My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) by Stuart David Read Free Book Online Page A

message saying the request was a mistake. I could have told him one of my cousins got into my profile and started sending friend requests out randomly. Now I’ve locked myself into it. I shut the computer down and tell myself to forget about it. Tell myself to focus. There are more important things to think about right now.
    I sit with my eyes closed for a few minutes, just getting my priorities in order. Then everything starts working again and I text Sandy to ask him if he knows where Chris Yates lives. He does. He gives me the address. I look it up on Google Maps and it’s not too far. And without giving myself any time to change my mind, I shout to my dad that I’m going out to the shop, and then I head for Yatesy’s place.

8
    I was there when Yatesy’s trouble first started. Then again, so was about three-quarters of the whole school. There were a lot of witnesses. I’d been down near the playing fields with Sandy, trying to work out the profit margin on this scheme I was thinking of setting up, when everybody round about us suddenly started running in the same direction, all at once. That could mean only one thing. A fight. Me and Sandy dropped everything and joined the stampede. By the time we got round to the playground in front of the old block the crowd was huge, a massive circle with a space in the middle, like an enormous doughnut. And standing in the space in the middle was this guy called Cyrus McCormack, and he was being hauled all about it by Bailey, the headmaster.
    â€œMissed it!” Sandy said as we threw ourselves into the scrum and tried to get down to the front.
    â€œWho else was fighting?” I asked the girl next to me.
    â€œChris Yates,” she said.
    And then, off to our right, about the same distance away from the center as we were, Chris Yates suddenly jumped up in the air, propelling himself as high as he could go by pressing his hands on the shoulders of the random in front, and using them as a springboard.
    â€œWho’s fighting?” he shouted. “What have I missed? Is it finished?”
    It still creases me up in a major way to think about it. His face was bright red, and there was blood running out of his nose and a big scratch across his cheek. His hair was all sticking up on one side, and pressed flat down on the other where he’d tried to put it in shape. As he jumped up and down he kept trying to flatten the other side, but it wasn’t really working.
    â€œWho’s fighting?” he shouted again, and then quite suddenly someone behind him grabbed hold of his shirt and pulled him down.
    â€œWise up,” they told him, and they dragged him down low and wove him back and forward through the crowd until he’d gone.
    Somehow, Bailey didn’t notice him. Maybe everyone else at the front looked like Yatesy too. Maybe they were all scratched and bloody. It looked like it had been a wild one.
    â€œSilence!” Bailey shouted, and quite miraculously the playground became almost quiet. “Okay,” he said, “I want the other boy involved in this fight to be standing outside my office when I get there. If he’s not, the trouble he’s already in will be multiplied by ten. At least.”
    Then he dragged Cyrus McCormack out through the parting crowd and hauled him across the playground and toward his office in a way that was probably against Cyrus’s human rights.
    Needless to say, Yatesy wasn’t waiting at Bailey’s office when Bailey got there. Yatesy was in the toilets scrubbing his face and trying to put his wild ginger hair back in order. (“Copper” he calls it on his profile.) One of his pals managed to get close enough to Cyrus on his way out through the crowd to whisper, “Tell and you’re dead.”
    And Cyrus took the advice. He told Bailey he couldn’t really see who was hitting him, and although Bailey probably knew it was a cover-up, he couldn’t make Cyrus say