The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Read Online Free Page A

wasn't clever. That was just being observant. Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new. Like the universe expanding, or who committed a murder. Or if you see someone's name and you give each letter a value from 1 to 26 ( a = 1, b = 2, etc.) and you add the numbers up in your head and you find that it makes a prime number, like Jesus Christ (151), or Scooby-Doo (113), or Sherlock Holmes (163), or Doctor Watson (167).
    Mr. Jeavons asked me whether this made me feel safe, having things always in a nice order, and I said it did.
    Then he asked if I didn't like things changing. And I said I wouldn't mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.
    He asked whether I wanted to become an astronaut and I said I did.
    He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot. But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
    Terry, who is the older brother of Francis, who is at the school, said I would only ever get a job collecting supermarket trollies or cleaning out donkey shit at an animal sanctuary and they didn't let spazzers drive rockets that cost billions of pounds. When I told this to Father he said that Terry was jealous of my being cleverer than him. Which was a stupid thing to think because we weren't in a competition. But Terry is stupid, so
quod erat demonstrandum,
which is Latin for
which is the thing that was going to be proved,
which means
thus it is proved.
    I'm not a spazzer, which means
spastic,
not like Francis, who is a spazzer, and even though I probably won't become an astronaut, I am going to go to university and study mathematics, or physics, or physics and mathematics (which is a Joint Honor School), because I like mathematics and physics and I'm very good at them. But Terry won't go to university. Father says Terry is most likely to end up in prison.
    Terry has a tattoo on his arm of a heart shape with a knife through the middle of it.
    But this is what is called a digression, and now I am going to go back to the fact that it was a Good Day.
    Because it was a Good Day I decided that I would try and find out who killed Wellington because a Good Day is a day for projects and planning things.
    When I said this to Siobhan she said, “Well, we're meant to be writing stories today, so why don't you write about finding Wellington and going to the police station.”
    And that is when I started writing this.
    And Siobhan said that she would help with the spelling and the grammar and the footnotes.
    53. Mother died two weeks later.
    I had not been into hospital to see her but Father had taken in lots of food from Marks and Spencer's. He said that she had been looking OK and seemed to be getting better. She had sent me lots of love and had my Get Well card on the table beside her bed. Father said that she liked it very much.
    The card had pictures of cars on the front. It looked like this

    I did it at school with Mrs. Peters, who does art, and it was a lino cut, which is when you draw a picture on a piece of lino and Mrs. Peters cuts round the picture with a Stanley knife and then you put ink on the lino and press it onto the paper, which is why all the cars looked the same, because I did one car and pressed it onto the paper 9 times. And it was Mrs. Peters's idea to do lots of cars, which I liked. And I colored all the cars in with red paint to make it a Super Super Good Day for Mother.
    Father said that she died of a heart attack and it wasn't expected.
    I said, “What kind of heart attack?” because I was surprised.
    Mother was only 38 years old and heart attacks usually happen to older