Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism (2 page)

Night was drawing in.

In the distance Molly heard the squawk of the cuckoo clock in Miss Adderstone’s rooms striking six.

“We’re
really
late,” she said, tearing her dressing gown from a hook on the door.

“She’s going to have a tantrum,” Rocky agreed as they sprinted down the passage. Expertly, they skidded round a corner on the polished linoleum floor and long-jumped down the stairs. Quietly, they tiptoed across the checkered stone floor of the hall past the TV room and toward the oak-paneled assembly room. They slunk in.

Nine children, four of them under seven years old, were lined up along the walls. Molly and Rocky joined the end of a line, near two friendly five-year-olds, Ruby and Jinx, hoping that Miss Adderstone hadn’t reached their names on the register yet. Molly glanced at the unfriendly, older faces opposite her. Hazel Hackersly, the meanest girl in the orphanage, narrowed her eyes at Molly. Gordon Boils made the
motion of cutting his throat with an imaginary knife.

“Ruby Able?” read Miss Adderstone.

“Yes, Miss Adderstone,” piped up tiny Ruby beside Molly.

“Gordon Boils?”

“Here, Miss Adderstone,” said Gordon, making a face at Molly.

“Jinx Eames?”

“Yes, Miss Adderstone,” the little boy said.

“Roger Fibbin?”

“Here, Miss Adderstone,” said the tall, thin boy who stood next to Gordon, eyeing Molly maliciously.

“Hazel Hackersly?”

“Here, Miss Adderstone.”

Molly was relieved. Her name was next.

“Gerry Oakly?”

“Here, Miss Adderstone,” said seven-year-old Gerry, thrusting his hand into his pocket, where he could feel his pet mouse trying to escape.

“Cynthia Redmon?”

“Here, Miss Adderstone,” said Cynthia, winking at Hazel.

Molly wondered when her own name would pop up. Miss Adderstone seemed to have skipped it.

“Craig Redmon?”

“Here, Miss Adderstone,” grunted Cynthia’s twin.

“Gemma Patel?”

“Here, Miss Adderstone.”

“Rocky Scarlet?”

“Here,” Rocky said.

Miss Adderstone slammed the register shut. “As usual, Molly Moon is not here.”

“I am here now, Miss Adderstone.” Molly could hardly believe it. Miss Adderstone must have read her name out
first,
to intentionally catch her out.

“Now
doesn’t count,” said Miss Adderstone, her lips twitching. “You will be on dishwashing duty tonight. Edna
will
be pleased to have the night off.”

Molly squeezed her eyes tight shut with regret.

After the last blessing prayer, the dinner gong sounded, and the heavy dining room door swung open. The orphans shuffled through it, welcomed tonight by the disgusting smell of old fish. They’d seen the fish earlier that week, lying in plastic crates in the alley outside the kitchen, scuttling with flies and beetles. And everyone knew that Edna, the orphanage cook, would have baked the fish in a thick, greasy, cheese-and-nut sauce to disguise its rotten taste—a trick that she’d learned in the navy.

There Edna stood now, broad and muscular, with her curly gray hair and her flattened nose, ready to make sure every child ate up. With a tattoo of a sailor on her thigh (although this was only a rumor), and her terrible language, Edna was like a grumpy pirate.

Every single child felt nervous and sick as they stood in line while Edna slopped out smelly helpings.

“I’m allergic to fish, Edna,” said Molly.

“Load a bleedin’ codswallop,” came Edna’s gruff reply, as she wiped her nose on her overall sleeve, then dolloped out an extra helping.

“It is cod’s wallop,” Molly whispered to Rocky, looking down at her fish.

The idea that something special might happen to her tonight was now entirely gone. Instead, the evening was going to be just like all the others. There would be nothing good to eat, no treats, and the hours before bedtime would be laced with trouble.

S
ometimes when bad luck comes your way, you think it will never end. Molly Moon often felt this way about her luck, which wasn’t surprising since she was so often in trouble. If only she’d known that her luck was about to change, she might have enjoyed the following day, for by the end of it all sorts of wonderful things were going to happen to her. But that morning, from the moment she opened her eyes, Molly’s day started to go wrong.

First she was woken with a shock by a bell ringing loudly in her ear. Big-boned Hazel, Miss Adderstone’s pet, liked to wake Molly up as violently as possible.

“It’s the cross-country races at school today, Bog Eyes, and that fifty-word spelling test,” she announced, scraping her black hair back with her hair band. She
walked away, swinging her bell happily, delighted to have ruined Molly’s morning.

Rocky hadn’t remembered the test either. He and Molly tried to catch up over breakfast, only to have their books confiscated by Miss Adderstone. Then Miss Adderstone took great delight in watching Molly clean the toilet with her toothbrush. By eight thirty, Molly was feeling sick.

The morning didn’t improve on the way to school. On the road, one of the village boys threw a water bomb at Hazel. When she ducked, the water bomb hit Molly, exploding on impact and soaking her. As a result, Molly and Rocky missed assembly, because they were trying to dry Molly’s sweater and shirt on the radiator in the girls’ locker room. They were also late for their first class.

“Late!” Mrs. Toadley, their teacher, shouted as they entered the classroom. She pushed them to two worm-eaten desks in the front row. “And you missed assembly. I shall give you punishments later. Aaa-tishu-ooo!” Mrs. Toadley had a small sneezing fit, which was what always happened whenever she got worked up.

Molly sighed. More punishments.

Molly hated Mrs. Toadley, and she was glad that she looked so repulsive—blubbery faced and half bald, with a belly like a water-filled rubber bag. Her appearance served her right.

Mrs. Toadley’s sneezing fits were usually good for cheating, but cheating together in today’s spelling test was out of the question, as neither Molly nor Rocky knew the answers. The test was from the land of Gobbledygook. Not only did the class have to spell the words, but they also had to give their meanings. Molly blundered through it, guessing the answers.

When they had finished, Mrs. Toadley collected the tests and set to work marking them. She started with Molly’s. Within seconds her squealy, high-pitched voice whistled through the classroom, followed by a succession of loud sneezes. Molly’s stomach went tight as yet another telling off began.

“You got ‘NOTORIOUS’ wrong. Aaa-tishu-ooo … There’s no
e
in it, and it actually means famous in a
bad
way, and I must say that’s you all over, isn’t it, Molly? Eh? … Eh? … Eh?”

Molly’s strength began to crack. After all, a person can take only so much battering. She put on her best anti-tell-off armor and switched off. She had to, to stop Mrs. Toadley’s cruel tongue hurting her. In her mind she floated away from the classroom until Mrs. Toadley’s ghastly tones were tiny and distant, as if coming down a telephone line, and the squirly pattern on her stretchy skirt became a purplish-orange blur.

“Molly Moon! Will you listen to me for once, you useless girl!”

Molly snapped back to the classroom. “I am sorry if I have disappointed you, Mrs. Toadley. I’ll try harder next time.”

Mrs. Toadley snorted and sneezed and sat down.

Molly gave the morning ten out of ten for dreadfulness. But in the afternoon something much worse happened.

After lunch Molly’s class changed for the crosscountry race. Molly couldn’t find one of her sneakers, and she and Rocky had to look all over for it. Droplets of rain ran down the locker-room windows as they searched. By the time they’d found it, the others were a long way ahead. And it was pouring rain. Rocky wanted to catch up, but the slippery ground made progress difficult. After running through the sludgy woods, Molly needed a break. So they sat down on a bench under a tree for a little rest. Their sneakers were sodden, and their legs were cold and wet.

“Come on,” Rocky said. “Let’s start again. Otherwise we’ll be way behind.”

“Why don’t we just go back?” suggested Molly.

“Molly,” said Rocky irritatedly, “do you
want
to get into trouble? You’re crazy.”

“I’m not crazy, I just don’t like running.”

“Oh, come on, Molly, let’s keep going.”

“No, I just don’t … feel like it.”

Rocky tilted his head and looked searchingly at her. He’d been late to school that morning because of Molly, and now she wanted to get them into even more trouble.

“Molly,” he said, exasperated. “If you don’t come, they’ll probably make us go around twice. Why don’t you just try?”

“Because I’m no good at it and I don’t want to.”

Rocky stared at her. “You could be good at running, you know, if you tried. If you got better at running, you’d like it, but you won’t even try.” Rocky looked up at the rain clouds above him. “It’s the same with lots of things we do. If you’re not good at them, you just give up. And then you’re not good at them more, and so you don’t try more, and then you’re even
worse
at them, and then …”

“Oh, shut up, Rocky.” Molly was tired, and the last thing she wanted was a lecture-from her best friend. In fact, she was shocked that Rocky should bother. He was normally so easygoing and tolerant. If anything annoyed him, he’d just ignore it, or wander away from it. “And then,” continued Rocky, “you get into
trouble.”
He took a big, fed-up breath. “And you know what? I’m sick of you being in trouble. It’s as if you like it.
It’s as if you
want
to get yourself more and more unpopular.”

Molly’s heart jolted in amazement as his unexpected words stung her. Rocky
never
criticized her. Molly was furious. “You’re not so popular yourself, Rock Scarlet,” she retorted.

“That’s because I’m usually with you,” Rocky said matter-of-factly.

“Maybe actually it’s because no one likes
you
much either,” Molly snapped. “I mean, you’re not perfect. You’re so dreamy, it’s like you live on a different planet. And you’re not exactly reliable. Sometimes I have to wait
hours
for you to turn up. Like yesterday, I waited
ages
for you by the school lockers. And you’re so secretive you’re almost sneaky. I mean, where were you yesterday after school? Recently you’ve been disappearing
all
the time. People may think
I’m
weird, but they think you’re just as strange. You’re like a weird wandering minstrel.”

“Still, they like me more than they like you, that’s for sure,” Rocky muttered.

“What did you say?”

“I said,” said Rocky loudly, “they like me
more
than they like you.”

Molly stood up, giving Rocky the filthiest look she could.

“I’m going,” she said, “now that I know you think you’re so much better than me. And you know what, Rocky? You can run on and catch up to the others. Go and make yourself more popular. Don’t let me hold you back.”

“Oh, don’t get so worked up. I was only trying to help you,” said Rocky, frowning. But Molly was enraged. It was as if something inside her had suddenly broken. She knew she was less popular than Rocky, but she didn’t want to hear it. It was true that everyone bullied her, and no one ever bullied Rocky. He was untouchable, confident, difficult to upset, and happy with himself. Hazel and her gang steered clear of him, and he had plenty of friends at school.

Molly hated him now for betraying her. She glared at him, and he puffed his cheeks out at her in an oh-you-drive-me-crazy way.

“Same to you, too. And you look like a
stupid
blowfish like that. Perhaps some of your new friends will find it clever.” As she stamped away from him, she yelled, “I hate this place, in fact I can’t think of a
worse
place to be in the world. My life is just
HORRIBLE.”

M
olly blasted her way through the school woods, the wet, ferny undergrowth slapping at her legs. She picked up a stick and thrashed the plants. The first hairy fern she came to was Miss Adderstone.
Shwippp!
The stick zipped through the air and cut off her head. “Old cow!” Molly muttered.

A dark-green creeper was Edna.
Shwippp!
“Filthy old bag!”

She came to the base of a large yew tree. Poisonous red berries were rotting on the ground around it, and a huge, yellow fungus was growing revoltingly on its trunk. “Ah! Mrs. Toadley!”

Thwack! Thwack!
Molly felt a little better once she had sliced Mrs. Toadley into smelly bits. “Notorious yourself,” she said.

Sitting down on a tree stump, Molly kicked at a nettle. “Take that, Rocky!” she said. The nettle bounced back and stung her ankle. As Molly found a dock leaf and rubbed it on the nettle sting, she thought that maybe Rocky had been right—a bit—but she still felt cross with him. After all, she never nagged
him.
Sometimes, if he was singing one of his songs, she had to shake him to get his attention. She didn’t expect
him
to change his habits. Molly had thought Rocky liked her exactly as she was, so it was a big shock to discover that he disliked even a part of her—a bigger shock to see him side with the others.

She wondered how often he’d been resentful of her without saying anything. He’d been wandering off a lot lately. Had he been avoiding her? Molly’s mind burned. What was it he had said? That she never tried at anything? But she acted out ads with him brilliantly. She tried at those. Maybe she should find something else to be good at. That would show him.

Molly strode on through the woods, feeling very sorry for herself. The trees cleared, and she stood in the wind on the bare hillside, looking down at the small town of Briersville. There was the school, and past it the high street, the town hall, and the houses. Everything glistened from the afternoon rain. Cars that looked the size of guinea pigs beetled through its
snaking streets. Molly wished that one of those cars were coming to pick her up, to drive her home to a cozy house. She thought how lucky children who had parents were; however bad their day, they always had a friendly home to return to.