Withering Tights - By Louise Rennison Page 0,29

bouncing across the dales and moors. Yorkshire people have a lot of sticks. Almost everyone who got on the bus had a stick.

Skipley was a biggish town, it had cafés and shops and everything.

I said, “Look! These shops have got stuff in them. Not just boiled sweets. Other stuff.”

We spent a lot of time trying on lipstick testers. I got a blusher, well more like little goldy pink balls that you brushed on. I noticed that a lot of the girls in the shop were very orange. And quite big. I was almost squashed to death when two of them reached for the same perfume as me.

We messed around most of the afternoon and got to the bus stop to go back at about six o’clock. The girls at Dother Hall had to be back by seven-thirty unless they got written permission from Sidone, and then you had to say who you were going with and where.

Flossie said, “It’ll be fun when you come up to the Hall to stay, Vaisey, although not necessarily for you, because Bob is making your bed.”

The bus arrived. We piled on and just as we were about to go a group of lads came skittering around the corner and leapt on too. I recognised Phil and Charlie, and as they came down the bus they saw us. Jo started fiddling about with her hair.

Phil said loudly, “Hurrah, it’s the Tree Sisters. Are you having a thespian outing?”

The people on the bus started tutting. I went bright red, I think. I could feel my head on fire. Phil and Charlie sat down in the seats in front of Jo and me. And the other three went near Honey and Flossie and Vaisey. As the bus lurched off, Phil leant over the back of his seat.

He said, “I still dream about our day in the woods.”

I said, “It wasn’t your day in the woods, it was our day in the woods. And anyway, it wasn’t our day in the woods, we were getting ideas.”

Charlie popped his head up then and looked really closely at us.

“Was your idea to go and get off with trees?”

Jo hit him over the head with her Topshop bag.

Phil said, “I like a fight on the way home.”

It was all getting a bit, I don’t know, sort of tense, but I don’t know why. The other boys were talking to Honey and Vaisey. And Flossie was talking to a bloke and his sheepdog. The bus stopped in the middle of nowhere. Not at a stop or anything, and a big old man got on and came up the bus towards us. He was carrying a chicken. It wasn’t dead.

He looked at the boys leaning over the back of the seats and said, “Ay, you young larrikins. Sit down properly, tha’s not at home now.”

Then he gave the chicken to a woman at the back and said, “Now then, that’s for thee, bring us up any spare cow tit you’ve got and we’ll call it evens.”

She said, “Awreet, thanks, love.”

Then the chicken man walked slowly down the bus and got off.

Somebody shouted out from the back, “Can’t tha go a bit slower, at this rate I’ll still be alive by the time we get to Heckmondwhite. Bloody hell.”

When we shuddered off again, Phil popped his head up.

He looked at Jo.

She looked at him.

He kept looking.

She said, “What do you want?”

And he said, “Do you want to come to the pictures with me?”

I have never seen someone look so much like a human goldfish as Jo.

Eventually because he went on looking at her she said, “What?”

Phil went on, “Cinema, you and me, jogging boy and tree girl. Go on. Be a devil. Go on.”

Jo was saying, “But I…don’t…”

Then Charlie popped his head up.

“Go on, lady. Don’t upset him. He’s shy.”

All the way home Jo has been driving us mad. How many times can you go through a conversation? A lot is the answer.

We had to hang around at the bus stop for ages while she went on and on.

Jo said, “What does he mean, do you want to come to the pictures with me?”

Honey said, “He meanth, well that meanth, he wanth to take you to the thinema.”

We all nodded.

I said, “That sums it up. Night, night.”

Jo said, “OK, what if I do go with him and then that’s it. He doesn’t want to see me again. Because I am too small. Or can beat him at arm wrestling or whatever. What then? I