The Trouble with Love Read Free

love people whether you wanted to or not. Except no one loved her. All she wanted was to go home, take her stupid skirt off and throw it in the bin.
    Polly started walking towards the path that would lead her back to the centre of town. She averted her eyes from the two heads, one dark and one auburn, that were kissing so intently in the cliff nook. Then she paused.
    Rhi and Max both had dark hair.
    Max wasn’t kissing Rhi. He was kissing Eve .
    Polly’s heart thumped as Eve pulled back from Max – and caught Polly’s eye.
    A rush of colour flooded Eve’s pale cheeks. “Spying, are you?” she accused, grabbing her coat and pulling it protectively around herself.
    At first, Polly couldn’t find the words to express her shock. “You. . . traitor !” she said at last. She looked with disgust at Max, who was scrambling behind Eve as if that would somehow hide his betrayal of Rhi.
    â€œRun and tell Rhi then, why don’t you?” Eve challenged.
    The tremble in her voice proved Eve wasn’t as cool about being caught as she was trying to make out. Polly realized that she looked scared. Eve was never scared.
    If I were Eve , Polly thought, I’d run right to the campfire and tell everyone, not just Rhi. But I’m not Eve.
    Polly had problems of her own, and not just with her crush on Ollie. Her friends and family knew nothing about her anxieties, or the trouble she had controlling them. She couldn’t face the idea of telling tales tonight.
    â€œI hope you’re both very happy together,” she said coldly, and stormed away towards the main beach.

THREE
    Polly approached the rocky outcrop at the very tip of Heartside Bay. Clambering over the rocks, slipping and sliding in the rockpools dotted with little starfish and crabs, gave her the chance to think about something that wasn’t Eve, and wasn’t Ollie, and wasn’t any of the other nameless fears and worries that she struggled with every day. She was forced to concentrate on simply putting one foot in front of the other. It worked like a kind of therapy. By the time she reached the very last rock, she felt calm again.
    Standing here is almost as good as being in the middle of the sea , Polly thought, and she breathed the damp salty air into her lungs.
    How could Eve do something like that to Rhi? The two girls had been best mates ever since Rhi had moved to Heartside. Everyone at school knew what Eve could be like, but Polly thought Eve would at least be loyal to her own friends. It seemed that she was wrong. And Max! Polly had always liked Max, with his ready smile, his sharp brain and the way he had seemed to care about Rhi. It looked as if Polly didn’t know him either.
    Her mind returned restlessly to Ollie again. Her dreams of Ollie were like the waves she was looking at, retreating and then crashing again and again against the rocks. Even the shock of Eve and Max’s betrayal couldn’t keep him out of her mind for long.
    She gazed across the causeway towards Kissing Island, Heartside’s most famous natural feature. The causeway was already partly covered by the tide. You could only ever reach the island when the tides were right.
    Local legend claimed that if you kissed your true love on the shores of Kissing Island at midnight on a full moon, you would be together for ever. Even though Polly had only lived in Heartside Bay since she was nine, she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known the legend. But she had never actually been to the island.
    She was saving it for the right boy, she thought, resting her eyes on the island’s familiar bumps and crags. But who was the right boy? Ollie? Or someone else, someone she had yet to meet?
    She closed her eyes and let her mind drift into her favourite daydream.
    She and Ollie were standing hand in hand on the shore of Kissing Island, the sand cool between their toes. The light from the full moon striped the