But then I had to sound sympathetic for Caitlin’s sake. So I said, “Scarlett’s mum sacked you for that ?”
“Yes … and the games I told her I played with Scarlett today.”
“Which games did you play?” I asked, wth my heart sinking.
“Just all the stuff we do together, Indie! Like pretending to be thunder and lightning by banging pot lids in the dark … and hide-and-seek, where I’m the ghost coming to get you … and You’re It, when I’m the vampire going to nibble your neck when I catch you!” As I listened, I thought of two somethings.
The first something was that Caitlin seemed NOT to have noticed that I was ten years old, and baby Scarlett was about ten months old.
“Caitlin, maybe you’re not meant to be a nanny. Maybe you’re meant to be something else!”
“Huh?” snuffled Caitlin, sounding surprised.
“Well, maybe you’d be brilliant at a completely different job. Is there anything else you ever wanted to be?”
Caitlin blinked for a second, then nodded hard.
“I always wanted to be the first didgeridoo-playing pop star! ”she gushed.
Hmmm.
That sounded very exciting but not very sensible. It’s a bit like Ethan Kent in my class who’s always going on about being Spider-Man when he grows up.
“Cool!” I said aloud to Caitlin. “Listen, I’ll go and get some juice and biscuits and we can talk about it some more!”
“OK!” said Caitlin, giving me a watery smile and looking almost cheered up.
As I searched the kitchen cupboards for Hobnobs, my head whirred fast, trying to think of something else interesting – and not mad – that Caitlin could do as a job.
And then it hit me.
OK, three things hit me…
All that thinking was the easy part, though. The hard part was suggesting it to the grumpy alien who looked like Mum. That made me sort of nervous.
I glanced over at her, all hunched up over a bunch of bills or something, looking very serious.
It was right then, as I got a Wibble in my tummy, that I remembered on my IS COOL list. Not being scared of anything sounded like a good idea right now, so I decided to be very grown-up and talk Mum into helping Caitlin.
“Mum…”
“Mmmmm?”
“Caitlin quite fancies working with animals instead of kids,” I said, fibbing a bit and missing out the part about Caitlin getting sacked again, in case it got Mum annoyed or something.
“Has Caitlin been sacked again?” Mum sighed, shooting me a weary look.
“Mmm. A bit,” I nodded. “But like I say, she’s interested in animals. Could she come to the centre sometime? Like for work experience or something?”
My big hope would be that Caitlin would love the rescue centre and that the animals in the rescue centre would love Caitlin, and the manager would give Caitlin a job on the spot.
I looked pleadingly at Mum, who looked on the verge of sighing a very l - o - n - g sigh and saying “No”.
“Sighhhhhhhh,”
sighed Mum. “Well, at least if Caitlin isn’t working, it means she could look after you when you come home from school tomorrow. Why don’t you both come round to the rescue centre then?”
“Oh, thank you, Mum!” I gasped, forgetting that Mum was an alien and throwing my arms around her.
It was a nice hug, for an alien. It almost felt like the real thing. In fact, it made me really miss my human mum…
“How’s it going?” asked Mum, bumping into me and Caitlin in the rescue centre reception.
“Great!” I told her.
“Mmm!” mumbled Caitlin.
Well, the last hour had been great for me, but then I love any excuse to come to the centre and hang out with the animals.
I don’t think it had been quite so great for Caitlin.
“Is that mud?” she’d asked me, when Peppa the pot-bellied pig rubbed against her leg and left an icky brown mark on her trousers.
“Er, yeah … and poo,” I’d told her.
She hadn’t liked it much when Jenny the goat headbutted her in the bum and sent her flying into a haybale.
And it was a pity that the one grumpy puss in the cat-block was the one that Caitlin chose to pat. (“Hello, Mr Tiddles … aren’t you— owwwwww!!!”
That’s why we were here – the receptionist had gone to get a BIG
plaster for the scratch on Caitlin’s hand…
So far, there was no sign of Mum’s boss, the manager, so there wasn’t much chance of Caitlin being offered a job on the spot, like I’d hoped. But as Caitlin didn’t exactly seem to be loving the idea of working here as a kennel assistant, maybe that wasn’t such a big deal.
“Listen,” said Mum, “I just had a word with Amy the vet – she’s about to do a procedure, and if you two want to watch, she’s fine with it.”
“Yes, please!” I said, practically before Mum got to the end of her sentence.
Mum still seemed a bit different or distant or something, but I thought we were getting on better since last night’s hug. The fact that she hadn’t got annoyed with me for a whole day had helped (yay!).
“Good. Well, put these on,” said Mum, shoving white cotton coats our way. “Right, I’ve got an important meeting to go to…”
“OK!” I said brightly, noticing that Caitlin was frowning at her white coat like it was the naffest fashion disaster of the decade. “Oh, Indie!” Mum called out, over her shoulder. “I might not get out of this meeting for a long time. Can you feed the tree frogs for me back at home?”
At last – Mum sounded more like Mum and less like a grumpy alien. She trusted me again! She wasn’t treating me like a silly kid!
“No problem!” I told her, feeling very grown-up. “What’s a procedure ?” Caitlin asked me, reluctantly wriggling into the white coat as I steered her through a couple of swing doors.
“An operation,” I explained, as we found ourselves in the surgery, where Amy the vet and Jonathan the trainee vet nurse were standing over a table with a small, unconscious dog on it.
Jonathan’s job was one I thought Caitlin might like, especially since it didn’t involve pig poo.
“Hi guys!” said Amy the vet, through her face mask. “If you could watch from over by the wall, to minimize the risk of infection, that’d be great!”
whispered Caitlin.
“The dog? No!” I laughed. “They’ve only anaesthetized it.”
I laughed ’cause Caitlin was just joking. Wasn’t she?
“Now, Jonathan is going to swab the area to keep it sterile…”
“Swab?” said Caitlin, in a LOUD, non-whispering voice this time.
Oh, that was good – she was looking keen, asking the vet a question.
“Yes, we swab the area with this special liquid to keep it sterile, germ-free,” explained Amy, picking up a small silver scalpel.
Then it dawned on me that there was something we didn’t know.
“Amy, what’s today’s operation anyway?”
“Oh, quite a simple one. We’re going to remove some stones from Ruffles’ bladder,” said Amy. “We start with a small cut here, like this, and then…”
And then there was a strange
swooooooooooooooooosh, followed by a
KER-thump
Yikes – Caitlin had just slid down the wall and fainted into a big girl pile on the floor…
The fresh air on the walk home had helped, but Caitlin still looked a bit green.
It was a pity she hadn’t mentioned that the sight of blood made her go all funny. Still, she’d come round OK, so once the rescue centre receptionist had given her a cup of sugary tea (for shock) and another plaster (for the graze on her elbow when she’d hit the floor of the surgery), we’d been able to leave.
And right now she was slumped on a stool in our kitchen, with another cup of sugary tea, blankly watching while I fed the dogs and Smudge – and the tree frogs, of course.
In fact, I was ju
st feeding the tree frogs their crickets (yuck) when a whining noise distracted me.
It was distracting Kenneth, George, Dibbles and Smudge too – they all stopped munching their crunchies and crunching their munchies and gazed in the direction of Caitlin.
“Are you OK?” I asked her, worrying that she’d discovered more bumps from her fainting fit, or more pig poo on her trousers.
“No!” whimpered Caitlin, who was working her way through an entire box of tissues.
“What’s wrong?”
“I wish I was ten again!” she sniffled. “I wish I could just sit and watch Scooby-Doo and eat crisps instead of worrying about work!”
“You’re kidding!” I said in surprise. “Being ten is no fun – being grown-up is much cooler!”
“No way!”
“Yeah way!!” I insisted, making a grab for my bag and the notebook inside. “Listen to this list I made…”
I started reading it out to Caitlin, but she stopped me by the time I got to reason number 3 of why .
“Right, let me look at this properly,” she told me, pointing a finger to the top of the list.
And then she began to read it out herself, with extra added bits…
We didn’t get further than number 7 on my list, because another thing I knew Caitlin was scared of was small animals that moved fast. So I really didn’t want her to notice a tiny tree frog that was hopping dangerously close to her plastered elbow…
(Why hadn’t I closed the tank lid properly? Oh, Caitlin had started whining, that’s why.)
How was I going to grab the frog and get it back where it belonged without her spotting it and going bananas?
“Hello!” Mum called out from the hall.
Half a second later, she was at the kitchen doorway, in a tangle of licking, welcoming dogs.
“Caitlin, could I have a quick word with you in the living room, please?”
“Mmm!” mumbled Caitlin, looking very, very scared, as if she thought Mum might be about to ask her to move out or something.
But I had no time to think about what was going on – I just leapt on the tree frog, scooped it up in my hand, and let it hop out happily onto a moss-covered branch in the tank.
It was only when the frog blinked its tiny eyes at me that I got a chance to let my mind whirr.
And it whirr ed like this…
The ping came from my back pocket.
(OK, from my mobile.)
It was a photo message from Dylan – of him, Soph and Fee, holding about a trillion doughnuts up to their mouths and grinning like crazy.
So they had gone to the shopping centre together. It was dumb, but suddenly I felt left out…
“Indie?” said Mum, making me jump.
“I’ve just had a chat with Caitlin, and now I’ve got something to tell you.”
I glanced quickly at Caitlin – weirdly, she was looking really, really happy for someone who’d just been told to move out.
“I’ve got a new job,” Mum continued. “I’m going to be the manager of the rescue centre!”
“Brilliant!” I beamed at her. Then something suddenly bugged me. “You told Caitlin first, didn’t you? How come?”
Wasn’t I important enough or grownup enough to be told first?
“It’s not like that, Indie!” Mum smiled, coming over and wrapping her arm round my shoulder. “I’ve been VERY stressed out the last few days, doing lots of work for lots of meetings and interviews, and I wasn’t even sure I could take the job!”
I didn’t know what this had to do with telling Caitlin before me, so I stayed silent. “The hours are going to be a lot longer, so I was worried about how I’d manage, and who’d take care of you,” said Mum, touching her forehead to mine. “And then this afternoon, I realized that if Caitlin needed a job, and I was earning more money, then—”
“Then I can look after the house and you, Indie!” Caitlin burst out happily.
“That’s my NEW job!”
“Anyway, sorry if I’ve been a bit edgy lately, Indie,” said Mum. “I’ve just had a lot on my mind.”
Speaking of minds, mine started
Who needed all that stressing and worrying? I just wanted to have fun, and I wanted to have fun starting right now.
“So how about sending out for a pizza, and the three of us can celebrate?” Mum suggested, heading over to get the takeaway menu from the drawer.
While she did that, I quickly keyed a text message into my mobile.
Got a spare doughnut for yr goofball best m8?
I wrote, and zapped it off to Soph and Fee.
And then I sent Dylan a text that said
Show Soph and Fee this
followed by a nice close-up photo-message of me crossing my eyes, and holding up my fringe so my half-an-eye-brow was on full display.
The thought of Soph and Fee sniggering over my half-an-eyebrow made me snigger too.
And maybe we could all go to the doughnut shop on Saturday for a doughnut-eating competition.
And maybe we could go to the park afterwards and roll down the hill till we were sick.
And maybe I’d start to write a new list after that, one called
For Tasmin,
all the way away in Kirriemuir
—K. McC.
Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Text copyright © 2005 by Karen McCombie
Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Lydia Monks
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by Walker Books Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written
permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address
Walker Books Ltd.
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visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers
ISBN: 978-0-307-49617-1
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Being Grown Up Is Cool (Not!) Page 4
