Girl, 15: Charming but Insane
Read Girl, 15: Charming but Insane Online
Authors: Sue Limb
For
and, to be honest,
to a certain extent actually
by
Betsy Vriend
Contents
Get to Know Sue Limb with her Q & A!
Books by Sue Limb (in reading order):
Eyes, nose, lips. Jess was drawing a face on her hand. She should have been making notes for her history essay: a list of ‘Reasons Why King Charles I Was Unpopular’. But instead she was giving herself a love-tattoo of the beautiful Ben Jones. The flicked-up hair, the slanty grin . . . Oh no! It didn’t look like Ben Jones at all. It looked like a demented iguana.
Art wasn’t Jess’s strong point. She wrote,
Ben Jones, – or Demented Iguana?
under her tattoo, and coughed in a signal to her friend Flora that communication was desired. It was a kind of ringtone. Flora looked up and Jess held the tattoo up to her. Flora smiled, but it was a kind of pretend smile, and immediately afterwards Flora glanced furtively at Miss Dingle and dived straight back into her work.
Miss Dingle – Dingbat to her fans – was glaring from the teacher’s desk. ‘Jess Jordan! What’s your problem?’
‘Oh, Miss, there are so many,’ sighed Jess, hastily pulling her sleeve down to hide the portrait-tattoo of Ben Jones: the Demented Iguana. ‘Tragic broken home, hideous genetic inheritance . . . massive bum . . .’ A few people giggled.
‘Get on with your work,’ snapped Miss Dingle, trying to sound steely and terrifying, even though she had a weedy little voice and a tendency to spit. ‘If you showed half as much interest in writing history projects as you do in trying to be amusing, you’d be the star pupil instead of the class dunce.’
Everybody hid their faces in their books and cracked up – as silently as possible, of course. The whole room shook.
‘And the rest of you!’ shouted Miss Dingle. ‘Be quiet and get on with writing your list of reasons – unless you all want to stay behind after school! I’m quite tempted to put the whole group in detention!’ At the word ‘detention’, another drop of spit went sailing across the room.
There was a muffled explosion as everyone tried to avoid laughing out loud by eating their own tonsils, but frenzied scribbling was also resumed. Nobody wanted to stay behind after school. Jess picked up her dictionary and tried to look intelligent. She turned the pages, hoping for a rude word. Suddenly she had an idea. Hey! Maybe you could consult the dictionary, a bit like the Tarot. Think of a question, then open it at random. Jess closed her eyes and concentrated.
Will Ben Jones and I ever be an item?
Her finger jabbed at a word.
Parsley. A well-known garden herb, used for flavouring soup
. Well, not a brilliant result, obviously. But maybe there was a hidden meaning. Perhaps you could make a boy fall in love with you by rubbing parsley behind your ears, or sprinkling chopped parsley in his pants while he was swimming.
Jess suddenly caught Dingbat’s eye again. A dangerous moment. Hastily Jess copied down the title of the history essay. ‘Reasons Why King Charles I Was Unpopular.’ All she had to do was read chapter six of the history book. Jess flicked through the book and looked at the pictures. Charles I had sad, haunted eyes and a stylish goatee. Flora had told her that he had been only about five feet tall. Some kind of Hobbit, obviously. And then he had had his head chopped off – pretty bad news for anybody of course, but for a short guy clearly a disaster, stylewise.
‘Reasons Why King Charles I Was Unpopular.’ Jess looked across at Flora, who was writing so hard that her whole body was shaking. She had written three whole pages already, and if Jess was going to catch up with her, she had to make a start. Jess picked up her pen and let her imagination run away with her. This was always dangerous.
Reasons Why King Charles I Was Unpopular
1. He never changed his pants.
2. He refused to grow.
3. He passed a law saying everybody taller than him had to have their legs cut off.
4. He slurped his soup.
5. He used to bottle his farts and sell them to the tourists.
Somehow, at this point, Jess’s inspiration dried up and she began to think about Ben Jones again. She formed a plan to steal a bit of DNA from his football boots or a hair from the shoulder of his blazer. There would be instructions somewhere on the internet, so she ought to be able to genetically engineer a Ben Jones lookalike, in case the real one proved unavailable. She gazed in adoration at the tattoo of Ben Jones: the Demented Iguana. How she longed to have his babies. Or possibly lay his eggs.
Jess started another list: ‘Reasons Why Ben Jones Is Popular.’ This was much easier than the history list.
1. Hair like golden grass (if only I could picnic on it).
2. Eyes blue enough to swim in (h
e
’s beginning to sound like a holiday destination).
