Harriet Bright in a Pickle Read Online Free PDF Page B

she didn’t know.
    It was an
    enormous
    secret.
    Melly Fanshawe was rapidly fading from view as a secret the size of Mount Everest grew up between them.
    Melly Fanshawe was on one side of the mountain and Harriet Bright was on the other, trapped in swirling mists and freezing temperatures.
    Frostbite was nipping at her toes and fingers.

    Harriet Bright was being frozen out!
    A secret this size was too big for just Melly Fanshawe.
    Didn’t people always climb mountains in teams? thought Harriet Bright.
    Like Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
    Harriet Bright had read all about them in her Lives and Times of Famous People. They climbed the highest mountain in the world – Mount Everest – together!
    It was positivelyto climb a mountain on your own, thought Harriet Bright.
    â€˜Where did you get the secret?’ asked Harriet Bright.
    â€˜Somewhere,’ said Melly Fanshawe.
    â€˜Where?’ asked Harriet Bright.
    â€˜I can’t tell you,’ said Melly Fanshawe. ‘That’s a secret too. I crossed my heart and hoped to die. Twice!’
    â€˜Why did you tell me you have a secret if you won’t tell me what the secret is?’ said Harriet Bright, feeling more and more like a boiling cumulonimbus.
    â€˜Because we always tell each other everything so I didn’t want you to feel completely left out,’ said Melly Fanshawe.
    â€˜Hmn pf h ,’ puffed Harriet Bright. ‘Well … I’ve got a secret too.’
    â€˜No you haven’t,’ said Melly Fanshawe. ‘You’d tell me if you did. You’re not very good at keeping secrets. You go all red in the face like you’re about to burst! I always know when you’ve got a secret.’
    Harriet Bright felt her cheeks.
    They were very red and hot.
    But it wasn’t because she had a secret.
    It was because Melly Fanshawe had a secret.
    A secret that Harriet Bright just had to know!

Tell me a SECRET
    Harriet Bright walked all the way home from school thinking about
    That Secret!
    Even her feet were talking about it:

    Maybe if I was better at keeping secrets, she thought, Melly might tell me hers.
    She opened her front door and walked into the kitchen.
    Her mother was experimenting with a new recipe for dinner. There were pots and pans everywhere.
    â€˜Can you tell me a secret, please, Mum?’ said Harriet Bright. ‘I need to practise keeping it all to myself. I need to be so good at keeping a secret that raging rhinos, hostile ostriches and three truckloads of triple-chocolate ice cream wouldn’t make me tell it.’
    â€˜Gosh,’ said Harriet Bright’s mother. ‘Well, we’ve got a closet full of family secrets, but I don’t know if you’re old enough to hear them yet. I think we’ll save them for your twenty-first birthday. Why don’t you see if your father’s got a secret to spare?’
    Harriet Bright’s father was practising his golf swing on the back lawn.
    â€˜Can you tell me a secret, please, Dad?’ said Harriet Bright.
    Her father stopped mid-swing. ‘What kind of secret, Harriet?’ he asked.
    â€˜Are there lots of kinds?’ said Harriet Bright.
    â€˜Well, I guess it depends on what you want it for,’ said her father.
    â€˜I want to show Melly Fanshawe that I can keep a secret all to myself so that she’ll tell me hers,’ said Harriet Bright.
    â€˜But maybe it’s not Melly’s secret to tell,’ said her father. ‘Maybe it’s someone else’s secret and Melly Fanshawe is just keeping it safe.’
    Harriet Bright frowned. But Melly Fanshawe was her best friend in the whole world. And best friends always shared secrets.
    Did this mean that Melly Fanshawe hadbest friend in the whole world?
    How many best friends in the whole world could one person have?
    And what about the secret?
    Secrets were very tricky things. The more Harriet Bright thought about them, the more questions