Head Spinners by Thalia Kalkipsakis Read Free Book Online Page B

that.
    Jack, Erin and I were still in the same room together, but we didn’t connect the way we had at first. We kept to ourselves, doing our stuff without talking. It was as if an invisible barrier had come down between us.
    After another round of tests in the morning, I sat in bed and played with my third arm, twirling the wrist and moving the fingers, marvelling that it had grown.
    I stopped as soon as Mum walked in. It wasn’t so much the look on her face as where she looked. Her eyes slid to the side, away from my arm – away from me. It wasn’t until I tucked my new arm neatly inside a sleeve that she looked at me and smiled. Even during tests that morning she’d kept her back turned, pretending to look out the window. I didn’t need to ask what she had been thinking.
    Not long now until this will all be over.
    Not long until we can forget . . .

    That night, a cry woke me from a light sleep. I slipped out of bed and padded across to Erin.
    â€˜Are you ok—’ I began, then stopped when Erin murmured something and rolled over, her face twitching in a dream. She had cried out in her sleep.
    I sighed and looked out the window. It was raining again. I looked back at a lump of a wing under the sheet. Just two more days until her operation . . .
    There was no way I could go back to sleep. For something to do, I tiptoed over to Jack’s bed and peered at him in the dim light.
    â€˜Don’t think you can sneak up on me,’ he mumbled, turning over and looking at me properly.
    â€˜If you could stop your operation, would you?’ I asked, straight out.
    Jack sat up and breathed in slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said clearly. ‘I would.’
    â€˜What if it meant showing everyone . . . showing the whole world?’
    One of Jack’s eyebrows cocked. ‘What are you up to?’
    I shrugged. I hadn’t really thought it through, but at the back of my mind, I did have an idea. Not a very good one, but it seemed better than nothing.
    â€˜Come on,’ I said. ‘Help me get into that office again.’
    Once Jack had worked his magic with the keypad and we were inside, I sat in the swivel chair and turned the computer on.
    Jack sat on the edge of the desk, swinging one leg. ‘So . . . what? You’re going to set up an online freak show?’
    â€˜If everyone knows what’s going on, it won’t be so easy for them to just . . .’ I trailed off, watching the screen going through its start-up. ‘Anyway, this thing is probably password protected.’
    Miraculously it wasn’t. Maybe Dr Drew figured two locked doors would be enough to keep people out.
    â€˜Freak show, here we come,’ said Jack.
    The next thing I knew, my new hand was resting on the mouse and the online world was at my fingertips. If I’d been unsure how I felt about my new arm, I wasn’t wondering anymore. It felt so good to be doing things with it, to be using it, rather than holding it out to be poked and studied for the best way to have it removed.
    It was easy to find some good photos saved in a file on the desktop – including a baby foot with seven toes and someone with a hand growing out of their shoulder. I cropped the photos carefully so that you couldn’t see any faces then saved them as a series of stills in a movie file so that it would work on YouTube.
    â€˜You realise they’ll just think it’s a hoax,’ said Jack over my shoulder. ‘Half the stuff online is fake.’
    â€˜Yeah, but if I can get the news networks interested . . .’ I searched for the contact details of all the major newspapers and TV stations around the country. Working fast, I typed a group email inviting them to come and interview us at the children’s hospital and added a link to the photos.
    â€˜Do you think they’ll come?’ asked Jack when I’d finished.
    â€˜Probably