The Apothecary Page 0,41

into my skin. I grew fingers and toes, and my skull thickened and expanded, and hair grew from my head.

And then I was sitting on the grass in my school uniform.

“Right,” Pip said. “Good. She can’t fly in.”

Through the fogginess in my new human head, I remembered my idea. “What if we could be invisible?” I asked.

“That would solve a lot o’ things,” Pip said, as if I was joking.

“We’d need the Pharmacopoeia,” I said.

“The farm-a what?”

“It’s a book,” I said, “and Sergei has it.”

“We hope he still has it,” Benjamin said.

CHAPTER 18

The Opera Game

School was just getting out when we got back to St. Beden’s to recover the Pharmacopoeia, and students were streaming out into the grey afternoon, released for the day. They were all going about their lives, heading off to field hockey practice or choir rehearsal, and I felt that an enormous, unbridgeable gulf had opened up between us. Wearing the wrong clothes and not knowing Latin seemed like enviable problems to have.

Pip stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looked up at the tall, imposing Victorian building, and shuddered. “I’ll just wait out ’ere,” he said.

It struck me as funny that Pip had no problem running across a peaked roof three stories off the ground, or attacking a monstrous cat as a tiny bird, but when confronted with a school, even after hours, he looked scared. It was as if someone might come after him with a butterfly net and pin him inside a case.

“But school’s out,” Benjamin said. “It’s safe.”

Pip looked doubtful.

“They’re not going to kidnap you and make you go,” I said. “No one will notice one more kid.”

Benjamin and I started up the stone steps, but Pip hung back.

Then Sarah Pennington came out the front door, and the February clouds momentarily parted—they really did. I’m not making this up. A shaft of sunlight caught her golden hair as she stopped at the top of the steps.

Pip stared, openmouthed, at this paragon of schoolgirl beauty. A few strands had escaped from Sarah’s long braid, and they sparkled around her face. She blinked her long eyelashes in the unexpected light.

Then her eyes met Pip’s bright hazel ones. I doubt she could have avoided it, given the intensity of his unconcealed longing. She seemed startled by what she saw, and she glanced at me, then at Benjamin, then back at Pip. We were all standing on the steps below her, like acolytes before the queen. I thought it might be good for Pip that she couldn’t see how short he was.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Pip said, as if in a dream.

“How do you do?” she asked.

He nodded, paralysed with love.

“This is our friend Pip,” I said.

“Pip?” she asked, tilting her head fetchingly. “As in Great Expectations?”

“Why not?” Pip said.

She smiled. “Do you have great expectations?”

“I do now.”

“Do you go to this school?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But if you go here, I will.”

I noticed that he had pronounced the h in “here,” and wondered how much he changed his accent to suit his situation each day.

Sarah blushed, flustered. Having started the flirtation, she didn’t seem to know how to keep it up. “My car is waiting,” she said, and she skipped lightly past us, down the steps, ignoring Benjamin and me but glancing one more time at Pip.

Pip gazed after her. Then he scampered down to the black car that waited at the kerb, slid in front of the chauffeur, and opened the back door for her, saying something I couldn’t hear.

“Is that a limousine?” I asked Benjamin.

“A Daimler,” he said. “It picks her up every day.”

As the Daimler pulled away, with Sarah safely inside, Pip clutched his heart and staggered backward, with the mock-clumsiness of a vaudeville performer. Then he ran back up the stairs.

“I think I should go to this school,” he announced.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She told me ’er name. Sarah Eleanor Pennington!” He sighed.

“She told you her middle name?” Benjamin asked.

“Benjamin fancies her, too,” I explained.

“I do not!”

“Yes you do. You know how she leaves school every day.”

“I don’t fancy her,” Benjamin said. “I did.”

Pip sized up his new rival, then shrugged. “May the best man win,” he said.

Benjamin stalked into the building, letting the door swing closed behind him, and I wondered if he was pretending not to like Sarah because he envied Pip’s success, or if he really meant it.

“What was that she said about great spectations?” Pip asked.

“It’s a novel,” I said. “Great Expectations. About a poor boy named Pip