The 10 P.M. Question Read Online Free Page B

toward Sydney. “
Bienvenue à salle onze,
Sydney.”
    “Merci beaucoup,”
said Sydney in a faultless French accent.
“C’est bien.”
She shook his hand with vigor.
    “Très bon,”
said Mr. A, grinning. “A rival for Frankie.”
    “Oh, mervil yerks,” said Gigs, in his ridiculous French accent. “Just what we don’t need. A foreign language expert.”
    “You seem to be suffering from an uncontrollable urge to express yourself this morning, Gigs,” said Mr. A. “Could I offer you some gaffer tape? A small gag?” Gigs looked stony.
    He was no happier a few minutes later when Mr. A directed Sydney to the seat beside Frankie at the Pepys table, where Frankie sat with Gigs, Solly Napier, Esther Barry, and Vienna Gorman. It was the obvious place for a new person; there’d been a spare seat at the Pepys table since Fletcher Armstrong had left at the end of last year.
    Gigs scowled, anyway. And scowled further when Mr. A assigned him to computer duty for the morning. A Gigs scowl was an arresting thing, Frankie thought. His normally cheerful, plump face creased up like a malevolent cushion; his freckles seemed to gather and darken.
    Mr. A wasn’t finished, either. He confirmed what he’d been threatening since last year. Their upcoming projects would
definitely
involve new working partners. Gigs banged his
Concise Oxford
on the desk in disgust.
    Frankie wasn’t wild about this development himself. He and Gigs always worked together. They did their best work that way. It was a fact. Frankie had done a French project with Fletcher last year and that had been all
right,
but not as good as working with Gigs. He and Gigs worked like a perfectly oiled machine, a machine powered by two different but complementary brains. They were pistols. Unrivaled. Everyone knew it. Not least, Mr. A.
    “Mustn’t let you wallow in your comfort zones,” said Mr. A, over everyone’s protests. “You won’t be working with your mates when you’re out there in the urban jungle. It’ll be a lottery most of the time. Sometimes you’ll work with people you don’t even
like
. You have to be adaptable, you have to be ready for change and challenge, you have to be —”
    The class let out a collective groan, knowing what was coming.
    “Yes, yes,
yes,
you have to be . . .
counterintuitive
!”
    Before he’d become a schoolteacher, Mr. A had been a probation officer and a prison psychologist. Until he’d burned out.
    “Singe marks all over me,” he’d say, holding out a hairy forearm.
    “Can’t you see?” He’d lift up his hair, show the weathered skin on the back of his neck.
    Mr. A’s hair was dead white and shoulder length, cut like a Roundhead soldier’s. (That was how Uncle George had described it after he’d met Mr. A at the first parent-teacher meeting two years ago, then shown Frankie a picture of Oliver Cromwell and Frankie had seen his point.)
    “Looks pretty battle-hardened, too,” said Uncle George, reporting to Ma. He meant Mr. A’s scar, which was the most startling thing about him. It was like stuck-on Plasticine, bleached and leathery, snaking diagonally down the left side of his face, from eye to earlobe.
    There were many stories circulating at Notts School about the origin of Mr. A’s scar: he’d been in a motorcycle accident; he’d fallen through a window; his wife had thrown a broken plate at him; a deranged prisoner had gone for him with a knife. . . .
    “Maybe he just had cheek cancer,” Gigs suggested once. (Frankie hadn’t even known there was such a thing, and he’d added it to his long list of terrifyingly possible diseases.)
    “The simple truth,” said Mr. A. “When I was fifteen, I fell out of an apple tree and onto a nasty piece of corrugated iron, which meant thirty stitches. And a face like a recovering pirate.”
    Somehow, Frankie and Gigs doubted it. They favored the deranged prisoner story, though Mr. A said deranged prisoners were generally a figment of the lurid collective