The Wish Pony Read Online Free PDF Page B

late has worried me and been deliberately hurtful to fellow classmates. We would like to discuss this matter at a mutually convenient time.
    I didn’t get notes like that. Only kids like Sharnie and Luke, who needed to kick walls sometimes just to get rid of some of his feelings before they bubbled over like an erupting volcano, got notes like that. I got star stamps and lollipops from the glass jar on Waddle’s desk. I got Lovely work, Ruby , This is beautifully presented and Excellent! Except for maths.
    I didn’t know what to do with the note. I certainly couldn’t give it to Dad, not now I’d opened it – unless I could stick it shut again. But a corner of the sticky flap had torn and the rest was crumpled. He’d know. I shoved it right to the bottom of my bag and kept walking. Maybe it would look as though it had caught on my pencil case and just torn open? I wished I’d never opened it.
    Thinking that made me think of the Wish Pony and I walked more quickly. At lunchtime, with Sarah and Bree totally ignoring me except to toss their heads at me and whisper loudly things like ‘Total loser’, and ‘See her zits? She’s the toadface’, I’d thought of how he felt warm, not cold like glass, in my hand. Thinking of him made me feel better. I’d left my old curtains wide open so he could see out the window at the tree ferns and the blue sky. Though he could have practically seen through the curtains, they were so thin and holey.
    Mum had promised me new curtains. But when was she going to make new ones if she always sick or in hospital? I kicked a squashed can that was in my way. I knew how Luke felt. That was because I was now a kid who got notes to take home.
    But all thought of the note vanished when Mum opened the front door for me as I was hunting through my bag for the key.
    â€˜Mum!’
    â€˜Hi, darling, thought I’d surprise you. Missed you!’
    â€˜I missed you, too,’ I hugged her sideways, so I didn’t squash her belly. ‘Are you better?’
    Mum screwed up her nose, ‘Well, perhaps not entirely better,’ she said, ‘but I feel a hundred per cent on what I was. Come and tell me everything that’s happened!’
    The kitchen smelled of cinnamon – she’d made muffins, chocolate for me and apple and cinnamon for Dad. There was a tray of lasagne in the oven and flowers on the table. I squashed any thoughts of showing her the horrible note or telling her what had happened. Why ruin her first day home? Instead I told her about Magda and showed her the Wish Pony. When I ran out of other things to tell her I told her about Bree, the new girl, but left out the fact that Sarah was now best friends with her, and hated me. I just wanted to keep her talking.
    Then she let me feel the baby kick. It was very strange imagining him curled up inside her tummy. I wasn’t sure I liked it. Imagine having another person growing inside you. I’d decided ages ago, when Mum told me how babies are made and all about having one, that I was never ever going to do all that. I’d decided to get a dog instead. Dad said we might get a dog when my brother is older.
    I didn’t always like feeling the baby kick. But this time I did.
    â€˜He’s going to be a footballer,’ Dad said when he got home and felt it.
    That was such a strange thing for Dad to say. He didn’t even watch football.
    Mum caught my look and laughed. ‘It’s what all dads say,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t mean anything. I’m going to look at my collage. Want to see it too?’
    She pulled out her latest one. She’d started it ages and ages ago. We both looked at it for a while. It wasn’t for a book or anything, though sometimes she does that. This was something personal she was making, though it might end up in an exhibition. There were two people, who looked quite small in an immense garden of trailing