All the Things That Could Go Wrong

by Stewart Foster

  ‘Hey, Alex,’ he says. ‘Maybe a television crew is coming and you’ll be on the 6 o’clock news tonight.

  ‘Superhero Alex saves the school bully!’

  I force a smile. I don’t think it’s funny. I just want to know what’s happened to Dan.

  I haven’t spoken to him today. He was in registration, but then Mr Francis came into class and asked Dan to go with him and I’ve not seen him since. I thought maybe he’d been sent to isolation or told to go home, but halfway through science I saw his mum walking through the main gates.

  Elliott nudges me and slides a card across the table.

  ‘Take it,’ he says. ‘It’s Zlatan. I got him for you.’

  ‘Who’d you want for him?’

  ‘Bale.’

  I reach into my pocket and then stop. Sophie and the Georges have just walked in and joined the dinner queue. The Georges are talking to each other, but Sophie’s staring at me like I’m the only person in the room. I find Gareth Bale and give him to Elliott. Elliott looks over his shoulder, then back at me.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He sees the worried look on my face. ‘Even if he stops picking on you, I don’t think he’ll be able to stop them.’

  I jam my cards in my pocket and try to eat my sandwiches. I don’t know if Dan has spoken to them or not, but I do know Sophie’s looking at me like she wants to dunk my head down the toilet again.

  ‘Keep the line moving,’ barks Mr Anderton. ‘And don’t forget to clear your tables when you leave.’

  Sophie and the Georges jostle each other and burst out laughing.

  Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing’s going to change.

  I look out of the window and wish I could leave now. My stomach tightens when I see Dan walking across the playground with his bag on his back. He’s smiling like nothing has happened. I watch him go along the path beside the canteen. He’s looking in through the window, but he doesn’t see me.

  ‘Let’s sit here.’ I look up and see Sophie smirking at me.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, Shark Face? Budge up!’

  Elliott slides along the bench towards me so it’s him and me at one end and Sophie and the Georges at the other. I don’t need to look up to know that they’re staring at me now.

  I glance out of the window and see Dan disappearing through the blue corridor doors. He can’t be getting sent home yet because the blue corridor only leads to the maths block then back round to the canteen.

  ‘Hey, Shark Face, heard you tried to go and swim with your friends in the sea.’

  ‘And Dan told you to get lost,’ says George W.

  ‘He didn’t,’ I mumble.

  ‘He did,’ says Sophie. ‘He said you were such a wimp that he had to save you from drowning.’

  ‘That’s not what happened.’

  ‘Tell us what did then. What were you doing down there anyway?’

  Elliott gives me a look as if to say I told you so.

  I put my sandwiches in my lunch box and close the lid. Nothing is going to change. It’s going to be exactly the same. Every day, every week, every term. There’s no point in talking to them. Dan obviously already has and he’s told a load of lies. It’s like he’s two different people. Nice when he’s with me, but horrible when he’s with them.

  I put my lunch box in my bag.

  ‘Dan! Where do you think you’re going?’

  I look towards the door. Dan has ignored Mr Anderton and walked straight past the dinner queue. He looks across all the tables. Sophie waves her hand in the air.

  ‘Over here, Dan!’

  He nods when he sees her, then starts to walk towards us. His face is straight and one of his hands is bunched in a fist. Is this when we have the fight. Have I got to get up and throw a punch at him now? I clench my fist. I can’t do it. I can’t. I feel Elliott tense as Dan glances at me. Does he think I’ve been talking about him, that I’ve told everyone about Ben? Sophie moves her plate along.

  ‘Sit here, Dan,’ she says. ‘What did Francis want?’

  Dan walks past her, past Elliott and sits down beside me.

  ‘Oi!’ hisses Sophie. ‘What are you doing?’

  Dan takes his lunch box out of his bag and looks at me.

  ‘All right?’

  I nod. I feel like there’s a bite of sandwich stuck in my throat.

  ‘Good.’ He grins at me. ‘That’s all right then.’

  I relax my fist. The snake loosens in my stomach.

  I nod again.

  I’m all right.

  Three months later

  Dan: This Shooting Star is ours

  I’m floating on Shooting Star. The sea is blue and the pebbles are golden. There’s a queue of ten people waiting for ice-creams and Mr Kendall is wiping his head, trying to serve them all. Ben is walking up and down the beach, collecting money from people sitting in deckchairs. The big wheel is turning and along the beach the Observation Tower is rising like a spaceship into the sky.

  Alex dips his gloved hand in the water.

  ‘This is great,’ he says. ‘I’m glad I came. I nearly didn’t.’

  ‘Because of the seagulls?’

  ‘Yep!’ Alex shrugs. ‘But I think they might be too busy hovering around to steal fish and chips.’ He nods towards the chip shop on the seafront.

  My stomach lifts, then falls as a wave passes by underneath us.

  Ben collects the money from another person, then turns and waves at me. I wave back. He’s been home three weeks now. He had to stay in the STC three months longer. Booth had thrown a chair against a window and Ben tried to stop him and got in a fight.

  Two days after I ran out of school, Mr Francis called me into his office. I thought he was going to suspend me, but he just wanted to talk to me about Ben. I told him that my house felt empty without Ben and that I was missing him like mad. Then I went quiet and he asked me if there was anything else bothering me.

  That’s when I told him what I’d been doing to Alex.

  That’s when Mum and Dad were called down to the school.

  That’s when I got suspended for a week.

  Alex: The last round

  Dan paddles us over a wave. I drag my hand backwards and forwards through the water. It bubbles and circles like there are fish darting around for food underneath.

  It could be a piranha.

  It’s not.

  It is. They’re under there now, nibbling at your gloves.

  They’re not. We don’t get piranhas in England.

  It’s a shark then.

  It’s not. A shark wouldn’t waste time eating fingers. It would eat your whole arm.

  I’m glad Ben came back. It was weird at first. Dan was talking to Ben all the time and I felt like I was at a party that I hadn’t been invited to, but as soon as we all started working on Shooting Star, that worry went away. Ben agreed that the buoys should go on the corners and he drew the picture of the pirate on the flag. We couldn’t find a proper anchor, so he filled a sack with pebbles and tied a rope to it instead. Shooting Star looks brilliant now. I told Granddad that she’s the best thing I’ve ever made. And then he made me wash his car!

  The week after I went to the seafront to save Dan, I was told to go to Mr Francis’s office. I thought I was in trouble or that something bad had happened to Mum, like a stack of baked beans had tumbled over and trapped her underneath, or that Dad’s work had been burgled and the burglars had tied him up and locked him in a cupboard. But, when I got to Mr Francis’s room, he was sitting at his desk, looking really calm. Dan was there too. I hadn’t seen him all week because he’d been suspended and so had Sophie and the Georges. He tried to smile at me, but he looked embarrassed and then looked at the ground.

  Mr Francis told me that Dan had told him he’d been bullying me and that he felt really bad about it. I didn’t know what to do or say. Then Dan looked up and handed me a letter.

  This is what he wrote:

  Dear Alex

  I am sorry I bullied you. I am so
rry I made things hard for you when you were at school. Bullying is a horrible thing to do and I wish I’d never done it. I’m sorry that I made you miserable and that things got so bad you had to stay at home. I’m sorry if I upset your mum and dad and your sister.

  Bullying is for cowards and I won’t do it again. I know I was upset about Ben but that didn’t mean that I should pick on you or Elliott.

  I hope we can be friends, but I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t want to. But if you do, we can go on Shooting Star all summer.

  Dan

  I didn’t know what to do after I read the letter. Dan was still looking at the ground and Mr Francis was looking right at me like he was waiting for me to say something back. I told him that Dan was all right. Then he asked if I wanted to meet with Sophie and the Georges. I said I didn’t want to see any of them. The Georges have left me alone since they came back, and Sophie hangs around with some girls in Year Nine. He said they’d write a letter too and then asked me if I wanted to say anything else. I looked at Dan. I knew he was sorry for all the horrible things he’d done. But I couldn’t see the point in telling Mr Francis how bad things had been, because I couldn’t change what happened and it was all over now.

  A wave lifts Shooting Star and we sink behind it. I watch as it moves away from us and then crashes on the shore. I look along the seafront. The Observation Deck is sliding down the tower ready for people to get off and new people to get on. It goes up and down all day, every day.

  Shooting Star rises over another wave. The flag flaps in the wind. I look up, see the pirate and his eye patch, and Jeff the giraffe standing next to him on look out.

  I pick up a paddle and dip it in the water. Dan’s already got one in his hand.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  I shrug.

  Dan starts paddling.

  ‘Come on,’ he says.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Jeff’s never seen a bumper car.’

  ‘You’re weird.’

  ‘You think I’m weird?!’

  We laugh then dig our paddles in the water and head for the pier.

  It seems a long time since the idea for this novel came to me, as I walked the corridors of Saffron Walden High, trying to figure out if I had what it needed to be a teacher. When I stopped and read the school notice board, my decision was made. So I’d like to extend a big thanks to Pete Wilson, my then mentor, for being so understanding that week, but also for a brilliant discussion on bullying that we had with his Year Seven. ‘Can we have empathy for the bully?’ From that question and subsequent discussion, All The Things That Could Go Wrong was spawned.

  Big thanks also to: My agent, Nicola Barr, for her enthusiasm and support. Liz Binks for being my publicist (and Lizzie). Sam Drew, for listening when I’m stuck then sending me away unglued. Jade Craddock, who worked on my early drafts. Rachel Mann who listened to and supported the idea, then edited the first one hundred pages, before she left me in the wonderful hands of Lucy Rogers, now my editor at Simon and Schuster. We got there in the end, Lucy, even if the late nights left our eyelids half-closed. Jane Tait for turning my prose into proper sentences.

  Big love to my daughter; Lois was also brilliant at helping me with ongoing edits and Alex’s worry lists. I’ll have to thank Tallulah, too, who did nothing to help but we did have great chats in Nando’s, and my mum and dad who must have wondered what was going through my head as we watched Monday night football.

  And absolutely not least, I am hugely grateful to Jonathan Bentley-Smith for, I want pavement, I want concrete, I want tarmac, but most of all for his friendship and his manuscript, The Palladium Cafe, which gave me invaluable insight into the inner life of someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Thanks, Jon, for trusting me.

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2017 Stewart Foster

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

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  The right of Stewart Foster to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

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  PB ISBN 978-1-4711-4542-1

  eBook ISBN 978-1-4711-4543-8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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