Hide & Seek - Alyssa Brugman [10]
'The kids have school, but London!' said Dad.
'We've always wanted to travel,' replied Shelby's mother.
'There are good schools up here too, and it's a long block of time. I'm sure they would settle in. It would be different if Shel was in year twelve.'
'Yes, much different. London!'
'I could commute from here. Or I could ask for a transfer. Buckingham Palace! The Tate!'
'Harrods!' laughed her mother. She clapped her hands together and held them up to her chin. Her eyes glistened with tears. She looked younger. Aunty Jenny leaned back in her chair smiling with pleasure. Everyone looked happy – everyone except Shelby.
'Harry Potter lives in London,' Connor told Blake.
'Harry Potter isn't real,' Shelby snapped.
Connor shrugged. 'Winnie the Pooh, then.'
'The Wombles,' added her father.
'The who?' asked Blake.
'And The Who!' her father replied. Shelby's mother and Aunty Jenny laughed.
'There's one member of the family that you all seem to be forgetting about,' Shelby said, folding her arms.
Her parents looked at Blake.
'Blue!' Shelby shouted.
'There are agistment places up here. I checked,' Aunty Jenny assured her. 'The girls ride out over the sand dunes and along the beach. One place had camels too.'
Shelby glared at her aunt for a moment and then turned to her parents. 'You can't be serious!'
Her mother leaned forward. 'Honey, you said the girls at school were teasing you anyway! This could be a fresh start.'
'A fresh start?' Shelby stood up pushing back from the table. 'You expect me to give up all my friends for some stupid camel club?'
She ran down the corridor, feeling her way because tears blurred her eyes.
'Shelby, you come back here and apologise!' her father shouted after her.
'Let her go,' Shelby heard her aunt say. 'You're forgetting how frightening change can be.'
Shelby raced down the steps and along the street. She wasn't sure where she was going – just away from where her parents were deciding her future without even consulting her. The footpath beneath her feet was crooked and she turned her ankle. Shelby hopped for a few steps and kept running past one neat garden after another. Bees hummed over daisy bushes and birds sipped nectar from native flowers. Everything on Aunty Jenny's street on this grey day was calm and organised, like old people, and not horsey in the slightest.
At the bottom of the hill there was a strip of shops. She slowed to a walk, keeping her head down so that strangers wouldn't see her crying. She crossed the road and headed for the beach.
From the scrubby lawn at the edge of the car park a set of wooden stairs led down and disappeared into the sand. Shelby perched on the middle step. She pulled the hood over her head, tucked her hands inside her sleeves and frowned into the salty breeze.
It was cold and spitting rain, so there weren't any swimmers. The only other people on the beach were three boys with a football about fifty metres further along. She watched them punching the ball to each other, or kicking it high into the air, then scrambling and wrestling with each other to catch it.
All her parents worried about was school. They didn't understand that she didn't care about her studies. One school was probably just as good as another. Her life was at the stables and she wasn't likely to find a place like that again.
The truth was that she had never made friends easily. She'd always been a bit weird and shy. At school the gap between her and the other kids seemed to be stretching wider all the time. Not only that, but she wasn't smart – just somewhere in the middle. The only thing she could talk about with confidence was horses, and sometimes when she got started she could tell other people were bored.
Now, for the first time in her life, she was part of a group of friends. She'd finally found people with whom she could talk about horses all day long. She couldn't imagine not seeing Erin and Lindsey every day.
Shelby remembered that it was only a month or so ago that