I suspected she used Headmaster’s favorite kind of persuasion-the monetary kind.
He found the chemistry lab inadequate to his needs, which was the only part of the story that had intrigued me, and his mother had somehow talked the headmaster into letting him have a space of his own. It was just cartoonish enough of an image to spread widely around the school. I, of course, had heard of Sherlock Holmes and his secret lab in the basement of the theater. Sherlock doesn’t seem to pay attention to things like alarms when he’s working. She might have nodded or shook her head, but she was already pushing me out the theater’s side door, so I couldn’t see.
Can he not hear the alarm on his own? I asked. Miss Francis was always calling us angels and champs. She said, Mori, do be an angel and nip downstairs to storage to fetch our Mr. The very minute the fire alarm started to simultaneously scream and flash lights at us, Miss Francis, the drama teacher, instructed the class to calmly make their way out of the theater, except for me. And by the time that happened, it had already been a very, very long day, to say the least-the kind of day that could only ever end with me wearing a feathered hat. Still, I hadn’t quite expected that a fire drill would send me into the inner sanctum of the most eccentric, highly notorious boy in my class. I thought I’d escaped the madness when I settled into my final class of the day, but even that turned into a colossal cock-up. Not my fault her room would smell like chemical warfare for months. I warned Marcus his calculations were off, but Professor made me promise to let him run at least one lab on his own before term was over. How he managed to do so, despite the two contingencies I’d put in place to make it impossible for him to ruin it, the greatest detective in history would never be able to deduce.
Lunch was followed by a long, boring lab as Marcus Gregson turned our chemistry experiment into a black, smoldering thing that stank up the entire room. Next came economics and a lecture from books I’d read for fun last summer’s break. But the bliss didn’t linger.įirst was double maths, where yet again I was forced to explain that just because our professor was ignorant of the latest in math theory, it didn’t mean he could mark my homework wrong when clearly it was the book that was in error. For once, leaving for school felt more like bliss than drudgery. Freddie even had a stupid, hollering ringtone for his mobile that shouted, March FOOOORTH! over and over until I threatened to flush the thing down the toilet.
I only remember the date because all three of my brothers glommed onto the Marching Forth pun for the entirety of breakfast. I wore a hat with a feather plume the first time I met Sherlock Holmes.
0 kommentar(er)
