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passed.
    “Thanks. They're a lifestyle choice.”
    She turns to look at me and for a moment, just one brief moment my mind swirls with colours. The make-up is gone and the waning sun illuminates her skin. She look different. So different. A better different.
    I should walk away. I don’t talk to holiday makers unless I’m taking their money in the shop.
    I don’t.
    Instead I fold my legs and sit on the sa nd. My fingers automatically pick up a splinter of driftwood, as I cast my eyes up at the sun and start to draw.
    “So do you have a name girl with the bangles?” I’m trying to remember what the young girl who was with her in the shop called her yesterday. Becca? Something like that?”
    Turning to me with a frown on her face she bites her lower lip. Jeez, I only asked her name.
    The frown and the angry glare instantly make me recall her name. “Bex.” I answer for her. The frown deepens.
    “No one calls me that, only my sister.”
    “Well I don’t know what else to call you?” I prompt. Her feistiness is rather amusing, it’s actually doing a good job of distracting me from the usual shit I try to keep out of my head.
    Her top lip curls a little in distaste at my goading. She really doesn’t want to tell me her name. Who doesn’t want people to know their name? My eyes flick over her with a little more interest. She is rather pretty. Hot, Dan would call it. But I would go with pretty. Pretty is a more delicate sounding word, easy to pair with the freckles and flame hair.
    Oh good god. I’ve realized what I am doing? I’m looking at another girl. I try and turn myself away from her a little. She mu st register my movement because she speaks, her voice low like she is sharing a secret.
    “Rebecca.” She clears her throat. “My name is Rebecca.”
    Something about her low tone makes me cast my eyes back over her. Well not exactly willingly, my eyes just won’t damn behave themselves and head straight back to the smooth sunlit skin.
    She looks nervous, her fingers brushing over her overload of bangles.
    “Does Rebecca have a second name?” My feet do this bizarre thing where they scoot over the sand towards her toes.
    “No.”
    “What no surname? So you are Rebecca No Name?”
    She scowls further. “Yes. I am Rebecca No Name.”
    Her tone and the death stare she lays on me make me do something I am not expecting in the least. I laugh. Fucking loud. I laugh like I never stopped.
    “Well Rebecca No Name. I am Joshua Adams, it’s a pleasure to meet you and your bangles.”
    I lean forward and shake her hand my fingers grazing against hers, sand rolls between our connected skin.
    Rebecca No Name digs her toes into the sand, burying them deep. “Walters. It’s Rebecca Walters.”
    “Bex Walters, now that has a nice ring to it.”
    “It’s Rebecca Walters.” She spits her name out like it burns her lips to say it.
    “Okay, okay.”
    “So Rebecca Walters where are you on holiday from?”
    “Nowhere.”
    Seriously. It’s like talking to a wall. I don’t even know why I am still sitting here. This makes an evening with Aunt May look like a social highlight.
    I get up and start to brush the sand from my legs.
    The girl with attitude stares up at me from the ground and I hesitate. “London. I come from London, and I’m not on holiday. My family have moved into Bridge Cottage.”
    Just like that the air gushes out of my lungs. The girl with the attitude and the wrong clothes and the frown lives in the house that I was fully expecting to move into one day. The cottage I expected to grow old in.
    I sit back on the sand with a bump.
    “I am leaving though, in two weeks.” Her gaze is on the sea as she speaks. “Two weeks. I’ve just got to get through two weeks.” She repeats almost to herself.
    Two weeks of what?
    “Who are you running from?”
    Rebecca, Bex, the girl with the attitude turns to me, her eyes hidden in the shadows of the dipping sun. “Myself.”
    And that I just don’t know