Page 67 of The Edge of Always

Chapter Sixteen

THEN

Luna was 15

Emmett was 16

The older Luna got, the more it felt that time was moving faster and faster. When she was younger, the gap between summers seemed to drag on for an eternity. She had no sense of it; it was so big.

But this year had passed quickly. A blur of studying and exams and final days of being at school. Signing shirts and crying with her friends over their lost childhood even though they were all going to the same school for college. The feeling that things were ending and just beginning all at the same time.

‘And I’ve double, no triple checked with school, Luna. We’ll get your results first thing on results day,’ her mum told her from the front of the car.

Luna was nervous. Her exams had been hard. Sometimes she wished that her brain would just work better. It seemed odd that something which was so intrinsically a part of her wouldn’t bend to her will and learn the equations she needed it to with more ease. She’d taken to drawing brains. Studying prints of them and wondering how it could be that that mass of slimy tissue could contain the essence of who someone was. It fascinated her. Mae had called the drawings her most detailed yet horrific to date.

‘We’ll be proud of you, however you do,’ her dad said, smiling at her in the rear-view mirror.

‘Yes, of course,’ her mum agreed, her voice more clipped.

‘I’ll disown you if you fail Art,’ Mae tacked on.

‘No one will be failing anything, Mae,’ their mum said. It sounded like a warning.

Mae rolled her eyes. Last year, Luna would have felt so angry at this exchange. She felt so angry at everything, it was all that she could see. She felt less angry now, but she wasn’t the same either. Mostly, she felt like she’d been through something.

‘You have been through something,’ Mae had said when Luna tried to describe it to her. ‘It’s called puberty.’ They’d had a lot of time to chat since they were grounded forever after their mum called the police when they disappeared to the beach last summer. She referred to it as the time they were missing persons, even if it was for a total of eighteen minutes. And even though Luna and Mae were the ones who were grounded, Luna’s mum also blamed Emmett and Earl.

When they were finally set free, Luna tried to get on with living her life. She’d gone out and tried to do normal stuff, like drinking and kissing. But even when she was kissing Jacob Grangemoor from the year above, a tiny part of her was still wondering what it would be like if it was Emmett who she was kissing instead.

At least she seemed to have stopped growing, though she was still as strong as ever.

Mae was trying to paint her toenails in the back of the car and their mum was complaining about the fumes.

The usual chaos, basically. This summer’s plan was The Glam Plan. Mae had said (and Luna was quoting directly here); ‘If you don’t get with Emmett this summer, I swear I will lose the will to live and emancipate from the both of you.’

They’d spent the last couple of weeks trying to become glam. Their mother, who honestly seemed delighted that Mae was finally taking an interest in looking like she lived ‘somewhere other than a bin’ had given them her Beauty Bible book. It was a massive pink thing with all sorts of hints and tips for being demure, ladylike, beautiful.

Mae had said it explained a lot about Mum.

The Beauty Bible was the reason Luna was wearing shimmery gold eyeshadow; she wasn’t allowed blue anymore because she had blue eyes and according to the BB, as they’d taken to calling it, ‘you wouldn’t display sapphires on a blue cloth.’

She’d also put some lightener on the ends of her hair and bought a set of hair straighteners. She was wearing a cute denim skirt, which is stretched just a bit too tight over her thighs, and a massive brown belt. She was now the proud owner of three really thin scarves which were definitely just for fashion.

She still wanted to be smaller, softer, but she felt that she was making a decent effort to become the type of person that someone like Emmett might want to kiss. She wasn’t exactly sure whether this was the type of person that she was meant to be. Luna wanted to be truthful, she wanted to know who she was and be that person. But mostly she felt like an enigma, even to herself. So being glam was better than nothing.

Mae had adopted a more lax approach to the suggestions of the Beauty Bible. She’d read the inspirational quote ‘When you want something with all your heart, the whole universe conspires to help you achieve it’ on the last page, called it horse shit and went back to dressing how she liked.

‘The Glam Plan only applies to you,’ she’d explained when Luna asked why Mae didn’t have to wear clothes to match her skin tone, or put on so much bronzer that she was unrecognisable as the same person. Mae was wearing neon yellow right now, which made her look like she was dying from liver disease. ‘I don’t need a Glam Plan to win anyone over. I’m perfectly happy with the state of my love life.’

It was no real surprise that Mae was happy with her love life. Mae was perfectly happy with all of her life. Sometimes it felt unfair to Luna that Mae had just grown so easily into the person she was meant to be as an adult. Luna often felt like she was at war with herself.

‘That’s because you’re an artist,’ Mae had told her when Luna had confided that she didn’t feel like she knew who she was, or not fully at any rate. ‘You guys spend way too much time thinking about everything.’

That was part of the problem though. The only time when Luna felt like she was close to becoming the person she should be was when she was drawing. But she wasn’t an artist. Her A-level choices were designed to help her get into law school. She’d convinced her mum to let her take Art as an extra on the side, but it had come with a warning that her mum ‘expected Luna to make the right choice, if it all became too much’.’

The right choice was dropping Art.

But more and more, Luna worried that without art, even her weird art, there was nothing. Less than nothing even. A void.