Free The Bad Karma Diaries by Bridget Hourican

what we were eating, and not to say anything in fact. I didn’t even make an issue of it when Justine got both the wings.
    I commented on it obviously, I said ‘Hey, why is she getting both?’
    But when Mum said, ‘Oh, don’t be such a baby, they’re her favourite,’ I kept my mouth shut, although it wasn’t me being the baby and the wings were wasted on Justine. She doesn’t know how to pick bones clean and she didn’t even eat the skin! It was a very quiet meal. Dad is the quiet type and recently he’s just been exhausted from work, and Justine never says anything, of course. I realised then that it is only me and Mum keeping this family talking.
T UESDAY O CTOBER 20 TH
    Here’s what we’re gonna do to Jayne: we are gonna get loads of stickers and write Racist! on them and stick them to her back, her bag, her locker, etc.
    This is definitely the most daring, bravest thing we’ve done yet as Instruments of Karma but the punishment must fit the crime and the crime is serious!
    I said we’d better run it by Gita. Anna said, why bother? Because, I told her, if she doesn’t agree to it initially , she mightuse it later as a way to get out of paying. She might say: that’s not what I meant, I’m not paying . Anna was pretty impressed by this argument. So was I – it sounded just like something an economist would say.
    Actually Gita thought it was a brilliant idea, but she was nervous too.
    ‘Jayne’s gonna think it was me,’ she said. She was getting in a state about it.
    Anna said, ‘Well what do you want us to do?’ quite belligerently.
    But then Gita calmed down, ‘I know, I’ll be off sick that day. You gonna do it tomorrow? Day after? Okay, I’ll be off sick. Then she can’t blame me!’ This seemed pretty neat, but pretty cowardly too!
    ‘If you’re off sick, you’ll miss her reaction,’ said Anna, but we left it at that.
W EDNESDAY O CTOBER 21 ST
    After school we stopped off and brought a roll of plain white stickers, not too big, but big enough and some markers and then we went to Anna’s and straight up to her room to design the stickers. This was definitely not something to do in the kitchen! On most of the stickers we wrote: Racist! in big black jagged letters like this: R A C IST ! (Anna) and RACIST! (me) and we coloured in the background red. But some of them we didin red on a green background, and some in black on a yellow background. Anyway, they all looked very noticeable and truly alarming.
T HURSDAY O CTOBER 22 ND
    We placed the first stickers just before first class. We put a black and yellow one and a black and red one on Jayne’s locker. At break she obviously hadn’t been to her locker yet because we saw her in the playground chatting quite normally. Then we had to do a very tricky and difficult manoeuvre. We had to get the sticker on her back without anyone noticing us. So we waited till everyone was filing back into class because then there’s this big crush of lines and queues, and we got in behind her. We kept chatting very naturally to each other and Anna had the sticker in her hand and just lightly, lightly, very very lightly, she pressed it on Jayne’s back so she couldn’t feel it. And we didn’t immediately disappear. We kept right on chatting to each other and blocking everyone else’s view of Jayne’s back, until the last minute. We went right up the steps and into the corridor behind her, and then we just turned nonchalantly up the stairs. We totally got away with it.
    At lunchtime we noticed these huddles of people from Gita’s class standing round hissing in excitement about something. So we got up close to try and listen. We couldn’t really make anything out, except ‘Did you see?’ and we didn’t want to makeourselves conspicuous, so we moved off. It seemed pretty clear though. We went to look for Jayne. We couldn’t see her anywhere, so we went inside. We passed by her locker and the stickers had been peeled off! A little bit of them was left on