Flip Read Online Free PDF Page B

deficit disorder would be able to find it.”
    With that, she dropped the fob on the mat, turned heel and stomped upstairs. Something smelled nice. Teri’s perfume. Probably she wasn’t always horrible. Just with him. That is, with her brother. The way Alex treated his own kid brother, he hated himself sometimes; he wondered if Teri ever felt like that.
    Right now he would’ve given anything to see Sam’s dopey grin.
    Alex thought about heading straight up to Flip’s room and shutting himself away, but the hunger wasn’t about to let him do that. So he went down to the kitchen, fixed himself a jam sandwich, a slab of cheese and a glass of milk and finished them off there at the counter. As he put the plate and glass into the dishwasher, the dog padded into the kitchen and went to the back door. He looked at Alex.
    “You need a pee, Beagle?”
    The dog growled at him as Alex found the key on a hook and unlocked the door. “Listen, fatso, I’m doing you a favor here. Pee all over the floor for all I care.”
    Mum wouldn’t be home for another hour, once she’d collected Sam from after-school club. Lying on his back on Flip’s bed, Alex decided not to call till then—no message this time; he had to speak to her directly. He stared at the ceiling, trying to stay calm, considering what to say to her. The woman who worked with Mum, Kath-or-Kathy, had said she’d go to the police if he rang the library again. But no way could she stop him calling his own home and speaking to his own mother.
    Alex replayed her voice mail. Sick, she’d called him. Sick in the head. Evil .
    He tried to recall what he’d said in his original message. That he didn’t know what was happening or where he was, that he was scared and wanted to go home, wanted Mum to come and fetch him. What was so terrible about that?
    Unless Mum’s colleague hadn’t recognized his voice. I don’t know who you are or how you got hold of this number … What if she thought he was pretending to be Alex, as some kind of cruel joke? Suppose the body-swap had only been one-way. Suppose Alex—the bodily, physical Alex—had been missing for six months, and then, out of the blue, a boy left a message on his mum’s work number, claiming to be her lost son.
    But too much of this didn’t fit. The six-months thing, for a start; it was a like a jigsaw piece for the wrong puzzle. Where had “Alex” been in all that time? Flip, it seemed, had carried on as normal—playing sports, acquiring girlfriends, struggling at school. But what about him ? What had he been doing in all those months before he suddenly found himself inhabiting another boy’s body, living another boy’s life?
    The question put an idea into his head. He hauled himself off the bed and switched on the smart flat-screen PC on Philip’s desk. It took an age to fire up. And when it did, Alex found that access to the Internet and to Flip’s e-mails was password protected. He closed the computer down again, bashing the mouse against its mat in frustration. As the screen cleared, there it was again: his reflection, as though he was imprisoned inside the monitor, staring out at himself.
    Not his reflection. Flip’s.
    Who was “he,” in any case?
    He still thought of himself as Alex Gray. The mental processes were the same as always—his memories, perceptions, emotions. His attitudes. His …  will . But if he looked in a mirror and said, “I’m Alex Gray,” out loud, he’d see those words spoken from the lips of a boy who wasn’t him.
    At school that day Alex had been startled to discover that he wrote in Flip’s handwriting. The pen felt awkward in that large, unfamiliar hand, and the formation of words was laborious, as though the muscles in Flip’s fingers had to decode the signals from Alex’s mind. When Alex saw what he’d written, it looked totally different from his own style. Compared to Flip’s, though, on the previous pages of the exercise book, it was practically