Page 47 of The Edge of Always

He was looking out to sea. His knees were up and his arms were resting on top of them. Luna thought that the vast expanse of sand before him made the sea feel a million miles away.

‘Emmett, hi!’ Mae went running towards him. Luna didn’t run. Running wouldn’t resolve the unending pressure she felt, so what was the point and – oh no.

‘What happened to your eye?’ Luna asked Emmett, sitting next to him on the warm sand, Mae sat on his other side as he held a bag of frozen peas to his eye. They were used to seeing Emmett with cuts and bruises, though it was always still shocking to Luna to see his face all marred. And this was much worse than normal. Luna was sure he needed stitches.

‘Mum,’ is all he said. Luna knew that he was trying to hide how much the bruises made his face throb.

This couldn’t keep happening. Could it? Why wasn’t anyone doing anything about it? Whenever Luna looked at the cut on the side of Emmett’s eyebrow, it was like white noise in her head. There was already a bruise there, and now this.

Luna saw Zadie and Ahmed, sitting together a little way off, looking their way. She moved over to talk to them.

‘I can’t believe his mum actually did that.’

‘It’s been bad this summer.’ Zadie was cool and Luna felt this like the slight it was. She’d barely seen Tanya this year, too busy stewing in her own dark thoughts. ‘Emmett threw out her supplies,’ Zadie finished.

‘Crap, that’s bad. But why is Emmett on his own? Where’s Cadence?’

‘He said he wanted some peace,’ Ahmed answered. ‘We’re just giving him space.’

‘It’s different for you and Mae,’ Zadie finished.

Luna looked back; Mae still had her head on Emmett’s shoulder. He’d shrugged an arm around her. Maybe Luna was wrong, all this time thinking that Emmett only wanted to be friends. Maybe Emmett had always thought of them as family.

Luna was making her way back towards him, totally at war with the soft sand.

She thought about how they skimmed over the worst parts of the way that Emmett lived – flattening the edges like a rough stone made smooth by water. But sometimes there was no getting away from it, like how he always ate really quickly, and how he let Mae cut his hair because he couldn’t afford a barber. This was far from the first time he’d had a black eye.

Luna didn’t even talk, she just plonked herself on the sand, graceful as a hippo, and took hold of his hand, lacing his fingers between her own. Earl arrived with a tea towel wrapped around some ice, and Luna pressed it gingerly to the side of Emmett’s eye, watching as he winced.

‘Me and Cadence broke up,’ he said eventually.

Luna found that she didn’t feel any sort of a way about this news, actually. It was hard to feel anything but worry with Emmett like this.

‘Never mind,’ Mae patted his knee, still sat on his other side. ‘She was a bit annoying, to be honest.’

That at least made them laugh. ‘She just didn’t get it, about Mum. She doesn’t understand. It wasn’t right for ages before, though. I’m not even sad. Or not about that anyway.’

Luna hated any insinuation that Emmett could be sad about anything. Hated it.

They didn’t talk any more about Cadence or Emmett’s mum for a while. They were all strangely polite, in fact, while they built a fire. They kept it up, the politeness, as the sun began to set and the temperature dropped. Emmett gave Luna his jumper. It had holes in the cuffs.

Zadie sat close to Ahmed around the fire, and Luna wondered if maybe, finally, his persistence was wearing her down. Or perhaps it was just that on the other side of Emmett getting hurt, they all felt soft and malleable.

It was late, almost fully dark now, and Luna knew that they couldn’t stay much longer. Her mum would realise they weren’t back at the cottage at some point.

‘Fancy a walk to the water’s edge?’ Emmett asked, stretching out a hand to pull her up from the sand. She went willingly, all thoughts of mum and Eyebrow Clive forgotten.

‘I can’t believe that it’s our last night,’ she told him as the moon appeared hazy in the sky.

‘Every summer goes too quickly.’

‘It does.’

Luna had a sense that they were on the edge of something. She didn’t know what. There was a tension in the air, like Emmett was holding back. His black eye looked darker still in the dark.

‘Do you think your mum will be okay?’ she asked and he smiled, finally. Luna felt something loosen within her. Like a tight screw that had finally given. ‘What?’

‘I like that you care about her, that’s all.’