Read Online Monster by C.J. Skuse - Free Book Online

sight of it all brought bile into my throat, I took a spoonful of each, knowing that if I didn’t there was nothing else to eat until dinner. The food at Bathory had alwaysbeen bad. When I’d first arrived as an eight-year-old Pup, I’d been vegetarian. The first week, when I realised the vegetarian option was either a saucer of grated Smart Price cheese or a grey hard-boiled egg, I quickly switched back to meat to keep myself alive.
    On a more positive note, Clarice Hoon hadn’t given me any more grief about Seb, aside from the odd snide look as I walked up Long Corridor. This I could handle.
First to lose their cool loses the argument,
Seb told me, and he was right. As always.
    Midway through lunch, Mrs Saul-Hudson marched in and dragged Maggie out. It turned out she’d just had a phone call from a pilot at RAF Lyneham who’d done a fly-past the previous day, who’d kindly informed her that the school now had letters crudely daubed on its roof. Instead of assisting with the Christmas Fayre preparations, I gladly spent the afternoon helping Maggie to clean it off.
    ‘Why though? Why not expel me for this? It does NOT make sense!’ she shouted, as I scrubbed away at the second S in ‘SAVE US’. ‘Why keep giving me these stupid meaningless detentions? I mean, I’ve tried EVERYTHING to get out of this place. I’ve done it all …’
    ‘… even vandalised a listed building now,’ I added.
    ‘Yeah. I don’t know what more I can do,’ she cried. ‘Maybe I could get a boy in here. Yeah, that might do it.’
    ‘Why do you want to leave so badly?’ I asked. She didn’t answer immediately, so I pressed. ‘Seriously, you can tell me.’
    ‘I just wanna go home, that’s all. I don’t need an education.’
    ‘But they’ll only send you somewhere else, won’t they?’
    ‘Fine. Then maybe they’ll send me back to my old compwhere I was happy and settled and didn’t have to wear this cheap scratchy boy-repeller.’ She loosened her tie like it was hurting her neck.
    ‘I’d miss you,’ I told her.
    ‘Yeah, right.’
    ‘I would. You’re the thing that’s keeping me going at the moment.’
    ‘Yeah, well, you’ll get over me eventually.’
    She carried on scrubbing. I felt no padlock on my urge to tell her any more, so I just said it. ‘They’re paying double the fees.’
    ‘Huh? Who?’
    ‘Your parents.’
    ‘WHAT?’ she cried, standing up and slamming her scrubbing brush down on the flat roof where a thousand soap bubbles flew up into my face. ‘What do you mean? How? How do you know that? Are you joking me?’
    I shook my head, wiping little flecks of foam from my nose and cheeks. ‘Your file was out on her desk when I was in there a few weeks ago. I wasn’t going through it or anything, I was just putting her cocoa down. And it was there, in your file. I read it.’
    Maggie sat back down on the roof. ‘Double fees? That’s really why I’m still here?’
    I nodded. ‘There was a letter in the file, open, from your dad. I only read a bit, as I said, it was just there on the desk. He wants you to get your GCSEs here so you can go to a good Sixth Form or get a good apprenticeship when you leave. He doesn’t want you sponging off them like your sister does. And because you were kicked out of two other schools, Mrs Saul-Hudson agreed to keep you here, comewhat may. He thanked her for it. But that was it, that was all I read.’
    Maggie shook her head. I sat down next to her. She looked beaten down. Flattened. Lost. ‘I can’t believe he’s done this. He knows how much I hate it here. I’ll run away.’
    ‘No you won’t.’
    ‘I will.’
    ‘You won’t, Maggie. You’d have to walk at least ten miles to the nearest train station.’
    ‘I’ll hitch.’
    I looked at her. ‘Maggie, don’t.’
    ‘Why not? My parents clearly don’t give a toss. He’s leaving me here all Christmas, that’s how much he loves me. Git.’
    ‘They’re paying £18,000 a term so you can get your