Chapters (37)
- Cover
- Also by Jenny Valentine
- Dedication
- Novo
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- Novo
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- Novo
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
On the drive down, I’d had less than two hours of sleep, and no breakfast. The air-conditioning in the car had been broken since forever and the stereo was playing up. Mum said, “If it rains, we’re screwed,” because the windshield wipers were worn out and basically useless. She wasn’t even sure if the car was going to start, or keep it together long enough to get us there, so on top of not wanting to go, there was the stress of not knowing if we’d actually arrive.
“Yay,” I said. “Road trip.”
I can’t read in a moving car because it makes me want to throw up. In fact, it’s just about the only place on the planet where a good book does nothing for me, my own special version of hell. I’d dropped my phone the week before, third time in as many months, and it was properly smashed, no real hope of repair, tiny hidden cogs and chips exposed like so much guts, close to useless in terms of in-car entertainment. I’d tried wrapping it up with tape to hold all its innards together, and the camera still worked, on and off, but it was like looking at everything through a shattered glass eye and half the time it just froze and stared me out like it was annoyed with me, which it probably was. Mum said she wasn’t paying for another one because I was (quote) pathologically incapable of looking after it, and she was twenty-four hours a day losing her shit about money anyway, so, job done.
Out past the M25, I told her about my (about to be ex) friend Roma’s grandad telling us out of the blue that he’d been an extra in the original Star Wars. And about this film I’d seen online about how the advertising industry got inside everyone’s heads in the 1950s thanks to some pioneering PR guy who was related to Freud. And about a book I’d started reading about the history of the atmosphere. All perfect openers, in my opinion, and there was a time they’d have worked like a charm, but this wasn’t one of them. Mum wasn’t biting, so I got desperate and asked her who her favorite Simpson was. That’s when she breathed out through her mouth like a cross horse and told me to be quiet for just one minute if that was at all possible, so she could think.
Rude.