The Honeymoon Sisters by Gwyneth Rees Page A

and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when his first response was to laugh.
    ‘Oh dear …’ he spluttered, then pulled a straight face as he saw how close to tears I was. ‘Listen, if you like, I’ll get Sean to explain –’
    ‘Sean?’ I scoffed. ‘Don’t be stupid! He’ll be too busy rolling about laughing to explain anything.’
    ‘Not if he sees how upset you are.’
    ‘Sure … right .’
    ‘No, you’ll see. Sean likes you. He’s going to want to help. He’s only gone to the tuck shop … there he is now …’
    I felt myself flushing for absolutely no reason when Sean arrived and sat down on the wall beside us. He offered us his crisps and Josh took one.
    ‘Listen, Sean … you know that mate of Poppy’s with the big mouth – Anne-Marie? She’s dropped Poppy in it with Leo and I was thinking you could help sort it,’ Josh told him. (It was funny hearing Josh refer to our English teacher by his first name. He’s started to do that quite a bit when he’s with Sean.)
    ‘Josh, leave it. It doesn’t matter!’
    ‘Anne-Marie drew an embarrassing picture of Leo and he saw Poppy with it,’ Josh continued as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Now he thinks Poppy drew it.’
    ‘An embarrassing picture? Brilliant! Did it feature his enormous bum, by any chance?’ Sean was grinning.
    I felt my face getting even hotter. ‘Josh – I told you to leave it!’ I spat out angrily, jumping up to leave. But to my horror, before I could get away, I started to cry. (Sometimes when I’m really angry about something, it’slike my brain has gone bananas and the angry bit has got cross-wired with the upset bit or something.)
    ‘Hey!’ A hand reached out and grabbed my arm. At first I thought it was Josh, and I was about to shake him off when I saw that the hand belonged to Sean. ‘I’m sorry …’ he said. ‘I should stop going on about it, but it was just so cool what you said that time, that’s all … you see all the other girls at school were going on endlessly about how perfect he is … which makes you want to throw up after a while … and there you were saying … well … you know …’
    I stood facing him, trying to assess if he was winding me up. His eyes were pretty sincere.
    ‘Julia blew the whole thing way out of proportion,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I didn’t even say it the way she made out.’
    ‘Well, don’t worry, cos you haven’t given Leo a complex about his bum, if that’s what’s bothering you. He already knows he spends way too much time sitting on it reading books and that he needs to start cycling everywhere like Mr Christie if he wants to get a 5/5!’
    ‘Anne-Marie was the one who invented that stupid quiz – not me!’
    ‘I think he knows that, Poppy.’
    ‘But now he’s seen that horrible drawing Anne-Marie did and he thinks it’s mine –’
    ‘Don’t worry about that. I bet he already guessed who did it. He’s pretty smart about that kind of thing. But just in case, I promise I’ll tell him it was Anne-Marie. OK ?’
    ‘Could you?’ I asked hopefully. ‘But be careful cos I don’t want to get Anne-Marie into trouble and –’
    ‘You know what? You’re just like my sister!’ he interrupted me with a cheeky grin. ‘ She’s always worrying and overthinking everything too!’

Chapter Thirteen
    The next bit of trouble between Sadie and me started that afternoon when we got home from school. I’d had to explain to Anne-Marie why Sadie was living with us and I’d ended up telling her we were cousins. I had told her as few of the details as possible and asked her to keep it a secret, but Sadie was still furious because she said Anne-Marie would definitely blab and then it would be round the school in no time.
    ‘It doesn’t matter that much if they know, does it?’ I defended myself.
    ‘That’s easy for you to say!’ she huffed.
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
    ‘What do you think it means?’
    ‘Listen, she was asking me loads