Worse Than Boys(4)

And me? Mum would only have moaned. Not that she would have missed me, but I could just hear her: ‘Oh yes, just go and leave me on my own. I’ve always been on my own anyway.’ She always made me feel guilty that I’d want any life away from her.

‘I’m wearing my pink dress,’ Heather babbled on. ‘You know, the one with the shoestring straps? I’m going to look like a babe.’

‘Babe was a pig, wasn’t she?’ I said, and Heather giggled and jumped on me, and we both fell back on the bed, laughing.

‘You’ll look like a pig when I’m finished with you,’ she said.

We rolled on to the floor, and it was funny at first. But Heather never knew when to stop. She ruffled my hair, pulled at it, tickling me all the time. I hated that I couldn’t stop laughing, as if I was enjoying myself. As if I didn’t want her to stop.

Finally, I managed to push her off me, angry now. She fell back, annoyed at me. ‘Look who can’t take a joke,’ she said.

‘You just get on my wick at times, Heather.’ I stood up, feeling stupid, and I hate feeling like that.

Erin put her arm round my shoulders. ‘She wouldn’t dare do that to Rose.’

Heather’s frown suddenly turned to a grin. ‘You’re right. Rose with her hair a mess, with a broken nail. “I’ll die, I’ll just die!” ’

‘I keep my nails long so I can drag them down Wizzie’s face.’ Rose drew her nails down Erin’s radiator, and we all shivered at the sound. Anyway, Rose was used to us going on about her vanity. She thought she was gorgeous, with her thick dark curls and her violet eyes. ‘I’m the one who’s going to be the babe at this wedding. You wait and see.’

Heather giggled. She’d forgotten my bad temper already. I sometimes wondered if she suffered from short-term memory loss. ‘I wish big Anil was going. I really fancy him.’

Anil Gupta, the best-looking boy in the school. Drop-dead gorgeous. Just about every girl fancied him, but not half as much as he fancied himself. ‘As if he’s going to look at any of us,’ I said. ‘Not when there’s a mirror nearby.’

‘There’ll be other boys at the wedding,’ Erin said. ‘My brother’s pals are all going. They’re a lot older than we are though. I think they’re more likely to be after the three other bridesmaids.’

Erin changed out of her dress and when she was back in her jeans her mum came in with cheese toasties and tea for us all and we sat on the floor and got stuck in.

As soon as her mother had gone, Erin said, ‘Come on, let’s play Light as a Feather.’

Our wish game. One of our favourites. Erin locked the door because her mother didn’t approve – she thought it had a touch of the supernatural about it – then Erin came back and sat with us.

Everyone said you needed at least six people to play Light as a Feather, but we always did it with just the four of us. And it always worked. We were sure that was because we were special. The magic was in us.

First the atmosphere had to be captured. The room had to be dark and eerie. It really helped that the wind had got up and we could hear it whistling through the telephone cables on the street outside. We switched off all the lights except for a dim night light Erin kept by the side of her bed. And then we started to tell ghost stories. You always had to start Light as a Feather with the ghost stories.

We let Rose tell hers first. That was because her stories were always rubbish, lifted word for word or scene by scene from some horror movie she’d seen on DVD. Then it was Heather’s turn. Heather couldn’t tell a story to save her life. She told us the Monkey’s Paw, one of the creepiest stories ever, and told us the end of the story first. She always did that.

It was Erin and I who knew how to tell a ghost story.

Erin kept her voice mysteriously soft. Her story was all about the ghost of a little girl who comes back to haunt the man who killed her. He sees her one dark night in his car mirror, sitting in the back seat, just staring at him. He looks into the back seat and she’s not there. There’s nothing there. But when he turns and looks into the mirror again, her face is so close, as if she’s right at his shoulder, and he screams and loses control of the car. It tumbles down a ravine. And as it bursts into flame, someone sees the little girl standing on the road, looking down and smiling. She’d had her revenge. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and we all moved closer into the circle together.

Then it was my turn.





Chapter Four


I knew some great stories and made up lots more. And I always told the story as if it had really happened to me. That was my special trick.