Love from Lexie

by Cathy Cassidy

  Contents

  Prologue

  1: How It All Began

  2: The Rescuer

  3: Meeting Mary Shelley

  4: The Misfits

  5: Poster Girl

  6: The Group

  7: The Lost & Found

  8: I’m With the Band

  9: The Leaping Llama

  10: Left Behind

  11: Band Practice

  12: Books and Dreams

  13: A Plan

  14: A Date

  15: Greystones

  16: Off the Rails

  17: In the Artist’s Studio

  18: Marley Brings Flowers

  19: A Long-Lost Legend

  20: Going Places

  21: Famous for Fifteen Minutes

  22: Something Special

  23: Library Love

  24: Train of Thought

  25: Half-Term

  26: Time Flies

  27: Cutting It Fine

  28: The Lost Boy

  29: New Day

  30: Pirates

  31: Hold On

  32: Afterwards

  Acknowledgements

  Read More

  Hiya!

  It’s so exciting to be at the start of a brand-new series. The Lost & Found is all about a bunch of misfit friends who find themselves at the start of a very exciting journey! Love From Lexie tells us how it all begins … It’s a story of friendship, first kisses and long-lost family, with a little library love mixed in for good measure. Lexie is such a cool character – she tries very hard to keep everyone else happy, but she’s carrying her own painful secret inside. Not everything that’s lost can be found again … and sometimes the things you’re looking for turn out to be a lot closer than you think!

  I hope you like Lexie’s story. I’ve fallen in love with the Lost & Found kids and I can’t wait to share stories from more of the characters as the series unfolds! Take time out to curl up and fall into a whole new world with Lexie and the Lost & Found!

  Books by Cathy Cassidy

  The Chocolate Box Girls

  CHERRY CRUSH

  MARSHMALLOW SKYE

  SUMMER’S DREAM

  COCO CARAMEL

  SWEET HONEY

  FORTUNE COOKIE

  LIFE IS SWEET

  BITTERSWEET: SHAY’S STORY

  CHOCOLATES AND FLOWERS: ALFIE’S STORY

  HOPES AND DREAMS: JODIE’S STORY

  MOON AND STARS: FINCH’S STORY

  SNOWFLAKES AND WISHES: LAWRIE’S STORY

  THE CHOCOLATE BOX SECRETS

  ANGEL CAKE

  BROKEN HEART CLUB

  DIZZY

  DRIFTWOOD

  INDIGO BLUE

  GINGERSNAPS

  LOOKING-GLASS GIRL

  LUCKY STAR

  SCARLETT

  SUNDAE GIRL

  LETTERS TO CATHY

  For younger readers

  SHINE ON, DAIZY STAR

  DAIZY STAR AND THE PINK GUITAR

  STRIKE A POSE, DAIZY STAR

  DAIZY STAR, OOH LA LA!

  The little girl is curled up on a second-hand sofa, snuggled in a handmade rainbow-striped jumper, her dark hair braided with bright cotton threads, an upturned library book at her feet. She is alone, hugging a knitted toy dog and watching Frozen.

  Sometimes she pads into the kitchen to look at the clock on the wall. Sometimes she goes to the window and presses her cheek against the glass, looking up at the clear blue sky and then down to the pavement ten floors below.

  She peels back the foil from a half-eaten Easter egg and nibbles it absently. When the movie finishes she goes to check the clock once more, then returns to the window. The pavement glitters with broken glass and broken dreams, and when her eyes blur with tears she wipes them fiercely away with her sleeve.

  She stays there, watching, waiting, until it gets dark.

  1

  How It All Began

  Have you ever been lost? I have.

  In a supermarket when I was a toddler; at a funfair, briefly, aged four or five; on a day trip to Glasgow when I was seven, in the crowds on Buchanan Street. Each time, I was scared, panicked. Each time, my mum found me, wiped my tears, hugged me tight, took my hand and made it all better.

  I thought that was just the way things were, the way things always would be. If you were lost, your mum would find you and make things better. I took it for granted.

  I didn’t realize back then that not everything that gets lost can be found again.

  I was nine years old when it happened, and I wish I could say I’d seen it coming, but I really didn’t … I didn’t have a clue. For starters, we didn’t live a regular kind of life. We moved around a lot.

  For a while we lived in a flat in Edinburgh, then a farmhouse in the Scottish borders, a cottage by the sea, and once, for a whole summer, in a bell tent.

  We ended up in a high-rise block of flats on a Midlands estate, which was probably the worst place of all … but we were happy. Well, I thought we were.

  The lifts smelled of sick and the pavements were starred with broken glass, but at last we had a proper flat with a TV and everything. There was no garden, but Mum said the sky belonged to us. We were on the tenth floor, so there was plenty of it.

  ‘We could spread our wings and fly, Lexie,’ she told me a few months after we moved in. ‘Go anywhere! London, Brighton, the south of France … You pick!’

  ‘We could stay here,’ I said uncertainly, but Mum said that was boring. She took my hands and danced me around the flat, laughing, but after a while I pulled away, pressed my nose against the windowpane and watched my breath blur and mist the glass. It was the Easter break and the sky was unexpectedly blue, spread out before me like a promise. I was weary of the moves by then, weary of endless new starts in new schools with new best friends who were never going to be forever friends.

  ‘I’m not a staying-in-one-place kind of person!’ Mum said.

  ‘I think I might be,’ I told her.

  She ruffled my hair and told me not to be so silly, but she seemed anxious, doubtful. ‘There’s a whole wide world out there to explore,’ she said, as if trying to convince herself. ‘We’ll get out there, the two of us, find new adventures! We’ll find ourselves!’

  I frowned. ‘But … we’re not lost,’ I said.

  ‘We are, Lexie,’ Mum replied, and her eyes went all sad and faraway. ‘We are.’

  The next day Mum had an interview in town.

  ‘I won’t be too long,’ she told me. ‘A few hours at most – I might pop to the shops on my way back. You can watch a DVD while I’m gone.’

  I slid Frozen into the DVD player and snuggled up on the sofa while Mum scribbled a shopping list on the back of an envelope. Bread, milk, chocolate spread, it said.

  ‘I’ll be back before it’s finished,’ she said, nodding towards the TV, and I barely looked up, just waved, my eyes still on the screen.

  Mum went out just after 2 p.m. and she didn’t come back.

  2

  The Rescuer

  That nine-year-old kid, the girl I used to be … she’s just a distant memory now. She was brave and funny and fearless … but the thirteen-year-old me? Not so much. I fell to pieces and put myself together again, but things aren’t quite the same.

  Maybe I didn’t get the pieces in the right places, because when I look in the mirror I see a girl I just don’t recognize. If Mum came back, would she know me? It’s a thought that worries me sometimes.

  My mirror shows a pale-faced girl with brown eyes and freckles, her dark hair chopped into a short, angular bob. She smiles a lot, but her eyes are sad. Nobody has knitted her a rainbow-striped jumper for a very long time; nobody ever thinks of braiding her hair with cotton threads.
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br />   These days I live with foster parents called Mandy and Jon in a tree-lined street three miles away from the Skylark Estate. It’s a nicer part of town, near the park, but I’d go back to the estate in a heartbeat if it meant having Mum back again.

  I’m not sure that that will ever happen, but I will never give up hope. I’m grateful to Mandy and Jon, I really am, but they are strictly temporary.

  ‘Of course, we don’t know how long “temporary” will be,’ Mandy had pointed out at the start. ‘I know you don’t want to be here, but how about we make your room feel more homey, more like yours? Pick out some bits and pieces?’

  The bits and pieces I picked weren’t quite what Mandy and Jon were expecting. I like to find the things that other people have lost, the stuff that they don’t want any more – I like to keep it safe in case someone needs it.

  My bed is draped in a charity-shop patchwork quilt; Mandy helped me to repair the holes, but I often wonder about the person who made that quilt. What was her story, and how did something made with so much love end up in a box with pink nylon curtains and a price tag of £2.99?

  I found a red formica table in a skip at the end of the road, a wobbly chair that Jon had to treat for woodworm before I was allowed to paint it red with white polka dots, a bookcase I’d spotted at the tip. Most of the books on it come from charity shops or the library. A tambourine with ribbons and bells, an old felt beret with a vintage poodle brooch on it … they’re all things that I’ve collected.

  Once I found a box of old Ordnance Survey maps on the pavement outside a charity shop. The man in the shop told me to take them, that people had no use for maps in the age of satnav and Google Earth. I opened out the maps, studied the contour lines, traced a finger along rivers and coastlines. I tried to imagine what the places would look like: Mousehole, Prestwick, Polperro, Pontypridd … hundreds of towns and villages I’d never heard of. Mandy and Jon helped me to paste some of the maps up over the bedroom walls, a jigsaw of faraway places.

  It’s the perfect wallpaper for a girl who still has nightmares about getting lost. On those nights, I lie awake in the dark and wonder if Mum might have found her way to one of those faraway towns or villages and somehow forgotten to come home.

  I had to switch primary schools when I moved in with Mandy and Jon, and though I didn’t think I had the heart for building new friendships, I changed my mind when I met Happiness Akebe. She was a tiny, waif-like girl in an old-fashioned pinafore dress that hung down past her knees, and she was the only person there who looked more lost than I did.

  ‘Call me Happi,’ she said, holding out a hand for me to shake as if we were sharing a dorm in some posh 1920s boarding school and not just a slightly manic Year Five classroom.

  ‘Are you?’ I questioned her, fascinated. ‘Happy?’

  ‘I think I am,’ she said with a grin, and her whole face lit up.

  We were odd friends back then – the sad kid whose mum had abandoned her and the bright-eyed Nigerian girl whose dad was a super-strict church elder – but we understood each other somehow.

  I knew I needed Happi in my life. I was still crying in my sleep, waking up every morning with a damp pillow and an empty heart. Sometimes there were nightmares, visions of what might have happened to Mum; sometimes there were dreams of times gone by, and they were sadder still.

  Mandy and Jon never complained if I woke up yelling or crying. They never made a fuss; they just worked around it, made allowances. Mandy would come in and sit with me, stroke my hair, whisper soft words, offer hugs. I never accepted those hugs; it felt like a kind of disloyalty to Mum, somehow.

  At first, I struggled to fit in. I was used to being an only child, and Mandy and Jon had three other ‘looked after’ kids. There were two irritating little boys called Wayne and Brandon who were always yelling and fighting, and Bex, a terrifying twelve-year-old force of nature who decided to take me under her wing.

  ‘What are you here for?’ she demanded, that first day in foster. ‘What’s up with your parents? Drugs? Violence? Neglect?’

  I blinked, terrified. ‘I’ve lost my mum,’ I tried to explain.

  Bex looked exasperated. She was eating an apple, munching through the crisp, white flesh with a careless precision that fascinated me. Even then she was an impressive five feet ten inches of lean, pre-teen awesomeness, with turquoise-blue hair and a nose ring made of Indian silver. Her pink patent Doc Marten boots looked like they could crush any kind of snarky comment underfoot – maybe even crush you, if you weren’t careful.

  ‘Lost how?’ she wanted to know. ‘People don’t just vanish. Did she die? Run away? Bang her head and lose her memory?’

  ‘I … I don’t think so,’ I whispered. ‘She just … went out one day and didn’t come back. My social worker says they’ve reported her missing, but so far the police can’t trace her.’

  ‘Probably just wanted to be shot of you,’ Brandon said with a smirk.

  ‘Shut up, loser!’ Bex snapped.

  She chucked her apple core at his head, and it skimmed his ear, leaving a red mark and a smear of apple-juice slime. Brandon went off to Mandy to complain, wiping away tears of fury.

  ‘You really don’t know why she went away?’ Bex asked. ‘There was no warning, no trigger?’

  Had there been? I’d thought about it a lot. Was it because I was boring? Because I didn’t want to spread my wings and fly, stick a pin in the map and choose a new place to live? These were the worries that poisoned my dreams – that it had been my fault. I’d learned to keep those thoughts to myself, though.

  ‘Nothing I can think of,’ I lied. ‘Mum’s a bit of a free spirit, but I don’t think she’d deliberately leave me.’

  Bex frowned. ‘A mystery,’ she declared. ‘That’s probably the worst possible thing, right? At least I know that I’m in care because my stepdad gets nasty when he’s drunk and my mum is too useless to throw him out. And I can be a pain, sometimes. I like running away. Wayne and Brandon’s mum just can’t cope because she’s got a new baby, what with the pair of them being horrible little yobs and all. No, your case is different, Lexie … a mystery. That must suck.’

  I remember nodding, keen to hang on to any sympathy Bex might have going spare. I remember watching as her expression brightened, her eyes sparking with mischief.

  ‘We’ll turn detective!’ she announced. ‘Look for clues, unravel it all. Like Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick, Watson!’

  I could tell right away that Bex was going to be Sherlock and I was going to be Watson, but so what? Anything that might throw up a few clues about what had happened to Mum had to be worth a try.

  ‘OK,’ I told her. ‘What do we have to do?’

  Bex grinned. ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ she said.

  3

  Meeting Mary Shelley

  The posters were everywhere, stuck on lamp posts, trees, fences, taped up in steamy shop windows. I was nine years old and there was nobody in the world more lost than me, but I stopped in my tracks and studied the posters. A lost tortoise from the student house along the road … a tortoise called Mary Shelley.

  ‘This will be a perfect test case,’ Bex told me. ‘First we find the tortoise, then we find your mum!’

  She took me to the local library, bigger and brighter than the one on the Skylark Estate I used to go to with Mum. The librarian, Miss Walker, was young and friendly, with candy-pink hair and polka-dot vintage dresses that swished as she moved. Bex told me that the missing tortoise Mary Shelley was named after an author of the same name – her book, Frankenstein, was about a mad scientist who made a monster from broken, leftover bits of people. I liked the idea of that – I was in the process of trying to put myself back together, after all.

  I borrowed the book. The librarian told me to be careful in case it gave me nightmares, and I laughed … as if I didn’t have nightmares every single night anyhow.

  We borrowed a book on how to be a detective too, and on the way home we bought cheap
notebooks from the corner shop and wrote the details from the poster inside. We found new cases – a lost scarf, a pair of mislaid school shoes that lit up when you walked, a stolen chocolate bar.

  That last one was the only case we actually solved. The chocolate bar was mine – I’d left it on my bed and came back upstairs to find it gone. Brandon had brown smears all round his mouth and very sticky fingers, but by the time we found Mandy he’d wiped his face and swallowed the evidence.

  Then, before I could find out if I had a talent for detective work, my social worker, Josie, stepped in and put a stop to it.

  ‘Don’t you think that some of these things might just be … well, lost?’ she asked me, holding out the notebook. ‘Tortoises do wander off. People lose things.’

  ‘Lost things can be found,’ I replied, stubbornly.

  Josie raised an eyebrow. ‘Is this what the letters are about?’ she asked, and my cheeks burned because I didn’t think anyone knew about the letters.

  ‘What letters?’ I bluffed, but I knew I’d been found out.

  Josie sighed. ‘The letters you’ve been sending to the flat where we found you,’ she said. ‘The place you used to live. Letters addressed to your mum. I understand why you might want to do that, but, Lexie … be realistic. If your mum comes back, she’ll find you … but new people live at the flat now, and they’re not happy about the letters.’

  I blinked back tears. Why couldn’t I send letters to the flat? How else was Mum supposed to know where I was when she came back? I’d promised to wait for her, and I had, right up until social services had taken me away.

  ‘Lexie?’

  My shoulders slumped. ‘Whatever. I won’t send any more letters to the flat.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Josie said. ‘And we’re all a bit worried about this detective thing … It’s not healthy, Lexie.’

  I can still remember the injustice of it. It hadn’t even been my idea, but I was being punished for it. Not fair.

  ‘Things have been hard for you,’ Josie was saying. ‘But the letters aren’t helping. And all this detective stuff won’t bring your mum back, you know that, Lexie, don’t you? It’s time to let go of the past.’