Samantha Young - The Fragile Ordinary

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Impossible Vastness of Us and the On Dublin Street series comes a heartfelt and beautiful novel about daring to dream and embracing who you are.

I am Comet Caldwell.

And I sort of, kind of, absolutely hate my name.

People expect extraordinary things from a girl named Comet. That she’ll be effortlessly cool and light up a room the way a comet blazes across the sky.

But from the shyness that makes her book-character friends more appealing than real people to the parents whose indifference hurts more than an open wound, Comet has never wanted to be the center of attention. She can’t wait to graduate from her high school in Edinburgh, Scotland, where the only place she ever feels truly herself is on her anonymous poetry blog. But surely that will change once she leaves to attend university somewhere far, far away.

When new student Tobias King blazes in from America and shakes up the school, Comet thinks she’s got the bad boy figured out. Until they’re thrown together for a class assignment and begin to form an unlikely connection. Everything shifts in Comet’s ordinary world. Tobias has a dark past and runs with a tough crowd—and none of them are happy about his interest in Comet. Targeted by bullies and thrown into the spotlight, Comet and Tobias can go their separate ways...or take a risk on something extraordinary.

Also By Samantha Young

The Impossible Vastness of Us

The Fragile Ordinary

The Fragile Ordinary

Samantha Young

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Samantha Young 2018

Samantha Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9781474084055

To the bestest friends a girl could ask for.

Here’s to over twenty years of glorious friendship, and many more to come.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Acknowledgments

Extract

About the Publisher

1

Out there she’s just a zero,

Observed. Judged. Promptly erased.

In here she’s always the hero,

Understood. Respected. Embraced.

—CC

Edinburgh, Scotland

I am Comet Caldwell.

And I sort of, kind of, absolutely hate my name.

People expect something extraordinary of a girl called Comet. Someone effortlessly cool and magnetic. Someone who lights up a room and draws attention the way a comet does when it blazes light and fire across the sky.

But a comet, when you break it down, is the opposite.

It’s an icy body that releases gas and dust.

Comets are basically great big dirty snowballs. Or, as some scientists have taken to calling them, snowy dirtballs.

Yup. A snowy dirtball. That makes more sense.

I was not a blaze of light and fire across the sky. I was just your average sixteen-year-old high school girl. An average sixteen-year-old who was spending the last day of summer uploading her latest attempt at poetry to her anonymous blog. The one with the comments turned off so I wouldn’t be subjected to public opinion and ridicule. “The Day We Caught the Train” by Ocean Colour Scene blared out of my laptop as I worked. I had a thing for nineties and early noughties indie music.

My phone vibrated. I ignored it, making sure the typesetting on my latest post was just right. Because that’s what I really cared about. The typesetting. Not the poem. Or that people would stumble across my blog and scorn the words torn from my beating heart.

The buzzing started up again and I sighed in irritation.

Vicki Calling.

As one of my two best friends, Vicki didn’t deserve to be ignored. I put my music on mute and picked up. “I hope you know you’re interrupting Liam and I, but keep it on the down low. Miley doesn’t know about our secret love.”

Vicki gave a huff of laughter. “Babe, I’ll take it to the grave.”

“So what’s up?”

“What’s up is Steph and I have been standing outside your house for the last ten minutes, ringing your doorbell. We can hear the music you dug out of a time capsule and Kyle has peered out the window at us and shooed us away twice.”

Kyle was my dad. Although I thought of him as Dad in my head, I never actually called him Dad. My parents had taught me to call them Carrie and Kyle from the moment I could make vowel sounds.

Of course my dad had waved my friends away. Because answering the door for people who weren’t there to see him would be too much like hard work.

I hopped off my bed, hurried out of my room and down the hall to the front door. As I swung it open, I was blasted by the familiar scent of the salty sea beyond our garden gate along with a rush of cool wind. I hung up my phone.

Vicki eyed my outfit carefully and then decided. “Nice.”

To say I had a quirky taste in fashion was putting it mildly. I was currently wearing a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar underneath a preppy lilac cardigan. Very 1950s. I’d matched it with a turquoise multilayered silk petticoat, and a pair of Irregular Choice Victorian ankle boots. They were lilac and instead of laces they were adorned with turquoise satin ribbons tied into large bows.

Steph stared at Vicki as if to say, Are you serious? and then she gave me a pained smile. “Dude, surely Carrie notices you in that outfit?”

I chose not to be insulted.

Steph was petite with an enviable bra size and a butt that actually filled out her River Island jeans. She wore her long honey-blond hair in carefully arranged loose curls, and her makeup was always perfect. Fashion-wise she mostly wore on-trend clothes from the more expensive stores in the shopping center but dipped into high-end designer when her lawyer dad felt like spoiling her.

Right now she was wearing skinny jeans with purposely placed rips in them, knee-high brown leather boots with a low heel and a Ralph Lauren bomber jacket.

Unlike Steph, Vicki, the wannabe fashion designer, appreciated my attempt to be different. Although to be fair it wasn’t really an attempt on my part. Or even an attempt to get Carrie to notice me—I didn’t think it was anyway. I just wore whatever jumped out at me from my wardrobe that day.