People being more than you thought they were was even true of Miss Taylor. Tom had always thought of the Deputy Head simply as a teacher who made people behave and gave them extra work if they didn’t. But Miss Taylor had shown she was much more than that. She was someone who worried if she thought you were overworking, who cared if you were doing enough maths to get to university and who noticed if someone in her class had a talent for running a business but wasn’t sure what direction to go in …
Was there always more to people than you thought, he wondered? Did they all have bits you didn’t notice until you got to know them? Did everyone turn out, like New York, to be even bigger than you’d thought, when you got close?
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Geoff still hadn’t pushed the button that would start them on their journey. ‘About going to Norway tomorrow?’
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘No, that’s fine.’
‘Next weekend,’ said Geoff as he eased Aquila up and out through the window, ‘you can choose where we go both days, OK? That’s a promise. You can go rock collecting anywhere you like.’
‘Great,’ said Tom.
‘Though I do have one suggestion.’ Aquila hovered in the air outside the water tower and Geoff pulled back slightly on the handlebars to lift the nose. ‘I was thinking the other day that you might find some interesting rocks … up there.’
As he spoke, he pointed up to where the round white shape of the moon hung in the clear blue sky directly in front of them.
For a moment, Tom was too astonished to speak.
‘I’ve been talking to Dunstan and he says there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to go there. He says Aquila was designed to do journeys much longer than that. We’d have to check it out, of course. Make sure it was safe, but … well, what do you think?’
And Tom thought that like New York, and like the people he was getting to know, their adventure with Aquila just kept on getting bigger.
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