Free Kiss and Tell by Fiona Walker

naturally gifted rider, her wealth of horsemanship gleaned from growing up with two dressage Olympians as parents. The girls became great foils, and the tradeoff was simple. Streetwise Carly had the glamour, feminine wiles and know-how with boys, and Faith had the riding expertise.

    As well as adapting to long-distance separation, their friendship had this year even survived the ultimate betrayal when Carly had got a boyfriend. Hugely sensible, bright and straight-talking, Faith made a perfect sounding board through the ups and downs of first love.
    Recently, in the wake of the monumental split between these two lovebirds – at least as traumatic and calamitous as Brad and Jen, according to Carly – the friendship had been experiencing a purple patch. Through the weeks of A level exams and then celebratory holidays combined with anxious waits for results, Faith had drawn surprising satisfaction from helping her friend through the break-up. In exchange, Carly had galvanised Faith’s determination to change her own life for ever.
    Faith’s mother Anke might have been concerned that all the late-night chats and emails were distracting her from her revision, but in fact they’d had the opposite effect, focusing her on the importance of academic credentials when faced with the sketchiness of Carly in a crisis and the fact that her friend was blowing all her chances of scraping the two Cs and a D required to get into the University of Essex.
    ‘How can I concentrate on media studies when my heart is broken?’ she had lamented to Faith.
    Faith, whose own heart had long been hammered hard by its fruitless love for charming, womanising Rory, sympathised, although Carly failed to see the parallels at first.
    ‘Your crush on that posh bungalow is nothing to my love for Grant!’ she had raged.
    Faith agreed wholeheartedly. ‘That’s why I need your help getting the posh bungalow to raise his shutters and see me blossom as soon as exams are over.’
    With A levels behind them, it was time for Carly to assist Faith’s plans to make Rory see her as more than just a tomboy cross-patch.
    Carly was six months older than Faith, an age advantage she liked to point out with the sort of pride that insinuated the age gap was the equivalent of light years socially – and in many ways it was. Pretty, busty, petite and as blonde one month as she was raven-haired the next, Carly kept up with the latest trends in fashion, music, TV and language with an insatiable appetite for weekly gossip magazines. Her heroines were Posh Spice, Paris Hilton andSylva Frost. She had even gained that ultimate credential – cosmetic surgery (admittedly it was just having her ears pinned back on the NHS, but it still counted). She had always led the way with the opposite sex while Faith trotted around in circles, but now it was time for Faith to gallop alongside her.
    In recent weeks the friends had a worked out a seduction strategy to make Rory fall in love with Faith at long last; she would acquire a whiter than white smile, buoyant 32EE Hollywood ice cream scoop boobs, a pert bottom and a tiny button nose to wow him and become his inseparable other half, living, riding and competing side by side like Tash and Hugo Beauchamp or her mother’s friends the Moncrieffs.
    Having won a small cash fortune in a local competition the previous year – wisely gathering interest in a savings account thus far – Faith was, on Carly’s advice, now planning to blow the lot on a makeover of industrial proportions. She had already made contact with a top London dentist and a cosmetic surgeon, although couldn’t actually book the veneers, boob job, nose job, lipo and chin implant until after her eighteenth birthday because she would need her mother’s permission before then.
    But now that she had almost come of age and could at last green-light the offensive, she’d suddenly come up against a serious obstacle and urgently needed Carly’s help.
    Again she texted PICK