Hello all! It's a damned long time since I've put anything at all up on this website and this is the first story I've ever written for Charlie Bone! But Emma has always been such a favourite of mine and after re-reading the series and suddenly having this idea I couldn't not try it!

Disclaimer: I'm sitting on the floor, wearing mickey-mouse leggings. Now this doesn't mean I'm not Jenny Nimmo, but it certainly seems unlikely. In which case, I obviously don't own the books or characters referenced here in any way at all...

I hope you enjoy this first chapter and if you do/don't why not let me know in a review?

Chapter One

Sixteen

(Now that my time is shorter/I wanna see my daughter/

tell her I'm sorry for the things I taught her)

Dear Emma,

If you are reading this and by God do I hope you are, it means that very shortly you will be sixteen years of age. It is a great and terrible age my darling girl (if I remember it rightly) but knowing you as I once did I have no doubt that you will do beautiful things with it. If there is anything I wish you to know as you reach this momentous number of years, it would be that mistakes are not currency. No one can save yours up to use against you and I sincerely hope you won't be a collector of those of others.

With love and (as always) deepest regret,

Your father.

(A year from now/ we'll all be gone/ all our friends will move away)

Emma Tolly stood before her bathroom mirror, the letter little more now than a collection of creases locked between her clenched fingers, its contents swimming amongst her thoughts. She had read and re-read the words so many times it almost seemed as if there had never been a moment in which she had not known them. Her aunt leaving it on her pillow this morning as Emma brushed her teeth was the fiction, the letter the only reality.

Sixteen.

As her father said, it seemed a momentous age. She ought to have something to show for it, some sort of mark, some badge of honour. Reaching sixteen felt like losing something, felt like all those previous years – ten, twelve, fifteen – those vague and insubstantial ages that had never really made any difference anyway, were being left behind. She would like something to remember all those moments of life – of childhood – by, something to remind her that all those years of glorious anguish and aching, catastrophic happiness had happened, to know that they were still there, still real, even if she was leaving those years behind.

She looked into the mirror.

Nothing had changed. The same face looked out at her. Perhaps it would always be too pale, perhaps she was doomed to always look unblemished, untouched, like one dirty look could fracture the sheet of glass that was her skin, split it into myriad, imperceptible fragments like stars looked at without a telescope. She could live with that if she had to. Her hair was longer than it once had been, the golden blonde frenzy held back as always though it was becoming harder and harder to change. That at least was a sign of change.

But her eyes never changed. A pale and slumbering grey, always six thousand miles away and several feet above the earth. Her eyes had always looked like they belonged to someone else, belonged somewhere else but now, Emma thought, they looked even stranger. Young and fragile and hesitant. She could almost see the ghost of the headache that had been plaguing her for days living in those eyes. Maybe it that was that made them look so wild, maybe its breath fogging up the glass of her retinas was what was giving them that unfamiliar, blurry, cast.

The headache. It ebbed and flowed – no that sounded too tranquil. It was like a faulty wire in her brain, it was like her thoughts were flickering like a lightbulb. When it came she couldn't think straight. When it left she couldn't think it all. Afterwards it was like she had been wiped clean. Names escaped her and faces sharpened and became fiercer, more savage things. It was just tiredness, she was sure of it.

It was amazing how much more exhausting happiness was than fear, after all. As Emma rubbed moisturiser into her skin she contemplated just how much there was to do these days. School may not be a dark cloud lingering, constantly in the back of her mind but it was still present in her thoughts, still constantly leeching away at her energy and her vibrancy and her time. And there were so many drawings to finish and books to read and friends to visit and flights to take. And, she reminded herself, there had been for weeks now a fizz at the pit of her stomach – in fact not so much a fizz as a firework display, an extravaganza. She knew Olivia had something grand planned for the occasion of her sixteenth birthday, moreover she was sure Tancred – and just the thought of Tancred was enough to smooth away almost all of the worry that Emma's brain was wrinkled with – had a hand in it, whatever it was. And anything planned by boys with storms in their veins has the potential to be exciting, at the very least.

All these things Emma Tolly told herself. She whispered them to her worries as she brushed her teeth and she repeated them in a sterner tone as the fear slunk from her thoughts to the treacherous depths of her stomach. As she pulled on duck-patterned pyjamas given to her as a joke by her aunt she told herself not to worry and as she plugged her mobile into charge she reiterated that everything was just fine. As she twisted herself into a comfortable – 'but how the hell is sleeping like a pretzel comfortable?' Tancred always asked – position beneath her miles of white duvet, she almost believed it was true. She was safe. Nothing was wrong. She was safe.

And yet as she drifted off to sleep she couldn't help feeling like her mind was spiralling away from her, spinning and twisting and whirling through the air. It leaked through her skull, her body fell away from it, it didn't belong to her anymore.

She was fine. She was safe. She was fine.

Almost.

How was that? Was it ok? I really wondered whether that was a good place to end it or whether I should have gone further. Let me know in a review? I'll update within a few days I should think...