My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (4 page)

“You!” she splutters.

“Hi,” I say, but she doesn't reply. She stacks all her cutlery and lunch debris onto her tray and starts getting to her feet. I can tell I've only got a few seconds to save things, and I panic. A line I came across earlier, flipping through her book, suddenly appears in the front bit of my brain, and before I even really know what's happening I hear it coming out of my mouth.

“I come on an errand . . .” I tell her. Somehow, this seems to slow her down. She's still up on her feet, but her hands pause at the side of the tray and she doesn't walk away.

“Sent by whom?” she asks me.

I struggle. Another line pops into my head, but I'm not even sure where this one came from. I don't know whether it's from the book or not.

“By the king . . .” I say.

Not good.

“What the
hell
are you talking about?” she says. “Are you mental?”

And there it is: I've been called mental by Elsie Green. Me. By her. It doesn't really bear thinking about. Maybe if I hadn't been in such a panic, I would just have said Drew Thornton, and maybe I could have woven something out of that. I try one last desperate line of attack. Off with the sticking plaster.

“I've just come to apologize, Elsie,” I say. “That's all. I really didn't mean to mess up your plans that time. And I've brought you a present.”

I take the book out of its bag and lay it down on the table beside her tray.

“Very nice,” she says, disinterestedly. “Whatever you're after, forget it.”

“I'm not after anything,” I tell her. “Just trying to make amends.” I reach out and flip the pages of the book. When it comes to the drawing that looks like her, I let it fall open and move my hand about on it, trying to attract her attention. It kind of works.

“What is this, anyway?” she asks, and she sits down and picks it up. She turns back and forward through the thing, then closes it and looks at the back.

“Actually,” she says, “this
is
very nice. Whose is this?”

“Yours,” I say. “If you want it.”

She looks at me suspiciously. “You ruined five months of my life,” she says. “That's not easy to forgive.”

I nod.

“I know,” I say. “But it was a total accident. I had a scheme going with the bread rolls, and I had no idea you were going to be there chatting up Stoogey. It was just bad timing.”

She looks at me, appalled. “I was
not
chatting
anyone
up,” she says. “Especially not Stephen. How dare you suggest such a thing?”

I apologize.

“My mistake,” I say. “That's what everybody said was going on. What was really happening?”

She straightens up and looks at the top of my head. “I was attempting to woo him,” she says. “I'd been working on it since the end of the Easter holidays. Then, in the space of ten minutes . . .” She stops, apparently unable to continue. She clenches her teeth, and a strange little noise comes out.

“I feel your pain,” I tell her, with no real idea what I'm saying anymore. I dig deep and come up with nothing. Then I give myself a sharp punch on the back of the head, in the hope it'll knock something into the front. It works.

“But maybe if none of that had happened, you'd never have found out how you feel about Drew,” I say, and ever so slightly I think I see her teeth begin to unclench. She opens the book up again and has another look through it.

“This is really mine?” she asks.

“If you want it,” I say.

“‘How many oceans
. . . 
?'”
she reads. Then she looks up in a strange trance and finally fixes her gaze on poor, unfortunate Drew. “I'll take it,” she says, and I hand her the paper bag to wrap it up in.

That afternoon, sitting in Baldy Baine's science class again, I feel kind of drained. It might just be the extra work my digestive system is having to do to cope with the soggy pie, but I get the feeling it's more to do with the time I spent in Greensleeves's company. It makes me wonder if I really could work on my idea with her, for the weeks or even months it might take. I might end up dead. I'm so tired in class, I even find myself listening to some of what Baldy Baine is saying for a while. Not that I understand any of it, but his voice is kind of soothing. Like a boring radio program droning away in the corner. It quiets down my head and stops me thinking. Gives my circuit boards a rest. Up until then, I'd been constantly going over the thing Greensleeves said to me before I got on her good side, the bit where she asked me what I was after. She was definitely on to me at that point, and I know things are going to be double hard when she finds out I really am after something. So listening to Baine chattering away about acceleration or something stops me driving myself a bit bampot and gets me back on my feet again.

Halfway through the lesson, I can really feel my buzz returning, and I start to feel good about how it went with Elsie and the book. I realize it's a case of mission accomplished. And then I have a fizzer. There must be something special going on in Baldy Baine's classroom, I think, some kind of hypercharged atmosphere or something because of all the experiments he does in here. Whatever it is, that's definitely the place where I'm connecting with the Big Ones at the moment. And this One is huge. I'm just listening to him cracking wise about a feather falling in outer space when I see my way clear to how I can convince Elsie to make generous with her Objective-C skills. After that, I can't pretend I listen to Baldy Baine much more. My leg's bouncing and I'm watching the clock, looking for it to perform some of those properties of acceleration Baine had been talking about earlier. It seems to be going in more for the opposite thing. The immovable force meeting the unsomethingable something.

But finally it gets there, and I'm up out of my seat before Baine has even reached the end of his “dismissed.” I streak out like Tom Murdoch did during our first-ever fire drill, letting no woman or child stand in my way.

Elsie Green isn't difficult to find in the school corridors. All you have to do is follow the trail of giggling first-years who've already passed her, and let them lead you all the way to the source. The fresher the laughter, the closer you're getting. I hunt around in the new block, then the old one, till I find what I'm looking for, and I follow the laughter up the stairs to the second floor. It doesn't take me long to spot her. She's passing the language labs, and I turn and run back down the stairs again so I can come up the middle staircase and make it look as if I've bumped into her by accident. I'm kind of breathless by the time I get there, but I manage it and meet her just as she reaches the top of the stairs.

“Hi, Elsie,” I say, all kind of surprised, but she just sort of frowns.

“What do you want?” she asks me, not particularly warmly considering the present I gave her earlier.

“I'm just saying hello,” I say, and she looks at me suspiciously again. “What have you got next?” I ask her.

“Double Latin,” she says.

By then I'm already walking beside her, not quite sure what classrooms are along in this direction, and not quite sure what to say if she asks me where I'm going. She doesn't, though. She doesn't seem to care where I'm going.

I watch some of the younger kids staring at her as we walk, but she's oblivious to their attention. And to the laughter that starts as soon as she's passed.

“By the way,” I say, as if it's just suddenly occurred to me, “you know what you were saying about Drew Thornton at lunchtime?”

She turns to look at me with narrowed eyes. It's pretty much the first time she's turned to look at me since I accosted her, so I take it as a good sign.

“How can you even dare to speak his name?” she asks me. “You should be struck dumb.”

“Yes,” I say, taking a lesson from the bookshop bampot. It doesn't faze her the way it fazed me, though. I'm not even sure she's noticed I spoke. “Anyway,” I continue, “were you serious about what you said?”

She does the narrowed eyes again. “I'm always serious,” she says. She's right. Seriously mental. “Especially when I'm talking about Drew.”

I nod.

“Good to know,” I say. “So you meant it?”

“Meant what? That he makes me want to live a better life?”

“Not that,” I say. “When you said you'd give anything to . . . to see him . . . I forget exactly how you put it.”

“Is this one of your schemes?” she asks me, and I shake my head. She screws her face up as if she's just sucked on a lemon. “What, exactly, are you after?”

We've reached her classroom by then. She stops walking and turns to face me close to the open door. She looks inside the room and then back at me.

“I just thought I might be able to help you,” I say, “now that we're friends.”

“Friends?”

“Well, now that we're on speaking terms.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she says. “Help me to do what?”

“To see Drew,” I say. “To see him . . . unrobed.” And I can tell I've finally got her interest. Her ears go kind of red, and a little muscle starts twitching at the side of her eye.

“Really?” she says.

“If you want.”

She covers her mouth with her hand. A couple of randoms squeeze past us to get into the classroom, then start laughing when they're in there.

“But what would you want in return?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “Well, nothing much. Definitely not twenty years of your life. Maybe you could, I don't know, do a little bit of programming for me or something. A bit of Objective-C.”

She waves her hand as if to say that means nothing, and we stand and look at each other. My heart suddenly starts racing. It's going to happen. The idea is going to fly. In my delirium I even notice that she's quite pretty, when you just look at her and don't see all the medieval finery.

“No tricks, though,” she says. “No photographs of him or videos or drawings or glimpses through a window. He has to be there. In the room. And so do I.”

I nod.

“Okay,” I say. “And the programming . . .”

“After it happens,” Elsie says. “If you make this happen and it isn't a scam, I'll program whatever you want.”

“Elsie!” her teacher shouts from inside the classroom. “Would you do us the honor of joining the class? Please come inside and close the door.”

Greensleeves rolls her eyes, and I tell her it'll happen. No question. I turn to watch a bunch of first-year girls giggling their way toward us, and when I turn back she's gone. She's disappeared into the class and the door's been closed.

“Is she your girlfriend?” a girl with a squeaky voice asks me, and I shake my head.

“She's weird,” another one says.

“I think she
is
your girlfriend,” the squeaky one tells me, and they all crease up, but I don't really care. I'm untouchable. I'm flexing my wings. Getting ready to fly.

For once, there's no threat of the Regular Madness at home tonight. I go downstairs prepared for it, but it turns out Mum's working late, and it's just me and Dad for dinner. Unfortunately, that clears a space for an entirely new form of madness I haven't experienced before, and it starts with what we're having to eat.

“That all right for you?” Dad asks as he puts my plate down in front of me. It turns out to be cold pizza and peas. Is that a thing? I'm not sure if the pizza had been warm and just got cold sitting on the plate or if he didn't cook it enough in the first place. The peas are boiling hot. So hot I get a blister on my tongue with the first mouthful. He's spilled quite a lot of pea water onto the plate as well, so the pizza has the added attraction of being all soggy as well as cold.

“Pizza and peas,” he explains as he sits down at his own spot.

“Is that a thing?” I ask him.

“It is now,” he says.

The radio is playing very loudly. That's the only way he can hear it, but he doesn't seem to have much interest in listening to it anyway. He seems much more intent on “bonding” with me, now that it's just the two of us.

“I'll have a word with Frank Carberry about you in the morning,” he says, obviously quite a fan of cold pizza, judging by the way he's wolfing it down. “Don't tell your mum, though. There's bound to be something for you at the factory. Bound to be. Don't get yourself too worked up about those exams.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Still struggling with them?” he asks.

“I haven't had any yet,” I tell him. “I'll probably be okay.”

“Not if you're anything like me,” he says. “If you're anything like me, it'll be a bloody disaster. Don't worry about it, though. You'll do fine in with us. You'll love it.”

“I think it might be too hot for me,” I say.

“No,” he says. “It won't. It's fine.”

“But what about in summer? I don't think I can take that. And the noise. How do you put up with the noise?”

“What noise?” he asks. “There isn't any noise.”

“The noise from the machines,” I say, and he shakes his head.

“You won't notice that,” he assures me. “You go deaf after the first week. That's another plus point. The sooner you get deaf, the sooner you get your compensation payment—it's a nice bonus on top of your first year's wages.”

It might come in handy during conversations like this, too, I think to myself. I have a shot at dealing with some of the pizza and peas. I don't get very far, but the attempt convinces me that it's definitely not a thing.

“So what do you think?” Dad says. “Will I talk to Frank in the morning?”

“Leave it for a week or two,” I say.