Free Chocolate Box Girls: Sweet Honey by Cathy Cassidy

are
     wrapping up your Christmas prezzies today. Expect a box of goodies soon! And no
     peeking till Christmas! Only 22 sleeps to go!
    Skye
    xxx



9
    I lie awake at four in the morning and
     stare at my bedroom ceiling. There is nothing much to look at; just plain white
     plaster, shadowy in the lamplight. At Tanglewood, my ceiling was a faded sky blue,
     collaged with little gold stars made out of sweet wrappers. The year I was nine, Mum
     spent a week painting the ceiling while I made the stars, folding, cutting, glueing.
     We stood on ladders to stick them up there and the end result was beautiful, a
     child’s picture of the sky, infinite blue.
    ‘If you ever feel fed up, you can
     wish on them,’ she’d said.
    I don’t believe that sweet-wrapper
     stars can chase away your troubles, of course, but I found them comforting. I wished
     on those stars the year Dad left, and again when Shay ditched me for my stepsister.
     They didn’t work, clearly, but still.
    My mobile says it’s 04.03 on
     Friday 8 December, and I am wide awake. Again.
    I don’t know if I can call it jet
     lag any more, not almost three weeks in, but who cares? Jet lag, insomnia, it all
     adds up to the same thing. At least for the last few days I’ve had more to
     distract me than maths homework and French translations.
    The middle of the night is when I talk
     to Riley.
    When I can’t face another equation
     and the sky outside my window is still ink-black, I click on to SpiderWeb and,
     almost always, Riley is there. I think he is nocturnal too. Sometimes he’s
     just home from a party, sometimes he’s been up all night writing a last-minute
     essay, another time he’d woken early to go for a run along the beach. Not
     Sunset Beach, sadly. He lives way out on the other side of Sydney, which is why I
     haven’t bumped into him again.
    A SpiderWeb romance has its limitations,
     though, and I’m the kind of girl who likes to keep her options open. If my
     early mornings are all about flirting with Riley, my afternoons are about chilling
     with Ash. I have taken to calling in at the beach cafe on my way home from school,
     and most afternoons he is there, reading or studying or serving customers. I buy a
     smoothie and sit up on one of the tall bar stools at the counter, and we talk and
     work and flirt a little.
    So yeah … life in Sydney is
     cool. I went shopping on Saturday with Tara and Bennie, admired the giant Christmas
     tree in Chiffley Plaza, the trees hung with fairy lights, the department stores
     piping Christmas carols into cool, air-conditioned interiors when outside the heat
     was stifling. It was weird to be Christmas shopping in shorts and a T-shirt, but I
     picked out the perfect presents for Mum, Skye, Summer and Coco. I even bought nail
     varnish in an especially nasty shade of mustard for Cherry and a packet of TimTam
     chocolate biscuits for Paddy, and the whole lot was wrapped and posted off days ago.
     I imagine that parcel, making its way round the world to Tanglewood.
    School is no picnic, of course. I have
     years of skiving to make up for, but at least now I have a shiny new laptop to help
     with the task. Dad brought it home last Saturday to make up for the mix-up and him
     having to work late.
    Tonight it is especially hard to make
     myself finish the maths study sheet I’m working on. Every question seems
     harder than the last, and although I keep plodding on, going through the steps Mr
     Piper showed me, I’m not sure my fragile pre-dawn brain can handle it all.
     Staying power is not a concept I have ever applied to schoolwork before, and by the
     time I finish, I feel like I’ve scaled the Blue Mountains in a pair of
     flip-flops and planted a flag of pride on the summit. What’s on the flag? A
     new leaf, obviously.
    I put the maths folder away, open up the
     laptop and click on to SpiderWeb. Sure enough, a message from Riley is waiting.
You awake, beautiful?
    My lips twitch into a smile and I