Escape for the Summer by Ruth Saberton

against her skin.
    “Come on,” urged Angel. “You know you want to be a Rock chick!”
    Andi’s bank account was empty, her boyfriend had left and she’d lost her job. Why on earth not? What did she have to lose? At that moment a Rock chick was exactly what she wanted to be.
     

Chapter 10
    “Oh my God! Oh my God! I can see the sea!”
    Angel’s shriek in Andi’s left eardrum was just about enough to make her weep. Her head was already pounding from listening to Gemma’s Lady GagaCD all the way from London to Cornwall; now it was ready to explode. By the time they’d joined the M4 Andi already knew the lyrics so well that she was confident she could put on a meat dress and double for Gaga should the star ever require a break; by the Tamar Bridge she was starting to wonder whether it was a new kind of torture. Death by “Poker Face”. Add to this the roaring Beetle engine only inches behind her backside and the constant squeals and giggles from Angel, and it felt like a pneumatic drill was boring into Andi’s brain. She’d popped so many painkillers she was in danger of developing a Nurofen addiction.
    “The sea! The sea!” echoed Gemma, bouncing up and down in the driver’s seat and craning her neck to glimpse the small slice of glittering blue nestling between hills that resembled Jordan’s boobs.
    “I can’t believe we’re nearly there!” Angel cried. She pogoed in her seat, the glimpse of Atlantic blue whizzing her back to her six-year-old self faster than you could say “tardis”.Andi couldn’t help but smile even though her neck was aching and she probably had deep-vein thrombosis. It was hard to move when you were sharing the back seat of a car with three suitcases, a hatbox and more pairs of shoes than you could count. And that was before she added in the endless chocolate wrappers, empty cans and sweet papers that had been constantly lobbed into the back seat. It had been like sitting in a skip for five hours.
    Turning to her, Angel said excitedly, “Oh my God, Andi! We’re back after all this time! Can you believe you’re going to be in Rock for the whole summer?”
    The short answer to this question was a resounding and heartfelt no, because Andi couldn’t quite believe that she was in Rock . Normally on a Wednesday morning she was sitting at her desk, frantically hoping Zoe would leave her alone for just one day and trying to wrestle figures into submission. By lunchtime she would be cross-eyed from staring at the screen and only able to make it through the day by emailing PMB for a chat. Andi wondered who had taken over her role and whether PMB would miss chatting to her? Probably not, she told herself sternly. He probably had a life.She hoped Zoe hadn’t told him that Andi had been sacked for taking credit for another colleague’s work. That thought made her skin prickle with mortification. Apart from the fact that it was untrue, she couldn’t bear the idea of him thinking badly of her. Somehow she had to clear her name. Maybe once she was away from the city and had some thinking space she’d come up with something? At the moment, though, her brain felt as if it had turned to cottage cheese.
    As the car began the descent towards the seaside town, Andi thought about how her life had taken a very odd turn. A week ago she was an accountant at a prestigious company, working on the figures for Britain’s answer to Microsoft and living with her long-term boyfriend in a small but comfortable flat. Fast-forward a week or so and here she was, suddenly homeless, penniless, unemployed and on her way to Rock to share a caravan with her sister and her sister’s bonkers friend.
    Even Russell Grant couldn’t have seen this coming.
    Andi was just contemplating, for the umpteenth time, the horrifying and gut-churning discovery that Tom had not only cheated physically but also emptied all her accounts and maxed out her credit cards to boot, when Gemma slammed on the brakes with such force that