Love, Peace and Chocolate (Pocket Money Puffin) Read online

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Happy birthday, Puffin!

  Did you know that in 1940 the very first Puffin story book (about a man with broomstick arms called Worzel Gummidge) was published? That’s 70 years ago! Since then the little Puffin logo has become one of the most recognized book brands in the world and Puffin has established its place in the hearts of millions.

  And in 2010 we are celebrating 70 spectacular years of Puffin and its books! Pocket Money Puffins is a brand-new collection from your favourite authors at a pocket-money price – in a perfect pocket size. We hope you enjoy these exciting stories and we hope you’ll join us in celebrating the very best books for children. We may be 70 years old (sounds ancient, doesn’t it?) but Puffin has never been so lively and fun.

  There really IS a Puffin book for everyone

  – discover yours today.

  Cathy Cassidy wrote and illustrated her first book aged eight years old. She has worked as a fiction editor on Jackie magazine, an art teacher and as agony aunt on Shout magazine. She lives in the Scottish countryside, with her husband, two children, two cats, some mad rabbits and a mad hairy lurcher called Kelpie.

  Books by Cathy Cassidy

  DIZZY

  INDIGO BLUE

  DRIFTWOOD

  SCARLETT

  SUNDAE GIRL

  LUCKY STAR

  GINGERSNAPS

  ANGEL CAKE

  LETTERS TO CATHY

  SHINE ON, DAIZY STAR

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  puffinbooks.com

  First published 2007

  Published in this edition 2010

  Text copyright © Cathy Cassidy, 2007

  Colour Puffin artwork on cover copyright © Jill McDonald, 1974

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-133052-5

  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

  Hiya!

  Love, Peace and Chocolate is a story I wrote a couple of years ago, all about friendship, chocolate – and falling for the same boy. The story came out as a free mini-book, but supplies were limited, and it has never available to buy … until now!

  I think you’ll like Love, Peace and Chocolate. It’s one of my favourites, anyhow! It’s a book that celebrates friendship, and that’s something all of us should take time out to do. Friends are fab, right? They keep us going when things go pear-shaped, and they’re always there to share a laugh, a secret, a dream.

  Keep your friendship strong by signing up to keep the Friendship Charter on my website, cathycassidy.com – or check out the My Best Friend Rocks competition on the website, and tell me why your friend is so special.

  I hope you enjoy Love, Peace and Chocolate. Seriously, what more could a girl want?

  Friends forever …

  Cathy Cassidy

  1

  hey jess! dying of boredom in french, karl williams is actually asleep on the desk. SNORING. seriously. if i survive, meet u in the music room at lunchtime. txt bak, my moby’s switched to silent.

  love, peace & chocolate,

  kady xxxx

  kady, mon amie, my moby wasn’t set to silent & now i hav 100 lines to do this lunchtime, thanks a bunch!

  love, peace & chocolate,

  jess x

  Kady and me have been best friends – well, forever, pretty much. We met at three years old, at toddler group. Mum says Kady nicked my Playdoh, and I retaliated by chucking a bit of soggy flapjack at her. We bonded later, over the finger-paints, and we’ve never looked back.

  We’ve been through a lot together, Kady and me. We braved playgroup, nursery, primary school. We discovered Bratz dolls, Brownies and ballet, and also nits, chickenpox and verrucas. (Don’t worry; those days are gone!)

  Secondary school brought a whole new bunch of stuff to handle: French verbs, Bunsen burners, equilateral triangles – and also first periods (Kady) and first bras (both of us). We’re looking forward to the first love, first boyfriend, first kiss bit too, but things have been kind of slow on this score.

  I don’t know if we’re just unlucky, but there’s not a whole lot of choice at Parkway Community School. There isn’t a single Year Eight boy who can make my heart beat faster – except for Karl Williams that time he set off a firework right outside Mr Barrow’s science class, and that was only because I thought it was a terrorist attack. Maybe it’s because we’ve known these boys since primary, or maybe they’re just exceptionally plain, charmless and downright annoying.

  ‘One day,’ Kady sighs, peering out of the window at Karl Williams and his gang, who are playing football with an old tin can in the pouring rain. ‘One day, we’ll meet a couple of cute, cool lads. Just you wait!’

  ‘Not in this school, we won’t.’

  We’re in the music room. Miss Anderson lets us hang out in here because I’m meant to be practising my flute for her, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of practice going on lately. I pick up my flute and run through a couple of scales to keep the guilt at bay, then scrawl another few lines of I must not leave my mobile phone switched on during lesson time.

  ‘So,’ says Kady. ‘Talking of cute, cool lads … Who would you rather kiss? Mr Barrow, Karl Williams or … a frog?’

  ‘Oh, gross!’ I protest. ‘Not Mr Barrow – he’s got to be at least sixty, and those nylon shirts he wears …’

  ‘Tasteful,’ Kady smirks.

  ‘Scary,’ I correct her. ‘And Karl Williams? No way! Nope, it’d have to be the frog.’

  ‘Even though it’s fat and slimy and covered in warts?’ Kady demands.

  ‘Even though,’ I admit. ‘It’s the best option of the three, by far. And who knows, if I kiss it, it might turn into a handsome prince!’

  ‘You’re a dreamer,’ Kady tells me. ‘There are no princes any more. There are no cool boys at Parkway, full stop – I think they screen them out and pack them a
ll off to private schools to stop them from distracting us. We could grow old and grey and shrivelled and never be kissed, the way things are going.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ I tell her. ‘You’re so impatient, Kady! We’re twelve years old. That’s not exactly old and grey and shrivelled.’

  ‘No – they’re the best years of our lives, my mum reckons,’ Kady says. ‘We’ve got it all, according to her. Clear skin, skinny hips, shiny hair, endless energy. And what are we doing? Wasting it all on lines and flute practice. That’s sad.’

  ‘Well, the lines bit is kind of your fault.’

  ‘I said I was sorry!’ she huffs. ‘Look, this is serious, Jess! What do we want from life? Love, peace and chocolate. Not much to ask, is it?’

  ‘We can usually manage the chocolate bit,’ I say reasonably.

  Kady thumps the tabletop. ‘It’s not enough!’ she argues. ‘What about peace? No more war, no more hunger, no more maths homework?’

  ‘I don’t know if a ban on homework would actually help with world peace,’ I say.

  ‘Of course it would,’ Kady scoffs. She runs a comb through my hair, twists it into a wispy little bun and pins it by my ear. ‘And what about love? What about romance? Don’t you ever feel that life is passing you by?’

  ‘You have to be patient,’ I tell her. ‘You can’t rush fate!’

  ‘Dream on!’ Kady scoffs. ‘Fate’s just for fairy stories, Jess. There are no princes, only frogs, and fate is another word for do-as-you’re-told. Face it, if we sit around here waiting for Prince Charming to show up, we’ll still be here when we’re ninety.’

  ‘So what are we gonna do instead?’ I ask.

  ‘Get out there and grab life with both hands,’ Kady announces. ‘I suppose. Some day.’

  Kady finishes messing with my hair and shows me the result in a hand mirror. She has pinned up two tiny, twisty little buns on either side of my face. It’s cute, if a little weird, like something an elf-queen might wear in one of those Lord of the Rings films.

  Kady is fab at hairstyles – she’s been practising on me since we were six years old, so she should be. She wears her own hair in tight, beaded braids pretty much all of the time, because otherwise it goes fluffy and frizzy. It always looks amazing, though – it complements her smooth, latte-coffee skin just perfectly.

  ‘Like it?’ Kady wants to know.

  ‘Love it. Thanks, Kady!’

  She grabs up the lined paper and swipes my pen. ‘I’ll finish these for you,’ she says. ‘After all, like you said, it was partly my fault too. You practise, OK?’

  She leans over the lined paper, scribbling furiously, and I pick up my flute and play.

  I love to play the flute – and Kady, for all her joking around, loves to listen. She even put up with me in the days when my playing was more like the screeching you’d get if you stood on a cat’s tail, but now, after four years of practice, I can actually hold a tune.

  When I play, it’s all about breath and concentration and cold, shiny silver for a while – and then all of that falls away and it’s just music, clear, cool music, chasing away the rain and the homework, the hassles, the drudgery.

  The notes rise up, filling the scuddy old classroom with light, shimmering into the darkest corners, flying like birds up through the ceiling and onwards, right up into the sky.

  Then it’s over, and I lower my flute and take a breath in, grinning at Kady, who has abandoned the lines, gone all sad-eyed and dreamy.

  ‘Lovely,’ she sighs.

  And then there’s a soft, slow clapping from the back of the room, and a tall, slim boy steps out of the shadows.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That was … awesome!’

  Kady turns to look, and I can see her eyes open wide, her jaw drop, her cheeks flush softly with pink. Me – I’m just about crimson.

  ‘Didn’t mean to embarrass you,’ he says. ‘I just didn’t want to interrupt, y’know? I don’t usually like classical music, but that was something else!’

  The boy in the shadows is tall and smiley. He’s wearing an old black suit jacket covered with band badges, low-slung cords and a skinny black jumper, and on his back is a black guitar case, slung diagonally across his body. As we gawp, he walks lazily across the room, shrugs the guitar case off and leans it against the wall.

  ‘Miss Anderson said I could leave it here till later,’ he grins.

  The bell rings out then, signalling the end of lunchbreak, and Kady jumps up, smooths her skirt down, finds her voice.

  ‘Um … we don’t know you, do we?’ she says. ‘You don’t go to Parkway, do you?’

  The boy laughs, shaking a mess of choppy, caramel-coloured hair out of his sparkly dark blue eyes. ‘Yeah, I go to Parkway,’ he says. ‘As of three days ago, anyhow! My folks just came down here from Liverpool. I’m still settling in, I guess. I’m in Year Nine.’

  ‘I’m Kady Hamilton and this is Jess Taylor,’ Kady says, twisting one long, beaded braid around her finger. ‘We’re Year Eight. And you are …?’

  He slips his thumbs through the belt-loops of his skinny cords and tilts his head to one side.

  ‘Jack,’ he says, looking right at me. ‘I’m Jack Somers.’

  2

  jess, i take it all bak, wot i said about fate. jack somers IS my fate, ok? he is SO cool!!!!

  love, peace & chocolate,

  kady xxxx

  kady, d’u no wot time it is? 3 in the morning! yeah, jack’s cool, yeah, he’s cute. i’m mad about him 2, but rite now i need 2 sleep. i’m switchin my moby off.

  seriously.

  love, peace & chocolate,

  jess zzzz

  Kady waits for me at the bus stop in a black, pleated skirt short enough to stop traffic and a tight black tank top instead of the regulation sweatshirt over her crisp white shirt. Her eyes are rimmed with black eyeliner, and her lips glisten with strawberry lipgloss.

  The bus rolls up and we pile on, squash in at the back.

  ‘You look amazing,’ I tell Kady. ‘I wish I’d known we were dressing up – I feel kind of boring next to you!’

  ‘No way!’ Kady says. ‘You’re great! You’ve got that dreamy, other-worldy look – boys love that! C’mon, Jack already thinks you’re dead talented and cool. I can’t compete with that, but – well, I don’t want him to think I’m childish or anything, y’know?’

  ‘He won’t!’ I tell her. ‘You look fourteen at least. He’ll go crazy for you!’

  ‘No, it’s you he likes,’ Kady insists. ‘Lucky thing!’

  ‘No way,’ I protest, although I secretly hope that she’s right. ‘He’s out of our league, but we can dream, can’t we? I mean … that boy is SO cute!!!’

  ‘Gorgeous,’ Kady breathes. ‘Did you see those eyes? That hair?’

  ‘How about his clothes?’ I chip in. ‘He’s just so cool! And he plays guitar! He’s probably in a band!’

  The bus shudders to a halt and we spill out on to the pavement outside the school gates, just as the nine o’clock bell peals out.

  ‘I think I’m in love,’ Kady sighs.

  ‘Me too.’

  We link arms and mooch off to registration, dreaming of Jack Somers.

  By breaktime, Kady has gathered a whole raft of information about Jack. His tutor group is 9C, based in room 43, and his favourite subjects are English, art and music. He used to have a band back in Liverpool, and he’d like to start one here. And guess what? Half the girls in the school are crazy about him already. More than half, really – the others just haven’t admitted it yet.

  ‘We don’t stand a chance,’ I tell Kady. ‘We’re only Year Eights. Why would he look at us?’

  Kady raises one perfect, black-winged eyebrow. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’ she asks. ‘Trust me, Jess. I have a feeling about this. It’s like you said – fate.’

  Sure enough, when we head into the music room at lunchtime, Jack Somers is sprawled at a desk in the corner, cutting random mismatched letters from an old newspaper. Sheets of black A3 paper,
Pritt Stick and a mound of little silver stars are sprinkled across the desktop.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ says Kady carelessly. ‘Jack, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hi, Kady,’ he grins. ‘Hi, Jess.’

  Is it my imagination, or does he hold my gaze a moment longer than he has to? Those dark blue eyes make my insides turn to slush, make my fingers tremble.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Kady wants to know, sitting on the edge of his desk. ‘What are you making? Ransom notes?’

  Jack arranges the cut-out letters carefully on the black paper, spelling out the words Fallen Stars.

  ‘I’m starting a band,’ he tells us. ‘Fallen Stars. Miss Anderson says I can hold auditions in the music room after school on Friday, so I’m doing some posters. Want to help?’

  ‘OK!’

  We sit with Jack all lunchtime, sticking snipped-out letters on to black card, spelling out the name of the band, the date, place and time of the auditions. We talk about his favourite bands – The View, The Fratellis, The Kooks, Razorlight – the names on the button badges that cover his lapels. We talk about Parkway Community School and Fallen Stars and Liverpool and fame. Jack takes a bar of Fruit & Nut from his pocket and shares it out, and I pocket the blue foil paper secretly, because it was Jack’s, and I think I might keep it forever.

  Five minutes before the bell goes, we sprinkle confetti stars all over the posters and Jack tells us they look totally awesome.

  ‘Do you two play anything?’ he asks us. ‘Well, I know you do, Jess, but a flute’s not really the right kind of instrument for a rock band. D’you play anything else? Bass guitar, keyboards, drums?’

  ‘Just flute,’ I admit.

  ‘OK,’ says Jack. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘We could help out at the auditions, though,’ Kady says. ‘You know, making a note of anyone you wanted to see again, their names and forms and stuff. And we could help put these posters up!’

  ‘Would you?’ Jack grins. ‘That’d be fantastic! I’d really appreciate it.’