Chocolate Box Girls: Coco Caramel (5 page)

Sadly, it is not just my pride that has taken
a battering. It would have been a lot worse without the riding hat, but still, there is
a purple-red graze along my jaw and a whole constellation of bruises all over my bum and
legs. Great.

‘What did you
do
?’ Skye
demands as I hobble into the kitchen at Tanglewood, the cloth soaked in witch hazel
pressed to my jaw. ‘You look awful!’

‘Thanks,’ I sigh.
‘You’re a real comfort, Skye. I had an argument with my favourite
pony … she got tired of behaving beautifully and decided to throw me
off.’

‘Seriously?’ Summer chimes in.
‘She threw you? What kind of psycho horses do they have at that place? It’s
supposed to be a riding school, not a rodeo!’

‘Don’t,’ I say.
‘It’s taken me the whole drive home to convince Mum not to make a
complaint.’

‘I didn’t want to complain,
exactly,’ Mum sighs. ‘I just wanted to say … well, that pony
really shouldn’t be part of a riding school. She’s too high-spirited, too
nervy!’

‘Mum,’ I argue, ‘I told
you – it was all my own fault.’

‘How come?’ Cherry demands.

A dark blush seeps across my cheeks. I
don’t want to come clean, but if Caramel’s future is in question I
can’t stay quiet.

‘I didn’t have permission to
ride Caramel,’ I admit. ‘She’s a bit unpredictable. Hard to handle.
Jean and Roy only let the really confident riders take her out, but she’s my
favourite pony and they were away today. So I managed to convince one of the assistants
to let me ride Caramel … I kind of pretended I’d been told I
could.’

‘But you hadn’t,’ Skye
says. ‘Boy, will you be in trouble!’

‘I don’t expect Jean and Roy
will be impressed,’ Mum comments, making teas and hot chocolates all round.

‘Well, I agree with Mum,’ Summer
frowns. ‘This Caramel doesn’t sound like the kind of horse that should be
around kids at all. She sounds dangerous.’

I put a hand to my aching head. Suppose Jean
and Roy think that too? I wanted to help Caramel, but maybe I’ve made things worse
for her. Whatever my sisters think, I know that Caramel did everything perfectly. It was
only when I started shifting about that she lost the plot … she freaked out
when I scissored my leg up over her neck. Maybe she doesn’t like unexpected
things, or things she can’t see properly. Perhaps she thought I was going to hurt
her?

If I could find out what was happening the
other times she’s behaved badly, maybe I could work out what’s upsetting her
and solve the problem, and then surely Jean and Roy won’t even think about getting
rid of her.

‘Good job you had your hard hat on,
baby sister,’ Summer grins. ‘You might have done some real
damage!’

‘I am not a baby,’ I scowl.
‘C’mon, you’re only seventeen months older than me!’

‘Maybe, but you’ll always be the
baby of the family to us,’ Skye teases. ‘We worry about you!’

‘Well, don’t!’ I huff.
‘I am very grown-up and independent, and you know it!’

‘Now, now,’ Mum says.
‘Don’t tease your sister, girls!’

That makes me feel like a three-year-old in the
middle of a squabble.

Mum sets down hot drinks and a plate of
home-baked chocolate chip cookies, scooping up a couple along with a mug of tea to take
out to the workshop because Paddy is working late on a special sample order for some big
department store. It has to be finished and sent off by Special Delivery to arrive on
Monday, but apparently it will be worth all the hard work and long hours if they land
the contract.

As soon as Mum has gone, Skye leans forward.
‘It’s not
you
I’m worrying about really, Coco,’ she
says in a whisper. ‘It’s Honey. I honestly thought she was trying harder
after the mix-up at the start of term when we thought she’d gone missing, and all
that stirring it with Shay. Well, it doesn’t look like it. My art teacher asked me
today when Honey would be back at school – she must have been skipping lessons. The
teachers seem to think she’s ill, so maybe she’s sent in a forged note or
something?’

‘No way!’ I gasp.

‘She gets the school bus with us every
day, the same as
always,’ Cherry says. ‘None of us had a
clue she was skiving!’

‘She may be on the bus, but she
obviously isn’t making it past the gates,’ Skye shrugs. ‘I know she
likes to hang around by the wall at the front before the bell goes, but it looks like
that’s as far as she’s getting. Wait till Mum finds out – she’ll go
nuts!’

‘She will,’ Summer says softly.
‘Mum has enough on her plate already, with the B&B and the chocolate business
and … well, stuff.’

Nobody comments, but we all know that
Summer’s illness is the part of the ‘stuff’ that is bothering Mum just
now. A few months back, Summer put herself under so much pressure to succeed she just
about unravelled in the process. For a while it seemed like she was trying to starve
herself, and now she has to go to twice-weekly meetings at an eating-disorders clinic at
the hospital in Exeter.

She had to give up her dance school place
and watch her friend Jodie take it instead. Summer still goes to ballet class in
Minehead, but she must think about the scholarship place she let slip through her
fingers. We don’t really
talk about that and we don’t
mention her eating disorder either – we just tiptoe around her, scared to upset her,
scared to say something that might make her feel bad. Although she has put a little
weight back on, Summer is still fragile, brittle, with pale skin and blue shadows
beneath her beautiful eyes. You get the feeling that if you held her too hard she might
snap, crumble.

Mum says that time is a great healer, that
we need to be patient and positive and kind, but I know that she worries about Summer –
we all do. The last thing any of us needs is for Honey to go off the rails again on top
of that.

Summer frowns. ‘It’s like Honey
just can’t help it, you know? She tries to get her act together, but she
can’t keep it up …’

I think that Honey can help it, actually.
Ever since Dad left a few years ago, my big sister has been lurching from one disaster
to the next. It’s kind of exhausting to live with, and these days my patience is
wearing thin.

‘D’you think we should keep
quiet about this?’ Skye asks. ‘Pretend we don’t know?
Or … should we tell? Not to get Honey into trouble, obviously,
but … well, to stop
her from getting into more trouble than
she is in already, if that makes sense?’

‘We can’t,’ Summer says.
‘Sisters stick together, right?’

I bite my lip. The family rule that we
don’t tell tales is unshakeable, but I can’t help wishing someone would
speak out about Honey. It’s no fun watching your big sister mess her life up.

‘Maybe we should tell?’ I
venture.

‘But … she’d never
forgive us,’ Summer points out.

There’s a silence as we think about
the fallout if we did dare tell. More than once, Mum has threatened Honey with boarding
school, and this could just be the last straw. None of us wants to be responsible for
that.

‘The high school reports are out next
Wednesday,’ Cherry says. ‘I guess Charlotte will find out then. No use
stirring things up when we know it’s going to come out anyway, right?’

‘Right,’ we agree.

The kitchen door swings open and Mum comes
in again with an empty tray, humming some old tune from the Dark Ages. ‘Nobody
hungry?’ she asks, scanning the untouched plate of cookies. ‘That makes a
change!’

We all reach for the biscuits and bite into
them guiltily, except for Summer who just breaks hers in half and feeds fragments slowly
to Fred the dog.

Let’s just say I am not looking
forward to Wednesday.

By the time Wednesday rolls around my graze
is healing, but the bruises on my legs have mellowed to rainbow shades of blue, purple
and greenish-yellow. They look especially attractive with my gym shorts, and I have to
recount the story of how the unpredictable, half-wild Exmoor pony at Woodlands got
startled by something and threw me off.

‘You have to get used to these things
when you move on to riding more challenging horses,’ I say. ‘But
they’re the most rewarding ones, of course …’

I am not sure how many of my friends totally
believe this version of events, but they say nothing.

I have been trying to steer clear of Lawrie
Marshall. He wasn’t in science on Monday – there was a football
match apparently – but we have science again last lesson today and I am not looking
forward to that. Should I blank him? Or smile sweetly and thank him for his help on
Friday in the hope that he chokes on his own self-righteousness? He was as grumpy as
ever when he handed over the first-aid kit, but while I was getting my bearings again I
watched him catch Caramel and calm and coax her back up to the stable yard. Lawrie
Marshall has zero charm with human beings, but I have to admit he’s good with
horses.

I have almost decided to swallow my pride
and let bygones be bygones when Lawrie walks into class, throws his bag down across the
aisle and shoots me the kind of look that could curdle milk.

‘Pleased with yourself, are
you?’ he says coldly.

‘Pleased?’ I frown. ‘What
d’you mean?’

‘You don’t even know?’ he
asks, shaking his head slowly. ‘You don’t even care?’

‘About what?’ I frown, but
Lawrie Marshall just glares and turns his back on me. Mr Harper starts the lesson and I
have to sit there for fifty whole minutes gritting my teeth and wondering why I ever
thought that saying thank
you to the Year Eight bully was a good plan.
He is sourer than stewed rhubarb without the sugar, bitter as aspirin.

What a loser. How come he always manages to
make
me
feel like I’m the one who’s done something wrong?

His comments get under my skin and bug me
all lesson, and by the time the bell goes I decide to confront him. I tell Sarah I want
to talk to Mr Harper about endangered antelopes because she may be my best friend, but
she has a one-track mind when it comes to boys. Lately, she is much more interested in
who fancies who than the plight of the white rhino and the blue whale, and if she made
some quip about me and Lawrie Marshall I would not be amused. The minute she’s
gone I pack my things and run; I catch up with Lawrie on the playground, and my temper
boils over.

‘Hey!’ I yell. ‘I want to
talk to you!’

He turns round, raising one eyebrow.
‘I don’t want to talk to you, so tough luck,’ he snaps.

‘What is your problem?’ I
demand. ‘No wonder you don’t have any friends! No wonder everyone thinks
you’re weird. You’re just a spiteful, horrible bully!’

Lawrie Marshall flinches as if I’ve
slapped him.

‘Shut up,’ he scowls. ‘You
don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I know exactly what I’m talking
about,’ I tell him. ‘But you – you just spout rubbish! What did you mean
earlier, about me feeling pleased with myself, and not even caring?’

He shakes his head. ‘You are probably
the most spoilt, selfish girl I have ever met,’ he says. ‘You lied about
being allowed to ride Caramel, didn’t you?’

‘No, I –’

‘You lied, and it all went wrong, and
Kelly was in trouble.’

‘What about me?’ I protest.
‘I was the one who got hurt!’

‘You deserved it,’ he shrugs.
‘And after all that, you didn’t even bother to apologize or call the stables
to find out what was happening.’

A flicker of unease stirs within me.

‘So … what is
happening?’ I ask.

‘Plenty,’ he snarls. ‘The
stables are selling Caramel. So, yeah, like I said, I hope you’re pleased with
yourself. It’s all your fault.’

He turns on his heel and walks away. Me, I
stand very still in the playground, letting the waves of shame and guilt slide over
me.

Then the school bus toots and starts its
engine, and I run down to the gates and scramble aboard, just in time.

I am still upset when I arrive home. We
finish a little ahead of the high school, so I’m usually home before my sisters
and I’m planning to ask Mum if we can call the stables and ask them to hang on to
Caramel. It’s a long shot, but it has to be worth a try. When I walk into the
kitchen, though, I find Mum and Paddy dancing around with champagne glasses in their
hands. Fred the dog is leaping madly round their feet, and even Humbug my pet sheep has
made her way into the kitchen and is curled up on an armchair in the corner.