Free Lifted by Hilary Freeman

the first thing I stole was tights!) I’m just updating it, bringing it into the twenty-first century. I’d like to take all the credit for the name, but it was actually someone else’s idea, the only other person who knows I’m writing this blog. Of course, if he tells anyone, I’ll have to kill him. Slowly.
    I like the idea of being a modern-day outlaw, a female bandit. They had them in the Wild West, didn’t they? Maybe I should adopt a uniform, or a costume, like Zorro. I could wear a mask and tie my hair up under a hat, so nobody would know I was a girl. And then I could ride around the high street on my horse, spreading fear and panic wherever I went. When I chose a shop to target, Iwould hold out my gun and say, ‘Stand and deliver! Your charity shop donations or your life!’ and the shop assistants would quake with fear and give me whatever I wanted. I’d put my loot in a big sack, which I’d swing over my shoulder, and then I’d trot down the street, handing out goodies to the charity volunteers. They’d all stand outside their shops and cheer and clap. And little children would run after me …
    I know I’m getting a bit carried away here, but let me have my little fantasy. It sure beats school and coursework and exams. It just seems a real shame that I’ll never be able to tell my friends or my family what I’m up to.
    Posted by Robyn Hood at 8:05 PM
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the investig8tor: Your secret is safe with me.
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Chapter 9
    Noah watched Ruby from his bedroom window, just as he had done many times before. She was sitting on the wall outside her house again, waiting for her dad to pick her up. He knew this for certain because she’d told him the day before, when they had bumped into each other in the street. Since he’d rescued her from the security guard, a couple of weeks before, she always acted as if she was pleased to see him and happy to talk to him, treating him more like a friend and less like an annoyance, although that wasn’t always the case when they were at school – there she still gave the impression that she was slightly embarrassed to know him. Much as it hurt him, he pretended not to notice. After all, school was school and nobody was really themselves there.
    Perhaps she was thinking about him too, because sheglanced upwards for a moment and waved, which made his tummy do little somersaults. He waved back, but she had already turned away, and she was now doing something with her mobile phone. Texting someone, probably.
    He liked being the inspiration for the title of Ruby’s blog, and he felt privileged to be the only person in the world to share her secret, but he couldn’t help feeling that he was encouraging her shoplifting habit, which he hadn’t meant to do. Whenever she saw him now she would tell him what she’d stolen, and which charity shop she’d taken it to, sometimes even before she blogged about it. It made him feel special and important, and he was aware that he responded with enthusiasm and excitement, rather than disapproval. Did that make him a bad person? It wasn’t as though he was asking her to steal, or congratulating her on it. And he knew she wasn’t a bad person either, just a bit mixed up.
    Quite why Ruby stole still made little sense to him, despite his conversations with her, and the fact that he had read her blogs over and over again in an attempt to find some explanation. It was like trying to decipher an invisible code, and Noah, usually good at cracking codes, found his inability to solve this one immensely frustrating. To tell the truth, he found
Ruby
immensely frustrating. Frustrating and captivating and irritating and amazing, all at once. He wasn’t used to having so many conflicting and confusing feelings at the sametime, and it scared him. Sometimes he wondered if he’d rather go back to the way things were before he knew the truth, when life was simple, but then he and Ruby would be practically strangers