Hold Your Breath Read online

  Melodie was at the centre of a group Tara privately called the Gossip Girls, because they seemed to think they’d just walked off the set of some shiny American TV programme. Some of them even had ratty little handbag dogs. She tried to keep out of their way. An air of meanness hung about them, as strong as their perfume. She didn’t want to give them an excuse to pick on her.

  Tara’s step slowed now as the argument increased in volume. Melodie’s hand snapped up so fast it was almost a blur. The boy put his hand to his cheek, said something quietly with a vicious expression and stalked away in the other direction, hands in his pockets and head slung low.

  Melodie Stone fumbled in her handbag and produced a pack of cigarettes. With a shaking hand she lit one up and inhaled deeply. She spotted Tara then and fixed her with a dead-eyed look.

  ‘Er, are you okay?’ said Tara uncertainly.

  Melodie barked a sudden harsh laugh that made Tara flinch.

  ‘Yeah, I’m completely brilliant,’ she said, blowing smoke sideways out of her mouth. ‘And it’s none of your business anyway. Why don’t you get lost?’

  ‘Pardon me for breathing!’ said Tara, turning back the other way. ‘I’m sorry I asked.’

  Rattled and hot, she headed home.

  Sammie looked up at his mistress anxiously as she marched along, picking up on her irritation. Tara wished she’d turned back before Melodie had seen her. She’d probably have it in for her on Monday morning because Tara had witnessed her stupid row with her idiot boyfriend. It was all she needed right now.

  But that was one problem Tara didn’t have to deal with.

  Because when she went to school again on Monday, Melodie Stone was gone.

  CHAPTER 2

  NORMAL

  The first she knew about it was when she spotted Jada Morgan from her class huddled with her cronies in a way that transmitted ‘drama’. Jada was snivelling loudly but Tara noted she didn’t have a red nose or piggy eyes like normal people got from crying. She held perfectly French-manicured fingers under her brimming eyelids, catching the jewels of her tears before they damaged her foundation.

  ‘But why didn’t she just tell us?’ wailed Jada. This seemed to be the tipping point for another girl, Amber, who started to sob.

  ‘All I got was this!’ Jada held up her pink BlackBerry. She wiggled it from side to side like it would talk.

  ‘Lemme see again,’ said Karis Jones, taking the phone and studying the message.

  Tara took her time finding her PE kit in her locker. It was hard not be curious.

  ‘Babes,’ read Karis in a slow, serious tone. ‘Gotta go away. Love U all. Kisses to my girls.’

  Jada’s sobbing went up a notch.

  ‘I’m going to miss her, so, so much,’ said Chloe Simmons, a girl with big moist eyes and long hair she constantly chewed.

  Tara yanked out the PE kit and walked past the huddle in the corridor. She accidentally caught the eye of Karis, who glared at her, but Tara had to fight back a smirk.

  Today was definitely looking up.

  Variations of the same conversation buzzed around her all day like static.

  ‘Have you heard? Melodie Stone has left.’

  ‘What, just like that?’

  ‘Yeah, just like that.’

  Their form tutor made an announcement at registration saying that Melodie had had a family issue to deal with and would be living with relatives in Brighton for the foreseeable future.

  This prompted more hysteria from Jada.

  Mrs Linley rolled her eyes in irritation. ‘Try and contain your grief a little, please, Jada,’ she said, prompting disgusted tuts from the rest of the Gossip Girls who snaked thin, bangled arms around their quivering friend.

  The whole thing was a bit strange, Tara thought. People didn’t usually just up and disappear in the middle of term. Although . . . that was exactly what Tara had done at her old school. But that was a unique circumstance.

  She wondered if the scene she’d witnessed with lover boy under the bridge had been him trying to persuade her not to go. But who cared, really? She couldn’t say she was going to be missing Melodie Stone.

  As far as Tara was concerned, it was good riddance.

  The end of the day came around and Tara hung back in her English class, hoping to avoid the crush in the corridors as everyone shoved and jockeyed to get to their lockers. She always hated that part of the day, when plans bounced like shuttlecocks around her head. ‘See you later at blah-blah,’ and ‘Everyone’s going, it’ll be great!’

  Tara was never going and none of them ever saw her later.

  She felt someone’s gaze and looked up to see her English teacher, Mr Ford, watching her.

  ‘Everything all right, Tara?’ he said.

  ‘Um, fine thanks.’ She quickly gathered up the rest of her stuff and hurried out into the corridor. It was still heaving so she went to the girls’ loos and locked herself in the least undesirable cubicle for a while to kill some more time. She played with her mobile and, despite herself, wished she hadn’t deleted all Jay’s messages.

  After a while she emerged into the corridor, which was surprisingly empty. She hunkered down to decant some books into her locker, wishing as always that it wasn’t so awkwardly placed. Arriving late in the school year meant she had to put up with one of the rubbish lower lockers. Melodie’s had been head height – perfectly placed. Of course. She was that sort of girl, the one who always managed to get the advantage. Her locker was just above Tara’s. Many times, Tara’d had to wait for Miss-Loves-Herself to finish up before she could get near her own. She swore Melodie sometimes took ages on purpose.

  She glanced up at the locker now.

  A nervous feeling suddenly fluttered in her stomach for no reason at all, followed by a rapid drumbeat in her chest. That was weird. What was making her feel like this?

  Everything around Melodie’s locker seemed oddly in shadow, as though at the periphery of Tara’s vision. She was suddenly seized by an overwhelming urge to look in Melodie’s locker, which was ridiculous. No, she didn’t want to at all. But she felt that she needed to somehow. It made absolutely no sense. But she had to do it all the same.

  Tara licked her lips. Her mouth had gone desert dry. She looked around the corridor. A cleaner was sloshing a mop about at the far end, headphones on, eyes cast down. No one was looking at her. No one would know.

  She looked at the locker again. It wasn’t open, of course, but these lockers were the same kind as at her old school and, if there was no padlock, easy to open. A boy called Alexi had showed her how to open them with a hairgrip in Year Seven when hers had got jammed. On autopilot, she fumbled in her pocket. Her long black hair was in a ponytail today and she had no hairgrips. She remembered the compass in her pencil case. Hurriedly getting it out, she pushed the sharp tip into the keyhole and jiggled it a little, feeling something give.

  She looked around again. A couple of Sixth Formers who were laughing at something on a mobile phone walked towards her. She waited until they passed, pretending to adjust her earring. Then, when she was sure no one was watching, she gently pushed the door open with a cautious finger. She didn’t know why she was doing this. It was definitely weird behaviour. And ‘weird’ was a place that she, Tara Murray, was trying to leave behind. But still she looked.

  There was nothing much to see though. The inside of the door held a poster of an actor from a gruesome vampire show on telly, all shirtless and glistening with oil. A body spray lay on its side and its musky aroma clung to the space. It reminded Tara instantly of Melodie and, for a second, the sensation that she was close by was so strong that Tara swung round to look behind her. But no one was there. She turned back to the locker. A single pink sweet had melted against the metal wall. Some sort of paper was wedged at the back, all bunched up. Tara tentatively poked her hand inside and reached for it, giving it a pull to free it from where it was trapped by the metal casing.

  A strip of photo booth pictures showed Melod
ie, her hair piled on top of her head, messy but attractively arranged. She was with an older boy with a small dark beard and a wolfish expression. The first three pictures showed Melodie laughing and sticking her head close to the camera or making faces, the boy in the background smiling indulgently. The final picture showed him with his face buried in Melodie’s neck, kissing her while she looked at the camera with a cat-got-the-cream expression.

  Suddenly feeling stalkerish and pervy, Tara dropped the photo. There was something else in the locker . . . a tiny silver earring shaped like a treble clef. She picked it up and ran her thumb over the smooth metal. The spicy body spray aroma became stronger now and then something else took over: the artificial strawberry smell of the melted sweet clung to the insides of her nostrils, cloying, choking. The interior of the locker went dark and then Tara was all nerve endings. Smells, colour, tastes all battered her and intricate patterns swam before her eyes. Staggering backwards, she barely felt the sharp corner of the locker door scraping the soft flesh of her inner arm. She stumbled until she felt the wall and she sat heavily on a bench, hands over her eyes. The jumbled pictures and white noise started to clear into an image in her mind. And then it was blindingly detailed, like a screen where Tara could see every individual pixel.

  A gloomy room. A single lightbulb swaying above her. A rotten, dank smell. Hard to . . . breathe . . . I’m scared . . .

  ‘Tara?’

  A blinding white light seared across her vision and then cleared to reveal the craggy, concerned face of Mr Ford, peering down at her.

  ‘What’s wrong? Are you ill?’

  ‘No!’ Tara’s voice came out thin and small as she struggled to her feet. ‘I’m all right . . . Oh.’ Something warm hit the skin of her upper foot. She looked down. Blood plopped from her arm and trickled down her foot in a crimson rivulet.

  ‘You’re evidently not all right, young lady! You’re bleeding!’ Mr Ford took her gently by the other arm and passed her a large cotton handkerchief, which she pressed against the cut. ‘Now come with me to the medical room.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘No buts!’

  Tara let herself be led down the corridor, through the fire doors at the end, and up two floors to the medical room. The nurse/secretary had gone for the day, so Mr Ford busied himself with antiseptic wipes and plasters on a roll while Tara meekly waited, wishing she didn’t feel so sick and that the throbbing in her head would stop.

  He expertly cleaned and bandaged her arm. She managed to avoid meeting his eye throughout the whole process, although he was close enough for her to smell coffee on his breath.

  ‘There,’ he said after a little while. ‘That should do it.’

  She looked up and met his kind hazel eyes.

  ‘Want to tell me what happened?’ he said.

  Tara’s head whisked a fast ‘no’. ‘Nothing happened,’ she said quietly. ‘I just stumbled against my locker.’ For a second she held her breath, convinced he would reply, ‘But it wasn’t your locker, was it?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Okay, well, you’d better be off home then,’ said Mr Ford. ‘But if you need to talk then I’m —’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Tara said, relief blooming inside. ‘Really. Thanks for sorting my arm out.’

  She got up and hurried down the corridor. She could feel Mr Ford’s gaze all the way to the main doors.

  As soon as Tara got out of the school gates, she stopped and looked down at her opened fingers. The tiny treble clef was still there, squashed into her sweaty palm. She should have dropped it when she had the chance. Looking at the earring made her throat constrict and spots dance in front of her eyes. Tara looked around for a bin but there wasn’t anywhere she could put it. It felt wrong to throw it on the ground. Sighing shakily, she stuffed it into the very furthest corner of the messenger bag she used for school.

  Tara headed for the river to walk home. It was longer that way but she needed to clear her head before Mum saw her and sensed something was up.

  The warm day had become muggy now and tiny flies floated in clouds around her head. Tara’s thoughts raced and flitted like the flies as she tried to take slow breaths and work out what had just happened.

  The cold terror. The choking sense of panic. The desperate need to be found before something awful happened. For a few moments she’d been absolutely certain – as certain as her own name was Tara Elizabeth Murray – that Melodie Stone was in some kind of terrible danger.

  There was only one time she’d felt like that before.

  When Tyler Evans went missing.

  But she’d been so wrong then. Horribly, disastrously wrong. She’d thought she was helping, and because of her a life was wasted.

  Tara bit her lip and squeezed her hands into her eyes, making the world a kaleidoscope when she pulled them away.

  Her insides lurched at the memory of her parents’ faces. The way they’d avoided her eyes for days and said things like, ‘Let’s just try to forget all about this.’

  But she knew she would never forget.

  Tara tried to push the memories of February away. This wasn’t going to happen. Melodie Stone had gone to live in Brighton. She was perfectly all right. It was nothing to do with Tara, and anyway, Tara’s ‘visions’ weren’t even to be trusted, not when it came to people.

  She couldn’t – wouldn’t – put herself through that again.

  She was going to be normal.

  It didn’t seem a lot to ask. She wasn’t asking for fantastic hair or to be the most popular person in the school.

  She just wanted to be normal.

  CHAPTER 3

  SHINY

  Tara was watching morning television, her empty cereal bowl on the coffee table in front of her. She’d slept better than she expected to, and there had been no bad dreams. What had happened yesterday nagged at her now she was up though. It was taking all her mental energy to focus on the feature about fake tans on the telly. She looked at her phone, which was lying on the coffee table. Someone from an unknown number had tried to call her yesterday evening. Probably a wrong number, she thought.

  Beck thumped down next to her and simultaneously crossed his legs on the table, his four slices of toast nearly skidding off his plate. His big, pale feet were almost obscuring the television. Tara smacked his leg.

  ‘Urgh,’ she said. ‘Move your horrible hairy toes out of the way. I can’t see.’

  Beck lifted a leg so his foot dominated the screen and she shrieked and battered his leg with ineffectual slaps.

  ‘Mum!’ she yelled. ‘Will you tell this hairy idiot to just stop!’

  Mum came into the room, putting in one of her earrings.

  ‘Stop, hairy idiot,’ she deadpanned. ‘Tara, it’s time to go anyway. Come on.’

  Tara got up and Beck instantly stretched along the sofa, thin white ankles and feet hanging off the end. Tara shot him a disgusted look and he grinned and folded a whole piece of toast into his mouth at once.

  ‘God, you’re foul,’ she said and picked up her school bag, suppressing a tiny smile at the same time. ‘How you ever got a girlfriend is one of life’s mysteries.’

  Beck just grinned again and reached for the remote control.

  He was really called Jack, but Tara had called him Beck when she was a toddler and it had stuck. He seemed to sail through life in a way Tara deeply envied. She didn’t sail. She felt as though she constantly got snagged on sharp things, like a kite caught in the branches of a tree.

  Today was one of Mum’s working days, so she gave Tara a lift into school. Her mother had a frightening ability to know when something was wrong, so Tara tried to think of a topic of conversation to head her off at the pass. But she wasn’t quite fast enough.

  ‘Are you all right, Tabs?’ said Mum, using the pet name she’d used since Tara was tiny. ‘Only you didn’t eat much of your dinner last night.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ said Tara, flicking a bright smile and then looking straight ahead a
gain.

  ‘Really, really?’ said Mum.

  ‘Really, really.’

  The car slowed and she felt her mum’s glance grazing her cheek. She kept her face turned the other way.

  ‘Is everything going okay at school?’

  Tara sighed, inwardly. ‘Yeah, it’s all good,’ she said.

  ‘I know it’s not easy settling into a new school,’ continued Mum, ‘but it’ll come, you’ll see.’

  Her mother’s soft, kind voice had the most annoying effect of making tears burn her eyes. She nodded briskly and grunted. When the car stopped at the side of the road, she got out without saying goodbye. She knew Mum would be hurt, but if she told her about last night and how, for a few horrible moments, she had been convinced that Melodie Stone was lost somehow and in danger, it would have sent her mother into the stratosphere with worry.

  All the same, it didn’t seem fair she should have to deal with this . . . whatever it was . . . alone.

  The thing that really sucked was that Tara’s freaky ‘trick’ used to make people happy. Lost your keys? Ask Tara. Can’t find where you left your wallet? Ask Tara.

  It had started on the way back from a big shopping centre when Tara was two and a half. Tara had heard the story so many times, she fancied now that she remembered it all herself. As they’d driven home, Dad had noticed that his watch wasn’t on his wrist. It was an expensive diving watch, which had been a special gift from his parents years before, and the strap had needed adjusting because one of the links was loose.

  He had been trying on suits for an upcoming wedding in lots of different shops while Mum had taken Tara and Beck to get new shoes and ice creams. The shopping centre was huge and the watch worth a lot of money, so Dad was worried it was gone for good. They’d rushed back and Dad had started to ring the shops he’d visited but nothing had been handed in.

  Tara had been whiney all the way home, repeating something over and over again and becoming increasingly agitated. She went into a full meltdown in the house and, finally, Mum realised she was trying to say something.