Free Chocolate Box Girls: Coco Caramel by Cathy Cassidy

serious. It
makes baking cakes to raise money for the pandas look like kid’s stuff.
    After brunch, I curl up in the oak tree to
play my violin, but I can’t concentrate; my mind is full of stolen ponies, angry
landowners, surly boys. I check my watch, killing time until I can set off for the
derelict cottage. I am kicking at the red-gold foliage, anxious, edgy, when Honey walks
across the grass wearing a cute print minidress, mustard-coloured tights and
high-heeled, lace-up boots. She leans up against the tree trunk, and takes a compact
mirror out of her bag to paint on scarlet lipstick and shimmery gold eyeshadow.
    Watching all this through the branches, I
can’t help thinking she is taking an awful lot of trouble to look cool and pretty
for a girl who is grounded until Christmas.
    Maybe I was wrong about the new-leaf
thing?
    ‘Going somewhere nice?’ I ask,
and Honey yelps, dropping her eyeshadow into the grass.
    ‘Coco, you are such a freak,’
she huffs, scooping it up and stuffing it into her handbag. ‘What is it with you
andtrees? Are you actually part monkey?’
    ‘Stop changing the subject,’ I
say. ‘I thought you were grounded?’
    ‘I’m just going down to
Anthony’s,’ she tells me. ‘Mum knows, and she says it’s fine.
He’s helping me with my calculus homework, OK? I want to get good
grades.’
    I frown. Anthony is Kitnor’s only teen
maths and computer genius, one of those slightly eccentric boys who still lets his mum
cut his hair in a little-boy bowl haircut and never seems to notice that his shirt tails
are hanging. I think he has a bit of a crush on Honey, but it’s definitely a
one-way thing.
    Besides, Honey doesn’t look like
she’s dressed to walk down to the village to study calculus.
    ‘Is Anthony your boyfriend now
then?’ I ask, swinging my legs just above her head.
    ‘That’s sick!’ she
squeals, outraged. ‘Of course he isn’t. I’m just studying, OK? Nothing
else.’
    She picks her way across the grass and I
hear the gate creak as she steps out on to the lane, the clack-clack of her high-heeled
boots on tarmac. As I listen, a car draws up blaring music and voices call out,
laughing, tellingHoney to jump in. ‘Shhh!’ I hear her
hiss. ‘My little sister is lurking about – keep the noise down! I’m
grounded, remember!’
    A door slams and the car accelerates away,
and I am left with a sinking feeling. New leaf? Honey? That’ll be the
day.

14
    It’s eerily quiet as I cycle along the
lanes towards the moors. It’s not such a long ride as yesterday – according to
Lawrie, the derelict farm is almost halfway between Hartshill and Kitnor as the crow
flies, so I take the route Lawrie has suggested, staying well away from Blue Downs
House. Once I reach the uplands I hide my bike in a coppice of hazel trees he told me to
look for and find a tiny stream that is supposed to lead right up to the derelict
cottage.
    I leave the lane behind and begin to trek
upwards, following the silver ribbon of stream as it cuts through the heather and
bracken. Each step feels like freedom, like leaving the chaos of the big chocolate order
and Summer’s illness and Honey’s latest rule-breaking allbehind me. There is nobody else around, and all I can hear is the distant buzz of a
car down below, the screech of geese flying overhead, the rhythm of my footsteps as I
walk.
    At one point I glimpse a herd of wild Exmoor
ponies in the distance, their dark manes ruffled by the breeze as they watch me pass. If
all else fails, maybe I could set Caramel loose on the moors and hope that she finds
them? It would break my heart, but at least she’d be safe. That wouldn’t
work for the grey, of course – she’s not an Exmoor, and her colour would mark her
out from the herd instantly.
    I am just beginning to worry that I’m
following the wrong stream when the tumbledown smallholding appears in the distance. In
the daylight I can see a rectangle of drystone wall enclosing an overgrown field