Little Bets
Her book was full of written notes, her backpack crammed with banknotes
She wore a secondhand school blazer, long boys’ trousers and had $20,000 stuffed inside her backpack.
Her classmates wore pristine red blazers and the girls were in identical red and white check dresses. If this bothered her, she didn’t show it. Nor was she concerned there were two hundred $100 bills in the bag hanging on the back of her chair.
The classroom settled around her. The pupils sat at their desks and chatted, many of them meeting again after the summer break. A few shot glances but no one spoke to her. Her new tutor Mr Jackson arrived and dropped a pile of textbooks on his desk with a bad-tempered crash.
She removed her little black notebook from under the stack of money in the backpack and opened it on the desk. She looked up at the other children then lowered her head over the notebook and craned an arm around it. She wrote using a stubby well-used yellow pencil. The eraser had fallen out of the end some time ago, they always did.
She made notes about the other children and wrote $20,000 followed by a question mark. She didn’t know how much $20,000 was, but it sounded a lot. The Queen was probably the only other person in England with that much money. Hers would be in British pounds and not…
