Dare Game
Authors: Jacqueline Wilson
Contents
About the Book
I’m Tracy Beaker, the Great Inventor of Extremely Outrageous Dares – and I dare YOU not to say this is the most brilliant story ever!
I thought I was going to live happily ever after with Cam as my foster-mum. Well, ha ha! It hasn’t turned out like that. Cam’s so MEAN! She won’t buy me designer clothes so all the other kids at my new school laugh at me. No wonder I bunk off and go to this special secret place. There are these two boys I meet there, Alexander and Football. We play the Dare Game – and I always win. I’m the greatest. I AM!
An all-time favourite Tracy Beaker story, now with an extra-special new introduction by Jacqueline!
To Jessie Atkinson
Francesca Oates
Zoe
Lee and Sarah
Emma Walker and all my friends at
Redriff School
and everyone else who ever wondered
what happened to Tracy Beaker
The Dare Game
The Story of Tracy Beaker
has always been the most popular book. For years afterwards children kept asking me for another story about Tracy. Everyone wanted to find out what happened next. The first book finishes with Tracy absolutely determined that Cam is going to foster her but we’re not entirely sure that this will happen – or if it
does
, whether it will work out!
I started to get loads of letters from children with their version of Tracy’s continuing adventures, some inventive, some amusing, some definitely not suitable for publication! For a long time I was happy to let things rest. I thought it was maybe more fun to let all my readers make up their own stories about Tracy.
Then I was asked to write a play for a children’s theatre in Manchester and I decided to have a go. I know that most people think of football the moment you mention Manchester so I thought I’d definitely have to have a football fanatic in my play. The theatre was going to be in the Rotunda so I imagined all sorts of inter-active ball play between the cast and the audience. Then I invented a brainy weedy small boy called Alexander who couldn’t kick a ball to save his life. I needed a girl for my third main character. She had to be pretty fierce and feisty to hold her own against football. I started to write her . . . and she seemed strangely familiar. Of course, she was Tracy!
I decided to have lots of new dares in my play. The dare scenes in
The Story of Tracy Beaker
where Justine
says
a rude word in front of the vicar and Tracy runs round the garden stark naked and both girls try to eat worms have always been the most popular part of the story. I wanted more silly dares, rude dares, funny dares – and then a very dangerous dare right at the climax of the play.
I wrote
The Dare Game
with great enjoyment. I loved getting back into Tracy’s life. This time I made sure that she had a truly happily ever after ending. The play was fine. The theatre wasn’t. It burnt down and by the time it was built again there was a new management and they didn’t want my play after all.
I decided to turn
The Dare Game
into a book, elaborating on the story, finding out much more about everyone. I’m so pleased that I’ve completed Tracy’s story. Or have I? There’s a brand new story about Tracy called
Starring Tracy Beaker
which is all about Tracy’s Christmas when she’s still living in the Children’s Home. Maybe there’ll be more Tracy Beaker books in the future. Tracy as a teenager? Tracy falls in love? Tracy Beaker, young mum? Tracy Beaker, famous writer, actress, television star? Let’s wait and see!
No Home
YOU KNOW THAT
old film they always show on the telly at Christmas,
The Wizard of Oz
? I love it, especially the Wicked Witch of the West with her cackle and her green face and all her special flying monkeys. I’d give anything to have a wicked winged monkey as an evil little pet. It could whiz through the sky, flapping its wings and sniffing the air for that awful stale instant-coffee-and-talcum-powder
teacher
smell and then it would s-w-o-o-p straight onto Mrs Vomit Bagley and carry her away screaming.
That’ll show her. I’ve always been absolutely Tip Top at writing stories, but since I’ve been at this stupid new school Mrs V.B. just puts ‘
Disgracefully untidy work, Tracy
’ and ‘
Check your spellings!
’ Last week we had to write a story about ‘Night-time’ and I thought it an unusually cool subject so I wrote eight and a half pages about this girl out late at night and it’s seriously spooky and then this crazy guy jumps out at her and almost murders her but she escapes by jumping in the river and then she swims right into this bloated corpse and
then
when she staggers onto the bank there’s this strange flickering light coming from the nearby graveyard and it’s an evil occult sect wanting to sacrifice an innocent young girl and she’s
just
what they’re looking for . . .
It’s a truly GREAT story, better than any that Cam could write. (I’ll tell you about Cam in a minute.) I’m sure it’s practically good enough to get published. I typed it out on Cam’s computer so it looked ever so neat and the spellcheck took care of all the spellings so I was all prepared for Mrs V.B. to bust a gut
and
write: ‘
Very very very good indeed, Tracy. 10 out of 10 and Triple Gold Star and I’ll buy you a tube of Smarties at playtime
.’
Do you know what she really wrote? ‘
You’ve tried hard, Tracy, but this is a very rambling story. You also have a very warped imagination!
’
I looked up ‘warp’ in the dictionary she’s always recommending and it means ‘to twist out of shape’. That’s spot on. I’d like to warp Mrs Vomit Bagley, twisting and twisting, until her eyes pop and her arms and legs are wrapped right round her great big bum. That’s another thing. Whenever I write the weeniest babiest little rude word Mrs V.B. goes bananas. I don’t know what she’d do if I used
really
bad words like **** and **** and ****** (censored!!).
I looked up ‘ramble’ too. I liked what it said: ‘To stroll about freely, as for relaxation, with no particular direction’. So that’s
exactly
what I did today, instead of staying at boring old school. I bunked off and strolled round the town freely, as relaxed as anything. I had a little potter in Paperchase and bought this big
fat
purple notebook with my pocket money. I’m going to write all my mega-manic ultra-scary stories in it, as warped and as rambly as I can make them. And I’ll write
my
story too. I’ve written all about myself before in
The Story of Tracy Beaker
. So this can be
The Story of Tracy Beaker Two
or
Find Out What Happens Next to the Brave and Brilliant Tracy Beaker
or
Further Fabulous Adventures of the Tremendous Terrific Tracy Beaker
or
Read More About the Truly Terrible Tracy Beaker, Even More Wicked Than the Wicked Witch of the West
.