Spurt Read Online Free Page B

picked, the players jogged out onto the field, leaving Jack alone in the goal square. For ten, then fifteen minutes, he watched the game play out in the distance. Jack didn’t want to complain about his team’s unexpected prowess against Sampson’s pack of supermen, but he was starting to get bored. He was just wondering if he’d ever get involved in the action when Sampson suddenly burst free from a misjudged tackle from Philo and streaked out in front of the rest of the field. Startled, Jack inched forward, trying to guess which way Sampson would strike.
    Sampson locked eyes with Jack – and shot for goal.
    Jack made a desperate lunge towards the ball, but he couldn’t get his hands to it in time. The shot went right through his defences.
    A whistle blew. There were muted grunts of victory from out on the field, as though the result had never been in doubt. Sampson threw a look over his shoulder.
    ‘You could’ve saved that if you were bigger, Sprigley.’
    The match finished one–nil. One winner.
    And one loser.

Square jaw. Bulging biceps. Rippling abs.
    ‘Need help?’ asked the chemist’s assistant. She chewed her gum at Jack and blinked.
    Jack backed away from the shelf of protein powder cans. ‘No, I was just …’ The row of identically muscular titans on the labels of the cans glowered back at him. Jack turned away from them and rolled his eyes at the assistant. ‘Wow. What sort of loser would buy this stuff?’
    ‘You have to be fourteen or older,’ said the assistant. ‘Sorry.’
    ‘I am fourteen,’ said Jack.
    The assistant raised her eyebrows. ‘Really?’
    Jack sighed and handed over the prescription. ‘I need to pick this up for my gran,’ he said. He felt waves of testosterone emanating from the wall of protein powder. Oliver Sampson’s taunt played over and over in his head.
    ‘You could’ve saved that if you were bigger.’
    Well, he had been bigger, once upon a time. He’d been a bigger deal than anyone at Upland West or Upland Secondary. But now he’d stepped so far out of the spotlight that no-one even seemed to remember that anymore.
    Jack followed the assistant over to the counter. ‘I used to be on TV,’ he heard himself say.
    The chemist’s assistant looked up at him, blank-faced. ‘My second cousin was in an ad for Sultana World when she was in Grade 2. She got paid, like, two hundred dollars.’
    Jack looked apologetic. ‘Um, my thing was kind of a bigger deal than an ad for Sultana World, actually.’
    ‘Avocado World? That is a pretty big deal, I guess.’ She handed Jack a white paper bag.
    Jack pulled out the $50 note his gran had given him that morning. ‘Ten thousand dollars. That’s how much I won.’
    The assistant stopped chewing her gum. ‘Wow. You could buy our entire shelf of muscle powder with that.’

    Jack headed straight for his gran’s bungalow when he got home.
    Jack’s gran, Marlene, had moved into the bungalow behind the house two years ago. Her unit on the other side of Upland had been slowly falling to pieces ever since Jack’s step-granddad, Clive, had run off with all of Marlene’s savings. Jack had wanted to do something useful with his Bigwigs winnings (or ‘losings’, as he called them), so he’d put the prize money towards renovating the bungalow for his gran to live in. For a while there, he’d felt like he was doing his bit. Like he really was the man of the house.
    ‘Knock, knock,’ he shouted. He waited a moment, then pushed open the door.
    Marlene was lounging on her bed, an old-generation iPhone with a turquoise case in one hand and a clunky grey dumbphone resting on the bedspread next to her.
    Hallie had handed the iPhone down to her a few weeks ago. ‘Just because I don’t have thousands of dollars to give away,’ she’d said, ‘doesn’t mean I can’t be generous if I want to.’
    Marlene squinted at one phone and then the other through her glasses. The radio (loud) and TV (muted) were both playing in the