Read Online Black Rabbit Summer by Kevin Brooks - Free Book Online

his country mansion, married a beautiful young model, and they’d set up home on a working farm in a little village about ten miles from St Leonard’s.
    His wife, Sophie Hart, was also pretty rich, so together they were worth a huge heap of money. But Stella never saw any of it. She was their only daughter, and because they’d both seen the ugly side of celebrity (Sophie was an ex-hellraiser too), they were determined to bring Stella up as ‘normally’ as possible. Which iswhy – despite their millions – Stella ended up at the same school as us.
    I didn’t actually know her that well, but she was really good friends with Eric and Nic, and she shared their passion for acting. They performed in all the school plays and stuff, and they were always singing and dancing, dressing up, dreaming of the days when they’d all be big stars. Most of us thought that if any of them were going to make it, it’d be Nicole. Eric was always a bit too intense about everything, especially himself. Stella had the looks, but not much talent, and although her parents knew all the right people, they refused to do anything to help her, which really pissed Stella off. Nicole, though… well, Nicole didn’t need any help. She had everything – talent, looks, energy, confidence.
    So it was a big surprise when Stella turned up at school one day and announced that she’d landed a part in a TV commercial. She was around fourteen at the time, and it turned out later that she’d got this part by getting all cosy with the sixteen-year-old son of one of her parents’ friends who just happened to be a well-known film director. The TV commercial was for a big supermarket chain. It was one of those serial adverts, the sort of thing that runs for a few months, then a new one comes out, but with the same characters, and then another one… like instalments in a stupid little story. This one featured an endearingly quirky family – father, mother, daughter, son. Stella played the daughter. Her character started off as a cute, but sassy, teenager – all sweetness and charm and innocence – but as the adverts developed, so did Stella’s cute little teenager, and within a year or so she was beginning to get the kind of tabloid attention that didn’t really fit in with the supermarket’s wholesome family image, so they dropped her from theads. Stella had already left school by then – I think she was being tutored at home – and the only time any of us saw her, including Eric and Nic, was when she was in the papers and on TV, which was pretty much all the time. She was doing all sorts of stuff by then – photo shoots for Loaded and FHM , chat shows, appearances in music videos – but mostly she was just famous for being Stella Ross. The Wild Child, the Fifteen-Year-Old Hellraiser, the Girl of Every Boy’s (and Every Man’s) Dreams.
    About six months ago, after a wild night out at some swanky club in London on her sixteenth birthday, Stella ended up in a hotel room with a guy called Tiff. Tiff was a singer with a boy band called Thrill who’d recently come third in a second-rate talent show on cable TV. Apart from Stella and Tiff, no one really knows exactly what happened that night, but within a few days their relationship had broken up and a series of intimate photographs of Stella had appeared in a Sunday newspaper. They were pretty grainy pictures, shot on a mobile phone, and they didn’t really show very much – the newspaper edited out all the naughtiest bits – but suddenly the whole world was talking about them. The newspaper that published the pictures was one of those papers that’s always ranting and raving about paedophiles, and now here they were, happily showing pictures of a near-naked girl who’d only just turned sixteen.
    So, of course, all the other newspapers went mad, calling them hypocrites, purveyors of filth, while at the same time showing edited versions of the photos themselves, just to let us see what they were