Love, Peace and Chocolate (Pocket Money Puffin)

by Cathy Cassidy

  ‘Right. Like that song you were playing when I came in?’

  ‘That’s one I’m working on myself,’ Jack says. ‘It’s about a girl I really like … someone I once thought I’d get to know a bit better.’

  I swallow. ‘And didn’t you?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well, I guess you’ve got Kady now,’ I point out.

  ‘Yeah. I’ve got Kady.’ Jack stands up abruptly, slides his guitar into its case. ‘Look, I’m not really in the mood for practising today. Why don’t we just go?’

  So we do.

  We take the long way home, idling through the quiet streets, cutting through the park. Jack talks about Fallen Stars and his dreams of making it big some day. ‘I want to be somebody,’ he tells me. ‘You know?’

  ‘You are somebody, Jack.’

  He rewards me with a flash of that soft, lazy grin. ‘You always know how to make me feel good,’ he says, and my heart starts up its hammer-beat again, too fast, too scary. Is this how Kady feels when she’s close to him? Is this why she can’t give him up?

  ‘We’re working so hard to be ready in time for the Peace Festival,’ Jack continues. ‘It’s a brilliant opportunity. The press will be there, maybe even the TV. It could be our big break!’

  ‘Hope so,’ I tell him. ‘You deserve it.’

  A couple of little kids get off the swings up ahead of us, and Jack turns to me, grinning. ‘Shall we?’

  He grabs my hand and pulls me to the swings, and a voice in my head wonders what Kady would think about this, but Kady isn’t here right now and I am. Jack’s hand is wrapped around mine and it feels good. We jump on to the swings, kicking our legs, pushing ourselves upwards. My hair streams out behind me and I’m squealing, laughing, swinging higher and higher until I feel like I could fly.

  It’s Jack who does that, though, launching himself through the air in a great star-jump of gawky, black-clad limbs, laughing as he hits the grass and takes a bow to his imaginary audience.

  ‘C’mon!’ Jack shouts. ‘Don’t be a chicken! Jump, Jess! I’ll catch you!’

  I let myself slow, my legs dangling, and look down at Jack with his messy hair and his laughing eyes and his arms stretched out wide. And then I jump.

  I land in his arms, the place I’ve wanted to be all along. I stagger against him, and we take a couple of steps backwards, laughing, and then he pulls me tight and he’s kissing me, so softly, and I think my heart might just about burst with happiness.

  Then it’s over and I step back, blinking, frowning. ‘What about Kady?’ I say.

  Jack grins and stretches his arms out, trying to reel me in, like I’m a fish he just caught and doesn’t want to lose.

  ‘I haven’t made any promises to Kady,’ he says. ‘It was you I liked first, Jess, you know that, don’t you? It’s OK.’

  But it isn’t OK. If Jack liked me first, then how come he’s dating Kady? And if he’s dating Kady, how come he’s kissing me?

  ‘This is wrong,’ I whisper, and although my hands are shaking, I push him away. ‘I don’t want this.’

  ‘Jess, wait …’

  But I grab up my blazer and my rucksack and turn away from him, pulling out of his grasp when he tries to pull me back. He’s the coolest, the cutest, the best-looking boy I’ve ever seen, but he’s a boy who doesn’t believe in forever, a boy who doesn’t belong to me.

  ‘Well, your loss,’ Jack says, behind me. ‘No need to tell Kady, OK?’

  My loss? I guess it is.

  10

  kady, i need 2 talk 2 u about jack. he’s gonna hurt u. he’s not honest. i’m sorry we quarrelled & i wanna make it rite, ok?

  love, peace & chocolate,

  jess xx

  jess, i no u’re jealous but u can’t spoil this 4 me. jack & i r happy, so back off & leave us alone.

  kady

  It’s the first time ever Kady’s signed off a text without writing love, peace & chocolate. She must be really mad at me. It’s not like I thought she’d be jumping for joy – who wants to be told their boyfriend’s a loser? I just thought she’d agree to see me, hear me out.

  Looks like I was wrong.

  A football bounces past my feet, and Karl Williams runs over, scoops it up and kicks it back into the playground. He turns to me.

  ‘You OK?’ he asks.

  I nod, but I’m not OK, not really. Fat, salty tears leak from the corners of my eyes and roll down across my cheeks. Karl hands me a folded white handkerchief, surprisingly clean.

  ‘Wanna tell me?’ he asks.

  I shake my head, but Karl doesn’t go away. He just sits beside me on the wall, silent, comforting.

  ‘I’ve messed up,’ I tell him at last.

  ‘Is that all?’ he asks. ‘I’ve messed up more times than I can remember. You’ll survive.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I argue. ‘I’ve lost my best friend.’

  ‘Kady?’ he says. ‘How did that happen?’

  My face crumples and I have to hide behind the handkerchief.

  ‘Jack Somers?’ Karl guesses, and I nod. I wipe my eyes, blow my nose.

  ‘He’s not worth it,’ Karl says. ‘Really.’

  ‘How would you know?’ I snap, lashing out because I’m hurting so much. ‘How would you know how it feels to like someone who doesn’t like you back?’

  Karl shrugs and looks at me sadly. ‘I do, OK?’ he says. ‘I just do.’

  We sit in silence for a couple of minutes, and Karl takes a half-eaten Dairy Milk out of his blazer pocket and hands me a square. It helps, a bit.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say in a tiny voice. ‘About Jack Somers. He’s not as nice as everyone thinks he is.’

  ‘He’s hopeless,’ Karl agrees. ‘He has an ego the size of a football pitch, and he’s a born flirt. I’ve seen him in action – he was flirting with Miss Anderson the other day, and she has to be at least thirty!’

  ‘But what about Kady?’ I wail. ‘She thinks he’s Mr Perfect. She’s going to get hurt, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it!’

  ‘Sometimes people have to make their own mistakes,’ Karl says. ‘I know. I’ve made plenty!’

  ‘You mean I just have to back off and let her get on with it?’

  ‘Do you have another choice?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Karl shrugs. ‘It’ll all work out in the end. Things usually do.’

  He gets up and walks back towards the football game, then stops and turns, grinning. He throws the Dairy Milk bar through the air like a rounders ball, and I grab it, laughing.

  ‘Supplies for later,’ he tells me. ‘I think you may need it more than I do!’

  Walking into the meeting for the Parkway Peace Festival is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, even with Ellie, Jade and Lisa in tow. We sit down near the back, as far as we can get from Jack and Kady.

  Miss Anderson is running the meeting, and the festival, pretty much. She starts off by saying how important the event will be. The school has picked out four charities to support, all of which work for peace in some way or another. The charities will each run a stall at the festival, telling people what they do, how they work, why they are needed.

  ‘Our aim is to raise money for those charities,’ Miss Anderson tells us. ‘The more we can raise, the more they can do.’

  ‘We need the papers and the TV there,’ Jack says. ‘We’ve got the primary schools coming, but TV could get us to a much wider audience. People could pledge money to the charities, even after the festival is over. Or we could ask businesses to sponsor us.’

  Nobody points out that it’d also be great publicity for Fallen Stars. Am I the only one who can see what Jack’s after?

  Probably.

  ‘Good one, Jack,’ Miss Anderson nods. ‘It’s not just about publicity and raising money, though. We have to do more than that – we’re raising awareness, too! Why are we here? What are we doing this for?’

  There’s an awkward silence, and Karl Williams says s
omething about sheltering from the rain.

  ‘Funny, Karl,’ Miss Anderson says. ‘But I think we’re actually here because we believe in world peace.’

  ‘We want to put an end to poverty,’ Lisa calls out.

  ‘An end to racism,’ Kady pipes up.

  ‘An end to hunger,’ Mr Barrow suggests, which is funny, because he’s at least sixteen stone and can’t ever have been hungry in his life.

  ‘No more war!’ someone adds.

  ‘No more pollution!’

  ‘Equality for all!’

  ‘That’s right!’ Miss Anderson says. ‘Those are the things we want to change. How can we get people thinking about those things? How can we get them to care?’

  ‘Songs,’ Jack suggests from the front. ‘Fallen Stars are writing a new set especially for the festival.’

  ‘Excellent, Jack,’ Miss Anderson beams. ‘Music is a powerful media. There are lots of old songs we can use to put the message across, too.’

  ‘A real festival would have more than one band,’ Karl points out. ‘Why don’t we put posters up in case anyone else wants to do something?’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Miss Anderson agrees. ‘What else?’

  ‘What about asking the Home Economics department to do the food?’ suggests Jade. ‘We could have real festival food, veggie stuff, Indian stuff, fun stuff …’

  ‘Helium balloons,’ someone else says. ‘We could all write a wish for peace on to a balloon, then let them loose at the end.’

  ‘I like it!’ Miss Anderson grins. ‘A bit like Buddhist prayer flags, but with a modern twist!’

  ‘We could do prayer flags, too!’

  ‘How about planting snowdrop bulbs on the banking?’ Ellie chips in. ‘They’ll flower in the middle of winter, when everything else is dead. It’d be a message of hope – white for peace.’

  Once we get started, there are ideas flying all over the place, more ideas than anyone could ever use. Miss Anderson has already organized stilt-walkers and jugglers and mime artists from the local College of Performing Arts. A Year Seven says her mum will come and do hair-wraps, and someone’s big sister has volunteered to do henna tattoos.

  I’d love to chip in my ideas too, but I can’t risk doing that in front of Jack and Kady. Instead, I write them down and hand the slip of paper to Miss Anderson after the meeting is over.

  ‘Friendship bracelets?’ she reads. ‘A friendship chain? That’s wonderful, Jess. Friendship is kind of basic, isn’t it? Showing people we care. We couldn’t have a peace festival without putting friendship in there somewhere.’

  I just smile and nod and walk away. How come, if I know all the answers, I’ve managed to make such a mess of things? There’s just no answer to that.

  11

  The day of the Parkway Peace Festival finally rolls round, and it’s everything I imagined and more. The playing fields are littered with tents, marquees and endless rows of stalls, and at the far end a big stage has been set up with a huge, fluttering CND flag hanging behind it.

  Karl’s drumming workshop sends a rumble of thunder out across the site, and there’s an acoustic music tent and even a chill-out zone. Ellie and I spot Mr Barrow sprawled on a pink beanbag, listening to trance music.

  There are workshops for making maracas, shakers, aboriginal-style rainmakers, and crazy xylophones made from dangling wine bottles filled with different amounts of water. There are kids making sculptures from old twigs and pine cones, kites from snipped-up bin bags, masks from papier mâché.

  The art department have got everyone tie-dying squares of old white cotton every colour of the rainbow, then drying them in the sun and writing on a prayer. Parkway kids run around tying the squares on to twine, and finally a 300-metre run of prayer flags is hung around the perimeter of the playing fields.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Ellie says. ‘The wind catches up the prayers and takes them to where they’re needed – it’s an old Buddhist idea. Cool, huh?’

  ‘Cool.’

  Ellie and I are working as stewards, herding a bunch of kids from one of the seven primary schools that feed into Parkway all around the site. We take them to the drumming tent, the dance workshop, the face-painting stall, the friendship bracelet marquee. Ellie and I make bracelets and tie them on to each other’s wrists, like a promise.

  I make a bracelet for Kady, and slip it into my pocket. We haven’t spoken for five weeks – that’s a long time to be without your best friend. Jade and Lisa and Sian and Becca give me bracelets as well, and even Karl, and I realize that you can’t have too many friends, even if you haven’t got the one you really want.

  Once we’ve helped the primary kids make their friendship bracelets, Ellie and I take them round the stalls, let them sample the veggie food laid on by the HE department. They try out the circus skills tent, listen to the storyteller and write a wish in marker pen on to a white helium balloon, to be released at the end of the festival.

  I wish I was a ballerina, a kid in my group writes.

  I wish there was no hunger and no war and I was rich enough to drive a yellow Ferrari, another scrawls.

  Ellie writes something about an end to greed and war and racism. Me? I just wish I had my best friend back.

  Jack gets his wish, anyhow. The newspapers are out in force, and so is the local TV station, which films kids from our group balancing on unicycles, signing petitions to save the whale and make poverty history. They film the prayer flags being hung up, interview kids painting a rainbow on the wall of the bicycle shed, test out lanterns made from old baked bean cans and hats made from felted woolly jumpers.

  And when the music starts, the TV people are filming it all. There’s an all-girl band from Year Seven who think they’re Girls Aloud, a bunch of baby-goths from one of the primary schools who’ve painted their faces white with added spider webs and black lipstick. A couple of sixth-formers do an anti-war rap, and then some of the teachers show their age, dressing up in scary 70s flares to play covers of peace-protester musicians like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Donovan and other ancient hippy-dippy types.

  Then it’s time for Fallen Stars. Jack lopes on to the stage, Alex, Karl and Lucie close behind. They’re all wearing tight CND T-shirts and faded hipster jeans, and they look casual, careless and very, very cool. Jack runs up to the mike.

  ‘Thank you, everybody, for coming to the first ever Parkway Peace Festival!’ he shouts, and the audience erupts like they’ve been waiting for this all day. Maybe they have. Jack rips into his first number, a crashing anti-war song that has everybody on their feet in seconds. Even the littlest kids are waving their arms in the air.

  ‘He’s good,’ Ellie yells over the roar of the music.

  Yeah, he’s good – he’s Parkway’s very own rock star. When he looks out from under his raggedy fringe with those sparkly blue eyes, it feels like he’s singing just for me, but I know better now than to believe that’s true. Jack flirts with everybody – it’s just the way he is.

  Towards the end, the pace slows and Fallen Stars sing the song I heard Jack practising, about the girl with the faraway eyes. It’s the song I thought he’d written for me, the song that fooled me into thinking he cared, but now that I listen properly I can see it’s not about me at all. It’s about a girl with faraway eyes in a far-off, war-torn land, who looks back to a time before the fighting started, and forward into the future to a time when the land will be at peace.

  I was kidding myself all along.

  The audience are swaying now, bodies pressed together, arms stretched up towards the blue summer sky. The song ends, and Jack and Alex and Karl and Lucie run to the front of the stage, throwing handfuls of silver stuff out into the audience, and suddenly, all around us, little stars are falling, drifting down on to our hair, our clothes, our outstretched hands.

  12

  The audience is breaking up, clumps of kids of all ages heading back up to the stalls, the tents, eager to squeeze the last dregs of fun from the day. I want to find Kady. What�
�s the point of campaigning for peace, if I’m still fighting with my best friend?

  ‘Will you be OK with the kids for a little while?’ I ask Ellie. ‘I need to find Kady.’

  Ellie grins and tells me there’s no problem, and I watch her head towards the stalls, ten blissed-out, face-painted, peace-loving primary kids trailing along behind her.

  I turn the other way, head towards the stage, because wherever Jack is right now, that’s where Kady will be too. I take a deep breath in, finger the narrow friendship bracelet in my pocket, the one I made for Kady. I have no way of knowing whether she’ll take it. It’d serve me right if she threw it back in my face, but I’m hoping she won’t.

  If you want to make things right, say sorry, then a peace festival has to be as good a place as any to do it.

  Backstage, kids are packing up equipment, unplugging amps and speakers.

  ‘Has anyone seen Kady?’ I ask.

  ‘Think she’s back there with Jack,’ someone says.

  So I pick my way further on, stepping over abandoned guitar cases and overturned mike stands, until I’m right back in the wings. And there, tucked behind the rack of lurid hippy-style costumes the teachers were wearing earlier, I see Jack. He has his arms around a girl, but the girl isn’t Kady. It’s Lucie, the keyboard-player from the band.

  My instinct is to get out of there, and fast, but I back into the clothes rack and Jack looks up, right into my eyes.

  ‘You,’ he says, looking faintly hacked off.

  ‘I’m looking for Kady,’ I say. ‘But she’s not here, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Lucie says, smirking.

  ‘She was,’ Jack says regretfully. ‘She left in kind of a hurry.’

  ‘Kady saw you?’ I echo. ‘You and … her?’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ Jack sighs. ‘She was a bit upset.’

  Lucie hooks her arm around Jack. ‘It’s best that she knows,’ she whispers softly. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Jack looks embarrassed. ‘Maybe,’ he shrugs.

  I need fresh air. I turn and run out of the wings, down off the stage, away through the crowded, crazy festival that has invaded Parkway Community School. I push past jugglers, dodge around stilt-walkers, duck out of sight when Karl Williams waves at me through the crowd.