Читать книгу Flight of a Starling - Lisa Heathfield - Страница 10

RITA

‘Your hair is still wet,’ I tell Lo. ‘Ma would kill you if she saw you going to bed like that.’

‘Then it’s a bit of luck we’ve got our own van,’ she says, squeezing her fringe tight in her hand. ‘Look, no drips. I’ll be fine.’

She puts her clothes in our tiny bathroom, hanging crooked over the toilet seat.

‘Are you cold?’ I ask.

‘You’re fussing,’ Lo says, jumping into her bed and running her legs quick under her duvet. ‘I’m toasty as toast.’

‘What imaginative words you have,’ I laugh, pulling myself over the bottom rungs of our ladder to get into the bunk above her.

‘All the better to eat you with.’

‘Words don’t eat, Lo.’

‘The knife and fork ones do.’ Her laughter fills our bedroom. There’s something different about her since we went out and met those boys, something fizzing under her skin.

‘Which one was it then?’ I ask.

‘Which what?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. Which boy did you like?’

‘Which boy where?’

‘Lo.’

She pauses. I hear her scratch the slats of my bed as she always does before she tells me a secret.

‘Dean,’ she says.

‘The one with the cap?’

‘Mm.’

‘Just mm?’

‘Mm mm.’

‘I see.’

In the silence, I can hear the water from Lo’s clothes dripping on to the toilet seat. They’ll be hanging there, dark from the wet, and I know they’ll never be dry by morning.

‘What did it feel like?’ I ask. ‘When you first saw him?’ I want to know if burning hearts are true.

‘It felt like the air stopped.’

I don’t want to be jealous, but I am.

‘But he’s a flattie.’

‘I know.’

I click off the lamp that Da fixed to the edge of my bed, the lead hanging down all the way past Lo.

‘I want to see him again, Rita.’

‘You know Da won’t approve.’

‘I won’t tell him.’

I hear her turn over in her bed. She’s stopped kicking her legs, so I hope the cold has left her.

‘Does it feel different? To you and Spider?’

‘Yes, completely,’ she says. ‘More like you and Ash.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t like him right now.’

‘But why not? Anyone can see you’re meant to be together. You’re lucky.’

‘Am I?’

‘Of course you are,’ she says, yet the happy parts have gone from her voice. ‘At least you can be with Ash if you want to be.’

‘Don’t be sad, Lo.’

‘I’m not.’ But I hear her breath weighed heavy in the dark.