Love and Muddy Puddles

  Chapter 26

   

   

  I don’t recommend sustaining a severe injury in the middle of the night in the back of the Australian bush. Basically, I don’t really do pain that well. I tend to whimper and cry and plead into the darkness for it to go away. Plus, even though I was deliberately running away from everyone I knew, I don’t really do ‘alone’ that well either.

  Let me also say this. Those night noises that you hear in the forest? When you’re on your own and you can’t see anything and your brain feels like it’s about to explode anyway, you really do begin to wonder if maybe there are things like vampires and werewolves and bloodsucking owls that could swoop down from the sky and take out your eyes, and the whole scenario kind of does weird things to your sanity.

  Let’s just say that by the time I was found, I was a quivering, blubbering, shivering, vomit-covered mess.

  Obviously, it’s not my preferred look.

  Especially not when the person who finds you is a boy. And especially not when he’s a boy who doesn’t think that much of you anyway, especially not after you’ve insulted his sister and generally been a selfish idiot.

  Yes, I was found by James. And Tessa. Embarrassment much?

  “Coco! Coco?”

  I had no idea how long it was before I heard their voices. I suppose it could have been only half an hour but it felt like about eight!

  “Coco? Are you there?”

  It always sounds like a cliché in books when people say that their hearts leap but when I heard Tessa’s voice my heart did what I can only describe as a forward somersault handspring with a twist.

  “Tessa? Is that you?” I squeaked out the words. It was amazing they could hear me but then I saw them riding down the hill and out of the bush.

  “It’s her! She’s there!” Tessa yelled. She threw herself off her horse and knelt down beside me. “Over here, James. She’s here. We found her.”

  “Stop talking, Tessa. Coco. Are you okay?” He got down from the horse and pulled out a flashlight and shone it in my face.

  In normal circumstances I would have told him to get the light out of my face and to not worry. But these were not normal circumstances.

  In these circumstances, filled with pain, covered in vomit and shaking with terror from the night, I did what any self-respecting girl would do.

  I cried.

  Big, shaking sobs with snot streaming out of my nose and slightly embarrassing shrieks of relief at being found.

  “Oh, I love you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can’t believe you found me. I thought I was going to die. Cupcake just freaked out and reared and I just bounced off her back and then she ran away, and it really hurts, but I’m so glad you’re here. Did I say I love you?”

  The words just kept falling out of my mouth. Poor Tessa didn’t know what to do except to hug me awkwardly. I held on to her hand like she was my saviour and didn’t let her go. James stood back and waited.

  “We’ve got to check that you’re okay, Coco,” he said, when I’d finally run out of breath. He knelt down beside me. “Do you think you can move?”

  I rolled over towards him. Slowly. Painfully. “Maybe.”

  “I think if you can roll, there’s probably no spinal injury,” he said. “What about getting up?”

  He put his arm around me to try to sit me up. I stiffened. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work because the pain was so bad, but then I was sitting up, leaning against him.

  “Ew. I’m so sorry. I think I smell of puke.” I tried to pull away but he just laughed.

  “It’s not really any worse than cleaning up stables,” he said. “I think I’ll live. Can you stand up?”

  “I’ll try.” I pushed down on the ground, clinging to his shirt but as soon as my ankle took any weight it felt like I was going to die. “Owwwwww!” I screeched. “Owah! Not possible.”

  “It’s either broken or it’s a really bad sprain,” he said. I was still sobbing and whimpering on the ground. “Tess, if you ride back and tell them where we are, I’ll stay here with Coco until they can get the car out here.”

  “What? You mean I can’t come back with you? But I need to go home!” I wailed at him. “I can sit on your horse with you.” I suddenly felt desperate. I couldn’t wait another hour.

  “Well we can try,” he said. “Want to stand up again? Tessa, you go on her other side.”

  This time I’ll manage, I thought to myself. I need to get home. But my legs didn’t want to cooperate and after two seconds I was back on the ground, crying again.

  “Waaaah. It’s hopeless. It’s not fair,” I sobbed. I felt like pounding my fists on the floor like a toddler, but everything hurt too much, plus I was now feeling bruises all down one side of my arm and on my bottom. And there was a sharp pain under my ribs where James had been supporting me. Crying was turning out to be too much work and then suddenly I realised that I had lost my audience. I rolled over stiffly to look at James, who had moved to sit away from me and was gazing at the moon. He turned to speak.

  “Tessa’s gone to get some help,” he said mildly. “It will probably take an hour or more. I’ll stay here so you can’t run away again.” He looked back at the moon. “Beautiful night tonight.”

  “You’re not very sympathetic,” I said. “I’m lying here in terrible pain and all you can say is that it’s a beautiful night.”

  He sighed. “What did you want me to say?”

  “Oh I don’t know. Maybe something like, ‘I’m so sorry you’ve broken your ankle. You poor thing. How can I help?’“ My voice was sharp.

  “Maybe you didn’t realise this,” he said, “but actually I am helping. I was having a perfectly good evening before having to come out into the cold and dark to look for someone. Especially a someone who’s gone bareback riding on a difficult horse in a frilly summer dress in the middle of the night without telling anyone.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I said, sulking. “You could have stayed home.”

  “What kind of person do you think I am?” He sounded scornful. “I look out for my friends. I don’t just leave them in the middle of the bush alone.”

  “Well I don’t know. Whatever.” I said. I struggled up onto one elbow and pulled myself up a bit. The pain was throbbing all the way down my leg. “Anyway, I’ve had a very difficult day. And I feel very upset.”

  “Is that why you ran away?” he said. He sounded unimpressed. “Because you felt upset?”

  “You wouldn’t say it like that if you knew what actually happened,” I said. My voice was getting choked up. “My friends in Sydney dropped me.”

  “I thought you were going to a party,” he said. “Why would your friends invite you to a party if they were dropping you?”

  “I don’t know.” My chin wobbled. “They said they wanted revenge. And then I got pushed in the pool.”

  “Are you serious? Are they like, the mafia or something?” he asked. “Did you kill their parents or poison their dogs? Why on earth would they want to take revenge on you?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why not?” he said. He sounded genuinely curious.

  “Because...” I said, but I couldn’t go on. I wanted to say because you’re ordinary, because you’re not cool, because you’re not popular, because you wear Cuban heels and ugly flannys but out in the open air, under a silver moon, sitting next to the boy who had left his own party to come to rescue me, my words suddenly sounded cheap, pathetic and nasty.

  “I’m a person, just like you,” he said. “And we’ve got at least an hour sitting here in the dark. You might as well try and make me understand.”

  So I told him all about it. I told him about Saffron and how much I admired her and her friends. I told him about the auditions and Sam and me trying so hard to get into the group. I told him about the fake school story we made up and the pretend rule about no emails and how desperately I’d been looking
forward to going back to Sydney next year.

  My words poured out of me, and I realised that I’d never actually told anyone any of this before. I’d kept it all in my own heart for a whole year, not sharing it with anyone. And through all of it, James sat and listened. He didn’t talk, he didn’t make fun of me, he didn’t try and tell me I was wrong.

  He just listened.

  “And so I guess I was just really upset, and I saw you guys at the camp and I knew I had upset you and I thought I would never have any friends except Cupcake, and then even she left me when she got spooked...” My voice trailed off. I was nearly crying.

  “But I still blame Dad.”

  “How is any of this your dad’s fault?” James asked. He sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? If he had just let us all stay back in Sydney, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have had to lie and I would have still been in the group and everything would be okay.”

  James looked at me. Even in the moonlight his blue eyes were clear and piercing. “No. I think you’re wrong. Nothing would be okay if you were still in Sydney.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Don’t you get it? If you were still in Sydney, you would still be with those girls and you would have become one of them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Coco, you’re smart.” He sounded frustrated. “I don’t know why you don’t get this. It’s like you’ve got a blind spot. Those girls are mean. Look what they did to you at the party. And Samantha? Your ‘best’ friend? She pushed you in the pool. It doesn’t matter what you might or might not have done to them, or if you ‘broke’ their rules. No one treats friends like that. Plus the guys they hang around with are really sleazy. I mean, like, completely gross. I know what kind of men they turn into, and believe me, it’s not good.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I think they’ve done you a complete favour by dropping you. If it was me, I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them.”

  “But...” My voice faltered. And then I suddenly knew that everything he was saying was right. My head was spinning. “But they’re popular. And they’re beautiful. And I want to be popular and beautiful.”

  “But you’re popular already,” said James. He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyway, why would you want to be popular if it means you treat people like they treated you?”

  I thought for a second. “And like they treated Shannon...”

  “Who’s Shannon?” he asked.

  “Another girl they dropped,” I said quietly. Thoughtfully.

  “Yeah, and they’ll probably get rid of Samantha some time,” he said, “or Isabella or whatever her name is—one of the other ones. Seriously, hanging around people like that doesn’t do you any favours. You just need to have friends you like. People who like you.”

  When someone tells you a truth that you’ve never realised before, the words kind of echo in your head. Every word James said was like a bell, clanging in my empty brain. I could feel the reverberations right down to my feet, even the sore one.

  But there was still a problem.

  “But the whole point is that Charlie is just better than me at everything,” I said. “Fashion and social stuff is the only thing I can do better than her. This is why I started hanging out with these people in the first place. Wherever we go, everyone admires Charlie more than me.”

  There was a silence. For a second James said nothing. The moon seemed bigger and the night sounds got quieter.

  “I don’t,” he said.

  My heart did another one of those tumble turn things. For a second I didn’t breathe.

  “What?” I said. But very quietly.

  His answer was quiet too. “I don’t admire Charlie more than you.”

  I could hardly look at him. I was still focusing on the moon, but now instead of not being able to breathe, I had to control my breathing because it was getting faster and faster.

  He kept talking. He also wasn’t looking at me. Deliberately. “I don’t know why you think you’re no good at anything. You’re amazing with Cupcake. You’ve got a real gift with horses. And you’re funny. Apart from when you make major stuff ups in Truth or Dare, you’ve always got something clever to say.”

  He waited for a second.

  “And you’re really beautiful.”

  I just about choked. In a good way of course.

  “Oh.” I said. And shot him a sideways glance. He looked at me at the same time. It was like we were caught in the same silver stream of moonbeam for a beautiful, magical millisecond.

  “Coco,” he said. “I like you. You know, like, ‘like like’, not just like.” And then he looked away, almost shy.

  “Oh,” I said again, and instinctively tried to move closer to him. “I really...” but as I spoke, I forgot I was injured and without thinking I shifted my weight onto my broken leg. The pain shot from my ankle to my hip, making me fall onto my hands, at which point my rib, which had been hurting a bit before suddenly went ‘crack’.

  Pain does funny things to you. In my case, as I opened my mouth to tell James that I ‘like liked’ him as well, that I hadn’t really noticed it until now even though I’d known it inside all along, that he was completely adorable as well as being right about me, and that I had a lot to learn and I was sorry for all the things I’d ever thought or said about him and especially his flannel shirts, which all of a sudden looked pretty good and not clichéd at all, out came a lot of something.

  Out of my mouth came, not words, but puke. And it went straight into his lap.