Read Online When Mr. Dog Bites by Brian Conaghan - Free Book Online

hard?
    You can sleep with a light on .
    That cracked me up. Mr. McGrain, the headmaster, would’ve kicked him on his bahookie if he’d told that one, however. Maybe I could be Amir’s manager/agent. Then we’d be best buds forever and earn some quality cashino along the way.
    Aren’t you forgetting something, Dylan? that little nutty bastard reminded me. I slapped myself on the head.
    It must have been tough for Mom, watching her only son, her only child, deteriorate before her very eyes. She was ultra-brave. George Cross brave. Usually she’d come into my room to give me some soggy pecks and a mega hug and tell me how much she loved me. And the nights when she’d been on one of her booze cruises she’d slobber all over my face like a big St. Bernard dog who’d just discovered me in some manky crevasse deep in Swiss mountain territory. This was just Mom’s way of showing me that she loved me like a crazy woman, and had nothing to do with the fact that the whopping amounts of booze guzzled that evening had shattered and scattered her emotional inhibitions. (We were doing the Alcohol module in social and health education.) Booze cruise or no booze cruise, she was Blackhawk Down , saying she’d protect me from all this palaver and won’t let it affect me. It made me feel Mr. Guilty, as I was the one who should be doing the protecting. Moms are the best things in the world. I often wondered what it would be like being a mom. I don’t have boobs, so it isn’t ever going to happen. Although I think it does in America.
    When I looked at my dimmed stars, I began to think more and more about Michelle Malloy and how I could get her to do the jiggy. Having a top chat would be a start. Women like talking about stuff and all that. She was sooooooooo beautiful. By far the coolest, grooviest, hippest, sexiest chick at Drumhill. I was sure that if Michelle Malloy went to a proper school, she’d be the coolest, grooviest, hippest, sexiest chick there too . . . 
    The next morning I had to cut my own banana slices and plonk them in the oatmeal before putting it in the microwave. Mom was still in her kip. I was a raging bull because Mom knew how much I hated taking anything out of the microwave.
    “MICROWAVE PRICK.”
    The microwaves can jump on your brain and kill you stone dead right there and then. Zoom! There have been cases in America, Bulgaria, and Ecuador. But it didn’t matter anymore, so I took the oatmeal out myself. Nothing happened, so I munched the oatmeal.

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    Match
    I always loved it when September came along. Not because the sweltering summer sun had finally buggered off to somewhere else. That was me being “ ironic ,” as I live in Scotland, which is not Papua New Guinea or Torremolinos. A hee-hee moment! No, I loved September because it was the time of the year that men became men and all the girls did arts and crafts. September was when THE SOCCER SEASON started in school. And I, Dylan Mint, was a first-on-the-team-sheet key member of the Drumhill School Soccer Team.
    First game: local rivals Shawhead.
    Bring it on.
    If you didn’t want to do arts and crafts or pretend-reading in the library, students could watch the game and cheer like maddies for the Drumhill boys. It was that silly bugger Amir who egged me on to ask Michelle Malloy if she wanted to watch me playing the game.
    “It’s perfect,” Amir said.
    “Not sure, amigo—the whole soccer thing wasn’t part of my master plan.”
    “‘ Put my master plan into action ,’ you said, so time to get them out.” Amir wiggled his fingers, all ten of them, in front of my face, like he was planting his thoughts in my brain.
    “Amir, she’ll see my legs.”
    “So?”
    “So there’s no hair on them.”
    “That’s ’cause you’re a white boy.”
    “She’ll think I’m, like, twelve or something.”
    “Twelve isn’t so bad—you know what they say about twelve-year-olds . . .” Amir winked and smiled.
    “No, what?”
    “Erm . . . I