Dead Romantic Read Free

death. Actual bodies. It boggled my mind. Lots of things boggled my mind, but death did more than anything.
    I knew it was weird for a girl like me to be interested in that stuff. I was a big softie who got all squiggly over Christmas and liked cuddles and romance novels. I even had a dolls’ house that I still liked to poke my head inside and pretend I was small. Someone like me shouldn’t gawp at car accidents or peek through funeral parlour windows. She shouldn’t feel happy in graveyards or tape programmes on the world’s worst serial killers. But that’s just me, Camille Mabb. I was a freak.
    And now I’d met another freak. In a graveyard, digging. And she was all I could think about.

 
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Monday Mourning
    M y phone had been off all weekend. I didn’t want to speak to Lynsey or Poppy, my two best friends. I didn’t know what I would say to them after freshers’ night, when they’d left me to stew in the poo with everyone laughing at me. The three of us had been so close all through school, and last summer had been the best. We’d met at the pool a few times a week to get fit and ogle the lifeguards, gone down to the Bracht to get tans and ogle the coastguards, and hung around the Asda cafe drinking iced teas and ogling the security guards. There was definitely something about men who guarded things.
    Now, only two weeks into A levels, I could feel us growing apart. My mum said it was natural for friendships to ‘come unstitched at the seams as you get older’. But shealso said Johnny Depp had a house on the hill by our dentist’s, so I wasn’t sure what to believe. The fact was that we were all into pretty different things these days. Lynx, that’s what Lynsey liked to be called these days, had her sights set on the Olympics. Poppy wanted to be a violinist. We were all taking Sociology together, but that was the last stitch really. We didn’t have to be friends any more. We could branch out, be who we were supposed to be in life. I didn’t know what I wanted to be yet. When I’d had my careers interview, I’d been told I came across as a ‘quite like’. I quite liked throwing the discus. I quite liked romance novels. I quite liked death. I’d asked if there was a job where I could throw the discus, read romance novels and study dead people, but they’d said there wasn’t.
    But that morning as I walked to college, I couldn’t think about anything else but Digging Girl. The hems of my jeans were soaked and my bridesmaid’s dress and pink coat were spattered with pretty, clear jewels of rain. Yeah, I still wore my first bridesmaid’s dress. I’d had it since my mum’s best friend’s wedding when I was seven and it still fitted so now I wore it as a top. Poppy said it was a fashion statement. Lynx said it was a death wish. I didn’t know what that meant.
    That day I didn’t care. I was all on fire looking for signs of Digging Girl. In every bus that passed me on the road, every girl I saw with her hood up. I even walked through the churchyard, just in case she was there. But she wasn’t there.
    The awful thought arrived that maybe she had been a ghost. Maybe it had been a dream? Maybe I was like thatbloke in that film who meets this mega-cool bloke who you think is just some mega-cool bloke who he gets to be best friends with but it turns out to be just a pigment of his imagination all along. An imaginary friend. I’d been quite drunk that night, thanks to Damian de Jager, who’d kept pouring this green stuff down my throat. I’d only let him to feel his fingers on the back of my neck as he was doing it. I’d liked that. But perhaps Digging Girl had been right. Perhaps Damian de Jager wasn’t the one for me.
    The rain was hammering down when I reached college. Lynx and Poppy were huddled under a red umbrella outside. I could see Poppy’s neat centre