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back and I kept doing them over. You’re not supposed to do that, see — the cards get angry. And then The Tower came up, which is the worst possible card. It means disaster and that’s exactly what’s happened.’
    ‘What — you played a game of cards and now the world’s ending?’ Miranda said.
    ‘Honestly, Prune, this is serious. Go back to your crystals or whatever,’ someone sneered.

CHAPTER 10
A SPOT TEST
    Over the next few days, one student after another was sent to the principal’s office. Jonty kept waiting for his name to be called. As each day passed and he hadn’t heard it, he dreaded going to school even more. His name was sure to come up next.
    Everyone who went to see the principal came back different. One by one, nearly all of Year 7 paid attention, answered questions brilliantly and behaved perfectly.
    Jonty arrived at school one morning, sure that he would be called today. He found a row of students sitting on the library steps, which was now the hot place to be. They were from Year 10 and they all had the same book resting on their knees. They read at exactly the same pace, turned over the same page at the same time. He watched them for a moment and walked off to find Boris and Mike, hoping that perhaps they might be normal again. It wasn’t muchof a hope. Neither of them had responded to a text for days and their MySpace profiles had disappeared.
    Across the schoolyard, neat students were sitting quietly, learning. He heard two girls and turned suddenly, recognising the voices of Anastasia and Miranda, but he couldn’t work out what they were saying:
    ‘Oui, puisque je retrouve un ami si fidèle, Ma fortune va prendre une face nouvelle.’
Anastasia was reciting the lines of an ancient French play.
    ‘Ca c’est
Andromaque
de Racine
!’ replied Miranda, identifying the source of the lines.
    ‘Hi!’ Jonty held up his hand to say hello. They walked right past him, testing each other with further lines in French. Their phones were nowhere in sight.
    Finally Jonty saw Mike and Boris sitting on a bench under one of the shadecloths. They looked extremely neat. A perfect small knot in Mike’s school tie was pushed right up to the collar. It was spotless. He used to be proud of the stain collection on his tie. He would hide it every weekend so his mum couldn’t wash them out.
    ‘Hey, Mike,’ Jonty said. ‘What’s going on?’
    Mike finished the page he was reading and then looked up slowly. ‘I’m busy,’ he said. He was reading
Physics in Context: the Forces of Life.
It was a Year 12 textbook and hundreds of pages thick. Mike hadalways struggled with science. He could barely say what an atom was and now he was reading this massive textbook.
    ‘Have we got a test?’ Jonty was worried he had missed an announcement about first period, which was Science.
    Boris snorted and rolled his eyes at him. ‘We don’t need a test to make us learn,’ he said, actually looking at Jonty for the first time in days. ‘We don’t need anything — especially not you.’
    He had muttered the last words so Jonty wasn’t sure if he had heard properly, but he tried to be friendly. ‘What are you studying?’ he asked brightly.
    Boris looked up from his book with a hard smile. ‘Townsend, don’t tell me you’re actually interested in quantum physics?’ he sneered.
    ‘Actually,
Brockman,
I never thought that you’d be interested in quantity physics,’ Jonty retorted.
    ‘Thinking never was your strong point, was it? And it’s quantum, not quantity, from the Latin for “how much".’
    Jonty took a step back and shook his head. ‘Why are you being so mean?’ he asked quietly.
    Boris laughed and Mike looked up from his book with a grin. Boris stood up and took a step forward so that his face was right in Jonty’s. ‘Because you make it so easy. You’re like a mouse running around on the wheel in its cage. It thinks it’s having a good time,when all the creatures with real brains are