Flip (3 page)

These were definitely Philip’s bronchial tubes. Philip’s lungs.

Maybe this was how transplant patients felt, with someone else’s lungs or heart or liver inside them. Only, in Alex’s case, it was an entire-body transplant. Skin, flesh, muscle, ligaments, bones, blood, internal organs—the lot. All he had left of himself, as far as he could tell, was his brain. Or not even the actual brain, but the thoughts inside it. The mind, or … consciousness. Whatever it was that made Alex
Alex
.

No. It was way too weird even to think about.

He turned his attention to the planner: A5, spiral bound, with a clear plastic cover and, beneath that, the school crest, motto (
Cognitio vincit omnia
) and name (Litchbury High School). Philip’s surname was Garamond (what kind of name was that?) and he was in Tutor Group 9b. Okay, so they were in the same school year. Tenuous, as connections go, but age was something they had in common, along with gender and country of residence.

A train had arrived. Passengers were streaming out of the station. Alex glanced up, distracted by the blur of passing feet.

He checked his watch again.
Come on, Mum. Call. Please call
.

She would call. She would believe him. She would drive straight up here and take him home, away from all this. She would get help, somehow, and it would be all right. He would be himself again.

“Garamond.”

There was a baker’s across the road. Alex thought about getting a sausage roll or something with Philip’s change but didn’t want to use up what little money he had.

“Garamond.”

Alex bent over the planner once more, ready to have a proper nosey inside. A shadow fell across the page.

“Philip Garamond, I’m talking to you.”

Alex looked up. The guy was bald and wearing a red and white bow tie and a checked jacket buttoned tight across his belly. He carried a leather briefcase too fat with books and papers to shut properly.

“It’s ten to nine, boy,” he said. “Why aren’t you in school?”

“Right, let’s see what Ms. Sprake has to say, shall we?”

Alex was made to stand in the corridor while the teacher with the bow tie and bulging briefcase went into one of the classrooms. He’d been marched from the station to the school, his escort panting alongside him, too out of condition to walk and talk at the same time. If Alex had made a break for it, there was no way Bow Tie could’ve caught him. But it wasn’t in his nature to disobey a teacher quite so blatantly, even if that teacher had mistaken him for someone else. Besides, Alex had nowhere to run.

Bow Tie reappeared with a woman Alex assumed to be Philip’s form tutor. She pulled the door, shutting off a hubbub of classroom chatter.
EN2
, the panel on the door said. English. He wondered what they called Ms. Sprake behind her back. Spray Can, or something like that. Quite young, but frumpy in her pale blue blouse and a navy corduroy skirt that came to her knees. She removed her glasses and held them carefully by the stems. Alex’s friend David was the same with his—paranoid about smudging the lenses, obsessively cleaning them with a special cloth. A long way from here, David was in history at this moment, an empty seat beside him.

“What’s this about, Philip?” the woman said, a crease forming between her eyebrows. If she had meant to sound stern, it came out more concerned. Perhaps she
liked
Philip. That was a first that morning.

“I don’t know, miss.”

“Mr. Johannsen says you were at the station.”

“I wasn’t going anywhere.” He shrugged. “Just sitting there … thinking.”

A snort, from Mr. Johannsen. “That would make a change, Garamond.”

So it continued: the two teachers doing the good-cop-bad-cop routine, Alex failing to come up with a satisfactory explanation for his truancy. For sure, he wasn’t about to tell them the truth.

Oh, what it was, I woke up in another boy’s body and …

Eventually Ms. Sprake decided that whatever the reason, he had been caught off-site during school hours without permission. Sanction: a comment in his planner, and he was to see her after last period so they could discuss this properly.

“Just be thankful Mr. Johannsen came by when he did,” she said. “An entire day on the skive and I’d be sending a letter to your parents and red-slipping you.”

Red-slipping. That must mean isolation here. At Crokeham Hill High it was called being kabinned, after the Portakabin where you served your sentence. Alex had never been kabinned or received a comment in his planner, although he was getting one now. At least, Philip was.

“What’s your first lesson?” Ms. Sprake asked.

Alex plucked a subject out of the air. “History.”

“I hardly think so,” cut in Mr. Johannsen, “seeing as I’m your history teacher.”

Damn
. What were the odds? “Sorry, I meant … actually, which week is it?”

“Blimey, Philip, you’ve been on this timetable for
nine months.
” This was Ms. Sprake. If that frown cut any deeper, her eyebrows would shear off. She flipped to another page in his planner. “Blue Week, Monday, first period: German.”

German
. He didn’t
do
German. “Oh, right, yeah. That’s it, German.”

“Right, get yourself off there. And no stopping at the lockers—you’ve missed twenty minutes as it is.”

As she handed back the planner, Philip’s mobile rang.

Mum
.

He pulled the phone from his blazer pocket, the ring-tone (some
rap
thing) startlingly loud. Before he could answer, Mr. Johannsen snatched the mobile from him.

“I don’t
think
so, do
you
?” With that, and some fumbling for the right button, Bow Tie switched off the phone. The ring-tone stopped.

“That call was
important
!” Alex’s raised voice ricocheted along the corridor.

It was hard to tell which of the three of them was the most shocked. After a pause, Ms. Sprake said, “Philip, you’re in quite enough bother as it is.”

“Sorry, but I need to take that call. I really do.”

“What you
need
to do, in fact, is take yourself off to German.
Now.
”

“But—”

“Now this
minute
, Philip.” She took the mobile from Mr. Johannsen. “As for this, you can have it back when you come to see me this afternoon.”

Halfway down the corridor, he realized he hadn’t a clue where the German classroom might be. He must have headed off in the right direction, because Sprake or Johannsen would’ve called after him otherwise. Frankly, Alex didn’t care where he was going. All he could think about was the missed call. Just a minute later, he’d have been free to talk to his mother. One minute. How unlucky was that? Now he didn’t know how or when he’d get another chance. If the rules at Litchbury High were the same as at his own school, only Years Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen would be allowed off-site at lunchtime, and there were bound to be teachers on gate duty, so no chance of sneaking into town to use a pay phone. He’d have to wait until he got the mobile back. Which meant he had to survive a whole day in this school, passing himself off as Philip Garamond, attending lessons that were nothing to do with him, surrounded by teachers and pupils he had never met, in a building that might as well have been a maze.

It was all he could do not to hurl Philip’s bag against the nearest wall.

At least the smell was recognizable. School corridors. They had to be the same all over the country. This one brought him to a stairwell with two other corridors leading off it and, at last, some color-coded signs. Language department, first left. According to the timetable in Philip’s planner, he was in LA5. Alex found it and let himself into the room to a round of applause and ironic cheers.

“So, Flip,” said the teacher,
“hat Man Deine Uhr gestohlen?”

“What was that all about?”

Alex gave the boy a sideways glance. Short blond hair, spotty chin; he wore his blazer over his shoulders like a cape. One of Philip’s mates, no doubt. He’d fallen in step with Alex outside LA5. “Nothing,” Alex said. “I was just goofing around.”

“No you weren’t.”

He was right: that shambles in there with Herr Löwenfeldt had been for real. Forty minutes of trying to pretend he could communicate in a language he’d never studied in his life. Alex had got off lightly, really: another note in Philip’s planner and banishment to an empty desk at the back of the room to copy out lists of vocab … 
to see if you can become as fluent in German as you are in sheer bloody stupidity
, the teacher had said.

“I’ve never seen Löwenfeldt so angry,” the lad said. “I thought he was going to rip your planner in half.”

“Or me.”

They were on a twenty-minute break. Alex wondered where he would go if he was Philip. On a day like this, most people would head outside. He didn’t want to hang out with this boy. The lad wasn’t
his
mate; Alex didn’t even know his name. Another lad joined them as they walked along the corridor—surprising them from behind, one hand on Alex’s shoulder and one on the first boy’s, swinging himself through the gap.

“Hey, Luke. Flip-man.”

“A’right,” Alex said.
Flip
. The teacher had called him that, too. Philip-Flip. It made sense. He quite liked “Flip”; it was cooler than Philip, or Phil.

“Nice one, eh?
Ich bin ein tosser
.” The second boy laughed, gave Alex a shove. “And you skive off registration. You, my friend, are
in the zone
this morning.” He sniffed, hard and loud, dredging the contents of both nostrils and swallowing them. “So, you seen Spray Can?”

Alex laughed. They really
did
call her that.

“What’s funny?”

“No, nothing, it’s just … nothing. Yeah, I saw her. No biggie.”

“You coming round the back?” the second boy said, looking furtive. He raised two fingers to his lips. Alex couldn’t figure out what he meant at first; then he caught on. “Oh, no. I’ve got stuff to do.”

“Like
what
?”

“Donna, he means,” the first boy said.

“Oh,
Donna.
” Boy two gave Alex another shove. He was big and brawny and his clothes looked like they didn’t quite fit. Quietly, he said, “You got any on you?”

Alex produced the playing-cards box and passed it to him, a conjuror palming something he didn’t want the audience to see. The boy pocketed it. “There’s eight in there,” Alex said. “Have the lot. I don’t want them.”

“Serious?”

“I don’t smoke.”

The first boy laughed. “Yeah, right.”

Both boys were looking at Alex, watching his face as though waiting for the punch line to a joke.

“Look, I gotta take a leak,” Alex said. “I’ll catch you two later, yeah?”

* * *

Alex had to traipse round three ranks of lockers before he tracked Philip’s down. He opened it with the key on the boobs key ring, sorted the books he would need during the day, then shut himself away in a toilet cubicle for the rest of break. He hid there at lunchtime, too, even though he was ravenous. The thought of encountering any more of Flip’s mates—or worse, either of his girlfriends—was too much. He didn’t know how to
be
with them. Didn’t want to be there at all. He needed to keep a low profile, run down the clock until he got his hands on the phone. Once he spoke to Mum, things would be on their way to being straightened out. He turned up to Flip’s lessons, though, making sure he was marked on every register—no point drawing himself to the teachers’ attention any more than he had done already.

Finding the classroom wasn’t always easy. Likewise, knowing where to sit, and who to sit next to (or not to sit next to). Avoiding eye contact and conversation as much as possible. He got plenty of funny looks and comments, but he could live with that. If they thought Flip was acting weird, so what? Being six months behind in the curriculum didn’t help, but he managed to blag his way through; in any case, it seemed no one had high academic expectations of Philip Garamond for Alex Gray to live up to. As it happened, Alex was bright, but they would never get to discover that.

English was with Ms. Sprake. There was homework to hand in—an essay, which he’d found tucked inside an exercise book in Flip’s bag. So that was okay. Not very well written, if the first paragraph was anything to go by, but that didn’t matter. Hand it in. Tick the box. Another lesson survived. Another hour nearer to the end of the day. If nothing else, the schoolwork was a refuge, a foothold on the scary, insurmountable cliff face of what had happened to him. The more he
did
, the less time he had to
think
.

In art, period four, Flip’s cigarette-smoking mate reappeared, parking himself right next to Alex. While the teacher was setting up the interactive whiteboard, the boy leaned in close, whispering, reeking of stale tobacco and fresh sweat, raking his fingers through his just-woke-up brown hair.

Why hadn’t Flip been at basketball practice that lunchtime? Eh? And why was he being such an idiot?

“Oh, and, by the way, Donna is
well
mad at you, man.”

Jack, he was called. There was his name, in blocky green felt-tip on the cover of his art folder. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, past each elbow, folded tight into his biceps. There was a hyperactivity thing going on: the rocking back and forth on the stool, the thudding of a knee against the underside of the table. He reminded Alex of a lad at Crokeham Hill who popped his thumb into and out of its socket to impress girls and who’d ask questions like
Would you rather slam your dick in a door or run across the M25?
Looking at Jack, his gurning, dumber than
Dumb & Dumber
expression, Alex realized that this could well be Flip’s, and therefore
his
, best friend.

By the end of the day, Alex was faint with hunger. But Ms. Sprake wasn’t about to let him go without an explanation for his “little trip” to the station that morning. He gave a shrug. Apologized. Said it wouldn’t happen again. That sort of thing.

“Are you okay, Philip?”

She’d perched herself on the edge of her desk, fussing again with her reading glasses. Her clothes were creased and her dark blond hair had worked loose here and there. She looked like she was tired but making an effort not to be.

“I’m fine, miss. I’m just … you know.” Another shrug.

“This term’s been a struggle, I realize that, but after our chat …” She exhaled. Alex hoped he wouldn’t be expected to remember anything she and Flip had discussed in their chat, whenever that had been. “Look, skiving off isn’t going to help. Is it?”

“No, miss.”

“And the work won’t get any easier in Year Ten, I can promise you that.”

Alex steadied himself against the back of a chair. Quite apart from breakfast and lunch, Flip would’ve scoffed two or three Snickers by now.
A struggle
. How had Flip done in his Year Nine assessments? Alex had missed his altogether, he realized, along with choosing the next year’s GCSE options. Not to mention Christmas, Easter. The half-term holiday in Cornwall. The borough chess finals. He closed his eyes, woozy all of a sudden. In that instant, the nightmare of the previous night recurred, flashing through his mind. Then,
snap
, the image vanished as quickly as it had come.