Page 42 of The Edge of Always

Chapter Eleven

Everyone was in the sea. Everyone apart from Luna. She sat on the dunes, sketching. It was a beautiful scene, the way the sun light reflected on the water like that. It was a beautiful scene and yet Luna wasn’t drawing it. No, she was drawing a discarded can of coke half poking out of the sand.

Still, she felt happier since she’d made up with Emmett. Happy, but still drained.

Along the beach, she saw a figure walking towards them, wearing a top hat with feathers.

‘Earl!’ Luna shouted. ‘Earl!’

Earl spotted her and began to make his way up the beach. He had a dog with him. A scraggy-looking Labrador.

‘Luna, hello!’

‘Hi Earl, what are you doing here?’ The dog had charged at Luna and almost knocked her over. It started to run in excited circles around her.

‘Walking Fred’s dog. He can’t get out so much since he had his hip operation. He’s quite excited, aren’t you, Scout?’

In reply, Scout began to wag his tail so forcefully that Luna was at risk of getting a mouthful of sand. Fred was a man with a horse who lived at The Edge.

Earl lowered himself next to Luna on the sand dune. He threw a ball for Scout, who charged off for it.

‘He has a lot of energy. We’ve been walking all morning.’

They sat for a while, as Luna sketched and Earl continued to throw the ball for Scout. Whatever the weather, Earl had a little grey beard and long hair that he wore in a ponytail.

‘You’d be drawing the waves,’ she said, not looking up. She couldn’t get the dimensions right on her can.

‘I don’t know for sure. The waves can be really challenging. Movement. Water. I was friends with David Hockney when he went through his water phase, trying to capture the uncapturable.’

‘Still, it would look better than a drawing of trash.’

Whatever Earl had said last year, it still bugged Luna that she wanted to draw rubbish more than she wanted to draw the beautiful scene in front of her. She wanted to be like Earl.

‘I disagree. Try adding more shading along the line where the can meets the sand. The contrast is not quite right, I think.’ Luna nodded and start shading with a vengeance.

Earl watched her as she shaded. His eyes were somewhere between green and yellow, but they were bright. Mae said that it made him look like a wise old owl.

‘There, much better, I think.’ Earl went to stand up. Luna looked at her can of coke – it was better. ‘I’ll go and say hello to the others before I get back.’

Luna nodded. She squinted at her drawing some more.

‘It is very beautiful, Luna. I hope you can see that.’

‘What topics in maths are you struggling with?’

They were in her room, sitting next to each other on her bed, maths textbooks spread between them.

Luna loved how close together they were. The only downside was Mae, sprawled out on her own bed.

‘Pretend I’m not here,’ she’d said, plugging her headphones into the iPod to play music loudly. She had one leg crossed over the other. They could hear the beat of When the Sun Goes Down coming through them.

‘Er, all of them,’ Luna admitted, trying not to recall the trauma of her school maths lessons. ‘I don’t know how I managed to get a D, honestly.’

‘Right, well, let’s start with trigonometry. It’s really tricky, loads of people find it hard.’

‘But not you, right?’

She nudged his shoulder with her own. ‘No, but I find other things more difficult.’