Bad Dreams: Part 4

By ANNE FINE, Illustrator SUSAN WINTER

She was no good at schoolwork. You could tell Mr Hooper was amazed how badly she did in all the tests he set her. But he still made her book monitor, along with me.

"Since Melly"s looking after you," he explained.

"Must I?" she asked him. "I hate books."

I was astonished. "Hate them? Actually hate them?"

She blushed. "Well," she said, "I just don"t get on with them very well."

What can you say? I love books more than anything. Left to myself, I wouldn"t come to school at all. I"d spend my whole life reading,. "Go out," my mother tells me. "It"s lovely today. Go and play in the fresh air." But I"d rather stay in my bedroom, and read about other children going out to play.

"You"re not a bit like me, then," I told Imogen. "You know those battered old Christmas albums you see in jumble sales that have a picture on the front of a girl reading another album just the same, with a picture of herself on the cover? You know how they go on, down and down, smaller and smaller, like boxes inside boxes, until the girl"s too small to be seen?"

"Yes, I"ve seen those."

"Well," I said, "that"s who I want to be. That girl who"s reading all the other lives in from the outside."

Publisher: Random House, $16.95

Age group: 10-13 years