Free Rebecca is Always Right by Anna Carey

Handsome Dan was a perfect co-star!’
    I don’t know whether Handsome Dan is a child or an animal. You’d assume he is an animal with a name like that, but you never know these days. There’s a kid in Jessie’s little sister’s class called Sugar Poppy. Anyway, I wonder what theBluebird Bakery would say if they knew Vanessa was giving so many hints about the contents of their top-secret ad? If I were a nasty sort of person, I would tell them and get her fired, but, sadly, I am not.
    On the plus side, we’re going in to the Knitting Factory tomorrow for our first practice! And Ellie is going in to use the art studio. I wonder will Sam be there? It would be nice to see him. More importantly, I do still have one of his Neil Gaiman books and I have to give it back. I’d contact him online, but I don’t want him to read anything into it – me contacting him directly I mean.

    What could he read into it? Why do I care? I’m being ridiculous. If I don’t see him tomorrow, I’ll send him a message.

    Rachel is feeling even worse today. She and Jenny went out last night and she had a terrible hangover this morning. WhenI woke up, I could hear her getting very sick in the bathroom. It was pretty revolting. As she will be eighteen in a few months Mum and Dad don’t usually mind Rachel going to over-eighteens places and having the odd drink. Their theory is that if they trust her to behave sensibly, she will then actually behave sensibly because she knows that if she broke their trust and went out and got hammered she would get into loads of trouble and then she wouldn’t be allowed out at all.
    So far it has worked (with one or two exceptions that Mum and Dad have turned a blind eye to). But they were very annoyed this morning and also a bit upset.
    ‘You can’t go drowning your sorrows,’ said Dad. ‘It’s not healthy and it doesn’t work.’
    Rachel gave a miserable grunt in reply. Mum and Dad lectured her for another while, but eventually they seemed to decide that her puking all day was punishment enough, and she’s also not allowed go on any nights out at all for the next month.
    I have to say she’s not exactly an advertisement for getting off your face. It makes me never want to drink at all (not that I really like the taste of any booze I’ve tried. Perhaps I am not a natural party animal). Apparently, she and Jenny went to a gig in a place where there was a late bar and were still theredrinking shots at two in the morning. It was Jenny’s birthday last week and she basically spent all of her birthday money taking Rachel out on the town. Not sure it was worth it today, though.
    Anyway, after a while I had to leave her lying on the couch in her pyjamas and go in to our first practice in the new studio space. It was totally brilliant! In fact, I felt a bit guilty being so cheerful when Rachel is still feeling so awful. But it was so good. The practice room we got to use was really nice – even better than the ones in the summer camp – and the drum kit was very cool. It was all red and sparkly (mine is just boring and dark green). And lots of our friends were there. Small Paula was working on something on her own in the recording studio (she is much more technologically advanced than Hey Dollface), and Richard and his band, the Wicked Ways, were in the practice room next to ours.
    Even though Cass and I see Richard fairly regularly (and of course Alice sees him all the time), it was cool to see the whole band again. We went in to their room for a bit to hear them play their new song, ‘Pterodactyl’. It is all about how sometimes Richard feels like an ancient flying dinosaur looking down on the earth. I had no idea he felt like this, but like all the Wicked Ways songs ‘Pterodactyl’ is both verymelodramatic and strangely impressive. Then they all came in to our practice room to hear our song ‘Pistachio’ (a very poetic title if I say so myself), which is about looking back at a long ago lost love