The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman by Julietta Henderson (sci fi books to read .TXT) 📗

before she left. So the next thing I thought to do was call Mum’s phone because of Leonard having it and because her number is programmed in. Plus I know it off by heart anyhow. But it just went straight to the message and because I didn’t know what else to do and I was starting to get a bit worried I called it again straight away. It went to the message again but at least it was nice to hear Mum’s voice.

I tried to stay as brave as I could, but it got harder and harder the later it got and I didn’t even have any chocolate left to make me feel better. When it was an hour later than the latest Mum said she’d be back I thought I should try talking to Jax again, but he didn’t talk back at all that time. Not even one little hey, loser, which you might not think a person would look forward to hearing but I would have.

I went over to the window for the millionth time, hoping to see Mum and Leonard coming up the street together. Or even separately from different directions. But the only people I could see were a couple of dodgy-looking guys in pulled-up hoodies who looked like they were up to no good. They kept turning around to look up and down the street and then, all of a sudden, one of them stared right up at the window to where I was kneeling on Leonard’s window-seat bed. I dropped down straight away, because the last thing I wanted was a couple of gangsters coming after me, and my knee banged into something hard, which turned out to be Leonard’s laptop. Which then gave me the idea to try to find his phone number on there somewhere, which I think might have been synchronicity, so maybe Jaxy was still talking to me after all.

I sat on the edge of the bed and opened and closed a few folders on the laptop. There was a lot of stuff about candle making and welding and some notes about Photoshop but I couldn’t find anything that looked like it might have Leonard’s phone number on it. I was about to give up and just go back to worrying when I saw a folder called Sadie. When I clicked on that there was another folder inside called Finding Fathers and when I clicked on that I found the spreadsheet Leonard had made way back when we first decided to come on the trip.

I opened it up and the list of my maybe dads’ names and phone numbers came up. Since the last time I saw it Leonard had added another column called Miscellaneous Contacts, and next to where it said Mr Big Al was Big Al’s phone number. And when I saw all those phone numbers it gave me a bit of an idea for a contingency plan, which was pretty handy because I didn’t have anything else.

Mum and Jax are both big on contingency plans. Jax says having a back-up idea in case everything goes wrong is the first rule of comedy, but Mum says it’s a pretty good rule for life in general. So, like, if we’re going over to Falmouth and me and Jax want to go to the library to look up comedy autobiographies while Mum does shopping, we’ll arrange to meet back up at a certain time but we also make a contingency plan. So we’ll maybe say we’ll all meet at the Co-op at three o’clock, but if anything happens we’ll keep going back there every half-hour to check for the others. Stuff like that.

I guess Mum didn’t have time to think of a contingency plan that morning. Like, ‘If I’m not back by six at the latest, Norman, go to the nearest police station and then alert the media.’ Although maybe not that. But I did realize that calling a responsible adult was probably a pretty good back-up plan and that if Mum hadn’t been in such a hurry that’s probably exactly what she would have said to do. And because you’ve got to work with what you’ve got, even though I didn’t have any proof that any of them were actually responsible, what I had was a bunch of phone numbers for quite a few adults, so I decided they’d have to do.

I called Tony’s number first, because I felt like he’d know what to do in a scary situation like this and also, if he didn’t, then Kathy definitely would. I thought that was cool, sort of like a back-up for my contingency plan, except that Tony’s phone rang a few times and then nobody answered so it went to his message. It was funny to hear his voice again, because even though I’d thought about him quite a lot since we left Swansea, it already seemed like it was ages ago.

Hearing Tony’s voice on his message also made me realize I didn’t actually have any idea of what I was going to say to the responsible adults I was calling. Like, hey, everybody’s disappeared and I’m all alone and really scared and I’ve run out of chocolate and there are a couple of suspicious-looking gangster types outside. Oh and also, I’m not very funny and I’m booked in to do a show by myself at the biggest comedy festival in the world tomorrow.

That didn’t sound great when I said it in my head, though, so I just left a message for Tony saying, it’s me, Norman, and we’re in Edinburgh but Leonard has gone missing and I’ve sort of lost Mum too now and would he mind giving me a call back. And it’s me, Norman. I said that twice, because for all I knew Tony and Kathy forgot all about us the minute we left Swansea.

There was no way I was calling Dan McFerretfeatures, and anyway, I was pretty sure what his answer would be, so my