Careful What You Wish For Read Online Free PDF

bring them luck.
    For the most part Rodney stayed in her room. He was the first thing Ruth saw every morning when she woke up and the last before switching off the light at night. She took to telling him about her day as she got into bed. He didn’t talk back to her in any formal sense, but it didn’t matter because she was almost sure that his expression changed. Sometimes he was amused, at other times angry and disapproving; occasionally she could have sworn he was totally bored by her! They had an understanding that if she went somewhere interesting she would take him with her in the bottom of her bag.
    Meanwhile, Mary Ellen got sicker and sicker and sicker.
    * * *
    Ruth got up from where she’d been lying on the floor and tried to shake off the sadness as she put the photo back on the wall and picked up her cup and plate. Rodney was gone now. The way she’d lost him still rankled. Better to just accept the facts , her parents had told her. Other wonderful things will come into your life, Ruthie, just you wait and see! But what did they know? Not so long after she’d lost the rat, Mary Ellen had died and then only a few weeks later she’d lost all her friends in one fell swoop.
    Not only that, her former-best-friend Lou spread around so many stories about her at school that no one else wanted to be friends with her either. So what wonderful things had come into her life to replace all that she had lost? Absolutely zilch! She was nearly twelve and her life was emptying out , not filling up.
    Ruth ran up to the bathroom to clean her teeth. She had a free day in front of her and she didn’t want to waste it being miserable. She rinsed out her mouth and straightened up and looked at herself in the mirror; she was still tall and skinny and plain. Too bad! She decided then and there that she had to do something completely out of the ordinary. Something wild and dramatic that she would remember all her life, the way people did in books. If only she could think what exactly.
    She toyed with the idea of heading into the city. If she stacked on the make-up and found some different clothes she might just pass for fifteen and be able to get into an MA movie. Afterwards she could sit in a café and wait for someone exciting to come along and talk to her. That had happened to her aunt when she was in Paris once.
    Ruth closed the bathroom door behind her, wishing she was in Paris and that her mother had some fashion sense so she could rifle through her clothes.
    Just then, the front doorbell rang. Strange! It was still very early. Who would be calling at eight o’clock in the morning?

4
    I t was Howard Pope standing on her doorstep, a little out of breath, holding something in a black plastic bag. Howard Pope, the oddball who’d arrived at school in the year before, who nobody much liked, was standing there looking dirty and slightly off-the-planet, as usual .
    ‘Hi, Howard,’ she said. How did he even know where she lived?
    ‘Craze,’ he replied with a sharp nod, no smile. ‘Can I come in?’
    Howard tended to call people by their surnames, which Ruth found kind of interesting. When she nodded he pushed past her into the hallway. Ruth shut the door and they stood in the hallway looking uneasily at each other for a moment.
    ‘What is it?’ Ruth asked bluntly, pointing at what he was holding.
    ‘A camera.’
    ‘Did you pinch it?’
    ‘Yeah.’ Howard frowned thoughtfully, looking past her down the hallway towards the kitchen. ‘But I’m not sure I got … everything,’ he mumbled.
    ‘What do you mean, everything ?’
    ‘Might need batteries and a cable. I don’t know.’
    ‘You want to check it out in here?’ Ruth turned to open the door into the front room, but he didn’t follow.
    ‘You got anything to eat?’ he asked in the odd scratchy voice that always caught Ruth’s attention in class.
    ‘Sure.’ She led him down to the kitchen, wondering if it was the theft of the camera that made him seem so