Size Matters Read Online Free PDF

small animal.
    â€˜They’re gorgeous. I don’t know how you can bear to part with them.’
    â€˜I try to think of the money, what little there is of it after registration, stud fees, food and vaccinations. Really, you have to put it down to being a labour oflove,’ Barbara told her with a smile as she rounded up the rest of the kittens, gathering them up into her arms like a bundle of wriggly laundry and heading back to the kitchen. The mother cat trotted after her, mewing reassurance at her babies.
    â€˜Come on you fluffies, time for you to run round the house and learn about joining in. Just think, Jay, this time next year it’ll be just like this for you but with Imogen’s baby.’
    â€˜Hmm. Another long stint of house-training and mopping. Lovely,’ Jay said.
    Ellie followed Tasha round the shop. It wasn’t easy to keep up – Tasha moved through the display racks fast and carelessly like a woodland creature through brambles. Tash looked this way and that, her streaky blonde ponytail swishing as she took in the stock and sorted it in her head into Wanted and Not Wanted. Ellie, following, picked her way more carefully, mostly looking at the floor and trying very very hard not to look up into the far left corner where she knew there was a security camera. She was, she knew, the idiot sort who’d go and smile up at it politely and probably end up on Crimewatch or in the ‘Familiar Face’ column that the local paper had been running to try and shame local shoplifting kids.
    Tasha didn’t care where she looked. ‘Brazen Personified’, that was what Mrs Billington, head of their year, called her. It had been meant as a huge telling-off but had somehow only added to Tasha’s glory. Nothing fazed Tasha. She’d blag her way daily through lost-homework excuses, through being caught most mornings with a fag at the bus stop, for wearing four-inch pink platform slingbacks, and never ever having the kit for netball. You wanted to be like Tasha, for the sheer nerve of her, for the fat-lipped, sexy,big-toothed smile that everyone fell for (even Mr Redmond, who blushed raspberry pink every time he told her off for not handing in the maths homework and she just grinned and flicked her bum at him like one of Barbara’s cats on heat). But then you so
didn’t
want to be like her because of the things she did. She lied. She picked on people. She changed favoured friends like other people change their tights and she stole. She’d get A grade A-level thieving, no question. That’s what they were out doing now, after school, still in uniform. Shoplifting. Tasha was after a new top, a restock on the Glamma Nails and some purple bangles to go with a dress she’d had (or said she’d ‘had’, who could tell? Her mum might have bought it for her) out of Topshop the week before. She was on a mission and Ellie happened to be the person picked to tag along, just because she’d lent Tasha some lipgloss in the cloakroom at going-home time.
    There wasn’t anything in this bright brash shop that Ellie actually wanted, not really. Everything, the jewellery, the make-up, the nail stuff, the thongy underwear that looked harsh and scratchy, it was all cheap and glitzy and just not worth the terrifying hassle. It looked like the kind of kit that nine-year-olds wanted, as if it would turn them into a fantasy play-Barbie overnight. Even if she’d got the money she wouldn’t be spending it on this. If she had a wish list, say if it was coming up to Christmas or a birthday, she’d have written down something shamingly secret like soft cuddly pyjamas that made you want to get into bed with a good book (like
The Woodlanders
)and completely shut out school and the Tash-girls and all the fighting hard-boys and the being careful not to be the nerd-in-the-corner stuff. Every school day she felt as if she was pretending to be someone else. You had