Bad Dreams Read Free Page B

asked to share a desk or a table.
    â€˜What, even in work groups?’
    The tears sprang. ‘It was horrible .’
    I felt so sorry for her. And the teachers had found her crying in corners so often that, in the end, they had suggested she might be better starting afresh in a new school.
    Ours.
    The problem was, of course, that you could see it was all happening again, exactly the same. Everyone except me avoided her. It wasn’t like giving someone the big freeze because they’ve been spiteful, or something. In fact, I don’t believe people even realized they were doing it. But somehow, everywhere Imogen went, everyone melted away.
    And it wasn’t just the book corner, because the first time I really noticed it, she and I were walking down the corridor towards the lunch room. Paul had bent down to tie up his shoe-lace, but, as the two of us came close, I saw him hastily straighten up and drift off, with his shoe-lace still flapping.
    Funny, I thought.
    And then the two girls from another class who had been sitting on the window-ledge, sharing a book, suddenly closed it without a word, and wandered away.
    We went into lunch, and, now I’d noticed it, I realized it had been happening all week. Whenever the two of us had headed for a busy table, within seconds everyone was stacking their dishes back onto their trays, and taking them over to the hatches.
    Then, on the way back from the cloakroom on my own, I bumped into Maria and Tasj.

    â€˜Don’t you find it a bpit creepy, going round with her?’ Tasj asked me outright. ‘She’s so weird .’
    â€˜Seriously strange,’ agreed Maria.
    I tried to defend her. ‘She doesn’t bother me. I get on with her all right.’
    But I was definitely the only one. It wasn’t just Mr Hooper who avoided her. Even the other teachers seemed to move away when she was near. That afternoon I stood waiting while Imogen rooted in her book bag to make sure she still had her calculator. Just across the hall, Miss Harvey and Mr Sands were standing together, checking something on a chart. Suddenly, Mr Sands looked quite distracted. He glanced round uneasily, then said to Miss Harvey, ‘Shall we go and do this—’ He obviously couldn’t think of anywhere else they should be doing it, so he just finished up lamely, ‘–somewhere else?’
    I didn’t think the idea would go down very well. Miss Harvey’s famous in our school for not wasting time. She’s usually telling the people in her class what to do even before she walks through the door. But now she, too, was looking round a bit uncomfortably, a bit unsure. And together, still holding the chart, they moved off across the hallway.
    Away from their classrooms, I noticed.
    Away from Imogen.
    And away from me.
    So even I ended up having to ask myself how I could stand being so close to someone so spooky. And I can’t really explain, except to say that, from the moment I ran after her, she never bothered me at all the way she bothered other people. I never felt the urge to drift away. Now, looking back, I wonder if it was because I was the only one who knew for certain there was something strange about her. I didn’t have to share their vague, uneasy feeling. But sometimes I think that all that time spent with my head in books had made weird people so familiar to me that I barely thought twice. After all, no-one writes a story that boils down to, ‘Once, there was a normal young girl, and nothing of interest happened her whole life.’ And, if they did, no-one would bother to read it. Would you have finished the last book you read if it had been about a plain, happy person doing nothing but plain, happy things?
    When you were three, perhaps. Certainly not now.
    So I was interested in her. And she turned out to be the perfect friend for someone like me. She was quiet, and she didn’t mind spending half her life in the book corner and the