Spy Stuff

Chapter 1-2

Emma was a good guide. The morning was a mess of confusing classes, faces Anton couldn’t remember five minutes later, and constant in-jokes that he didn’t get, but Emma stuck to Anton like glue through it all. The class were kept together for the common core subjects, but split up for modern languages—French versus German—and the arts subjects. This school didn’t seem to believe in sets, but Anton noted that not everyone in the class had the same maths textbook. It wasn’t what he was used to, and Emma and her frantic, constant whispering was the only grounding he had.

Lunch came too soon—after maths and the fastest catch-up in English ever on Hamlet, because his old school had used the Romeo and Juliet-favouring exam board instead—and Anton’s building anxiety about what the hell this new social world demanded of him for lunch was destroyed by Emma tugging on the cuff of his blazer.

“Come on,” she said. “You can sit with us for lunch.”

“Oh,” Anton said. “Thanks.” He didn’t know who ‘us’ actually was, but it was better than nobody.

“The canteen here is awful,” Emma continued, towing him down a couple of corridors to her locker. Anton didn’t have one yet, and waited awkwardly. “You have to buy the food to sit in there, and the food’s just dire, so we go to the drama studio in winter—it has benches by the radiators—or the playing fields in the summer.”

“My old school canteen was okay.”

“Where was that?”

“Lambeth,” Anton lied. He hadn’t moved, but that was the story he was sticking to. It was easier that way.

“Ew,” Emma said pointedly. “Okay, so don’t worry, I’ll introduce you proper, not that crappy intro Miss Taylor gave you—and just as an FYI, it’s totally okay to just punch Jude whenever he gets gobby, he practically expects it.”

“We’re…going to sit with them?”

“They’re totally harmless, don’t worry,” Emma reassured him, tucking her arm through his as though they’d known each other for years. It was totally unfamiliar—the girls at his old school had avoided him like the plague, and Anton’s skin itched with the urge to pull away and ask what she wanted from him—but kind of reassuring, too. Emma was…nice. So far. And she’d been quite crass to Walsh earlier, so he must kind of like her if she went and sat with those boys for lunch, right? Then Anton was towed into the drama studio—a surprisingly small space dotted with clusters of people in blue uniforms—and there they were.

“Guys,” Emma announced, tugging him towards the cluster—three boys and a girl, crowded around a radiator on the slightly dusty floor. “This is Anton.”

“We know,” Larimer said. He was a very gangly boy, far too tall for himself and with hands that were more like spades attached to sticks than functional body parts. He looked like he’d been messily arranged by a pretty drunk God on a Friday afternoon. Even his eyes didn’t match—one was pale blue, one was bottle-green.

“Don’t be an arse,” the girl said. She was petite and ash-blonde, and smiled up at Anton. “Sit down,” she added, patting the floor. “I’m Isabel.”

“Thanks,” Anton mumbled.

“That’s Walsh, and that’s Larimer—they’re like a set of shitty jokers, just ignore them or punch them when they get too stupid,” Emma advised. Up close, Walsh’s rat-like face was even more angular than Anton had realised, but he offered a toothy grin and a vague ‘sup, nutfucker?’ that was somewhere between warmly irreverent and just plain weird. “And that’s Jude.”

Turned out that Kalinowski was Jude. And—

Oh, crap.

From three feet away, as opposed to a classroom away with tables between them, Jude Kalinowski was…good-looking. Very good-looking. He was lean and wiry, broad-shouldered but not bulky, with freckles and fair hair spotting his bare arms. He had a wide easy smile that turned itself up to beam at Anton, with stupidly perfect teeth and a dimple in the left cheek that did something a bit funny to Anton’s stomach. His hair wasn’t just red, it was red, a brilliant ginger that seemed to bend the light, springy and soft-looking, and Anton wanted to reach out and touch it.

He realised he was staring gormlessly, just staring into bottomless, deep brown eyes, and swallowed. “Er,” he said.

“You talk his ear off already, Emma?” Jude asked genially, and gave Anton another one of those crazy smiles. Anton’s heartbeat stuttered. Oh s**t. Oh-s**t-oh-s**t-oh-s**t.

He sat down, to hide the sudden attack of the jitters, and let Emma’s denial wash over him.

“Word of advice, Anton?” Jude said, leaning forward. He was sitting cross-legged, his knees almost able to touch the floor despite the position, and Anton’s brain unhelpfully informed him that it meant Jude could probably get his legs behind his own head. Anton swallowed very hard. “Ignore about…ninety percent of what comes out of Emma’s mouth and you’ll be fine.”

“Hey!” Emma protested, swatting at him. Jude laughed, fending her off. “You’re such an arse.”

“You love me anyway.”

“That’s what you think,” she retorted. “So, Anton, where’re you from?”

Anton focused. He looked away from Jude and those dark, dark eyes and red, red hair, and focused on the story he’d come up with, the story Mum and Aunt Kerry had helped him in crafting, the story the head had accepted and fed to most—if not quite all—of the staff.

“We had to move after my parents split up,” he recited faithfully, and began his fake story.

He didn’t dare look at Jude again for the entire telling of it, in case his composure came undone, and the story—the story he needed for this, the story he had to have to let this new life begin—was ruined.