Free Gentlemen & Players by Joanne Harris Page B

the novelty of being in the school during lesson time was enough. Unquestioned, I walked down the corridors. Some classes were uproarious. Others were eerily silent. I peered through glass panels at heads bent over their desks; at paper darts thrown surreptitiously behind a Master’s back; at notes passed in secret. I put my ear to closed doors and locked studies.
    But my favorite haunt was the Bell Tower. A warren of little rooms, most rarely used—box rooms, pigeon lofts, storage cupboards—with two teaching rooms, one large, one small, both belonging to the Classics Department, and a rickety stone balcony from which I could gain access to the roof and lie there unseen on the warm slates, listening to the drone of voices from the open windows along the Middle Corridor and making notes in my stolen exercise books. In that way I furtively followed a number of Mr. Straitley’s first-year Latin lessons; Mr. Bishop’s second-form Physics; Mr. Langdon’s History of Art. I read Lord of the Flies with Bob Strange’s third form and even handed in a couple of essays to his Middle Corridor pigeonhole (I collected them in secret the next day from Strange’s locker, marked, graded, and with the word NAME?? scrawled across the top in red pen). At last, I thought, I’d found my place. It was a lonely place, but that didn’t matter. St. Oswald’s—and all its treasures—were at my disposal. What else could I want?
    Then I met Leon. And everything changed.

    It was a dreamy, sunny late spring day—one of those days when I loved St. Oswald’s with a violent passion no mere pupil could have hoped to duplicate—and I was feeling unusually bold. Since our first encounter, my one-sided war against the school had gone through many stages. Hatred; admiration; anger; pursuit. That spring, though, we had reached a kind of truce. As I rejected Sunnybank Park I had begun to feel that St. Oswald’s was coming to accept me, slowly; my movement through its veins no longer that of an invader, but almost a friend—like an inoculation of some apparently toxic material that later turns out to be of use.
    Of course I was still angry at the unfairness of it; at the fees that my father could never have afforded; at the fact that, fees or not, I could never hope to be accepted. But in spite of that, we had a relationship. A benign symbiosis, perhaps, like the shark and the lamprey. I began to understand that I need not be a parasite; I could let St. Oswald’s use me as I used it. Lately I had begun to keep records of things to be done around the school; cracked panes, loose tiles, damaged desks. I copied the details into the repairs book in the Porter’s Lodge, signing them with the initials of various teachers to avoid suspicion. Dutifully, my father dealt with them; and I felt proud that in a small way I too had made a difference; St. Oswald’s thanked me; I was approved.
    It was a Monday. I had been wandering along the Middle Corridor, listening at doors. My afternoon Latin class was over and I was considering going to the library, or the art block, and mingling with the study-period boys there. Or perhaps I could go to the Refectory—the kitchen staff would have gone by then—and sneak some of the biscuits left out for the teachers’ after-school meeting.
    I was so absorbed by my thoughts that as I rounded the bend into the Upper Corridor I almost bumped into a boy who was standing, hands in pockets, face to the wall, beneath an Honors Board. He was a couple of years older than I was—I guessed fourteen—with a sharp, clever face and bright gray eyes. His brown hair, I noticed, was rather long for St. Oswald’s, and the end of his tie, which was hanging disreputably out of his sweater, had been scissored off. I gathered—with some admiration—that I was looking at a rebel.
    “Watch where you’re going,” said the boy.
    It was the first time any St. Oswald’s boy had bothered to speak to me directly. I stared at him,