Chocolate Box Girls: Bittersweet by Cathy Cassidy Page B

going in for all that malarky!’
    ‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Nikki argues. ‘You could manage him, make sure he was looked after. Shay has a talent. You wouldn’t want him to waste that, Mr Fletcher, would you?’
    ‘Talent?’ Dad snorts. ‘When has talent ever been enough? You’ve been watching too much
X-Factor
. Listen, because I don’t think you heard me the first time. Over. My. Dead. Body. Clear enough for you?’
    I cringe. How can he be so rude, so aggressive? I bite my lip and roll my eyes, and hope that Nikki and Curtis know how mortified I am feeling.
    ‘Allthat showbiz nonsense,’ Dad rants on. ‘Ridiculous! Shay is fifteen years old. He’s still at school, and I need him here at the sailing centre too. This is a family business, in case you haven’t noticed. And it’s real work, proper physical work, not your airy-fairy music rubbish!’
    ‘Dad!’ I cut in. ‘Please? This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance! If you’d just give Nikki and Curtis a fair hearing –’
    ‘I’ve listened,’ he huffs. ‘And I didn’t like what I heard. It’s a con, Shay, can’t you see that? So, thanks, but … no thanks.’
    He smiles icily and tries to shut the door, but Curtis turns back at the last minute, sticks his foot against the door frame and hands Dad his card and a sheaf of forms and leaflets.
    ‘Think about it,’ he says. ‘No pressure. You know where to reach me if you change your mind.’
    He steps back just in time to avoid a bunch of broken toes as Dad slams the door. The forms and leaflets go straight in the bin, of course. Much later, when the worst day of my life is finally over and Dad has gone to bed, I fish the papers out and stuff them into my rucksack, even though they are slightly crumpled and have a nasty brown stain from where a tea bag has landed on them.
    I am not about to give up that easily.

It’s not that my dad doesn’t believe in talent – I think he believes in it too much. He knows that fame and fortune can be very fickle things. It’s just that as far as Dad is concerned, all of the talent in our family belongs to my big brother.
    Ben is a bit of a legend around here. He’s brilliant at sport, football especially … he was playing for Bristol City FC Youth Squad by the time he was fourteen, and Southampton FC scouted him when he was sixteen, but he had an injury and things didn’t work out. It wasn’t majorly serious, but it was enough to wipe out Ben’s chances of a premier-league football career.
    Dad didn’t cope too well when it all went pear-shaped. He couldn’t believe you could play so well and work so hard and have it all end in nothing, and I suppose that has made him suspicious of chances and opportunities and promises of fame and fortune.
    Anyhow, Ben went off to uni to study sports science and said it was the best thing he ever did. He went out every night and partied hard, doingall the stuff he hadn’t done when he was younger because of training so hard, and this summer he graduated with a 2:1 degree and started working full time at the sailing centre. He works hard, but he parties hard too.
    ‘You’re only young once, Shay,’ he likes to tell me. ‘Take my advice – loosen up, little brother. Live a little!’
    I don’t take Ben’s advice, though.
    I haven’t done that since I was five years old. Ben had made a go-cart and he told me I could be the first person to test it out. I felt like the most important boy in the world as I followed him up the hill behind our cottage.
    ‘You have total control,’ he told me. ‘Just yank on the steering rope to turn left or right, or to slow down. You’re so lucky I chose you to be the test driver, Shay! It’s going to be epic!’
    It was epic all right. I wedged myself into the driver’s seat and Ben pushed me off down the hill at about a million miles an hour. Three seconds into the ride, the steering rope came off in my hands and, of course, there were no brakes. By the time I got