The Problem With Posters

They came down from the bridge in the late afternoon and walked back through town together, Petra between them, her hands in her pockets.

There were six more posters on the route. Petra looked at each one and said nothing. Zara watched her jaw tighten and the sky darken by one degree and then ease back as Petra steadied herself. Control. She was getting better at it.

"We need to deal with the posters," Kofi said. He was practical in the way that people who feel things deeply sometimes are, turning the feeling into something that could be addressed.

"How?" Petra said. "I cannot exactly hold a press conference."

"No," Kofi said. "But someone could. Someone who was there and saw what actually happened."

"Nobody was there," Petra said. "That is the problem. The only witnesses were the people whose gardens flooded, and they were looking at their gardens, not at the roof."

"We could write something," Zara said. "For the community group. Anonymously. About what actually happened on the roof."

"Nobody will believe an anonymous post," Petra said.

"Then we make them believe it," Kofi said. He stopped walking. They were outside the newsagent where the first poster was. He looked at it for a moment. "This poster says you caused the flooding. But we know you did not cause it deliberately and we know you were trying to stop it. The problem is not what you did. The problem is what people think you did. Those are different problems."

Petra looked at him with an expression Zara recognised as the one she used when Kofi said something that was obvious in retrospect but that she had not thought of herself.

"So we fix the second problem," Zara said, following his thinking. "Not by explaining the power. But by giving people a different story about the girl on the roof. One that fits the evidence they have."

"What evidence do they have?" Petra said.

"A blurry photo of a girl on a roof with her arms raised," Kofi said. "During a storm. That is all."

"There are many reasons a person might be on a roof during a storm," Zara said slowly.

"Many," Kofi agreed.

Petra looked at both of them. Then she looked at the poster. Something shifted in her face, not quite hope but the beginning of something that might become it.

"What are you thinking?" she said.

"I am thinking," Kofi said, "that the community group my mum is in is run by a woman called Mrs. Okafor who takes everything that is posted in it very seriously and who forwarded seventeen messages about this today."

"And?" Petra said.

"And Mrs. Okafor's garden flooded," he said. "And Mrs. Okafor would very much like an explanation. And if someone gave her a satisfying and believable explanation she would absolutely share it with the entire group and the posters would come down within twenty-four hours."

Petra stared at him. "You want me to go and talk to Mrs. Okafor."

"I want us to go and talk to Mrs. Okafor," Kofi said. "Together. And I want you to tell her the parts of the truth that help and leave out the parts that do not."

"Like what?"

"Like that you were on the roof because you had just found out your family is moving and you needed somewhere high up to think and you were as surprised by the storm as everyone else was." He paused. "All of that is true."

Petra was quiet. A car went past. The sky above was still grey but the darkness had eased.

"You are eleven," she said to Kofi.

"Yes," he said.

"You are a terrifyingly clever eleven," she said.

"Thank you," he said, as if this was a completely normal thing to be told.