Boy Meets Ghoul Read online

  For Jo,

  I heard you like nice surprises.

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  NEED SOME SUPPORT?

  ONE

  The first time we drove past the front of the stadium, a couple of people turned to give the car a curious look.

  By the third time, we’d drawn a bit of a crowd.

  The sixth time, there were enough people lining the pavement to make it feel like we were the headline float in a surprise parade. People had their phones out. I wasn’t sure if they were filming, or phoning their friends to come and take a look for themselves.

  We turned the corner again, and two girls in gym gear dropped their kitbags and stopped dead at the edge of the kerb to stare.

  My best friend Kayla cringed and huddled down low in the back seat. ‘They look like they’ve seen a ghost,’ she muttered.

  I peered out of the window from between my fingers. ‘No – just something totally horrific. Have you still got that paper bag we had our lunch in, by the way? I might cut some eyeholes in it and wear it over my head for the rest of my life.’

  You wouldn’t think there was too much in our car to strike fear into the hearts of the average passer-by. All right, there were enough suitcases piled precariously on top of it to cause a mid-motorway landslide, but for once Mum wasn’t driving like she was trying out for Formula One.

  I was wearing my Woking FC shirt in the back seat, but it’s not like I could have been taken for a football hooligan. After all, I was a bit younger and a lot less drunk and bald than most of the ones you see on the news. I didn’t have a flag tattooed across my face or anything.

  Kayla looked perfectly respectable with her newly dyed hair gleaming petrol shades of green and blue, and my little brother, Jude, whose bladder was usually a ticking time bomb on any long car journey, was slumped safely snoring against my side, a set of noise-cancelling headphones clamped over his ears.

  No. The thing so monstrous it was making people turn and stare as we passed them by – the thing so embarrassing that I was willing to put a bag on my head and live the rest of my life pretending to be litter just to avoid anyone thinking I was associated with it – wasn’t in the back with us at all. It was in the front, relegated to the passenger seat as it’d been too overexcited to drive.

  My dad.

  Apparently oblivious to the fact that he could take a smack in the face from a lamp post at any minute, he was hanging out of the window like a dog being driven past a sausage factory, bellowing football chants at terrified strangers.

  ‘WOKING ARE MAGIC – IF YOU’RE NOT A FAN, YOU’RE TRAGIC – LALA LA LA – OI! LALA LA LA . . .’

  He was flying a massive bath towel with the Woking FC crest on it down the side of the car like a flag, and every so often, he tooted an air horn and yelled, ‘WHO-KING? WE-KING! WO-KING!’

  Which might not have been a weird thing to see if it had been a match day. Or if he’d been part of a crowd of other noisy, enthusiastic fans. It would definitely have made more sense if we were actually in Woking, or if the stadium we were driving past happened to be the setting for an upcoming away game.

  But it wasn’t. It definitely wasn’t.

  Because the street we were driving down happened to be the one outside Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, probably the most famous football team in the world. No matter how brilliant Woking were, it was safe to say that they weren’t quite in the same league. So Dad’s enthusiastic support was a bit of a David and Goliath situation.

  You know, if David had shown up to fight Goliath by yelling about how awesome he was, on a day when Goliath had gone home to take a nap.

  Honestly, I thought Dad might just be overwhelmed by being in such a famous footballing location. Virtually every iconic player must have walked out on to the pitch at Old Trafford at some point. I’d felt a pretty big thrill myself the first time we passed the green glass frontage. I’d only ever seen it on TV before, but now, as we turned to circle the stadium for what seemed like the seven thousandth time, the experience was getting seriously old. And so were Dad’s chants:

  ‘TWO-FOUR-SIX, YEAH – THESE WOKING LADS PLAY FOR MANCHES-TER!’

  On the pavement, a prim-looking woman almost tripped over her sausage dog as she tried to get away from the noise. I sighed, unwrapping a toffee and holding it out between the seats, in the vain hope he’d take it and stick his teeth together.

  ‘We’re not playing for Manchester, Dad. We’re playing in Manchester. There’s a difference,’ I muttered, eyes rolling so hard I was surprised they stayed in my head.

  I hadn’t even wanted to come here to begin with. But my half-term plans – my amazing, romantic Halloween hang-out plans – had all fallen apart at the last minute when my new boyfriend, Leo, had cancelled on me. And it turned out that Dad just happened to have reserved me a place on a football training camp called Feet of the Future, just in case.

  It was like he’d been expecting my life to fall apart.

  My total misery didn’t even seem to register with Dad. He was still waving his arms out of the window, narrowly missing swiping the shopping bags off two grans innocently waiting to cross the road.

  ‘Just think,’ Dad called back to me, ignoring my sugary bribe, ‘in five days, you’re going to be playing here!’

  I shot a despairing look at Kayla, who now had her head in her hands.

  ‘Not here here, Dad. I’m going to be playing on a training pitch somewhere on the other side of the city,’ I corrected. ‘It’s not exactly the start of my Premier League career.’

  He blinked at me, then broke into a dopey grin. ‘TWO-FOUR-SIX, YAY! MY BOYS WILL MAKE IT BIG SOME DAY!’

  The car tyres squealed again as Mum veered off down a side road before Dad could beg her to go round just one more time.

  Beside me, my little brother wiggled groggily into wakefulness. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ he asked, eyes big, brown and watery. ‘Because I want to go home.’

  I couldn’t have agreed more. As Old Trafford retreated into the distance, and I thought about how my dreams of a loved-up Halloween were being crushed under a pair of muddy football boots, all I wanted was to be anywhere but here.

  TWO

  Sensing Jude gearing himself up to start sobbing, I quickly repurposed the toffee I’d been offering Dad, and shoved it into my brother’s mouth instead. Then I slid down as far into my seat as I could and closed my eyes. Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could fall asleep and dream about the way this week was supposed to go.

  I wasn’t meant to spend half-
term trapped in a car halfway across the country while Dad tried to think of something clever that rhymed with ‘goals’. This week was supposed to be special. It was supposed to be the first real chance I’d had since school started to spend some proper in-person time with my summer-romance-turned-sort-of-boyfriend, Leo.

  Closing my eyes made it all too easy to picture him just the way he’d looked on the last day of our trip to Starcross Sands (Cornwall’s coolest caravan park). For most of the holiday, he’d been in disguise, playing his part as the park’s massive hamster mascot, Nibbles. But during the end-of-season celebrations, he’d thrown off the orange fur and shown up in a white T-shirt and black leather jacket, looking like something out of Grease. The disco lights had turned his dark skin different shades of gold and caught the highlights in his eyes perfectly. He’d looked like he was glowing. And when he kissed me, it had felt like I was glowing too.

  I could remember it like it was yesterday, not two whole miserable months ago. The way he’d smelt like fairground popcorn when I’d leaned my head against his shoulder. How dancing with him had just felt natural, and not like I was trying to do very hard sums with my feet, like it always had before. How his smile had creased up into dimples at the corner of his mouth, and how he could never say my name without smiling, murmuring it soft and low into my ear, ‘Dylan. Dylan.’

  ‘Dylan? Dylan Kershaw, you’re pulling kissy faces and saying your own name in your sleep. Consider this fair warning that if you don’t wake up now, you’re about to become a viral video sensation.’

  I blinked one eye open to find Kayla pointing her phone in my direction. I blocked it with the palm of my hand. ‘You’re evil.’

  ‘I’m saving you from yourself. And from myself. The video really is hilarious – want to see?’

  Hissing at her, I shook my head and dragged myself upright again. ‘I wasn’t sleeping. Anyway, why bother? None of my dreams ever work out.’

  Kayla twisted her lips together, looking sceptical. ‘That seems a little dramatic. Just because you’re not getting to see Leo this week?’

  ‘And because every other time I’ve seen him, something’s gone horribly wrong. Like the weekend right after school started, when his parents and my parents decided to come along, and the whole date was just us eating the world’s most awkward Whoppers while they argued about politics. Then there was the cinema date, when all the good films had sold out, and we ended up watching Twinkle the Talking Train’s Big Journey surrounded by four-year-olds crying and giving off unsettling odours.’

  I looked at Jude, still sucking on his toffee. It hadn’t been too different from this car journey, in fact.

  Kayla leaned back and held up her hands like she was framing a camera shot. ‘Welcome to Dylan Kershaw’s Dating Disasters. We join almost-fifteen-year-old Dylan as he navigates the rocky terrain of dating his dream boy.’ She grinned. ‘I think it could be a hit. We’ll get Bear Grylls to narrate, and there can be a date where you have to drink your own wee to survive.’

  I scowled across at her. ‘Has anyone ever told you you’re not very funny?’

  ‘No, never,’ she said, wide-eyed in fake innocence. ‘Everyone thinks I’m hilarious. But, Dylan, all of that stuff’s just about the circumstances not being right. It doesn’t have anything to do with you and Leo. And he still wants to see you, doesn’t he? What happened with this week, anyway? I thought you had plans.’

  Silently, I opened the messages screen on my phone and held it up for her to see.

  Kayla squinted at it for a moment, then just said, ‘Oh.’

  We had had plans. Leo was going to come and visit me for the first time, and I’d been totally ready to show him the cultural delights of Woking town centre. I’d even ranked all the restaurants in order of most to least romantic, starting with the fancy place in the local manor house and going down to the burger van in the market that was set up a bit too close to the fish stand.

  But Leo had suddenly got a real, professional dancing job in a real, professional show, and now he was going to be away for rehearsals the entire week.

  Even that should have been fine because, obviously, if you’re really in love then you shouldn’t need to see each other all the time. There are loads of romantic sayings about it, like ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. And whether Leo is near or far – according to the wisdom of Celine Dion – my heart will go on.

  So it was weird that, as I stared at the text message on my phone and read Something’s come up, my heart was feeling less like it was going to go on, and more like it had been dropped into a car compactor and squashed thin and flat.

  It’s not like I expected him to pick seeing me over his dancing. It just might have been nice if he had. Or even if he could have done both. Just one day together would have been better than nothing.

  Now I was going to be stuck at football camp for a whole week, pretending I was fine. I was trying to be cool about it, but secretly I felt like throwing the world’s biggest tantrum.

  Though from the siren-blast wailing coming from the seat next to me, it seemed Jude had beaten me to it. Kayla was patiently feeding him toffees, but they only temporarily muffled the din.

  ‘Can’t you stop?’ I asked him, trying to figure out what I’d done with the earbuds for my phone.

  ‘Not going to,’ Jude retorted between sugar-sticky sobs. ‘Not until we go home.’

  ‘Then it’s going to be a very long cry,’ I warned him. ‘We’re staying for a week.’

  ‘He probably just misses Fluffy,’ Kayla suggested.

  Fluffy. Jude’s brand-new pet hamster, bought for him because of his obsession with the character Leo had played at Starcross Sands. Jude had even wanted to name it Nibbles after him, but I had to veto that one quickly. I didn’t want my little brother cleaning out the cage of something named after the alter ego of the boy who’d been my first kiss.

  We were going to be staying in a hotel with a NO PETS policy, so Jude had been forced to leave Fluffy in the care of our gran. He’d kicked up quite a fuss.

  ‘Fluffy hasn’t gone anywhere,’ Kayla said, rubbing Jude’s back in what looked like a reassuring way. ‘He’s just stayed at home.’

  ‘But I love him,’ Jude wailed, his sobs getting back into glass-shattering territory. ‘I love him and want him with me all the time.’

  Kayla and I shared a mutual eye-roll. All out of toffees, I put in my earbuds and cranked up the Deathsplash Nightmares’ screamiest hit.

  Jude was being ridiculous, which was fair enough really, since he was only five.

  The problem was, I was starting to think I knew exactly how he felt.

  THREE

  It turned out even heavy metal couldn’t compete with Jude’s decibel level. I was trying to brood over my tragic lack-of-love life but kept getting interrupted by a wail of ‘WANT HOME, WANT MY HOUSE, WANT HOOOOOME’. I wasn’t sure exactly at what age it stopped being socially acceptable to just yell out anything you fancied, whenever you fancied it, but if I could have joined in by wailing ‘WANT LEO, WANT PIZZA, WANT A SOCIAL LIFE NOT TOTALLY PLANNED BY MY PARENTS’ and got away with it, then I probably would have.

  ‘What are you doing to my littlest boy?’ Mum asked, peering over her shoulder when we stopped at the lights. Somehow, she managed to keep her voice at a normal level while still cutting through his din.

  ‘We’re not doing anything!’ I said. ‘He’s protesting about being kidnapped – you did teach him to shout if anyone tried to take him somewhere he didn’t want to go.’

  I wasn’t sure it counted as kidnapping when it was your own kid, but Jude might not have grasped the complexities of that, yet.

  ‘He’s purple.’ Mum pursed her lips. ‘That’s not a normal colour for a child to go. Not blueberry-purple.’

  I helped Jude to sit upright again, surreptitiously checking he wasn’t choking on a toffee. He was looking a bit swollen and fruity.

  ‘He’s in mourning,’ Kayla said, as Mum turned back to the r
oad.

  Dad was still trying to catch a last glimpse of the football stadium, ignoring us, with his backside wiggling hideously as he leaned out of the window.

  ‘He can’t be in mourning,’ I argued. ‘Fluffy’s not dead; he’s just been left at home.’

  This prompted another hiccupy sob from Jude.

  ‘Yes, but he could be dead,’ Kayla retorted, triggering another, much louder sob. ‘It’s like Schrödinger’s hamster.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s Jude’s hamster – that’s the whole point.’

  Kayla tutted at me and went on. ‘Schrödinger was this physicist who said that if you put a cat in a box, once the lid was closed, you couldn’t know for sure whether the cat was alive or dead until you opened it again.’

  ‘What does that have to do with hamsters?’

  ‘It’s not about the hamster – it’s about whether or not it’s dead.’

  I clamped my hands tightly over my ears as Jude dutifully let off a mammoth wail. He was turning raspberry-red now. At this rate, he’d have worked through all the shades of the fruit bowl before we got to where we were staying.

  ‘Nobody’s dead,’ Mum cut in sharply from the front. ‘Now drop it, you two.’

  Even though she wasn’t looking at us, the tone of voice she used made both Kayla and me nod sheepishly.

  Dad slid back through the window and turned round in his seat with a dramatic flourish.

  ‘Jude, we’ll call Gran and have her put Fluffy on Skype later. Right, are we nearly there yet?’

  I couldn’t believe Dad had been bouncing in his seat the whole way and was still using that line.

  ‘We are indeed . . . In fact –’ Mum smiled smugly across at him and threw the car expertly into a parking space – ‘we’re here.’

  The spot Mum had picked sat in the shadows of a massive black bus, but everything else around us was gleaming brightly in the reflected glow from the huge silver building towering over the car park.

  ‘That’s the hotel?’ I gripped the edge of Dad’s seat with both hands and knelt forward to get a better look. It was completely out of place, like aliens had touched down in a massive shiny spaceship then forgotten where they’d parked it and caught a taxi home.