Free The Adjusters by Andrew Taylor Page B

and sighed.
    “You look soooo cool.”
    He swiped the curtain of the changing room and jumped to find Blake standing right there, waiting eagerly.
    “Man, you look great!” Blake exclaimed and pumped his fist in the air. “One of us! One of us!”
    “Right,” Henry said, putting his old clothes into his bag and slinging it over his shoulder. “We should get going. Don’t like being late on my first day.”
    “That’s the spirit,” Blake said as they walked alongside one another down the corridor. He consulted his diary. “Hey, we’ve got class together! French.” His
face fell. “Man, what a way to start the day!”
    Henry looked at him and smiled. “Have we found something you don’t like about school?”
    “It’s just…I’ve been studying that darn language for six whole months and I don’t seem to be making any progress.”
    “Well, six months isn’t long,” Henry replied. French was actually one of his favourite subjects. He’d had it at his last school since he was twelve, clearly a lot earlier
than they started here. He’d found, to his surprise, that he had a real facility for language and had been top of his class in both French and Spanish for most of the last two years. To let
Blake know he was no slouch when it came to languages, he added, “ La pratique rend parfait .”
    Blake looked at him and roared with laughter. “Nice accent, Jean-Claude! Where did you learn that, a Pink Panther movie? Jeez, you’re a kidder!”
    Henry was still puzzling over what that was supposed to mean as they reached the classroom door and Blake pulled it open. The entire class was silent, heads down over thick textbooks while a
prim-looking woman stood at the front, casting her eyes over them. She turned her gaze on Blake and Henry as they entered.
    “ Pardon, Mademoiselle Chabrol ,” Blake replied in perfectly accented French. “ J’ai dû prendre Henry pour aller chercher son uniforme .”
    The teacher gave Henry an unimpressed look. “ Et ce nouveau spécimen ne parle pas pour lui-même ? ” Doesn’t he speak for himself?
    There was a smattering of laughter around the room, which was silenced by a stern look from Mademoiselle Chabrol. Henry had worked out, despite the speed at which the teacher had rattled off her
question, that it was his turn to speak.
    “ Je m’appelle Henry Ward ,” he said, trying to sound as fluent as possible. “Uh… je suis un student nouveau dans votre classe… ”
    “ Oui, oui ,” the woman said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “ Asseyez-vous et ouvrez le livre à la page cinquante-six . Nous lisons À
la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” As she turned away, she muttered, “ Mon dieu, il y a du travail à faire avec celui-ci .”
    Blake nodded to two spare desks at the back and they sat down. Henry picked up the book in front of him, which was almost a thousand pages long, and flicked through. It was written in incredibly
complex French – far more advanced than anything he’d ever been asked to read before in class. He looked at Blake who, like the other twenty students, had become engrossed in the French
text. He turned towards the front and saw that the teacher was regarding him with a look of barely disguised contempt.
    “ Avez-vous un problème, Monsieur Ward? ” she called across to him. “ Préféreriez-vous quelque chose de plus simple à lire? ” Would you prefer something easier to read? She held up the French equivalent of a Janet and John book, causing more giggles around the room.
    “ Non, mademoiselle ,” Henry replied firmly. He looked down at his book and pretended to read.
    “How long did you say you’ve been studying French?” Henry asked Blake at the end of the period, as they walked to the next class, which was maths.
    “Six months,” Blake replied. “You were struggling, I could tell. But don’t worry, you’ll soon get up to speed. Mademoiselle Chabrol is the best.”
    “Yeah. She seemed like a…really nice