When I Was Joe Read Free Page B

shove the broken glass under the bed and grab a tissue to mop up the blood. It really stings. Doug looks suspicious, but stands aside to let someone else into the room.
    â€˜This is Maureen,’ he says, and she’s smiling at us, an older woman with a big black suitcase.
    â€˜It’s Extreme Makeover day,’ she says. ‘We’ve got to change the way you look,’ she explains, adding, ‘I hope you’ve been growing your hair, young man.’ I have – one of the things I hated most about St Saviour’s was the army-type haircut – and my fringe is already falling over my eyes.
    Maureen nods her approval and then looks me up and down. ‘There’s not much I can do really. You’ve already got very anonymous clothes. Wear your hood up as much as possible – there, you don’t expect the police to tell you that. I’ve got some more clothes for you in my bag and I think Doug’s already sorted your school uniform.’
    School uniform? I didn’t even know I had a school.
    â€˜He’s a nice-looking lad,’ she adds, as if I’m not there. ‘His eyes are very striking, aren’t they? An unusualcolour, that light green; we’ll have to do something about that. And I think we’ll have to darken the hair . . . although you’ll have to keep it going, because we don’t want his roots showing.’ She and Nicki start giggling at what must be a look of complete horror on my face. I’m praying none of the boys from school will ever hear about this.
    She turns the tiny hotel bathroom into a salon, and tackles Nicki first. Nicki’s raging from the moment she sees Maureen’s scissors. ‘These extensions cost me a fortune,’ she says, as they hit the tiles. ‘I can’t believe you have to do this. Isn’t it enough to drag us away from our home?’
    But I remember the flames eating up everything from
TV Quick
to
Playboy
and I doubt our home even exists any more, so I don’t complain when Maureen slaps some foul-smelling muck on to my hair and then smears something which prickles and burns on to my eyebrows too.
    She washes my hair and wraps it up in a towel, which looks completely stupid, and then makes me sit down on the bed. ‘Eyes wide open,’ she says, then jabs her finger at them. I slam backwards, yelling out loud with pain. Who said the police could torture me? ‘It’s only a contact lens,’ says Maureen, but I won’t let her near me again. Eventually, after a huge amount of agony,I master putting them in myself.
    Maureen dries my hair, and scrubs my eyebrows with a flannel, Nicki clucking strangely in the background. Then I’m allowed to look in the big mirror. Somehow I’m still expecting to see green eyes and light brown hair looking back at me. But instead I see a white face, black shaggy hair, amazing black eyebrows and dark brown eyes – very bloodshot eyes. Only the pointed chin is recognisably mine, and it’s a lot more pointy than it used to be because I seem to have lost any sign of chubbiness around the face. In fact my whole body is leaner than it ever was before.
    â€˜What do you think?’ asks Maureen.
    â€˜I look like a bloody Goth,’ I mutter, giving the eyebrows an experimental wiggle. Actually I rather like it. I look a lot older – I seem to have grown taller, cooped up in captivity – and the messy black hair is excellent.
    She turns to Nicki. ‘I think I’ve done a pretty good job there.’ But Nic’s gloomily examining her brunette helmet-hair frump-of-the-year look, and doesn’t even look at me. With one crappy haircut and some unisex sweatshirts, Maureen’s managed to turn her from someone who looked a bit like Nadine Coyle into a complete minger. She’s gone from looking twenty-five, max, to around forty. Poor old Nic. She’s actually only thirty-one. If they ever made a TV show