Free The Bed and Breakfast Star by Jacqueline Wilson Page A

she read it she just gave me one of those smug old smiles.
    ‘This is certainly some story, dear,’ she said. ‘Rather a fairy story, I’m afraid.’
    The other kids tittered, though they didn’t know what she was on about. She handed me my story back with all my spelling and punctuation mistakes underlined. There seemed to be more red ink on the page than pencil.
    But I was not deterred. If I was meant to be thick then some of the kids in the class were as dense as drains, and gurgled into the bargain. So I tried out my Elsarina story on them, and they were all dead impressed, even the big tough guys. I gave them a few quick samples of my comic routine out in the playground and some of them laughed and then I treated them to a rendition of ‘The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow’. I forget what a powerful voice I’ve got. One or two of them ran for cover, but those that stayed seriously seemed to appreciate my performance.
    School didn’t seem quite so bad at this stage. I had my little group of fans who happily drank in everything I told them. I got a bit carried away and started elaborating about my mum being this really beautiful actress and yet she could belt out a song and dance up a storm in this really classy cabaret act . . . and every so often I seemed to step outside myself and hear my own voice and I could see I was tempting fate telling all these lies. Well, they weren’t completely lies. Mum did use to be beautiful before she met up with Mack and had some more kids so that she lost her lovely figure and gained a few worry lines. She could still look beautiful if only she’d bother to slap on some make-up and do her hair properly. She really did use to sing and dance too. She’d sing along to all the records on the radio in a happy husky voice and she’d dance away, wiggling her hips and waggling her fingers. So Mum could sing and dance and if only she’d had the right breaks then I’m sure she really could be a star . . .

    All the same, I shut up at lunchtime when I met Naomi. It was great to have my own special friend to wander round the playground with. School dinners weren’t so bad either. They weren’t a patch on my Mega-Feast at home with Pippa, but you were allowed to choose what you wanted, so I had a big plateful of pizza and chips, and I set all our lunch table laughing with a whole load of pizza jokes that aren’t fit for publication. Even my silly old chip joke went down well salted.
    ‘Hey, you lot, what are hot, greasy and romantic? Chips that pass in the night!’
    The afternoon wasn’t so great because we had to divide up into groups to do all this dumb weighing and measuring. I could do that easy-peasy but I didn’t have much clue when it came to how you write it all down. I didn’t want to admit this so I made a lot of it up, and then of course Mrs Fisher came nosing around and when she saw all my calculations she sighed and scored a line right through them, so it was obvious to everyone I’d got it all wrong. She sat down with me and tried to explain how to do it. I felt stupid in front of all the others and so I couldn’t take it in. She had to go through the whole gubbins again, speaking e-v-e-r s-o s-l-o-w-l-y because she obviously thought she had a right moron on her hands. The other kids started to snigger by this stage, so when Mrs Fisher at last left us in peace I had to work hard to regain their respect. I started on about my stage clothes and my mum’s stage clothes and my little sister Pippa’s stage clothes, and once I’d started on Pippa I couldn’t stop, and soon I’d turned her into this adorable little child star with chubby cheeks and a head of curls and though she hadn’t started school yet she could sing and dance like a real little trooper.

    I was certainly going a bit over the top here, because even Mack and Mum admit that Pippa is plain. Well, the poor kid can’t help it, being lumbered with Mack as a dad. She hasn’t got chubby cheeks, she