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  Chapter 4

  The rest of the month flew by, and it was soon mid-October, by which time Amber had managed to hit Matthew Pryer with plenty of sarcastic comments and remarks. It was becoming a war of wit, and Amber had to admit that she was losing. Her brain just didn’t seem to think fast enough to come up with a retort on time. She did think of something to say, but it tended to be about ten minutes after she needed it.

  September had been chilly, but this month the cold was really starting to show. Amber had started wearing a black waterproof to school because it was raining so much. The trees were becoming rapidly bare as the leaves turned orange and fell to the ground.

  “Do you want to come round to mine for a sleepover on Friday night?” Eva asked one particularly damp day in History. “My parents have to go to a friend’s party and they said I could have someone over.”

  “Who else is going?” Amber asked as she drew little stars on her notepad.

  “Just Josh.”

  “Josh?” she said.

  “Yeah, Josh Samuels, we’ve been going out for like two months I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him.”

  “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” said Amber. Actually, she had always thought Eva and Darren were kind of an item, but apparently that was wrong.

  “What time do you want me over?” Amber asked.

  “We can walk back to mine after school on Friday, it’s only round the corner.”

  “Alright then, I’ll ask my mum.”

  As Amber’s mum was keen on Amber making friends after what had happened at Polegate, she consented to allow her to sleep over at Eva’s.

  So, on Friday afternoon once school had finished, she and Eva caught the bus to Eva’s street, stopping at the shop on the way to buy popcorn and snacks. Amber had bought some horror movies from her collection for them to watch. Eva had said she wanted to be really scared for once, so she had picked out one that she knew to be exceptionally terrifying. Amber loved horror movies.

  Eva’s house was huge, and old too. Eva said it had been built in the eighteenth century, and the inside was done up grandly with lots of creams and reds. Eva’s room was upstairs and to the back of the house, facing west, so the almost set sun cast a grey glow around the room and made finger-like shadows on the cream-painted walls.

  “Josh doesn’t arrive for another half an hour; his school gets out after ours, so make yourself at home. Have a look at what’s on TV,” she said. “Or you can put on one of your films now?”

  Amber picked out one of the movies and put it in the player, which was underneath Eva’s large television set. She wished her house were like Eva’s.

  “I think I’m quite good with horror movies,” said Eva, eating a thick strawberry lace. “I just don’t tend to find them that scary.”

  After just over an hour of watching horror films with the girl, Amber decided she had been wrong. Eva spent most of the time behind a pillow, or screaming. A lot of times Josh, who showed up quarter-way through the movie, had to try to calm her down because she looked so scared. Amber was very glad she had started on something more lightweight.

  “Why would you call out ‘who’s there’?” said Josh, who himself was not scared so easily. “It’s blatantly obvious that there is someone there, and she just let them know where she’s hiding.”

  “I know, and you wouldn’t just stand there, you’d call for help. These are meant to be teenagers, yet when they realise their main phone line has been cut, they don’t think to pull out their mobile, which goes with them everywhere,” said Amber. Between the two of them, they managed to scrutinise almost every scene of the film, until the end credits rolled, at which point Eva jumped up and flicked the light switch, and turned the television back onto normal channels.

  “Why don’t we play a game?” she said.

  “What kind of game?” asked Josh. He seemed fairly agreeable, and Amber thought he looked as if he was a generally nice guy.

  “I think we should play a dare game,” she said.

  “Alright then,” said Eva. Amber could tell she was trying to act unfazed, but noticed every now and again how Eva would quickly look behind her to make sure there was no man in a hockey mask coming to get her.

  “Ok, I’ll go first then shall I?” said Josh. “Go on, challenge me.”

  “I dare you…to go downstairs and put the popcorn on the cooker,” said Eva.

  “That’s not a dare,” he said.

  “No, but I’m hungry-why don’t you go Amber?” she asked.

  “Um, yeah sure,” said Amber. She could tell from Eva’s look that she hadn’t liked her talking with Josh while she sat cowering behind a pillow in silence. She got up off the floor and walked downstairs to the kitchen.

  It was the type of popcorn that cooked on the stove rather than the microwave, and Amber took it out of the wrapper and set it down on the heat. Now, she could act all she wanted that she wasn’t scared of the bad guy in movies, but when she was alone in an unknown, dark area, at night time, she did start to get just a little bit afraid of what could be out there. Then when she started thinking like that, she got that tingling sensation you get on your back when you’re scared, which made it even worse. So, instead of waiting for the popcorn to cook and taking it back up with her, she ran back upstairs empty handed.

  “Is it my turn for a dare?” she asked when she walked back into the room, and pretended she hadn’t seen Eva and Josh kissing.

  “Yeah, alright then,” said Josh. He narrowed his eyes as though he was thinking of something particularly evil. “I dare you to run to the graveyard next door, touch the marble tomb, and run back.”

  “Challenge accepted,” said Amber. She wasn’t scared any more, and she was ready for a good dare.

  Next door to Eva’s house was an old graveyard, in which was apparently a tomb made of marble. Amber wasn’t exactly sure where this tomb was, so she knew it might take her a while to find.

  “Do you have a torch?” she asked Eva.

  “Yes, in my desk drawer,” she pointed to a cream table on which sat perfume bottles and hairbrushes. It was more of a dressing table than a desk, Amber thought.

  She picked up the heavy torch and braced herself for the dark cemetery. She knew there was nothing to be afraid of; there was no such thing as the supernatural and ghosts that would come to snatch her. The world just wasn’t that interesting.

  As she passed the kitchen door, Amber glanced in and saw that the popcorn on the stove was swelling in the bag.

  “Eva, the popcorn’s done,” she shouted up the stairs.

  Amber carried on down the hall and out the front door, and jogged along the pavement to the cast-iron gate that marked the entrance to the graveyard. It didn’t creak, as it would have done in a horror movie, when Amber opened it.

  She scanned around with the torch for this marble tomb she was meant to be looking for. Of course, she didn’t have to really find it; she could just pretend she had, but that just wasn’t what Amber was like. If she was set a challenge, she was going to complete it, whether it made sense or not.

  With the preliminary scan, she couldn’t see any tomb made of marble, which meant it must be behind the church, out of sight. She walked quickly to the back of the old building, but another quick swipe with the torch didn’t reveal anything. She gave it a second look over, more carefully now, but again saw no tomb of marble. She couldn’t see one at the front of the church either when she checked the second time.

  Just as she was thinking that there was no marble tomb, the light from the torch began to flicker. She whacked it hard with the palm of her hand, which seemed to do more harm than good as after that the light went out altogether, which was very bad, as she had no other way of seeing and it was pitch-black.

  Thankfully, and slightly strangely as she didn’t remember leaving the light on, a glow from behind the curtains in Eva’s kitchen shone towards the graveyard and fought back the darkness just enough so Amber could make it b
ack onto the street.

  She wasn’t very happy with Josh for sending her on a wild goose chase, but she thought she would probably find a way of getting him back later on.

  Amber was puzzled by the light coming from the hall, because she knew it was definitely off when she left, and she could see from the high window above the front door that it was more orange than the light from a normal light bulb, and it seemed to flicker every now and then, like lots of little moths were fluttering in front of it.

  She opened the front door.

  It took Amber a moment to register what she saw, because it wasn’t what anyone should expect to see when they opened a door to a house.

  From the left-hand side of the stairs, where the kitchen was, smoke was floating out sinisterly and into the hall. Even though she was about twenty feet away from the room, she could feel the heat coming towards her in waves-it was like standing next to a bonfire.

  “Eva!” she shouted in panic. “Josh! Eva!”

  No one replied.

  Amber very much doubted that they were hurt at that moment, because the fire, though obviously large, seemed to be contained in the kitchen. Eva either couldn’t hear her or couldn’t be bothered to call back. Amber hoped it was the second one, because she would hate to have to throttle Eva after attempting to save her life.

  Amber coughed; the smoke was making her lungs feel dry and prickly. Somehow, her body seemed to have separated itself from her mind and wasn’t registering her surroundings properly. The smoke had crept closer without her realising, and Amber was getting hotter and hotter as time went on. The fire was getting more and more threatening by the second.

  “Eva!” she called up the stairs again. Her voice cracked in desperation. “Eva, please! There’s a fire! I’m not kidding, seriously Eva!”

  Still Eva did not respond.

  Amber was becoming more fearful; Eva’s bedroom was above the kitchen, which meant smoke might have drifted up through the floorboards. She wasn’t sure how safe her friends were.

  But she didn’t want to go any further into the house. From just at the front door, Amber could feel the heat, hear the crackling of the flames, smell the smoke, and see the chaos. If she went into that house, there was a chance she might not come out.

  Her mind clicked back into sync with her body. She took one last survey of the scene-the fire was still only in the kitchen, she had time.

  She put her hand over her mouth and ran up the stairs coughing.

  “Eva,” she said as loudly as she could whilst being choked by fumes. “Josh, Eva?”

  Amber found it a struggle to remember the way back to her friend’s bedroom through her alarm, but after opening a few doors in a panicked daze, she managed to find them.

  “Eva,” she said. “Why the hell didn’t you answer me?”

  “Amber, what’s wrong with you?” said Eva. Up here, everything was normal; there was no smoke, no fire, just the pale walls of Eva’s bright bedroom. If she could have gotten the burning out of her lungs, Amber would have thought none of what she had seen was real.

  “I was shouting you Eva, we have to get out of here, now,” she said urgently, and grabbed the blonde girl’s wrist strongly.

  “What-Amber what’s going on?” said Josh, who had been watching the scene unfold before him from where he sat on the carpet.

  “There’s a fire!” Amber shouted. She knew she didn’t need to raise her voice, the others were no more than a few feet from her, but part of the shouting was to release her panic, and the other part was to try and snap Josh and Eva into realisation of just what was going on “If we don’t get the hell out of here right now, it’ll be barbequed Eva and Amber with a side of fire-grilled Josh.” She was surprised to see she was able to make an attempt at comedy at this point in time. “Now come on, go!”

  Amber didn’t think either of the two of them believed her as she chased them out of the room, but by the time they got through the bedroom door, no one had a doubt in their mind that what she had said was true. More smoke had drifted up and was filling the hallway. Amber coughed violently and pulled the sleeve of her jumper over her mouth. Eva froze where she stood at the top of the stairs.

  “Eva, come on why are you stopping, lets go!” said Amber loudly and quickly. It was like she was hyper on adrenaline or something, and even her voice was leaping ahead of her.

  “I can’t,” said Eva.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” Amber asked. Her lungs felt like they were about the collapse.

  “There’s fire,” said Josh quietly and matter-of-factly.

  “Yes Josh, that’s right, which is why we have to run now,” Amber said more slowly. She seemed to be the only one whose brain still hadn’t reached panic mode.

  “Come on,” she said, and grabbed both of their hands. She ran down the staircase, dragging the other two behind her, moving as fast as she possibly could. And then she stopped.

  The bottom of the staircase was blocked by flames and billowing thick, black smoke. There was no way they could get through that. Amber turned around and wordlessly led them back up the stairs, and into Eva’s bedroom, which was still relatively smoke-free.

  The first thing she did was run to the window and thrust it open. It felt like part of the fire downstairs was actually burning in her chest. She gulped down the night’s air and looked out into the street. It was lifeless. She could see the shadows the fire downstairs was casting on the surrounding garden and parts of the pavement. Still, there was a part of Amber’s brain that wasn’t registering any of this as real. It was like another film on the television, or the near-death dreams you have when you aren’t really in tune with what’s happening. But this was real. It wasn’t a dream she could wake up from.

  “Help!” Amber shouted at the top of her voice. “Help!”

  Josh realised what she was doing and joined her at the window, and shouted with her.

  “Help! Help us!”

  Eva was rocking back and forth on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, and tears rolling down her cheek. For a less than a second, Amber was reminded of how she had looked whilst they were watching the horror movie, and remembered what she said about how any teenager would pick up their mobile phone and call someone. She did just that.

  “Hello?” she said down the receiver. “We need the fire brigade-quickly.” Amber didn’t know why she added quickly onto the end; they were the fire brigade, of course they would get there quickly.

  “What’s your location?” said the lady down the phone.

  “What’s your address?” Amber mouthed to Eva.

  “Forty-one, Baker Street,” said Josh, who was recovering from his initial shock and was beginning to be helpful. He leaned back out of the window and began shouting again.

  “Someone will be with you shortly,” the woman said.

  “Okay, um, thank you,” Amber panted down the phone. All the talking had made her already smoke-dried throat sore.

  She put an arm around the still-rocking Eva to try to comfort her, still aware of Josh shouting out the window at the top of his voice. Amber sighed.

  “There’s no point, no one’s going to-“

  “Hey, I see someone,” he said. “Help us! Help, there’s a fire!” He turned back to Amber and Eva. “They’re coming,” he wheezed.

  Moments later, because of her adrenaline high, Amber heard running footsteps over the flames and shouting and sobbing.

  “How many of you are up there?” a man’s voice called. Amber thought she recognised it, but her locked brain wouldn’t let her figure out who it was.

  “There are three of us,” she heard Josh shout back. “We can’t get out, the staircase is blocked with fire!”

  “I’ll come and get you,” said whoever was out there. Amber could hear the conviction in his voice, and for a second, she knew she would be safe. And then she remembered she was in the middle of a house fire and was about to let some poor stranger risk their lives to attempt
of save her.

  “No don’t!” she yelled out to the figure in the garden. “It’s too dangerous, the whole ground floor is probably in flames by now.”

  Whoever the person was, he was either very brave or very stupid, because he didn’t listen to Amber’s warning, and dove straight in through the still open front door.

  Only a few seconds later, she saw the same figure emerging through the bedroom door, dusted with smoke.

  “Come on,” he said strongly. “You have to go.”

  “We can’t, the only way out is the window and it’s-“

  “I’ll get you out,” said the man. “Come on, now.”

  The next thing Amber knew, she was being lifted of the ground, and when she opened her eyes, was outside lying on the grass. Looking around, she saw Eva and Josh to her sides, also on the ground looking bewildered.

  “How did you…?” she asked confusedly.

  “I carried you out,” said the boy. Now they were outside, Amber could see their saviour more clearly by the light of the flames, which were devouring their way through Eva’s home.

  But she knew this figure, even though it was definitely strange that he should be here, it was-

  “Matthew Pryer? What are you doing here?”

  “You mean, besides saving your life?” he asked shortly.

  Out in the distance, Amber could hear blaring sirens coming closer and closer.

  “How did you know we needed help?” she said.

  “Well, I saw that guy,” he pointed at Josh, “With his head sticking out of a second story window yelling into the night, so I thought there was probably some bad stuff going down, and here I am.”

  “How did you get us out so fast?” Amber asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, you did. It was like one second we were in the bedroom and the next moment we were out here.”

  “You fainted Amber,” said Matthew.

  “No, I didn’t,” she said awkwardly. Amber had passed out before, and she knew it resulted in her feeling nauseous and having a headache.

  “Yes you did, I took one step towards you and you started to keel over, it’s lucky I managed to catch you before you hit your head,” Matthew said quietly. It was almost as though he didn’t want Eva or Josh to hear, but Amber thought she must be mistaken in thinking that, because it was senseless.

  She sat and looked at the flames for a while, which were somehow calming after what had just happened, like it almost satisfied her that they had failed in trying to kill her and her friends. The flickering orange lights in the darkness were sort of hypnotic.

  “I don’t think I fainted,” she said suddenly.

  “You fainted, and when you woke up, I’d already managed to get you out here,” said Matthew, and looked deep into Amber’s eyes with his own startlingly blue ones. For some reason, she story sounded more believable after he said it, like hearing the words made it click somewhere in the back of her brain. She fainted, she woke up, Matthew Pryer had saved her. It was simple.

  All this time, Amber had been gazing into those sapphire blue eyes aimlessly. She realised what she was doing and quickly looked back at the flames, which were growing less calming. All the adrenaline in her system was filtering away, leaving Amber back in her normal mind-a mind that was very much afraid of what had just happened, which was stupid, she told herself, because she wasn’t in any danger any more.

  She could hear the sirens now, no more than a street away, any second now a great big fire truck would be pulling up beside them, trying to extinguish the now vast, roaring flames.

  She sat on the wet ground, hugging her knees. No one spoke. Amber could feel herself shaking, but she couldn’t stop it, no matter how hard she tried. Her brain kept on flashing back to images of the fire, which she didn’t even realise she’d had time to process in her panic-stricken state.

  Someone sat down beside her and laid a steadying hand on her shoulder.

  “Amber,” said Matthew. “I have to go, but I want you to do me a favour.”

  “Huh?” she said. She was very tired; it was hard to concentrate on what he was saying to her. The whole thing seemed so complicated to her right now.

  “When you get home, I want you to go to the cupboard, Amber listen to me,” he said, for Amber had started to waver on the spot. “I want you to go to the cupboard and find the most sugary food you can-marshmallows, chocolate, whatever-and eat it. Eat lots of it. Don’t be all girly and go thinking about getting fat, it’s for medicinal purposes. Promise me you’ll do that?”

  Amber nodded. She could feel herself drifting out of consciousness, and apparently it was fairly obvious how she was feeling because Matthew laid her head back on something soft on the ground. The last thing she was aware of was him saying to one of the others with her that they needed to look after her. Then he was gone, and mentally so was she.

  The next thing Amber was aware of, was waking up in the own bedroom, wrapped in duvets, with a glass of water next to her on the bedside table. She had some recollection of a traumatic dream, but she didn’t try to remember it; it if was traumatic, why should she want to know what it was?

  She sat up and lifted the water. She was very thirsty. Upon taking a sip though, she realised that she didn’t want this water; it tasted awful, like someone had put sugar in it. It seemed like a strange thing to do, putting sugar into a glass of water.

  Sugar. There had been something about sugar in her dream; someone had told her she needed to have lots of it. That was a strange coincidence, she thought.

  She looked around the pale blue walls of her room. They were like soft, flowing water. Amber remembered water…

  She remembered.

  It hadn’t been a dream. There was a fire, Eva’s house had been on fire. Someone else was there too…John…no, that didn’t sound right. Josh. Josh had been there. And Matthew Pryer. He had saved them.

  But then he had left. Amber distinctly remembered him leaving, as clearly as every single other moment of the previous night, which was too define for her liking. It was like watching television reruns in her head, but she’d lost the remote and couldn’t change the channel, so she had to watch the same thing over and over again, one image.

  The fire.

  Amber could remember feeling almost ok when it was happening, because her mind didn’t seem to have processed what was going on. But now that the event was over, her whole head was free to play back everything that had happened, which it was doing repetitively.

  Amber still felt slightly sick, and Matthew had said to eat lots of sugary food to make her feel better. She didn’t see how eating sickening foods was going to make her less sick, but he did save her life, so maybe his advice was worth trying.

  Amber slowly swung her feet onto the floor and walked downstairs to the kitchen, where she found her mother in the middle of a phone conversation.

  “Yes, they say they were very lucky to have gotten out…yes I’m just so glad everyone was safe…oh, Amber, you’re awake,” she said when she saw her daughter standing there. “Can I call you back?” she said to the person on the phone. “How are you feeling sweetheart?”

  “Bad,” said Amber quietly.

  “I’m just so glad that you’re all right, you could have been really hurt, are you sure you’re okay?” she surveyed her daughter over the kitchen counter, on which Amber was leaning heavily to keep her standing.

  “I’m fine mum, honestly,” she said. “Do we have any chocolate?”

  “Chocolate? You can’t be eating chocolate, after what you’ve been through you need some proper food, I’ll make you a cooked breakfast if you like.”

  “No, really I’m supposed to have something sugary,” Amber insisted.

  “Said who?” her mum asked.

  “Matthew Pryer told me,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Matthew Pryer, you know, the boy who got us out of the house?” Amber said.

  “Amber honey, no one helped you
out of the house, when the fire brigade arrived they found the three of you on the grass outside. You had fainted and the other two were in shock. There was no one else there.”

  “Mum, Matthew Pryer was there, trust me,” she said. She was feeling too sick to argue; it would really make her life easier if her mum would just give up and hand over the chocolate for once.

  “If this Matthew person saved you, why wasn’t he there when the fire brigade showed up?” her mum asked stubbornly.

  “He said he had to go,” Amber muttered. “He only left a few seconds before the fire engines arrived.” She really needed some food now, so started shuffling towards the cupboard herself.

  “Why don’t you go and sit down, I’ll get you some sugary food,” her mum said. “I think we need to talk about what happened last night. The doctor’s going to come round later to make sure you’re okay.”

  Amber had the impression that her mother though she had imagined seeing Matthew Pryer in the garden, which she knew she hadn’t, because she could clearly remember every single thing that had happened last night, and that included everyone that had been there, and exactly who had come to save them. She doubted anyone would want to keep quiet about saving the lives of three people, so Matthew would probably come out with it himself later, and then she would prove to her mother that she had been right.

  Amber ate liberal amounts of chocolate and biscuits that morning, as well as several glasses of lemonade and an ice bun from the bakers that her mum bought her for ‘being so brave’. Amber didn’t feel brave; Matthew Pryer had been the brave one, walking into a burning building to save them. She would have to thank him next time she saw him.

  Eating all the sweet stuff did help stop Amber feeling sick, but then as she continued eating it feeling better peaked and she started to feel sick again. It was at the point when she finished her second bar of chocolate that she resigned to the sofa guiltily. She would usually have done some exercise, or at least gone for a walk, but today he figured she had a good excuse to sit around and do nothing.

  Her mum, who had taken the day off work to be with Amber, sat down on the sofa and together they watched film after film after film.

  “Right,” said her mum when the fourth lot of credits started rolling across the screen. “I’m not letting you mope around the house all day, so come on, up you get.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Amber. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Yes, you do, you just don’t know it yet. Come on, up.” Her mum lifted the blankets of Amber, and opened the curtains to let in as much light as possible.

  Amber groaned.

  “Go and get dressed, and I’ll take you out for a drink and some food, okay.”

  Amber groaned again.

  “I know you don’t like the sound of it now, but trust me, the walk will do you good.”

  With a lot of moaning and grumbling under her breath, Amber reluctantly stood up and trudged out of the room and up to her bedroom.

  The first thing she did was make her bed; to anyone else, making their beds would be quite low down on the list of priorities after being in a house fire, but Amber was nothing if not neat, and having a messy bedroom would stop her from being able to think clearly.

  Next, she went to her small wooden wardrobe in the corner of the room and opened the double doors. Amber liked clothes, which was probably why she had so many of them. She picked out a pair of jeans and a grey jumper with a pair of boots. It was cold outside, and Amber had noticed she was more sensitive to the temperature than she had been before, so she also thought to put on a cool green hat with what she was wearing.

  She then went into the bathroom so she could have a look at her reflection for the first time since the fire. Her hair looked blackened in places and white in others, and she could see near her hairline where someone had tried to clean her face of all the soot, but had left a thin black rim around her face where the clothe had not reached. Her entire appearance looked generally awful. Her skin itself seemed to have taken on some of the grey of the smoke, and even her expression was hopeless. She decided she was going to have to take a shower before she went anywhere.

  Hot water helps. It’s true. As the soothing droplets soaked her body and hair, Amber tried to look to the future instead of remembering the past. She thought about how her and Matthew Pryer may end up being friends after all that had happened, and she thought about meeting up with Will, whom she had gotten much closer to since he had first kissed her. He was like her best friends, but he was romantic as well, and at the same time he was always cracking jokes or explaining to Amber everything she needed to know for her next homework assignment. She remembered with a shock that she was meant to be meeting up with him today, but she’d forgotten in the rush of everything that had been going on. When she got out of the shower, she thought, she would have to ring him and apologise.

  So Amber climbed out of the jet of steaming water, got redressed and picked up the phone that was on the table by her bed. She keyed in Will’s number and pressed the dial button.

  The phone didn’t even ring; just went straight to answer machine. Amber hoped he wasn’t annoyed that she’d stood him up. She knew he would understand once she explained, in fact, he’d probably end up insisting on taking her to the park and forcing her onto the swings to cheer her up, which though she would pretend it didn’t, would actually have her laughing happily after a couple of minutes.

  She tried to ring him once more, but it went through to answer phone again, so she left a message saying that she was really sorry and that she would explain everything another time, and that he should come over to see her tomorrow. Will always came to her; she’d never even seen his house. Actually, she wasn’t exactly sure which one it was, which wasn’t very reassuring.

  “Come on Amber,” her mum shouted up the stairs. “The café will be closed soon.”

  Though Amber highly doubted the café would be closed (it was only just pat lunchtime) she jogged lightly down the stairs into the hall.

  “You look better,” her mum said.

  “Thank you,” Amber replied. “If you’re making me go out now, does that mean I can do nothing once we get back?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Well tough, because I’m telling you now, once we get back I’m going to lie down on the sofa and watch Romeo and Juliet.|

  “Romeo and Juliet?” her mother repeated. “I didn’t think you were that cultured.”

  “Charming,” said Amber. “I’ll have you know it is now one of my favourite films.”

  “Well that’s great,” said her mum, putting her arm around her shoulder. “I’m just impressed you can understand it; I always thought Shakespeare was like a foreign language.”

  Amber left the house with her spirits lifted the highest they had been all day, but the further they walked, the more the dropped again.

  “Everyone’s staring,” she muttered.

  “They can’t be,” her mum replied. “No one’s going to know about what happened, it was only last night.”

  “They’re looking at me, mum,” said Amber. If there was anything she hated, that made her feel insecure and angry and upset, it was people staring at her. She had learnt to tell a lot from a look since her dad had been arrested. Some quick glances are just to acknowledge that there’s somebody there, and then there are stares that are admiring, or pitiful, but most people just looked at Amber judgingly, which was worse than anything else. Having people staring at her just reminded her of being back at Polegate, being the daughter of the murderer that nobody wanted to sit next to at lunch. She couldn’t bare it.

  “Can we go home?” she asked.

  “Come on Amber, we’ve come so far,” said her mum. “It’s just round the corner, and then you’ll be inside and no one will be able to see you. Besides, I doubt they’re staring at you because of the fire, I mean, I don’t even know how anyone could know about that yet, it only happened a few hours ago. Maybe you’
re just noticing people looking at you more than usual because you’re expecting it.”

  “I’m no paranoid,” she said. “I’ve had plenty of experience of people staring at me, thanks to dad.”

  “Please can we not talk about your father,” said her mum, who felt the same way towards Amber’s father as Amber felt herself. “Today’s bad enough without bringing him into the conversation.”

  It had become almost a rule to avoid mentioning Amber’s father since he had been taken away. Amber didn’t miss him; she couldn’t after what he did.

  So they didn’t talk about him, and instead moved onto movie reviews and news stories and pointless things that didn’t matter, because it kept the conversation flowing, and away from the ‘D’ word.

  “So tell me more about Will,” said her mum as they took a seat at one of the two tables in the tiny café.

  “There’s nothing much to tell,” Amber said. She didn’t like talking about boys with her parents; she liked her private life private.

  “Do I get to meet him?”

  “No.”

  “What about this Matthew Pryer who you were talking about earlier?”

  “Oh, so you believe me now do you?” Amber asked and folded her arms.

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe you, I just don’t think it’s possible that anyone else was at the house Amber,” her mum explained.

  “He was there! I’ll ask Eva, and she’ll remember, then will you believe me?”

  “I told you, I do believe you, but you went through a lot last night, and you always hear stories about shock causing people to see things.”

  “I’ll prove it to you,” Amber promised.

  But she couldn’t. On Monday, when she went back to school, and asked Eva about that night, Eva denied seeing anyone else apart from the three of them.

  “I don’t remember anyone being there,” she said. “Especially Matthew Pryer. Don’t you think it’s unlikely that he would be on my street in the middle of the night and just happened to be the only person to see us and come to help?”

  So what do you think happened?” Amber asked.

  “I think you must have gotten us out somehow, but the shock of it all stopped you remembering.”

  “Well, I think you’re wrong.”

  “I spoke to Josh yesterday, and he didn’t say anything either. Honestly Amber, I just think you don’t realise what a hero you are.”

  Amber didn’t believe it, because she knew, she knew that it was Matthew Pryer who had saved them, and she was going to prove it. She’d talk to him herself.

  It took Amber fifty-seven minutes to track down Matthew Pryer, which she thought was ridiculous; the school really wasn’t that big. However, she did find him, outside the maths block on his way down to PE.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “I just wanted to say thank you.”

  “Thank you?” Matthew asked.

  “Yeah, you know…for saving my life?” Amber was really hoping that she was right, because there was not a flicker of recognition on Matthew’s face.

  “Oh, that,” he said.

  “You did, I knew it,” Amber couldn’t help saying aloud, then continued when Matthew gave her a puzzled look. “Eva couldn’t remember you, and my mum didn’t believe me.”

  “Oh, alright.”

  “Why do you think that is?” she asked.

  “Why what is?”

  “It’s just, and I don’t mean this in an offensive way, but weird stuff just seems to happen around you…sorry, that sounded offensive, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And seen as no one’s ever made that observation before, maybe it’s you that has weird things happening around them,” he turned around to go.

  “Then how come Eva and Josh can’t remember you saving them?” she shouted.

  “I don’t know,” he sighed, and Amber thought he sounded unreasonably exasperated. “It could be anything, shock probably, so can I go now?”

  “Yes, sorry,” she said. “And thank you again.

  Matthew turned his back and walked quickly away, leaving Amber alone in the middle of the pavement.

  As she drifted to sleep that night, thinking of how annoying Matthew Pryer was, a boy with hair the colour of midnight and sapphire blue eyes was running for his life from a monster beyond any dream Amber’s mind could conjure up.