Ice Lolly Read Online Free

called you?”
    “When I was little.”
    “ Lollipop .” Holly giggles. “D’you know what I call you? The girl that laughed at the Queen!”
    Mum and me apologised for that. And I wasn’t laughing at the Queen, I was laughing at Mum pretending to be the Queen.
    “ My husband and I… ” The words come shooting out of my mouth before I can stop them.
    “You’re doing it again!” Holly glares at me, accusingly. “You are such a rude person!”
    I say that I’m sorry. I don’t quite see what’s rudeabout it, just standing here in the bedroom, but I’m sure Mum would say I shouldn’t have done it.
    Holly slams Winnie-the-Pooh on to the shelf and dives back into the box. By the time she gets started on the last one I’ve managed to rescue thirty-five books, including Little Women, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, I Capture the Castle, Just William and all of Jane Austen, cos she was Mum’s favourite. Holly objects to David Copperfield on the grounds that he’s the wrong size and looks untidy.
    “He’s too short and fat!”
    For one wicked moment I’m almost tempted to say, “So are you!” But that would be really rude. And she isn’t exactly fat, just plumped up like a pillow cos of Auntie Ellen letting her eat junk food all the time. I suppose, actually, she’s quite pretty. She has this little round face with freckles, and her hair’s bright red and curly. She gets her hair from Auntie Ellen. And the freckles. Uncle Mark is fair, like me and Mum. I’d rather be fair than ginger, but it would be nice, I think, to becurly instead of dead straight and limp. I toss back my ponytail and wrench David Copperfield away from her.
    “He’s staying!”
    I put him on the shelf with the others. Holly, with an air of triumph, says that now I’ve only got room for one more. “You could have had two if you got rid of that fat one.”
    I say yes, well, I don’t want two. I want David Copperfield.
    “There’s not many left anyway,” says Holly. She burrows back into the box. “War and Peace …yuck! Poetry . Double yuck! Diary of a Nobody . Yuck yuck triple yuck! Pil —”
    “Excuse me,” I say, “I want that one.”
    “Which one?”
    “ Diary of a Nobody. ”
    “What for?” She looks at it, suspiciously, like it might be something dirty.
    “It’s funny.”
    “Doesn’t look funny.”
    “Well,” I say, “it is.”
    “Why? What’s it about?”
    I tell her that it’s about a man called Mr Pooter and his wife Carrie. “They’ve just moved into a new house and Mr Pooter’s keeping a diary, all about the things that are happening to them.”
    “ Funny things.”
    “Yes, and Mr Pooter keeps making these really bad jokes, like when he discovers his cuffs are frayed he says, I’m ’fraid, my love, my cuffs are rather frayed. And Carrie calls him a spooney old thing .”
    “You think that’s funny?” says Holly.
    I have to admit it doesn’t sound very funny. It did when Mum read it out, doing all the different voices. I try to think of a bit that doesn’t need voices.
    “One time he’s doing some decorating and he’s got this red paint left over, so he paints the bath? Then later on when he’s lying there in the water the paint all comes off and he thinks he’s burst an artery!”
    Holly doesn’t say anything; she just looks at me, like you are seriously weird. I know people think I’m weird. There was that girl at school, Alice Marshall, that I found crying in the girls’ toilets one day, and when I asked her what the matter was she said nobody liked her and she didn’t have any friends, so I said I’d be friends with her and she said what would be the point of that? “You’re just weird!”
    I suppose I must be, if everyone thinks I am. I never used to mind, once upon a time; I was happy just being me. Now I’m not so sure. I begin to have this feeling that it might be easier if I could somehow learn to be a bit more like other people. I really would like to be! But I don’t