PROLOGUE
TEN YEARS AGO
I might have felt this nervous before – heart racing, my stomach twisted up in knots – but right then I couldn’t remember it.
This was one of those nights that I would surely never forget. Given that my prom date was my twin brother, my hopes perhaps shouldn’t have been that high. But then again, his best friend Elliot Ollerton was arriving any minute, and that had the potential to change everything.
‘Jessie, come on!’ Isaac, my brother, called up the stairs. It was all right for him; all he’d had to do was put on a suit and rub some gel through his hair. My preparation for this evening had started a month ago, with trying on every party dress in Meadowhall. The shopping centre was in Sheffield, a decent drive away, but it was a rite of passage for every sixth form girl in Brooksby Academy. I wondered how many of them had thought about Elliot Ollerton the whole time.
I wasn’t the only one who’d dreamed about being his date tonight. Having joined our school at the start of A levels, Elliot had not quite lost the frisson of interest that a city boy arriving at a village school stirs up. It helped, of course, that he was affable and at ease with himself. He was the fastest cross-country runner in the county, and had floppy blond hair and a smile that flipped hearts upside down.
What I lacked in terms of looks or any of the other, as yet mysterious, elements that caught a popular boy’s attention, I made up for by being Isaac’s twin. With the three of us catching the school bus from Houghton, an even more boring village than Brooksby, twice a day we spent twenty glorious minutes discussing everything from our English coursework to the likelihood of our driving instructor being an alien.
Tucked away inside my tender teenage heart, I knew that Elliot liked me. We were interested in the same things – social justice and mysterious crime stories. We would discuss food preferences until Isaac begged us to change the subject. Once, when he was playing Xbox with Isaac, I made him laugh so hard he snorted lemonade out of his nose.
What I had no clue about was whether he liked me just as a friend. Or, even worse, his best friend’s sister who, Isaac had made clear, was completely Out of Bounds to any of his mates (I did point out that this only left people he didn’t like as potential boyfriends, but his solution to that was I stay single).
But when Elliot looked at me, eyes crinkling with humour, or his forehead furrowed with concentration as we debated an issue, I couldn’t help wondering if he felt the same as me. Which was utter infatuation. I was about as in love with Elliot Ollerton as a seventeen-year-old living in a tiny village who’d never been kissed can be in love.
So, as I inspected myself in the mirror for one last time, I knew that if this was going to be like the movies, I had to look right. So perfect that Elliot suddenly saw, not his friend’s perpetually disorganised and amusing sister, but the Woman of His Dreams. As I adjusted the ice blue, floor-length dress, I felt a flutter of hope that it might be enough.
‘Finally!’ Isaac took one look at my hand gripping the banister and adjusted his tone. ‘Hey, you look good though, sis. I like the… sparkly bits.’
‘You’ve managed to look not quite so ugly yourself, for once.’ Isaac and I shared the same black hair and pale grey eyes, with a smattering of tiny freckles. While his open features and bold bone structure had created a face that earned almost as many Valentine’s Day DMs as Elliot, on me they prompted grandparents to declare me ‘handsome’. And had earned me one Valentine’s Day card to date. Which I suspected was from my dad.
‘Come on then. Elliot’s waiting.’
To everyone’s surprise, Isaac had decided to go with me to the prom. As he’d patiently explained to our parents, he’d rather spend the evening with his mates than hanging about with a random girl pretending she was special. I was thrilled, as that meant we’d be going with Elliot. Rather than choosing the unimaginative (and expensive) option of hiring a limo or a tractor (this was the countryside; a lot of kids chugged to prom on farm machinery) Isaac had hired a tandem bike to cycle the mile and a half to the venue. When I pointed out that I wasn’t spending a fortune on a dress only to arrive sweaty and dishevelled after cycling up the hill to the Houghton Country Club, he invited Elliot to ride tandem and added a kid’s bike trailer on the back for me.
‘Hey.’ Elliot was attempting to prop the bike against a tree when Isaac and I stepped out onto the front path of our tiny terrace. He gave Isaac a complicated fist-bump then turned to look at me, where I was still hovering nervously half-way down the path.
And I mean, helookedat me. At my stubbornly messy hair tamed into a sleek twist for once, a few artful tendrils curled around flaming cheeks. Mum had insisted on doing my make-up and I don’t know what kind of spell she weaved with that smoky eyeliner wand, but it had worked.
‘Wow.’ Elliot’s eyebrows disappeared beneath his floppy fringe. For a second he appeared genuinely stunned, and my heart thumped so hard I was surprised the beading on my bodice didn’t ping off. ‘You look… I mean, you always look…’ He stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. ‘Jess, you look beautiful.’
Before I could remember how to speak, Isaac had flung an arm around Elliot’s neck and dragged him towards the tiny square of grass that made up our front garden. ‘Photos, before Mum starts crying again.’
We did the obligatory poses while my parents cooed and clucked and made embarrassing comments about what they’d got up to at their school prom. Standing there, in between two of the people I loved most in the whole world, it felt as though all my dreams were about to come true.
For the next few hours I sailed along on a cloud of awestruck happiness. Once we’d safely locked the bike up, Elliot had waited for Isaac to go and say hello to another group of friends, then turned to me, face serious.
‘I’m counting on you to protect me tonight.’ He swivelled his eyes towards a group of girls loitering a few metres away, and gave a brief shudder.
‘So I’m a shield to ward off all your admirers?’ I folded my arms. ‘I’m not sure how I feel about that. I thought we’d genuinely bonded over cheese and ketchup paninis. Now I find out you only want to hang out with me as a decoy date so Macy MacDonald won’t jump you.’
‘Come on, Jessie. You know that’s not the only reason.’
The stomach fluttering started up again.
‘There’s Gabby Stephens and Serena Curtis… that girl with the weird eyebrows…’
I swiped him with my clutch bag just as Isaac strolled back over. ‘What’s this?’ His eyes narrowed suspiciously.
‘Elliot’s freaking out about being sexually harassed. He’s begging me to be his bodyguard.’
Isaac scowled. ‘My sister is not guarding anyone’s body this evening. Least of all yours.’
I bit back the retort that I’d do whatever I damn well liked, instead ducking my eyes to hide my frustration.
