Because why? I think.
… because you’re my dad.
Please reply soon and let me know about the tickets, preferably by tomorrow morning, 8.30 am Australian Eastern Standard Time.
Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Young (your son)
P.S. I wouldn’t normally just ask for free tickets but I only have one month to live.
Sorry, guess I got a little desperate there. Who am I kidding? This isn’t going to work.
I decide to abandon the email just as my mum enters my room to say goodnight. How do parents always manage to turn up right at the moment when you look most guilty?
‘What are you up to?’ says Mum, scanning my guilt-ridden face like a Terminator cyborg scanning for humans.
‘Nothing,’ I say, angling the laptop screen down so Mum won’t see the email. She doesn’t know that I promised to get the whole team tickets to the game and I really don’t want her to find out. She’s only just accepted me wanting to follow in my dad’s football-boot footsteps. She’d really lose it if she found out I was big-noting myself using my dad and making all sorts of crazy promises I can’t keep.
Which reminds me … Why am I making all sorts of crazy promises I can’t keep? I guess I just want the other kids to like me and I’m afraid they won’t if they know that even though I have a famous footballer for a father, I know him about as well as they do.
‘All ready for your first day back at school tomorrow?’ Mum asks, still eyeing my laptop suspiciously.
‘Absolutely,’ I say, which is absolutely not true.
‘And how’s Garth’s old laptop working out?’ Garth is my mum’s boyfriend. He’s a bit of a nerd and he has a really lame ponytail, but I guess he’s okay.
‘Great!’ I say. Again, not completely true considering most of the kids at school have brand-new laptops while Garth’s laptop looks older than me and is covered in all sorts of weird fantasy and sci-fi stickers. But I don’t want to seem ungrateful. Besides, it’s a step up from Mum’s old desktop computer, which has one of those chunky box screens.
‘You sure everything’s okay?’ Mum asks, her Terminator scanner working overtime on my face.
‘Yep. All good,’ I say, pushing the laptop screen completely closed and hoping Mum doesn’t get suspicious.
‘Okay … Get some sleep,’ she says, giving me a final cyborg-mum scan before kissing me goodnight and closing my bedroom door.
I try to take her advice but it’s a little hard to sleep. I still need a plan for facing Kane and everyone else at school.
I guess I’ll just have to fess up and tell the truth. After all, honesty is the best policy, right? Yep. I’ll tell the truth and just face the music. Simple.
So I close my eyes and go to sleep. Except I don’t sleep. I just lie in the dark and stare at the shadows crawling across the ceiling and I can’t help wondering how my life got to be so complicated.
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Version 1.0
Football High: Young Gun
9781925324518
First published by Random House Australia in 2016
Copyright © Patrick Loughlin, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Random House Australia book
Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.penguin.com.au
Addresses for the Penguin Random House group of companies can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Loughlin, Patrick
Title: Young Gun [electronic resource]
ISBN: 978 1 92532 451 8 (ebook)
Series: Loughlin, Patrick. Football high; 1
Target audience: For primary school age
Subjects: Soccer players – Australia – Juvenile fiction
Soccer stories, Australian
Dewey Number: A823.4
Cover illustration and design by Nahum Ziersch
Ebook by Firstsource
Football High: Young Gun Page 7
