Recommended Reading: The Tulip Touch

I read this with my first Year 8 class at GM (now Year 11!). Written by Anne Fine (The Flour Babies, Madame Doubtfire etc.), and winner of the Whitbread Children's Book Award in 1996, The Tulip Touch tells the story of an intense and dangerous friendship between two teenage girls - Natalie and Tulip. Natalie cannot escape the allure of Tulip's mysterious ways, but, as things become more and more sinister, she realises that being with Tulip is like playing with fire. And yet, has she gone too far to turn back?

Click here to visit Anne Fine's website.

Here are a couple of extracts from the novel to whet your appetite:

I paid for the privilege (if privilege is what it was). Nobody else would have Tulip in their gang. They knew from experience that she was out of school more than in. (That’s why I’d never seen her.) From that time on, I spent countless hours scuffing alone round the playground, desperately hoping that she’d show up, or that some soft soul in one of the busy swarms of children whooping around me would crack and say the words I longed to hear.
‘Forget silly old Tulip. She’s never here, anyway. Come and play with us.’
I look back and think I must have been mad. What sort of friendship is it when one of the pair is hardly ever there and the other is never permitted to go off and find her?

* * * * *

... I was so mad at her for the sheer stupidness of it (and for ignoring me so horribly) that when she took a gold chain I’d never seen before out of her pocket and twirled it round her fingers, I left Marcie to ask all the questions.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘It’s mine.’
‘Is it real gold, though? Real gold?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘You’re looking at it.’
‘No, I mean, can I hold it?’
Pleased with her interest, Tulip spilled the chain into Marcie’s hand. Marcie turned to the sunlight and studied it.
‘This is real gold. It’s got that funny mark.’ She raised her eyes to Tulip’s. ‘It can’t be yours.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I don’t think so. It must be worth an awful lot.’
The edgy tone I knew so well came into Tulip’s voice.
‘Why shouldn’t it be mine?’
Marcie said nothing, and, with Tulip standing there in her cheap clothes and worn jacket, there was no need. Furious, Tulip snatched back the necklace and hurled it, glinting and rippling, as far as she could. It flew across the car park like a live snake, and fell with a rattle into the huge rubbish drum beside the wall. We stared.
Then Tulip said to Marcie: ‘I don’t want it any more. You can have it if you find it.’
Marcie hesitated just a shade too long. And then, humiliated by the notion of scrabbling in a dustbin for something cast out by Tulip, she turned her back on us.
‘I don’t want it!’