Planet Joy by Jenny Valentine

Author:Jenny Valentine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2022-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I already knew that Phoebe Dark would have a long list of things to say she was good at. At break time, she was sitting on her own under the big oak tree. The rest of the playground was like Mumbai central train station, loud and colourful and frantically dashing this way and that.

I did not need a reminder from Mum or anyone else about how it felt to be new here, and a bit different, so I ducked under the oak’s low branches, the same way Benny once did for me.

‘Hi, Phoebe,’ I said.

Phoebe Dark had her eyes closed.

‘It’s Joy.’

She opened them, grey as thunderclouds, and looked at me with something halfway between patience and fury. ‘I know who you are,’ she said. ‘Where’s the other one?’

‘The other one?’

‘The boy. The one you’re always with.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Benny? He’s playing football.’

‘Right.’

Phoebe Dark blinked very slowly, the way Grandad’s cat, Buster, does when he is just about tolerating you and doesn’t want you to forget it.

‘It’s nice under here, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Nice and peaceful.’

‘Very.’

She didn’t look peaceful; she looked annoyed.

‘What are you up to?’ I said.

Phoebe Dark’s sigh was long and slow and exasperated, a bit like one of Mrs Hunter’s. ‘I am trying to think.’

‘What about?’

She smoothed her hair down and put her hands in her lap. They looked like two sleeping doves. She didn’t answer my question.

‘Do you need something?’ she said.

‘No. I just thought you could do with a friend,’ I said, and Phoebe Dark’s eyes got even darker, like two thunderclouds filling up with rain. Her dove hands flew at me the way Claude’s do when I am a fly she wants to swat and a buzzing she wants to silence.

‘Honestly, what I could do with,’ Phoebe said, ‘is some silence.’

‘Really?’ I said, but Phoebe Dark had finished talking to me. She closed her eyes again and sat as still as the trunk of the tree. Not even her eyelids flickered. And the annoying buzzy fly that was me backed away.

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