The Infernals Read Free Page A

when she was stuck. Come to think of it, that wasn’t angels: it was every other boy in the class, for Lucy Highmore was the kind of girl who made boys dream of marriage and baby carriages, and made other girls dream of Lucy Highmore falling down a steep flight of stairs and landing on a pile of porcupine quills and rusty farm equipment.
    It had taken Samuel over a year to work up the courage to ask Lucy out: month upon month of finding the right words, of practicing them in front of a mirror so that he wouldn’t stumble on them when he began to speak, of calling himself an idiot for ever thinking that she might agree to have a pie with him at Pete’s Pies, followed by a squaring of his newly teenage shoulders, a stiffening of his upper lip, and a reminder to himself that faint heart never won fair lady, although faint heart never suffered crushing rejection either.
    Samuel Johnson was brave: he had faced down the wrath of Hell itself, so there could be no doubting his courage, but the prospect of baring his young heart to Lucy Highmore and risking having it skewered by the blunt sword of indifference made his stomach lurch and his eyes swim. He was not sure what might be worse: to ask Lucy Highmore out and be rejected, or not to ask and thus never to know how she might feel about him; to be turned down, and learn that there was no possibility of finding a place in her affections, or to live in hope without ever having that hope realized. After much thought, he had decided that it was better to know.
    Samuel wore glasses: quite thick glasses, as it happened, and without them the world tended to look a little blurry to him. He decided that he looked better without his glasses, even though he couldn’t be sure of this as, when he took them off and looked in the mirror, he resembled a drawing of himself that had fallen in a puddle. Still, he was pretty certain that Lucy Highmore would like him more without his glasses, so on the fateful day—the First Fateful Day, as he later came to think of it—he carefully removed his glasses as he approached her, tucking them safely into his pocket, while repeating these words in his head: “Hi, I was wondering if you’d allow me the pleasure of buying you a pie, and perhaps a glass of orange juice, at Pete’s emporium of pies on the main street? Hi, I was wondering if—”
    Somebody bumped into Samuel, or he bumped into somebody. He wasn’t sure which, but he apologized and continued on his way before tripping over someone’s bag and almost losing his footing.
    “Oi, watch where you’re going,” said the bag’s owner.
    “Sorry,” said Samuel. Again.
    He squinted. Ahead of him he could see Lucy Highmore. She was wearing a red coat. It was a lovely coat. Everything about Lucy Highmore was lovely. She couldn’t have been lovelier if her name was Lucy Lovely and she lived on Lovely Road in the town of Loveliness.
    Samuel stood before her, cleared his throat, and without stumbling once said, “Hi, I was wondering if you’d allow me the pleasure of buying you a pie, and perhaps a glass of orange juice, at Pete’s emporium of pies on the main street?”
    He waited for a reply, but none came. He squinted harder, trying to bring Lucy into focus. Was she overcome with emotion? Was she gaping in awe at him? Even now, was a single tear of happiness dropping from her eye like a diamond as the little tweety birds—
    “Did you just ask that letter box on a date?” said someone close by. Samuel recognized the voice as that of Thomas Hobbes, his best friend.
    “What?” Samuel fumbled for his glasses, put them on, and found that he had somehow wandered in the wrong direction. He’d stepped out of the school gates and onto the street where he had, it seemed, just offered to buy a pie for the red letter box and, by extension, the postman who was about to empty it. The postman was now regarding Samuel with the kind of wariness associated with one who suspects that the person standing