Read The Trouble with Sauce for Free Online Page B

pointing and laughing at how dumb it is. And the best part is, you don’t even know how stupid you are.’
    Jonty pushed him away. ‘We’re meant to be mates!’ he shouted.
    ‘Mates?’ spat Boris. ‘What a primitive concept! We don’t have
mates.
We have study colleagues.’
    ‘What do you mean
we
. Who’s
we
?’
    ‘Everyone — except you. Now, get out of our way.
We
have a class to go to.’ He stepped around Jonty like he was a pile of dog dirt.
    ‘Come on, Mike,’ Boris said. ‘I can feel my intelligence drop, just standing next to him.’ He and Mike tried to walk off.
    ‘What’s happened to you?’ Jonty grabbed Boris’s shoulder and looked into his eyes, trying to find a sign of his old mate. He couldn’t see anything he recognised.
    Boris held his gaze and then glanced down at Jonty’s hand. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he growled and walked away.
    ‘You’re not my friend,’ Jonty muttered quietly to himself, as he watched Boris go off. The bully that looked like his mate was someone else. He wasn’t the same person.
    When Jonty got to Science, there was only one seat left — in the back row, next to Prune. Boris wasalready in the front row, impatient for the start of the lesson. As he walked to the back, Jonty saw Nathaniel sitting in the second back row. Normally he would be up the front. Jonty shrugged. ‘Welcome to the back!’ he said.
    Nathaniel turned away. He was tired. He had spent most of the night studying Pythagoras. It had taken him days, but he had finally got his head around it all at two in the morning.
    Jonty sat down next to Prune. ‘Do you know if we’re having a test?’ he asked.
    ‘Are we having a test?’ She jumped and shouted.
    Nathaniel turned around and shook his head. If there was a test, he’d have known about it.
    Jonty breathed a sigh of relief.
    Mr Needham entered, wearing a fresh lab coat and a smile. Normally he was really grumpy, but today he grinned as if he were really looking forward to the class.
    ‘As some of you may know, we’re having a Physics Pop Quiz today.’
    ‘What?’ Nathaniel’s hand shot up, but Mr Needham ignored it.
    ‘It’s just a bit fun, but to make it interesting you can earn up to five points towards your end-of-year mark.’
    Boris turned round and smirked at the panicked faces up the back.
    ‘Right,’ said Mr Needham, sweeping onto the first question. ‘Question one — who can define “kinematics” for me?’
    Jonty blinked. He had never even heard of kinematics. Last week in Science they had named the parts of a worm. Now they were talking forms of energy he’d never heard of.
    ‘Do you have any clue what’s going on?’ he asked Prune.
    She looked out from her long hair. ‘Perhaps we’ve been sucked into a time warp,’ she suggested. ‘We are now several weeks into the future. It can happen, you know. Just enjoy it; we’ll probably travel back to our regular time soon. It happens to me all the time.’
    ‘This is not a time warp.’ Jonty groaned and put his head on the bench.
    ‘So what’s your explanation?’ she said.
    This could not be right. Jonty’s best friend had dumped him and was joyfully answering Physics questions and here he was, stuck listening to Prune de Luca bang on about time warps. The world had gone mad.
    At the end of class Nathaniel tried to speak to the teacher. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I was unaware of any test. When was it decided?’
    ‘The Advanced Physics Study Group decided last night that they wanted one,’ said Mr Needham.
    ‘There really is an Advanced Physics Study Group?’ Nathaniel thought it had just been a trick to get him to the Misery Mall café.
    ‘Aren’t you a member, Nathaniel?’ Mr Needham looked puzzled for a moment. Then his face changed as if he had realised something. ‘Oh — of course. Well, never mind.’
    ‘Mr Needham, how do I join the Advanced Physics Study Group?’
    The teacher smiled and tilted his head as if he almost felt sorry for Nathaniel.