Lifted by Hilary Freeman Page B

the counter and shook his head at me. I remember that he looked sad, not angry. ‘Why did you steal from me, my friend?’
    I shrugged. I couldn’t answer.
    Mr Shah made me stand behind the counter with him while he called my parents. I gazed down at the floor, my chin resting on my chest, hoping it would make me invisible.
    Mum and Dad arrived within minutes. I remember that they couldn’t look me in the eye and I recall hearing profuse apologies – ‘So sorry, Mr Shah, it will never happen again, we’ll make sure of it, we’re so terribly sorry …’ –before I was made to stutter ‘Sorry’ too, and then Dad grasped my hand and marched me home. I sobbed all the way. I wasn’t allowed any sweets for a month and my independent outings were curtailed for several more. But the look of disappointment on my parents’ faces, the sense that I’d failed them, that was worse than any punishment.
    I didn’t set off that day intending to shoplift. It wasn’t something I’d even imagined doing before. I thought people stole because they needed to, or because they were bad people, not because they felt like it. I would have perfectly happy with the amount of sweets I could afford, just as I had been every other Sunday. And there was no reason why I couldn’t have chosen the Wispa bar, instead of the caramel bar or the other items I selected and paid for. Thinking about it now, if I’d really wanted that Wispa bar as well, and didn’t have the money for it, Mr Shah would probably have let me have it. I could have dropped the money in another day.
    So why did I do it? Good question. And why was it another six years before I did it again?
    Posted by Robyn Hood at 3:05 PM
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Chapter 10
    ‘Excuse me, miss …’
    It was almost bound to happen sooner or later, and Ruby knew that, but she’d never truly believed it would happen to her. She had taken the shoplifting statistics she’d read somewhere on the web too literally, because they made her feel more secure. Some boffin had sat down with a calculator and worked out that a shoplifter only gets caught once in forty-eight trips. But that didn’t mean that Ruby could go out shoplifting forty-seven times and get away scot-free. She might have got caught the very first time she did it, or it could have happened on the seventh, tenth or one-hundredth trip. Then again, if she’d been really, really lucky, it might never have happened to her at all.
    There had been a few near-misses, notably the time Noah had rescued her in Kelly’s, and as a result she hadbecome overconfident, too reliant on the belief that fate would always step in and pull her out of trouble at the last moment. The truth was, the nearer Ruby came to getting caught, the greater the thrill of her shoplifting expeditions. The more she shoplifted, the easier it seemed to her and the feeling that she’d got away with it yet again gave the experience an extra frisson of excitement, making the high she craved that little bit more intense. Half-consciously, she had started to take greater risks, choosing shops where the security was tighter, or where she looked conspicuous. And that was her downfall on the day she did get caught, at Zenda, an upmarket shop that sold designer labels and own brand clothes to young businesswomen who wanted to look both smart and fashionable.
    The instant she walked into the store, the security guard clocked her. She was very obviously too young and too fresh-faced to be a businesswoman with a platinum credit card and a taste for well-cut suits. And she was either extremely stupid, or careless, or reckless – he couldn’t decide which – because her coat was undone, revealing the local school’s uniform. He recognised it because his elder daughter had gone there, a few years ago. Years of experience had taught him there were only two reasons why girls in school uniform came into Zenda. Either they were dragged there by their mothers, or