Prologue

It’s a Friday afternoon in late July, the summer after Year Six, and Andie and I are scrabbling about in the drizzle, wrestling with the canvas of the big old bell tent and giggling too much to actually get anywhere. Ryan from next door comes over to put up his little pop-up one-man tent and we drag him in to help, but that makes things worse because Andie is too busy flirting to take much notice of ropes and canvas. In the end Ryan goes home and Andie’s dad has to untangle the mess and help us put the tent up properly.

It’s Andie’s eleventh birthday, and we’ve planned a sleepover party, a garden camp-out for the Heart Club. It’s also a bit of a farewell thing, because Tasha and her family are moving to France in ten days time and Hasmita will be going to a different secondary school after the holidays. Tomorrow Andie and her family are going to Scotland for a week’s holiday, so even if Tasha’s family are still here by the time she gets back, it could be the last time we all get together properly. I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach at the idea of us being parted.

We all know that things are changing, and none of us like it.

‘It’s got to be a sleepover to remember, Eden!’ Andie says, peering out at me from under her anorak hood. ‘It’s got to be special!’

‘It will be.’ I promise, because our sleepovers always are and who cares if the TV says this is the wettest summer we’ve had in forty years? A bit of rain can’t stop the Heart Club from having fun. We spread bright rugs, pillows and blankets inside the bell tent, hang battery-powered fairy lights around the inside, make raggedy bunting to liven up the inside of the tent by tying endless strips of bright fabric scraps on to the strings of fairy light. They look beautiful, in a frayed and slightly frantic way.

‘OK,’ Andie declares at last. ‘It’s my birthday, and I reckon we’ve earned cake. C’mon, Eden, let’s go get ready – the others will be here soon!’

We head for Andie’s bedroom, a tiny boxroom painted sunshine yellow and papered with boy-band posters and bright, manga style paintings she’s done herself. Andie’s mum is saving the birthday cake for later when Hasmita, Tasha and Ryan arrive for the sleepover, but she’s given us jam tarts and cheese on toast, and Andie ramps the music up to full volume to get us in the mood.

‘I think I’m in love,’ Andie says, throwing her arms wide. ‘Ryan Kelly. Who knew?’

‘Isn’t it a bit awkward falling in love with one of your best friends?’ I ask.

‘It’s awesome, because we’ve known each other forever,’ she says. ‘We already love each other in a friend-ish way, I just have to get Ryan to see I’m not just the girl-next-door. Imagine … all this time and I’ve only just noticed how cute he is!’

I smile, but I know my ears have gone pink and I hope Andie doesn’t notice.

‘Tonight could be the night,’ Andie sighs. ‘He might say something – make a move. Or maybe I will! What d’you think?’

‘Cool … why not?’ I say, even though it’s not cool and I can think of a million reasons why not. It doesn’t matter, though; I don’t think Andie will do anything more than flutter her eyelashes at Ryan. She’s eleven; she’s not ready for romance yet – any more than I am.

For me, friendship comes first anyway; I think it always will.

I reach into my sleepover rucksack, pull out a little parcel wrapped in gold tissue paper and tied with red raffia, and hold it out to Andie.

‘Just wanted to give you this before the others get here,’ I say, grinning. ‘Happy birthday, Andie!’

‘Oooh! What is it? It’s tiny … but heavy!’

She peels the tissue paper back and lifts out a little silver heart pendant, the kind that breaks in two so that two best friends can share. Her face lights up with glee, and she holds one half of the heart pendant out to me.

‘Wow! I’ve always wanted one of these!’ she exclaims. ‘Thank you. A friendship locket, right? One half for me and one for you, because you are the best, best friend ever, Eden Banks. I love you loads, and I’ll always be there for you, promise!’

I believe her. Andie has always been there for me, even through this past year. My parents split up, and I don’t think I could have got through it without Andie’s support.

‘Any word from your dad?’ she asks, as if reading my mind.

‘Nothing,’ I tell her. ‘I think he’s forgotten me.’

‘Oh, Eden,’ Andie says. ‘As if anyone could ever do that!’

She puts on her half of the heart pendant while I put on mine, and then she flings her arms around me and hugs me tight, laughing, and I can smell the vanilla scent of her shower gel all mixed up with the aroma of strawberry jam and cheese on toast.

‘I love my pressie,’ she tells me. ‘I’m going to wear it always. Awww … tonight is going to be epic!’

Epic is one word for the camp-out, I guess. By midnight, the rain is sheeting down and the bell tent is full of puddles; Ryan’s little one-man tent has already collapsed in a soggy heap.

It’s like the end of the world, but Andie doesn’t do failed sleepovers and somehow she makes it all seem cool, an adventure. We eat hot pizza with pineapple chunks and chocolate birthday cake with ice cream. Ryan has brought over his copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which he wants to lend to Andie, but she’s not in the mood to listen to chunks of story right now. She has swiped her mum’s iPod and makes us all sing karaoke to dodgy, ancient cheese-pop. By the time Ryan launches into his rendition of ‘It’s Raining Men’, we’re laughing so much the tears run down our cheeks, and it doesn’t matter any more about the leaky tent or the fact that fate is pulling us apart.

Andie ramps up the volume to max, opens the tent flaps and drags us out into the downpour.

‘Noooooo!’ Tasha is screeching. ‘I’m soaked already! Are you crazy, Andie Carson?’

‘I’d rather be crazy than boring,’ Andie declares, pulling me and Tash out into the deluge. ‘C’mon, guys, think of it as a rain dance in reverse! Who cares about a little bit of rain? Once you’re wet, you’re wet, right?’

‘A little bit of rain?’ Hasmita argues, pushing her black plaits up into a woolly hat with a grin. ‘Trust you to look on the bright side, Andie! This is a monsoon, a tsunami, a hurricane … plus it’s pitch black! Are you serious?’

‘Andie’s never serious,’ Ryan says. ‘But I am – get dancing!’

He flings himself into a full-on disco routine, playing it for laughs, and the rest of us join in, half-hearted at first and then with energy. I’m drenched, but it feels awesome, like I am truly alive for the first time in forever. I’m wearing pyjamas and a rain jacket, my feet soaked and squelching in thick socks that are already slick with mud. Trickles of cold rain slither down my upstretched arms, but I’m laughing, singing, loving every moment. I’m with my best friends. So what if it’s chucking it down? We are the Heart Club, and not even the wettest summer in forty years can stop us having fun.

I’m dancing around, my arms wide like wings, doing some kind of shimmy with Andie when I slip on a patch of mud, twisting my right ankle. I gasp with pain. Andie whirls away from me in the dark, oblivious, her bare feet sliding in the wet grass, long fair hair transformed into rat’s-tail ringlets flying out around her face. Tasha and Hasmita dance on too, faces turned up to the starless sky … they have no idea I’ve hurt myself. Only Ryan sees me stumble, and drops his comedy routine to come over and help.

‘You OK, Eden?’ he asks, and like an idiot I am blushing because he’s noticed and cares.

I try shifting my weight on to the damaged foot, and red-hot pain sears through me instantly. ‘Ouch,’ I say. ‘I can’t stand on it …’

Ryan takes my elbow and steers me back to the tent, and I crawl inside, peeling down one squelching sock. He flicks a torch on, and in the little pool of yellow light I can see my ankle is already swelling, looking disturbingly spongy and Swiss roll-like.

A surge of self-pity rolls over me. My ankle is throbbing and sharp, shooting pains make my eyes brim with tears. The party vibe has ebbed away; I am soaked to the skin, cold to the bone.

‘I’ve spoiled everything,’ I say. ‘Our last proper get together ever, and now it’s ruined …’

‘Hey,’ Ryan argues. ‘Nothing’s ruined – this was just an accident, OK? Dancing on wet grass in torrential rain probably isn’t the greatest idea ever!’

‘But … things are changing,’ I protest. ‘Everything’s being shaken up. What if we break up, drift apart?’

‘Shhh,’ he says, softly. ‘Change isn’t always a bad thing. And nothing is going to come between us, Eden, OK? I promise.’

The words seem laden with meaning. I feel my cheeks flame and there is a fluttering in my chest that’s halfway between terror and joy. It’s all in my imagination, of course … Ryan is talking about all of us, not just me and him.

But then his fingers curl around mine, and I don’t pull away. I have never held hands with a boy before. I have never felt so happy, or so scared.

‘You’re shivering,’ he says, grabbing a blanket to drape around my shoulders. The tip of one finger wipes the tears from my eyes, and then he leans over as if he might kiss me and I panic and turn my face away, and he kisses my ear. I think I might die of happiness.

The music ends, and there is a sudden shift in the air around me. I open my eyes to see Andie kneeling in the doorway of the tent, her face frozen, eyes like ice. An Arctic chill falls over me.

‘She slipped,’ Ryan is saying. ‘A twisted ankle, pretty bad. I was just …’

He trails away into silence.

‘You were just what, Ryan?’ Andie asks, her voice clipped and cool. ‘Getting in the way, most likely. I’ll sort this. You’d better ring home, Eden, get them to fetch you. You might need an X-ray or something. Too bad.’

A new track begins to blare out of the iPod speakers, an upbeat number about it being the end of the world as we know it.

I think maybe it really is.

1

Ryan

Andie was the first proper friend I ever had. We met when we were toddlers, and the proof is there for all to see, a series of shaky smartphone videos of us crawling around in the park or sharing fruit and biscuits as we played.

We lived next door to each other, and there were just a few months between us in age, so it was inevitable we’d be thrown together. Our mums were friends, too, and we spent so much time in each other’s houses that both places felt like home.

Once my mum went back to work, I spent most of the week at my gran and grandad’s, where everything was neat and tidy and quiet. We took long walks in the countryside, collecting acorns and fallen leaves. Gran taught me to bake bread and Grandad gave me a little patch of his garden to grow carrots and sunflowers, and sometimes we did puzzle games together or kicked a ball around in the garden.

At the end of the day one of them would often drop me off at Andie’s while I waited for Mum and Dad to get home. If my grandparents’ house was quiet and orderly, Andie’s was the opposite … noisy and hectic and warm and fun, especially after Andie’s two little brothers came along.

Andie always said I was lucky, back then, getting to go to Gran’s. She thought she was missing out. Then, when we were four, Andie started at nursery school, and I was the one who felt left out. I didn’t go, because Gran and Grandad lived on the other side of town, and because Mum said spending lots of time with them was an education in itself.

It wasn’t the same, though. I wanted to know everything about nursery school. Andie said there was a sandpit and a water table and computers, books and building blocks. There was a dressing-up box and a playhouse and an indoor slide, and every other day it seemed she came home with paintings and egg-box dinosaurs and once a frog puppet made from a Dairylea cheese triangle box, some buttons and a sock.

I won’t lie; I was kind of jealous.

And then Andie brought something even more astonishing home … a girl called Eden Banks.

‘She’s my new best friend,’ Andie explained. ‘She can be your new best friend, too!’

The two girls looked at me, Andie with her blonde pigtails and Eden with her wonky, golden-brown fringe, her upturned nose dusted with freckles. Andie was like a sister to me … I knew her almost as well as I knew myself. Eden was different. Her face was solemn and serious but her mouth was already twitching into a smile. She was wearing a blue cotton dress embroidered with bright flowers all around the hem, and stripy tights in shades of pink and orange and red.

I shrugged and broke a Jammie Dodger biscuit in half and offered half to Andie and half to Eden, and that was it, the friendship was sealed.

I was four years old, and already a little bit in love.

2

Eden

Best friends forever? Yeah, right.

I don’t believe in that stuff any more; it’s for the kind of kids who still believe in the tooth fairy and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. They are nice ideas, but they’re just not true.

I mean, look around you. You see it every day … sadness, loneliness, bullying, boredom. Friendships built on convenience, on fear. Kids bonded together by a shared interest in maths, or cheese and onion crisps, or desperation. It’s so random.

And it doesn’t last.

Yesterday you had a friend for life, but today you’re alone, on the outside looking in, wondering where you went wrong.

I sound bitter, I know, but hey.

You would be too.

Losing one best friend, that’s unlucky. Losing four? Well, that’s just careless.

It started with Andie, that whole best-friends-forever thing.

I was four years old. It was my first day at nursery and Andie Carson (Andrea really, but nobody ever called her that) was just about the first person I saw. She was standing at an easel, all blonde spindly plaits and blue eyes, and wearing a shiny red apron. She was painting a big sunshiny picture with swirls of yellow, gold and orange, and as I watched, she leaned over with her brush and daubed a splodge of yellow paint right on my cheek.

The paint was thick and cold and slightly gritty. I blinked and my lower lip quivered, but Andie just laughed and reached out with her brush to paint my other cheek.

‘You look like sunshine,’ she told me, and I started to laugh, too.

By the time Miss Miller noticed, Andie had painted my cheeks yellow and my lips red and my palms white with blue spots, and I had streaked her blonde plaits with purple, pink and green. Miss Miller hauled us off to the bathroom to scrub us clean, the two of us holding hands tightly as if we would never let go.

That was the start.

We were best friends, even then, but the first time I went over to play at Andie’s house things got complicated. I thought it would just be the two of us, but when I walked into the living room there was a boy in jeans and a red T-shirt, sprawled on the carpet making a Lego tower and eating Jammie Dodgers.

‘Eden,’ Andie said. ‘This is Ryan. He lives next door … he’s my best friend. Ryan, this is Eden … she’s my best friend, too.’

Ryan looked up at me, curious. I watched as he snapped a biscuit in half and offered us both a piece, and I took my half politely even though it was sticky with jam and a bit smashed up around the edges.

‘Hello, Eden,’ he said.

‘Hello.’

I wasn’t crazy about the fact that Andie had another best friend, especially a scruffy, smiley boy, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Ryan lived next door to Andie and was often at her house, so in the end I got used to him. We built a den together that summer, at the end of Ryan’s garden … a wobbly tepee made of garden sticks and covered with climbing beans that burst into bright orange-red flowers. In the winter, when the beans died, we draped the garden sticks with polythene to keep the rain out. When it got really cold, we retreated to the garden shed and turned that into a den instead.

Ryan was OK, really.

By the time the three of us started in Reception Class, I liked Ryan almost as much as I liked Andie.

The teacher sat Andie and me at a table with two other girls. Hasmita was shy, with flashing brown eyes and an armful of silvery bangles. Tasha was kind and funny, with tumbling braided hair and an infectious giggle.

Before long, the four of us were a team. At playtimes, Ryan would hang out with us, thinking up crazy games and teasing us whenever we got too girly.

We were together as much as we could be, but Andie was always in the middle of the group, at the centre of whatever was going on. She was like the sun, and we were like the planets, moving around her, staying close to the warmth and light.

It was Andie who worked out the name thing, too.

It was just before Christmas, the year we all turned nine, and Andie was writing our names out on scraps of paper to pull out of a hat because she had decided we should do a Secret Santa.

‘We all close our eyes and pull out a name,’ she explained. ‘Whichever name you get, you have to buy them a Christmas prezzie. You’re not allowed to spend more than a fiver … so everyone gets something good, but each of us only has to buy one present. Cool, right?’

‘Cool,’ I agreed.

Then Andie’s eyes widened, and she rearranged the little scraps of paper so that Hasmita’s name was at the top, mine was under it, then her own, then Ryan’s and finally Tasha’s.

‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘I never noticed before! The first letters of our names … see what they spell? Look!’

We looked.

Hasmita.

Eden.

Andie.

Ryan.

Tasha.

‘It spells HEART!’ Tasha squealed.

‘Exactly!’ Andie said. ‘How did we never notice that before? We can be the Heart Club!’

The Heart Club … that sounded awesome.

Ryan pulled a face, but he was a boy; what did he know? He had typical boyish tendencies; weird obsessions with football and spiders and skateboards.

‘Best friends forever, right?’ Andie grinned.

‘Right!’ we agreed. ‘Forever!’

Forever sounds like a long time when you are nine years old, but trust me, it can be a whole lot shorter than you know.

3

Ryan

We said that nothing would ever change, that nothing would ever come between us. We said we’d stick together forever, but still we fell apart.

We’d never really argued before, or not for long. Someone – Andie usually – would wade in and shake things up and pull us all together again. This time, that didn’t happen. After the sleepover, we shattered into about a million pieces, and there was no way of even starting to put the pieces together again.

Andie’s family moved away and new people moved in. We didn’t see much of them, but they had two little girls, and sometimes I would hear them playing in the garden and be reminded of Andie.

I don’t see any of the Heart Club now – not even Eden, who goes to the same secondary school as me. She’s a loner, these days. I see her skulking along the corridors with her head down, shoulders slumped. She might as well have her own personal rain cloud following her about; her body language says ‘keep away’ as clearly as if she’d scrawled it across her forehead in black marker pen. Most people get the message and leave her be, me included.

She’s a different person from the girl I knew, but then I’m a different person, too, so I have no right to judge.

What happened that summer was just too big, too awful; it turned everything upside down, left its mark on us all. My way of coping was to pretend the past had never happened. I reinvented myself as someone tougher, stronger, braver. I guess Eden reinvented herself, too, but in a slightly different way.

She turned from a girl full of spark and fun into a sad-eyed kid practically drowning in ugly, baggy uniform, and I turned from class clown into school troublemaker. I’m on report pretty much all the time and I spend more time outside the head teacher’s office than in class.

I have a short temper, lately. In the past, I always had a way of turning something bad into something funny, but after that summer my knack for finding the humour in stuff deserted me. These days, I react with anger and I don’t think too much about the trouble it might get me into.

None of that seems to matter any more.

I’ll never forget my first day at Moreton Park Academy. It felt like someone had torn the rug out from under my feet; turned everything upside down. I’d had the worst summer ever, and now I was trussed up like an idiot in an enormous black blazer, a starched white shirt and a stripy tie that felt like it was choking me. Mum had taken me to the barbers the week before and they’d practically scalped me; when I looked in the mirror, I looked like one of those photofit pictures of dangerous criminals they show on Crimewatch.

‘Give it a chance,’ Mum had said. ‘It’ll be a fresh start!’

There was not a single person from primary school in my form group – not one friendly face. A wave of nausea rose up inside me, and I loosened the stripy tie.

‘Sort that tie out,’ the teacher barked. Mr Benedict was a PE teacher, a big, beefy bloke in a tracksuit, and he was glaring at me. ‘You look like a scruff!’

‘Don’t feel well, sir,’ I said, and loosened the tie some more. ‘Can I go to the loo, please?’

‘Not a chance,’ the teacher said. ‘You’ve only just got here!’

The class were watching now, wide-eyed. I stood up, a little shaky, and moved towards the door. Mr Benedict stepped in front of me, arms folded, face like thunder.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ he asked.

‘Ryan Kelly,’ I said, and puked up all over his shiny new Adidas trainers. Two lairy kids on the back row began to cheer at my accidental revolt, and within seconds the whole classroom was roaring with laughter. Mr Benedict looked as if he’d like to strangle me.

Fresh start? I pretty much aced it, right?

I slammed out into the corridor, looking for an escape, and walked straight into a pale, sad-eyed girl with black hair and an armful of books. She did a double take, looking up at me through a dipping fringe, her blue eyes faintly accusing.

I glared at the weird girl and broke into a run. I didn’t stop running until I was outside the school – two blocks away in fact. Then I slowed up, sank down on a garden wall and put my head in my hands.

I’d worked it out by then.

The weird girl was Eden Banks.