Page 3

Chapter 3

Mrs C stopped me on the way out. The bell had rung several minutes ago. I was already late because I’d just been sitting at the table, staring into space, but, you know, existential crisis and all that.

“Jamie!” She beckoned me over to the desk where she handed me a book called Wildflowers of Great Britain. “I think you might enjoy it.”

I glanced up from the book and met her eyes.

“It’s good,” she added. “Good read. Important.”

“I’m not taking biology.”

“And that’s OK,” she said.

I frowned at the book. “But—”

“Jamie, do you trust me, as keeper of the books, or do you not trust me?”

I cracked a smile. “Obviously, I trust you.”

“Then trust me on this. Keep an open mind. OK?”

I shrugged. “OK.”

She smiled, satisfied.

Isn’t it interesting (and also terrifying) how one tiny action can completely alter the course of your life? When I think about it now, I marvel at this, and how, had I not done it, everything could have been totally different, and not necessarily in a good way. I took out my library card. How is it possible that such a small thing can ultimately change so much? Well, it’s chaos theory, I suppose. The butterfly effect – the idea that one small change can create much larger consequences down the line. Taking out my library card was, however, a perfectly normal thing to have done. Every student had a library account, and the database of who had borrowed what books was kept on the library computer system – a BBC Master Computer with some kind of database software that ran off five and a quarter inch floppy discs. Each book had a barcode and that was scanned, along with the one on your library card, and that way everyone knew if you were the one hundredth second year student to try and steal Diary of a Teenage Health Freak because there was a little chart in there that told you how big your willy was meant to be.*

I took my library card out, and I realize now that Mrs C was shaking her head, telling me not to worry about the card, just to take the book, but right at that moment Mr Haskins, one of the PE teachers, walked through the doors, about to take a supervised study lesson, and clocked us both, so Mrs C grabbed my card and scanned the book to my account, and it was all so quick and easy and normal I thought nothing else of it, taking the book, my card, and heading off to an English lesson.

What I didn’t know, of course, was that that was the first domino, and now, inevitably, the rest would fall; the wheels were in motion; it was … unstoppable. I’d been thinking about change earlier that morning, and now bigger change than I could have anticipated was happening.

But I didn’t understand that.

And nor do you.

And that is called dramatic tension.

Let’s leave this chapter here. Significant events deserve emphasis, and very short chapters do that, don’t you think?

*Somewhere between five and six inches, in case you’re wondering.