“Jake. Jake. JAKE!” Jakes mum waved her hand in front of his face, diverting his attention from the TV to her. “What?” He asked grumpily. It was the summer holidays, he was fifteen and had nothing to do. He wasn’t in a particularly good mood. “Well…” Said his mum, sitting down on the couch next to him. “D’you know how me and your dad said we had no money to go on holiday?”
“Yeah?” said Jake, his interest slowly starting to rise. “ Well, I lied, we do have money, and we’re going to Australia for a couple of weeks. So get upstairs and get packed, we leave in an hour.” She laughed at Jakes astonished face. “Go on.” Jake needed no more encouragement as he leapt from the couch and spurted up the stairs, on all fours like he did when he was a child. He grabbed a rucksack from his room and threw his most stylish clothes in, as well as two pairs of shoes and some swimming shorts. Ten minutes later he was waiting downstairs until it was time to go, texting fast to all his friends to tell them where he was going. “Come on then, Jake.” Said Jakes dad, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. “Time to go, or we won’t catch the plane.” Jake practically leapt from the couch, swinging his bag over his shoulder and racing from the house before his parents could say another word. A few seconds later, he had dived into the front passenger seat, only to be turfed out of it a minute later by his dad. Grumpily, Jake clambered over the seats and sat on the back ones of their ford Capri. The journey to the airport would take a few hours, and after an hour, Jake got bored of the journey and lay across the back seats, eyes closed. It didn’t take long for him to drift off, sent to sleep by the bumps in the road, like a mother rocking her baby to sleep in a cradle.
Jake was woken a couple of hours later by his dad shaking him. “Jake, we’re here. We’ve already stopped off at a service station, but we left you sleeping, so you can go grab some food while we sort the tickets out. But make sure your phones switched on so we can get hold of you, don’t want to lose you.” Jake groggily took all of this information in before sliding out of the back seat onto the tarmac, looking at the huge metal airport before him. His parents had locked the car as soon as he had got out, and walked off, carrying their suitcases and Jakes rucksack with them. Jake followed at a distance, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he made his way through the double glass doors at the front of the airport. He instantly lost sight of his parents in the throng of hundreds of people, and checked his phone was on in his pocket before going to find a small cafe somewhere within the airport. It took him a while to find one, but eventually found one, bought himself a sandwich and a coke, and sat down at one of the tables that somehow passed as clean.