Plan B

Chapter One

© Copyright Eleanor Kirk 2012.  All rights reserved.  Reproduction of this work, in part or in whole, is illegal.

Fran's first reaction to Darkwood's boys' boarding house was surprise.  Her second was that it was going to be a pretty comfortable place to stay for as long as she was hiding out pretending to be a boy.

Admittedly, it wasn't a hotel, but the place was distinctly smarter than she might have expected – especially for a male boarding house – and the carpet was new enough for her to guess that it had been put in earlier that year.  The wooden panelling on the corridor walls, though – that had to be expensive.  She trailed one of her hands along the panels until she suddenly realised that she couldn't afford to leave fingerprints all over the place.

Maybe I ought to burn my fingerprints off with acid, she mused, trying to tune out the housemaster's voice as he explained that the laundry was in the door to the right and it was only in use during the lunch break and anybody who forgot to remove their clothes would have them confiscated and had to pay a fine to get them back.  One could never be too careful, either with clothes or with fingerprints.

Then again, there were supposed to be ninety-odd boys knocking around the house, so her fingerprints would probably be hard to single out from anybody else's, and—

Mr Carson, the housemaster, knocked the next door open.  "This is the kit— Isaac, what are you doing here?  It's lesson time."

A lanky boy stacking cheese toasties onto a plate looked up.  "I have a free, sir."

"You're not supposed to spend it in the kitchen.  And who are the toasties for?"

Isaac swept his fringe to the side and considered the dozen or so there, absently catching the pile as the twelfth one threatened to topple it.

"Me.  Why?"

Fran poked her head around Mr Carson and inhaled deeply.  "Is that cheddar?" she asked eagerly.

One of Isaac's eyebrows rose and he held one out.  "Sure.  Have one.  You're the newbie, right?"

Fran took it and bit in.  It was the first decent thing she'd eaten for twenty-four hours.

"Mmhmm."  She wiped melted cheese off the side of her face and gave him a thumbs-up as thanks.

"Welcome to Darkwood," Isaac said, grabbing another couple of slices of bread and heading back to the toastie machine.

"Fnkth."

"And you owe me a toastie," he added.

Fran immediately tried to hand back the remaining half.  Isaac chuckled and leant on the toastie machine's lid to close it.

"Just kidding.  What year are you in?"

"Eleven."

Melting cheese began to bubble out of the crack in the side of the toastie machine, but Isaac didn't appear to notice.  Fran immediately made a mental note to make toasties as often as possible.  The machine Isaac was using was the fastest she'd ever seen.

"Bit of an odd year to join."

Fran shrugged.  "My parents are getting divorced and I thought it was best to be out of the way."  And also because I'm being stalked by some random creeps and the police don't seem to be able to do anything about them.

"Ah."  Isaac seemed to realise that the machine was beginning to smoke, but he did nothing about it.  "Well, enjoy it here.  GCSEs are a total pain."

"Thank you, Isaac," Mr Carson interrupted.  "Francis, let me show you the rest of the boarding house."

It turned out that there wasn't really that much left to see.  They'd already toured the rest of the ground floor, which included the house common room, the house games room, the boot room, the housemaster's office and a small medical cupboard next door to the matron's room, and the first, second and third floors were the rooms.  The first years and half of the second years were in dorms of five on the first floor, with their own small common room (complete with a fifty-two inch flat-screen TV) at the end, whilst the remaining second years and the third years – which Fran knew as year eleven – were accommodated on the floor above, also in dorms of five.  They too had their own common room.