The Impossible Boy Read Online Free PDF

was honest, he wasn’t too happy about.
    Faking an optician’s appointment, Gabby had left her final lesson of the day twenty minutes early. She used this time to slip into the girls’ toilets and change into a different coat
and a curly blonde wig she had bought the previous year for a fancy dress party (she had gone as Marilyn Monroe but everyone had assumed she was Lady Gaga, much to her annoyance). She removed her
glasses and put in her emergency contact lenses. The tiny slivers of plastic felt weird and uncomfortable in her eyes but she knew any disguise she donned would be useless if she was still wearing
her usual glasses. An old baseball cap pulled down low over her face completed the outfit.
    That morning, Laura had told her which classroom Chas would be in for his final lesson of the day – class LO5 (the LO stood for Lower Block, a long single-storey building that was the
oldest in the school). Laura had also told her that kids in her and Chas’s form were not doing their LifeSkillz activities until next term so he should definitely be in school today. Gabby
had a sudden vision of Chas on LifeSkillz working on the checkout in a supermarket and making customers’ groceries vanish as they trundled along the conveyor belt. She stifled a giggle.
    The school bell rang. Gabby tensed. From within the building erupted the happy shouts and laughter that signalled the end of the school day, followed by the weary voices of teachers calling for
calm. Chairs scraped against the floor. Fire doors squeaked and slammed. Muffled footsteps echoed down corridors. And then, like cola from a well-shaken can, a stream of kids burst through the door
of the Lower Block and exploded into the playground, yelling, running, pulling on their coats, all with a single happy thought –
home
.
    Chas was one of the first kids out. He waved at another boy and sauntered towards the school gate. Gabby followed, moving through the crowd at a leisurely pace, keeping her distance.
    Watching Chas move through the school gates, Gabby pushed forwards and, pulling down the peak of her cap further still, she followed.
    Town was clogged with traffic. Cars and buses were bunched up against one another like impatient cattle, engines grumbling and exhausts coughing out streams of smelly white clouds. Gabby slid
into the doorway of a shop and peeped around at Chas. He was standing outside a specialist hi-fi shop a few doors down, gazing in at various pieces of unidentifiable matte black audio equipment.
What is it about boys and hi-fi stuff?
she wondered. Could anyone really tell the difference between a CD player that cost thirty pounds and one that cost three thousand pounds?
    Then a thought struck her.
    She remembered reading somewhere that a lot of the specialist props that magicians used in their tricks were actually extremely expensive pieces of high technology. An apparently simple bit of
conjuring involving, for instance, some vanishing sponge balls might actually utilise cutting-edge materials and techniques developed by big electronics corporations or even NASA to achieve its
effects. Perhaps Chas was somehow using the science of sound to influence people’s minds and this was why he was so interested in state-of-the-art audio equipment? Could sounds of a certain
frequency interfere with a person’s brainwaves and make them hallucinate that they’d seen miraculous feats? It seemed doubtful, she thought – impossible even – but that was
what Geek Inc. was all about, wasn’t it? Maybe if she could see which bits of audio gear Chas was looking at that might give her some clue? She stepped out of the doorway, her eyes fixed on
Chas . . .
    ‘Ooof!’
    The old lady in the fur coat slammed into Gabby with the force of a rugby fullback. The two of them tumbled to the ground in a jumble of limbs. Gabby leaped to her feet, half dazed, gabbling
frantic apologies, and attempted to help her up.
    ‘Keep away!’ bellowed the old lady,