2: Chocolate Box Girls: Marshmallow Skye Read Free

She’s off the rails – and there’s nothing at all we can do about it.

3
    The evening goes downhill from there.
    Millie and Tia are waiting for us outside the hall. We’ve been best friends since we were little kids … Tia and Summer, and Millie and me. One look at their faces tells me that the party, as Honey predicted, is lame. There are lots of little kids ducking for apples and mums sipping blood-red punch that is really just cranberry juice. There are biscuits with green icing shaped like severed fingers and the tray of toffee apples we carried down from Mum. There are cool pumpkin lanterns that flicker and glint, but still, we are the oldest kids there by a mile. We slope off early to trick-or-treat around the village, and manage to collect a plastic cauldron full of toffee and peanuts and weird gummy sweets that look like eyeballs.
    Maybe I am getting too old for Halloween after all, because I am sick of cheesy, spooky jokes and I have eaten so many sweets I think my teeth might dissolve. ‘This is no fun,’ Summer declares, reading my mind. ‘Let’s go home.’
    ‘It’s only half eight!’ Coco argues. ‘And it’s Halloween!’
    ‘We can’t go home yet,’ Millie groans.
    ‘Why don’t you all come back to the caravan?’ Cherry suggests. ‘Paddy said he’d light the stove, so it should be warm, and I have Irn-Bru … we could tell ghost stories!’
    Coco’s eyes light up. ‘Oh, let’s! That’d be cool!’
    ‘Sounds like a plan,’ I say.
    We are walking up past the church when Cherry stops and frowns, looking around anxiously. ‘Did you hear something?’ she asks. ‘Like … well, ghostly footsteps?’
    ‘Ghosts don’t have footsteps!’ Coco says. ‘They just glide right through you, like a cold finger sliding down your spine!’
    ‘There’s nothing there, Cherry,’ Shay promises.
    We move on, but seconds later a tall, grey-skinned zombie, trailing lengths of bloodstained bandages, leaps out from behind a gravestone, wild-eyed and moaning, right in front of us.
    I take a closer look and sigh, exasperated. Alfie Anderson is possibly the most annoying boy at Exmoor Park Middle School, and practical jokes are his speciality. Bad practical jokes. I have known him since the first day of primary school, and he has not improved with age.
    ‘Alfie, what are you playing at?’ Summer asks. ‘You just about gave me heart failure. It’s OK, Cherry – he’s harmless. Meet the village nutter.’
    ‘Hey,’ Alfie says, raising an eyebrow. ‘It was just a joke.’
    ‘Jokes are supposed to be funny,’ Summer says. She hooks an arm into Cherry’s and marches away along the lane with Millie, Tia, Shay and Coco following. I am left with Alfie, his shoulders drooping.
    ‘Where are you all going?’ he asks. ‘What about the party?’
    ‘We’ve been, and it wasn’t very good. We’re heading home to tell ghost stories,’ I say, and Alfie’s face lights up.
    ‘I know lots of those! Really bloodthirsty ones. Can I come?’
    I hesitate. Summer finds Alfie deeply annoying, and so do I except in very small doses, but it seems really mean to say no.
    ‘Er … well …’
    But Alfie is striding on ahead. ‘I love ghost stories. Ghouls, zombies, axe-wielding maniacs … awesome stuff.’
    I roll my eyes and head off after Alfie and the others, out of the village and along the quiet lane that leads up to Tanglewood House. Ancient trees dip down, whispering, over the hedgerows and a barn owl hoots eerily and swoops down low above us with a flash of white wings.
    ‘A ghost!’ Coco yelps, thrilled.
    ‘An owl,’ I say. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts, you know that!’
    ‘There might be,’ she argues. ‘It’s Halloween! I read about it – it’s the one night of the year when the veil between the world of the living and the dead lifts a little –’
    ‘Woo-hoo-hoo!’ Alfie Anderson yells. And he clowns around all the way up the lane, across the gravel drive at