Infinite Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

skinny girl
in a baseball cap was with him. I hadn’t seen her before. She held a growling pit bull by its collar. Fiasco barked her head off, still damp from her bath, but she didn’t come out from
behind my legs.
    ‘Is Sam in?’ Punky said.
    I shook my head. I didn’t even know they knew each other. Punky Beresford had been in the year above Sam. He was expelled last year before he took his exams for throwing a chair through a
window in the maths block.
    He had the bluest eyes in the world. They were pink at the edges, like he’d just been crying – though you couldn’t imagine it – and he stared at you when he talked, so it
felt like a challenge. His front teeth overlapped slightly, and the left tooth had a grey patch in the middle where the nerve had died, but it didn’t make him ugly. Even the story that went
with it, that his dad had hit him in the face with a television, couldn’t do that.
    The girl had high cheekbones dented with acne scars, and black hair cut into a bob. One side curled under her chin and the other hung straight down, so it looked uneven. I had to shout over the
racket the dogs were making. I told them Sam wasn’t in, that he was off somewhere with Benjy, though I had no idea really, and when I was finished, Punky gave me this strange, slow smile. He
tilted his head back when he spoke, and those pink and blue eyes stared.
    He said to tell Sam he’d be at the rec later, and he spoke even slower than he smiled, so I couldn’t tell if he was stoned, or taking the piss out of me somehow.
    ‘I like your dog,’ the girl said, and her voice was really soft and high-pitched, like a little kid’s. She let go of the pit bull’s collar, and her and Punky walked off,
holding hands. From the kitchen I could hear the dog’s claws tapping on the path.

Five

    Matty answered the door in black hot pants and a silver bikini.
    ‘I’ve been in the garden since seven,’ she gasped, giving Dad and Austin a little wave as they drove off in the pick-up. Dad gave her a nod, but Austin only looked away.
    Ever since Dad took him on last year, Austin had been in love with Matty. He was so shy around her that she called him The Mute. She wouldn’t believe me when I told her how clever he was
about trees and ponds and plants. She said he was just like a Labrador with his scraggy hair and sad eyes. Nice to pat occasionally but you wouldn’t have him in the house.
    ‘It’s sweltering!’ she said now.
    I’d never heard her say sweltering before.
    ‘What’ve you got on?’ she said, looking at my baggy jeans and T-shirt. ‘You’ll die like that.’
    ‘Nah,’ I said, my legs already sweating inside the thick denim. Death was better than comments about why it wasn’t normal to wear my mum’s dirty running shorts, and why I
should be sympathetic if Dad couldn’t face doing the laundry.
    ‘Donna’s got loads of stuff in,’ Matty said, and I didn’t ask why she’d started using her mum’s first name.
    The kitchen gleamed white. If you made toast at Matty’s house, you had to get the toaster out of a cupboard, and then – before you’d even taken a bite – you had to return
it, and wipe the crumbs from the surface. If you really wanted to make Donna mad, you just had to leave the toaster out, or eat
without using a plate
.
    The back door was open, and a bright line of sequin- and diamanté-studded flip-flops waited beside it: glamorous boats at the pontoon. Matty dropped ice and slices of lime into a jug,
filled it with ginger beer, and I listened to the fizz rising. She got three glasses and put everything onto a tray.
    ‘Carry that out for me?’ she said, stepping into her flip-flops, and before I thought to ask why
she
didn’t take it, I was following her with the loaded tray into the
garden.
    Donna was sunbathing. ‘I-
ris
!’ she called. ‘Perfect timing with the fizz!’
    I set it down on the white patio table.
    ‘Come here,
you
,’ she said, like I was her long-lost