Free Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets by Guy Adams, Kasey Lansdale, Glen Mehn Page B

her notebook and able to put the entire business behind her.
    And instead, this.

Dear Plain Jane,
    Surprise! Not quite what you expected to find? Nice trick with the fire alarm, sweetie, but you’re not going to get that notebook. It might have worked, if you hadn’t already told me about the time Charlotte used the same trick on the headmistress.
    Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. She was all you could talk about, even when we were together. No wonder you didn’t want me. I had the wrong parts. No wonder you wouldn’t put out! I thought you were frigid, but you’re just bent.
    Admit it. She’s the reason you left me. I never could live up to her, to her cleverness, to your adventures. You’ve got a crush, you dyke bint, and it isn’t on me, or on the characters in your stupid little TV shows and your gay fanfiction. All the time you spent writing about the two of them, you were really writing about the two of you! It’s pathetic.
    And now I’ve got proof. You won’t be getting your notebook back, not until I’ve shown it to Charlotte. Next time she’s alone I’ll show her—it’s not like you can spend every hour of the day with each other, no matter how hard you tried when we were dating.
    Let’s see if she still wants you around when she knows how you feel.
    Be seeing you,
    —Eric Sadler

    The pit in Jane’s stomach opened wide. What she was feeling—it was as awful as that time her dad caught Eric with his hand up her shirt, as bad as realising she had an exam she hadn’t revised for, or being sent to the headmistress’s office, but a hundred times worse.
    Eric knew. Eric knew.
    Next time she’s alone I’ll show her.
    Eric knew and he had the notebook and he was alone with Charlotte and he was going to show it to her.
    Jane broke into a run.
    Extract from Jane’s notebook, unpublished work titled ‘A High School AU: Ten Things John Watson Hated About Sherlock Holmes, and One Thing He Didn’t.’
    M ATHS LESSONS AT the Baker Street School for Boys had to be a form of torture, John Watson was sure. Perhaps the U.N. would issue a decree against it.
    It wasn’t just the maths itself. Or the teacher, Mr Harrison, who sweated too much and had once put his hand on John’s knee. No, it was sitting next to Sherlock Holmes every lesson, that was the worst part.
    In the back of his exercise book, John was making a list of the ways Sherlock annoyed him. It was cathartic, and it was something to do—he’d already finished the trigonometry problems Harrison had set. Plus, John reasoned, if he ever did something rash, like, oh, maybe stabbing Sherlock through the heart with a biro for being such an annoying git, the list would help his manslaughter defence no end.
    Number one on the list was ‘ he’s a bloody know-it-all. ’ Sherlock was a genius, there was no way around it. The only reason Sherlock still had his head down working on maths problems was that he had finished the assigned work, and instead of slacking off like any normal sixth former was now ten pages ahead in the textbook, working on partial fractions instead of trigonometry.
    He was such a know-it-all that it was impossible to hide anything from him. That was the second item for the list. When Big Jim and his gang had called John a ‘poof’ and worse, and given him a black eye, he had hidden his embarrassment by telling everyone he’d walked into a door at home. Even John’s parents had accepted this. Sherlock was the only one who had questioned this explanation, applying logic where logic had no reason to be, asking where and how exactly he’d hit the door, and poking holes in the story until John had been forced to confess Big Jim’s involvement.
    Jim and his gang hadn’t bothered John again. He wasn’t sure why.
    Sherlock turned the page of his textbook and began another sheet of problems. John couldn’t explain it, but it was hard to take your eyes off Sherlock. John had always been the kind of student who got told off for