Star Struck Read Free Page A

on the relevant texts and was poised to start skim reading when a new message pinged into my phone, with the characteristic chime that made me want to hide my mobile under something big and wet.
    From: Fe Brand
    Come on Skye, u no u want 2.
    I typed straight back.
    From: Skye
    I told you I’m thinking about it. And stop using text speak, you’re not twelve.
    From: Fe Brand
    Yeh, yeh. Cme on, don’t u thnk its tme u got out of tht wheelchair?
    From: Skye
    You’ve got predictive text stuck on again. Wheelchair?!
    From: Fe Brand
    It’s a metaphorical wheelchair you pilchard. An emotional one. You don’t have the monopoly on grieving and all that crap, and if I can get on with my life after what happened, then so should you. So, what the fuck, let’s go to America!
    Serious stuff. So serious that he’d abandoned his jokey, half-text-speak, and mentioned things we didn’t talk about in real life. Things so raw and overwhelming that we pretended they’d never happened. I dropped the phone and my fingers began twisting around one another, plucking at my nails. The skin around them was nearly healed, but ugly white scars streaked each fingertip.
    From: Fe Brand
    And stop doing that shit with your fingers.
    I smiled without meaning to. Felix knew me so well. But then, we’d known each other for … how many years? Ten? More, maybe, by now, but I’d stopped counting. Stopped even thinking about him as a person, as a man. He was just Fe, irritating as an itchy bum. So much like Faith that I hadn’t been able to look at him for the first six months after the accident without seeing her looking back from behind those hazel eyes. I’d become so accustomed to the feeling that it had worn away without my noticing, until one day he was just Felix again.
    From: Skye
    Whereabouts in America?

Chapter Two
    I awoke from disturbing dreams to grit between my teeth, a sun blazing through a windscreen and a seemingly endless rank of telephone poles marching beside the road. My feet were cold but my back prickled with dried sweat and I had never regretted letting Felix talk me into anything quite so much. Surely even Gethryn wasn’t worth this much discomfort? ‘Where are we?’ I twisted my head against the uncomfortable upholstery of the hired car.
    Felix looked over his shoulder at me. He was concentrating ferociously on staying the right side of the road whilst juggling the map across his lap. ‘Bloody hell, Valium worn off already?’
    I licked my lips. The sedative had left my mouth feeling as though it had been unscrupulously carpeted and my tongue was as heavy as a corpse. ‘’S okay. I feel … okay.’ This was a lie. Through the layer of Valium I felt displaced, anxious. The car was confining and yet not safe. Outside I could see a landscape scrolling past in a backdrop of dust; bare hills sketched against a white sky and some buildings that looked like aircraft hangars. There was nothing familiar to pin myself onto. ‘Fe –’
    â€˜Nearly there, apparently. God, I wish you hadn’t talked me out of that GPS, there’s places here, actual places . They weren’t on the map.’ I’d wanted to hire a car with GPS, but he’d raised his eyebrows and pointed out that this was Nevada; once we got on the right road the motel was virtually the only thing of note in 200 miles, and that an extra seventy-five dollars for pin-point accuracy probably wasn’t necessary unless I wanted to nuke it. He was paying and I was hot and confused so I’d shut up. But I wasn’t going to be sympathetic if we were lost. Felix was driving without looking at the road, staring out of the window as we passed through a town that looked as though a missile strike would probably improve it. ‘Not a single Gap for miles – how do these people manage ? Honestly, it’s just a patch of desert with two office blocks,