My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (19 page)

“I'm busy,” I tell her. “Find me at lunchtime. In the dining hall.”

She shakes her head. “It has to be now,” she says. “This is when we need to talk about it.”

Without me having heard a sound—a single footstep, or even the sound of somebody breathing—I realize the library lady has suddenly appeared beside my table, and she's holding a finger up to her lips.

“There's no talking in the library,” she says, hardly even talking herself. “I'm afraid it's not allowed.”

“Why?” Kirsty asks. “There's no one else here.”

“You're both here,” the library lady explains, “and the library is a place for studying. Not for talking.”

I start to realize that the library lady is my kind of person, and I have this vision of her coming into Uncle Ray's place and sorting out all the commotion for me there, until it's as quiet as the library. I wonder if she would do that.

“I'm sorry,” I tell her. “We're finished talking now. I'll get back to my essay.”

“No you won't,” Kirsty says. “And we're not finished talking. We haven't even started yet.”

“Then you'll have to do it elsewhere,” the library lady says.

“No we won't,” Kirsty tells her. “It's a free country.” But I've already gathered all my stuff together and got up from the table.

“Sorry,” I tell the library lady again. “I'll come back later.”

“Thank you,” she says.

But Kirsty stays where she is for a while, asking the library lady if she wishes this was China, and if she wishes we lived under a totalitarian regime. Then eventually she gives it a rest and comes out into the corridor behind me.

Kirsty Wallace is pretty strange. She always wears kind of, like, soldier clothes to school, and she has this rope hair she never washes. Sometimes her soldier clothes have camouflage patterns on them, and she's always having meetings for things she thinks are an injustice. The weirdest thing is, she's always trying to sort out things she thinks are unfair or horrible, but her way of sorting them out always involves doing unfair or horrible things.

“Why did you talk to the library woman like that?” I ask her out in the corridor. “That wasn't cool.”

“What's it to you?” she says. “Is she your new squeeze? Given up on Elsie Green?”

“I haven't got anything to do with Elsie Green.”

“Whatever. What you do in your private life isn't my concern. All I'm interested in is you standing in for Chris Yates.”

“I'm not. I told you that. It's my cousin Harry.”

“Either way,” Kirsty says. “So where do you want to talk? Up in the common room?”

I look at my watch. “I've got science in a couple of minutes,” I say.

“Skip it,” Kirsty tells me.

Usually I wouldn't need any encouragement to skip science. Any excuse would do. But talking to Kirsty Wallace, about whatever she wants to talk about, seems even less appealing than sitting listening to Baldy Baine making merry with the quantums.

“I can't do it,” I say. “Baine saw me in the corridor before the break. He knows I'm in.”

“Your call,” Kirsty says. “All I really need to tell you is, you've got until lunchtime to do that stand-in thing in Bailey's office. You or your cousin Barry. Whoever. That's pretty much what it boils down to.”

“What's that got to do with you?” I ask her.

“We had a meeting,” she says. “For the school trip. Everybody who's going on the trip, and everybody who's just tired of the crap. We're standing up. If you or your man don't step in now, we're all going to Bailey's office at the end of the lunch break. And we're telling him about Yatesy together. There's nothing him or his henchmen can do about that. Too many of us. People power.”

“But I'm still squaring the thing with Cyrus McCormack,” I tell her. “I need to sort something out for Cyrus before he'll tell Bailey he fought Harry. If you go at lunchtime, Yatesy gets expelled.”

Kirsty shrugs. “He's standing in the way of the greater good,” she says. “There are always casualties in the interests of the greater good.”

“Just give me a few more days,” I say. “Then there don't need to be any casualties. What difference does a few more days make?”

“Can't do it,” Kirsty says. “We're taking back the streets.”

“What streets?”

“It's a saying. It's a figure of speech.”

“It doesn't make any sense, though.”

“Of course it does,” Kirsty says. “We're taking back the streets of Barcelona. For the school trip. It's over, man.”

I start to feel everything slipping away from me. Maybe she's right—maybe it is all over. The worst of it is, I know if I hadn't been farmed out to Uncle Ray's, I would have a proper plan by now. I'd be all over the Cyrus situation like a rash. But even with my newfound quiet spot in the library, I don't know if I can come up with something even if she does give me a couple of days. Once my train of thought's been broken, all burst up by the noise and the chaos, it can take a couple of days just to get back on track, never mind to have the whole thing sorted out.

And then the bell rings.

“Enjoy science,” Kirsty says, and heads off down the middle staircase. I start running after her.

“Hang on,” I shout. “Give me another couple of minutes.”

She slows down, and I catch up with her before she's on the first landing.

“My cousin Harry doesn't get to university if this falls through,” I say. “There are a lot of long stories involved, but think of all the consequences. Yatesy gets expelled, Harry's life is ruined. Cyrus, too—he'll be high and dry. Think of all the good you'd be doing if you give me a bit more time. Who gets hurt if the school trip's on ice for a bit longer? It'll still happen. At least give me till tomorrow morning—twenty-four hours.”

I regret that as soon as I've said it. Twenty-four hours is as good as useless to me. I've got as much chance of sorting the whole thing out by lunchtime as I have of getting anything done by the same time tomorrow. But the thing about helping people out seems to have made a little dent in Kirsty.

“Let me see what my people think,” she says. “Whatever they want I'll go along with.”

“But you can convince them,” I tell her. “Get me two more days. I'll tell Yatesy and Harry and Cyrus it was you who held back the mob, and you can take the credit for making Harry go to Bailey. You'll be feeling the love from all directions.” She thinks it through for a minute, twisting a big bit of her rope hair. Then she comes to a decision.

“Twenty-four hours,” she says. “I like Yatesy—he's a freethinker. You've bought him a reprieve.”

“Give me two days,” I say, but it's not happening.

“Twenty-four hours,” she says again. “Then we march on Bailey's headquarters. Tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours.”

It's a victory of a kind, I suppose, but it's as close to utterly useless as any victory could ever be. And I wander off to Baldy Baine's science class in a state of total defeat.

I don't even bother visiting the dining hall before I head for the library at lunchtime. Trying to think on an empty stomach isn't always the best way to go, but time is so short, I don't really have much choice, and I come out of Baine's science class like a bullet out of a gun, breaking a world record for reaching the new block, and taking the stairs in there two and three at a time. I'd been hoping to get some thinking done in the Baldy One's class, but Sandy Hammil kept throwing dirty looks at me from the other side of the room, and Baine had us heating things up and mixing things together almost from the get-go, so I hardly got a minute to myself.

When I finally reach the library door, I stop and look in through the little window, at all the silence waiting for me in there. I thought it might be busier at lunchtimes, but it's empty again, so I grab the door handle and get ready to feel the peace. The thing is, though, the door doesn't open. At first I think I've just pulled it the wrong way, and I feel a bit stupid, but when I push it away from me the same thing happens. Nothing. I start pulling and pushing as hard as I can, till the door rattles in its frame. Then I stop and bang on the window.

Someone walks up behind me and stops there.

“Keen today, Mr. Dawson,” they say. “I've never seen such a passion for learning before. Not in this school.”

I keep my hand on the door handle and turn round. It's my geography teacher, Miss Voss.

“I can't get in,” I tell her. “I think it's locked.”

“Of course it's locked,” she says. “It's lunchtime.”

“So?”

“So the library closes over lunchtime.”

“But I need to get in. I'm working on an essay.”

“You shouldn't have left it till the last minute,” she tells me. “Then you wouldn't need to work on it at lunchtime.”

“But it's not last minute,” I say. “I'm making an early start on it.”

“Then you don't need to work over lunch,” Miss Voss says. “Go and get something to eat.” And she wanders off and leaves me to stare through the little window at everything I'm missing inside. I can't work out how they get it so quiet in there. Out here in the corridor, people are rushing about and chatting, their shoes clopping on the hard floor, doors banging everywhere.

“Can't you see I'm trying to think?” I want to shout. “People's lives are at stake here.”

Out loud, though, I just shout after Miss Voss.

“Miss!” I call. “What time does the library open again?”

She doesn't even turn round, just keeps walking. “When lunchtime is over,” she says. “One thirty.”

And I decide there's nothing I can do but head back to the dining hall and at least fill up my empty stomach.

I sit a few tables down from Sandy Hammil, and pretty soon he starts giving me the evil eye again. He gives me it all through my war with the rubber chicken and the powdery chips, and by the time I'm moving on to the neon cheesecake I'm getting pretty sick of it, so I send him a text.

“I know you told Kirsty Wallace about Elsie Green and me,” it says.

“About your love affair?” he texts back. “I didn't tell her. Or anybody.”

“She told me you did,” I reply. “You're busted.”

“And you're a moron,” he says. “And she's a liar.”

Then he gets up and leaves the dining hall, holding his middle finger up behind his back as he walks away. For a few minutes I manage to convince myself I'll be able to think more clearly with him out of the picture, but my head is mashed. Digesting the road accident I've just eaten takes up most of my vital juices, and the noise in the dining hall starts to drive me almost insane. I've never really noticed it before—it was always just there in the background—but my experience at Uncle Ray's must have given me some kind of battlefield trauma, and I become aware of the full blaring cacophony—knives and forks on plates, the roar of talking and laughing and screeching, the cooks up at the counter banging dishes and trays and wheeling carts about, everyone's phones ringing and vibrating and beeping and playing music all the time. It gets so bad, I even find myself thinking seriously about Uncle Ray's rope ladder scheme, and I try to modify it into some kind of workable solution. Maybe if I climbed up the ladder after Cyrus climbed out, and I went into the bed instead of the pillows. Maybe that would be more convincing. And if I used a real ladder instead of a rope ladder . . .

In my crazy state of mind, this difference seems to matter somehow. I genuinely seem to believe the flaw in Uncle Ray's plan lies in the fact that it's a rope ladder. If only it was a proper ladder . . .

Just before I'm about to be taken away by a security patrol from a crazy hospital, though, I see Cyrus coming into the dining hall and sitting down, and I dump my tray up at the counter, then go and sit beside him.

“It's all over,” I tell him as he tries to work out whether his chicken is real or not. He spears a piece of it with his knife and holds it up in front of me.

“What the hell is this?” he asks me. “Is this food, or is it packaging the food came in?”

“I think that's the chicken,” I tell him, and he looks appalled. Then he pushes it into his mouth.

“What are you talking about, anyway?” he asks me. “What do you mean by ‘It's all over'? It's been all over for me for weeks.”

“Not like this,” I tell him, and I explain the whole Kirsty Wallace thing to him. Strangely, he suddenly looks a lot happier than he did a minute ago.

“She's really going to do that?” he says. “No bullshit? That sounds amazing.”

“No it doesn't,” I tell him. “What sounds amazing about it? This isn't what we want at all, Cyrus. If Yatesy goes down, I don't help you get to the dance. Think of it that way.”

He shrugs. “You'd never be able to pull that off anyway,” he says. “No offense, but no one would. It can't be done.”

“Of course it can,” I tell him. “I was almost there, Cyrus. This is the kind of thing I do all the time.”

He shakes his head. “Not with my parents,” he says. “No way.”

He struggles with another bit of the chicken for a while, then gives up on it and sees what he can make of the chips. I sit and watch him, numbly, searching through my broken brain for even the hint of an idea. Then I resort to begging.

“Please let Harry go to Bailey this afternoon,” I say. “Then I've got all the time in the world to make sure you get to the dance. You can't let this thing get away from you, Cyrus. Think about Amy.”

He shakes his head. “Kirsty's got a concrete plan,” he says. “This way I'm guaranteed the bohemian's head on a spike. I can't pass that up.”