Rebecca Rocks Read Free Page B

anyway. And then we stopped talking about love and talked about ways we could earn money over the holidays in order to pay for a practice space. Cass suggested we could make sweets like fudge and sell them at farmers’ markets.
    ‘There’s one in Saint Anne’s Park in Raheny on Saturdays,’ she said. ‘We could take our wares there and sell them among the farmers.’
    This seemed like a very good idea.
    ‘Ooh, yes,’ I said. ‘And we’d stand out because we’d be the youngest people there, and everyone would be really impressed. And we could call our sweet company Hey Dollface and sell the sweets at our gigs!’
    ‘Yes!’ said Cass. ‘And the whole thing would hardly cost anything. I mean, I bet we could get little bags or boxes ina supermarket for a euro or two. And then the ingredients wouldn’t cost very much. What do you need to make fudge?’
    ‘Um … I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Sugar, probably.’
    ‘Vanilla essence,’ said Cass knowledgeably. ‘And … um … butter? Maybe eggs?’
    And then we realised that neither of us have ever made fudge before. Or any sweets. In fact, the only sugary foodstuff I’ve ever made was a slightly soggy lemon drizzle cake over the Christmas holidays. But, as I told Cass, it was quite delicious even if it was soggy (and despite the fact I got slightly nervous whenever I turned on the electric hand mixer in case I lost control of it and it sliced my fingers off, even though Mum kept saying that wasn’t going to happen).
    ‘Can we actually sell soggy cake, though?’ said Cass. ‘Or whatever the fudge equivalent of soggy cake is?’
    ‘Well, I bet we’d get the hang of it with a little bit of practice ,’ I said. I mean, how hard could it be?

    I mentioned my and Cass’s plans to become artisan farmers’ market sweet makers to my mother, and she LAUGHED. Shedoes nothing but crush my dreams.
    ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she said when she’d stopped laughing. ‘It’s just that I think you might need a bit more practice before you can sell sweets at that market. And possibly some sort of food production licence.’
    Honestly, the way she goes on about how much she and Dad spend on me and Rachel, you’d think she’d welcome my plans to earn my own money, but no! Talent and initiative are not encouraged in this family.

    My father has abandoned us! But only for a few days. He has gone off to a conference in Oxford. Dad is an academic, which in his case means he is basically a fancy history teacher, and every so often he goes off to England or New Jersey or Istanbul for conferences where he meets lots of other history teachers, and they all stand around talking about Early Modern European History, which is Dad’s supposed ‘speciality’. And what they call Early Modern European History isn’t very modern at all. It’s, like, six hundred years ago, which makes no sense. ButI shouldn’t expect something to make sense if my dad, a man who once played the part of a dancing pirate on stage while wearing gold harem pants, has anything to do with it.
    He’s gone to some college in Oxford called Shrewsbury which used to be an all-female college. As I am in an all-girls school and never get to meet any boys ever I can’t imagine anyone wanting to go to an all-girls college afterwards (unless they liked girls, obviously), but when I said this to my mum she said that women’s colleges had a fine tradition in educating girls and that actually girls sometimes do better when there are no boys around, which is fair enough. But I still think I would like to go to a college with boys in it. I know I said I quite like not having a distracting boy in my life right now, but I have to admit that sometimes I worry that I’ll never go out with anyone ever again. And the chances of that happening would be higher if I went straight from an all-girls school to an all-girls college.
    Anyway, Dad is going to spend a few days at Shrewsbury listening to all his history mates