The Other Side of Summer Read Online Free Page B

you needed to, or she’d help you not to feel so shy if you let her. You could tell her your secrets and most of all you could trust her. She made things better.
    She could be bossy, I suppose. Sometimes she used to snap at Dad if he was working too hard (which was often) or being boring (also, admittedly, often). If she had too much wine her temper could pop like a champagne cork. But honestly, that hardly ever happened.
    This shell of Mum was doing silent crying with her mouth open and one fist clenched at her heart. She was all the pain in the world and I felt numb, as if I was watching something too horrible for my brain to measure. I stared at the house on the paper and almostdidn’t notice her get up and squeeze my shoulder again as she left the room.
    Dad and I were alone. When I looked, I saw he had tears in his eyes. I felt us nudge closer to his plan.
    ‘To tell you the truth, I’m frightened for us, Summer. I want to take us somewhere new, better. I just want to protect us.’
    An uncomfortable pip stuck in my throat – the small, sharp-edged seed of the matter. If dads were frightened, what were the rest of us meant to do? I couldn’t promise him that things would get better if we stayed. What did I know?
    Softly, like the last bit of air in a balloon, I said, ‘Okay. We’ll go.’
    His face brightened and he wiped his tears. It was that easy. All I had to look like was ‘okay’, and all I had to say was ‘okay’.
    ‘You’ll love it, Summer.’ He came to sit right next to me. ‘I guarantee it.’
    The room was so clogged up with other people’s feelings that I couldn’t work out my own. But Dad’s plan was moving fast enough for things to go blurry and maybe that would feel better than the stiff, slow crawl of missing Floyd.
    ‘Look at the photo of the house again, Summer. Tell me what you like about it.’
    He needed me back on his side, didn’t he? ‘The welling tons,’ I said, with my jaw clenched.
    He nudged me playfully. ‘We say “gumboots” in Oz.’ Then he put his arms around me, front and back, like safety bars on a fairground ride. We looked at the house together and my stomach lurched. I tried to imagine what lay outside the edges of the photograph. What the street would look like. How hot the sun would feel. Which birds we’d hear in the mornings. I remembered a song we used to sing at Girl Guides, the one about a laughing kookaburra. Laughing didn’t feel right anymore.
    Floyd had always wanted to go to Australia; he would have loved this. Mum had always wanted to go, too. They’d had exactly the same sense of adventure. We’d talked about living there before, but I’d always thought it was just pretend, like the talks we’d had about getting a dog or taking a year off school and caravanning around the world.
    Maybe Dad was thinking that Mum would get better once we were far away …
    That was the thought that made me jump up and grab the phone as soon as it rang. It was Plan A calling.
    ‘Mal, don’t bother, it’s just me.’
    ‘Er … Hello … I mean, good evening . This is Jamila Everdeen from the Australian Department of Immigration –’
    ‘Mal, seriously, it’s too late.’ On another day I’d have laughed at her mashed-up name – Jamila after one of her favourite authors, Everdeen after her favourite book character. She was going to try to convince Dad that there was a problem with our passports, to buy us time.
    ‘Sorry, madam, I don’t know who “Mal” is. This is Jamila Everdeen . I wish to speak with Mr Doug Jackman, please.’
    ‘Mal, stop. I mean it. We have to give up now.’
    It felt like forever until she spoke again.
    ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you, Summer.’
    She kept talking, and the nicer she was to me, the more I felt my heart getting smaller and colder. A china doll’s tiny fist. Already I was forgetting how to talk to my best friend.
    We hadn’t even packed, but when I put the phone down, it was the end of