Plan B

Chapter Fifteen

Friday started out reasonably well.  Fran had managed to catch up for everything except French, which she didn’t really care about in any case, and got all her maths classwork done fast enough to be able to do that evening’s homework during the lesson, which meant that she’d have a relatively stress-free prep session.

The first hurdle came after break, in the form of Physics.  Fortunately, her teacher accepted her explanation for changing the name on her exam entry details with no more than a frown, a hesitation and a raised eyebrow.

The next problem was Brookie.  During the lunch break, and especially if she didn’t feel like eating, which was fairly common, Fran usually stayed in her room to avoid Simon and Kevin, who still hadn’t forgiven her for the Pythagoras episode.  Unfortunately, Brookie hadn’t either, and he’d run out of people to blame for ruining all of his records on the training programmes on his gym equipment, although Fran was at least willing to tacitly admit that that was her fault.  Given how he’d nearly destroyed her desk with a dumbbell he’d thrown at her the previous day for singing along to a cheesy eighties song, though, Fran didn’t think she was ever going to actually tell him.

She had the bad luck to walk in at lunch break while Brookie was on the phone to his girlfriend.

“Aw, cute,” Fran simpered as she listened to Brookie bickering.  “Married love.”

Brookie threw a dirty look her way.  “Sorry, Selena.  Can I ring you back?  I need to deal with somebody quickly.”  He didn’t wait long enough for a reply before hanging up, and he turned to glower at Fran.  “Get out.”

“Hey.  My room too.  Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”  Fran dumped her books on her desk with a resounding crash.

“Seriously, do you really only have to be in this room for two seconds before you manage to piss me off?”

Fran rolled her eyes at him.  “Wow, somebody’s having a bad day.”

“You’re making it a whole lot worse.”

Pursing her lips, Fran surveyed him and pretended to think for a few seconds.  “Well, since I’m not your girlfriend, perhaps you’d like to continue the argument you were having with her rather than just slaughtering an innocent bystander—”

“Oh, will you please just f*ck off?”

Fran couldn’t help a smirk.  Winding Brookie up could be so entertaining.  “Technically, I don’t think that’s poss—”  She ducked out of the way of a large black ring binder that he threw at her.  “Are you on your period or something?  This has to be PMS.”

Brookie let out a furious growl and stormed into the bathroom.  The door slammed shut behind him so hard that all the nearby posters fluttered.  Bruno from Kill Me Softly didn’t look too pleased, but then again, he never looked too pleased.  Bruno Merton’s character had scowled pretty much the entire way through that film, so Fran figured it was only right that the poster should have him glowering too.

Shrugging, she picked up the file that Brookie had thrown at her and opened it.  The first thing she noticed was that it wasn’t schoolwork – in fact, leafing through, it looked a lot more like a play script.

Then she noticed all the camera directions.  Oh my gosh, it’s a film script!  She flicked feverishly back to the front page to see what the title was, and her jaw dropped.  The first book of the Isles of Iron series, Stonehelm, was being turned into a film.  Isles of Iron was arguably the best fantasy series since The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, and Stonehelm was the only seven-hundred-page-long book that Fran had read in a single sitting.  Judging from what she knew of the characters, Brookie would be playing the youngest of the protagonists, Miden, the fourth son of an earl, who excelled at archery and was blackmailed into becoming a secret agent for the enemy.