The Key to Finding Jack by Ewa Jozefkowicz (i can read books TXT) 📗

the quiet. I forced my right foot inside and slowly made my way to the bed. I took out my phone and called Jack. It went straight to voicemail. I tried again a minute later with the same result. I hadn’t really expected him to answer, but I felt a sudden, desperate need to hear his voice. I replayed the video clip he’d sent me on my birthday when he was on the beach in Brazil. His nose was so sunburned that it had begun to peel. He was lying in a deckchair, eating watermelon. He seemed relaxed and happy, but there was a tiny shake in his voice when he said he missed us.

I lay face down on the duvet and breathed in deeply. It wasn’t as strong as before, but I could still smell that faint sweetness. Then a thumping began in my head, like a tiny drummer beating a fierce, sad rhythm. My hand reached and felt for the roughness of the chocolate frog packet. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a hair – a single, blond strand, short and thick.

I stared and stared at it, until my vision blurred. Picking it up carefully between my thumb and forefinger I looked for something that I could put it in. Suddenly, there was nothing more important than making sure that hair was safe.

I scanned Jack’s desk. Then I kneeled down and peered under the bed – which was home to his most prized possessions – half-empty packs of cards (used for some of his more imaginative tricks), scrapbooks of ideas and pictures of friends and people he admired.

When he was younger, my brother used to take his scrapbooks with him everywhere, even to school. He sketched his funny tricks, jokes he’d invented and notes on how to bring them to life.

I could vividly remember his first detention. He thought it would be funny to put plastic cups of water along the corridor. When everyone came out of class, they had to navigate their way to their next lesson via a huge obstacle course. Obviously loads of water spilled in the process and the corridor soon became very wet. When somebody else was about to get the blame, Jack owned up. That was something everyone knew about him – he would never lie, and he always took responsibility for what he did.

Mrs Singh was a great head and Jack didn’t always get caught. But his tricks didn’t stop and after many incidents, she must have written Mum and Dad a strongly worded email because Dad sat Jack down for ‘a chat’. Mum was at her after-work yoga class, which was a shame. She never liked any of us arguing. Without her there, I didn’t want to leave them alone in the kitchen, so I sat on the counter and waited to see what happened.

‘Why did you do it?’ Dad demanded. ‘You’re sitting your exams. You need to be revising. The competition out there is tough,’ he said, pointing randomly towards the window. I almost expected to see a queue of keen future barristers in our garden. ‘If you want to get onto your law course, you can’t be messing around at this stage.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jack muttered. He sounded strangely young in front of Dad. He swept his long fringe out of his eyes, something he did when he was nervous.

‘It seems as if you have no self-discipline,’ said Dad, which I thought was unfair, because Jack was extremely well-organised and on the whole very careful. He had to be, having haemophilia. It was a disorder that meant his blood didn’t clot in the way that other people’s did. He bled for a long time after injuries and bruised easily, and he could be in deep trouble if he ever got internal bleeding. Jack had to have injections every other day to help with his clotting, and for years he’d managed them himself.

I felt like pointing this out to Dad, but it was probably the wrong time.

‘If you’re feeling stressed or need help you can ask,’ he said to Jack now, ‘but don’t resort to this silliness. You could have spent that useless detention writing your personal statement for your uni application. You’d better get onto that tonight. Don’t waste time planning practical jokes, Jack – they’re not funny.’ It wasn’t true, of course. His classmates found them hilarious. I bet he had brightened up everyone’s day.

I was shocked when Jack didn’t say anything. He was normally the first to argue with Dad when it came to stuff like sport, the environment, or things on the news – they seemed to have such completely opposite opinions about everything. But on this subject, Jack was silent. He nodded, then turned and ran up the stairs.

Watching Dad with Jack made me wonder how he would react if I told him I hoped to become a writer one day. What if he wanted me to be a lawyer too? I made a mental note to tell him soon that law wasn’t something I was interested in.

Dad’s reaction got worse after each detention, because Jack kept getting them – he couldn’t seem to resist plotting new tricks. But then he got his mock exam results the following January, and I knew our parents were secretly amazed at how good they were. I was the only one who wasn’t surprised. Jack had always done incredibly well at most things without having to put in much effort.

I snapped out of my daydream when I saw it, peeking out from under the bed, almost asking to be picked up – a small, black, glossy box with a pink flamingo on top. I recognised it immediately. It had been given to Jack on his twelfth birthday by Grandpa. I remembered Jack showing me the card that went with it.

To keep all your treasures in, it had said.

I opened it – the perfect place for that lonely strand of hair. But it turned out that Jack