Hold Your Breath Read Free Page B

process, although he was close enough for her to smell coffee on his breath.
    ‘There,’ he said after a little while. ‘That should do it.’
    She looked up and met his kind hazel eyes.
    ‘Want to tell me what happened?’ he said.
    Tara’s head whisked a fast ‘no’. ‘Nothing happened,’ she said quietly. ‘I just stumbled against my locker.’ For a second she held her breath, convinced
he would reply, ‘But it wasn’t your locker, was it?’
    There was a pause.
    ‘Okay, well, you’d better be off home then,’ said Mr Ford. ‘But if you need to talk then I’m —’
    ‘I’m fine,’ Tara said, relief blooming inside. ‘Really. Thanks for sorting my arm out.’
    She got up and hurried down the corridor. She could feel Mr Ford’s gaze all the way to the main doors.
    As soon as Tara got out of the school gates, she stopped and looked down at her opened fingers. The tiny treble clef was still there, squashed into her sweaty palm. She should have dropped it
when she had the chance. Looking at the earring made her throat constrict and spots dance in front of her eyes. Tara looked around for a bin but there wasn’t anywhere she could put it. It
felt wrong to throw it on the ground. Sighing shakily, she stuffed it into the very furthest corner of the messenger bag she used for school.
    Tara headed for the river to walk home. It was longer that way but she needed to clear her head before Mum saw her and sensed something was up.
    The warm day had become muggy now and tiny flies floated in clouds around her head. Tara’s thoughts raced and flitted like the flies as she tried to take slow breaths and work out what had
just happened.
    The cold terror. The choking sense of panic. The desperate need to be found before something awful happened. For a few moments she’d been absolutely certain – as certain as her own
name was Tara Elizabeth Murray – that Melodie Stone was in some kind of terrible danger.
    There was only one time she’d felt like that before.
    When Tyler Evans went missing.
    But she’d been so wrong then. Horribly, disastrously wrong. She’d thought she was helping, and because of her a life was wasted.
    Tara bit her lip and squeezed her hands into her eyes, making the world a kaleidoscope when she pulled them away.
    Her insides lurched at the memory of her parents’ faces. The way they’d avoided her eyes for days and said things like, ‘Let’s just try to forget all about
this.’
    But she knew she would never forget.
    Tara tried to push the memories of February away. This wasn’t going to happen. Melodie Stone had gone to live in Brighton. She was perfectly all right. It was nothing to do with Tara, and
anyway, Tara’s ‘visions’ weren’t even to be trusted, not when it came to people.
    She couldn’t – wouldn’t – put herself through that again.
    She was going to be normal.
    It didn’t seem a lot to ask. She wasn’t asking for fantastic hair or to be the most popular person in the school.
    She just wanted to be normal.

C HAPTER 3
S HINY
    T ara was watching morning television, her empty cereal bowl on the coffee table in front of her. She’d slept better than she expected to, and
there had been no bad dreams. What had happened yesterday nagged at her now she was up though. It was taking all her mental energy to focus on the feature about fake tans on the telly. She looked
at her phone, which was lying on the coffee table. Someone from an unknown number had tried to call her yesterday evening.
Probably a wrong number
, she thought.
    Beck thumped down next to her and simultaneously crossed his legs on the table, his four slices of toast nearly skidding off his plate. His big, pale feet were almost obscuring the television.
Tara smacked his leg.
    ‘Urgh,’ she said. ‘Move your horrible hairy toes out of the way. I can’t see.’
    Beck lifted a leg so his foot dominated the screen and she shrieked and battered his leg with ineffectual slaps.
    ‘Mum!’ she