Pumpkin Pie by Jean Ure Read Free Book Online Page A

make people laugh and they would stop noticing how weird I was.
    But I thought on the whole I was OK. I didn’t have a head like a turnip, my hair didn’t grow to a point. I even thought, secretly – I mean, trying to pretend to myself that I wasn’t thinking it, as it seemed rather vain – that I had nice eyes. They are bright blue, like Petal’s. Dani Morris once asked me if I wore coloured contact lenses, because she said you couldn’t have eyes that were as blue as that, it wasn’t natural. Well, it is, and I do! So sucks to Dani Morris.
    All the same, I was glad that I’d hit on the transformation scene. Under my baggy old lady coat I intended to wear something really sensational. I hadn’t yet decided what, since it was still a long way off, but even when I had I was going to keep it a secret so that everyone would be taken by surprise and go “Ooooh!”
    There were two people I specially wanted to go “Ooooh”. Both of them were boys. Surprise, surprise! There was Gareth Hartley, who was the one that had corpsed when I wandered into the recording studio doing my complaining, and there was Mark Nelson, who played the DJ. Both were truly cool! Everything that Saffy had promised. Creative and sensitive and
seriously gorgeous.
    Mark was like the big star. He had once been in a movie and had had real lines to say! Everyone fancied him like crazy. Even Saffy said that he was “lip-smacking” (what kind of disgusting expression is that?). She said that she would actually be prepared to accept him as a substitute while she was waiting for Brad to get divorced. But “Some hopes!” she added.
    I told her that she could always dream, though as she was already dreaming about Brad I thought perhaps I could be the one to dream about Mark. I knew it was a dream that couldn’t ever really come true. Gorgeous guys, especially when they are nearly seventeen, don’t very often fall for plump twelve year olds, even if the plump twelve year olds do have bright blue eyes. Maybe when I’d taken the world by storm doing my transformation scene… Well, anyway. We would see!
    In the mean time, there was always Gareth. He wasn’t quite as gorgeous as Mark, but on the other hand he was only fourteen, so I thought perhaps I might stand a bit more of a chance. Saffy said he wasn’t really mature enough for her, but that he would do “if all else failed.” She had some nerve!

    One thing she’d been wrong about, and that was the girls. She’d promised me they wouldn’t all be gorgeous, and it was true they weren’t
all,
but lots of them were! Even the ones that weren’t were just so-o-o cool. And guess what? They were all thin! Thin as pins. All except for Connie Foster, who was little and bouncy and could walk on her hands and do the splits and pick up her leg and pull it straight up into the air, as far as her head. I would love to be able to do that! If I could do that I would be doing it all the time, just to show off. The only reason I don’t show off is that I have nothing to show off about. What I mean is, it is not a
virtue.
    Connie was the same age as me and Saffy and really nice. I’m not just saying that because she was the only person who wasn’t thin, but because she was sweet and giggly, and
she
didn’t show off, either. Not like some of them! Angie Moon, for example. She was the most horrible show-off. She had this habit of twinkling, by which I mean she would suddenly open her eyes very wide and stretch her lips into this great mindless grimace with her top teeth showing. I think it was supposed to be a smile. She did it whenever a boy happened to look at her, and especially Mark or Gareth. Me and Saffy thought it was pathetic. Saffy started calling her Little Miss Twinkle, which soon got shortened to just Twinkle, or Twink. She never understood why we called her that! She probably thought it was a compliment, as she had a very high opinion of herself.

    Another girl who thought she was the cat’s