Being Small Read Online Free Page B

kind of genius, then?”
    Relief was a hard, high giggle in my throat, like bubbles rising, bursting. “Me? I don’t think so. My mother says not. That’s why. She says that smart boys do okay wherever, but ordinary boys need special help, if they’re going to be special.”
    He pulled a face, but it was fairly friendly. “What’s it like?”
    “Dunno, I’ve never done the other thing. What’s school like?”
    Another kind of face. “Holidays are better. Homework’s better, you can do that with the telly on. You’re lucky.”
    I didn’t feel lucky, I never had. I was meaning to explain that, but just then my mother appeared, saw us both with our bikes and sent us off. “That’s good, Michael, that’s the best idea. You two go riding and keep yourselves out of my hair. What’s your friend’s name, Adam, is it? Which number do you live at, Adam? Well, you take my Michael away and show him around, where’s good for a bike and where’s not. If you don’t bring him back before teatime, you can have your tea with us...”
    My mother is the original plague of locusts. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but run away.
    ～
    For a while there, everything made sense. And so, of course, inevitably, we came to this:

    “Your mum’s mad.”
    “This is news? Whoo, déjà vu. I know my mother’s mad. You know my mother’s mad. You knew it the day we met.”
    “Yeah, but I thought mad in a good way. This is just crazy.”
    “Welcome to my life.”
    “I mean, you’ve got it made in that house, the old lady’s practically paying you to live there. Why would she ever make you move?”
    “Because she hates to see me happy?”
    We both fell silent for a moment, giving that thought the space it deserved. Then we both sat up, turning away from it, from each other. I can’t speak for Adam, but me, I thought maybe it would be fairer to say she didn’t recognise me happy, so she didn’t realise it might be a factor.
    Not that it would have made a difference. Once she decided we were moving, off we went. Again.
    “Is it because of me?” Adam asked, after a while.
    No, no, don’t think that, why would it be? She’s always on at me to make friends. Just because I never did before, don’t think you’re someone special, someone to be run away from. It’s the six-month cycle, that’s all, her ticking clock. It starts running down the moment she has a key in the lock of the new front door.
    I might have said that, some of that, all of it. It was all there to be said, and maybe he wanted to hear it. He’d heard it all before.
    But I was bitter, truth was a sour thing in my mouth that day; I said, “I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe she wants us back the way we were, just the three of us, the story of my life. She says I can have a dog. She says that’s why we’re moving, she’s found a house where we can keep a dog.”
    “You could have a dog where you are. The old lady wouldn’t mind.”
    “The old lady wouldn’t notice. I know that, you know that. She knows that, and so does Small. It’s an excuse. Or it’s a bribe, maybe, a substitute for you. I can’t have a friend, but hey, I can have a dog. Yee-hah.”
    “Tell you what else you can have,” he said suddenly, “you can have my old bike. Dad’s getting me a new one for my birthday.”
    I looked at him. “What’s that, another kind of bribe? Make it easy from both sides?”
    “No. What I mean is, I’ll have a bike, you’ll have a bike you can actually ride. The city’s not that big. We don’t have to lose touch. We don’t have to lose anything.”
    That wasn’t true, we both knew it, and so did Small. Moving is always about loss. Whatever you’ve got that matters, you can’t take it with you when you go. But he was offering me a lifeline, a way to knot the string behind my mother’s blade. It might have been the first time I’d ever seen a way to work against her, and someone else had to show it to me. It might well have been the