Free Girls in Tears by Jacqueline Wilson Page A

I’m
usually
inattentive and appalling at PE, but I couldn’t even paint properly in art, my best subject.
    We are still stuck in the still-life slot. I like
animated
life a lot more, though I suppose Mr. Windsor did his best to make it interesting for us. He showed us copies of these weirdly lovely seventeenth-century Spanish paintings of cabbages on string, and then he dangled a whole load of real cabbages in the air for us to copy. Magda had a little go at flicking one cabbage into another to see if they’d go
dong dong dong
backward and forward like those smart executive toys, but they just made a dull
thwack
and got their strings all tangled. Mr. Windsor said if we didn’t settle down sharpish he’d lop off our heads and string them up instead.
    So we settled, sort of, though Magda kept moaning that the smell of cabbages was making her feel sick. I couldn’t smell anything at all but I felt sick anyway. I tried hard at first but my cabbages looked like giant green roses and I lost heart. I painted in a little cartoon bunny upon on its back legs, mouth open and drooling, desperately trying to leap up and reach the dangling feast. Magda and Nadine were duly appreciative but Mr. Windsor wasn’t amused.
    “We all know you’re an inventive cartoonist, Ellie, but it’s getting a little bit predictable the way you fall back on cartoons whenever you’re having trouble with a serious subject.”
    “Oooh!” Magda said mockingly.
    “That’s enough, Magda! You three girls are starting to annoy me. I shall split the three of you up if you carry on like this.”
    “No one could
ever
split us up,” Magda muttered, but not quite loud enough for him to hear.
    “Now, come on, Ellie. Paint over the rabbit and look a little harder at your cabbages. You haven’t got the texture of the leaves right at all. They look far too limp.”
    I
felt limp all day long at school. I didn’t really feel like going out with Russell. Nadine was going round to Magda’s house and they were going to sort out all their stuff to see what to wear to Big Mac’s party. Nadine isn’t remotely interested in any of the boys there. She’s still dippy about this
Xanadu
fan Ellis who keeps e-mailing her. Still, she said she’d come along to give Magda moral support.
    “
I’ll
give you moral support, Mags,” I say, a little wounded.
    “Yeah, but you’ll be sitting in a corner snogging with Russell all night, won’t you?”
    “No I won’t. Well, not all the time. And there’ll be dancing—”
    “God, does Russell
dance
?” says Nadine.
    I give her a very dark look.
    “Sorry, sorry!” she says hurriedly.
    We are best friends again, but things are still slightly edgy. Every time I catch Nadine looking at me I wonder if she’s thinking, FAT FAT FAT.
    I’ve always said I love Magda and Nadine absolutely equally, but I suppose secretly I’ve always liked Nadine just a teeny weeny bit more, simply because we’ve known each other since we were four and we’ve shared so much together. But now I sometimes wonder if maybe Magda is just that little bit nicer. Nadine can be such a witch at times. And almost
too
wild. I thought she was mad to get involved with Liam. Then there was that time she insisted we go off with those scary guys in their van, when we tried to go to the Claudie concert. And now she’s gone truly crazy, confiding all sorts of secret stuff to a total stranger.
    I tried having one more go at telling her how risky this can be but she just laughed at me. She’s starting to laugh at me more and more now. She acts like I’ve become Ms. Dull and Deadly Boring since going out with Russell. Which is ridiculous. Isn’t it?
    I didn’t have such a great time with Russell last night. I was feeling lousy but he’d set his heart on going to this fantasy film full of men with helmets and bare chests who zap people with one point of their finger. There were hardly any women in it, just a few silly maidens shrieking in see-through