My phone buzzes, and I immediately forget my promise and think that it might be Noah. But it’s not him. It’s Kira. “Where are you?” the text reads. Then I look at the time. I only have five minutes until my first lesson—and I’m supposed to be doing a presentation in history class with Kira. Oops.
I pick up my pace into a run, race up the steps and through the double doors of my school. Just inside, two new Year Seven girls are bent over their phones, giggling at something on Celeb Watch. Immediately I feel my anxiety rising like a tide in my mind, in case it’s me they’re gossiping about—but this time it isn’t. It turns out that Hayden of The Sketch has broken up with his girlfriend, Kendra. When one of the girls looks up at me, she frowns—but there’s not a hint of recognition in her eyes. It’s just because I look a bit like a weirdo staring at them. I hurry past, my heart beating quickly inside my chest. I don’t even turn any heads anymore.
I breathe a sigh of relief, letting the anxiety wash away. Noah and I are officially yesterday’s news. I’m just a normal girl, living a normal life in a normal school. It’s what I’ve wanted ever since the end of the tour.
Isn’t it?
“Penny! GOODNESS ME, there you are.” Kira comes running up to me, snapping my train of thought before it can get too long. She launches into a run-through of our presentation, so I let her pull me through the school hallways and back into normality.
Chapter Two
“Hang on, just one more.”
“Penny, it’s five to seven . . .”
“I know, but the light is perfect . . .” I take one last shot of Elliot, silhouetted against the darkening sky. This time we’re not by the beach but in Blakers Park, situated in front of our houses and near a row of cute pastel homes. Living up on the hill means we always get a great view of the park, with the sea behind it, from our adjoining attic bedrooms. There is a clock tower in the park where Elliot and I have spent many sunny evenings sat underneath reading and taking photos. Elliot’s making exaggerated shapes with his body, jumping up into stars and bending over into backward bridges. I’m on my tummy, shooting from a low angle. If you didn’t know it was Elliot, you might not even recognize him in these photos as Elliot. I manage to catch the setting sun beneath the arch of his back, rays of light blurring any detail—but it makes him look ethereal, like light is bursting out from inside him.
“OK, I’m done,” I say, putting the camera down. I sit up and check my phone—there are no worried texts from Mum, so I assume that Tom is probably late.
“Lemme see,” says Elliot, who drops out of his backbend and onto the grass. I lean over to show him. “Oh, Penny, these are amazing! Your best yet. Those had better go in the gallery.”
“Oh, it’s definitely going to be the centrepiece! I’m going to call it Elliot and the Sunshine Bend.”
“Maybe you need to work on your titles a bit, P.”
“Point taken.”
Elliot’s fantasy for me is that I’m going to have a giant gallery opening one day—a solo show, not like the time my photographs were displayed with the rest of our school’s photography GCSE class. His vision of my gallery is always somewhere grand—like London or New York, or even somewhere far-flung like Shanghai or Sydney. His grand dreams for me always make me grin, but also make my anxiety flutter. At the end of my amazing internship with François-Pierre Nouveau, he let me know that I might be able to hang a set of my photos in his gallery—if they ever met his high standards. I’d been sending some of the pictures I’d taken of Elliot to Melissa, F-P Nouveau’s office manager, whom I’d really connected with. She told me that—while they were good— something was missing. “I just don’t see any of you in these pictures,” Melissa had told me. “You’re almost there. Work on finding out what you’re really passionate about, a subject you really love, and then you’ll nail it. Your photographs need to have a voice. Something . . . uniquely Penny.”
I don’t want to let her down, so my goal is to practise, practise, practise until I can find out exactly what is “uniquely Penny.” Because my dreams for me are just as big as Elliot’s. I want to take photographs for the rest of my life. I’ve never been more determined to make it happen than I am now.
Out of the corner of my eye, something catches my attention and I look up sharply. “Noah?” I whisper, before I can stop myself.
“What? Where?” Elliot follows my eyeline, but there’s no one there. Whoever it was has disappeared down the hill.
“I could’ve sworn . . .” But what did I see? A beanie hat, slung low over long dark hair. A familiar swing to his walk. It could have been anyone. “Never mind,” I say quickly.
Elliot’s not fooled. “It’s OK, Penny. I wish he were here too. But someone who is around is Tom. Let’s get back, shall we?”
“Definitely.” I know I’m being silly—Noah is probably in New York, or maybe LA—anywhere other than in Brighton. I just wish I knew something about where he was or what he was doing. Then at least I wouldn’t be driving myself crazy.
“Come on, slow poke!” Elliot shouts at me. I’ve fallen behind as we walk up the hill towards home. That’s the problem with Brighton—it’s almost all big hills, and our houses are halfway up one of the biggest.
“I hear Dad’s cooking one of his famous lasagnas tonight!” I say as I catch up.