Free The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle Page B

main building. Bea sticks her head up to see through the mottled glass window in the top of the door to one of the classrooms that is used for supervised study. She makes a little whistling noise and quickly ducks her head back down. We giggle and run down the corridor to hide around the corner. A few minutes later, Toby Healy comes out of the classroom.
    As well as being quite possibly the prettiest boy in school, Toby is also the son of the secretary. Alice has somehow managed to persuade him to steal his mother’s keys to the office for us. I don’t know how she did it; Toby is hardly the rule-breaking type.
    When he hurries toward us, I get a butterfly-fluttery sense of nervousness and excitement that is either becausewe’re about to break into the secretary’s office, or because Toby is one of those guys who looks more like a character in a film than a real boy. And a little voice in the back of my mind wonders if maybe, just maybe, he might be helping us because he’s slightly interested in me. I’ve certainly noticed him smiling and saying hi to me in the halls lately, although maybe that’s just because I’m Alice’s sister.
    Toby looks back over his shoulder and turns the corner to join us. “Right,” he says. “Mrs. Delaney thinks I’ve gone to the bathroom, so I better be quick.” He fishes a set of keys out of his jacket’s inside pocket. He holds them out but stops before Bea can grab them. “What do you want these for, anyway?”
    “Never you mind,” says Bea.
    Toby gives her a look. “I could get into a shitload of trouble over this—you know that, right?”
    Bea rolls her eyes. “Don’t be dramatic,” she says, which I think is kind of funny coming from Bea. Toby mutters something that sounds a lot like
witch
.
    “We’re just looking for someone’s phone number, that’s all,” I cut in quickly.
    “Does it have anything to do with the masquerade ball? I’m really looking forward to Friday.”
    I feel a little flustered all of a sudden. I knew Alice had invited her friends, but I didn’t know that Toby Healy was actually going to come.
    “Yes,” says Bea emphatically. “It’s very important.”
    Toby looks curious but he doesn’t ask any more questions. “Cool,” is all he says. He hands me the set of keys, pointing out the one that opens the office. “Slip it in my locker when you’re finished,” he says. “It’s number 503 outside Mr. Connolly’s class.” Then he flashes us a grin, says, “See you there, then,” and winks at me before he hurries away. I exchange a look with Bea, who barely suppresses a smile as I hand her the key to fit into the lock.
    We try to be in and out of the office lickety-split, like lightning. The filing cabinets squeak and we muffle our laughter. Bea whispers that we’re lucky our school still lives in the Stone Age, that most schools’ files are on computer, password-protected, but here they’re kept in cardboard files in cabinets that don’t lock. This is one of the good things about living in a tiny speck of a town in Middle of Nowhere, County Mayo: We haven’t all quite caught up with the twenty-first century yet.
    “What’s her last name again?” Bea asks, thumbing through the alphabetical files.
    I open my mouth to answer, then frown. “I’ve been blanking on it for the last few days,” I say. “I
know
I know it.” I rub my forehead with exasperation. “Try under
M
?”
    Bea shuffles through a few files before pulling one out triumphantly. “Got it!”
    Elsie’s file has a tea stain on it, straight across the lastname. The cardboard is stuck together—the tea, I imagine, was milky and sugary, turned to syrup when it dried—but the information we want is on the front cover. Bea jots down an address and a phone number in her homework notebook and we hightail it out of the office like bandits, running low under the classroom windows.
    Once we’ve sped out of the main building, through the parking lot and out of the