Free Over the Moon by Jean Ure Page A

young man has called. Do you want to come down?”
    “Come down
?” I tear off the witch hazel pads and stare at Mum in horror. “You mean he’s actually
here
?”

    “Dropped by on the off chance. Are you going to come and speak to him?”
    Is Mum mad? Does she really think I’m going to show myself to Matt in this state?
    “Come on,” she says, “be brave! You can put my sunglasses on.”
    “No
!” Why would I be wearing sunglasses when I was supposed to have the flu? ‘Tell him I’m ill! Tell him to phone me!”
    “Oh, all right,” says Mum.
    The minute she’s gone I leap out of bed and race to the door. By opening it just a crack I can hear Mum, down in the hall, talking to Matt.
    “ … some kind of allergy. Her face is a bit swollen. It’s not as bad as she makes out, but you know Scarlett … won’t be seen dead unless she’s blemish-free and perfect.”

    How could she?
How could she
? I hurl myself back on to my bed and scream silently into the pillow. When I accuse Mum, later, of betraying me, she says she’s sorry, she’d forgotten it was the flu.
    “Just stop overreacting,” she says. “I know it’s not very nice, but it’s not as if it’s life-threatening. If you’d just stop looking at yourself in the mirror every five minutes, you might find it went away.”
    I sob and say that she obviously thinks I’m some kind of neurotic.
    “I think you’ll turn yourself into one,” says Mum, “if you don’t relax a bit.”
    I yell that I am relaxing. “I’m lying here with these stupid bits of cotton wool soaked in stupid witch hazel and they’re not doing the least bit of good!”
    To which all Mum can think to say in reply is, “In that case, why don’t you come downstairs and join us for tea? You can always put the glasses on,” she says, “if you’d rather Dad didn’t see you.”

    So I put the glasses on and they’re the cheap kind that make everything just like totally pitch black, so I have to keep lifting them up to find out where things are.Mum says maybe she should make me a veil, out of curtain netting. I immediately burst into tears and have to be comforted by Dad, who reprovingly tells Mum that “This is no joking matter!” Mum agrees that it isn’t, but says I am grossly overplaying it and nobody who didn’t actually know me would ever realise there was anything wrong. Dad says that is not the point.
    “There is something wrong and she’s naturally upset. If she’s like this tomorrow, she’ll have to see the doctor.”
    That’s my second memory: seeing the doctor. Cos when I wake up on Monday morning I’m, like, right back to square one, huge great puffballs where my eyes are supposed to be. You can hardly even see my eyes, they’re so swollen. I scream hysterically at Mum that
no way
am I going in to school to be laughed at. Dad says there’s no question of my going in to school.
    “You’re going straight to the doctor!”
    Well, you can’t go
straight
to the doctor (not unless you’re dying, and maybe not even then) cos you have to make an appointment, and the first free slot is days away. It’s not until Dad’s angrily snatched the telephone from Mum and bellowed into it that the dragon woman who guards the entrance to the cave grudgingly says I can come along at six o’clock that evening. So I spendanother day lying on my bed, and by the time I finally get to the surgery with Mum my eyes have, like, subsided a bit, only now the elephant skin is back. It looks like the skin of some ancient old crone.
    The doctor is a complete idiot. He says, “Hello, it’s Scarlett, isn’t it? And what’s wrong with Scarlett this fine day?”
    I say, “
This
” and whip off my glasses.
    He looks at me and says, “So what’s the problem? You look very pretty!”
    I scream that my eyes are all puffed up.

    He says, “Are they?” and peers a bit closer.
    I screech that of course they are! “You don’t think they’re normally like this, do