No Rules

by R. A. Spratt

  ‘That’s not in the original experimental method,’ said Friday.

  ‘No, Mirabella has been making improvements,’ said Johanna. ‘You’ll see.’

  Chapter 19

  A Touch of Orwell

  When the four girls arrived at the genealogy class they discovered that for the most part it looked like a regular classroom. The students’ project work was pinned up on all the walls. And each student had researched a large and elaborate family tree, which had been illustrated with photos and portraits where possible. But at the front of the room there was a large banner saying:

  BROWN EYES GOOD

  BLUE EYES BAD

  ‘I’m surprised,’ said Friday.

  ‘That VP Pete would allow this?’ asked Gretel.

  ‘That Mirabella managed to write a sign without making a spelling mistake,’ said Friday.

  ‘She didn’t do it herself,’ said Johanna. ‘She made the blue-eyed students do it.’

  Friday checked her watch. ‘We’ve got five minutes until your class starts,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a look around.’

  The desks and chairs had been divided. Half the chairs were evenly spaced at the front of the room. The other half of the furniture was crammed into a corner at the back.

  ‘Is that where the blue-eyed students have to sit?’ asked Friday.

  ‘That’s where we sat last week,’ said Gretel.

  ‘This week, Mirabella decided we weren’t good enough and we should sit on the floor,’ said Johanna.

  ‘Are you allowed to lie on the floor?’ asked Melanie. ‘You could just take a nap and forget about your worries.’

  ‘We have to take notes for the brown-eyed students,’ said Gretel.

  ‘That’s just cruel,’ said Melanie.

  Friday was studying one of the family trees on the wall. ‘Look, here’s Lizzie and Max Abercrombie’s family.’

  ‘They’ve got a lot of twins in their family tree,’ observed Melanie. ‘Even their dad has a twin. It’s horrifying to think there’s two of them.’

  ‘Lizzie and Max won’t speak of him in class,’ said Gretel. ‘They are ashamed of their uncle because he has a conviction for welfare fraud.’

  ‘They’re not ashamed that he’s a criminal,’ said Johanna. ‘They’re ashamed that he was on welfare.’

  ‘It looks like they’ve got lots of interesting relatives,’ said Friday. ‘It says here that their grandmother was an aviatrix, their grandfather was a stationery magnate, their great grandfather was an advocate for domestic animal rights and their great great aunt won a bronze medal at the 1904 Olympics for croquet.’

  ‘I didn’t know croquet was an Olympic sport,’ said Melanie.

  ‘It isn’t anymore,’ said Friday. ‘There were a lot of silly sports included in the 1904 Olympics. Croquet, the plunge for distance, wax bullet duelling.’

  ‘All sports are silly,’ said Melanie. ‘They just seem sillier because no one does them anymore.’

  ‘This is intriguing,’ said Friday. She had moved along to the next display.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘Mirabella Peterson’s family tree,’ said Friday.

  Johanna rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, we’ve heard about it endlessly. How her family has a long proud history in industrial cleaning products.’

  ‘No,’ said Friday, ‘I mean this photograph of her parents. Have a look.’

  The other three girls came over to have a closer see.

  ‘Mirabella looks just like her parents,’ said Melanie. ‘The same chin, hair colour and forehead. It’s uncanny.’

  ‘Except her parents both have blue eyes,’ said Friday.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Gretel.

  ‘I’d never noticed that,’ said Johanna.

  ‘That probably explains why she has such an issue about it,’ said Melanie. ‘She might have felt like the odd one out at home.’

  ‘What are you doing in here?’

  The girls turned round to see Mirabella Peterson herself, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Blue eyes are supposed to wait in the corridor until all the brown eyes are seated,’ Mirabella reminded them.

  Gretel and Johanna scurried out.

  ‘And you two shouldn’t be here at all,’ said Mirabella. The rest of the class were filing in.

  ‘I quite agree with that,’ said VP Pete cheerfully, as he followed the students into the room. ‘Are you two girls lost? Do I have to give you detention so you can spend some time studying your schedule more closely?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in detention,’ said Melanie.

  ‘Flexibility is so important for an educator,’ said VP Pete with a false smile. ‘For you two, I’m prepared to make an exception.’

  ‘We’re here because you’ve been allowing Mirabella Peterson to unfairly persecute the blue-eyed students,’ said Friday.

  VP Pete chuckled. ‘That’s the whole point. I’m teaching my students empathy by demonstrating what injustice feels like.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Friday. ‘That’s like a geography teacher shoving his students out of an airplane to teach them what it feels like to be a raindrop.’

  ‘Don’t suggest that to Mr Maclean,’ said Melanie. ‘He just might do it.’

  ‘Are you criticising my lesson plan?’ asked VP Pete.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Friday. ‘Any sane person would. But that is not the only reason why Mirabella’s tyranny should be stopped immediately.’

  ‘I wish you had blue eyes so I could shove you out in the corridor,’ said Mirabella menacingly.

  ‘I bet you do,’ said Friday. ‘But you can’t, because my eyes are brown.’

  ‘Not as brown as a hazelnut!’ yelled Mirabella.

  ‘No,’ agreed Friday. ‘But they’re browner than yours.’

  Everyone in the room gasped.

  Melanie stepped closer to her best friend. ‘Friday, I’m not sure if you’ve gone insane or if you’re suffering from colour blindness but Mirabella’s eyes are clearly as brown as a piece of dark chocolate.’

  ‘No,’ said Friday. ‘That’s not genetically possible.’

  ‘Throw her out!’ yelled Mirabella. ‘She’s an eye-colour traitor!’

  ‘Look at the photo on her family tree,’ said Friday. ‘Both her parents have blue eyes. Blue eyes are a recessive gene. So it is genetically impossible for two blue-eyed people to have a brown-eyed child.’

  Everyone gasped again and looked at Mirabella.

  ‘So she’s adopted?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Friday. ‘She has every other genetic similarity. The pinched nose, the square jaw.’

  ‘Then how are her eyes brown?’ asked Gretel.

  ‘Contact lenses,’ said Friday.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said VP Pete.

  ‘Physical vanity always is,’ said Friday. ‘But in teenage girls, it is a strong driving force. Thanks to increasing racial diversity in popular culture, blue eyes are no longer the cliché of beauty they once were. These days, the majority of music and movie stars have brown eyes. They are more fashionable. And Mirabella always wants to be fashionable.’

  ‘Is this true?’ asked VP Pete.

  ‘You can’t prove anything,’ said Mirabella.

  ‘I just have,’ said Friday.

  ‘She’s right!’ said Melanie, as she peered at Mirabella. ‘If you look really closely, you can see the edge of her contact lenses.’

  ‘All right, all right!’ said Mirabella. ‘So I’m wearing brown-tinted contact lenses. That’s not a crime. This dumb experiment wasn’t my idea. No one said I had to have naturally brown eyes.’

  ‘I’m disappointed in you,’ said VP Pete. ‘Cheating on a social experiment is very serious indeed.’

  ‘No, actually, it’s not,’ said Friday. ‘This experiment is the ridiculous thing. Students don’t need lessons on how to be cruel to one another. They’re all masters of it already. No one knows more about cruelty and
intolerance than a teenage girl. The social pressure you’ve put on these students is just silly.’ Friday turned to face the students. ‘If you all refuse to participate, you will demonstrate your empathy far better than if you continue with this insulting charade.’

  ‘I want to quit,’ said Trea Babcock. ‘Bullying is fine when it’s off the cuff. But doing it every day is just boring.’

  ‘Even I’m getting fed up with it,’ admitted Mirabella. ‘Coming up with new ways to make people miserable is not fun when it’s homework.’

  ‘We want Miss Darnston back,’ said Gretel.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed the rest of the class.

  ‘So what do you say, Vice Principal?’ asked Friday.

  VP Pete was clearly fuming. ‘You can each write a 5000-word analysis about what you’ve learned.’

  The class groaned.

  ‘You see,’ said Friday. ‘You’ve just demonstrated there are so many simpler ways to demonstrate what injustice feels like.’

  Chapter 20

  The Spinal Injury

  Friday and Melanie spent the morning trying to break in to the Headmaster’s office. This had not impressed the Headmaster because he was trying to have a nap at the time, and Friday’s method of breaking-in involved drilling a hole through the stone external wall into the back of his filing cabinet.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ demanded the Headmaster as he leaned out his office window and found the two girls crouched in the bushes.

  ‘We’re attempting to work out who is behind the string of misdeeds that has taken place at Highcrest by reinvestigating the original crime,’ said Friday.

  ‘What?’ asked the Headmaster.

  ‘She’s trying to figure out who forged the termination letters,’ explained Melanie.

  ‘We already know who did it!’ said the Headmaster. ‘It was Ian Wainscott.’

  ‘Then how did he get the information?’ asked Friday.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Headmaster.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Friday. ‘Which is why I’m trying to work out how someone could break in to your personnel files and find out all the teachers’ dark secrets.’

  ‘You just drilled a hole in the stone wall of a heritage-listed building!’ yelled the Headmaster.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Friday, ‘and I’ve pulled Mr Braithwaite’s file out of the back of your filing cabinet. So now we know it is possible.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just look and see if there was already another hole in the wall?’ asked the Headmaster.

  Friday looked about at the wall. There was only one hole. The one she had just made. ‘I suppose that would have been more sensible.’

  ‘You promised me you would keep a low profile while the school was on probation,’ said the Headmaster.

  ‘I’m crouched in a bush,’ said Friday. ‘You can’t get much more low profile than that.’

  The Headmaster quivered with suppressed rage. ‘I want to give you detention every day for the rest of your life, but the vice principal is at this very moment taking representatives of the Department of Education and the school council on a tour of the school, and I don’t want to draw their attention to the fact that I have such a degenerate in the student body.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Melanie.

  ‘Why are you thanking him?’ asked Friday. ‘He just called me a degenerate.’

  ‘Yes, but the subtext is we’re not getting detention,’ said Melanie.

  ‘Give me that file and get out of my sight!’ said the Headmaster.

  ‘If you stopped leaning out your window we would be out of your sight,’ said Friday, as she handed the file to the Headmaster.

  ‘And make sure you plug up that hole before you go. My office is draughty enough as it is,’ said the Headmaster, slamming the window shut.

  Friday and Melanie took a good twenty minutes to refill the hole with putty, then wandered as slowly as possible back to their classroom. They were supposed to be in woodwork but neither of them was in a hurry to get there. Unfortunately, as they turned the corner into the quadrangle, they came face to face with VP Pete and his tour group.

  ‘Barnes,’ said VP Pete. ‘What are you doing out of class?’

  ‘We were assisting the Headmaster with a problem,’ said Friday.

  ‘Something he couldn’t cope with himself?’ asked VP Pete. Two of the people in the tour group started jotting down notes.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Friday. ‘The Headmaster is an excellent man, capable of anything.’

  ‘Is this Friday Barnes?’ asked a woman in the tour group. ‘The student whose father was arrested for theft last term?’

  ‘He was exonerated,’ said Friday. ‘He’d been framed.’

  ‘That happens a lot here, doesn’t it?’ said VP Pete.

  ‘My mother is a Nobel Laureate,’ said Friday, trying to impress the group.

  ‘Is she the woman who landed a helicopter on the polo pitch and caused four thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the turf?’ asked another member of the tour.

  ‘She wasn’t the one actually flying the helicopter,’ said Friday. ‘That was a member of the Swedish Air Force.’

  More notes were jotted down.

  VP Pete smiled. ‘You’d better run along, Barnes. Thank you for being so informative.’

  Friday and Melanie began to walk away.

  ‘I don’t think we helped,’ said Melanie.

  Suddenly they heard a crack, a sickening thud and then screaming.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Friday.

  ‘It sounded like it came from the quadrangle,’ said Melanie.

  The girls rushed over to see. There was a large crowd gathered around a garden bed outside the English classrooms. Max Abercrombie was lying flat on his back in the middle of it. The balustrade along the verandah had collapsed and was lying in a scattering of sawdust on the ground.

  ‘Urggh,’ moaned Max.

  His sister, Lizzie, was kneeling over him. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, picking up his hand and giving it a squeeze.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Max. ‘It’s my back. It hurts so much. And I can’t move my legs. I’m scared.’

  ‘Gosh! It must be a spinal injury.’ said Mr Conti, who was standing on the deck above them. The broken bannister hung splintered and dangling near his feet. ‘Don’t let him move! I’ll run and call an ambulance.’

  Mr Conti ran off.

  ‘Should the only responsible adult be running away from the scene of a serious injury?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘He’s probably gone into shock,’ said Friday.

  ‘Who, Max?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘No, Mr Conti,’ said Friday. ‘Teachers so rarely have to deal with anything important. He’s not used to thinking like a rational adult.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Max,’ said Lizzie. ‘Help is on its way.’

  VP Pete rushed over and pushed his way to the front of the crowd. ‘What happened here?’ he asked. His tour group hung at the back, observing the situation.

  ‘Max was just leaning on the balustrade and it gave way,’ said Lizzie.

  VP Pete picked up a piece of broken timber that was lying on the ground. It had been a solid three-inch square piece of timber, but now it was splintered halfway through. ‘Shoddy maintenance,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘What if I’m a paraplegic now?’ asked Max.

  ‘The school’s insurance policy will pay for your rehabilitation,’ said VP Pete.

  ‘I’ll never walk again,’ moaned Max.

  ‘You poor boy,’ said VP Pete. ‘This is a tragedy. A spinal injury could be the last straw for Highcrest.’

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ said Friday. She was closely inspecting the broken balustrade in VP Pete’s hand.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Lizzie. ‘Just because you’re a smartypants, doesn’t mean you can diagnose spinal damage.’

  ‘For all her brains, she doesn’t know how to have an ounce of human compassion,’ said Mirabella, who was at the
front of the growing crowd of spectators.

  ‘If you look at this balustrade,’ said Friday, ‘it’s only splintered on one side, while the other half is a clean break.’

  ‘So it snapped,’ said Lizzie. ‘They probably used substandard wood when they built it.’

  ‘No, this is hard wood,’ said Friday. ‘You can tell because it’s hard.’ Friday tapped the piece of balustrade against the decking to demonstrate. ‘And down here –’ Friday kicked at the dirt beside Max ‘– we have sawdust. Broken wood does not make sawdust.’

  ‘It was probably caused by termites,’ said Lizzie. ‘They weakened the wood.’

  ‘Termites are photophobic,’ said Friday. ‘They only like the dark. They wouldn’t eat a piece of wood that is exposed to daylight all day long. Besides, there is no papery disintegration of the timber like you would see if there was a termite infestation.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘I’m saying that this balustrade was cut halfway through with a saw,’ said Friday. ‘The sawing action created the sawdust and the clean half of this break. Then it would only have taken a good hard shove to snap through the rest.’

  ‘It hardly matters,’ said VP Pete. ‘This boy is seriously hurt.’

  ‘No, the only injuries Max has are very superficial,’ said Friday.

  ‘How can you say that?’ demanded Lizzie. ‘Can’t you see my brother is in pain?’

  ‘Yes, which is part of the problem,’ said Friday. ‘Also, I can see that his hand is reddened.’

  ‘So he must have scraped it on something when he fell,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Or he could have rubbed it raw when he was using a saw to cut the timber himself,’ said Friday. ‘If he did, he would have a blister on the inside of the base of his thumb. Show me your hand, Max.’

  ‘Urrrgh,’ said Max. ‘I’m in too much pain.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ said Friday. She walked over and kicked Max’s foot.

  ‘Aaaagggh,’ said Max.

  ‘If you had a broken spine, you wouldn’t be able to feel anything,’ said Friday.

  ‘But I can’t move my legs,’ said Max.