If I Can't Have You

By Federica Bosco

'One morning you open your eyes and you're a teenager. Without warning, you wake up in the body of an overweight stranger who hates everyone, only wears black and has suicidal thoughts eighty-four percent of the time. And I was no exception.'

This is Mia: sixteen years old, rebellious, sarcastic, determined, and always ready to face head-on the problems of teenage life: school, classmates, separated parents, and a stormy relationship with a single mother who loves her to bits.

Mia has always pursued her one big dream: to get into London's Royal Ballet School. The most prestigious dance school in the world, with a gruelling selection process and fees which are way too expensive for a single mother.

And just to make things even more complicated, there's her secret passion for Patrick, her best friend's brother: a boy so charming and unique that it's hard to believe he's not an angel – but, unfortunately for Mia, an angel who thinks of her as a little sister.

Her passions for dance and for Patrick are so intense that there's no way Mia would ever be able to give up either. Until destiny presents her with a difficult and painful choice...

For fans of Jenny Han and Holly Bourne, a charming young adult novel about first love and big dreams from bestselling Italian author Federica Bosco.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781838932916

Federica Bosco

Federica Bosco is a writer and screenwriter. Her books have been translated into 11 languages. Read more about her on her blog: www.federicabosco.com

Book preview

1

One morning you wake up and find you’ve become a teenager.

Without warning, in the space between one day and the next, you wake up in the body of a total stranger who thinks she’s fat, hates everything, dresses all in black and wishes she was dead at least three quarters of the time.

I was no exception.

My classmates all organized big parties for their thirteenth birthdays. They demanded (and were mostly given) the hire of expensive venues, hundreds of pounds, fancy catering, designer clothing, the latest phones, and in one case, a pony. My Mum had taken me for a curry with her current partner and given me a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets, saying that now I was old enough to read them.

My father had called me two days late and insisted that I go out to dinner with them. They were the perfect family: Dad, Libby, Adrian and Seb, a constant reminder of our inferiority. We were the failed first experiment.

We’d been fine for a few years: we celebrated birthdays and Christmases, went on holidays, caught measles and chicken pox and swapped my baby teeth for shiny pound coins. I have the photographs to prove it! Of course, it’s true that you have to smile and look happy in photographs, even if you’d rather eat worms, but still, back then I really was convinced that everything was fine between my parents. I felt happy, protected and secure, whatever that means. It sounds like an advert for a sanitary towel.

He was never the sort of dad who would take you out for ice cream, or bowling, or one of those dads who at your dance show shouts out ‘That’s my daughter!’, or films everything you do. He always seemed to be only half-listening to you, as if he was busy dreaming up the invention of the century, and if you asked him to repeat what you just said, he would look at you all confused and ask you what was for dinner.

He seemed almost like a guest. You expected him to come and ask for the bill at any minute. And sure enough, one day he had packed his bags and summoned us into his study to say goodbye.

He knelt in front of me and said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world: ‘Mia, even if I won’t be living here anymore and I’m going to be the dad of two other children, I’ll always be your dad too.’

It was that too that had hurt the most. Like when your parents tell you to share your sweets;

‘Don’t be selfish - share your dad with the other children, too!’

From that day on he seemed to have become the father and husband of the year, only to another wife, and other children. When the twins were born, he called us in the middle of the night in tears, and Mum suddenly became his best friend, someone to call on at any time to ask how to boil an egg, or for advice on nappy rash. Of course she tried her best not to let it show, but you could see from a mile off that it still hurt.

And I watched it all with this weird feeling of being out of place, of not belonging anywhere. But perhaps that isn’t surprising: with an Italian mother and an English father it’s easy to feel like you don’t know who you are.

My parents had met in Florence, where Dad was attending one of those crappy language courses for foreigners and Mum was his teacher. It was, I am told, love at first sight, but if you ask me, they probably rushed into things a bit. I think she thought he was a bit exotic, which is difficult to imagine when you look at him now. There is a typically Italian belief that all Anglo-Saxons are charismatic, independent go-getters, so maybe that was part of the attraction. My father was about as charismatic as a block of concrete and about as independent as a toddler.

He only took her out for Valentine’s Day once, after she had pestered him for a month. He had booked them into one those horrible touristy places near the San Lorenzo market, and ordered the cheapest, nastiest wine on the menu. After that she had stopped hoping he would change and no longer hoped for flowers or romantic nights out.

I’ve always wondered whether their love story wasn’t all just in my mum’s head, because to be totally frank, there really wasn’t anything special or irresistible about Giles. He didn’t even have an English sense of humour. When mum told her girlfriends she’d was marrying an Englishman, they’d all imagined someone like Hugh Grant or Colin Firth, or at least like Ozzy Osbourne, but when she showed them the photos they were so disappointed that they’d ordered another round of prosecco, raised a glass to friendship and secretly hoped that he was at least a bit of an animal in the bedroom.

How he managed to get two women to fall in love with him I will never know: he was a boring old duffer in a beige cardigan, already balding at twenty, with his nose constantly stuck in the Guardian.

And as for him being a bit of an animal in the bedroom – well, I really don’t want to know, to be honest.

Less than a year after they married he began to insist on going back to live in England, and sent off hundreds of resumes begging for a job at any bank in the City. One letter from my mother was enough to secure her a place as an Italian teacher at the University of Leicester, the homeland of Kasabian, and they moved there six months later. Mum was already pregnant with me.

Leicester was not Florence, but it wasn’t London either, and Dad still wasn’t happy. It didn’t take long for him to fall for a fellow stockbroker. And so, just as suddenly as I woke up one morning and found myself in the body of a teenager, one day six years earlier I had woken up to find that my family had split apart.

And it was then that I realised what my chemistry teacher meant by ‘irreversible reactions’, like when you burn something or cook an egg. No matter how hard I tried to pretend, I knew that my life would never be the same, and that my time from now on would be spent trying to convince other people that I was okay so they didn’t worry too much or feel obliged to try and help.

Until the day of my metamorphosis into a teenager, my life had been one long and boring rainy day, divided between school and dance lessons. I spent most of my time writing bad poetry and rewatching the DVD my mother gave me of Sylvie Guillem dancing Prokofiev’s Cinderella. I would practice in front of the mirror for hours, dreaming of being able to dance like that, of being chosen prima ballerina at only nineteen, just like Sylvie.

To do that I had to get into the Royal Ballet School as soon as I’d finished my GSCEs. The entrance exam looked tough, and although their website told students not to be discouraged by any financial difficulties, when I saw what it cost I was very discouraged indeed.

While my schoolmates spent their time hanging around outside KFC and stealing lipsticks from Boots, I dreamed of finding a way to move to London, paying for my studies and becoming a ballerina. I think my mother would secretly have preferred it if I was stealing lipsticks from Boots. I’m sure she wanted me to fulfil my dreams and everything, but I knew we couldn’t really afford it, and Dad had the twins to think about, so we mostly tried to avoid talking about it.

I knew I wasn’t the kind of teenager that every parent dreams of (assuming there is such a thing as the perfect teenager anyway). Not because I was out of control. I just wasn’t great company. I hadn’t really smiled much since my father had left. Mum sometimes said that I made her feel lonely, especially when we were driving around together.

I used to go for long bike rides by myself, listening to Pearl Jam, and thinking about my future on the stage. I’d been taking lessons at the local dance school for years, but they were no longer enough. It was time to take the leap or give up forever. It didn’t help that my body felt like it no longer belonged to me.

The only person who could make me smile was Nina, the best friend a girl could ever wish for. We had been inseparable since playgroup, and we liked to tell people that we were sisters, even though we couldn’t have looked more different. I had short dark hair, hazel eyes, pale skin dotted with freckles, and a gloomy disposition, while she had long honey-blonde hair and grey eyes and was always in a good mood.

And why not? Her family were amazing. She had a cool older brother who was an officer in the Royal Navy, a mum who was always cheerful and made the best chocolate cake, and a dad who wouldn’t even pop out to buy cigarettes without letting you know, and who took us to a Tokyo Hotel concert and parked round the corner so that we weren’t embarrassed.

My dad didn’t even know who Tokyo Hotel were.

When we were little, Nina would write a letter to Santa Claus every year asking him if her parents could adopt me, and her mother had to tactfully explain to her that my parents might be upset about it. When they split up I started writing my own letters, getting more and more threatening every year, until eventually I gave up.

Nina never gave up. She even drew up a document in which she stated that she and I, in spite of everybody, were, and always would be, sisters, and we both solemnly signed it in red pen that we pretended was blood, on the night of a full moon. Nothing could divide us. We were invincible, we were inseparable, we were nine years old. Looking up at the full moon.

These days we were almost sixteen and still nothing had shaken us, not a cute boy, or the envy of other friends, or a bad grade. Nina was my sister, and I was hers. Now, though, when she stayed over at my house, or I stayed over at hers, instead of playing with Barbies, we would stay awake until dawn imagining our First Time.

Nina had decided she would lose her virginity to Robert Pattinson. They would meet at a premiere and she, instead of screaming like all the other idiots, would meet his gaze calmly, with the hint of a mysterious smile. Then, when hysteria broke out, she would take him by the hand and they would speed off into the night on her scooter.

She would take him for dinner in a cosy restaurant, hidden away from prying eyes, and he would look deep into her eyes and say, ‘‘Nina, you’re so beautiful. Stay with me tonight?’ And his voice would break with emotion.

Then she would stand up, caress his cheek and, without saying a word, take him back to her house. The paparazzi would follow them, of course, but Nina would weave in and out of the back streets, scattering them, and Robert Pattinson would cling to her tightly.

Once at home, they would explore one another in the dark, leaving time and all the madness outside, savouring every single moment. He would hold her close to him and stroke her face gently, tracing the outline of her face with his fingers, and kissing her lips as if they were something precious and sweet. Then Nina would take him by the hand and lead him to her room, where they would fall onto the bed, letting their bodies merge with a long, slow, and sensual passion that would bind them together forever.

‘I love you, Nina,’ he would say to her, bathing her face in his tears, ‘I love you and I can’t be without you.’

The dawn light would catch them in a tender embrace, unable to say goodbye. He would finally leave, begging her to go with him, but she would reply that her world was here, and that they would always have that one perfect night, that they would never forget.

Nina was a hopeless romantic, and, well, why wouldn’t she be? It was natural for someone who had known no other love but the dependable, faithful and true affection of her family. And this was why, when I imagined my first time, it was always with her brother Patrick.

Patrick and Nina were blessed by luck and liked by everyone. For them life was a gift to be enjoyed to the fullest, and they made everything look so bloody easy: friendships, homework, relationships. Being their friend was a privilege, and every minute spent with them was like a holiday in the sunshine. And I, a gloomy impostor, caught blinking in their light, could do nothing but worship them.

I had loved Patrick since I was three years old. If I had to choose between him and ballet, I swear I would rather throw myself off a bridge. He was almost three years older than me and had always treated me like another little sister, and I had always been careful to act like I saw him as nothing more than an older brother. In fact, I sometimes pretended not to like him at all to avoid suspicion, snapping at him, or more often answering him only in monosyllables.

I had loved him from the first moment I saw him, when Nina, in the school playground, took my hand and introduced me to him.

‘He is my brother and you are my sister,’ she had said in a solemn voice.

When he replied that it wasn’t possible, Nina had burst into tears and, to calm her down, he had pretended to agree. From that moment I realised that Patrick was someone special to me. Not like Mum or Dad and not even like Nina. All I knew was that when I saw him my cheeks went up in flames and I got a strange feeling in my belly.

And over the years it had only got worse. Now that I knew about love and all its complications, seeing Patrick had become physically painful. It was getting more and more difficult to pretend I hated him, especially because I knew Nina would have given her right arm to have the two people she loved most in the world to get along.

Then again, if she’d known that I’d been dreaming of marrying him and having seven children all these years, she wouldn’t have been happy either. There were limits beyond which even I was not allowed to go, and I had always carefully kept myself within those boundaries, so as not to upset the balance of our relationship. Patrick was her brother, and she refused to share him with anybody. Every time he showed an interest in some girl, Nina did everything she could to put a spanner in the works.

Yes, maybe it was childish of her, but Patrick was so wonderful that you felt like no one could ever be good enough for him. Not only was he ridiculously good-looking, with the same grey eyes, like a winter sea, and sun-kissed golden hair as Nina, he was also so kind-hearted and friendly that you felt lucky just being around him.

He left school two years ago, but the teachers still remembered him as their star pupil, and even though he’d left for the navy, everyone knew who he was. As though enchanted, everyone who met him or heard about him became entangled in the web of his disarming charm and couldn’t help but love him.

He could have driven up the motorway on the wrong side of the road and got off without a fine, passed any exam without even opening a book, or calmed a drunken brawl with just one of his dazzling smiles. But above all, he could make any girl fall in love with him, without even meaning to, and never take advantage. He was genuinely unaware of the effect he had on people, and seemed astonished to find women throwing themselves at him.

I too would have given anything to be with him. Literally, anything. But I knew that Patrick could only ever be a daydream for me, so I resolved to love him in silence, from afar, to protect myself from jealousy and disappointment.

School was heavy going in the run up to GCSEs, and to make matters worse I had started to get my period, which was an annoyance I could’ve done without. Developing would mean boobs, water retention and big thighs, and for a dancer there was nothing worse.

Why couldn’t everything just stay as it was? Was I really going to be forced to enter the world of adults? It seemed so easy for Nina and the other girls in my class. They adapted to their new bodies, made new friends and started going out with boys like it was the most natural thing in the world, while I hid in my room, confused, and wrote dark thoughts in my diary.

As a result, my schoolwork was suffering and I was the favourite target of all my teachers. The more I tried to hide at the back, the more they singled me out to answer their questions. Until then, I had been an average student with average grades, but it was as if everyone else had suddenly started speaking in a different language. Literature made no sense, maths was like unravelling the Da Vinci Code and French was a jumble of random letters that meant nothing to me.

I hated high school, bras and Facebook with all my heart. I had eleven friends, one of whom was my mum, I never updated my profile and I hadn’t even uploaded a profile pic, but Patrick was in my contacts, which meant I could torture myself without revealing who I was, checking his updates like a secret agent. Not that he wrote much himself, but he had friends and acquaintances from all over the world, who were always tagging him in photos or inviting him to different events, and I would imagine him replying with things like, ‘As soon as Mia has finished her exams we would love to come windsurfing with you in Hawaii,’ or, ‘Thanks, but I promised Mia I’d take her to see the Great Wall of China that weekend.’ I imagined our adventures together, across the world, followed by growing old together in our country house, surrounded by grandchildren and dogs.

Sometimes I felt like I had nothing to cling to but my imagination and these days that was where I spent most of my time. If the real world got too tough, all I had to do was imagine a parallel life and take refuge in my dreams, where I was truly happy.

I think the real reason behind my current anxiety was the growing awareness that my fantasy world was about to come to an end, that Nina and I would soon graduate and go our separate ways and I would have no reason to see Patrick when he was home from the navy. Nina wanted to become a human rights lawyer, while I knew that one day I would leave the city to try and realise my dream of becoming a dancer. I still didn’t know how, but I knew I had to try. And so I lived my life like a girlfriend who knows in her heart that it’s all over, but can’t bring herself to admit it.

It was the coldest autumn imaginable. The boiler was constantly breaking down, and I had to keep going downstairs in the mornings to give it a thump. It usually waited until I was in the shower, and I would have to streak down the stairs covered in soap, risking both pneumonia and slipping on the lino in the kitchen.

This was the sort of thing that made me and my mother feel lonely. When stuff like this happened there was no one else to help, and Mum had to do everything by herself. Her partner Paul had another family too, although he said they were ‘just staying together for the children’, so he was rarely there when we needed him. When we had a break-in, Mum had to threaten the burglar with a hair dryer, and when the car broke down, the dodgy mechanic up the road had convinced her to replace the entire engine, as ‘an investment for the future.’

This was why I didn’t like the thought of having to rely on another person. I promised myself I would always be emotionally self-sufficient, and never need anyone for anything. That way no one could let me down and, in theory, I would never have to suffer.

The theory was not working particularly well lately.

‘Mia!’ Mrs Bowen’s voice cracked like a gunshot across the hushed classroom, and hit me right between the eyes. I could feel the sighs of relief from my classmates, as they realised it was my head on the chopping block.

‘Go on, I’ll help you,’ Nina whispered.

‘Without help from Nina!’ the teacher thundered.

Not that it mattered anyway, hints were fine in a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ test, but not when you had 400 years of British history missing from your head. I began to mumble random sentences, just to give the impression of knowing something, which was probably not the best idea I ever had. Now everyone thought I was weird as well as stupid.

The worst thing was that I had studied for hours, but I still felt like my head was completely empty. It was like the information had poured right back out again, like water down a plug hole, with no way to hold it in.

‘She doesn’t know it!’ I heard someone whisper behind my back.

I didn’t know and didn’t care.

I wanted to get up, flip my desk, and run away to sea with Patrick.

But instead of keeping quiet and obediently accepting the public humiliation, I turned to the voice and said, ‘Fuck you! You think you’re some kind of genius because you know when the Magna Carta was? I’ll tell you where you can stick your Magna Carta…’

In hindsight, I should probably have left it to his imagination, rather than telling him exactly where to stick it. If I had, perhaps I wouldn’t have found myself sitting in front of the headmistress five minutes later, and perhaps she wouldn’t have tried to call my mother (who fortunately never remembers to switch her phone on) and threatened to put me back a year. I couldn’t risk losing a year, or I could wave goodbye to any chance of getting into the Royal Ballet School in time. If they’d have me.

At break time, Nina tracked me down in the girls’ toilets and demanded to know what was going on.

‘What’s wrong with you these days?’ She looked really worried. ‘You sounded like the possessed child out of The Ring!’

‘Nothing. I was just fed up,’ I replied, scratching an old sticker from the wall.

‘Mia, do you realise they could suspend you? Do you want to miss the year?’

‘Come on, Nina, don’t you start. You sound like my mum!’

She took my hands. ‘I know you. There’s something you want to get off your chest, and if you don’t tell me who will you tell? York?’

York was my dog. The ugliest dog anyone had ever seen. Mum had decided a few years back to get me a puppy, hoping to distract me from my father’s abandonment, and had taken me to see a litter of beautiful fluffy puppies that jumped and looked adorable and tried their best to be picked up, but my eyes had gone straight to York, the scruffy, one-eared runt who sat in a corner and wagged his tail out of time, trying not to be noticed, just like I did at school.

And I had known right away that he was the one for me, refusing to even consider any of the others, to the amazement of both my mum and the breeder. I only needed one look to fall madly in love with him, just like it had happened with Patrick.

And in fact Nina was right, although she didn’t know it. I had told York about Patrick, but I could never tell her, even though she was my best friend.

‘Are you coming round to my house to revise after school? We’ve got a maths test tomorrow.’

‘No, not today. I can’t.’

Nina looked at me suspiciously ‘Why not?’

‘I have to go.somewhere with my mum.’

‘Where?’ She insisted

‘I dunno.just, on a visit…’ I mumbled unconvincingly.

One more question and I think I would have told her everything.

‘A visit where? Has something happened to your mum?’

‘No, no, she’s fine. I just, I can’t today...sorry.’

‘Why are you being so weird? Are you in a mood with me or something.’

She looked really worried.

‘If I’ve done something to upset you, you have to tell me.’

That was Nina. Always worrying about other people. The girl who had given her mother’s best coat to the tramp in the park as a child, who had released her Aunty Sue’s budgies back into the wild, and who wanted to adopt me.

And here I was answering her like I was dumping someone: ‘It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve just...I’ve been feeling a bit strange recently.’

‘Are you in love or something?’ she said suddenly

I turned beetroot, so then of course she knew she’d got it right.

‘Oh my God, you are!’ she said, her eyes lighting up.

‘What? No! Are you serious? Who would I be ‘in love’ with?’ I answered huffily, unable to look her in the face.

‘Looook into my eyes,’ she said, waggling her fingers spookily.

‘You’re not funny,’ I muttered.

‘Mia, we’re supposed to be sisters, remember? There’s nothing I don’t know about you. Come on, tell me who it is! I’ve always told you everything, even about Thomas.’

There was no escape. It was true that she had told me all about her crush on Thomas. Thomas was a couple of years older than us, and they were working on the project originally intended for Robert Pattinson. There was no part of my life that she didn’t know about, nothing that I didn’t involve her in, apart from the one thing that dominated about three quarters of my life, and involved her brother. We were almost always together, and when we weren’t we would spend hours talking on the phone.

I was cornered.

I sighed, and Nina leaned forward eagerly.

‘Come on, spit it out!’

‘Do you know...erm...that boy from Sixth Form?’

She frowned. ‘Which one? There are loads of boys in the Sixth Form.’

‘The one with dark hair?’

‘The one who looks like Charlie Bewley?’

‘No, the one who looks like Jared Leto. Or his hair is like Jared Leto’s, anyway.’

‘Yes!!’ Her face lit up. ‘Tall? Big eyes? This is great! Do you know his name? Has he got a girlfriend?’

‘No, come on, Nina, he doesn’t even know I exist. He’s way out of my league.’

‘Hey!’ She pointed a threatening finger at me. ‘That’s my best friend you’re talking about. Nobody’s better than you! Just remember, no man is out of your league just because he’s good looking, or because he happens to live in Hollywood! They’re just people like us, with all the same insecurities, at least that’s what my mum always says.

‘You and me, we could get off with Robert Pattinson if we liked. Maybe we just don’t want to. So if you want to go out with Jared, we just need to come up with a plan to make it happen!’

She beamed at me.

It was the biggest load of crap I had ever heard. But if she was focused on Jared Leto from Sixth Form I could go quiet sometimes without her wondering what was wrong, and more importantly, I could finally tell her how I was feeling, only I’d have to pretend I was talking about this other guy and not Patrick. It would be such a relief to open up to her.

And it wouldn’t exactly be lying. Not really.

2

‘Annnnd, piqué, piqué and double chainé, chainé, chainé, passé, holllld. Aaaand down!’

The solo ended with me in the centre of the dance studio with my teacher, Claire standing looking at me, arms folded and without expression. I didn’t remember seeing her smile once in all the years I’d been going to her classes. She had studied at the Royal Academy in London and for a while at the American Ballet Theatre with Diana Adams, but her career had been cut short by a skiing accident, which probably had something to do with her bad temper.

She had been my teacher since I was five years old, and had trained me to a level where we now had to decide whether to go all out and try for a professional career, or to remain forever at an amateur level and settle for maybe getting a job as a teacher at a provincial dance school.

And if that was all I was good for, I might as well go to university and get a job in the City with my father.

Mum worried that if they sent me to the Royal and I didn’t break through, I’d be left with nothing to fall back on, and, even though the state financed a large part of the fee, we’d still have wasted at least twelve thousand pounds a year that we didn’t have in the first place.

The blank look on Claire’s face didn’t bode well.

‘Mia, you are aware of what we’re doing here today, are you not?’

‘Yes,’ I said, wiping my forehead with the back of my hand with an exaggerated gesture.

‘And what are we doing?’ she continued, drawing circles on the worn parquet floor with her stick.

I hated it when she did that.

She liked to play the eccentric Russian teacher. All that was missing was the turban and cigarette holder.

‘We’re preparing my audition for the Royal Ballet,’ I answered patiently, trying to hide my annoyance.