Chocolate Box Girls: Bittersweet Read Online Free PDF

she’d find out some time …’
    I glare at Honey. ‘Yeah, I should have known. Like I should have known you’d stir things up, make it look a million times worse than itactually was. Thanks a bunch.’
    As I grab my rucksack and head to lessons, Honey shrugs and picks up the half-eaten Twix, taking another bite and wiping the chocolate from her mouth with a grin.
    My life sucks, it’s official. My mates Luke and Chris tell me I must be mad to go messing around with Honey again, and when I tell them I really wasn’t, they smirk, disbelieving, and tell me Cherry’s way too good for a Romeo like me. Skye and Summer, Honey’s younger sisters, ambush me in the corridor at lunchtime, demanding to know why Cherry’s so upset.
    ‘What have you done to her?’ Skye demands, furious. ‘Every time I ask, she just starts crying again! There’s a rumour going round that you kissed Honey in the school canteen, and if that’s true I think I might have to strangle you.’
    ‘It’s not true,’ I huff.
    ‘You’re not welcome in our house any more,’ Summer chips in. ‘You cheated on Honey last summer and ditched her for Cherry – now you’ve dumped Cherry! What’s wrong with you, Shay? Do you enjoy hurting people?’
    ‘I haven’t – what? Of course I don’t!’
    But the twins turn tail and are gone.
    I scrape through the day, flunking a maths test,spilling ink all over my pencil sketch in art, breaking a guitar string in music. Yesterday’s gossip about my possible contract with Wrecked Rekords has been replaced with a twisted story of how I’m way too full of myself these days and how I think Cherry’s not good enough for me now.
    It makes me sick.
    I want to talk to Cherry, but her friends form a wall round her, warning me off. I try texting, until Cherry’s friend Kira tells me to stop, that Cherry’s deleted all my messages and blocked my number.
    ‘Give up,’ Kira tells me. ‘Haven’t you caused enough trouble?’
    ‘It’s all a mistake,’ I argue. ‘If I could just talk to Cherry, explain …’
    ‘Take the hint,’ Kira says. ‘It’s over.’
    I make it to the end of the school day, then have to endure the bus journey home. Surprise, surprise, Cherry is not saving me a seat; she is guarded by her friends who glare at me as I mooch past, looking for somewhere to sit. Luke and Chris both live in town, so they’re not around for moral support. Summer and Skye and their friends give me the cold shoulder; Alfie, who’s been hanging out with us all though the holidays and has just started dating Summer, shrugs awkwardly, mouthing an apology, turning away as I pass.
    ‘There’s a spare seat here, Shay,’ Honey callsfrom the back, and everyone watches to see what I’ll do.
    I am pretty sure they’d lynch me if I took that seat, so in the end I squash in beside Anthony, a quiet loner-kid from the village, who is known as a maths and computer whizz. His hair is greasy and still cropped into a little-boy bowl-cut, his shirt is greyish and un-ironed and his school trousers flap an inch above his ankles. Anthony doesn’t notice things like that, but he notices my misfortune all right.
    ‘Hear you’ve blown it with Cherry,’ he says brightly. ‘Too bad.’
    ‘It’s a glitch,’ I say. ‘A misunderstanding. Trust me, it’ll all be sorted by this time tomorrow.’
    ‘How?’ Anthony asks reasonably. ‘As far as I can see she wants nothing to do with you.’
    ‘I’ll email,’ I say confidently. ‘Or send her a message on chat, or on her SpiderWeb page.’
    ‘Don’t think so,’ Anthony says. ‘This afternoon she was asking me how to block people on email and chat and defriend them on SpiderWeb.’
    ‘She wouldn’t do that!’ I argue. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’
    Anthony smiles. ‘I know a lot about computers. If I wanted to, I could probably show you how to get past Cherry’s security settings … it’d cost you, mind. But that still doesn’t mean she’d read