My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œActually,” she says, “this
is
very nice. Whose is this?”
    â€œYours,” 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œMy 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œThis is really mine?” she asks.
    â€œIf you want it,” I say.
    â€œâ€˜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.
    Â 
    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