Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets by Guy Adams, Kasey Lansdale, Glen Mehn

gazing out of the window, but these days he found his gaze gravitating toward Sherlock instead. Whatever Sherlock was doing, be it excitedly explaining his theories as to why Mr Harrison was the school disco flasher, eating his lunch or simply doing nothing at all, John found himself watching, head turning like a compass needle always pointing north. He’d noticed other students doing it too.
    John wasn’t quite sure how to articulate this particular annoyance, so he wrote ‘ attention whore ’ and stared at the big blue letters for a moment. He was aware this wasn’t quite fair of him, but he couldn’t work out how to say ‘commands the attention of any room he’s in’ without sounding a bit, well, gay.
    “You left out my amazing good looks.”
    It was true, Sherlock did have the kind of good looks that you expected to see on a poster pasted inside some girl’s locker.
    His hand started to write ‘ good looks ’ before his brain caught up and figured out what he was doing.
    “Who said this was about you?” John thought he’d been clever by leaving the list untitled.
    Sherlock smirked, and went back to his equations. (Impossible to hide anything from.)
    John hid the list with his left hand, as Sherlock was on his left, and wrote ‘ SMUG GIT, ’ in sharp blue letters.
    “So we’re on for later, yeah?” asked Sherlock.
    This was another problem with Sherlock, John mused. He was very difficult to say ‘no’ to.
    “Sure.” Damn it.
    After class, John went to meet Sherlock at the bike sheds, where the students went if they wanted a sneaky smoke or a secret snog with one of the girls from the Catholic school.
    Sherlock was waiting for him, lighting up one of his Mayfairs.
    John hated the cool way that Sherlock smoked. And hated how good he looked in that black coat. If John had tried either of those things himself, he’d have had the same effect as a sparrow sticking raven feathers to its wings and pretending it was dark and interesting.
    The problem was, thought John, the real problem was that he’d been perfectly happy assuming he was straight, before he’d met Sherlock. He’d liked girls, he’d liked the way they felt and the way they looked in tight clothes; still did, in fact, only now he was noticing the same things about Sherlock, too.
    “You’re too tall for this,” John told him, reaching up to Sherlock and locking his hands behind his neck, pulling the other boy down to his level.
    Sherlock quirked one dark eyebrow. “Add it to your list.”
    One thing John liked about Sherlock, one thing he liked very much, was the way he kissed.

    Here the legible part of the extract ends, as the author has scribbled deep, angry biro marks all over the pages, with notes such as ‘stupid, stupid!’ ‘high school story = dead giveaway, idiot’ and ‘NEVER PUBLISH THIS’ scrawled in the margins.
    J ANE WASN ’ T SURE what she expected to find when she reached the school roof, but it certainly wasn’t Charlotte standing on the edge of the building. She had Jane’s notebook in her hands and looked as if she were about to leap onto the pavement four floors below. Jane’s heart jumped into her throat.
    “Don’t jump.” She couldn’t live with herself if Charlotte jumped, she couldn’t live without—
    “Wasn’t planning on it.”
    “Oh, thank god.” Eric was nowhere to be seen. Now Jane thought about it, Charlotte didn’t seem so much like she were about to leap, more like she was watching something below. She had another horrible thought. “What did you do with Eric?”
    Charlotte smirked, and gestured over the roof ledge.
    “You didn’t...”
    “Nope. I threw his iPhone into the road.”
    “Good aim.” Jane came forward, peering over ledge, into the playground and the school gates and the busy street beyond. “I hope he gets hit by traffic.”
    “But imagine some poor sod having to go to prison just because they’d hit Eric Sadler .”
    “Prison? He’s a lower life form. It