Free The Impossible Boy by Mark Griffiths Page B

Siskin, could only nod dumbly – like everyone else in the school he was a bit afraid of Miss Roberts and didn’t like disagreeing with her.
    She hadn’t been looking forward to this morning. She was due to teach a Year Ten class that included that insufferable know-it-all, Gabrielle Grayling. It was obvious that the Grayling
girl knew just as much about chemistry as she did herself – if not more – but the thing that really got up Miss Roberts’s nose was that Gabby was so unfailingly
nice
the
whole time. When a pupil was as bright and gifted as Gabrielle Grayling, you wanted them to have a horrible personality so you didn’t feel so bad about hating them. But Gabby was just so
quiet and patient and thoughtful that it made her want to scream. On several occasions she had made fun of Gabby in front of the class, banged her metre-long wooden ruler on the desk to startle
her, and deliberately given her poorer marks than she deserved, just to see if she could provoke Gabby into some angry reaction, but all her attempts had failed. When Gabby had been absent from
this morning’s lesson, Miss Roberts had felt a wave of relief.
    But as it turned out the lesson had been the most troubling one she had ever taken.
    She had been about to demonstrate to the class how mixing zinc with hydrochloric acid produces hydrogen gas, and had the necessary apparatus set up on her desk. In her handbag under the table,
her mobile phone suddenly emitted an electronic bleep. She was meant to have her phone switched off in class but she had been waiting all day for a text from her best friend about whether
she’d been able to buy tickets to a concert by their favourite boyband. Eagerly, she ducked under her desk. A strange acrid smell greeted her. It was coming from her handbag. She scooped it
up and laid it on the desk. Thick, stinking fumes were rising from its interior. Someone had poured acid into it! Everything inside was churning and dissolving as the hissing acid devoured it. She
watched, goggle-eyed, as her mobile phone disintegrated into a pool of bubbling plastic and metal.
    ‘WHO DID THIS?’ she demanded in a voice that sent icicles of terror through the hearts of her class. ‘WHO. IS. RESPONSIBLE?’
    The horror-struck Year Ten class stared back, mute with fear. Miss Roberts met their gaze, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. She could normally sniff out a culprit easily, few children being
able to withstand her ferocious stare, but today all the kids in her chemistry lesson looked equally shocked and alarmed by what had happened.
    Very well
, she thought.
Time to turn up the pressure
. She’d have the guilty party tearfully confessing in no time. She reached for her metre ruler, which leaned in its
usual position against her whiteboard. One swift slap of the ruler on the desk produced a clap as loud as thunder and was usually excellent for inspiring terror in wayward children. But as she
raised the ruler to strike it on her desk, its wooden length crumbled to dust in her hands, spraying her with tiny splinters. Someone had dipped it in acid! The fragments of wood clattered softly
on to her desk. The class gasped in unison. It was then that Miss Roberts gave up and decided she’d rather be elsewhere. She snatched her coat off the back off her chair. Its collar came away
in her hand – the rest of the coat, she saw with horror, reduced to acid-ravaged scraps of cloth. She let out a grunt of frustration and stormed from the class and up the corridor towards the
staffroom, where she was pretty sure Mr Osborn kept a bottle of whisky hidden in the umbrella stand.
    This was not the only odd event to happen in Blue Hills High that day. At morning break, a Year Eleven girl named Maisy Quench had been demanding to be given the lunch money of two Year Eight
girls. Maisy was explaining that if the two girls didn’t hand over their cash, she would push both of their heads down a toilet and flush it, much as she had done