Starring Tracy Beaker Read online

  tell you about Cam in a

  minute.) I'm sure it's practi-

  cally good enough to get

  published. I typed it out on

  Cam's computer so it looked ever so neat and the spellcheck took care of all the spellings so I was all prepared for Mrs V.B. to bust a gut

  and write: ' Very very very good indeed, Tracy.

  10 out of 10 and Triple Gold Star and I'll buy you a tube of Smarties at playtime.'

  Do you know what she really wrote? ' You've tried hard, Tracy, but this is a very rambling story. You also have a very warped imagination!'

  I looked up 'warp' in the dictionary she's always recommending and it means 'to twist out of shape'. That's spot on. I'd like to warp Mrs Vomit Bagley, twisting and

  twisting, until her eyes pop and her arms and legs are wrapped

  right round her great big bum.

  That's another thing. Whenever I

  write the weeniest babiest little

  rude word Mrs V.B. goes

  bananas. I don't know what she'd

  do if I used really bad words like

  **** and **** and ****** (censored!!).

  I looked up 'ramble' too. I liked what it said:

  'To stroll about freely, as for relaxation, with no particular direction'. So that's exactly what I did today, instead of staying at boring old school. I bunked off and strolled round the town freely, as relaxed as anything. I had a little potter in Paperchase and bought this big fat purple notebook with my pocket money.

  I'm going to write all my mega-manic ultra-scary stories in it, as warped and as rambly as I can make them. And I'll write my story too.

  I've written all about myself before in The Story of Tracy Beaker. So this can be The Story of Tracy Beaker Two or Find Out What Happens Next to the Brave and Brilliant Tracy Beaker or Further Fabulous Adventures of the Tremendous Terrific Tracy Beaker or Read More About the Truly Terrible Tracy Beaker, Even More Wicked Than the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Yes. I was telling you about The Wizard of Oz. There's only one bit that I truly dread. I can't actually watch it. The first time I saw it I very nearly cried. (I don't cry, though. I'm tough. As old boots. New boots. The biggest fiercest reinforced Doc Martens . . .) It's the bit right at the end where Dorothy is getting fed up with being in Oz. Which is mad, if you ask me. Who'd want to go back to that boring black and white Kansas and be an ordinary kid where they take your dog away when you could dance round Oz in your ruby slippers?

  But Dorothy acts in an extremely dumb manner all the way through the film. You'd

  think she'd have sussed out for herself that all she had to do was click those ruby slippers and she'd get back home. That's it. That's the bit. Where she says, There's no place like home.'

  It gets to me.

  Because there's no

  place like home for

  me. No place at all.

  I haven't got a

  home.

  Well. I didn't have

  up until recently.

  Unless you count the Home. If a home has a capital letter at the front you can be pretty sure it isn't like a real home. It's just a dumping ground for kids with problems. The ugly kids, the bad kids, the daft kids. The ones no-one wants to foster. The kids way past their sell-by date so they're all chucked on the rubbish heap. There were certainly some ultra-rubbishy kids at that

  Home. Especially a certain Justine Littlewood...

  We were Deadly Enemies once, but

  then we made up. I even gave Justine my special Mickey Mouse pen. I rather regretted

  this actually and asked for it back the next day, pretending it had just been a loan, but Justine wasn't having any. There are no flies on Justine. No wasps, bees or any kind of bug.

  It's weird, but I kind of miss Justine now. It was even fun when we were Deadly Enemies and we played the Dare Game. I've always been great at thinking up the silliest daftest rudest dares. I always dared everything and won until Justine came to the Children's Home. Then I still won. Most of the time. I did. But Justine could certainly invent some seriously wicked dares herself.

  I miss her. I miss Louise

  too. And I especially miss

  Peter. This is even weirder.

  I couldn't stand weedy old

  Peter when he first came to the

  Home. But now it feels like he was my best ever friend. I wish I could see him. I especially wish I could see him right now. Because I'm all on my own and although it's great to be bunking off school and I've found the most brilliant hiding place in the whole world it is a little bit lonely.

  I could do with a mate. When you're in care you need to make all the friends you can get

  because you don't have much family.

  Well. I've got family.

  I've got the loveliest prettiest

  best-ever mum in the whole

  world. She's this dead famous

  Hollywood movie star and

  she's in film after film, in so

  much demand that there isn't

  a minute of the day when she

  can see me so that's why I'm

  i n c a r e . . .

  Who am I kidding??? Not

  you. Not even me. I Used to

  carry on like that when I was little, and some kids took it all in and even acted like they were impressed. But now when I come out with all that movie guff they start to get this little curl of the lip and then the minute my back's turned I hear a splutter of laughter.

  And that's the kinder kids. The rest tell me straight to my face that I'm a nutter. They don't even believe my mum's an actress. I know for a fact she's been in some films. She sent me this big glossy photo of her in this negligee – but now kids nudge and giggle and say, 'What kind of film was your mum in, Tracy Beaker?'

  So I duff them up. Sometimes literally. I'm very handy with my fists. Sometimes I just pretend it in my head. I should have pretended inside my head with Mrs Vomit Bagley. It isn't wise to tell teachers exactly what you think of them. She gave us this new piece of writing work this morning. About 'My Family'. It was supposed to be an exercise in autobiography. It's really a way for the teachers to be dead nosy and find out all sorts of secrets about the kids. Anyway, after she's told us all to start writing this

  'My Family' stuff she squeezes

  her great hips in and out

  the desks till she gets to

  me. She leans over until

  her face is hovering

  a few inches from mine. I thought for one seriously scary second she was going to kiss me!

  'Of course, you write about your foster mother, Tracy,' she whispers, her Tic-Tac minty breath tickling my ear.

  She thought she was whispering discreetly, but every single kid in the room looked up and stared. So I stared straight back and edged as far away from Mrs V.B. as I could and said firmly, 'I'm going to write about my real mother, Mrs Bagley.'

  So I did. Page after page. My writing got a bit sprawly and I gave up on spelling and stopped bothering about full stops and capital letters because they're such a waste of time, but I wrote this amazing account of me and my mum. Only I never finished it. Because Mrs V.B. does another Grand Tour of the class, bending over and reading your work over your shoulder in the most off-putting way possible, and she gets to me and leans over, and then she sniffs inwards and sighs. I thought she was just going to have the usual old nag about Neatness and Spelling and Punctuation – but this time she was miffed about the content, not the presentation.

  'You and your extraordinary imagination, Tracy,' she said, in this falsely sweet patron-izing tone. She even went 'Tut tut', shaking her head, still with this silly smirk on her face.

  'What do you mean?' I said, sharpish.

  'Tracy! Don't take that rude tone with me, dear.' There was an edge to her voice and all.

  'I did my best to explain about Autobiography.

  It means you tell a true story about yourself and your own life.'

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