Angel Kiss - Laura Jane Cassidy [5]
‘Hi, Nick,’ I said, trying to sound as casual as possible.
‘Hi, Jacki.’ He turned back to the girl and smiled. ‘Sarah, this is Jacki, the girl I was telling you about.’
My heart almost stopped beating. He’d been talking about me?
‘Jacki, this is my girlfriend, Sarah.’
This time my heart almost stopped beating again, but for an entirely different reason. My girlfriend. It’s amazing how a mere two words can change the mood of an entire day. How could I not have presumed it anyway? He’s such a good-looking guy … of course he would be taken. And he seemed so proud as he said it: my girlfriend. He was clearly happy with her. Sarah appeared friendly, although her eager smile seemed a little fake. As we made polite conversation I got the impression she would rather I wasn’t there. My new life went crashing back to boring. I quickly bought some bread and made my escape.
Head down, ego deflated, I reached the bottom of our lane.
‘Jacki! Will you check if there’s any post?’ Mum called from the caravan door. I struggled to find the rusty red postbox hidden among the overgrown bushes. There was no key for it, so I got a stick to prise the letters out. At first I thought it was empty, but then I felt the stick touch some paper at the very bottom. I couldn’t get it out: it was firmly stuck inside. I was going to just leave it there, but that little voice in your head that speaks to you when you least expect it told me to try harder. I forced my hand in through the opening, and gripped the letter with my fingers. For one horrible moment I thought my arm might be stuck. I yanked it out, managing to scrape some skin off the back of my hand. But I soon forgot about my stinging skin when I saw the letter.
It was addressed in neat writing to a Mr Alf Meehan. The ink was faded and the stamp foreign and it was dated about six months earlier. I should have given it to someone to forward to him, but that persuasive inner voice suggested that I open it. Before I knew what I was doing the envelope was open in my hands. I pulled out a slip of cream notepaper. Unfolding it, I felt a shiver run through me as I read the bold black letters:
KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT
I spent most of the afternoon lounging in the caravan. I didn’t really feel up to doing anything else.
‘What’s wrong with you, Jacki?’ Mum asked.
‘What do you mean?’ I said, looking away from the window.
Mum was sitting cross-legged on her bed, flicking through a home-decorating magazine.
‘You’ve been moping around all afternoon,’ she said.
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Yes, you have.’
‘Well, sorry.’ I’d gone for a short walk after lunch just to try to clear my head and cheer myself up, but obviously that hadn’t worked very well. I’d come back feeling more down than ever. Ever since I’d opened the envelope I’d felt very sick. The threatening note had freaked me out slightly. I needed to forget about it: it had nothing to do with me.
I grabbed my phone off the ledge beside the bed and sighed when I saw that I still had no coverage. I hated that it was nearly impossible to get even one bar of coverage up here. Not to mention the fact that we didn’t have any Internet. I hadn’t been online in days. There was broadband available in the café in the village, but it had been closed for the past week. My life was a total mess. All my friends were in Dublin. I couldn’t even ring them, for heaven’s sake. I missed them and I missed my computer, I missed playing music, I missed everything. And the first guy I’d fancied in months, and who I’d got my hopes stupidly high about, had a girlfriend. A gorgeous girlfriend called Sarah.
A few minutes later I glanced at my phone again, and could hardly believe it when I saw one teeny bar. Yay! Contact with the real world. Afraid to move the phone, I lay down on the bed and dialled my friend Hannah’s number. It rang and rang.
I decided to text Ross rather than ring him, because I knew he’d be in work. I wrote a text that spanned