The Bone Dragon Read Online Free PDF Page B

suddenly my body twitches reflexively, starting at a noise by my bed. My eyelids start to lift. My head starts to turn towards the bedside table . . . But the warmth of the quilt drags my eyes closed before they’ve truly opened and I’m back in the workshop, watching a mouse dart among the discarded tools on the old wooden table. As I turn to look out of the diagonal leadlight window panes at the cobbled street beyond, I know the mouse is watching.
    I feel his eyes on me.

     
     
    Mrs Poole stares down at my work, horror morphing into exasperation into something like sympathy. ‘It’s a little ambitious again, Evie. A good idea, but perhaps a little ambitious since you do only have a few weeks.’
    I stare down at the pencil case too. It’s nothing like what I imagined. The things I make for Mrs Poole’s textiles projects never are. This is black and plasticky and the little bits of elastic made into loops to hold the pencils and pens in place are all different sizes and heights and most of them are lopsided. I pick up one side and the whole thing flops alarmingly. I can’t imagine what it will look like full of pencils. And I forgot to think about ends – something to stop everything tipping out when I roll it up.
    ‘Well, one thing we can do to make life easier is get you a better needle. I’ve got a nice, thick one that will go through that . . . er . . . fabric much more easily. Just be careful not to hurt yourself with it.’
    The needle she hands me is short and squat with a vaguely rounded end: made more for piercing rubber than fabric. Not that the pencil-case material is fabric. I’m not sure what it is. It seemed like a good idea when I was in the shop.
    ‘But can we really make spaghetti over a camp stove? What would we use for a sauce?’ Phee is asking Lynne. Her own pencil case – a nice, plain sort of thing – is all but finished. Glitter and glue are drying on it while she doodles absently on her folder.
    ‘Do you really want to get one of those canned meat meals?’ Lynne says, eyes fixed on her sewing as she coaxes gold thread into a chain stitch.
    ‘How about SpaghettiOs? SpaghettiOs are OK.’
    Lynne sighs. ‘Do you know how many calories . . . ?’
    Phee groans. ‘So we’re going to try to make a gourmet meal over a camp stove? Why don’t we just take crisps and you can take some revolting low-fat bit of nastiness?’
    ‘We’ll be cold by the time we stop to camp. We’ll need something hot,’ she says, biting the words off to clamp the tip of her tongue between her teeth as the thread catches in the fabric.
    ‘Are you sure this is a good idea, all this D of E stuff? I don’t really like walking. And you’re going to hate camping. And we still need two more people since Evie can’t come.’
    They both look up at me then with apologetic grimaces. They’ve been trying (and failing) not to talk about starting their Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award all day. The first meeting did have to be this morning, didn’t it? They keep taking out their little record booklets and thumbing through the pages, sighing and rolling their eyes about how they’re going to fulfil the different requirements. The expedition bit is only a month away so I can’t go. And of course it makes sense that they haven’t invited me to their planning meeting: they’d think it was rubbing it in. And of course they need to invite the people they pick to team up with . . . But then they’ll all go off together and when they come back they’ll have two new friends to spend their time with, gossiping about their adventures.
    Or perhaps they’ll both hate it so much that they’ll end up coming home early. It’s probably mean of me to think that would serve them right, but I can’t help it after my less than triumphant return to school this morning.
    The bell rings then and, figuring I might as well have something to do while everyone else is running around having fun on the netball court during PE, I