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number.’
    I didn’t say anything, mostly because Mum had been nagging Dad to paint our name and number on the side of our bin for over a year.
    ‘Honestly, who worries about their bin getting stolen?’ Miss Huntley went on. ‘So, since the bins don’t seem to be marked, what say we just do a swap?’ She lifted the lid of our bin and peered in, wrinkling her nose slightly. ‘Yes, I’d say there’s room in there for my one little bag of weekly refuse. Your family composts, right?’
    ‘Uh huh,’ I said, nodding. ‘We’ve got a worm farm.’
    ‘Excellent. Then it’s a deal. Well, I’ll see you later,’ Miss Huntley said cheerfully as she hoisted the handle of her basket further up her arm and headed away along the street. Was she whistling? I didn’t think anyone whistled any more.
    I decided that the right thing to do would be to put our half-full bin behind Miss Huntley’s house before I took her empty bin back to ours, so I grabbed the handle and dragged it across her damp front lawn and down the little stone path that led around to the side of her house.
    As I parked our bin beside her back door, I heard a clinking noise, like bottles, coming from the direction of the street. And then, as I took the handle of Miss Huntley’s bin, I heard another sound from somewhere over the street, on our side. It was a small, rattly noise, like a gate closing, but when I looked up, I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Plus Muppet was barking like mad behind our side fence.
    I didn’t think any more about it then – I just started to wheel the empty bin up our driveway. Except the bin wasn’t empty. It felt a bit too heavy to be empty. And when I checked inside, it wasn’t. There were four or five brown beer bottles and a couple of pizza boxes in the bottom.
    That’s weird, I thought. Maybe the garbage truck had missed Miss Huntley’s bin for some reason. Besides, I’d always thought she’d be more into scones and tea than beer and pizza.
    ‘Come on, Muppet, quit your woofing,’ I said as I put the bin away and went inside, closing the door quietly so I wouldn’t wake anyone up.
    ‘You’re up early,’ Mum said as I walked softly into the kitchen. I hadn’t expected her to be out of bed yet, and I jumped in surprise when she spoke to me.
    ‘Hey, Mum. You scared me!’
    ‘Sorry about that. Um . . . Lizzie, why were you outside in your pyjamas?’
    ‘What?’ I said. I had actually heard her, but I was trying to come up with a good reason without much preparation time.
    ‘You’re never up this early, so why today?’
    ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I said, which was kind of true, since I hadn’t been able to sleep at all after I was woken by the garbage truck driving past.
    ‘So you went outside?’
    ‘Yup,’ I said. ‘Went outside. For a walk.’
    ‘For a walk ? At this hour?’
    ‘Uh huh.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Trying to get fit,’ I said, and then, just to prove it, I did a couple of star jumps and blew out a few big breaths. ‘I don’t feel very fit at the moment. So I’m trying to get fit.’ (You’re saying ‘fit’ a lot, I thought to myself – try to say ‘fit’ a bit less.)
    Mum frowned at me. I knew that look really well – it meant that she didn’t believe me. ‘Lizzie, are you all right?’
    ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Why?’
    ‘You just look . . . strange.’
    ‘It’s the exercise,’ I said. ‘I’m so puffed, because I jogged for . . . I don’t know. Ages.’
    ‘Did you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Truly?’
    ‘Yes!’
    ‘I thought you said it was a walk.’
    ‘I walked for a while, then I jogged, then I walked some more. You know, a bit of one, then the –’
    ‘In bare feet?’
    ‘I left my running shoes at the back door,’ I said. (I was pretty impressed with how quickly I came up with that one.)
    ‘You left your shoes at the back door, did you? Along with your running shorts and your running shirt?’ she asked.
    ‘Oh,’ I said, looking down. ‘My