White Ninja Read Online Free Page A

her, shocked. ‘How’d you get that?’
    â€˜Chantell brings it to school for me. Her mum buys heaps of the stuff. Mum won’t know. She’s kidding herself with all that reflex food.’
    The sugar bites the front of my brain and I feel it needle up my veins and into my neck.
    â€˜Good, huh?’ Elecktra twirls on the spot. ‘I’m going to get Chantell to bring me chocolate bars too! Imagine!’
    The thought of seeing Hero and his mates, and me having nowhere to hide, makes my head too heavy to lift up off the letterbox. My hands grow piping hot under my forehead. My skin feels sunburned.
    â€˜C’mon, Rox, we’ll be late again and I want to make an entrance.’
    I turn my cheek onto the back of my hand. ‘Will you walk in with me?’ I ask, then close my eyes because I can’t handle seeing her response.
    â€˜Stop asking me that. You know the answer. I’m going!’ She pulls up her socks and walks off.
    I slowly lift my head and look at my hands. They’re burning with the same fire as when I gripped the benchin the playground. I shake my hands in front of me and something happens. I must have blinked. I shake them again — they disappear, then reappear. I shake them a third time and they go invisible for three seconds, then come back.
    â€˜Elecktra!’ I shriek. ‘Elecktra, my hands are invisible! I can’t go to school with invisible hands!’
    She is ten steps ahead. She turns slowly and sashays back to me. She flips up my eye patch, then takes my hands in hers and squeezes them tight.
    â€˜You’re hurting me!’ I gasp.
    â€˜Enough! Your hands are not invisible — they’re right here, see?’ She squeezes them again. ‘You can feel this, can’t you? It’s just your eye patch playing tricks on you.’
    I nod fervently. The eye patch — of course.
    â€˜It’d help if you walked through the gate with me,’ I say, but Elecktra cuts me off.
    â€˜You know the rule!’ She walks off, then yells back, ‘Today of all days!’
    As always, I walk the final three blocks to school alone.

THREE
    Staring at Gate Two, I feel the quiver under my tongue. A torrent of thick saliva fills my mouth with the bitter taste of terror and a trickle of nervous sweat runs down my back. All the things I hate — Chinese burns, pimples, cheese, answering questions in class — are Christmas compared with having to walk through the gate to school.
    I concentrate on my breathing like Mum does when she meditates. A calm spirit is the only way to stop myself puking my Hulk juice all over the outfit Elecktra’s made me wear. Ever since I was little she’s dressed me up like a doll. I’ve never worn an outfit that felt like ‘me’; I always try to look like her and fail. I wanted to wear my own clothes today, but she said if anyone found out we were related and I was dressed as myself, then her ‘social reputation’ would be over.
    Kids are pouring through Gate One, all dressed in casual clothes instead of our usual navy uniform. I watch Elecktra prepare to make her entrance. She hangsup her phone, bends over so her hair’s hanging down and runs her hands through it to ‘volumise’ it, then stands and smiles with neon-white teeth. Her routine is mesmerising, if a little too practised.
    Jarrod meets her at the gate. She ignores him and he follows her in. She strides in a straight line, as if walking a tightrope or a catwalk, the whole performance seeming in slow motion. It feels like the world stops for Elecktra. That’s what happens when you’re so pretty you look like you belong in a box. Unlike me. My messy hair isn’t bright yellow like Elecktra’s, but jet black, so black it’s almost navy blue. I’m short for my age and have to wear glasses to see the whiteboard. Mum says it’s a matter of time before I land the double whammy and