My Family and Other Freaks Read Online Free Page B

skin like an old tortoise. Except that I don’t have enough money left for a whole bottle.
    â€œGood, let’s go home,” says Amber. But then I spot some little sachets of “self-tan towelette” which cost 99p each. Amber thinks they’ll be rubbish, but I tell her to shush and lend me a pound so I can buy three. I will apply it tomorrow when Mom is at the pub quiz with Auntie Karen.
Tuesday
    Amber comes around at 6 p.m. to do the deed and we tell Dad we are going upstairs to do our history homework. “I’m glad one of Danni’s friends is having a good influence on her,” he says. Amber’s face goes all pink and guilty-looking. She really is a hopeless liar.
    Simon’s head is resting cutely on his “girlfriend.” When Dad tries to pull Mom’s Ugg boots away from him he growls and buries them under his front legs like he’s hugging them. They cost £100 and are now covered in slobber.
    â€œIt says you have to exfoliate first,” says Amber, squinting through her glasses at the packet.
    â€œWhat does exfoliate mean?” I say.
    â€œI don’t know,” she says.
    â€œJust ignore it then,” I say, and start taking off my school uniform.
    â€œAre you sure Damian’s worth all this trouble?”she says. “I sometimes think he seems, you know, a bit up himself.”
    Poor Amber—she just doesn’t understand boys.
    I’m going to do my face and neck and Amber’s doing my legs and arms. It just feels like one of those wet serviettes you sometimes get at the end of a meal in a Chinese restaurant. It says it will make me look “tanned, healthy and glow with summer radiance” within 12 hours. Amber looks doubtful and says it seems a bit cheap. She’s such an old woman, that girl. We rub it on and then I hear Dad bringing Phoebe upstairs to bed. She wants to come in my room, like always, to be with the big girls. I shove a T-shirt and some jeans on and tell my dad she can come in for ten minutes, tops, because we’ve got a lot of Roundheads and Cavaliers to get through, actually.
    Phoebe plays with my pencil case, pulling things out and saying, “I have this?” and, “I keep this?” while me and Amber run around destroyingthe self-tanning evidence. Amber says she’d better be off home and scuttles out of the house. Honestly, she’s such a wet sometimes.
    â€œYou smell funny,” says Phoebe, climbing on to my knee and sniffing my face like Simon does when I’ve got strawberry lip gloss on. It is true that the tanning towelettes do whiff a bit like smokey-bacon chips, but that’s not a bad thing, is it? I tell her to button it or I won’t read
Room on the Broom
to her for the 472nd time.
Wednesday
7 a.m.
    Wonder what I’ll look like? I don’t expect to look exactly like Treasure, but at least I’ll be brown like one of those contestants on
Celebrity Love Island
. I look in the mirror in my room, ready to drink in my bronzed loveliness. OH. DEAR. GOD. ABOVE. It looks like I’ve turned into an elephantine rasherof streaky bacon. My face is striped like a bumble bee and my hands are so smeared it looks liked I’ve wiped my bum with them.
    Luckily Mom is still in bed because she’s tired—again—but Rick sees me when I go down for breakfast. “Ha! You’ve been Tango’d,” he says.
    I try covering it up with Mom’s foundation cream, but the orange streaks show through. My dad says I could always pretend I was using Phoebe’s wildlife face paints and it all went wrong. Phoebe, quite seriously, asks if I want to borrow her pussycat ears.
    Dad seems to think this is hilarious until he realizes it won’t wash off. “Get to school before your mother sees you,” he says. I’ll have to save the mascara for another day.
8:25 a.m.
    I’m waiting at the bus stop wearing a duffle coat with the hood up and a scarf