Chocolate Box Girls: Bittersweet Read Free Page A

messing up, me sorting things out – it was just what we did. Still, I cannot for the life of me figure out what Honey is doing here now.
    ‘OK,’ I prompt, one eyebrow raised. ‘What is it this time? Fire, flood, plague of frogs? Or have you just broken a fingernail?’
    Harsh, I know, but you have to remember that Honey and I are not exactly friends these days. Her lips begin to quiver and her eyes blur with tears, and right away I wish I could take the words back. What if something really serious has happened?
    Honey is crying harder now, her shoulders shaking, mascara running down her cheeks in ugly black streaks. I hate it when girls cry. I never know what to do.
    ‘Hey, hey,’ I say, patting her arm awkwardly. ‘It can’t be that bad!’
    Honey burrows her head against my neck and I panic because this clearly means that things
are
that bad, or possibly worse. Me and my big mouth. What if Honey’s mum has been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or her no-good dad has finally gone bankrupt and topped himself by jumping off the Sydney Harbour Bridge? And here’s me making jokes about broken fingernails. Nice one, Shay.
    Meanwhile, Honey is clutching on to my T-shirt and making a wet patch on my shoulder. I can smell her favourite vanilla and almond shampoo, the scent of peppermint from the gum she likes to chew. I put an arm round her, then withdraw it again because it all feels a bit too close for comfort. This is not good.
    ‘Shhh, Honey,’ I say gently. ‘Don’t cry. Why don’t you tell me about it?’
    We sit down side by side on the beat-up sofa, the way we used to back when we were dating, and Honey dries her eyes with a corner of my T-shirt, leaving smudges of eyeliner and glittery shadow.
    ‘They hate me,’ she announces finally, her voice a whisper. ‘They really do. Just because I was a little bit late home last night …’
    Back when I used to date Honey, her curfew was 11 p.m., earlier on a school night, but Cherry tells me that those days are gone. These days, Honey iseither ‘grounded’ or ‘ungrounded’, and right now I am pretty sure it’s ‘grounded’. Just a few weeks ago she accidentally set fire to a stable while sharing a forbidden ciggy with one of the boys from the film crew, and her sister Summer fainted while trying to fight the flames and ended up in hospital. How did Honey handle it? By taking a handful of cash from a kitchen drawer and running away. They found her at Heathrow airport trying to buy a ticket to fly out to her dad in Australia, and the last I heard she was grounded until Christmas.
    Unless I am mistaken, it is not Christmas yet.
    ‘I stayed over with a friend, obviously,’ Honey is saying. ‘No big deal, right? I’ve done it before. And it was the last night of the school holidays – you’d think they’d give me a little bit of leeway!’
    But Honey is the kind of girl who takes a little bit of leeway and turns it into a wagonload of chaos, as far as I can remember.
    ‘So I bent the rules a little,’ she goes on. ‘So what? I stayed with a friend and I would have gone straight to school from there, but I accidentally slept in. It was unlucky, sure, but it’s not a crime, is it? Only Mum had to go and call the school, then the police … you name it. Talk about overreacting!’
    I frown.
    ‘Let’s get this straight,’ I say. ‘You stayed out all night and didn’t come home in the morning, andthen you skipped school too. Plus, three weeks ago you ran away from home … Honey, don’t you think your mum had reason to panic?’
    ‘No!’ she argues. ‘I didn’t skip school, I just slept in! And I was perfectly fine all the time, just staying with a friend, I told you! They practically had a search party out looking for me, I swear … crazy. So now I am in trouble at school and if that’s not bad enough, the police have been on my case, telling me I am treading a very fine line … what does that even mean?’
    ‘Dunno,’ I