Riding on Air by Maggie Gilbert Page B

think abou—” I clamped my mouth shut, horrified at the deeply secret thought that had nearly spilled out.
    â€œWhenever you think about William kissing you, ooh baby,” Tash said laughing madly. Eleni snorted and then she was sniggering along with Tash while I sat there with my skin predictably heating up.
    But that wasn’t the horse I’d so nearly let out of the stable. I did get butterflies whenever I thought about William—and my stomach rolled queasily as if in agreement—but the thing that most often tied my stomach in ugly knots lately was fear. The bitter familiar fear that the next time my hands snarled up in a bad flare would be the time they never came good again. The fear that this end to all my dreams, the end of everything, could be so close was what drove me to do things Dad couldn’t understand, like palming that pill, and things my friends couldn’t understand, like turning down their invitations for coffee and sleepovers and parties.
    Everyone is a slave to time, Mum says, and she has no sympathy for people who say they’re too busy to get stuff done because she says we’re all given exactly the same amount of time, 24 hours a day. Mum’s a scarily smart lady, but this is something I know more about than she does. We aren’t all given the same amount of time to do the things we dream of doing. For some of us, the clock is winding down a lot faster than it is for everyone else.
    My stomach slowly squeezed itself down into a tight twisty little lump as Tash and Eleni’s giggles faded into the indistinguishable noise of the bus’ engine and the laughing, talking and arguing of the other kids. The other kids who had the same 24 hours a day that I did, but who could count on a lot more good days.
    I held the hard rectangle of my net-book, the baby laptop computer that was all I had to carry to and from school because of a special medical exemption for my mangled hands, and tried not to be jealous of all those days and all those chances that Tash and Eleni, and Oliver the bus driver and all these other kids would get that I would not.
    My phone chimed in my pouch pocket announcing a text message and I carefully slipped my hand in to retrieve it. Thumbing the slider, I looked at the screen and my heart took a single giant leap into the back of my throat.
    â€˜Sweet dreams of u last night. Can i pick u up frm school this arvo? Will xxx’
    My stomach rapidly unwound itself just long enough to twist and heave in the opposite direction. I palmed my phone back into my pouch before Tash or Eleni could notice what I was looking at and tried for all of five seconds to not dissect and analyse every word, every syllable, every letter. Futile hope.
    He hadn’t said he loved me, or that he wanted me to be his girlfriend or anything, but what were all those x’s if they weren’t kisses? Was I seriously even expecting him to say something like that at this stage? Would I have admitted it to him? Get a grip, Melissa.
    Sweet dreams. Was that a good thing? Surely it was good. At least he definitely wanted to see me again; he was picking me up from school. Oh god, unless that was just because he realised he’d made a terrible mistake and he wanted to tell me to my face. And I still had to think of something to text back to him.
    Stress. Oh yeah, I was on familiar terms with that one. Who knew that having the guy of your dreams actually dreaming of you would be so anxiously stomach churning?

Chapter 10
    I sat on a log at the edge of the student car park—foreign territory for me—looking at the rows of mud-splashed utes, four-wheel drives and small, shiny town cars, all bearing a green or red P plate, waiting for William. Or at least I tried to sit. Mostly I got up and wandered back and forth, only to sit down again in an effort not to look too pathetically obvious to the students who passed me on the way to their cars. A couple I knew had