We were all supposed to bring a pet but only some of us had one. The girls brought birds, and kittens, and a chicken. Felicity had a lizard. I found a frog but it died in the jar before I got to school. Fred had a tadpole in a bottle. Gray had fleas, but they didn't count as pets.

Camile brought a large, heavy lamb.

"Haven't you got anything smaller?" complained Mrs Bletcher.

"Only our dog, but Mum wouldn't let me bring him!" Camile said.

We lined all our animals up along a bench and talked about them. Camile put her lamb in a big cardboard box with lots of newspaper on the bottom.

Mrs Bletcher wanted us to do some writing but we only got as far as doing some drawings of our pets. All of us were too lazy to do any work that morning.

At lunch break we left our pets in the classroom (Camile put her lamb outside, on a string) and got onto a bus. Today we were going on a class outing to the waxworks.

That was one thing I really enjoyed about our school; we were always going places. Factories, museums, the beach, hikes along the edge of the Bay, visits to the zoo. It was supposed to broaden our experience. I think it must have. I loved doing anything except schoolwork. If only we didn't have to write about where we'd been when we got back!

Our minibus pulled up at the gates and we piled out. A man with very black hair and a gray suit came to show us around. He was friendly enough, but everything he said sounded like a recording, like he's said the same thing so many times he wasn't even listening to himself.

We were all standing in a display room. It had panels on every wall, with photographs of things made out of wax. Amazing! There was a small table against one of the walls, with a blue lamp and a bowl of fruit.

I looked long and hard at that fruit. The banana, the orange, the apple, the lemon, the grapefruit, the peach. They were real, weren't they? When Mrs Bletcher wasn't looking, I picked the apple up. It was light. Light as a feather. Wax!

But it looked so real. My eyes told me one thing, but my hands told me another. Before I thought about it any more I took a bite.