Cherry Blossom Dreams Read online

  I felt my face go hot. OK, so I might have gone a bit heavy on the foundation but there was no way I looked that bad. I started to feel cross.

  Sean didn’t help by appearing in the kitchen and saying, ‘Of course it’s necessary. Raffy will be there!’

  Leo looked puzzled as I yelled at my brother to shut up.

  ‘Raffy?’ Leo repeated. ‘But isn’t he –’

  ‘Nearly three years older than her and a total numbskull!’ Sean declared. ‘That’s right! Doesn’t stop her having a massive crush on him though!’

  ‘Shut up, Sean!’ I yelled more savagely. My face felt like it was on fire. How long had he known?

  ‘Sasha, I really think you should change into something more sensible,’ Leo said, while looking as if he was trying to work out if what my brother had just said was true.

  I’m not sure what came over me next. It felt like some furious cranky girl, whose existence I had only been vaguely aware of before then, suddenly exploded out from inside me and bawled, ‘GET LOST, LEO!’

  And I stormed out of the house in a total rage, slamming the front door as hard as I could behind me.

  I half-ran, half-hobbled, all the way to Lily’s house, crying a little on the way, hoping they hadn’t left for Blossom House yet. (On top of everything else, the toe strap on one of my flip-flops had become loose and it was proving difficult to keep on.)

  ‘I HATE HIM!’ I burst out the second Lily opened her front door.

  ‘Who?’ she asked, looking surprised.

  ‘LEO!’

  I hadn’t meant to blurt everything out so dramatically, but I just couldn’t help it. As we stood on her front doorstep I gave her a blow-by-blow account of what had just happened, leaving out the embarrassing bits about her brother.

  ‘You’ll just have to tell Leo you need more time to adjust before he starts going all overprotective dad on you,’ Lily advised me after she had listened.

  I sniffed. ‘You think that’s what he’s doing?’

  ‘Sounds like it. And I don’t blame you for not wanting to take it. After all, he’s not even married to your mum yet! He’s lucky you didn’t … I don’t know …’ She glanced down at my feet. ‘Throw your flip-flops at him or something!’

  I smiled briefly, imagining the look on his face if I had.

  ‘Never mind – you can save that for the next time!’ Lily added mischievously.

  ‘Next time?’

  ‘Trust me, this isn’t the only time he’s going to try and tell you what to do … at least if he’s anything like my dad.’ She grinned. ‘Once I got so mad at mine I threw a yoghurt at him. I’ve never actually walked out of the house on him though. I probably wouldn’t see my phone for a month if I did that.’

  ‘You reckon?’ I suddenly worried that my outburst was going to have consequences – on top of the ones I knew would soon be coming my way as a result of the party, that is. I quickly realised it might be smart to get Mum on my side sooner rather than later.

  ‘Don’t worry. Your mum won’t do anything like that. She’s way too cool,’ Lily said, like she could read my mind.

  ‘Yeah, well Leo certainly isn’t cool,’ I grumbled. ‘I mean, out of Mum and him … well, it’s almost like he’s the one who’s nearly forty and she’s the one who’s nine years younger!’

  Lily was grinning.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I demanded.

  ‘You! I just can’t believe you yelled at Mr Anderson like that. Hey, don’t look offended! I think the new rebellious you is awesome. And I think you look great … even if you do look like you’re going out on a date!’

  When Lily and I arrived at Blossom House I quickly told Mum what had happened between Leo and me. I might have skewed the account a little in my favour, but I figured Leo could have phoned Mum and done the same, and that if he hadn’t that was his problem.

  ‘He’s going against what you think about Sasha’s clothes,’ Lily backed me up. ‘I mean, you’re her mum and if you didn’t want her wearing those designer jeans then you wouldn’t have bought them for her, would you?’

  Mum just glared at her. Clearly she was still very cross with us about the party.

  ‘Actually, Lily, I totally agree with him that dressing up just to come here to clean does seem rather pointless. Now … you’d better make a start on the garden. Where are the boys by the way?’

  ‘Sean’s just coming,’ I said.

  ‘Raffy’s coming a bit later,’ Lily mumbled, avoiding looking Mum in the eye. She had already told me that her brother had conveniently disappeared soon after he’d been told he had to come and help us. I felt quite relieved. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to talk to Raffy normally after seeing him with his arm round that other girl last night.

  ‘Good, because Miranda is bringing her client round to view the place again with his partner first thing tomorrow morning,’ Mum snapped. ‘So I want it completely back to normal by then.’

  ‘So it’s not definite that he’s going to buy it then?’ I said. ‘I mean, he could still change his mind?’

  Mum narrowed her eyes at me as if she was trying to work out why I was so interested. But before she could ask Lily was picking up the roll of black bin bags Mum had left out for us and giving my arm an impatient tug. ‘Come on, Sasha,’ she urged.

  And I have to say I was brought down to earth with a bump as I surveyed the garden and all the discarded rubbish from the night before.

  Half an hour later the garden was tidy again and Lily and I had placed a couple of bin bags of rubbish with the other stuff waiting to be collected at the front entrance. I spotted the birdcage from the shed in the pile of stuff being thrown out and, acting on an impulse, I took it back inside the house with me and hid it in the bedroom cupboard.

  I went back downstairs to find Sean and Lily about to make a start on cleaning up in the front room.

  ‘You might need to use the vacuum cleaner in there first,’ Mum was telling them as she stood in the hall handing out cloths and cleaning fluids.

  ‘It’s broken,’ I said without thinking.

  ‘What?’ She whirled round to glare at me. ‘Don’t tell me that happened at your party?’

  ‘Well … no, but …’ I trailed off, looking at Sean, not sure what to say next.

  The two of us had accidentally broken Blossom House’s ancient-looking vacuum cleaner the December before. I’d been making my own Christmas cards there one Saturday while Mum was at work, and Sean had ended up helping me and getting really silly with the glitter. While I was vacuuming up the mess, a little tube of glue had somehow got sucked up into the hoover and we hadn’t been able to get it to work ever since.

  ‘Come on, Mum – it has to be broken!’ Sean said, doing his best to rescue me. ‘Have you seen that thing? It looks like it belongs in a museum for ancient household contraptions!’

  And he quickly pushed me ahead of him into the front room before Mum could respond.

  Needless to say the front room was a complete mess. There were paper cups everywhere, some empty and some with bits of drink still left in them. Sticky sweets and crisps were trodden into the polished wooden floor that I had once been so proud of. Thankfully nothing structural seemed to have been damaged. (I knew for a fact that the one crack in the windowpane had been there before the party.)

  The fairy lights were still up, so Lily and I started to take them down.

  ‘Yuck!’ Lily exclaimed as she stood on a sticky blob of chewing gum.

  ‘Maybe I should get the house professionally cleaned,’ Mum said with a frown as she watched us. ‘I don’t want to risk losing my job over this.’

  I remembered Leo saying Mum could lose her job because of what we’d done, but at the time I’d thought he was just sounding off. Plus he didn’t know anything about Mum’s boss Miranda. Hearing Mum say it made me think again. ‘But this isn’t your fault, Mum. Why would Miranda fire you?’

  Mum was looking at me like I was incredibly stupid. ‘Because you and Sean
are minors. I’m responsible for what you do. Even Leo agrees. And Miranda’s furious that I allowed this to happen.’

  ‘Mum, I’m so sorry,’ I blurted. ‘I didn’t think.’

  Mum scowled. ‘Well, that’s what Leo and I find hard to understand, Sasha. You always think. I mean, this is completely out of character for you! Sean … yes … I can believe he would do something like this and not give any thought to the consequences – and then be very sorry about it afterwards. But not you …’

  I felt my cheeks burning and my eyes prickling. I stared hard through the window at the cherry trees and tried not to cry. Mum completely ignored Sean’s huffy snort of indignation and looked at me as if she expected some sort of response.

  Lily gave a little cough. ‘Actually it was Raffy and me who persuaded Sasha to let us have the party here,’ she confessed.

  But Mum shook her head. ‘Sasha would never do anything she didn’t agree with just because you suggested it, Lily. No … I’m afraid there has to be more to it than that. Leo thinks Sasha is covering for Sean but –’

  Just then we heard new footsteps in the hall and a hesitant voice calling out, ‘Hey, is anyone in here?’

  ‘Raffy!’ I gasped, standing up and self-consciously smoothing down my top, which had ridden up slightly while I was crouching down.

  As he strolled into the room looking really cool and casual in jeans and a light blue sweatshirt, I could feel the familiar pink flush I always seemed to get in his presence start to creep up my face.

  ‘Mum and Dad sent me,’ he explained a bit sheepishly. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  Mum was looking thoughtful as she turned her gaze away from Raffy and on to me. In fact, scrub thoughtful … As I kept blushing furiously, Mum was staring at me as if a gigantic light bulb had just switched itself on inside her head.

  It was an hour or so later, while Lily and I were on our own cleaning up in the back sitting room, that Lily found the photograph. She was sweeping the floor when the bristles on her brush must have nudged it out slightly from its position stuck between two floorboards. Lily knelt down and carefully pinched the protruding corner of the photo between finger and thumb.

  ‘Look at this,’ she said as she pulled it out. ‘I guess it must have fallen out of an album or something when the house was being cleared. ‘Oh wow!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, isn’t that the dress you were wearing at the party?’

  ‘Let’s see …’ It certainly looked like the same dress, though because it was a black and white photograph it wasn’t possible to tell the colours. The young woman wearing it seemed to be in her twenties or early thirties. She was very small and dainty-looking with a tiny waist and shoulder-length wavy hair. A young man dressed in a smart suit was standing with his arm round her shoulders. He looked very tall compared to her.

  ‘There’s something written on the back,’ Lily said.

  I turned it over and saw some words scribbled in black pen: May 1955 – our engagement party.

  ‘I’m guessing this must be the old lady who lived here,’ I said. ‘I guess her son might want this photo. We should give it to Miranda.’

  Mum came into the room then. ‘Have you two nearly finished? Rafferty’s done cleaning in the bathroom and I’ve said he can go home.’

  ‘Mum, look what Lily just found stuck between the floorboards.’

  ‘Let me see.’ Mum took the photo and stared at it, shaking her head like she couldn’t believe it.

  ‘What is it, Mum?’

  ‘It’s just … well … this looks just like a picture I’ve got of my father when he was a young man. In fact I could swear this man is my father.’

  ‘Well, he can’t be, Mum,’ I said dismissively. ‘That’s got to be the old lady who used to live here because she’s wearing one of those dresses from the wardrobe upstairs.’

  But instead of letting it drop, Mum stared at the photograph for ages, shaking her head and looking really puzzled.

  The brilliant thing was, this photograph seemed to have distracted Mum from her anger with us. As soon as we got home she phoned Granny to tell her about it. But apparently Granny was very dismissive when Mum told her about the man in the photograph looking uncannily like our grandfather.

  ‘She was too dismissive,’ Mum told us when she got off the phone. ‘I just have this feeling that she knows something she’s not letting on. And when I think about it, she acted quite strangely when I showed her round Blossom House the other day …’

  ‘Mum, Granny always acts strangely,’ joked Sean.

  Mum gave him a sharp look. ‘I’d watch the smart mouth if I were you, young man. Don’t forget you are in serious trouble.’ She put the photo away in her bag and didn’t say any more about it.

  Normally I’d have been falling over myself to solve any potential mystery involving Blossom House – but right now I had some other things I needed to sort out first.

  Most importantly, I had to speak to Leo again about the party.

  ‘So you see the party really was my idea, not Sean’s,’ I told him that evening. ‘Sean thought it was a bad idea from the start and he even tried to talk me out of it, but I wouldn’t listen. I’m so sorry, Leo.’

  I knew Mum had already had a quiet word with Leo about how she thought I’d gone along with the whole party idea to impress Rafferty. Plus I was sure Leo must have told Mum what Sean had said earlier about my so-called ‘massive crush’ on him.

  I only hoped Leo didn’t want to talk to me directly about my feelings for my best friend’s brother, because I was pretty sure I’d die of embarrassment if he did.

  Leo nodded at me. ‘OK, Sasha. I’ll go and speak to Sean. But you’re both in a lot of trouble. You realise that?’

  I did. Plus I knew I still had to apologise for yelling at him so nastily when I’d left the house earlier.

  But before I could, he beat me to it.

  ‘Listen, Sasha … about this morning … I’m sorry if I overreacted a bit about what you were wearing.’ He paused. ‘The trouble is, even though I’m not officially part of this family yet … well, I guess I can’t help feeling a bit protective of you …’

  ‘Oh, that’s what Lily said!’ I blurted before I could stop myself. I must say, I felt rather touched by his admission, until I got a sudden image of being shut up in some tower like Rapunzel for the rest of my life, just so he could make sure I didn’t run off with any dodgy princes. ‘Still, there’s protective and overprotective,’ I pointed out firmly.

  ‘Oh, I know that, Sasha.’ He was struggling not to smile. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll try and get the balance right in future. Remember I’m new to this though. You might have to bear with me for a little while.’

  Mum came into the room then. ‘Listen, Sasha,’ she said briskly. ‘As a punishment for the party I’m stopping your allowance for the next couple of months – Sean’s too of course. I’m also taking away all your electronics, from both of you, for the next fortnight. That means no phones, no iPods, no Xbox and no using the laptop for anything other than schoolwork. And you can both write letters of apology to Miranda.’

  I nodded solemnly to show that I accepted the punishment. ‘Though it’s not really fair on Sean,’ I pointed out. ‘He’s got way more electronic stuff than me.’

  ‘Well, that’s too bad,’ Mum said impatiently. ‘And stop standing up for your brother all the time, Sasha! He can speak for himself, you know.’

  I suddenly wondered if some of what Leo had said while they were rowing that morning had affected her after all.

  As I left the room I heard Mum murmur, ‘She looks every bit the teenager in that get-up, doesn’t she?’ She let out a weary sigh. ‘If she’s anything like I was in my teens, it’s going to be buckle-your-seat-belts time in this house pretty soon.’

  I almost felt like going back to reassure her that no way was I going to be anything like her as a teenager. I’ve heard all the stories about Mum’s teenage years, and frankly I can’t imag
ine getting up to even half the stuff that she did.

  In the end though, I decided to let things be. After all, if Mum wanted to worry about me turning out to be just like her, then who was I to stop her?

  The next morning I was feeling very nervous about going back to school. I just knew everyone would be talking about the party. It was major gossip material, made worse by the fact that Leo was the one who had caught us. I couldn’t help thinking how lucky it was that it had only been Leo (without Mum) who had caught us at Blossom House on Saturday night. If Mum had been with him, there’d have been no way to prevent their big secret coming out. At least now we could pretend it was pure coincidence that Leo happened to be passing. And since no one at school (apart from Lily) knew the truth about them, there was no reason for anyone to suspect anything different.

  Leo left for school before us with strict instructions to both of us not to be late. Why, oh, why did we have to have Leo as our registration teacher this week of all weeks?

  As we ate breakfast, Sean suddenly clutched his stomach and complained that he felt sick. If you ask me, he was just feeling nervous too, though Mum immediately started flapping and telling him to get up to the bathroom because she didn’t want him throwing up all over the table. (He did that once when he was younger and Mum’s never forgotten it.)

  Since she didn’t go upstairs with him, Mum couldn’t really argue when he came down five minutes later and reported that he’d been sick in the loo. She told him to go to his room to rest and ignored my disbelieving face as she phoned the school to say he wouldn’t be in.

  And not for the first time I wished Mum wouldn’t be quite so amenable every time Sean decided that he needed the day off.

  The trouble started as I crossed the playground just after the bell had rung. Becky Addams, a Year Ten girl I hardly knew, came and stood in front of me. Her mates were quick to follow.

  ‘Hey, Sasha! Is it true your mum’s shacking up with Mr Anderson?’ she asked.