Page 9 of A Flash of Neon
She shouts that last part through to the kitchen, where Joel is sitting at the table. He gestures to his laptop and the pile of textbooks beside him. “Do I look like I have time for parties? I’ve got three assignments due next week, and I haven’t done the reading for two of them.”
“They’ll be fine, Liv.” Mutti picks up her coat from the end of the bannister and eases her arms into it. “And Carrie’s around if there are any emergencies.”
Joel joins us in the hallway. “Carrie willdefinitelyknow if there are any emergencies.”
A loud voice calls from outside. “I heard that!”
Our next-door neighbour Carrie is without a doubt one of the world’s nosiest people. It would be more annoying if she wasn’t so nice – she’s always coming over to our house with food or newspaper clippings about Mutti’s books, and she’s got a random and ridiculous story for every occasion. She’s sitting on her front step when we follow Mum and Mutti out to the car, a cup of tea in her hand and a book that is probably a cover for her eavesdropping in her lap.
“Is that you off to London, then, Monika?” she asks Mutti. “Sounds so fancy. You’re like literary royalty.”
Mutti wheels her suitcase down the garden path and laughs. “We’re staying in a two-star hotel and will probably eat Tesco meal deals all week, so not quite.”
“Still – London!” Carrie says dreamily. “Did I ever tell you I lived in a houseboat on the Thames one summer? With a painter from Tuscany and a goat named Sally.”
She launches into one of her stories, but this time I’m too nervous to listen. Upstairs, the curtains of my bedroom window twitch. My heart leaps, but luckily Mum and Mutti are too busy laughing at Carrie’s account of the time the Tuscan painter and the goat got stuck in the toilet together to notice anything. A moment later, the taxi pulls up by the pavement.
“Right! Be good, duckies.” Mutti still calls us that, even though I’m fourteen and Joel is nineteen. She gives me a tight hug before scurrying over to him. Mum does the same, then they load their suitcases into the boot and climb into the taxi. We all wave goodbye, Carrie raising her cup of tea into the air like she’s making a toast.
“Pop round whenever if you need anything, you two,” she tells us as the car slips out of view. “I’ve got Pilates on Monday and Wednesday evenings, and my friend has asked me to keep an eye on their bonsai collection while they’re shooting a film in Thailand. But apart from that I’ll be around all week.”
Carrie works from home, so she’s almost always in. That could make getting Neon in and out of the house without being spotted tricky, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes. I thank her, then race back upstairs to my room. Neon is crouching by my chest of drawers and rifling through my old notebooks and pens.
“Er, what are you doing?” I hurry over and shut the drawer – I’ve got some diaries from when I was eight or nine in there that I would rather die than let anyone see, even made-up people like Neon.
“Sorry, I got too curious.” He holds up a purple pencil case that I haven’t seen in forever. “Stuff is so much morerealhere. The colours are brighter and it feels different, and—”
“You have to be quiet! Joel is downstairs.”
I open my computer and turn on some music so that Joel can’t hear us talking, but that makes Neon bounce to his feet, shouting that he’s obsessed with this song. According to the story I made up about him, he loves singing, like me, and he also plays guitar and piano and a bunch of other instruments. I turn the music up and put a finger to my lips. Neon begins to lip-synch along to the song instead, but the floorboards creak with his enthusiastic dance moves.
“What are we going to do?” I run my hands over my face and sigh. “You can’t stay here until Saturday.”
“I think I sort of have to?” He smiles apologetically. “Reminder: youdidinvite me.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually – never mind.” I shake my head. “How about a hotel? There are a few B&Bs in town – you could try one of those.”
“No money, remember?” Neon pats the purple backpack lying on my bed. “Look. Empty. You should have imagined me as a millionaire.”
He laughs but that gives me an idea.
“Could I start now? Not necessarily a millionaire – but what if I imagined you had loads more money?”
“It doesn’t work now that I’m out of the Realm,” Neon says. “Back there, you could have made me the richest person in the world, or a dragon or a koala bear or whatever you fancied. Remember when you changed my birthday? That was quite confusing.”
Originally I’d decided on the middle of June for Neon’s birthday, but then I realised that would make him a Gemini. I’m Pisces, so I shifted it back a few weeks to make him a Cancer so we’d be more compatible as friends. It seems silly now – I don’t even really believe in star signs, but I figured that Neon would.
“What about your mum?” She flashes into my head as soon as I mention her – a tall, willowy hippy who I named Karma. “Can we get her to come here? She’d have some money, surely.”
Neon sits up and takes a turquoise pen from the pot on my desk. “Not possible. You never believed in my mom the way you started to believe in me, and she didn’t have loads of online followers who thought she was real. Besides, we don’t have any way to contact her there.”
I sink on to the bed beside him, out of ideas and out of energy. There’s a big part of me that wants to call my mums and get them to turn the taxi round, come home and sort this out for me, but I can’t. These events are a big deal for Mutti, and there’s no way they’d believe any of this anyway. Neon flops back, already at home in my space – the very space where I spent so long imagining him, talking to him, wishing he was real.
“Chill out, Laur. It’s only a week.” He twirls the pen in his fingers and grins. “How much could go wrong?”
With Neon here, my room feels more cramped than usual. Physically he’s not much bigger than me, but something about him takes up a lot of space. Maybe it’s the fact that he moves so much. He gets up and down from my bed a dozen times; he dances to the songs he likes and leaps across the room when he wants to look at something – and he wants to look ateverything. He goes through my books, the shoes shoved in the bottom of my cupboard, then stares at the photos of my family and friends pinned on the corkboard above my desk.
“You didn’t tell me you had a pet!” he says, pointing to a photo of nine-year-old me cuddling a beautiful cocker spaniel.
