Read Online The Mixed-Up Summer of Lily McLean by Lindsay Littleson - Free Book Online

don’t want to see what is looming in front of us. I would rather have faced my ghost girl again.
    My step-dad is lurching along the aisle between the rows of seats. He is looking for a seat, but he’s clearly drunk and people are placing their bags on the empty seats next to them. Nobody wants a drunk jaikie sitting near them.
    “’Scuse me, ’scuse me,” he slurs, as he nearly falls into somebody’s lap.
    He hasn’t seen Mum yet and if we’re careful, I think that we might escape unnoticed. Mum grabs my hand and hisses at me to get my journal out of the carrier bag on the floor. I bend down to fetch it and she leans down at the same time, pretending to rummage in our bags.
    My step-dad sways forward and flings himself clumsily into a seat just three rows from us. The face of the elderly lady directly opposite him is a mask of distaste. He is half lying across the train seat, feet sticking out in the aisle. He looks scruffy and unwashed and I expect he smells pretty unpleasant.
    “Just sit quietly and write in your journal,” whispers Mum. “He’ll never know we’re on the train as long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.”
    Mum winds her scarf round her head, covering her hair and part of her face, and then leans her head against the window and closes her eyes. I stare down at my journal as if I’m concentrating really hard, but the words are jumping about on the page. My heart is jumping about in my ribcage too. And my hands are shaking too much to write.
    The train carries on rumbling along the rails and I pray silently that he won’t turn around.
    I’m not sure exactly who I’m praying to, as I stopped believing in God when I was in Primary 4 and our teacher told us the story of Noah. I didn’t want to believe in a God who would decide to kill everyone in the whole world, except one family, because the majority of people weren’t behaving very nicely. He sent masses of rain and flooded the land, and all those bad people drowned. I’ve read that drowning is one of the worst ways to go, so that makes it even more cruel. My family wouldn’t have made it on to the Ark, that’s for sure. We would have drowned with the rest of the bad guys.
    The train whizzes through the countryside, stopping regularly at the small stations on the line. As we stop at Johnstone, Milliken Park and then Howwood, I wonder uneasily when my step-dad is going to get off the train.
    Mum has told me many times that he isn’t allowed to come within a five-mile radius of Largs. I picture miles and miles of jagged barbed-wire fence, probably electrified. And a wide circle of armed guards holding the collars of snarling, slavering dogs. I imagine these things because they make me feel safe, even though I know they are silly, and that in real life the only thing preventing my step-dad from turning up at our front door is the legal injunction organised by McTavish and Quipp (the lawyers, obviously, not the cats).
    So he can’t be getting off at our station, surely. I begin to feelquite panicky at the thought of him staying on the train all the way to Largs. What if he follows us home?
    “Mum, when’s he going to get off?” I whisper, hearing the anxiety in my voice.
    “Next station, I expect, Lily,” says Mum confidently. “He is staying with his mother and she lives out this way.”
    The train slows with a screeching of brakes as we approach Glengarnock. My step-dad heaves himself to his feet and staggers towards the doors and it’s as he stands, clutching the rail, waiting for the doors to slide open, that I notice how much weight he has lost. How yellow and papery his skin looks.
    He almost falls out of the train and reels towards the station exit. Mum gives me a shaky smile, but her eyes look desperately sad and I feel the same. For the first time since my step-dad came into my life, I feel sorry for him, and not nearly so afraid. He looked pathetic; not the bogeyman I remember. Not that I am sorry to see the back