Six—no, seven of them. They looked pretty mean to me, although that could just have been because of the history. I could tell the second the gang saw me: the excitement went through their bodies, jolting each one. Here comes some fun, they thought. I took the box out of my bag and held it out in ...
Well, it was north of here, up near the border with Alaska. You won’t like the sound of this, but we were up there collecting bald eagle eggs. No, hold your horses, it was all to help save the species. The birds had once been common all over North America, but they were down to just a few hundred...
I’d walked through the heavy drizzle, and made it through the gates and into the school building. I’d gone down two corridors, and hadn’t yet been strangled, coshed or vamped. I was standing in front of my locker, ready to retrieve the PE kit I’d stuffed in there, still damp and grimy from the we...
This was where a tramp lived. A tramp like King Arthur. ‘This is the one, isn’t it?’ said Noah quietly. In fact the whole world seemed strangely silent. Up here there was no traffic noise, no sounds of children playing, no sounds of life at all. I nodded. ‘Smells of wee,’ said Jamie. Do you think...
‘Me,’ said a voice we knew all too well. ‘Oh no,’ groaned The Moan. ‘What does she want?’ ‘Probably to rub salt in our wounds,’ said Noah. We all crawled outside to see. Jennifer was there, holding a big stick. I thought for a second that her plan was to whack us with it, probably as a way of mak...
‘I think he’s sweet,’ said Jennifer. I don’t know if she really did think he was sweet or if she just wanted to disagree with The Moan, because he was her brother. ‘What’s his name?’ ‘He’s called Rude Word, or Rudy, for short.’ They all laughed, and then when I told them why he was called that th...
I was wearing all my new stuff and I was conscious of my gelled hair cutting through the atmosphere, more shark than Hoxton Fin. My honest guess is that I looked pretty fine, by my standards, but then my standards were undeniably low. Some people were definitely staring: a man washing the thirty-...
His face was contorted, so he looked as if he were wearing one of the savage war masks of the Polynesian cannibals. But his face was not the truly scary thing about him. It was Cedric. Yes, once again Tortoise Boy was charging with Cedric raised high above his head in the classic tortoise attack ...
I stayed in the box and closed my eyes and kept them shut until the bell sounded. I didn't want to see anything that was happening around me, because it would most likely be something terrible, and the chance of it being anything apart from terrible was maybe one in a million. It was actually qui...
At least I managed to get through THREE WHOLE DAYS without proving myself to be an ASS OF TITANIC PROPORTIONS. Strange that only yesterday I was a happy schoolboy without a care in the world, except for the fact that I was a bit too fat and had to sit next to someone who smelled of meat, and that...