Charley by Tim O'Rourke Read Free Book Online Page A

down on the grass. With my legs crossed, I looked her straight in the eyes.
    ‘If I tell you something, you will keep it a secret, won’t you?’
    ‘Oh my God, Charley, you’re pregnant,’ she gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Your dad is going to go ape when he finds out.’
    ‘Pregnant?’ I cried. ‘I’m not pregnant.’
    ‘I thought that’s why you’d been having all those headaches and feeling sick,’ she said.
    ‘What, since I was six years old?’ I groaned.
    ‘Oh yeah,’ she said, and I caught sight of the gum again. ‘It’s just that I’m sure I read somewhere on the internet that pregnant women feel sick sometimes.’
    ‘I’m not pregnant,’ I sighed.
    ‘So why all the headaches?’
    ‘You promise you won’t tell anyone?’
    ‘Cross my heart,’ Lucy said, and drew the sign of a cross over her chest.
    I took a deep breath. ‘I see things.’
    ‘You see things?’ she asked, her brow creasing. ‘Like what?’
    ‘Dead people, I think,’ I whispered. ‘Or people who are dying. I’m not sure if I see them as they’re dying, or if they’re showing me how they died once they are dead, if that makes sense?’
    ‘You’ve lost me,’ Lucy said. ‘What, so you’re like physic or summin’?’
    ‘You mean psychic,’ I corrected her and smiled.
    ‘Whatever,’ she said, swishing the gum around again.
    ‘No, I’m not psychic,’ I said. ‘Or at least I don’t think I am.’
    ‘What then?’ she asked.
    ‘I see these pictures inside my head. Flashes of them. They, like, come really fast – hundreds, sometimes thousands of them all at once. Like snapshots, I guess. They never really make any sense.’
    ‘But you said you see people in them,’ Lucy said, her interest growing. ‘People who are dying?’
    ‘That’s right,’ I said, looking back at the school, anywhere except that agog look on her face; I already knew she didn’t believe me. Would I believe me, if I were her?
    ‘So, what, like murders, you mean?’
    ‘Sometimes,’ I told her, now feeling dumb.
    ‘Cool,’ she said, and I just caught the faintest of smirks on her lips.
    ‘It isn’t cool,’ I said. ‘It’s a pain in the arse.’
    ‘You could be, like, in your own movie or summin’,’ she said. ‘Like Paranormal Activity . You could set up a camera in your bedroom and we could see what happens in the night while you’re sleepin’.’
    ‘It’s nothing like that,’ I said, wishing that I’d kept my mouth shut. Why had I said anything? But I knew why. I needed to talk to someone about it and I’d hoped that because I’d known Lucy since junior school, she might have believed me.
    ‘You could make a fortune,’ she smiled. ‘Remember me when you’re rich and famous.’
    ‘I don’t want to be rich and famous,’ I said, gathering up my bag and standing up.
    ‘I was just messing about.’ Lucy smiled up at me. ‘Don’t go, Charley. Stay and tell me more about some of these dead people.’
    ‘No, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get home.’
    I had been right. I did get a stream of text messages and Facebook comments, not just from Lucy, but a whole bunch of other people. Lucy started it first, just the smallest of comments, on my Facebook page, but then it spread.
    Tracy from Year 10 asked me if I could contact Heath Ledgeras she wanted me to tell him that she hoped he rested in peace and she thought he played a mean Joker! That comment got over three hundred ‘likes’.
    Some guy I’d never even heard of left a comment on my page saying that his dad wanted me to ask Lady Di who was driving the white Fiat in the tunnel the night she died. Another wanted me to give their love to Michael Jackson.
    Then the comments got nasty, more sick and cruel. Some called me a witch, a freak. Someone wanted to know if I could ask Mary Ann Nichols what Jack the Ripper looked like. And all the while, Lucy melted away into the background.
    But there was one person who hadn’t melted away,