Keep the Faith Read Free Page B

obvious choice.’
    ‘Clearly.’
    ‘Unfortunately, my mum loves money more than her only child so, instead of rewarding me for spending Christmas in the company of shouting adults by giving me a little holiday, she managed
to get a refund.’
    ‘Madness,’ I said.
    ‘This is why I enjoy talking to you, Faith. I like the way you think.’ He smiled and I felt a warm bubble expand in my tummy. He leant closer to me and said in a confidential voice,
‘Of course, that’s mostly because the way you think is the way I think. If you had plastic surgery to look like me, I’d probably have to marry you.’
    My tummy bubble popped and sent off fireworks and swirls of confetti.
Whoa
. I was supposed to be on a date with Finn (even though I was starting to wonder where the monkey he’d
got to). I’m not sure that Ethan should have been setting off a street party in my middle section just because he was joking about marrying me. I pulled myself together. I’d actually
been chatting to Ethan for quite a while now and Finn still hadn’t arrived. I told Ethan I needed to talk to Lily and went off to look for Finn.
    By now, the house was crammed with people. I saw Lily playing Twister with some boys, but I didn’t even get a glimpse of Angharad. By the time I’d done a tour of the whole house, the
only interesting thing I’d found was my arch-enemy Vicky Blundell (AKA Icky) standing in a laundry basket while snogging a boy with long hair. I’ve got no idea why. I mean, I
don’t know why she was standing in the basket, not why she was snogging the boy. (Although, to be honest, he was pretty greasy, so that was a questionable call too.) I’ll just say I
wouldn’t let Icky rummage around in either my mouth or my dirty washing. Anyway, I didn’t find Finn or any of the boys I used to see him sitting with at choir. I was starting to think
I’d been stood up.
    I went back downstairs to find Ethan talking and smiling with some ridiculously pretty Year Eleven girl. They both turned round when I walked into the crowded kitchen and I didn’t want to
look like I was desperate for Ethan’s attention, so I pretended I’d just come in for a snack. I grabbed the nearest thing on the table, which happened to be someone’s leftover
paper plate with four cocktail sticks, half a poppy-seed cracker and a pickled onion on it.
    ‘There it is!’ I said out loud and then I attempted to slink off before anyone noticed that I seemed to be the only person at the party not talking to an attractive member of the
opposite sex.
    The thing about pickled onions is that they’re not really designed to sit still on a plate, especially if the plate is moving. As I walked towards the door, the onion started to roll. I
tried to stop it falling off by tipping the plate back towards me, but unfortunately my hand caught on the back of a chair and I ended up flicking the plate pretty hard. The onion flew across the
room – catching everyone’s attention – and landed in the curly hair of a very unimpressed-looking boy.
    I probably should have left the party straight away, but for some reason I thought I could make things better by retrieving the onion. I nipped over to the boy, who was staring at me in disgust,
and reached out a hand towards his head. ‘I’ll just . . .’ At this point I realised that, other than the music coming from the sitting room, the kitchen was completely silent.
‘. . . Get this and . . .’ It was a bit of a struggle because his hair was really thick and the onion was pretty slippery, but finally I had it.
    The boy said,
‘Thanks.’
But what he obviously meant by that was, ‘Get away from me, evil-onion-girl, and don’t go dragging me into your inability to look cool at
parties.’ Which I thought was a bit rich from a boy who was wearing a bright yellow shirt, but I had other matters on my hands. More specifically, I had a pickled onion on my hands. I
didn’t really know what to do with it so I popped