Chocolate Box Girls: Coco Caramel Read Online Free PDF Page A

late on a special sample order for some big
department store. It has to be finished and sent off by Special Delivery to arrive on
Monday, but apparently it will be worth all the hard work and long hours if they land
the contract.
    As soon as Mum has gone, Skye leans forward.
‘It’s not
you
I’m worrying about really, Coco,’ she
says in a whisper. ‘It’s Honey. I honestly thought she was trying harder
after the mix-up at the start of term when we thought she’d gone missing, and all
that stirring it with Shay. Well, it doesn’t look like it. My art teacher asked me
today when Honey would be back at school – she must have been skipping lessons. The
teachers seem to think she’s ill, so maybe she’s sent in a forged note or
something?’
    ‘No way!’ I gasp.
    ‘She gets the school bus with us every
day, the same asalways,’ Cherry says. ‘None of us had a
clue she was skiving!’
    ‘She may be on the bus, but she
obviously isn’t making it past the gates,’ Skye shrugs. ‘I know she
likes to hang around by the wall at the front before the bell goes, but it looks like
that’s as far as she’s getting. Wait till Mum finds out – she’ll go
nuts!’
    ‘She will,’ Summer says softly.
‘Mum has enough on her plate already, with the B&B and the chocolate business
and … well, stuff.’
    Nobody comments, but we all know that
Summer’s illness is the part of the ‘stuff’ that is bothering Mum just
now. A few months back, Summer put herself under so much pressure to succeed she just
about unravelled in the process. For a while it seemed like she was trying to starve
herself, and now she has to go to twice-weekly meetings at an eating-disorders clinic at
the hospital in Exeter.
    She had to give up her dance school place
and watch her friend Jodie take it instead. Summer still goes to ballet class in
Minehead, but she must think about the scholarship place she let slip through her
fingers. We don’t reallytalk about that and we don’t
mention her eating disorder either – we just tiptoe around her, scared to upset her,
scared to say something that might make her feel bad. Although she has put a little
weight back on, Summer is still fragile, brittle, with pale skin and blue shadows
beneath her beautiful eyes. You get the feeling that if you held her too hard she might
snap, crumble.
    Mum says that time is a great healer, that
we need to be patient and positive and kind, but I know that she worries about Summer –
we all do. The last thing any of us needs is for Honey to go off the rails again on top
of that.
    Summer frowns. ‘It’s like Honey
just can’t help it, you know? She tries to get her act together, but she
can’t keep it up …’
    I think that Honey can help it, actually.
Ever since Dad left a few years ago, my big sister has been lurching from one disaster
to the next. It’s kind of exhausting to live with, and these days my patience is
wearing thin.
    ‘D’you think we should keep
quiet about this?’ Skye asks. ‘Pretend we don’t know?
Or … should we tell? Not to get Honey into trouble, obviously,
but … well, to stopher from getting into more trouble than
she is in already, if that makes sense?’
    ‘We can’t,’ Summer says.
‘Sisters stick together, right?’
    I bite my lip. The family rule that we
don’t tell tales is unshakeable, but I can’t help wishing someone would
speak out about Honey. It’s no fun watching your big sister mess her life up.
    ‘Maybe we should tell?’ I
venture.
    ‘But … she’d never
forgive us,’ Summer points out.
    There’s a silence as we think about
the fallout if we did dare tell. More than once, Mum has threatened Honey with boarding
school, and this could just be the last straw. None of us wants to be responsible for
that.
    ‘The high school reports are out next
Wednesday,’ Cherry says. ‘I guess Charlotte will find out then. No use
stirring things up when we know it’s going to come out anyway,