Page 33 of Tabloid Princess

“What, like a youth club?” Paula spoke up. “My kids would never be seen dead in one. Sorry, Leia, but they are old school now.”

“Okay. Youth clubs aren’t cool anymore. But where can we get access to young kids before the damage takes place?”

Molly shook her head. “Let’s hope we aren’t being bugged, everything that’s just come out of your mouth sounds morally wrong.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. “You know what I mean. In schools is one.”

Paula tutted. “Kids hate talking to teachers.”

“In primary?” I asked. I thought of Daisy and her infallible love of Miss Evans; something I was a little jealous of if I was being honest.

“From about age eight upwards,” Paula clarified.

“What about computer games?” It was Ian who spoke. We all turned in shock. That’s how quiet he normally was.

“Imagine a kid is playing his Xbox in his room. Downstairs, he thinks something is going on that shouldn’t be, but he doesn’t actually know, it’s just a feeling he’s got. But he’s on his game, his friends are chatting, so he ignores everything in his own house, until later a window smashes because his drunk father has got fed up with the dog barking and has thrown it through the window.”

A heavy silence spread until Paula broke it with the squeak of the wheels on her chair as she scooted to his side of the desk and gave him a giant motherly squeeze. I wanted to turn and look to see how the prince reacted to this. This was the stuff we dealt with: horrific, painful, messy.

I kept myself focused on the conversation.

“Okay. Computer games. Adverts?” I held my hand up to stop other people talking… an idea grew, alarmingly clear. “What if we reached out to those YouTubers or the gamers they all watch, and we asked some of them to record segments? That would put the message about safety directly into that boy’s bedroom.”

I met Ian’s gaze and a little pinch turned my stomach. My own memories of being shut in my bedroom were ones I didn’t like to remember very often.

“Yes! That would be far cooler.”

“Okay.” I scribbled in my notebook.

“What is our message though?” It was Janine who spoke, and we all turned to her. It was her business, her driving passion; if she didn’t know the message then we were all basically fucked.

“What do you mean?”

“We want to help youngsters who come from addicted backgrounds to stick to their own path, to not be pulled into the only existence they know.”

I nodded.

“But it’s not concise. If someone only knows baked beans for dinner because their mother is a smack addict and that’s all they’ve ever been served, how do we now show them that it isn’t the only way it has to be?”

Again, I fought the urge to evaluate the royal response. I wondered what he ate for dinner growing up? Highly unlikely it was partly-cooked fish fingers and beans.

“So, we need to be more career focused. Get them at Daisy’s age, make them dream big,” I offered—it sounded lame even to my own ears.

“And what about the adults we help? They don’t need to be asked what job they want to do.” Sonya, one of the counsellors, tapped her pen against her teeth. “They want help escaping the hell they are in.”

Freya, who had perched on the outside of our informal meeting tutted and mumbled something under her breath about, “no clue”. I shot her a glare and grabbed at the first words that formed in my brain.

“Dream free.” I shrugged, it sounded stupid. “Uh, how about—”

Janine held up her hand, her mouth lifting with a smile. “Dream free at Bright Futures.”

I glanced at Ian and shrugged—for all the world I wanted to look at the prince. “Would that have meant something to you?” I asked Ian, determined to only look at him.

I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down. “Yeah.”

“Is it cool enough, we could get gamers to say it?”

Molly smacked her hand on the table. “We need everyone to be saying it. Like everyone. What was it Emilia called it?” She looked at me expectantly.