SOMEONE DIFFERENT Read Online Free

homework yet?’ Dad asked.
    ‘I’ll do it now.’ I walked out of the dining room just as I heard Mum saying something about ‘science test’, ‘results’ and ‘strange’.
    In the kitchen, I scraped my lasagne into the bin and put the plate in the dishwasher. I poured a glass of milk and took it up to my room.
    The first lot of homework was ICT. I switched my computer on, found my glasses and read through the task while it loaded up. It was something to do with spreadsheets and formulae, and it might as well have been written in Chinese. I opened up Microsoft excel and stared at it. I typed some numbers in, but I knew they were wrong straight away. I read the task again, tried some different numbers, tried some different cells – it just wouldn’t work. What did he want us to do? Why hadn’t he explained it properly?
    I slammed the mouse down, stamped over to the French doors and leaned against the cool glass. Huge snowflakes drifted down steadily, and a thick covering had formed on my balcony. In daylight, I could see most of our fields from here. I could see the stables up at the house, our riding school and the ménage in the dip, then the woodland and the hills on the other side of valley. In the darkness though, I couldn’t see a thing – not even Pepper. But I knew he was out there, probably with this head over his stable door, and somehow, just thinking about him meant I managed not to cry about that ICT homework.
     
    ***
     
    Waiting outside Miss Welbourne’s lab the following lunchtime made me feel more sickly than ever. I’d had no lunch and made sure I’d arrived there really early, but by 12.45 she still hadn’t invited me in. She knew I was there – she’d raised her finger in a ‘one minute’ sort of way when I’d first knocked on the door, but then she’d disappeared into the prep room, and, as far as I could see through the narrow strip of glass in the door, hadn’t come back out.
    My fingernails clicked quietly against a piece of rough skin around my thumbnail. It was just starting to feel sore, but it wasn’t too bad; it wasn’t bleeding yet.
    The lab door flew open and I jumped.
    ‘Come in,’ Miss Welbourne said, turning away.
    I followed her and stood in front of her desk. She sat down, found my name in her mark book and traced her record of my test results across the page with her finger.
    ‘A steady decrease,’ she said, looking up at me. ‘Can you explain it?’
    My cheeks must’ve gone red because I felt them getting hotter. ‘I ... I don’t know, miss; I just find the tests really difficult.’
    ‘ Difficult? Do you listen in class? Do you revise adequately at home?’
    ‘Yes, miss. I try, honest.’
    ‘Well it shouldn’t be difficult then, should it? Obviously something is going wrong, somewhere.’ She closed the mark book and leaned back in her chair with her hands folded in her lap. ‘What do your parents have to say about this?’
    Oh, God. Quickly I made an effort to keep the panic off my face, but it was too late; she saw it, she interpreted it, and she shook her head.
    ‘You haven’t told them, have you?’
    Her eyes forced mine down low. ‘No, miss,’ I said.
    ‘Really, Annabel, that is so disappointing and deceitful; not at all what we expect from Highfield Park girls. I’ll telephone your parents this afternoon; it’ll be very interesting to see what they have to say about the matter. Now, you may go.’
    Back out in the corridor, the bell rang for the end of lunchtime. I looked at my hand as I made my way to registration. Now my thumb was bleeding.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    5 – Jay
     
    My dad was still on the settee when I went down the next morning. He was snoring and his T-shirt had ridden up to show his skinny ribs moving in and out as he breathed. A thin dribble of slaver ran down the side of his face from the corner of his mouth, and the row of Budweiser bottles on the floor totalled ten. The Smirnoff bottle at the end topped it all