2: Chocolate Box Girls: Marshmallow Skye Read online

  2: Chocolate Box Girls: Marshmallow Skye

  Cathy Cassidy

  Penguin Books Limited (2011)

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  Rating: ★★★★☆

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  SKYE and SUMMER TANBERRY are identical twins, and SKYE loves her sister Summer more than anyone else in the world. They do everything together, but lately Skye's been feeling like second-best - it's the story of her life. And when her friend Alfie confesses he's fallen not for her, but for Summer, it hurts. Skye wants to be her own person, but with an effortlessly cool twin, how can she? Will Skye ever step out of Summer's shadow and find her own chance to shine?

  Cathy Cassidy

  PUFFIN

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  Hiya …

  I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a twin … to have an identical sister, a second ‘self’. Pretty cool, I used to think. But would it really feel that way? What if your twin was talented, popular, perfect … and you were always in her shadow? That might not feel quite so cool.

  Skye Tanberry is used to feeling second-best, but when she is given a trunk of 1920s dresses that once belonged to a long-lost relative, she finally has something that is hers alone. Soon she finds herself haunted by sad, sweet dreams of the past, and starts crushing on a boy she can never have. Skye really doesn’t believe in ghosts … so how come she is falling for one?

  Skye knows she is in trouble when hiding in the past seems safer than living in the present … but can she find the strength and courage to let go of the dreams?

  Marshmallow Skye is the second in my Chocolate Box Girls series. It’s a story of friendship and sisters and learning to trust … and chocolate, of course! Curl up with your favourite sweet treat and lose yourself in Skye’s story … follow the dream!

  Books by Cathy Cassidy

  DIZZY

  DRIFTWOOD

  INDIGO BLUE

  SCARLETT

  SUNDAE GIRL

  LUCKY STAR

  GINGERSNAPS

  ANGEL CAKE

  The Chocolate Box Girls Series

  CHERRY CRUSH

  MARSHMALLOW SKYE

  DREAMS & DOODLES DAYBOOK

  LETTERS TO CATHY

  For Younger Readers

  SHINE ON, DAIZY STAR

  DAIZY STAR AND THE PINK GUITAR

  STRIKE A POSE, DAIZY STAR

  Thanks …

  To Liam, Cal and Caitlin for being there for me, always … and to Mum, Joan, Andy, Lori and all my fab family. Thanks to Sheena, Helen, Fiona, Mary-Jane, Maggi, Lal and Jessie for the ongoing support, cake, party nights and hugs.

  Thanks to my fab PA, Catriona, to Martyn for all the maths, and Darley and the team for being all-round fab. Huge thanks to Amanda for being the best editor ever, and to Sara and Julie for the gorgeous artwork. Thanks also to Adele, Emily, Tania, Sarah, Kirsten, Jennie, Jayde, Julia, Hannah, Rachel and all the lovely Puffins. Thanks to Rosie Fiore for being a lifesaver.

  Lastly, a big thank you to Shannon for the flying rucksack story, and to all my brilliant readers … you really are the best!

  1

  I don’t believe in ghosts.

  I do believe in creaky floorboards and sudden cool draughts and eerie howling sounds when the wind whistles through the eaves, because when you live in a big, old house like Tanglewood, those things are part of the deal.

  I have always lived at Tanglewood. Mum and Dad came to live here back when my big sister, Honey, was just a baby, because Grandad died very young and Grandma Kate got married again, to a Frenchman called Jules. They wanted to live in France, but Grandma Kate didn’t want to sell the family house, so she gave it to us. Tanglewood is a big Victorian house just a stone’s throw from the beach, and to me it is a little slice of heaven.

  Some people think it’s a bit spooky – and I guess I can see why. The house actually looks like it could be haunted. Ivy clings to the soft red brick and the windows are tall and arched and criss-crossed with lead, the kind of windows where you might expect to see a face watching you: a pale, sad-eyed shadow from the past. The sort of thing you read about in books – stories where the clock strikes twelve and you wake up to mystery and intrigue and people in rustling dresses who walk right through you as if you’re not there at all.

  I used to wish for something like that to happen to me. I wanted to step into the past, see it for myself. I’ve grown up listening to ghost stories, spent summers with my sisters hunting for spooky visions and ghostly apparitions … but I have never seen a single one.

  The only ghosts I believe in now are the Halloween variety, small and sticky-faced and dressed in white sheeting, clutching a plastic bag full of toffee apples and penny chews.

  ‘Skye! Summer!’ my sister Coco yells, sticking her head round the door. ‘Aren’t you two ready yet? Cherry’s downstairs waiting and I’ve been ready for ages too, and if we don’t get a move on we’ll miss the party! Hurry up!’

  ‘Relax,’ Summer says, scooshing her perfect hair with a blast of lacquer. ‘We’ve got tons of time, Coco. It doesn’t start until seven! Go duck for apples or something!’

  ‘Skye, tell her!’ my little sister wails. ‘Make her hurry up!’

  It is hard to take Coco seriously, though, because she has painted her face green, blacked out some of her teeth and spiked up her hair with neon gel. She is wearing a tweedy old jacket that belongs to Mum’s boyfriend, Paddy, and I think she is supposed to be Frankenstein’s Monster.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ I promise. ‘We’ll be down soon!’

  Coco rolls her eyes and stomps off down the stairs.

  Summer laughs. ‘She is sooo impatient!’

  ‘Just excited,’ I tell my twin. ‘We used to be like that, remember?’

  ‘We’re still like that, Skye,’ Summer says, smoothing down her raggedy white dress. ‘Just don’t tell Coco! I love Halloween, don’t you? It’s so cool … like being a kid again!’

  I smile. ‘I know, right?’

  And Summer does know, of course … she knows me better than anyone else in the world. She knows how I feel about a whole bunch of things, because most of the time she feels the same.

  And dressing up … well, that’s one thing we both love.

  I lean in towards the mirror, pick up a brush. I am not as good with hair and make-up as my twin, but I love the magic, the moment when you glance up and see, just for a split second, a whole different person.

  The girl in the mirror is pale and ghostly, a shadow girl. There are ink-dark smudges beneath her wide blue eyes, as if she hasn’t slept for a week, and her hair is tangled and wild, twined with fronds of ivy and black velvet ribbon.

  She looks like a girl from long ago, a girl with a story, a secret. She’s the kind of girl who could make you belie
ve in ghosts.

  ‘Awesome,’ I say, grinning, and the ghost girl grins too.

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ Summer says, as I turn away from the mirror. ‘Think you’ll hook up with some cute vampire boy at the party?’

  ‘Vampire boys are a pain in the neck,’ I say. Summer laughs, but the truth is that we are still at the stage of dreaming about boys in books, boys in movies, boys in bands. Neither of us has a boyfriend. I like it that way, and I think Summer does too.

  Besides, if you saw the boys at Exmoor Park Middle School, you would understand. They are childish and annoying and definitely not crush material, like Alfie Anderson, the class clown, who still thinks it’s funny to flick chips around the canteen and set off stink bombs in the corridor.

  Classy.

  Summer is perched on the edge of her bed, stroking silver sparkles along her cheekbones, painting her lips to match. Our dresses are the same, skirts made from frayed, layered strips of net, chiffon and torn-up sheets, hastily stitched on to old white vest tops.

  On Summer, this looks effortlessly beautiful. But when I look back at the mirror I can see that I was fooling myself – on me, it just looks slightly crazy and deranged. I am not a ghost girl, just a kid playing dress-up, and not quite as well as my sister.

  I guess that is the story of my life.

  Summer and I are identical twins. Mum actually has a scan from when she was pregnant, where the two of us are curled up together inside her, like kittens. It looks as if we are holding hands. The picture is fuzzy and grey, like a TV screen when the signal is lousy and everything looks crackly and broken up, but still, it’s the most amazing image.

  Summer came into the world first, a whole four minutes ahead of me, dazzling, daring, determined to shine. I followed after, pink-faced and howling.

  They washed us and dried us and wrapped us in matching blankets and placed us in Mum’s arms, and what was the first thing we did? You got it. We held hands.

  That’s the way it has always been, really. We were like two sides of the same coin, mirror-image kids, each a perfect reflection of the other.

  Right from the start, we each knew what the other one was thinking. We finished each other’s sentences, went everywhere together, shared hopes and dreams as well as toys and food and clothes and friends. We were each other’s best friend. No – more than that. We were each other.

  ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’ people would say. ‘Aren’t they the sweetest things you ever saw in your life?’

  And Summer would squeeze my hand and tilt her head to one side, and I’d do the same, and we’d laugh and run away from the adults, back to our own little world.

  For the longest time, I didn’t know just where Summer ended and I began. I looked at her to know what I was feeling, and if she was smiling, I smiled too. If she was crying, I’d wipe away her tears and put my arms around her, and wait for the ache inside to fade.

  It sounds cheesy, but if she was hurting, I hurt too.

  I thought it would be that way forever, but that’s not the way it’s working out.

  We both went to ballet class back then – we were ballet crazy. We had pink ballet bags with little pink ballet pumps and pink scrunchies, books full of ballet stories, and a whole box at home filled with tutus and fairy wings and wands. Looking back, I think I always liked the dressing up bit more than the actual dancing, but it took me a while to see that I was only crazy about ballet because Summer was. I saw her passion for dance, and I thought I felt it too … but really I was just a mirror girl, reflecting my twin.

  I started to get fed up with ballet exams where Summer won distinctions and I struggled to scrape a pass; fed up with dance shows where Summer had a leading role while I was hidden away at the back of the chorus. She had a talent for dance, I didn’t … and bit by bit, it was chipping away at my confidence. After one of these shows where everyone came up and told Summer how brilliant she was, I finally found the courage to admit that I didn’t want to go to ballet any more. It was the year that Dad moved out and everything was changing. Changing one more thing didn’t seem like such a big deal, to me at least.

  Summer didn’t get it, though. ‘You can’t stop, Skye!’ she argued. ‘It’s because you’re upset about Dad leaving, isn’t it? You love ballet!’

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘And this has nothing to do with Dad. You love ballet, Summer. Not me.’

  Summer looked at me with her face all crumpled and confused, as if she didn’t understand the whole idea of you and me. Well, I was just getting to grips with it myself. Up until then, it had always been us.

  Lately, I have been wondering if that whole dancing thing might just have been the start of it. Sometimes, when you change one thing, the whole pattern falls apart, shattered, like the little pieces in a kaleidoscope. I guess I shook things up between my twin and me, and three years on we are still waiting for the dust to settle.

  I turn back to the mirror, and for a moment I see the ghost girl again, all wild hair and sad, haunted eyes, lips parted as though she is trying to tell me something.

  Then she is gone.

  2

  The kitchen smells of toffee and chocolate. Mum is at the Aga, skewering apples and dipping them into a pan of golden melted toffee for us to take down to the party, and Paddy has brought a batch of toffee-apple truffle mix over from the workshop for us to try.

  ‘Just taste,’ he says. ‘This could be the one, the flavour that catapults us to fame and fortune …’

  Paddy and his daughter Cherry moved in with us in the summer, and it feels as if they belong. They are like a couple of jigsaw pieces we didn’t even know were missing. There is still a jagged hole where Dad used to be, but we are getting better at stepping round it, and having Paddy and Cherry here somehow helps. Cherry is cool and kind and funny, like a cross between a sister and a friend. Paddy laughs a lot and plays the violin, and he has turned the old stables into a workshop for the business he and Mum have launched, The Chocolate Box. The smell of melted chocolate wraps itself round the house these days, and there is no way that could ever be a bad thing.

  Mum and Paddy are getting married in June, so we’ll be a proper family then. Cherry and Paddy make everything better.

  Well, almost everything.

  We crowd round to taste the mixture: two ghost girls, a grinning Frankenstein (Coco) and a witch (Cherry). The truffle mix tastes exactly like Halloween, dark and sweet and autumnal.

  Cherry’s boyfriend Shay Fletcher is here too, wearing a werewolf mask with a shock of grey fur attached, pretending to bite Fred, the dog. I’m kind of surprised to see him. He used to go out with my big sister Honey, but when Paddy and Cherry moved in, everything changed and Shay ended up with Cherry.

  See? Boys mess everything up, even nice ones like Shay. If he hadn’t fallen for Cherry, then maybe Honey and Cherry would have had half a chance of getting along. Maybe. Things would definitely be easier around here if they did.

  When Cherry and Shay got together, Honey was not amused. She cried and yelled and locked herself in her room for days on end, and when she came out again she had chopped off her beautiful, waist-length blonde hair with the kitchen scissors, so that it stuck up in little tufts from her head. Most girls would have looked like a scarecrow with a DIY haircut like that, but Honey always manages to look model-girl cool, with fierce, faraway eyes and lips that are in constant pout-mode. I said that Paddy and Cherry make everything better, but my sister Honey would not agree.

  Shay has been steering clear of the house lately, for obvious reasons. I would not want to be in his shoes, or Cherry’s, if Honey catches them together.

  ‘I’m guessing Honey is out tonight?’ Summer asks, reading my thoughts.

  ‘I think so,’ Cherry says, adjusting her witch outfit nervously. ‘She said the Halloween party would be lame, that she had something way better to do …’

  ‘Whatever,’ Shay shrugs, pushing back the werewolf mask. His sandy hair is sticking up, his ocean-coloured eyes lau
ghing. ‘We have to face her some time. It’s been two months now – it’s time to let go, move on.’

  ‘Ri-ight,’ I say.

  I am not sure that Honey would want to let go or move on if she saw Shay Fletcher in our kitchen right now. I think she might want to grab him round the neck and hang on very hard indeed, until he keels right over and dies. After that, she might ‘move on’ to Cherry.

  I don’t say any of this out loud.

  ‘Hey,’ I say instead, trying to round everybody up. ‘We have a party to go to, and we’re meeting Millie and Tia at the hall. Don’t want to keep them waiting!’

  ‘Exactly,’ Coco says. ‘Come on, you lot!’

  Everyone is talking and laughing and putting on jackets, but we are not fast enough. Honey appears in the doorway, and the laughter dies. The atmosphere is so frosty you’d need an ice pick to even dent it. I can practically see the icicles forming all around me.

  She is dressed as a vampire girl, in a cute crimson minidress with her face and neck powdered pale. Two red puncture marks are painted on at the base of her neck, just above her collarbone.

  The costume’s pretty good – because my sister is not as sweet as she looks. Ever since Dad left she has swung between tears and tantrums and just enough little-girl charm to keep the rest of us wound round her little finger. Then Shay ditched her, and Dad had a promotion to open an overseas branch of the firm he works for, and announced he was going to live in Australia. He left a couple of weeks ago.

  It’s not as if Dad was very good at birthdays or Christmas or weekend visits – he wasn’t. But there is only one thing worse than having a hopeless dad, and that’s having a hopeless dad on the other side of the world. Personally, I cannot quite forgive him.

  And, what with the Shay-thing and Dad moving abroad, Honey has dropped any pretence at charm. These days she is like a whirlwind of don’t-care, in-your-face attitude.

  Honey glances at Shay and I can see him shrink away under her gaze.