Read Online Head Spinners by Thalia Kalkipsakis - Free Book Online Page B

made me feel even worse. I had done something awful, and I deserved to be punished for it – grounded for a year or forced to quit gymnastics. But no one said anything at all.
    From then on, the guilt sat inside me like a disease. I could feel it living in me, making my breath smell bad. I could see it in their faces when my family looked at me.
    It changed the way I felt inside.
    Now, as we walked home from the Big Cow Cafe, Mum asked a heap of questions about my friends and whether I had told them about Monty. ‘What about your friends at gymnastics?’
    She seemed to have decided that I had stolen the sandwich because of Monty, as though I had turned to the dark side now. Kill your dog, become a thief – it was all a natural course of events.
    But I just felt sick. I couldn’t talk to Mum about any of it. I couldn’t bear to keep thinking about it.
    When we got home, Dad looked up from the newspaper. ‘Is everything okay?’ he said as I passed.
    But I just kept going straight to my room and slammed the door.
    I lay on my bed and buried my face in my quilt, crying until the light blue cover had a dark blue patch around my face. There were a lot of tear-stained patches on my quilt.
    Eventually the tears slowed. I sat on the edge of my bed and reached into my gym bag for a drink of water. But as I pulled it out, I gasped and hugged the bottle to my chest.
    There, in my gym bag, was the trout sandwich. The one I’d been accused of stealing. But it wasn’t sitting quietly as it had been in the shop.
    It was jumping up and down.

    I stared at the trout sandwich, too amazed to move. It was flopping around like a fish out of water.
    With one massive leap, the sandwich was out of the bag and onto my bed. It started flopping towards me.
    Eek! I pushed myself backwards off my bed, hitting the bookcase with a thud and dropping my bottle on the floor. Water trickled out of the bottle and onto the carpet, but I wasn’t worried about that.
    The sandwich looked like a freaky ocean beast. Cling wrap flopped around it like a limp fin and lettuce trailed after it like seaweed.
    The sandwich flopped onto the floor and jumped towards the bottle I’d dropped. It landed in the wet patch on my carpet and lay there flapping, like a kid splashing in water.
    I stared at it with my mouth open. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Was the sandwich somehow alive?
    I found a ruler on my bookcase and knelt on the floor. Using one end of the ruler I dragged open the last bit of cling wrap. Then I flipped the top piece of bread over as if I was flipping a pancake. Underneath were slices of tomato, some floppy lettuce . . . and six or seven slivers of shiny trout.
    For a moment, nothing moved. Then a single piece of trout started jumping. Flip, flop . . . flip flop . . .
    It looked exactly like a fish trying to flip itself back into the water. Except, it was just a piece of fish. A freaky fishy blob.
    The trout flicked what looked like its tail-end, flopped itself into the mouth of the bottle opening, slithered down the neck, and was soon swishing around in the water left inside.
    The next thing I knew, the other pieces of fish were flipping across my bedroom floor. They looked as if they were having a party, dancing to music that I couldn’t hear.
    One by one, they dived into the bottle. The last piece was wider than the others, and wider than the mouth of the bottle. It sat for a while on the carpet. Then it rolled itself into a tube and wiggled into the bottle opening.
    I shook my head in amazement. Somehow, those pieces of fish were still alive, and had been searching for water all along. They must have jumped the sandwich into my gym bag.
    I lay on my stomach and peered into the bottle. I couldn’t take my eyes off those fish (well, those fish pieces , I guess). They were supremely brilliant. It was as though the universe was giving me a second chance, a way