Girls Under Pressure by Jacqueline Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

line. Yet maybe there’s some truth in what she’s saying. It sounds logical. Well, not the raspberry Danish bit, sadly. But if I could
really
kick-start my metabolism into superdrive every morning it might make a real difference.
    “Yes, Ellie!” says Magda, seeing my face. “I’ll meet you outside the leisure center at seven tomorrow morning, right?”
    “Wrong,” I say. How can I go swimming and show off my great white whale body to everyone? And yet . . . half an hour’s strong swimming would burn up so many calories . . .
    “Just
once,
Ellie. Please. Pretty please.”
    So I say I will. Just once.
    I spend most of the evening peering at myself in my awful old swimming costume, convinced I cannot possibly expose myself in all my horrible wobbliness. Plus, what should I do about all my hairy bits? I try shaving under my arms, snaffling Anna’s razor, and cut myself, which smarts terribly.
    I phone Magda to call the whole thing off. She tells me that swimming tautens all your muscles, and points out that even the biggest beefiest serious swimmer has a washboard stomach, tight bum and taut thighs. I miserably feel my flabby flesh as she speaks. I agree to go after all.
    I feel like death getting up at quarter past six but the cold air revives me a little. I jog-shuffle most of the way to the leisure center, deciding I might as well get in a little extra exercise on the way. I make good progress and get there at three minutes to seven, before the doors are even open. There’s a little group of fitness freaks waiting, huddled into the hoods of their track tops. Magda isn’t here yet. There’s no dark dishy hunk that could be Mick, either. I stand in my school uniform, clutching my duffel bag, feeling horribly out of place. People will be wondering what on earth this squat blobby schoolgirl is doing at a fitness center—
fat
ness center, more like. There’s an enviably thin girl in a green tracksuit staring at me right at this minute.
    “Ellie?”
    I stare back, startled. The thin girl is smiling. It’s Zoë Patterson!
    Zoë is famous at our school. She’s a real brainbox. She should be in Year Ten but she’s been put up a year to take all her university entrance exams a year early. God knows how many she’s doing—ten, eleven, maybe even twelve. I bet she gets As in all of them. Zoë wins her class prize every year. And the art prize too.
    That’s how I know her. We both spend a lot of time in the art room doing all sorts of stuff, and when Mrs. Lilley, the art teacher, wanted a special mural to brighten the room up she asked Zoë and me to work on it together during our lunch hour.
    We hardly spoke to each other at first. I thought it was because Zoë was older than me and might be a bit snobby, but then I realized she’s actually even shyer than I am. So I got up the nerve to start talking to her and she soon got ever so friendly and funny. By the time we’d finished our mural (a crazy summer camp scene of all different creative women through time: we had Virginia Woolf with her skirts tucked in her drawers paddling in the stream, Jane Austen in an apron peeling potatoes, all the Brontë sisters with their sleeves rolled up sizzling sausages on the barbecue, Florence Nightingale pitching a tent, Billie Holiday picking flowers, Marilyn Monroe hanging out the washing, Frida Kahlo painting pictures on her welly boots) it seemed like we were firm friends.
    But this school year Zoë hasn’t been coming to the art room and whenever I’ve bumped into her in the corridors or the cloakroom we’ve just said hi and hurried on. I wondered if she’d gone off me or thought me too babyish or was maybe just too busy to be friendly when she was swotting for all those scary exams.
    “Hi, Zoë. I never expected to see you here,” I say.
    I assumed Zoë thought along the same lines as me when it came to sport.
    “I come here every day,” says Zoë. “Are you here to swim too?”
    “Yes. I said I’d come with