The Worst of Me by Kate Le Vann
‘Don’t run away,’ he said. I just shook my head and turned away, pulling my nice coat more closely around myself. ‘Cassidy. Cassidy.’ But then I stood there with my back to him, unable to go. ‘I . . .’ He sighed. ‘I know you don’t want to see me now.’ I focused on the snow melting on my sleeves. ‘You can’t know how much it kills me to think of that night,’ Jonah said. ‘I would do anything to make it not have happened.’
‘You’ve told me all this,’ I said. ‘And I believe you.’
‘I love you.’
‘You’ve told me that too.’
‘But you don’t care?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’ So easy to say something like this and make it believable, to sound all dead and flat. I dropped the newspaper as I started to walk away, and when I picked it up I could feel the imprint of my fist, I’d been gripping it so hard.
‘When I think,’ Jonah said, ‘that you have completely and totally stopped loving me, I’ll leave you alone.’
‘You’re so sure I ever loved you?’ I said.
Jonah smiled. ‘I have to believe you still do.’
Maybe he’ll get tired of waiting before I’m ready to take him back, and maybe I’ll be sad if that happens. I’d be there to watch it, him letting me go – I’ve already applied to the sixth-form college for next year, the one Jonah transferred to. I don’t want to do another two years of Samuel Bond’s with the same people I’ve always gone to school with, all of them knowing what I’m like – what I was like.
Jonah’s right: I still love him. That’s not enough, though. I’m going to take Sam’s advice, but I have to try to make me nice first. I need to start listening and reading and thinking, so that I can never be fooled or seduced or frightened by the wrong people again. So I can step up when things don’t feel right. I want to be able to trust myself. If Jonah’s prepared to wait for me, I want to be worth the wait.
Also by Kate le Vann
Tessa
in
Love
Wolfie was totally scruffy . . . and totally sexy. It wasn’t love at first sight, because I’d been aware of him for years and just hadn’t noticed before. It was like really seeing someone for the first time.
Tessa has always been ‘the quiet one’, while her best friend, Matty, is outgoing and constantly has boys flocking around her. But when Tessa falls in love for the first time at sixteen, everything changes. Tessa finds a soulmate in Wolfie, a committed green activist, and she grows more confident and outspoken every day. She also begins to look at the world differently . . .
But just when their love is at its strongest, tragedy strikes. How will she ever be able to cope?
‘A fabulous story – I couldn’t put it down.’ Wendy Cooling, children’s books consultant
Things I Know About Love
1. People don’t always tell you the truth about how they feel.
2. Nothing that happens between two people is guaranteed to be private.
3. I don’t know if you ever get over having your heart broken.
Livia’s experience of love has been disappointing, to say the least. But all that is about to change. After years of illness, she’s off to spend the summer with her brother in America. She’s making up for lost time, and she’s writing it all down in her private blog.
America is everything she’d dreamed of – and then she meets Adam. Can Livia put the past behind her and risk falling in love again?
‘Compelling, poignant and uplifting . . . Kate’s writing is perfectly pitched.’ Claudia Mody, Waterstones
Two
Friends,
One
Summer
Best friends Samantha and Rachel are spending the holidays with two families in France. They’re used to doing everything together, but suddenly they’re living in different worlds.
Rachel’s family is glamorous, vivacious and right in the centre of everything, but Samantha is stuck with a strict family who live in the middle of nowhere.
Samantha is shaken – she’s used to being the outgoing one, and now their roles are reversed. As new experiences and boys threaten the trust between her and Rachel, it looks unlikely that their lifelong friendship can survive this turbulent summer . . .
‘Sweet and insightful.’ MIZZ
RAIN
I remember Sarah. She was funny and happy and her voice went croaky when she was excited. I loved her more than anything. But she died before I ever really knew her: she was twenty-six. She was my mother.
Rain Lindsay is spending her first summer away from her father at her grandmother’s house in London.
London is scary and exciting – just like Harry, a student who is helping her grandmother renovate the house. Slowly their suspicion of each other lessens as Harry helps Rain discover more about her dead mother, whose diary Rain finds in her old bedroom. A diary that contains unsettling secrets . . .
An utterly compelling story of a girl on the brink of love and adulthood.
‘This is compelling reading, utterly, painfully believable, painstakingly and movingly charted.’
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Kate Le Vann, The Worst of Me