Holiday Of A Lifetime
Part 1 - Seahouses Bay
- Cover
- 1 - Dysfunctionality
- 2 - Rude Awakening
- 3 - Financial Wrongs
- 4 - Ticket to Where?
- 5 - Smooching with Woo-Who?
- 6 - Passports Please
- 7 - New Arrivals
- 8 - Xavier
Part 2 - Isla del Granita
- 9 - Work It, Own It
- 10 - Strange Stirrings
- 11 - Retail Therapy
- 12 - Dinner for One
- 13 - Xavier
- 14 - Skinny Dipping
- 15 - Xavier
- 16 - Culture and Cuisine
- 17 - Xavier
- 18 - Biscotti Bliss
- 19 - Xavier
- 20 - Morning Sickness
- 21 - Smugglers' Bay
- 22 - Xavier
- 23 - It's Not the Fall ...
- 24 - Xavier
- 25 - Not That Kind of Girl
- 26 - Xavier
- 27 - Smugglers' Cove
- 28 - That Kind of Girl
- 29 - Demons
- 30 - Storm Clouds
Part 3 - Westhouses
Part 4 - Seahouses Reprise
- 33 - Home at Last
- 34 - Breakfast Plans
- 35 - Outstanding Bills
- 36 - Planning an Invasion
- 37 - Financial Rights
- 38 - New Beginnings
- 39 - Mile High
- 40 - Epilogue
Bonus - Melissa's Tale
1 - Dysfunctionality
It was past midnight. Until recently Analise had never been up this late, but she needed to give her presentation one final check.
She knew every slide by heart, and exactly how she was going to expand on each bullet point, but tomorrow was going to be the biggest day of her life and she needed it to be perfect. She switched off the computer, checked the alarm, and went to bed.
It was dark ... too dark. She reached out, turned the bedside lamp on and rolled into a ball in the middle of the double bed.
After all these years, she still didn't like the dark. The dark was where bad things happened - voices raised, feet stamped, doors slammed, engines started - and where her family had started its long, slow slide into dysfunctionality. Monsters stamped their feet, bogeymen slammed doors, aliens hovered over the house in their spaceships before zooming away; all of them shouting to be heard above each other. Analise had retreated into herself and books.
Always in bed while there was still some light in the sky. Huddled in a tight ball under her duvet, back to the wall, as far from the open edges of her single bed as she could get.
Melissa, her twin sister, had responded very differently. A new garish make-up or hair style every week,
ever higher hem lines, ever lower neck lines. Then Melissa discovered boys, sneaking out, smoking behind the bike-sheds, and, presumably, other things. Her mother had once snidely suggested that Mel changed her boyfriend more often than her knickers, Mel retorted that at least she wore them.
After that the two were rarely in the same room, and could barely tolerate being in the same house. Mel's grades slipped and she was often excluded, but never expelled. The school needed Analise - the 'straight A*' daughter of an international pop princess and world-renowned sports star - and if Mel was the price they had to pay, then pay it they would.
The once inseparable twins drifted further and further apart, unable to comprehend each other.
Cover