I blundered down the stairs, swiping furiously at my wet, tear-streaked face and pushed past Ty who was standing in the hall, gawping at me and waving a long-suffering Huckleberry in the air. ‘Ber-tiiie,’ he whined. ‘Jazz just called Huckleberry a tail-less lettuce-munching rat!’ ‘S-sorry, Ty. Gotta go,’ I mumbled, letting myself out of the house and running down the street before Jazz’s mum or sister could spot me and make me sit down with Jazz and ‘try to sort it all out’. All I could think was how much distance I wanted to put between me and Jazz. How could she have said those things? We had always been mates. OK, so we didn’t get on one hundred per cent of the time, but she’d never been so hurtful before. What was I going to do now? It had always been Jazz and Bertie, Bertie and Jazz. I wished I had Kaboodle to run home to – that gorgeous, soft, clever little kitten who always had some words of wisdom and a loud jet-engine purr to make me feel better.
