Muddle and Win Read Online Free

guard. ‘You know how it goes.’
    ‘Until lately, we’ve been able to make up our quota and Low Command hasn’t complained too much. But now there’s a problem.’
    ‘A big one.’
    Muddlespot’s skin tingled. Suddenly he understood why Corozin had been disappointed with so many of his agents of late. Something had been going wrong up on Earth. Somebody up there had been handing out defeat after defeat after defeat to all Corozin’s best and finest devils. They had gone up one after another, and one after another they had failed. The object of Mission Alpha was  . . .
    The picture changed.
    ‘It’s
Sally Jones
,’ said the guard.

THE BELL HAD gone. The school yard and the pavements outside the gates were teeming with young escapees. Sally was among them with her bag over one shoulder. It was a heavy bag, with a mountain of homework in it. She passed Ameena and Janey and Chris, who were swapping tunes on their mobiles.
    ‘Hi, Sally!’ they said to her.
    ‘Hi, guys!’
    ‘Seeya tomorrow.’
    ‘Yeah, seeya.’
    Ameena and Janey and Chris were each nearly six feet tall, and won tennis matches at county level and competed in the district high jump. Janey was also a showjumper and was seriously good at that too. Sally wasn’t one of the sporty set at Darlington High . But they all said ‘Hi’ to her because she was Sally.
    At the school gates Mrs Watkins, Head of Languages, gave her a wan smile. Mrs Watkins was still heartbroken because Sally had decided to drop Spanish at the start of Year 9. What she didn’t yet know was that Sally was planning to join the Japanese club she ran at lunch times as a way of making it up to her. (OK, it’d mean another language to learn, but so what? Japanese wasn’t going to be a problem for Sally.)
    On the pavement, Cassie Anderson-Higgs had draped herself languidly against a parking meter. ‘So I mean, like, pleeeeease!’ she yawned. ‘Not only was it a hamburger, but he’d got them to put mayo on it! So I told him – “Right, you’re dumped, jerkface. And by the way, you kiss like a fish.” Oh – hi, Sally!’
    ‘Oh –
hi
, Sally!’ called Viola and Carmela and Imogen Grey, looking round.
    Cassie and her group were the ‘14/18’ set at Darlington High. They weren’t just wannabe eighteen-year-olds. They
were
eighteen in every sense except the technical one involving the calendar. Including how they looked, where they went and what they drank when they got there. Cassie dumped six men a week. Viola was taking driving lessons. Their contempt for anyone else was Total. The attention they gave them was Nil. Except for Sally. They liked Sally.
    It was easy to like Sally. She had an open, uncomplicated face and she smiled a lot. Her forehead was large, her eyebrows were strong and her nose and chin were small, so that it looked as if she carried her head tilted slightly forward all the time. Her hair was dark, trimmed in a neat line over her eyes and to collar length at the back. She wasn’t a fashion leader, or follower. She wasn’t a sports hero. She wasn’t the centre of any of the social sets in her year, and she wasn’t ever going to be lead singer in the school band. What’s more, she was getting awesome grades in class without ever seeming to try. But nobody minded.
    Because if your phone was out of credit, you could borrow Sally’s. If you’d left your maths homework at school, you could call Sally and she would give you the questions. If you called her after 7 p.m., she could probably give you the answers too. Her allowance wasn’t great, but if you needed any of it, it was yours. She’d hear your lines for the school play. And when all was lost and the Head of Year was bearing down on you and your last alibi was blown, Sally would get you out of it. Somehow. Without even lying.
    If you needed to cry about anything, you could cry on Sally’s shoulder. She’d listen. Later you might realize that in fact she’d been in a screaming rush about