Page 72 of The Edge of Always

Chapter Seventeen

Luna didn’t fail.

That’s what she reminded herself as she moved around the cottage, a tray of prawn cocktail lettuce boats held aloft in front of her. They’d already started to wilt.

Luna’s mum had described her grades as ‘perfectly respectable exam results’, which was probably somewhere between a compliment and a comment. But perfectly respectable was entirely fine by Luna. Especially since she thought she’d failed. Her dad had texted her ‘B good’ because most of her grades were Bs.

‘I’ll take one of them off your hands, Luna.’ Ahmed, leaning back against the kitchen worktop, peeled a prawn cocktail boat off the tray her mum had arranged them on.

All around the cottage, little groups of people were gathered. It was like two different styles of art meeting on canvas, and it being all wrong. For instance, there was Earl, paint-splattered and wearing his feather top hat, an artist to his very core, chatting politely to Eyebrow Clive, the most literal man on the planet. Zadie, who, Luna was sure if she were an artist, would be a cubist, was talking to her mum, who would paint vases of flowers and nothing else. It was a mish-mash of friends her mum had in the village, and people Luna knew from The Edge.

‘Were you happy with your results?’ she asked Ahmed.

He shrugged. ‘I have more important things to be worrying about than grades, Luna.’

He folded down a page in his book, One Hundred Poems to Fall in Love By, and looked over at Zadie. ‘Emmett said that you got a special recognition certificate for Art?’

Luna flushed red, sure that even her stomach was the colour of beetroot. Art was the only subject that she had got the top grade, alongside a certificate to say that she was in the top 3 per cent of candidates.

Luna looked around for Emmett. She wondered if she was ever not looking for him.

‘He went into the garden, I think,’ Ahmed said, smiling at her.

‘I’m not looking for anyone in particular.’

‘Sure, Luna. I believe you.’

It seemed that everyone knew how hopelessly in love with Emmett Luna was.

‘You know, there might be a way for us to both get what we want,’ Ahmed carried on. It was stuffy, Luna needed water. She put down the tray of soggy prawns.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Come on, Luna. We aren’t little anymore. You’re sixteen now, time to start playing with the big kids.’ He was peering down at her, completely grossing her out.

‘Can you just spit it out, Ahmed? What are you talking about?’ Luna’s head was starting to ache, a consequence of not sleeping the night before. Or the night before that.

‘Try this. You want to get with Emmett.’ She neither confirmed nor denied. ‘I want to get with Zadie. So how about we get with each other, to make them jealous.’

It was the most ridiculous thing Luna had ever heard.

She started to laugh.

‘That would never work.’

‘It’s actually a classic trope. Works every time.’

Somehow, Luna doubted that this was true. But if there was a chance…

‘I don’t know. Do you even want to kiss me?’ she asked.

‘You’re not hot, but you’re beautiful. Interesting. And I appreciate those qualities.’ It wasn’t quite the compliment Ahmed seemed to think that it was.

Luna didn’t want to kiss Ahmed any more than he probably wanted to kiss her, but she was stubbornly stuck in the friend zone with Emmett.

‘Emmett probably just doesn’t fancy me,’ she told Ahmed.

‘Emmett is obsessed with you,’ he answered simply. ‘You forget, I’m here when you’re not.’