Girl Online

Chapter Thirty

“Penny! Penny! He came!”

At the sound of Bella’s voice I sit bolt upright in bed and rub my eyes, trying to see in the pitch-blackness. Suddenly, the thin beam from a flashlight shines in my face, causing me to blink.

“He came!” Bella says again. The torch beam swings away to reveal her little face peering at me from the top of the ladder at the end of my bed.

“Who came?”

“Santa, of course.”

“Oh.” I lie back down and grin up at the ceiling.

“Wake up!” Bella says. “We have to see what he’s brought us.”

“OK. Just coming.”

I reach under my pillow for my phone to see what time it is. Five thirty! I also see that I have a new text message and breathe a sigh of relief. By the time I got to my phone last night, Elliot had texted me three times about his flight home and how much he hated his parents. I’d felt really bad about replying so late. But when I open my texts folder I see that it’s from Ollie.

Happy Christmas, Penny! Hope you’re having a great time in New York. Looking forward to seeing you when you get back. Ollie xx

What? Why is Ollie texting me? And why is he looking forward to seeing me? Then I remember the photo shoot on the beach. He probably just wants me to take some more profile pics for him. Whatever. I put my phone back under my pillow.

“Come on, lazy bones!” Bella calls from the lower bunk and I feel her prodding my mattress.

“OK, OK.”

I clamber down the ladder and peep through the curtain into Bella’s bed. She’s sitting cross-legged, shining her torch on two stockings laid out in front of her. As soon as I see the mysterious lumps and bumps inside the stockings, I get that old familiar excited feeling. I guess you never truly grow out of Father Christmas.

“I didn’t think I was going to get anything this year,” Bella says to me, as I get into the end of her bunk.

“What? Why not?”

“Because I did something really bad at school,” she whispers, “and I thought Santa might have seen but I guess he didn’t.”

“Ah. Well, I’m sure Santa doesn’t mind if you’re bad once in a while. It’s very hard to be good all of the time.”

‘Tell me about it!” Bella says with a dramatic sigh—making me want to adopt her right there and then.

After emptying our stockings—mine was full of brightly colored candy, sweetly scented bath bombs, and a beautiful glass angel—I manage to persuade Bella that we should go back to bed. And somehow she agrees. But as I lie in the dark, my mind becomes way too busy to sleep. I’m unsettled by the text from Ollie, and worried that Elliot hasn’t texted me back—it’s already midday in the UK, so it’s really weird that he hasn’t sent me a message wishing me a happy Christmas. I hope he isn’t annoyed at me for taking so long to reply to him.

Noah kept apologizing for getting upset about his parents last night. In the end I had to remind him that I’d ended up blubbing all over him within an hour of us meeting so it just meant we were even. But, actually, it feels like so much more than that. When you cry in front of someone, when you show them your most vulnerable side, it shows that you really trust them. It’s so strange because, even though I still don’t really know very much about Noah, on some deeper level it feels like I’ve known him forever. Is this what it means when people talk about meeting their soul mate?

I get the sudden urge to write a blog post. Creeping down from my bunk, I go over to my suitcase and take out my laptop. Bella is curled up on her bed fast asleep, hugging the new teddy that Santa brought her. I gently pull her cover over her, then take my laptop back up to my bunk and log on to my blog.