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  I couldn’t speak so I just hunched my shoulders sadly.

  She guessed anyway. ‘Boy at school?’

  Hunch hunch.

  ‘And … Dolores?’

  Hunch wobbly lip hunch. Eyes suddenly filling up again. Big hunch.

  ‘Can’t face the idea of ever going to school again?’

  Hunchety hunch and small mucus trail sliding down my face towards my unattractive upper lip.

  Mum gave me a quick hug, then grabbed my arms excitedly, which was weird, given the circumstances. ‘I know just the person to cheer you up.’ Then she jerked her head towards the living room.

  Which was even weirder, as I’d only been able to think of one person who might possibly cheer me up even a little, and there was no way they’d be sitting in our living room.

  Then the person who’d been sitting in the living room suddenly appeared in the hall, leaning against the doorframe in a very familiar way and going, ‘Hey, Squirt.’

  Which was really, really weird, because the person was Gemma.

  ‘Seriously,’ I yelled. ‘Could this day get any worse?’

  Gemma and Mum both raised their eyebrows at me. ‘Nice to see you too,’ said Gemma.

  And when she said that I realised it was really really really nice to see her, so nice that it was painful, and I started crying again and trying to mime ‘Sorry’ and ‘Didn’t mean that’ and ‘Omigod it is so utterly brilliant to see you’ with much hunching of the shoulders, so that she gave in and laughed and came over to grab me for a rather squelchy hug, and then she patted my back going, ‘S’okay, Squirt. S’okay,’ as I smeared slime all over her denim jacket.

  When I eventually looked up, Mum was crying too, so we all huddled in the hall like a pathetic little rugby scrum and did mutual patting of the back.

  After about an hour (okay, it was probably just a minute or two but it felt like it should have been an hour – about one minute’s hugging for every one of the months since I’d last seen Gemma) we all stood up and laughed.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ I said.

  Gemma smiled. It was so nice to see her smile again. ‘I know.’

  ‘We’ve missed you very much,’ said Mum.

  ‘I know.’ Me too, said Gemma’s smile.

  ‘It’s really weird,’ I said, ‘because I haven’t talked about you for years and then suddenly this morning I mentioned you to someone and here you are.’ Maybe the Vortexicon was magic, I thought.

  ‘I know,’ said Gemma.

  How could she know that? It HAD to be magic.

  So then we all sat on the same sofa and drank tea and found out that Gemma had regretted being so snickety when she and Dad left for Germany almost the second she said it, especially with me. ‘But I was sixteen, Squirt,’ she said. ‘And now you know what that’s like.’

  ‘It’s pure bloody hideous insane hell with hormones and chemical reactions on top,’ I said. Or perhaps shouted.

  ‘Right,’ said my step-sister, sitting right there in our lounge. ‘For some reason I felt like I had to blame someone – I was so angry, you know? So I yelled at you, Squirt. I’m so sorry. Then I just felt like I’d been so horrible I couldn’t go back on it, and I convinced myself you didn’t miss me, either of you, and I didn’t miss you either.’

  ‘Your dad and I should have handled it better, Gemmy,’ said Mum softly, but Gemma put her hand up.

  ‘Dad explained it all to me, again and again. I understand now. It was just one of those things. I’m sorry I messed up.’

  At that point, we all felt like doing another rugby scrum, so there was more hugging and mutual back patting.

  ‘So don’t you live in Germany now?’

  ‘No,’ said Gemma, with a quick glance at Mother Dearest. ‘About an hour away, actually. I’ve been at university over here doing medicine – just twenty two more years to go and then I’ll be a doctor!’

  ‘It doesn’t really take twenty two years, does it?’ My plans to become a doctor of a different kind seemed much quicker.

  ‘No, Squirt,’ said Gemma gently. ‘Just feels like it. I’m in the fourth year of my degree and still have a few to go.’

  Wow. That was a long time. A loooooong time. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said after a moment’s contemplation of how old Gemma would be when she finally qualified. ‘So you’ve been here for four years?’

  Mum and Gemma glanced at each other, and that’s when I understood why Gemma had shot a look across to Mother Dearest. Mother Dearest KNEW!

  ‘You knew she was here, about an hour away, and you didn’t tell me?’

  Mum squirmed with guilt but then said, ‘I only knew because her dad told me. I’ve always respected Gemma’s wishes to stay anonymous and keep herself to herself. After all, she’s not actually my daughter and she was quite grown up when we split up. Your dad’s kept me across the main points, Gemmy,’ she added, gazing fondly at her not-actual-daughter in a way that would have made me jealous if it had been anyone but Gemma.

  ‘There’s not much,’ said Gemma. ‘Just the degree, and the odd boyfriend. Have you got one, Squirt?’

  ‘An odd boyfriend? No. Not any kind of boyfriend, actually.’

  This nearly started up the snot-fest all over again, I have to admit, while I thought about Dolores and Freddie and Freddie and Dolores and what a complete spare wheel Sean the Vile must be feeling right now. I was still considering letting out a wail of misery when Gemma said the strangest thing.

  ‘Oh. Only I saw all the YouTube stuff about you and Jazzy D. Of course, I didn’t believe it, even when I saw he’d lived in Jersey.’

  Ouch. Of all the things for her to see! Not my science quiz mastery or choral stroke madrigal achievements, but my made-up romance with a made-up person – made up of Vortexiconed cells, in fact.

  ‘It was only when he called me that I wondered if it could be true, and you might actually be an item.’ She leaned in towards me. ‘And if you are - well, kudos, Squirt. He’s a very fine specimen.’

  A fine specimen? Was that any way to talk about a nice human being? I was just deciding whether to bother arguing when I myself had, in fact, thought he was a failed science experiment, and then I thought of something. ‘Hang on. Back the truck up. The Divine Jazzy D actually called you?’

  Gemma held up her phone. ‘Actually, Jason Devaney called me. Said he was a friend of yours and that you’d been talking about me, and he wondered if I knew how much you missed me.’

  ‘I never told him that.’ I grinned. ‘Even though I did. Miss you.’

  ‘Well, of course I didn’t believe it was him to start with, but then he told me about the pea tree and his family’s garden centre thingummy in Jersey, and I remembered it.’

  ‘The garden centre! That’s why he looks familiar. Must look like his dad. So Cat, just how did he get hold of you?’ asked Mum, obviously about to start on some major rant about the nerve of the guy after everything he’d put us all through. I couldn’t really tell her that the ‘put-us-through’ stuff was not actually Jason, but a life-size action man version of him.

  Luckily, Gemma headed her off. ‘Well, he found me on Facebook, messaged me and asked if it would be okay to ring. It’s dead easy these days, Mum,’ she said.

  And then Mother Dearest was just so besotted with Gemma for calling her Mum that I reckon we could have paraded a whole troop of nekkid Jazzies around the coffee table and she wouldn’t have noticed.

  I let them have their little moment, grabbed Gem’s phone and went off in search of my own. There was one very easy way to tell if it was the real Jason Devaney who’d called my step-sister, and with a quick compare of the numbers I could see that it was definitely the very same dude who had texted me about a shovel in his back and had gone to some effort to track down my sister, even when he was meant to be looking for his double.

  So he definitely did it. The only question was why?

  I trekked back into the living room. ‘Did he say anything else?’

/>   ‘Who?’ they said together, looking up at me from where they were squished together, side by side, on the small sofa. It seemed like I’d interrupted something.

  ‘Jason Devaney, when he called you. Did he say anything else?’

  Actually, Mum was rather interested in this too. ‘Yes, Gemma, that young man has been creating all sorts of havoc. I’m really not sure you should be encouraging him.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Gemma, waving a hand casually. ‘Just said he’d been thinking a lot about the past because he’d been talking to you, and there were some things he’d do differently, given a second chance. He told me he wouldn’t forgive himself if he didn’t pass on how much I meant to you, Cat.’ She ruffled my head as thought I was still ten like when she last saw me. ‘Actually, he was lovely. Not at all what you’d imagine.’

  ‘I know, right?’ I said, a bit bewildered.

  Mum snorted. ‘There wasn’t much left to imagine, Gemma. He just forced his way into Cat’s life, showing up at her school. He even turned up naked in Dean’s dining room, for crying out loud!’

  ‘Sorry I wasn’t there,’ said Gemma. ‘I mean, I’d have loved to have seen all of your faces.’

  Ah yes. All those faces. Mine, and Mum’s … and Dean’s and, of course, Aggie. I felt a little surge of something which might have been triumph. Now Gemma was back, Mum might reconsider on the marriage front. She certainly didn’t need another step-daughter …

  Suddenly a completely, utterly miserable day – no, make that a completely, utterly miserable life - was looking a whole lot rosier.

  Chapter 16: Shine (Take That)

  Gemma agreed to stay overnight after she and Mother Dearest opened the wine (and yes, I was actually offered a glass!) and we set her up in the spare room. I was already planning the layout and where she could put her desk etc, seeing as she’d be living with us between terms or whatever she had at university, but Gemma soon put paid to that.

  ‘So your mum tells me she’s getting married again,’ she said as we shook out the sheets and applied them to either end of the bed.

  I shrugged. ‘Well, she says she is, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not sure she’s getting married?’ Gemma laughed. ‘I think it’s pretty definite. She’s booking the registry office next week.’

  ‘Yeah, but now you’re back …’

  Gemma dropped her end of the sheet pretty quickly. ‘Aw, Squirt. I am back, in that I’m never going to stay away from you both like I have in the past. But our lives have changed. I’m going to be doctor in who-knows-where, you’ll be a scientist in somewhere exciting, and Mum will have Dean.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘And you’ll have a new step-sister, I believe,’ she added softly.

  I shook my head. ‘No. No, I won’t. I’ve got you.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean you can’t have another one.’

  But I don’t want another one, I wanted to bleat. In fact, I wanted to fling myself face-first onto the mattress and have a big old screaming tantrum, braying like a donkey. I. Don’t. Want. Another. Step-sister! After all, the old one might have been a smidge unreliable to the extent of being not even there for the last five or so years, but she was the coolest step-sister ever: old enough to talking about going overseas, and living with her boyfriend if he behaved himself, and being a proper doctor with a stethoscope and everything. Plus, she’s gorgeous and pretty tall so I could borrow her clothes. Did I mention she’s gorgeous? Yep. Dolores levels of gorgeousness. I certainly did not need another step-sis, especially one who still lived with her parent and drove his car rather than her own and was more than likely to turn up in my bathroom and might even want to borrow my clothes. All right, maybe not that last bit but all the other stuff was true, for sure.

  Then fairly tall, gorgeous Gemma nodded to the mattress and made me sit down on the bed beside her.

  ‘Dean makes your mum happy, Squirt. Doesn’t he?’ She didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘I don’t think Dad made anyone happy towards the end. He was horrible to live with for the first year after they split up and we went to Germany. He’s heaps better now, and that’s because he’s met someone new too. He’d love to see you, Cat, and introduce you to her. She’s got kids too. Twelve year old twins. And they’re boys!’

  At that we both stared at each other, amazed and aghast.

  Then she laughed. ‘That’s what families are like these days, Squirt. They get bigger, and divide, and get bigger again and multiply. They’re like …’

  ‘… cells,’ I said. She wasn’t coming back to live with us, was she?

  ‘Cells.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘And you are going to come over to Germany with me and see Dad again, and you can come up to the smoke and stay with me and Arlen, and you’re also going to get to hang out with your new step-sister and grow a new family with Mum and Dean.’

  ‘I was with you right up to that last part. We cannot grow a new family. We are not a petri dish.’

  At that, Gemma snorted with laughter, so hard she pulled a funny face and almost looked un-gorgeous. ‘Oh, I’ve missed you, Catherine Melissa Andrews. You and your clever comments.’

  I’d missed her too, naturally, although by then I was actually thinking how you literally could grow a new family, not in a petri dish, but in that strange contraption of Dean’s. If I had to have a replacement step-dad, I supposed a world-renowned geneticist wouldn’t be the worst one in the world.

  Aggie, though, was a different matter.

  ‘Give her a chance, Squirt,’ said Gemma, reading my mind as she always used to.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘And Jason.’

  ‘Huh?’ I said.

  But then Mum came in with hot chocolate for everyone and we all sat on the unmade bed and talked for hours until the mascara streaks had set on my face so it looked like a sedimentary plain leading to the delta of the Nile (as in Geography GCSE – see, it’s not just science). Then I fell asleep right where I lay so Gemma got in my bed and I woke up in a strange bedroom feeling very peculiar, like I no longer knew who I was.

  I decided I had to be brave and go to school. Actually, Gemma decided for me and drove me there herself after I told her all about it.

  ‘If you don’t go,’ she said, ‘you’ll imagine everyone is thinking you’re not there because Dolores and Freddie are going out, and then you’ll never be able to go back because you won’t be able to stand them thinking that.’ She glanced at me slyly over the coco-pops. ‘And then you won’t get your grades and do A levels and go to uni and be a proper scientist.’

  She’s clever, that Gemma. Knew exactly what would motivate me. Never going back to be stared at – that I could handle. Not getting to go to uni – no way.

  I clung onto her at the school gate, saying, ‘Come in with me! Stay for the day. You could teach a class! Do biology – Miss Sargeson is rubbish.’ That’s actually not true; she’s a good teacher if a little on the shouty side. But then she is dealing with a bunch of morons waving Bunsen burners and … ahem … scalpels around.

  But Gemma just laughed and said she had to get back for lectures. She gave me her address and her phone number and Arlen’s phone number in case she was in uni and couldn’t take a call, and promised to be in touch with a date for visiting Dad together in the very near future.

  ‘Wunderbar,’ I said Germanly. ‘Ich liebe…’

  ‘I love you too, Squirt,’ said Gemma, even though I’d been about to say “Deutsch” not “dich”. ‘Look after Mum.’ She pulled away and then wound down the window. ‘And yourself.’

  Then she gave me a big thumbs up and drove off with her beautiful Rapunzel hair flowing behind her in the jet stream. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite like that, but I sure was going to start missing her all over again.

  Talking of people I was going to miss, I turned to stare at the school and wondered for the millionth time that morning what I was going to say to Dolores and/or Freddie. If I could actually bring myself to say
anything at all. What if they were sitting together? What if they were gazing at each other in a loved up fashion? What if they were (pause to say rank, vomit-worthy and utterly unacceptable) KISSING? It was completely possible that my arteries would literally clog up with poison and I would die on the spot.

  But the bell rang, and no amount of staring at the building was going to stop any of those things from potentially happening, so I tucked my hair wings behind my ears in a teeny attempt to control them, and forced my feet to march one after the other into school.

  Only then did I discover that Dolores was waiting for me behind the door. She really isn’t as daft as she sometimes thinks I think she is (all right, fessing up, sometimes I do actually think she is, but not ALL the time). You see, if I’d seen her lurking at the main entrance I’d have found another way in, or stood frozen to the spot unable to move at all, or possibly I’d have run after Gemma’s car, hair wings flapping and screaming, ‘Take me with you!’

  She surprised me, though, so despite the pink hair and the boobiness I didn’t even see her until I’d got to the bottom of the stairs up to the form room.

  ‘Cat,’ she said. Not unusually, as that is, in fact, my name.

  Mostly.

  ‘It’s Catherine,’ I said, because Cat was the name Dolores invented for me.

  ‘Oh, Cat, Cat; don’t be like that.’

  That almost made me laugh, but then I remembered we were no longer friends and sorted my face out, and instead of saying ‘Okay, Dr Seuss,’ as I would normally have done, I said, ‘Like what?’

  Then Dolores looked up at me and I could see some amazing things:

  #1 she had no make-up on

  #2 her hair was distinctly lank, so the pink strips merged with the dark blonde and it was overall just kind of mousey brown. I had never ever before seen Dolores with not-washed hair.

  #3 she’d been crying.

  #4 she was actually still crying a bit.

  #5 she was speaking while crying a bit and saying, ‘I won’t go out with him if it means that much to you. We can’t not be friends any more.’