Burning Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Louie tried not to look startled. “Oh, it’s nothing personal,” she said cheerfully. “It’s just the Wragge grapevine. I practically know what you had for dinner.”
    I’ve got a pretty good idea what you had for lunch, Daniel thought. He’d quite fancied her until he’d seen those teeth.
    â€œEverybody knows everybody’s secrets here,” she added over her shoulder as she went to rejoin her friends, hips and plaits swinging as she walked.
    Daniel and Louie exchanged a look: you don’t know ours .
    â€œY OU SHOULDN’T BE HERE .”
    â€œI know. I’m sorry.”
    The man sitting on the other side of the desk had my file open in front of him, tilted away so I couldn’t read it. He said he was my key worker and told me to call him Alan. I thought it meant he was the one who would lock me in. That’s how much I knew.
    â€œI meant you shouldn’t be at Lissmore,” he said. “It’s not for lads like you.”
    For a second I felt hopeful: maybe they’d changed their minds and would let me go. Then a sudden plunging dread: maybe they were sending me somewhere worse.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said again.
    â€œYou’ve never been in any kind of trouble before this.” He read on slowly, shaking his head. “You’re not a Lissmore boy,” he said.
    This was a compliment: they were psychos.
    You know that feeling you get when you’re coming home on the night bus and someone gets on and comes weaving along the aisle, off his face, looking for a fight? You sit there trying to make yourself invisible, gazing out of the window as though there’s something out there so interesting you hadn’t noticed the psychopath on the bus. And you don’t dare stand up and go downstairs where it’s safer, because the minute you move he’ll notice you. The other passengers are doing exactly the same as you: all trying to be invisible, knowing that one of you is going to get your head kicked in and hoping like hell it isn’t them. That was the feeling I had at Lissmore. Every day.

Chapter 5
    â€œA ND IF YOU come when all the flowers are dying And I am dead, as dead I well may be… ”
    Fifteen clear soprano voices bounced off the high walls of Stape High’s music room and the teacher let her fingers trail across the piano keys, until the singers straggled to a halt. She had never come across a choir with such tuneful voices and yet so little musical sense. They sang as if they were reading out a shopping list. “Could we try that again with a little bit of emotion?” she pleaded. “ Danny Boy is meant to be a sad song. It’s famous for reducing beefy Irishmen to tears. But not the way you’re singing it, girls.”
    In the back row of the choir Ramsay was finding herself distracted by thoughts of another boy. He hadn’t turned up to the beach barbecue, which was a shame as she’d worn her new red dress and ended up getting sand and sausage fat on it for nothing. And they’d been back at school for a week now and every day he’d failed to turn up. Ramsay’s one tiny criticism of life on Wragge, which was otherwise perfect, was the lack of new faces. It was reassuring to know and be known by everybody on the island, to be safe wherever you went day or night. She hated the way people lived in cities; squashed together in their little boxes, not talking to the neighbours, frightened to go out after dark. But sometimes Ramsay wondered what it would be like to walk into a roomful of strangers: people who hadn’t already made up their mind about her because they knew her parents and her grandparents and had watched her grow up. It would be nice, just once in a while, to go to a party and not be absolutely certain that she would know every single person there.
    Visitors from the mainland or abroad were a rarity – like her friend Georgie’s cousin