Free Alice in the Middle by Judi Curtin

Alice said. ‘What about you? What did you do? Did you have a nice time with your family?’
    What could I say to that?
    I’d had a lovely day out. I’d had fun making endless sandcastles with Rosie, and swimming in the sea. Dad buying the chicken nuggets and the sausages and the potato wedges had been really funny. Still, I knew if I described my day to Alice and Hazel, it would suddenly sound stupid. My day would have sounded totally dull if you compared it with the fun day Alice and Hazel had.
    I shrugged.
    ‘It was OK I suppose. Parent stuff, you know, kind of boring.’
    And Alice didn’t ask me any more about it.
    * * *
    In bed that night, I kept hearing beeps and seeing flashes from Alice and Hazel’s phones. At first I thought they were texting each other – telling each other secret stuff about their day out that they didn’t want me to hear.
    Then I had a horrible thought.
    Were they writing stuff about me?
    Was Hazel mocking me and my family?
    And was Alice letting her?
    For a while I pretended not to care. I listened to my Walkman. (I decided to take a chance, because it was dark, so Hazel couldn’t see it.)
    In the end though, I couldn’t take it any more. I pretended I needed to go to the toilet, and when I got back into the bedroom, I kind of casually went and sat on Alice’s bed. She was smiling to herself as she read her latest message.
    ‘Who are you texting?’ I asked, trying to sound like I didn’t really care all that much – like it wasn’t driving me totally crazy, wondering what was going on.
    Alice looked up, as if she’d just remembered that I existed.
    ‘Oh, hi Megan,’ she said. ‘It’s just Conor and Lee. They are
soooo
funny. Look at this.’
    She held the phone towards me and I read the message. It was very long, and was about a bowl of carrot soup and a slice of bread and it didn’t make any sense at all to me.
    Then Alice said,
    ‘Oh, sorry, Meg. You wouldn’t get that one. It’s a joke about something Lee said today.’
    She leaned out of bed, and held the phone over to Hazel. As soon as Hazel read the message she fell into a fit of laughing like it was the funniest thing she’d ever in her life read. I felt like throwing my uncool, ancient Walkman at her, because I knew that half the reason she was laughing was because she knew that I didn’t get the joke.
    I went back to my bed and climbed in. I heard my Walkman clatter down onto the floor. It sounded as if it might be broken.
    I didn’t care.
    I didn’t care about anything except that I had never in my whole life felt as left out of things as I did at that moment.

Chapter fifteen

    N ext morning I was kind of glad when the time came for Alice and Hazel to go off to their tennis course. I thought I’d scream if I had to hear another word about Conor or Lee or the ‘cool’ time they’d all had together.
    After basketball, Sarah didn’t feel well.
    ‘I’m going to skip lunch,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll go and lie down in bed for a while.’
    ‘You poor thing,’ I said, putting my arm around her. ‘I hope it isn’t anything too serious.’
    She shook her head.
    ‘I don’t think so. I’m sure I’ll be fine soon. Anyway, if it turns out to be anything bad, I’ll make sure to breathe on Hazel so she catches it too.’
    I laughed, and waved good-bye to her, and then set off for lunch.
    I collected my food, and went to sit next to Alice and Hazel. I tried not to care that Alice kept talking to Hazel, and sometimes seemed to forget that I was even there.
    By the time we were all finished our jelly and ice-cream though, I was more worried than ever. Not alone had Alice got totally caught up in her new friend’s life, but also she had that funny gleam in her eye that always makes me feel so nervous. She was plotting and scheming again – I was sure of it.
    The three of us sat outside in the sun for a while before we had to go to French. Alice and Hazel spent most of that time with their phones in