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Sarah Sues Santa – P.J. Leonard

Chapter Thirteen: The Saddest Christmas Tree

More than ever before, Sarah felt cold. She reached out and felt the duvet. But this duvet
felt...different, somehow. It was thin, and not very warm at all. She pulled the thin sheet around her,
shivering. The wind howled somewhere nearby, shaking the window. She didn't want to get up. She
didn't want to see what was beyond this bed. This place...it seems scary.
Creak. The bed moved slightly. Someone else was in the room with her. She leapt out of her bed -
and smacked her head against something hard. "Ouch!"
Rubbing her forehead and stars popping in her eyes, she looked up. The ceiling was low, low
enough to reach out and touch. Wait, no, it's not a ceiling...I'm in a bunk bed, and there's another
bed above me.
The bed above creaked. Sarah scrambled into the corner of her bed as a girl's head popped out from
the ceiling above, her hair falling like a curtain around her face.
"What are you doing?" said the girl.
"I...I was just..." Sarah felt as though her tongue had been stolen.
“Keep it down, you two!” someone called from across the room. Sarah looked out across her
bedroom, and knew straightaway that this wasn’t her bedroom at all. Instead of just her bed, there
five other bunk beds against the walls. Each bed had a girl sleeping in it. There was a table and
chairs in the middle, a sink in the corner and a door in the corner marked ‘Toilet’. What is this
place?
The girl above Sarah looked across the room. “Sorry, Becky,” she said, “Sarah just made me jump,
that’s all.”
The girl called Becky slumped back into her bed, muttering something about being ‘too early’.
Sarah leaned forward and looked out of the window. Like all the other days, weak sunlight pushed
through the snow and window, which didn’t have any curtains. Was this Christmas Day too? She
looked around but couldn’t see a clock or calendar. Now that she came to think about it, where were
all of her belongings? She couldn’t see any wardrobe, chest of drawers or closet. She looked down
at herself, and noticed that she was in an old nightgown that had a big stain down the front of it.
Cold horror washed over her. Each day she’d put them on, the remaining tickets were safely in her
jeans pocket. But her jeans, always right next to her bed every morning, were now gone. If I can’t
find those jeans, then I cannot leave. I’ll be stuck here forever!
Sarah stood up quickly, careful not to headbutt the top bed again.
“Where are you going?” The girl in the top bunk whispered.
“Err, toilet,” Sarah blurted out, staggering across the room and nearly bumping into the table on the
way. She walked into the toilet, locked the door and sat down. She took a deep breath. One thing
was for sure: this was not her house. Or was it? Maybe in this version my parents just have a lot of
kids? She shook her head. Don’t be silly. All those other girls are my age as well! She rubbed her
head. What was this place, then? She thought hard. If she’d seen what her family would be like if
they were really rich, then really poor, then what else could there be? I have to go and investigate…
She poked her head out of the toilet door. The girls in the room were all fast asleep again. Spotting
the other door on the opposite side of the room, she crept across the thin and scratchy carpet to the
door and left the bedroom.
The corridor was cold and bare, with a concrete floor and pipes running along the ceiling like the
strings of a giant spider web. The windows on the left-side wall were big and thin, letting in a lot of
the cold as well as the morning light. Sarah saw her own breath rise in front of her like a little
cloud.
She passed a door marked 'Boy's Room'. Looking back, she saw that the door she had walked out

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