Read Am I Right or Am I Right? for Free Online Page B

watched how others saw the good
    That living brings. I stumbled, fell—
     
    But then you caught me, touched my pain
    By being there with friendship’s kiss.
    The truth, I know, is simply this:
    You
taught me how to live again.

Chapter 6
    Vanessa gets excited
    I couldn’t wait to tell Vanessa. I was tempted to call her when I finished work, but it was two in the morning and I couldn’t be sure of a warm response. It would have to wait.
    I slept like the dead. I tell you, there’s nothing like stacking the old baked beans to guarantee uninterrupted Z’s. I woke at midday and luxuriated for a while in the memory of my conversation with Jason. My little slip of the tongue had been a godsend. For all I know, I could have continued gibbering about soccer, getting absolutely nowhere. Clearly, Jason liked the direct approach. Good job I had blundered into it.
    That set me thinking. Maybe he had called already. I leaped out of bed and threw on a blue T-shirt with a cartoon crocodile in a deck chair on the back (fashion icon, me) and raced into the kitchen. The Fridge was sitting at the table, drinking coffee. She obviously wasn’t expecting me to appear at such a pace, because she spilled a fair amount down her front.
    “My God, Calma,” she said. “Is your bed on fire?”
    “Has anyone called for me?”
    “What?”
    “Phone? You know, the lumpy device with buttons, over there on the wall?”
    “How was your first shift at work?”
    “Masterly. I’m on my way to becoming CEO of the entire organization. Has anyone called?”
    “Like who?”
    “Like anyone. Like someone saying, ‘Hello, can I speak to Calma Harrison, please?’ That sort of someone.”
    “No. Who were you expecting to call?”
    “Me? No one. No one at all. Why would I be expecting someone to call? Nothing on the answering machine, then?”
    The Fridge looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. “What’s going on, Calma?”
    “I saw the poisoned dwarf at work last night.”
    “The poisoned dwarf?”
    “You remember. Little runt, head like a cue ball, face like a baboon’s bum. You used to be married to him. Goodness, how soon we forget!”
    “What did he want?”
    “To talk.”
    “And did you?”
    “No. I rammed him in the gonads with a substantial warehouse cart and that seemed to stop the conversation dead in its tracks.”
    “Unfortunate.”
    “Yes. Where’s a one-ton truck when you need it?”
    I cut the banter and called Vanessa. I got her out of bed. Can you believe it?
She
hadn’t been working until the small hours. She’d probably hit the sack at nine-thirty and I was still up before her! Her mum got her to the phone. Vanessa’s voice was thick and heavy with sleep. Mind you, even at her most awake she does a remarkable impersonation of someone just roused from six months’ intensive hibernation.
    I arranged to go over to her house.
    Brushing off further questions from the Fridge, I showered and slung on my new denim skirt and red EMILY THE STRANGE T-shirt. Yellow glasses and I was ready. Vanessa lived a few minutes’ walk from my place, so I was in her front room before I could even build up a decent film of sweat.
    Vanessa’s mum was a person in a permanent state of frenzy. She looked as if she was expecting a homicidal maniac to appear out of the woodwork at any moment. Her eyes darted everywhere and her feet twitched in a fight-or-flight agony of indecision. Maybe that’s why Vanessa turned out the way she did, as a reaction against parental influence. I have to say this about Vanessa: there’s not much that gets under her skin. The world can be falling apart around her, and she still keeps calm. It’s one of the things I like most about her.
    “Hi, Mrs. Aldrick,” I said cheerily.
    She reacted like an SAS squadron had rappelled down the walls and crashed through the window. It was like cornering a wild jungle beast.
    “Hello, Calma,” she said finally. “Vanessa’s in her bedroom.”
    And she scuttled off,