LITMIR.BIZ

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but a commune. That’s right, a commune. Obviously someone forgot to tell the people here communes went out of fashion a million years ago when hippies went extinct.

       Mum said I’m missing school for the rest of the term, which could have been good. But it’s not. I miss my friends. It’s PE tomorrow and I even miss that! And I won’t get to go to Laura Gilchrist’s end of year party.

       And all this horrible stuff is happening because she’s divorcing Dad. But I don’t get why we have to leave London and come here? Why can’t Dad leave instead? That’s what happened when Jess’s parents got divorced – she ended up with two cool places to live, her mum’s house and her dad’s new flat in Chelsea. And I’ve ended up living in a field.

       I keep telling Mum I hate it here, but she just keeps smiling.

       Mum’s friend Pam is here and she’s all smiley too – like me having my whole life ruined is a good thing.

      I hate them both. There’s not even a TV so I’ve already missed one episode of Sex and the City – which I’ll probably never see ever again now. Or Friends. Or Beverly Hills 90210 (although that’s not so bad now that Luke Perry’s hardly even in it). And, even worse, forget about a computer or the internet, this place doesn’t even have a phone. So I can’t even ring Jess. She’ll probably think I’ve been kidnapped. I had to write her a letter. How tragic is that?

      The woman that runs this place is called Laura and she’s a total psychopath. But her son Art is THE WORST. He’s only a year older than me, but he’s really scary. He’s sort of good-looking, if you fancied Jack in Titanic you’d probably fancy him too. He’s got a tattoo on his arm– which I thought was a little bit cool (it’s a big red rose with thorns) until I got a closer look at it today, and realised the petals are actually drops of blood. Yuk! And anyway, no one has a tattoo who isn’t a criminal or a biker. All the other kids here, who are miles younger than me and him, follow him around like a pack of wild dogs and treat him like he’s God. Which he is so not.

       I bet he’s never smiled in his entire life. His jeans are ripped, but not in a good way, and covered in stains like he’s never cleaned them ever. And he doesn’t seem to go to school, so we were the only kids here today. He totally ignored me when I said hello. Then when I told him the room my mum’s given me here is nowhere near as pretty as my room at home (just to make conversation, like a normal person), he made a mean comment about me being like Princess Di. As if that was a bad thing. When EVERYONE loves Princess Di, especially now she’s dead.

       He called me Princess Drama at supper, so now all the other kids have started calling me it too. They all hate me (AND Princess Di probably) but I don’t care because I hate them back.

       I told Mum what Art said about me (and Princess Di) and she just smiled AGAIN and told me I shouldn’t judge people too harshly before I get to know them properly.

       Like I want to get to know Art properly! As if!! Honestly, Mum acts like it’s my fault Art’s so mean to me. Why is she on his side? When she should be on mine?

       I want to go home. I wish I was dead. I might have to kill myself if we stay here. I think I’ll start a hunger strike tomorrow and see what Mum does.

       If you’re reading this, Mum, I’m not kidding!

NOW

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘Mom, this pie has Jell-O in it. It tastes weird.’

      Eloise Granger eased her foot off the accelerator, to see her son’s face screwed up in comical disgust over the remains of his Melton Mowbray pork pie.

      The gamey taste and meat jelly was obviously too much of an acquired taste for an American twelve-year-old brought up on meat that had been processed to within an inch of its life. Even for one who had never been a fussy eater she thought, taking in the dimpled skin where Josh’s tummy peeped above the waistband of his ‘husky boy’ shorts.

      ‘Have some popcorn chips instead then.’

      ‘I ate all the popcorn chips already,’ Josh whined, his usually sweet nature finally beaten into submission by jet lag and boredom after seven hours in a plane and a total of fifteen hours on the road since they’d left Orchard Habor in Upstate New York yesterday.

      ‘Once we get to Grandma’s, I’m sure they’ll have supper ready.’ Whether it would be edible though was another matter.

      If Josh was struggling with the concept of pork pies, what were the chances he would wolf down kale stew or tofu casserole or whatever other vegan weirdness the commune had on the menu tonight?

      ‘Are we almost there?’ he said.

      ‘Very nearly.’ The rental car hugged a curve, the high-sided banks on either side of the road topped with wild grass and nettles. The stretch of road was familiar, even if it had seemed never-ending too, when she was fourteen and arriving here for the first time with her mum nineteen summers ago. ‘Twenty minutes tops.’

       At which point I will get to time-travel back to the worst summer of my life.

       So I can top it. And possibly myself in the process.

       Why did I ever think running away from Dan and our disaster of a marriage to a place I haven’t been in nineteen years would be a good idea?

      The simple answer was, desperation had set in a week ago when Dan had levelled her with his I’ve-just-been-caught-with-my-dick-in-someone-else’s-cookie-jar-again look and told her his latest mistress was accidentally pregnant. And it had all gone downhill from there – because Ellie hadn’t been angry, or upset, or even remotely surprised. She’d just been numb. Numb enough to think that taking her mum up on the invitation she’d been extending to her and Josh for the past four years, ever since Ellie had received that first tentative, white-flag-waving Christmas email from Dee, was a good way of escaping the shit storm that had wrecked her life and her business in Orchard Harbor in less than seven days. Because announcing you were divorcing the town’s Golden Boy was the opposite of good publicity for a woman who made her living as a wedding and events planner. Who knew?

      Unfortunately, she hadn’t stopped feeling numb until she and Josh had boarded the plane at JFK… And she’d actually had a moment to contemplate the new shit storm she was flying into.

      ‘You said that ten minutes ago.’ Josh’s whine drilled through Ellie’s frontal lobe. But she resisted the urge to snap at her son.

      He hadn’t complained when she had wrenched him away from everything and everyone he knew, without giving him a proper explanation, and dragged him across an ocean, not to mention two hundred miles of the M3 and the A303 in a tiny Ford Fiesta because that was the only hire car they had left. And he always got cranky when he was hungry. Right now he was probably ravenous, because she’d had to make do with the limited options at the small service station near Stockbridge. Hence the Melton Mowbray debacle.

      And, anyway, even a cranky Josh was a welcome distraction from the flood of memories that had kept her awake during the red-eye flight to Heathrow.

      What had she been thinking? That swapping one shit storm for another would somehow cancel them out?

      ‘I said that less than a minute ago,’ she corrected. ‘But you’re right, that means it’s probably only nineteen minutes now.’

      Why was it that when you knew something bad was headed your way, it always took that much longer to arrive? Was it just life’s equivalent of slow-motion replays on America’s Funniest Home Videos? Because she could remember another sunny June day nineteen years ago, when her

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