In her place, I wouldn't have known whether to be excited or worried if dizzy feelings failed to show up. Sometimes we felt that all the fuss being made over Charlotte was just too much.Ĭharlotte herself usually hid her feelings behind a mysterious Mona Lisa smile. Of course it was exciting to have someone with a time-travel gene in the family, but as the days went by, the excitement kind of wore off. The rest of us-my mum, my sister Caroline, my brother Nick, and Great-aunt Maddy-rolled our eyes. My aunt Glenda, Charlotte's mother, filled the ten-minute gap by asking the same thing in between Lady Arista's interrogations.Īnd whenever Charlotte said that she didn't feel dizzy, Lady Arista's lips tightened and Aunt Glenda sighed. On most days, my grandmother, Lady Arista, asked Charlotte how she was feeling every ten minutes. The entire family was on tenterhooks, waiting for Charlotte to have a dizzy fit.

Charlotte, beautiful and immaculate as ever, was sitting right there next to Cynthia, gracefully scooping mashed potatoes into her delicate mouth. Not mine, though: my cousin Charlotte's dizzy spells. There'd been too much talk at home recently about dizzy feelings. Only I'd never felt dizzy at the same time before.īut I was probably just imagining it. And I really couldn't count the number of times the stupid tie that's part of our school uniform had been drenched in sauce, juice, or milk. The week before that I'd knocked my cranberry juice over, and everyone at our table was splashed. Only last week my pudding had hopped out of its dish and landed a few feet away, right in a Year Seven boy's spaghetti carbonara. 'As if I'd ever sit next to you of my own free will, Cyn.' It's a fact, I'm afraid, that I did quite often have little accidents with school lunches. 'Don't you sit next to me, you mucky pup.'

'There goes Gwenny, playing with her food again!' said Cynthia Dale. I buttoned up my dark blue blazer over it. Lennox High School uniform was pretty much the color of mashed potatoes anyway, but you still couldn't miss seeing the remaining globs of my lunch.

'No thanks.' As it happens, the blouse of the St. 'You can have mine too, if you fancy spreading some more on your blouse.' 'This stuff tastes like it's been scraped off the floor anyway,' said my friend Lesley while I mopped up the damage as well as I could. I managed to catch the plate just in time, as my knife and fork clattered to the floor. It lasted only two seconds, but that was long enough for me to dump a plateful of mashed potatoes and gravy all over my school uniform. For a moment it was like being on a roller coaster when you're racing down from the very top.

I FIRST FELT IT in the school canteen on Monday morning.

Ruby red book