Just Peachy by Jean Ure Read Free Book Online Page A

lot? Do you all look the same?”
    I shook my head as I sucked again at my straw, glugging up the last few drops from the bottom of the carton. I don’t look like anyone in my family. Charlie and Coop are quite big, like Dad, with dark hair. The twins are smaller, and more gingery, like Mum, with pale skin and freckles. I am a bit big, which is to say I am not small, and I do have pale skin, but my hair is blonde and I’m the only one with blue eyes, so that nobody ever says, “Oh! Aren’t you like your dad?” or, “Ooh, you take after your mum!” like they do with the others.
    When I was little I used to have this fantasy that I’d been kidnapped from royalty and then abandoned, and that Mum and Dad had found me in an orphanage. I think I must have read a story where this had happened. When I got a bit older I stopped thinking that I was royalty but still felt that I had to be someone – someone different, that is. I even (eek!) used to wonder if Mum had had a secret love affair and that Dad wasn’t my real dad at all. But they are so much in love that I don’t honestly think this can have been the case. I am just odd, and that is all there is to it.
    Millie was looking at me expectantly.
    “So what are they like?” she said. “Your lot?”
    “Mm… well.” I busied myself unwrapping a Kit Kat. “They’re OK. I’m sort of… in the middle.”
    “Better than being the oldest. At least you don’t have to act as babysitter. Or do you?”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t have to do that.”
    I nibbled on my Kit Kat. Millie sat waiting. I had to tell her something, it was only fair. It’s what friends do: they ask about each other’s families. I’d heard all about hers, about her mum being a school dinner lady and her dad driving his bus all the way up to town. Now it was my turn.
    “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want,” said Millie. “I expect I’m just being nosy.”
    But she wasn’t. She was just taking a normal interest. With fierce concentration I started folding my Kit Kat wrapper into a concertina as I told her about Charlie having played Gwendolen in a musical version of The Importance of Being Earnest and how it was Coop that had written the music.
    Millie said, “Wow!” Her eyes widened. “He wrote the music ?”
    “It’s what he does,” I said. “He’s like some kind of musical prodigy.”
    “Like Mozart!”
    “Dunno about that,” I said.
    Sister Marie Claire was into Mozart. She was always playing us bits in the hope that some of it would rub off on to us and stop us listening to nothing but pop, but to me it just sounded tinkly. Not a bit like the sort of stuff that Coop wrote.
    “He did this thing called Holes ,” I said. “All crashing and banging. The reason it’s called Holes is cos every few bars there’s, like, total silence? Like a row of knitting with dropped stitches.”
    Actually, as far as I was concerned, the silences came as a relief cos the music itself was just noise. Well, that was how it seemed to me. It didn’t have any tune. It didn’t have any rhythm. You couldn’t sing to it; you couldn’t dance to it. But I’m not musical, so what do I know? Mum says he’s a genius, and she is probably right.
    “You ought to tell Sister Marie Clare,” said Millie. “She’d be well impressed!”
    I wriggled uncomfortably. “That’d be like boasting.”
    “It wouldn’t if I told her.”
    I bent my head over my concertina, carefully folding it in half, and then half again, only second time round it was too thick and wouldn’t fold properly. Millie sat watching me. I looked up and saw that she was frowning.
    “I won’t tell her if you’d rather I didn’t,” she said. “Not if it’s supposed to be a secret.”
    I said that it wasn’t a secret, it was just…
    “What?”
    “Just…”
    “It’s all right.” Millie said it kindly, like she’d taken pity on me. “’Tisn’t any of my business. Let’s get this stuff downstairs and