My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (15 page)

“I'm disappointed in you, Jack,” she shouts as I follow the randoms down into the playground. I look around a bit, pretending I'm trying to work out who's being shouted at. A little leaf out of Chris Yates's book. On a smaller scale.

I've still got ten minutes left before it's time for registration, so I make my way round the back of the old building and head down toward the bins, looking for Cyrus. I'm in luck. He's there with the same crowd as yesterday, doing the same weird thing in the circle with the phones. Cyrus is all caught up in it, jerking about and making strange noises, so I take the opportunity to get as close to him as I can, then just stand and wait. They all do that jerking thing for what seems like ages, then one of them shouts, “Bam it!” and they stop for a minute and regroup.

I take my chance.

“Cyrus,” I say.

He turns round and looks at me, then shakes his head.

“Get lost!” he says.

“I wanted to apologize for yesterday,” I tell him.

“Good for you. I don't want to know.”

He fiddles with his phone, then lifts it back up to where the others are holding theirs. I move even closer to him and speak more quietly.

“I think I've thought up a way to get at Chris Yates,” I say. “Risk free.”

He doesn't seem to respond at first, though he pulls his phone back a bit. I'm starting to get to him, but he's trying not to show it.

“Can we meet up at lunchtime to talk about it?” I ask, and he doesn't say no. He lifts his phone up close to his face and pretends he's doing something with it again. Then he speaks without turning round to look at me.

“Where?” he says.

“Somewhere quiet,” I say. “Round behind the games hall?”

“When?” he asks.

“Half twelve? Something like that?”

“Be there,” he tells me, and then he gets fully involved in the phone madness again. I walk away and leave them to it.

I certainly will be there.

During the morning break, after a mind-numbing double of maths, I track down Chris Yates and tell him my cousin Harry is ready to stand in for him. Yatesy is on his own down near the art classes, staring at a broken calculator that's lying in the grass, and drawing it in his notebook.

“When's it going to happen?” he asks, and I tell him I just need to square it with Cyrus first. Then I decide to chance my arm and see if I can fix a date for the Drew Thornton session.

“How about this weekend?” I ask him. “Can you do it on Saturday?”

“We'll see,” Yatesy says. “Talk to me when your cousin's done his thing.”

“But you'll be in the clear by the weekend,” I tell him. “I can guarantee it. Let's set it up now.”

He puts a few more lines in his notebook and then holds it out at arm's length. It's a pretty good drawing.

“Cyrus wants blood,” he says. “You'll have trouble with him. All he cares about is seeing me expelled.”

I act surprised, as if I didn't know anything about it, and Yatesy nods.

“The bitch is angry,” he says.

He keeps scribbling away, rubbing things out and drawing them back in, and I decide to see if I can get any information that will help me get round Cyrus. Even just a kilobyte.

“What was the fight about, anyway?” I ask. “What started it?”

“Have you ever spoken to him?” Yatesy says.

I nod. “Just once.”

“That's enough,” he says. “If you've spoken to him once, you know what it was about.”

Fair point.

“Just that?” I say. “Nothing else?”

Yatesy nods. “Just that. And he kept going on about me being a bohemian. As if it was an insult or something. Did my head in.”

“What's a bohemian?” I say, and Yatesy screws his face up.

“You know,” he says. “Like an artist. Somebody who doesn't buy into the bullshit. A freethinker.”

I decide he probably means somebody who paints his mum and dad naked without thinking it's weird, and then I pretend I'd known what it meant all along but I'd just forgotten.

“That,” I say. “He thinks that's an insult?”

Yatesy nods.

“I'll find a way round him,” I say. “Don't worry about it.”

“Good luck,” he says, and he draws some grass round about the calculator. Then he rubs it out again.

“So how about Saturday?” I ask.

“Maybe,” he says. “I need to wait till your cousin's been to Bailey. That's just how it is, Jackdaw.”

I can see I'm not going to get any further. I know when I'm wasting my time. I stand watching him drawing for a bit longer, then wander off and leave him to it.

After that, it's Sergeant Monahan for the rest of the morning. There's a bright spot when he calls Wendy Gillis out to the front of the class to elevate the book, and she refuses to do it.

“My brother says there's a European directive against it,” she tells him. “You can't make us do that anymore.”

The tops of Monahan's ears go red, and he stands pressing his hands down on his desk. He caught Wendy watching a clip of a moron eating a spider on her phone, when we were supposed to be listening to his analog upload about the first plane to drop a bomb or something, and he's not happy.

“Perhaps we should go and ask the headmaster if your brother's right, then,” the Sergeant says. “He's bound to know all about it.”

He walks over to the door and opens it, holding it for Wendy to go first. She stands without moving by the side of her desk, where she's been since the Sergeant shouted, “On your feet!” at the start of the proceedings.

“Shall we?” the Sergeant asks. “I'm sure the rest of the class is keen to know if Mr. Bailey would agree with your brother too.”

Wendy still doesn't move, and the Sergeant lets the door fall shut. He goes to his shelf and brings down the weighty volume, then puts it on his desk. Wendy looks at one of her mad friends for a while, then at another one. They both pretend they don't really know her, and she sighs and stomps out to the front of the class, where she picks the book up and gets started on the usual business with it.

The rest of the lesson is a gigasnore. Monahan continues to Bluetooth his nonsense about bombs and planes and general destruction, and the lack of sleep from the night before starts to catch up with me. A couple of times I see the big orange shape and hear the dream voices, and I have to take serious measures to make sure I don't pass out. I sneak my phone from my pocket and switch it on underneath the desk, to see if anything has come in from my dad. Being caught using my phone would probably get me a longer stint with the book than falling asleep in class, but I have more control over whether Monahan catches me with the phone or not, and I know the sense of danger will keep me awake. I watch Monahan now as if I'm listening to every word he says, and just glance at the phone when I'm absolutely sure his attention is engaged elsewhere.

The phone vibrates almost immediately, but it's a good five minutes before I get the chance to look at what's come in. When I do, I'm pleased to see my dad's taking the whole situation relatively calmly.

“That arse-biscuit!” his text says. “I'll kill him. If your mum doesn't kill me first.”

I do all I can not to laugh, and then I go back to staring at the Sergeant.

A few minutes later, the phone vibrates again and a new text comes in. This time it's almost fifteen minutes before I can even glance at it. Monahan appears to have picked me out as his star pupil for this lesson, probably because I'm the only person who's actually looking at him, and he starts delivering most of his pitch exclusively to me. It's only when Grant Fraser's earphone jack slips out of the socket on his phone, and the tiny speaker starts blasting out the crappy music he's been listening to, that Monahan finally turns his attention to other matters and I'm free to read my dad's latest missive.

“I need one of your schemes, pal,” it says. “Help me out here. What can I do to fix things with your mum?”

Luckily, the Sergeant is going all out on this Grant Fraser thing, and I even have time to reply. Wendy gets sent back to her seat, still muttering about the European Parliament, and Grant steps into the spotlight.

“I'll see what I can do,” I write, then send it and turn the phone off. I don't have the heart to tell him that even my formidable talents can't help him out of this one. What could he possibly say to fix it with Mum?

“I slipped on a patch of spilt whiskey and fell into arranging the interview”?

Or, “I pressed the wrong button when I was trying to set up a meeting for him at university”?

He's dug his own grave this time. Plus, all my RAM is given over to working on what I'm going to say to Cyrus. I don't have anything left to spare.

By the time the Sergeant resumes business again, I'm wide awake. With the phone switched off, I don't need to be looking at him anymore, and I soon manage to zone out his stream of data about Spitfires and doodlebugs and mushroom clouds and get down to thinking about what really matters: letting that wave of good luck carry me on to a victory with Cyrus.

When I arrive at the games hall, Cyrus is already waiting for me, just him on his own. He's eating something soggy out of a paper bag, and he holds it up to me as I approach.

I peer inside the bag. It looks awful.

“What's that?” I ask him.

“Macaroni and cheese,” he says. “Made it in hospitality.”

He asks me if I want any, but I tell him I'm not hungry, even though I'm really starving.

“Why's it in a bag?” I ask him.

“Forgot my Tupperware,” he says. “Benson wouldn't lend me a tub. Silly old cow.”

We sit down on the grass, over by the fence, and he pushes another handful of the yellow stuff into his face. It smells terrible. I didn't know it was possible to feel sick and starving at the same time, until now.

“So how do we get Yatesy?” Cyrus says. Straight in. “This better be good. I'm missing Boodle for this.”

“What's Boodle?” I ask him, and instantly wish I hadn't. It turns out Boodle is the stupid phone game he's always playing, and he launches into a long description of all its pathetic rules and a list of his scores. Then, just when I think I'm about to pass out, he tells me I'm wasting too much of his time, and that he's only here to talk about my plan.

“So what is it?” he says. “What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to make you tell Bailey you fought Harry, rather than Yatesy,” I think to myself. “I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet, but it'll happen.”

I just need the right bit of information.

“Here's what worries me,” I tell him then. “I'm scared the plan I've got at the moment might let Yatesy off too lightly. I have to make sure I get him as badly as he got you.”

And I ask him exactly what Yatesy did to him.

“He ruined my life,” Cyrus says. “Totally.”

It's not exactly the windfall I'm looking for.

“I thought you just got a three-day suspension,” I say, and he nods.

“I did,” he says, “but that was only the start of it.”

And he begins unleashing the good stuff. It turns out his parents have really gone to town on him. He's been grounded since then until the exams are over, and he's not allowed to do anything he wants to do, even at home. His dad drops him off at the gate in the morning and picks him up again as soon as the bell rings for the end of the day. They've even banned him from going online except for homework, and his dad confiscated his Xbox away in the garage.

“I want Yatesy to pay for all of that,” Cyrus says. “And . . . some other stuff. Plus, he's a bohemian.”

“I hate bohemians,” I assure him. “They freak me out.”

“They're disgusting,” Cyrus says. “They undermine the whole fabric of society.”

I decide I should have looked into this whole bohemian thing a bit more. I'm starting to get out of my depth, so I turn the conversation back to the matter in hand.

“I've got a new idea forming,” I tell Cyrus, and he looks at me eagerly. “What was that you said about some other things, though? What things were they?”

He pokes about in his bag for a minute. “It doesn't matter,” he says. The bag is starting to tear, down near the bottom, where it's all wet. Bits of it are staying stuck to the food now too, but he doesn't seem to notice.

“I have to know the whole story,” I tell him. “We have to get Yatesy for everything. We can't let him get anything over on you.”

Cyrus sighs. He tears the top part of the bag away, and he's left with just a horrible mushy mess of paper and yellow gunk in his hands. He keeps on eating it, though.

“My parents won't let me go to the school dance,” he says quietly, and keeps his eyes on the gunk.

“You want to go to that?” I ask him. “Really?”

He nods, still looking down. “I'm meant to go with Amy Gilchrist,” he says. “She said she'd go with me weeks ago. But now she's going with Yinka instead if I can't make it.”

I almost just blurt out what I'm thinking. “Amy Gilchrist? Really? You want to go to the school dance with her?” Amy Gilchrist only comes second on the weirdo scale to Elsie Green. She has this strange kind of smile, and she's always making this weird noise in class when everything's quiet. It just seems to come out on its own. But then I remember Cyrus is pretty much in that same category of weird himself, and I stop myself saying any of it just in time.

“That's harsh,” I say instead, and the wheels start to turn. “How long have you been after Amy for?”

“Forever,” Cyrus says. “I wish I could kill Yatesy. I really do.”

Something is starting to happen. My fingers are tingling, and my synapses are firing. All my binary data is starting to flow. I sit quietly for a minute and let it happen, trying not to watch Cyrus licking the last of the gunk off his fingers, then rubbing his hands on the grass, then licking his fingers again.