by Katy Cannon
“I was supposed to be staying with my dad in Australia for the summer, while he worked.”
“Working in Australia? That’s cool.”
I smiled. It was cool. It was his dream, in fact. “Yeah. He’s a Professor of Marine Biology.”
Willa’s eyes widened a little. Dad’s job title sounded a lot more impressive if you hadn’t met him.
“So what happened?” I asked. “Why are you heading to London?”
“I’m not,” Willa replied, flicking her hair over her shoulder. “London would be perfect. London was the original plan, before my parents messed it up. But London is just where I’m being collected by an aunt I’ve never met. Then she’s stealing me away to some farm in the middle of nowhere, Italy.”
An Italian farmhouse. My mind filled with memories of our last family holiday before Mum died – a little cottage on the Italian coast, where we hung out on the beach all day, Mum resting on a lounger. We spent our evenings eating huge bowls of pasta on the patio outside the cottage, stars twinkling overhead and Dad telling stories about them. Mum would doze off quite often, and then Dad would carry her to bed. But still, it was perfect.
Mum had wanted to tick the last item off her bucket list while we were there – visiting some waterfall near the coast that was supposed to have magical powers – but she hadn’t been well enough to go in the end.
If I ever got to visit Italy again, that was where I was going. To the waterfall Mum said could take away all of your worries.
“Is it by the sea?” I asked.
Willa gave me a look. The sort of look my friends give me when I say something weird. Usually about marine life.
“I think so, yeah,” she said. “I mean, I wasn’t really listening when my mum was going on and on about how great it would be, but I think she said something about a beach. Probably a stupid rocky one you can’t sunbathe on.”
“Sounds pretty great to me,” I admitted. “Although maybe that’s just because it’s anywhere but London.”
“Are you crazy?” Willa asked. “London is the best! It has theatres and shops and the Harry Potter Studios and everything. I used to go there with my parents all the time before—” She cut herself off.
I didn’t ask ‘before what?’ I’d done the same often enough when I found myself almost talking about Mum. Whatever Willa’s before was, she didn’t want to talk about it. Just like I tended to tell people it was only me and Dad these days, if they asked, and not elaborate on where my mum was.
“It’s not London I don’t like,” I explained. “It’s who I have to stay with.”
“Worse than a random aunt?” Willa asked, eyebrows raised.
“Much. A random woman my dad used to work with who I’ve never met, know nothing about and who he hadn’t even mentioned until he needed to get rid of me for the rest of the summer.” And that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was how he’d told me about her.
Willa looked taken aback at my sudden outburst. “Whoa. I guess I’m not the only one with rubbish parents right now. Why does he need to get rid of you?”
I instantly felt guilty for ranting about my dad. He’d worked so hard to keep things stable and happy for me since Mum was gone, and it wasn’t like he could say, ‘Actually, no, I don’t want to do my job any more but could you keep paying me please while I just hang out on the beach with my daughter?’
“It’s not really his fault. He’s got to go on some research vessel out on the reef for, like, three weeks or something stupid. And I wasn’t allowed to go with him.”
“Did you tell him how annoyed you were?” Willa asked.
“Not … exactly.” By which I meant no, not at all. In fact, I’d actually told him it was totally fine and I completely understood.
Except it wasn’t.
“Right,” Willa said, with the sort of look that meant she didn’t understand me. I was used to seeing that one. “So why the random woman? Was there literally no one else he could ask?”
“Usually, yes. But apparently everyone was away on holiday this time.” We had a whole network of people who were happy to have me stay a night or two.
But this time he’d chosen Mabel.
Willa’s eyes widened. She’d obviously been following the same train of thought as I had when Dad told me. “Oh! D’you reckon this woman’s his new girlfriend?”
Bingo. And that was the number one reason I didn’t want to spend my summer with her.
“I know she is,” I replied. “Because I asked him.”
He’d looked embarrassed at the question and started stuttering in a way that was nothing like my laid-back, articulate father.
Mabel and I … we’re old friends. And now we’re seeing if maybe, well, we think we might, actually, um, be something more.
So she’s your girlfriend? I’d asked. It had to have been going on for a while, yet I’d heard absolutely no mention of her until now.
That was the part that hurt.
I didn’t want to tell you until we were sure it was going somewhere. We’ d planned to talk to you after the Australia trip, he’d said sheepishly. Introduce you properly, let you spend time together before… Well, anyway.
He’d cut himself off, but I knew what that ‘before’ had meant. It meant ‘before we get married’. Because I knew my dad better than anyone now Mum was gone. He’d been making noises about me needing more ‘womanly influences’ (as he put it) for months now. (Mostly I thought he was just terrified of having to give me the Talk on his own. You know, about periods and boys and stuff. Except Mum had already done that, before she died.)
Anyway. If he was sending me to stay with Mabel, she wasn’t just a girlfriend. She was a prospective new mother.
And I really didn’t need one of those, whatever Dad thought.
“Wow.” Willa studied me, and somehow I was sure she read every one of my concerns in my face. And even weirder, it felt like she understood. “I’m guessing you’re not keen on getting a new step-mum, huh? I know I wouldn’t be.”
“What’s so bad about the random Italian aunt then?” I said, changing the subject.
Wriggling a little in her seat, Willa rolled her eyes dramatically, then leaned forwards. “Trust me. If you want my sob story, we need pastries first. Come on.”
I’ve been in enough airport lounges around the world to know that, whatever the time of day or night, there are always pastries.
Mandy, supposedly in charge of us, was clearly having some sort of life crisis given the way she was frowning at her phone and texting furiously. She barely looked up as Alice and I made our way through the connecting door to the real lounge and the pastries.
“Back in a minute,” I called over my shoulder to pre-empt any questioning, but I doubted she was even listening. Her eyes were a little red round the rims, and she was reaching for the cookies.
I had considered making a run for it to avoid the Italian Summer Nightmare (as I was calling it) but the thing about airports was, unless you were getting on a plane, there weren’t a lot of places to go. Even Mandy would probably raise the alarm if I disappeared completely, which would scupper my chances of finding another flight out of here, even if I could manage to book a ticket with my mum’s credit card.
The pastry table was at the far end of the business-class lounge, so Alice and I wandered past lots of people in suits and a few families with little kids to get at our snacks.
“I reckon her boyfriend just dumped her by text,” I said.
Alice blinked a couple of times, clearly trying to piece together what I was talking about. “The UM woman? I just figured she was playing some game on her phone, or something. Do you think she’s OK?”
I rolled my eyes. Clearly my new friend wasn’t exactly a student of human nature.
My mum is always talking about a person’s ‘motivation’ – what makes them do what they do. Usually she’s referring to a character she’s playing but it applies to real life too. People do things for a reason. I like t
rying to figure out what those reasons are.
Take Alice. She was obviously sulking because her dad had a new girlfriend – which was fair enough, I felt kind of the same about my dad too. But there was something else I hadn’t figured out yet. Like, where was her mum? Abandoned her as a baby? Ran off with her piano teacher? Kidnapped by aliens? I’d get an answer by the time we landed in London.
“I’m sure she’ll be fine. Come on.”
After carrying our piled-high plates of pain au chocolat and maple pecan pastries back out of the business-class lounge, Alice and I settled into our seats in the Unaccompanied Minors room. Mandy looked up from her phone just long enough for me to see that her eyes were still red and sad.
“So,” Alice said, nibbling on a pain au chocolat. “Now that we have pastries, what’s this sob story of yours?”
I’d rehearsed my tale of woe repeatedly in the days leading up to this, in the mirror mostly, so I was well prepared for the question.
“My parents are Sarra and Scott Andrews,” I said, and waited for the amazed look of recognition from Alice.
It didn’t come.
“They starred together in Heatherside,” I nudged, naming their most famous series. “For years, until they killed off Mum’s character.”
“The soap?” Alice asked, then shook her head. “I don’t watch it, sorry.”
“Mum’s been in all sorts of shows and films since then, too many to name,” I went on. But if she didn’t watch Heatherside (everyone watches Heatherside, right?) Alice probably hadn’t seen them either.
“So they’re both actors,” Alice said. I was starting to think she might be a bit slow on the uptake.
“Yes, Alice. They’re actors. My dad’s been on a kind of sabbatical from Heatherside for the last month or so,” for reasons I really didn’t want to go into, that were mostly waiting for the scandal to die down, “and now he’s up in Edinburgh for the festival. You know, the Fringe?”
“I’ve heard of the Edinburgh Festival,” Alice said, as if I should have known that. From the girl who didn’t watch Heatherside.
“Anyway, I was supposed to be spending the next few weeks with him in London, but now he’s in Edinburgh instead, performing in some weird comedy thing.”
“What do you normally do during the holidays, then? If your parents are working?”
“Usually my dad’s at home in Cheshire, filming for Heatherside, so it’s not a problem.” Or at least, it hadn’t been, until he decided to run off with his much younger co-star, like the ultimate actor cliché. “But this year it all got complicated.”
“So what happened?” Alice scooted closer on her chair. Obviously my life was fascinating to her. Naturally.
“Well, the plan was originally that Dad would be in London for the summer, so I’d stay with him. I was all signed up for this course at the theatre around the corner from his flat too.”
I felt a pang again at missing the course – I’d worked so hard to convince Mum to let me go. She had claimed I wasn’t old enough to think about an acting career yet, but what did she know?
There was another reason I wanted to do the course – one I hadn’t told anybody. Rumour on the course message group was that the agent coming to the showcase would be the new casting director for Heatherside! Apparently they were adding a new family to the soap and needed two teenage daughters. If I got the part I’d be working with my dad every single day. Then there’d be no chance of him forgetting I existed, like he seemed to have done since he left.
“What changed?” Alice asked.
“The show Dad was in down in London got moved up to Edinburgh, and Mum’s guest spot in the series here in LA turned into something more permanent and her filming schedule is crazy. She told Dad it was his turn to figure something out, since I was supposed to be with him anyway. I think she was hoping he’d take me to Edinburgh with him, but instead I’m—”
“Off to Italy and the random aunt,” Alice finished my sentence. Then she frowned.
Part of me wondered whether it was just the filming schedule Mum was worried about, or if Veronica the Evil Agent had said something to her about me getting in the way. She couldn’t go to all the showbiz parties with me there, and Veronica was always going on about networking.
As for Dad … he didn’t want me with him. He hadn’t even talked to me about my ideas for how we could make it work if I went to Edinburgh with him, just packed me off to his half-sister in Italy, like an unwanted Christmas present.
The worst part was that, however mad I was at him, I still missed him. And the idea that I might be losing him for good … terrified me.
Not that I was admitting it to Alice.
I shrugged. “Anyway I’m off to the aunt and you’re off to London, and we can both be miserable about it together, all the way across the Atlantic.”
“Which sucks,” Alice said.
“It super does,” I agreed.
“Maybe we should just swap summers,” Alice said, laughing. “That way you’d get to go to your theatre course, and I’d get to avoid Mabel. Plus, I love Italy and you hate it. If Mandy’s anything to go by, I doubt the airline would notice.” She nodded to where Mandy was now openly sniffling as she typed into her phone.
“They wouldn’t,” I agreed. “So what, we’d just swap suitcases and passports and pretend to be each other?” My mind was whirring with possibilities.
Alice laughed again. “Willa, it was a joke!”
“I know,” I said.
But this was better than a joke. It was an opportunity. And we had a whole plane journey to figure it out.
“Welcome aboard!” Mandy had handed us over to another flight attendant at the gate. Oonagh showed Willa, the two boys and me on to the plane, smiling broadly the whole time.
“How cute,” she went on, as we filed past her. “Two brothers and two sisters. What a treat for me to look after you today!”
“We’re not sisters,” Willa and I said, in unison.
“Really?” Oonagh asked, as if we wouldn’t know.
Willa rolled her eyes for the fifteenth time since I’d met her (I was counting), grabbed my arm, and pulled me over to our seats.
“We should really do it,” she whispered, as Oonagh focused on getting the boys strapped in across the aisle. We were first on the plane, right at the front of the economy section, where the staff could keep their eyes on us.
“You’re not serious,” I replied.
“I am! We should totally swap places for the summer.”
The excitement in Willa’s eyes made me nervous. It was the same sort of gleam I saw in Dad’s when he was all worked up about some research trip to a ridiculous place in the middle of nowhere with a reputation for murderous sea creatures or natural disasters.
She’d been pestering me about swapping summers the whole time in the queue for boarding at the gate, not to mention the walk from the UM lounge with Sad Mandy, but I’d mostly been tuning her out. I figured Willa was just being overdramatic about having to go to Italy when she was talking about ‘reclaiming her life from her parents, the tyrants’.
Apparently not.
“You realize that’s … kind of insane.” Who pretended to be someone else for a whole summer? I mean, yes, the idea of spending my summer holiday in Italy was kind of wonderful, but also totally impossible. Right?
“It was your idea,” Willa pointed out.
“Yeah, but I was joking.” I had been joking. It was a joke. Just a joke.
“Yeah, but I’m not.”
She stared me in the eyes as, behind her, the other passengers started to file on to the plane. Most of them looked tired or bored or resigned. None of them looked like they were contemplating the crazy.
But Willa was.
And against all my better judgement, so was I.
It was absolutely impossible, I knew that. But that didn’t stop me imagining it. Italy, Mum’s bucket list…
This was ridiculous.
“You can’t
really think we could actually do it. We’d get caught.” Wouldn’t we? I mean, there were passport controls and stuff for a reason.
“I bet you we wouldn’t.” Willa gave me a wicked grin as she fastened her seatbelt. “And we won’t find out if we don’t try.”
“At which point we’ll be in prison.” I made myself think about that. How furious Dad would be with me.
Because otherwise, it was all too easy to imagine the benefits of being thousands of miles away from my prospective step-mum. I could just … avoid the situation entirely and hope it went away. Maybe Dad would lose interest in Mabel, once he got really stuck into the data from the research project. He was always hopping from one interest to another, after all. He hadn’t even mentioned her until now, so how serious could he really be about her? Even the way he spoke about her: an old friend … maybe something more … a possibility… None of that sounded like true love to me.
If I just waited it out, maybe he’d realize that I didn’t need another mother, and he wasn’t all that interested in Mabel anyway.
What? It could happen. (In the back of my head I could hear my counsellor asking, ‘Alice, do you ever feel that you try too hard to avoid difficult or upsetting situations?’)
Well, if ever there was a situation worth avoiding, Mabel was it.
Willa waved a hand at me. “Prison?! We could totally talk our way out of it. Play it off as a mistake or a prank. It would be fine.”
For the first time in my life, I was contemplating doing something outrageous. Something crazy. Dangerous, even.
This wasn’t the sort of thing Alice Wright did. I studied hard, didn’t worry my dad, smiled sadly when people told me how sorry they were about my mum, and didn’t even let on to my closest friends how scared I was, all the time. Not that I could really say I had any close friends any more.
I’d tried to explain to Dad that I’d rather be alone in Australia, waiting for him to come back, than on the other side of the Earth with some woman I’d never met before.
He said it wasn’t safe. As if anything in this world is, really.