Read Online Midnight by Jacqueline Wilson - Free Book Online

radio. Her strange bright beautiful clothes were hanging outside the wardrobe, transforming it. She’d covered the dressing table with glass perfume bottles and snow domes and several sets of Russian dolls, little carefully painted figures lined up in descending order right down to teeny creatures smaller than my fingernail. She’d spread an electric blue and silver Indian veil over the duvet and turned her ordinary bed into a bower. It was sewn with red jewels like rubies. When Jasmine lit the candles on her shelf the jewels glowed in the flickering light. They were scented candles, musky, sweet.
    â€˜Are they jasmine too?’ I asked, sniffing appreciatively.
    â€˜They’re neroli,’ said Jasmine. She stretched lazily. ‘It’s especially relaxing. My dad used to have a girlfriendwho was an aromatherapist. I really liked her. She told tarot cards as well. She said she was going to teach me how to do it. She was much nicer than Georgia, his new lady. She’s just one of the dancers in the show.’
    â€˜Maybe she could teach you to dance?’ I said.
    â€˜I can dance already,’ said Jasmine. She put some jazzy show music on her CD player and launched into an impressive routine, strutting and sashaying, slapping her pointy boots. Her skirt whirled, showing the taut calf muscles in her slender legs, real dancer’s legs.
    I’d been sent to ballet classes when I was five. It was Dad’s idea. He wanted a little dancer in the family. I hated the lessons. All the other little girls went to a different infants school and knew each other already. They had butterfly bobbles and diamanté hairslides and FOREVER FRIENDS necklaces and little Lycra leotards in pink and purple and blue. I didn’t have any jewellery. I didn’t even have a leotard at first. Mum made me change into my swimming costume for classes, even though I nearly died of embarrassment. I begged her to buy me a proper leotard but I didn’t look much better when I got it. It was too big and baggy and I was always afraid it might show my bottom if I bent over.
    I was in the ballet class concert that Christmas, even though I was slow to pick up the steps. Every child was in the concert, small or tall, fat or thin, talented or totally useless. I was a kitten who had lost her mitten. Dad videoed my dreadful performance. One of Will’s favourite tortures was to replay me stumbling about the stage, head bowed, knees bent, wrists wringing, totallyout of step with the other two kittens. It cracked him up every time.
    â€˜You’re brilliant at dancing, Jasmine,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been rubbish at it.’
    â€˜I’ll teach you if you like,’ said Jasmine, holding out her hand.
    â€˜Absolutely not,’ I said firmly.
    â€˜OK, OK,’ said Jasmine, and she swapped her CD for wonderfully weird choral music.
    â€˜It’s Lisa Gerrard. Isn’t she great?’ said Jasmine.
    â€˜It sounds very witchy.’
    â€˜It
is
witchy. I’m a white witch, didn’t you know? With amazing occult powers,’ said Jasmine. She flicked her fingers as if she was executing extraordinary witch spells.
    â€˜Oh yeah – and you’re a vampire slayer too?’ I said.
    â€˜You bet. And Supergirl. Watch me put on my special suit and fly,’ she said, spreading her arms wide.
    She was fooling around, of course, but she was so magical I almost believed her. I stood at her dressing table and fingered the green and blue perfume bottles and shook the snow domes and rearranged the Russian dolls, making them line up two by two in a long crocodile of best friends. I felt overpowered by perfume, shaken in a snowstorm, unscrewed into smaller and smaller pieces. I even looked different when I peered at myself in Jasmine’s mirror. My eyes shone in the candlelight and when I shook my hair free of its fat school plait it tumbled past my shoulders in dark