Earth and Fire Read Online Free Page B

swearing, and reluctantly turned to face Cathan. I didn’t know if
this was pure bad luck, or if he’d been hanging round here waiting for us, but
either way he had a stupid smile on his face as he admired the sight of me
dressed up like a vid star.
    “Thanks,” I
muttered. “I’m on my way to my room so …”
    He took a step
closer and interrupted eagerly. “Why don’t we go out this evening, Jarra? Just
the two of us.”
    “No!” I held up
a hand to stop him. “We aren’t going anywhere, Cathan.”
    “Oh, come on,
Jarra. I know we had a fight, but that didn’t mean anything. Everyone has the
odd fight when they’re boy and girling.”
    “I said no!”
    I saw his face
take on its habitual sulky expression and groaned. Going to Europe Off-world had
been pretty nardle, but nothing like as stupid as the mistake I made when I
agreed to boy and girl with Cathan. I’d suffered two months of his whining before
I gave up and dumped him. That was back at the start of March, and it was June
now, but Cathan still hadn’t accepted things were over. I explained it to him
for the thousandth time.
    “Cathan, we
aren’t boy and girling any longer. There is no we. There is no us. We’re not
going anywhere together.”
    “So why did you
get all dressed up if it isn’t for me?” The sulky expression turned into
suspicion. “Who are you seeing?”
    I considered pretending
I was seeing someone else, but decided it would only make life more complicated.
“No one.”
    “In which case,
we should …”
    “Cathan, stop
it! Whether there’s anyone else or not doesn’t matter. Things are over between
us. I don’t want a clingy boyfriend who grumbles if I want a few minutes alone
or a private chat with Issette.”
    He was back to
pure sulks again. “I’m not clingy!”
    “Not clingy?” I
stared at him in disbelief. “How can you say you’re not clingy? You wanted me
to act like a human hover bag, spending my life trailing round after you. You
don’t think the three concentric spheres of humanity are centred on Earth, you
think they’re centred on you!”
    I shook my head
in despair and stalked off towards my room. Issette giggled and chased after
me, with Cathan bringing up the rear. I was planning to go into my room and slam
the door in Cathan’s face, but when I got there I couldn’t. The Principal of
our Next Step was standing outside it!
    I stopped,
Issette bumped into me, and Cathan’s voice broke off in mid-complaint. I had a
sick moment of panic, wondering how the chaos the Principal had found out about
my trip to Europe Off-world, and whether Issette was in trouble too, before I
saw the woman had her saccharine professional smile on her face. That smile
slowly changed into a puzzled frown as she looked at me.
    “You’re looking very
well-groomed today, Jarra.”
    “I thought I’d try
dressing up as an experiment,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s really me.”
    She swapped back
into the professional smile mode. “Well, it’s lucky the three of you arrived
just now. Since you weren’t in your rooms, I was going to call you.”
    She’d been going
to call us? What about? I waited nervously for more clues rather than risk
saying anything that might incriminate me.
    “I’m doing my
mid-year monitoring checks a couple of weeks early because of my holiday plans,”
she continued. “I notice you haven’t seen your ProDad recently, Jarra.”
    I relaxed. The
Principal raised the ProDad issue with me every time she did her monitoring
checks. Hospital Earth allocated each of its wards two ProParents, who you were
supposed to see for two hours each week. My ProMum, Candace, was great, but I’d
fallen out with my ProDad so we avoided each other as much as possible. Three
years ago, I’d worked out and memorized a sentence that would stop the
Principal from forcing us to meet. I recited it now.
    “As I am approaching
adult womanhood, I feel my parental needs at this time are more adequately