Under My Skin Read Free Page A

tomorrow if we got parts or not.’
    Mrs Feather smiled. ‘I do hope so. It’d be so nice for you to get out of the house and actually do something for once. You need to join in more. I was in all the school plays when I was your age. I was once Lady Macbeth. And it’ll look ever so good on your application forms.’
    Even the words ‘join in’ gave Sally cold cramps in her stomach. She’d heard the pitch before.
I do go out,
she thought sulkily. Sally looked to her mother. ‘May I go over to Stan’s, please?’
    â€˜But you’ve hardly touched your supper, dear.’
    Sally felt the same way about her parents as she did about algebraic equations: baffled and frustrated in equal measure. ‘Please. I’m not hungry – and I need to talk about what happened with Jennie and Stan.’
    â€˜Have you done your homework?’
    â€˜Yes. You can check it if you like.’ She’d done it while waiting for her turn at the audition.
    Her mum relented. ‘Well, if you think it’ll help.’
    â€˜It will.’
    â€˜All right then, dear, but I’d like you home by ten. And leave your homework on the sideboard for Dad to check.’
    â€˜Sure thing.’ Sally pushed herself away from the table, leaving her plate for her mum to clear away – why deprive her of her main joy in life? Cooking, cleaning, serving her dad. Their home was a time capsule. They could so easily be living in the 1950s: doilies, net curtains, chintz fabric and oppressive dark wood antique furniture, although that was nothing compared to the prehistoric roles her mum and dad played.
    Her dad was a bona fide bank manager, although he never missed an opportunity to remind Sally that he’d started at the bottom and worked his way up the ladder through blood, sweat and tears, so her mother had never had to, or chose not to, work. ‘Being a wife and mother
is
a full-time job, dear,’ she would often say. Her parents were a good ten years older than most of her friends’ parents – when she was little, people had often mistaken them for her grandparents.
    After putting her homework out for inspection on the sideboard next to her mother’s creepy collection of faceless porcelain angels, Sally jammed some Converse on her feet and made a prompt exit. The second she let the front door slam shut behind her, she was back in the real world. Her home smelled a lot like the historical museum in town and she rinsed the furniture polish haze from her lungs with a deep breath of night air.
    Somewhere close by, her owl, and it was
her
owl because he was a nightly visitor, hooted in the trees behind the house as she scurried across the lawn. She was ‘lucky’ enough to live in Mulberry Hill, the ‘nice’ part of town that overlooked the rest of Saxton Vale. Their hometown was truly a caste system: in the valley were the dingy terraced houses, rundown flats over betting shops and don’t-get-out-of-your-car areas; halfway up the hill were the nicer semi-detached homes and shiny new ‘executive apartments’ for commuters; while the richest residents lived up here at the very top of the tree. To Sally, Mulberry Hill was nothing more than a viper’s nest filled with snakes like Melody Vine and her equally poisonous parents.
    When they were about six, Stan and Sally had removed a plank in the fence separating their houses, to save themselves the trouble of having to go all the way down the drive just to come back up the other side. Sally was still skinny enough to fit through the gap even if Stan’s shoulders would get wedged in these days. Although they were the same architecturally, Stan’s house was the polar opposite of hers. The garden was perpetually overgrown and cluttered with his little sister’s toys.
    A warm, familiar voice called out of an upstairs window. It was Jennie Gong, her other best friend. It’s OK to have two