Chapter 20
Out there she’s just a zero,
Observed. Judged. Promptly erased.
In here she’s always the hero,
Understood. Respected. Embraced.
—CC
Edinburgh, Scotland
I am Comet Caldwell.
And I sort of, kind of, absolutely hate my name.
People expect something extraordinary of a girl called Comet. Someone effortlessly cool and magnetic. Someone who lights up a room and draws attention the way a comet does when it blazes light and fire across the sky.
But a comet, when you break it down, is the opposite.
It’s an icy body that releases gas and dust.
Comets are basically great big dirty snowballs. Or, as some scientists have taken to calling them, snowy dirtballs.
Yup. A snowy dirtball. That makes more sense.
I was not a blaze of light and fire across the sky. I was just your average sixteen-year-old high school girl. An average sixteen-year-old who was spending the last day of summer uploading her latest attempt at poetry to her anonymous blog. The one with the comments turned off so I wouldn’t be subjected to public opinion and ridicule. “The Day We Caught the Train” by Ocean Colour Scene blared out of my laptop as I worked. I had a thing for nineties and early noughties indie music.
My phone vibrated. I ignored it, making sure the typesetting on my latest post was just right. Because that’s what I really cared about. The typesetting. Not the poem. Or that people would stumble across my blog and scorn the words torn from my beating heart.
The buzzing started up again and I sighed in irritation.
Vicki Calling.
As one of my two best friends, Vicki didn’t deserve to be ignored. I put my music on mute and picked up. “I hope you know you’re interrupting Liam and I, but keep it on the down low. Miley doesn’t know about our secret love.”
Vicki gave a huff of laughter. “Babe, I’ll take it to the grave.”
“So what’s up?”
“What’s up is Steph and I have been standing outside your house for the last ten minutes, ringing your doorbell. We can hear the music you dug out of a time capsule and Kyle has peered out the window at us and shooed us away twice.”
Kyle was my dad. Although I thought of him as Dad in my head, I never actually called him Dad. My parents had taught me to call them Carrie and Kyle from the moment I could make vowel sounds.
Of course my dad had waved my friends away. Because answering the door for people who weren’t there to see him would be too much like hard work.
I hopped off my bed, hurried out of my room and down the hall to the front door. As I swung it open, I was blasted by the familiar scent of the salty sea beyond our garden gate along with a rush of cool wind. I hung up my phone.
Vicki eyed my outfit carefully and then decided. “Nice.”
To say I had a quirky taste in fashion was putting it mildly. I was currently wearing a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar underneath a preppy lilac cardigan. Very 1950s. I’d matched it with a turquoise multilayered silk petticoat, and a pair of Irregular Choice Victorian ankle boots. They were lilac and instead of laces they were adorned with turquoise satin ribbons tied into large bows.
Steph stared at Vicki as if to say, Are you serious? and then she gave me a pained smile. “Dude, surely Carrie notices you in that outfit?”
I chose not to be insulted.
Steph was petite with an enviable bra size and a butt that actually filled out her River Island jeans. She wore her long honey-blond hair in carefully arranged loose curls, and her makeup was always perfect. Fashion-wise she mostly wore on-trend clothes from the more expensive stores in the shopping center but dipped into high-end designer when her lawyer dad felt like spoiling her.
Right now she was wearing skinny jeans with purposely placed rips in them, knee-high brown leather boots with a low heel and a Ralph Lauren bomber jacket.
Unlike Steph, Vicki, the wannabe fashion designer, appreciated my attempt to be different. Although to be fair it wasn’t really an attempt on my part. Or even an attempt to get Carrie to notice me—I didn’t think it was anyway. I just wore whatever jumped out at me from my wardrobe that day.
Plus, 195 days out of the year, I had to wear a school uniform. The days when I didn’t, you bet your ass I was going to have fun with my outfits.
Wearing an oversize thin cream sweater with an angled hem, paired with bright green leggings with skulls on them, Vicki was more adventurous, like me. But she was naturally cool. This was a girl who could pull off the name Comet. She wore loosely laced black leather biker boots, large gold hoops in her ears and a bright green suede crossover body purse. Her tawny skin was flawless, so Vicki didn’t wear as much makeup as Steph, whose pale white skin tended to blemish.
