Read Cosmic for Free Online

not sure about this color.”
    Not only was I not allowed to go to Tunisia, I wasn’t even allowed to walk home by myself anymore. Mom and Dad took to meeting me at school and escorting me home, like a prisoner. They would have banned me from Little Stars too except everyone else had done so much work on The BFG that it wouldn’t be fair if it had to be canceled.
    Lisa tried to be nice about it. “You’re the star,” she said, “so you get your own dressing room.” Then she shoved meinto this cupboardy thing just behind the stage. There was one chair, no window, a packet of pickled-onion flavor Space Ranger crisps and a blue Panda Pop. Space Rangers are the cheapest crisps that money can buy. They are crisps, but only until you put them in your mouth. The moment they make contact with your tongue they stop being crisps and become soggies. The flavor is sort of optional in that it seems to fall off the crisps and make a powdery sludge at the bottom of the bag, which you can scroop up with your finger if you like. Blue Panda Pops are supposedly raspberry flavored, but the flavor is irrelevant as they are so fizzy that when you drink them all your senses close down and your brain just shouts, “FIZZY!” Later on you belch a lot, which is fine if you’re playing the BFG, as he’s quite a belchy character.
    I remember sitting in that cupboard, feeling like the rest of the world had completely vanished and that I was now orbiting the sun entirely on my own, on a chair. Planet Panda Pop. Sitting in a tiny enclosed space eating strange chemicals. It turns out that Little Stars was outstanding training for astronauts.
     
    During the interval, I just messed about on DraxWorld. At first I checked “location of phone one”—so I could see where Dad was. He was in the audience. Then I looked atall the Waterloos in the world, trying to decide on a favorite. I was just tossing up between Waterloo in Sierra Leone and Waterloo in Trinidad and Tobago when the phone rang. It was a woman with a very friendly voice saying, “Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Drax Communications. We’ve noticed you have a very interesting pattern of use and we’d like to ask you a few questions if you have some minutes.”
    I had about two and a half minutes to the beginning of Act Two.
    “Can I just ask you, have you actually been to any of the following places which appear in your recent searches—Waterloo, Sierra Leone?”
    “No.”
    “Waterloo, Siberia?”
    “No.”
    “Waterloo, Belgium?”
    “No.”
    “Do you have any plans to visit these places in the near future?”
    “Yeah,” I said, “all of them. I don’t know how near the future is though.”
    “We also noticed that your recent searches include many theme parks and rides.”
    “Oh. Yes. Alton Towers. EuroDisney. Six Flags. Mountain—”
    “Pretty well all the theme parks in the world, in fact.What is it you like about theme parks?”
    “The Crispy New World feeling you get after you’ve been on a thrill ride. I love that.”
    “So you go on the rides with your children?”
    She thought I was a grown-up and she couldn’t even see me! I deepened my voice a bit and said, “That’s right. Yeah.”
    “How old is your child?”
    “Eleven.”
    “Lovely. Thank you. And one last thing—as a dad, how would you summarize your philosophy of child rearing?”
    “My what?”
    “What do you want most for your children?”
    “Well…” I don’t remember thinking about it. I just came out with this: “I want my children to think of the whole world as their thrill ride.”
    “Oh,” said the woman. “What a beautiful thought.”
    And I was thinking, Yes, it is a lovely thought. I wonder where it came from.
    “Thank you, Mr. Digby, for talking to me. We’ll be in touch very soon.”
    She hung up. In World of Warcraft, when you defeat an enemy you can take their stuff: their money, their armor, things like that. But sometimes it turns out they’ve got something you