17) A chapter from later in the book
(but you can read it first if you like)

'Gravity works like a giant magnet,' explained the physicist, a guest on the popular TV show, 'Famous People'. 'It pulls everything towards the centre of the earth.'

'So why not me?' asked the other guest, a small, dark-haired girl who appeared to be suspended upside down from the studio ceiling.

'Repeated exposure to electromagnetic forces, along with the reverse Gs every time the car descended, seem to have de-gravitised you.'

Martin Beam, host of the show, interrupted. 'If she was simply de-gravitised, wouldn't she weigh nothing? I mean, look at her,' - he jerked his thumb upwards - 'she weighs less than nothing!'

Both men peered up at the girl on the ceiling.

'Since gravity is no longer holding her down,' explained the physicist, 'the centrifugal forces caused by the earth's rotation are actually pushing her away from its centre. So instead of falling down, she falls up!'

'Can she be fixed?' asked Martin Beam.

'I don't know,' the physicist admitted. 'This is the very first case of it ever recorded. You've made history, Miss...um...'

'Hu,' said the upside-down girl.

'Who?'

'That's right.'

The physicist looked puzzled.

'H-U,' she spelled.

'Bless you!' he said.

The upside-down girl rolled her eyes towards the floor. 'I was spelling it.'

'Spelling what?' he asked.

'Her name,' said Martin Beam.

'What is it?' asked the physicist.

'Hu.'

The physicist pointed upwards. 'Her.'

1) The real start of the book (or: Brittany's dream)

Brittany's kindergarten class were asked to draw pictures of themselves as grown-ups. The other children drew veterinarians, firefighters, flight attendants and astronauts; Brittany drew a circle of reporters and photographers all crowded round a slim, dark-haired woman with a huge, red-crayon smile.

'Which one is you?' asked the teacher.

'The lady in the middle.'

'Look everybody!' Mrs Donato said as she hung Brittany's drawing alongside the others on the classroom wall. 'Brittany is going to be a film star.'

'No, I'm not,' said Brittany.

'A singer?'

Brittany shook her head.

'A model?'

'Nope.'

Mrs Donato smiled. 'I give up. What are you going to be, Brittany?'

'Famous!'

That was her dream. One day the whole world would know the name 'Brittany Hu'.

2) Brittany who? (or: Twenty ways not to become famous)

It had seemed simple enough when she was four. But as she grew older, Brittany came to realise that becoming famous was tricky. It wasn't like other careers - there weren't any courses you could study or training you could do to make you famous. In fact, if you wanted to be famous you had to do something else first - usually something sporty or artistic - and be really, really good at it. Or you could become Prime Minister, fly to the moon, or make an important discovery such as a new comet or the cure for a disease.

Over the next few years Brittany tried all sorts of things: oil painting, ballet, BMX racing, even singing (until her mother put a limit on how long she could stay in the shower).

She took up long-distance swimming but gave it up after swallowing a jellyfish.

She came 2852nd in a Fun Run.

She learned the recorder, the piano, she took violin lessons. She even practised playing her grandfather's bagpipes every day after school (until Mr Rankin, next door, offered her $2 a day to stop).

She asked her little brother to teach her chess, but he kept beating her.

She joined a pony club and broke her collarbone.

She went in a karate competition and dislocated her little finger.

She had a go at pole vaulting, but instead of landing on the inflatable mattress she'd set up on the lawn, Brittany sailed across the side fence and dented Mr Rankin's brand new Harley Davidson motorcycle. (It dented her shoulder.)

During one of her stays in hospital, Brittany wrote a novel that filled two whole exercise books. One of the friendly nurses posted it off to a publisher for her. The publisher sent it back two weeks later with a note to Brittany saying she had lovely handwriting, but a man called Lewis Carroll had already written a book all about Alice's adventures in Wonderland. (Can't publishers read? In Brittany's book it was Downunderland!)

She tried out for Dorothy in her school's production of The Wizard of Oz and was given the part of a munchkin.

She campaigned to be school captain but nobody - not even Morgan Barker, her best friend - voted for her.

She wrote to NASA about becoming the first kid in space and they wrote back and said 'wait till you grow up'. ('How can I be the first kid in space when I'm grown up?' she wondered.)

She lost hours of sleep searching the night sky but the only comet she discovered turned out to be a moth having a snooze on the other end of the telescope.

She nearly made herself throw up experimenting with horrible-tasting ways of getting rid of those little bumps on your tongue.

Nothing worked. Here she was almost starting high school and people still said, 'Brittany who?'

3) Simple!

Amazingly, it was her brother who provided the answer. Lukas was nine and a bit of a pain, but for her birthday that year he gave Brittany the book that was to change her life. As soon as she opened it, Brittany knew how she was going to become famous.

She would set a new World Record!

The book was the McGuinness Book of Records and it was full of people who had become famous for doing really kooky things.

A Scotsman, for example, had walked right around the British Isles backwards. In Holland a woman had knitted a pair of gloves with 488 fingers. And a boy in Canada had taken 215 consecutive rides on a roller-coaster.

Brittany wondered how many times the Scotsman had tripped over. She tried to estimate how long it took the person the Dutch woman had knitted the gloves for to paint their fingernails. But it was the roller-coaster record that really interested her. Brittany's family lived right near the centre of Sydilly, only a few kilometres from Loony Park, the biggest fun park in the country. All she had to do was take 216 consecutive rides on the Loony Park roller-coaster and she would be famous. Simple!

4) Well, not quite so simple

On the Saturday after her birthday, Brittany and her brother caught the bus to Loony Park. She took Lukas along as her Official Witness. If you were setting a World Record, it said in the book, you had to have someone watching. To make sure you didn't cheat, Brittany supposed. And to count how many times you did whatever it was you were doing, or to time how long you did it for.

Lukas had a pad and a pen to mark down the number of rides she took. He'd brought along his camera as well, so there would be photographic evidence of her record-breaking performance.

'A photo of you chucking up!' he said gleefully.

'I'm not going to chuck,' said Brittany. She hoped not, anyway. (And had skipped breakfast, just in case.) 'But maybe you'd better take the photo at the start - before my hair gets messed up.'

Lukas poked the camera in her face. 'Say cheese...'

'Not yet, Lu--!'

Flash!

'What did you do that for?' she asked crossly. 'We aren't even there yet!'

Lukas grinned. 'If you're going to be famous, you'll have to get used to it.'

Brittany tried to catch her reflection in the bus's window. 'How do I look?'

'Sort of green.'

It was just hunger, Brittany told herself. She should have had breakfast. She should have...stayed in bed!

5) Let's kick but

ROLLER-COASTER CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS

Brittany breathed a secret sigh of relief. 'What a shame! Oh well, I suppose we can come back another time.'

Lukas took a photo of the sign. 'Let's check out the other rides.'

'I'm not in the mood.'

'Don't you want to break a World Record?'

'Of course I do. But I've got to wait till they fix the roller-coaster, don't I.'

Her brother turned his camera on a nearby ride. 'The merry-go-round's still working.'

'So?' said Brittany.

'So you could set a new merry-go-round record.'

She hated having to admit it, but: 'Lukas, you're brilliant!'

Ripping open her backpack, Brittany dragged out the McGuinness Book of Records. 'M' for Merry-go-round... Bummer! A girl in Turkey had ridden one non-stop for three days. Three whole days! Loony Park was only open from ten in the morning until midnight, so breaking that particular record was impossible.

But there were lots of other rides at Loony Park...

They looked up Ghost train and discovered that a Frenchman had stayed on one for 42 hours.

What about the Octopus? 502 consecutive rides. (At three minutes a ride, with a minute for people to get on and off, that worked out to 33 hours.)

Ferris wheel - 51 hours.

Stingray - 800 rides (38 hours).

Dodgem cars - 2 days, 3 hours and 44 minutes.

Mad Mouse - 466 rides (23 hours).

'It's impossible!' Brittany said finally. 'We'd have to stay here for the whole weekend to break any of these records.'

'What about the Gravity Buster?' Lukas asked.

Brittany took a deep, slow breath. The Gravity Buster was the newest and scariest ride at Loony Park. She had never been on it. It was a big, open-topped car that shot up the side of a 500-metre tower on a set of magnetic rails. The sign said it pulled a force of 5 G, which meant the car accelerated up the tower so fast that on the way up you weighed five times what you normally did (Brittany would weigh nearly 200 kilograms!). When it was nearly at the top, it slowed right down and stopped. But only for a moment - after about half a second, it plunged back down, backwards, at minus 5 G!

Just thinking about it was enough to make Brittany's stomach churn. Nervously, she looked up 'G' in the McGuinness Book of Records. Glass balancing, Gobstopper spitting, Gumboot throwing. There was definitely no Gravity Buster.

'Looks like we're in business!' said Lukas.

'How do you figure that out?' Brittany asked. 'There isn't a record for the Gravity Buster.'

'So start a new one!'

'I don't think you can do that.'

Lukas snatched the book away from her and flipped through to the back page. 'Look!' he pointed.

There was a special form for starting new records.

'Description of activity,' it said at the top. Using the pen he had brought along to keep a tally of her roller-coaster rides, Lukas wrote:

Gravitty buster

'That's too many Ts,' Brittany told him.

He scratched out one of them. Gravitty buser. 'Let's kick butt!'

Brittany was staring at what he'd written. 'Lukas, you're hopeless! It's the double T that's the problem.'

'Let's kick but,' he said.