Stuck on Me Read Online Free Page B

have it.
    ‘What are you doing?’ asked Grass, pushing open my bedroom door and making me jump. She never remembers to knock, probably because she got so used to sharing a room with me when we
were younger. She came in, uninvited, and sat herself down beside me on the bed.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said, clumsily trying to hide the photos under my duvet.
    Too late. She’d seen them. ‘Are you looking at old pictures?’
    ‘Yeah, I guess.’
    ‘Of what?’
    ‘Nothing much. Just stuff from when I was a kid.’
    ‘Are you looking at photos of Dad?’ She squashed up closer to me.
    ‘Maybe . . .’
    ‘Can I have a look?’ She sounded very curious. ‘I don’t really remember him at all. I can’t see him in my head.’ She’s only eleven now; she was tiny
when he left.
    ‘I guess,’ I said, handing over a photo of me sitting on Dad’s lap. ‘Don’t you remember how he used to sing to us?’
    She shrugged. ‘Not really.’ She picked up one of the photos and pulled a face. ‘Was he good?’
    ‘Yes, really good. He played in bands. He could play loads of instruments – the guitar, the harmonica, the piano . . .’
    ‘Ocean says he wasn’t a nice guy. She hates him.’
    ‘Ocean just thinks whatever Mum says she should think,’ I told her. ‘He wasn’t all bad. He was funny and he used to love playing silly games with us. I remember
that he’d let us ride around the living room on his back, like he was a horse. And he’d make up stupid songs that rhymed for us.’
    She smiled at me. ‘Do you think we’ll ever see him again?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
    I didn’t tell Grass this, but I also clearly remember the last conversation I had with Dad. It was the day before he left for good.
    ‘I’m going away for a while,’ he told me. ‘On the road.’
    ‘Will you be back soon?’
    ‘Probably,’ he lied. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’
    ‘Will you bring me a present when you come home?’
    ‘Of course I will, Sky-blue. It’s a promise.’
    Six years later, I’m still waiting.

 

    oday is back to school day. Already. The summer holidays are never long enough. At the start, six weeks seems
like forever – days and days of doing whatever you like (if you don’t get carted off to Goa against your will, that is), waking up late, seeing your friends – and then, all of a
sudden, it’s time to go back to school again. Worse, just two days in, it feels like you’ve never been away.
    What’s weird is that, even though the holidays go in a flash, people do seem to change over those six weeks. Maybe it’s the fresh air or the sunshine, but everyone seems to come back
taller. People – boys especially – who came up to your shoulders in the summer term are suddenly the same height as you.
    I measured myself when I got up this morning. Over the summer I’ve grown a total of four centimetres: two in height and two in nose length. To be fair, the amount my nose has grown is just
a guess; I’ve never measured it before today. But it must be at least twice as long as it was in July. My beak is now a whopping five and a half centimetres from the middle of my
eyebrows, where it starts, to the tip, where it – finally – ends. Then I Googled nose length and discovered that for an average European woman, like me, it should be just five
point one centimetres. If that’s not bad enough, I’m an overachiever in the protrusion stakes too. The average nose sticks out by two point two centimetres; mine is two point three. And
we’re not even mentioning the bent bit. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever wanted to be average at anything. Less is definitely more, when it comes to your nose.
    I put the tape measure in my schoolbag, so I could measure Rosie and Vix’s noses later this afternoon, when we meet. And then, in desperation, I Googled ways to make your nose look
smaller. The page I found told me that if I wanted to make my nose look shorter, I should apply my regular foundation all