Free Love and Other Drama-Ramas! by Sarah Webb Page B

and starts scanning the side. She’s dropped by so we can go through a
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letter together. The house is empty apart from us. I can’t remember the last time I walked into a quiet, empty house after school. It’s blissful. No Mum to quiz me about homework or poke in my bag to see if I’ve eaten my sandwich, and no rug rats pulling at my skirt or slapping sticky hands on my skin. Score! After the day I’ve had, with both Seth and Mills wiped out by the Bailey virus, I deserve it.
    I put my hand over the list of ingredients. “I don’t want to know, Clover. Anyway, you’re always telling me that dieting is pointless.”
    “You’re right.” And dipping her spoon in again, she starts shoveling ice cream down her throat like there’s no tomorrow. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Beanie,” she says between mouthfuls. “One minute I have no appetite at all, and the next I’m ravenous. My energy levels are all over the place.”
    “I’m not surprised if you’re not eating properly. Did you have any lunch?”
    She thinks for a second. “Actually, no.”
    “Right, read me this letter while I make you a toasted sandwich.”
    “I’m not really hungry, Beanie. And I feel a bit sick from all that ice cream.”
    “You’re having a toastie and that’s that.”
    “Fine. You get more and more like your mother every day.”
    I ignore her and start slicing cheese.
    “I guess it’s all the walking,” she says after a few minutes. “And you can’t eat in the Dead Zoo.”
    I stop slicing and look at her blankly.
    “I’ve been strolling around Saint Stephen’s Green Park at lunchtime,” she admits. “Or visiting the Dead Zoo. I tried the National Gallery, but that was snoozeville. I really don’t understand what you see in galleries, Beanie. Stuffed animals are far more interesting.”
    I’m about to ask why she hasn’t been eating lunch at college when it dawns on me — she’s afraid of bumping into Cliona or Kendall.
    “You have to eat, Clover. You’ll get sick.”
    She nods glumly. “I know.”
    I decide not to press her. Right now, she could do without a lecture. “So what about this letter, then?” I ask instead.
    She delves through her bag — a leopard-skin Mulberry satchel, the
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fashion cupboard strikes again — and pulls out a folder. “This poor soul sounds in an awful state.”
    I get back to sandwich making while she reads the letter to me.
    Dear Clover and Amy,
    You are probably going to think this is the weirdest, saddest letter that has ever landed on your desk. I have a problem. A BIG problem.
    I live in Greystones with my mum. She’s a flight attendant, and because she’s away a lot of the time, I’ve been at boarding school — Rathmore Abbey. But here’s the thing: Tuesday’s my last day.
    Mum has just come off the transatlantic flights. She’s shifting to the European routes instead — so I don’t have to board anymore. She says she needs to get her life back. I think she’d actually like to meet someone, someone who isn’t a married pilot.
    She’s had a rotten time with men. There was this one guy, Dermott, who had a wife and a baby at home. Mum was devastated when he finally told her. And he only came clean because Mum invited him to spend Christmas with us and couldn’t understand why he claimed he was tied up on Christmas Day.
    Anyway, Mum has found me a place in Lakelands Secondary School in Bray, starting next week — a week! I’m TERRIFIED, girls, utterly heart-thumpingly petrified.
    I have three days to get ready — buy the uniform, check what extra books I need — but I know nothing can prepare me for the biggest difference of all . . . You see Rathmore is all girls, and Lakelands is mixed. Please don’t laugh — but I’ve never really spoken to a boy my own age before, not properly. I have no brothers, no cousins, no male neighbors, nothing. My life is a boy wasteland.
    All my friends are girls, and I never meet any boys. If I walk into a