PROLOGUE
Even though ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ was Tammy’s favorite story, she hated how it ended.
It started out well enough.
A little girl, Goldilocks, went into the forest one day and found a big, empty house. She went inside it, and tried out some chairs and tried out some porridge and tried out some beds then went to sleep. That bit was actually way more exciting than it sounded, because the idea of breaking into someone’s house was so naughty that it made all the tiny hairs on Tammy’s arms stand on end. Tammy was a good girl, so the thought of doing something like this delighted her in a wicked way.
In the original version of the story — which was the one that Tammy knew, because she had a lovely but very old-fashioned fairytale book — the three bears were not a Mama, a Papa, and a Baby bear. They were threebachelorbears. Three big, grizzly males.
Which made the story all the more wicked.
But the end of the story was disappointing. Because all that happened when the bears found Goldilocks was that the little girl woke up, jumped out of the window, ran away, and was never seen again.
Talk about an anticlimax.
So, Tammy liked to retell the story using three of her most grizzly teddy bears, plus her favorite stuffie of all: a fish called Goldie.
When the three bears found Goldie, in Tammy’s version, they gave her ass a good slap. And then, after the spanking, they asked Goldie to live with them. And she said yes…
Tammy had just acted out the story for the third time in a row, but something was bugging her. She rolled onto her stomach, swiping the bears aside, and looked at Goldie.
‘What’s up, Goldie?’ she asked the stuffie.
‘Well,’ she made Goldie say, in a funny voice, flapping her mouth open and closed like a goldfish. ‘Why can’t I just enjoy all three things in the house? The big chair, the medium chair,andthe little chair? And why can’t I just enjoy taking my porridge three different ways? And enjoy all the different beds? Isn’t there something to like about them all?’
Tammy tutted. ‘Oh dear, Goldie,’ she said. ‘That’s very greedy. You can’t have everything in life. You have to choose.’
Tammy sat up and started putting her toys away.
You can’t have everything.
That was so true it hurt. Tammy was sixteen now, and she was at that age where it was becoming more and more obvious to her that life was full of compromises.
For instance…
You could be clever, but not popular.
You could be pretty, but not sexy.
You could be a grown-up, but not a child.
That last one on the list was the hardest pill of all to swallow. Tammy’s friends had all stopped playing with dollies and teddies a long time ago. They didn’t put on silly voices or do jigsaw puzzles or pretend to be superheroes or sing songs from Disney movies. Tammy felt like there was something wrong with her for still doing all of that.
So, like usual, she packed her toys away, hiding them in a big messy mountain inside her closet in case her father saw them. He was not a very understanding man, and there was no way he’d approve of her still playing with all this stuff.
She kept Goldie out, though.
One stuffie in bed is fine at any age, right? Nobody would begrudge me that.
Just as she was tucking Goldie under her covers, there was a knock at the front door downstairs. Tammy rushed out of her room, about to race down to answer it. But her father must have been on his lunch break because he got there first.
‘What’s the craic, Doc?’ said a familiar voice. It was a deep, Irish voice — cocky and animated. That was Conor.
‘Hullo there, Doc,’ said a second voice, almost identical to the first. Tammy could tell the difference between them, though. Something about the precision with which Finn spoke differentiated him from his twin brother.
‘Alright, Dr. Southey,’ mumbled a third voice. That voice was easy to identify. So gruff. So moody. SoShay.
Tammy scurried back to her room, pretending she hadn’t been eavesdropping. She heard her stern father talking to the boys, warning them not to stay for long, telling them that Tammy had to study.