Going for Gold Read Online Free Page B

school?”
    I pulled a face. “I doubt he’ll show. The heat would muss up his hair!”
    Lola giggled. “That’s so mean!”
    Indigo was a v. posey boy Reuben and I met on our soul retrieval course. Reubs was convinced he fancied me.
    My friend couldn’t stop herself bopping to the beat. “Don’t you LOVE this band? If Reubs was here, he’d be up there jamming. Wouldn’t mind jamming with them myself…”
    “Go for it,” I told her.
    Lola looked torn. “You wouldn’t mind? It’d just be one song.”
    “Go!” I gave her a friendly push
    I watched her threading her way through the party goers. We’d been in Egypt five hours max, yet Lola felt confident enough to jump up on stage and strut her stuff with a bunch of foreign musicians. Everyone would love her. They always did.
    Here I was at the exact same party, totally alone. Suddenly I couldn’t bear to stay and watch.
    My flip-flops made pathetic slapping sounds as I hurried from the roof garden. Lola would look for me in the middle of her song and wonder where I’d gone.
    As I reached the bottom of the steps, a flicker of white lightning silently lit up the sky, followed by another. Must be a storm somewhere in the desert. I was shivering in my thin top but I stayed where I was, watching the dramatic cosmic light show. It felt like the storm and I were rushing to meet each other, like we’d been travelling towards each other forever.
    Are you willing to go for gold? Are you truly an angel - or was that just a beautiful dream?
    In just a few hours now I was going to find out.
     

Chapter Five
    Y ou were yelling, babe, are you OK?”
    I woke briefly to find Lola peering anxiously into my face, then got sucked down into a new dream where Sky was getting v. excited about her new job.
    “I’m working on a really special perfume counter,” she kept telling me. “Can you believe I get to make the perfumes myself!”
    Next thing I heard someone calling my name. I sat up with a gasp, but the voice must have been in my dream. Lola was still sound asleep, one bare brown foot sticking out from under the sheet.
    With that strangely familiar voice still ringing in my ears, I softly opened the door on to the balcony and went out. It was so early, the palm trees looked like pencil sketches waiting to be coloured in.
    Someone came sauntering into my line of vision, talking on her phone. “Yeah, finally! No, not yet. OK, baby cakes, I’ll let you know how it goes. Call you later, byee!”
    I was practically hanging off the balcony. Not only did this angel girl have my style of talking, she even had my daffy giggle. It sounds vain, but I was mad-keen to know if she looked like me too. Don’t they say everyone has a cosmic double?
    The fuzzy pre-dawn light made it hard to see her properly, as she wandered off through the garden in the direction of the river.
    I remember how her trainers left dark furrows in the dew.
    At no point had she looked up, yet all the time I was watching I had the strangest feeling, like she totally knew I was there.
    Thirty minutes later, I was trailing my arm over the side of a stylish white jeep enjoying the cool rush of air.
    Lola and I were squashed in the back seat with two angel girls called Yoko and Tegan. Yoko’s boyfriend was up front with Maryam. The other trainees were following in the tour bus with the delayed celestial college kids.
    Lola hadn’t said anything about me leaving the party. I’d asked her if she had a good time. She said fabulous, thanks. End of conversation.
    We passed a cluster of flat-roofed houses surrounded by a patchwork of tiny fields. Men and women were at work in the early morning cool, throwing bundles of straw into a cart. Except for a satellite dish on the side of one of the houses, it could have been any time in the last thousand years.
    Yoko and Tegan said they’d been having weird dreams all night long. Maryam said it was probably the local vibes. Apparently Egypt was well-known for giving you a