up the puffins,’ Mae answered after a long silence.

Luna was too lost in her thoughts to even think about an itinerary, too preoccupied with how she’d react when she saw Cadence and Emmett this summer. On balance, she thought that she’d done a pretty good job of hiding how she really felt last year, depressing self-portraits aside. But now, she feared that her newfound anger would make it impossible to contain. It was as if her emotions were right there, simmering away just under the surface where she had no hope of concealing them. There was an Andrex puppy advert on TV just last night that had made her weep. A toilet roll advert. Her mum had threatened her with counselling.

‘I’m looking forward to some well-needed R&R,’ their mum chimed.

‘Well, your life sure is exhausting.’

If anything, Mae had become more Mae than ever this year. Annoying their mum was like a full-time job for her. Luna felt halfway to jealous about it. At least Mae had a purpose. Luna didn’t feel like she had any purpose; instead she felt adrift, apart. Even now, she felt like she wasn’t quite fully present in this scene. It felt as if she was hovering above it. Distant. It made her feel like she wasn’t in charge of her own life.

‘I wonder what Clive has been up to,’ Mum asked, oblivious to Mae’s sarcasm. Luna felt that there was something deeply troubling about people who didn’t understand sarcasm.

‘Hopefully he didn’t like die or anything. But then at his age, anything is possible.’

Even their mum couldn’t ignore the fact that Mae was trying to get a rise out of her. Luna suspected that Mae was just bored. But now they all had to suffer through Mum telling them how Clive couldn’t possibly die because he’s super virile for his age. Just the word virile grossed Luna out and made her irrationally angry at Clive. And her mum. And the whole world, come to think of it. She wanted to turn up the volume on her iPod, but it had run out of battery. Life was just so cruel.

The chat about Clive’s virility ended when they pulled up to the cottage.

Emmett wasn’t there. He wasn’t waiting on the step like he did every year. It’s not that Luna expected him to be there, since she hadn’t told him they were coming, but still, his absence stung.

‘You are like emitting hatred. Will you chill out?’ Mae muttered as they carried their bags into the bedroom. It felt smaller than before.

Luna was just so big. Broad, her mum called her, in a tone that made it patently clear that being broad was the worst possible thing a girl could be at fourteen. Her dad said that she took after him, that she was just strong. And it was true, she was strong. She could throw the javelin further than anyone else in her year. It didn’t exactly feel like a win.

‘Those puberty hormones really are playing you today, huh?’ Mae asked.

Luna didn’t know what Mae meant. So what if she was sat on the edge of her bed, clutching New Moon to her chest and crying silently because Emmett wouldn’t ever love her like Edward loved Bella.

Luna sniffed. ‘It’s not hormones.’

‘I don’t know, I don’t think jealousy is normally quite so stabby.’

Luna flopped back on the bed.

‘Will you please just trust in the plan?’

Like she did every summer, Mae had come up with a plan. Why she persisted in coming up with plans, since she was otherwise completely chaotic, Luna didn’t know. What she did know was that this year’s plan was called The Man Plan. And it involved no small amount of lying.

‘I just can’t see how—’

‘That’s because you have zero experience, which is a whole other level of tragic. If I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: you could have been using this year to get some practice in. Look at me – I let Liam in Year Nine touch my boob. And I felt his dick through his trousers. It was amazing.’ Mae paused for a second. ‘Well, it would have been if he wasn’t crying about England getting knocked out of the World Cup the whole time.’

Mae sighed as if she were recalling some great love story as opposed to being groped by a weeping Liam round the back of the swimming pool.