2: Chocolate Box Girls: Marshmallow Skye (2 page)

‘Just excited,’ I tell my twin. ‘We used to be like that, remember?’

‘We’re still like that, Skye,’ Summer says, smoothing down her raggedy white dress. ‘Just don’t tell Coco! I love Halloween, don’t you? It’s so cool … like being a kid again!’

I smile. ‘I know, right?’

And Summer does know, of course … she knows me better than anyone else in the world. She knows how I feel
about a whole bunch of things, because most of the time she feels the same.

And dressing up … well, that’s one thing we both love.

I lean in towards the mirror, pick up a brush. I am not as good with hair and make-up as my twin, but I love the magic, the moment when you glance up and see, just for a split second, a whole different person.

The girl in the mirror is pale and ghostly, a shadow girl. There are ink-dark smudges beneath her wide blue eyes, as if she hasn’t slept for a week, and her hair is tangled and wild, twined with fronds of ivy and black velvet ribbon.

She looks like a girl from long ago, a girl with a story, a secret. She’s the kind of girl who could make you believe in ghosts.

‘Awesome,’ I say, grinning, and the ghost girl grins too.

‘You look gorgeous,’ Summer says, as I turn away from the mirror. ‘Think you’ll hook up with some cute vampire boy at the party?’

‘Vampire boys are a pain in the neck,’ I say. Summer laughs, but the truth is that we are still at the stage of dreaming about boys in books, boys in movies, boys in bands.
Neither of us has a boyfriend. I like it that way, and I think Summer does too.

Besides, if you saw the boys at Exmoor Park Middle School, you would understand. They are childish and annoying and definitely not crush material, like Alfie Anderson, the class clown, who still thinks it’s funny to flick chips around the canteen and set off stink bombs in the corridor.

Classy.

Summer is perched on the edge of her bed, stroking silver sparkles along her cheekbones, painting her lips to match. Our dresses are the same, skirts made from frayed, layered strips of net, chiffon and torn-up sheets, hastily stitched on to old white vest tops.

On Summer, this looks effortlessly beautiful. But when I look back at the mirror I can see that I was fooling myself – on me, it just looks slightly crazy and deranged. I am not a ghost girl, just a kid playing dress-up, and not quite as well as my sister.

I guess that is the story of my life.

Summer and I are identical twins. Mum actually has a scan from when she was pregnant, where the two of us are curled up together inside her, like kittens. It looks as if we
are holding hands. The picture is fuzzy and grey, like a TV screen when the signal is lousy and everything looks crackly and broken up, but still, it’s the most amazing image.

Summer came into the world first, a whole four minutes ahead of me, dazzling, daring, determined to shine. I followed after, pink-faced and howling.

They washed us and dried us and wrapped us in matching blankets and placed us in Mum’s arms, and what was the first thing we did? You got it. We held hands.

That’s the way it has always been, really. We were like two sides of the same coin, mirror-image kids, each a perfect reflection of the other.

Right from the start, we each knew what the other one was thinking. We finished each other’s sentences, went everywhere together, shared hopes and dreams as well as toys and food and clothes and friends. We were each other’s best friend. No – more than that. We
were
each other.

‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’ people would say. ‘Aren’t they the sweetest things you ever saw in your life?’

And Summer would squeeze my hand and tilt her head to one side, and I’d do the same, and we’d laugh and run away from the adults, back to our own little world.

For the longest time, I didn’t know just where Summer ended and I began. I looked at her to know what I was feeling, and if she was smiling, I smiled too. If she was crying, I’d wipe away her tears and put my arms around her, and wait for the ache inside to fade.

It sounds cheesy, but if she was hurting, I hurt too.

I thought it would be that way forever, but that’s not the way it’s working out.

We both went to ballet class back then – we were ballet crazy. We had pink ballet bags with little pink ballet pumps and pink scrunchies, books full of ballet stories, and a whole box at home filled with tutus and fairy wings and wands. Looking back, I think I always liked the dressing up bit more than the actual dancing, but it took me a while to see that I was only crazy about ballet because Summer was. I saw her passion for dance, and I thought I felt it too … but really I was just a mirror girl, reflecting my twin.

I started to get fed up with ballet exams where Summer won distinctions and I struggled to scrape a pass; fed up with dance shows where Summer had a leading role while
I was hidden away at the back of the chorus. She had a talent for dance, I didn’t … and bit by bit, it was chipping away at my confidence. After one of these shows where everyone came up and told Summer how brilliant she was, I finally found the courage to admit that I didn’t want to go to ballet any more. It was the year that Dad moved out and everything was changing. Changing one more thing didn’t seem like such a big deal, to me at least.

Summer didn’t get it, though. ‘You can’t stop, Skye!’ she argued. ‘It’s because you’re upset about Dad leaving, isn’t it? You love ballet!’

‘No,’ I told her. ‘And this has nothing to do with Dad.
You
love ballet, Summer. Not
me
.’

Summer looked at me with her face all crumpled and confused, as if she didn’t understand the whole idea of
you
and
me
. Well, I was just getting to grips with it myself. Up until then, it had always been
us
.

Lately, I have been wondering if that whole dancing thing might just have been the start of it. Sometimes, when you change one thing, the whole pattern falls apart, shattered, like the little pieces in a kaleidoscope. I guess I shook things
up between my twin and me, and three years on we are still waiting for the dust to settle.

I turn back to the mirror, and for a moment I see the ghost girl again, all wild hair and sad, haunted eyes, lips parted as though she is trying to tell me something.

Then she is gone.

2

The kitchen smells of toffee and chocolate. Mum is at the Aga, skewering apples and dipping them into a pan of golden melted toffee for us to take down to the party, and Paddy has brought a batch of toffee-apple truffle mix over from the workshop for us to try.

‘Just taste,’ he says. ‘This could be the one, the flavour that catapults us to fame and fortune …’

Paddy and his daughter Cherry moved in with us in the summer, and it feels as if they belong. They are like a couple of jigsaw pieces we didn’t even know were missing. There is still a jagged hole where Dad used to be, but we are getting better at stepping round it, and having Paddy and Cherry here somehow helps. Cherry is cool and kind and funny, like a cross between a sister and a friend. Paddy laughs a
lot and plays the violin, and he has turned the old stables into a workshop for the business he and Mum have launched, The Chocolate Box. The smell of melted chocolate wraps itself round the house these days, and there is no way that could ever be a bad thing.

Mum and Paddy are getting married in June, so we’ll be a proper family then. Cherry and Paddy make everything better.

Well, almost everything.

We crowd round to taste the mixture: two ghost girls, a grinning Frankenstein (Coco) and a witch (Cherry). The truffle mix tastes exactly like Halloween, dark and sweet and autumnal.

Cherry’s boyfriend Shay Fletcher is here too, wearing a werewolf mask with a shock of grey fur attached, pretending to bite Fred, the dog. I’m kind of surprised to see him. He used to go out with my big sister Honey, but when Paddy and Cherry moved in, everything changed and Shay ended up with Cherry.

See? Boys mess everything up, even nice ones like Shay. If he hadn’t fallen for Cherry, then maybe Honey and Cherry would have had half a chance of getting along.
Maybe. Things would definitely be easier around here if they did.

When Cherry and Shay got together, Honey was not amused. She cried and yelled and locked herself in her room for days on end, and when she came out again she had chopped off her beautiful, waist-length blonde hair with the kitchen scissors, so that it stuck up in little tufts from her head. Most girls would have looked like a scarecrow with a DIY haircut like that, but Honey always manages to look model-girl cool, with fierce, faraway eyes and lips that are in constant pout-mode. I said that Paddy and Cherry make everything better, but my sister Honey would not agree.

Shay has been steering clear of the house lately, for obvious reasons. I would not want to be in his shoes, or Cherry’s, if Honey catches them together.

‘I’m guessing Honey is out tonight?’ Summer asks, reading my thoughts.

‘I think so,’ Cherry says, adjusting her witch outfit nervously. ‘She said the Halloween party would be lame, that she had something way better to do …’

‘Whatever,’ Shay shrugs, pushing back the werewolf mask. His sandy hair is sticking up, his ocean-coloured eyes
laughing. ‘We have to face her some time. It’s been two months now – it’s time to let go, move on.’

‘Ri-ight,’ I say.

I am not sure that Honey would want to let go or move on if she saw Shay Fletcher in our kitchen right now. I think she might want to grab him round the neck and hang on very hard indeed, until he keels right over and dies. After that, she might ‘move on’ to Cherry.

I don’t say any of this out loud.

‘Hey,’ I say instead, trying to round everybody up. ‘We have a party to go to, and we’re meeting Millie and Tia at the hall. Don’t want to keep them waiting!’

‘Exactly,’ Coco says. ‘Come on, you lot!’

Everyone is talking and laughing and putting on jackets, but we are not fast enough. Honey appears in the doorway, and the laughter dies. The atmosphere is so frosty you’d need an ice pick to even dent it. I can practically see the icicles forming all around me.

She is dressed as a vampire girl, in a cute crimson minidress with her face and neck powdered pale. Two red puncture marks are painted on at the base of her neck, just above her collarbone.

The costume’s pretty good – because my sister is not as sweet as she looks. Ever since Dad left she has swung between tears and tantrums and just enough little-girl charm to keep the rest of us wound round her little finger. Then Shay ditched her, and Dad had a promotion to open an overseas branch of the firm he works for, and announced he was going to live in Australia. He left a couple of weeks ago.

It’s not as if Dad was very good at birthdays or Christmas or weekend visits – he wasn’t. But there is only one thing worse than having a hopeless dad, and that’s having a hopeless dad on the other side of the world. Personally, I cannot quite forgive him.

And, what with the Shay-thing and Dad moving abroad, Honey has dropped any pretence at charm. These days she is like a whirlwind of don’t-care, in-your-face attitude.

Honey glances at Shay and I can see him shrink away under her gaze.

‘What do you think you’re doing here, loser?’ she asks icily.

Mum turns round sharply from the Aga. ‘Honey!’ she says. ‘Whatever you might think of Shay, that’s no way to talk to a guest!’

Honey doesn’t seem to hear. The rest of us stand there awkwardly.

‘It’s OK, Charlotte,’ Shay says to Mum. ‘I’m sorry. Looks like I misjudged things. I thought it was time we buried the hatchet …’

Honey laughs, and I am pretty sure that if there was a hatchet anywhere around right now, she would know exactly where to bury it.

‘I didn’t think you were going to this party, Honey!’ Mum says, trying to steer the conversation on to safer ground.

‘As if,’ Honey snarls. ‘I’m going into town with Alex.’

‘Alex?’ Mum echoes, but Honey ignores the question.

She glances at Cherry, whose witch costume is a black T-shirt, miniskirt and stripy tights, with toy spiders in her hair and a broomstick she made herself from birch twigs tied on to a twisty branch.