Ross Lawhead Read Online Free PDF Page B

push the pen into her hand and if he didn’t handle it right, there would be a “scene.” Also, he was starting to think that there was someone lying next to her.
    No, it was far easier to do the second thing. He hurried back downstairs and put the slip on the kitchen counter, then uncapped the pen he was holding. He looked at the paper for a second and then exhaled. In a quick, confident burst of motion, he wrote his mother’s name in a suitably grown-up and illegible manner: Elaine Tully . He regarded the slip. Not his best work perhaps, but it would do. The trick was not in trying to make it look exactly like her real signature, but in making it confident.
    He folded up the paper and put it in his pocket. No, he reflected, the real trick isn’t the signature—it’s in making all the teachers believe that you were the sort of boy who would never even think about faking his mum’s signature. And that meant, as so many things in life, keeping your head down.
    He picked up his school bag, fished out his gym clothes (wouldn’t need those), and thought about signatures and permission slips. Where did they all go? What happened to them? Were they all put in a file somewhere? Did anyone really check them?
    Would this little scrap of paper be scrutinised against all the others— checked for authenticity by a man in a white coat with a giant magnifying glass in a brightly lit room? By now there must be more of his fake signatures on all these different slips and documents than his mother’s real one. To the school office his forgeries were more authentic than the genuine article.
    He was just checking that his keys were in his pocket when his eyes fell on something unusual. He and his mum didn’t get a lot of mail other than bills, but there, on the floor beneath the front door, was a red envelope. He was so surprised that he actually took a half step back and then bent down to pick it up.
    He turned it over and looked at who it was addressed to—it was to him. Someone had remembered his birthday.
    There wasn’t any sender’s address on the envelope, and he didn’t recognise the block capital handwriting on it. Quickly, he thrust it into his jacket. It felt like a secret, and he wanted to keep it to himself as long as possible.
    All the way to school he thought about the envelope. It might be from Nan, his mum’s mum, but she didn’t really go in for that sort of thing—she was more forgetful than his own mother. It could be from Grandma and Grandpa Tully, but he hadn’t seen them in three or four years, since the separation.
    He could see that the coach was already waiting when he got to school. He sighed. He’d actually prefer a day of the ordinary routine rather than having to navigate the chaos of a field trip. For a moment he considered not going, but last time that meant he’d had to join another class for a day—a dangerous and unknown social minefield. He handed his permission slip to Miss Singh and got on the bus, sitting down in the first pair of seats that weren’t occupied and sliding over by the window.
    He sat there unmoving, trying to be a part of the background, holding his breath when anyone passed by. Eventually the coach was nearly full and he thought he’d gotten away with it, but just as Miss Singh had crossed the last name off her list, a group of girls—who had already passed him—came back up the aisle and stood at his seat.
    â€œLook,” said one of them. “If we get him to move, we can all sit together. Hey, Daniel.”
    He pretended not to hear.
    â€œDaniel!”
    He turned and saw Callie Johnson bending towards him. “Hi, do you mind moving so that we can all sit together?”
    â€œWhere to?” he asked, playing for time.
    â€œI don’t care, you little freak,” Callie said in a low voice, leaning towards him. “Just leave.” The girls behind her giggled. He