School Rules Are Optional

by Alison Hart

‘Yeah,’ Braden says. ‘We left footprints all around our room when we went back for our camp journals.’

  He adds, ‘We had to write in our camp journals every night after tea.’

  Alex starts laughing. ‘What if you put that in your camp journal?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The whole thing about the chickens and the pillows and everything,’ Alex says.

  Everyone’s laughing except Braden.

  ‘Dad was really angry,’ says Braden, seriously. ‘He said I wouldn’t be going on another school camp ever.’

  I can’t imagine having a carry-over punishment for something I did a whole year ago. In my family, we either get yelled at straightaway or nothing happens until everyone’s forgotten what happened in the first place.

  I’m hoping that’s what will happen with Noah’s eye.

  I only care that I clonked him in the head a whole week ago and he still won’t talk to me. He should’ve forgotten about it by now.

  Before we go home, Mrs Leeman makes Jun stand up in front of the whole class while she explains his ‘Sneak Peek’ assignment is a finalist in the National Scientific Innovation Awards. Somehow he has gone from stick figures to a tiny device that reads all the vitamins and minerals in your blood via a single fingerprint and orders all the food and drink you need. First prize is a trip to the planetarium. The National Science people aren’t that smart, though. They don’t know Jun already has a season pass to the whole museum complex. He can go to the planetarium anytime he feels like it.

  Over the next week, nobody talks about anything else except camp. Mrs Leeman makes an addition to her encyclopaedic list of rules: no talking about camp in class. It’s kind of unnecessary because we’re not allowed to talk in class anyway, but it does mean I only have to pretend I’m looking forward to it as much as everyone else when we’re at recess and lunch.

  By the end of the week, I realise trying to get out of camp might take more effort than going. It means thinking of a plan, carrying out the plan, and then thinking of another plan when that one doesn’t work. It might be easier just to go.

  On Friday, Braden tells us he is allowed to go, after all.

  ‘Dad says I can go to camp because I’m at a new school,’ he says. ‘He thinks it’ll help me make some friends.’

  ‘You’ve got friends,’ Jun says.

  ‘I know, but Dad doesn’t know that. He thinks I’ve been a bit funny lately.’ Then Braden looks straight at me!

  Is that because I’ve noticed he’s been a bit funny lately? Or has Braden noticed I’ve been a bit funny lately?

  The thing is … I can’t tell Mr Winsock or Alex or anyone else why I don’t want to go to camp because I don’t even know myself. I want to go on a flying fox and a giant tree swing, I just don’t want to drive three hours there and back to do it. And I want to sit up all night eating stuff we’re not allowed to bring to camp, but not in a strange bed that smells weird. I don’t want yucky food, wet clothes, or cold bathrooms full of millipedes.

  I’m not a baby, but if I say something, people might think I am one.

  I don’t know what to do.

  The Saturday morning before camp, it starts to rain. I go with Mum to the army disposals place and get waterproof pants and boots. They’ve run out of black boots, so I have to get bright green ones. They make me look like an elf. I wear them on the way home, though, because it’s pouring with rain and I don’t want to make my good runners wet.

  When we arrive home, Dad is in a panic because the gutters are overflowing, and water is pouring into a line of buckets in the lounge room that he and Noah are emptying out in a kind of conveyor-belt sequence. Noah starts laughing when he sees my boots. He empties a bucket of water over them, which makes them shiny as well as green.

  ‘Have you seen your feet?’ he asks.

  ‘No one will notice them,’ I say, hopefully.

  ‘Oh, they’ll notice them,’ he says. ‘You look ridiculous.’

  I look down at my shiny green feet and feel secretly pleased.

  It’s only cost my dignity to make Noah forget he wasn’t talking to me.

  Mum comes out from the linen cupboard with a million towels and stacks them around the door. I hope she’s not all the way back to the flowery sheets yet. I go inside to put saucepans underneath the drips coming down in the kitchen, my room and the laundry. I’m not taking my boots off. It’s raining nearly as much inside as out.

  During the night it’s almost as bad, but by Sunday morning it goes from torrential to just really rainy. Every towel is soaking and there are big wet patches all over the ceiling. I look outside my bedroom window into the backyard. All my camp stuff is in a backpack floating around in the backyard like a chip packet on the Yarra. Milky’s standing on the deck watching everything drift past. Every time a stick or a bone appears, he leans out for a better look. But we don’t have to worry about him jumping in. He doesn’t even like getting his paws wet.

  A woman on the news with a massive umbrella says it’s the most rain we’ve had in eleven years. Who cares what the weather was like eleven years ago?

  The rest of the day we put towels in the dryer, soak up more water, then hang them over the line in the rain to dry. Everything in the linen cupboard is being used to mop up the water so I have to grab my replacement Grade 6 jumper from behind Newcastle Nanna’s flowery sheet sets. It’s been there for over a month. No one has even noticed I haven’t been wearing it.

  It’s a bit strange, us all being home at the same time on the weekend. It’s like a special occasion, with the special thing being the roof leaking and the backyard underwater. We order pizza because the kitchen is a mess. Dad’s phone rings just as the pizza guy rings the doorbell. It’s a bit confusing because nobody ever uses the front door at our house and so we’re not sure what the noise is. Dad’s phone rings again when we’re eating, and this time he answers it after banging his knee on a chair trying to find it.

  ‘Yes, yes … I understand, Mrs Overbeek.’

  Mrs Overbeek?

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be very disappointed but—’

  Dad keeps nodding his head even though he’s on the phone.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes …’ he says.

  Yes, what?

  Dad gets off the phone and tells me the Ovens Valley Recreational Facility is currently under a metre of water and camp has been postponed until further notice! Woo hoo!

  Mrs Overbeek told Dad his deposit will be returned within three working days. So it is refundable.

  Five minutes later, Alex messages me. He’s so disappointed about camp I try to keep my industrial strength happiness out of the conversation. I ask him over to look at the place where our backyard used to be to cheer him up. Braden walks down the street from his house to see if our house is okay and to discover that it isn’t. I can tell he and Alex are impressed by the amount of water everywhere. The house looks like an island in the middle of a lake with a water pollution problem. That’s because our place is at the bottom of the hill and everyone’s rubbish has drifted into the corners of our yard. Alex notices right away that I’m wearing a Grade 6 jumper.

  ‘Which one is that?’ he asks. ‘The old one or the new one?’

  ‘The new one.’

  ‘Oh, good. I was getting worried,’ he says, laughing.

  ‘Worried? Why?’

  ‘Cause I thought you’d lost another one … and you’d have to get another one and then all three of them would turn up at the same time.’ He cracks up.

  ‘Yeah. That’s funny,’ I say, trying hard to laugh. I want to tell Alex where my old jumper ended up but Peta promised she wouldn’t tell anyone, so I had to promise, too. Braden isn’t laughing, either. He’s standing on the deck watching soft drink cans and coathangers drift past, looking sad. I keep forgetting that everyone else is upset camp has been cancelled.

  We get the dinghy out of the shed and blow it up. It takes about a hundred years because for some reason Dad won’t help us look for the air p
ump.

  It’s pretty cool drifting around the backyard in a boat. We keep bumping into stuff: the lawnmower, the clothesline, my backpack … We pretend the water is poisonous and dare each other to stick our hands in it.

  It probably is a bit toxic. The little blue fertiliser pellets Dad puts on his roses are floating on the surface and also, Milky does his business in the backyard.

  The fence between us and our neighbour, Mr Mancini, has come down in the flood. The stuff from his garden shed is floating into our garden. All his tools are really old, like him. There’s not a battery pack in sight. Even the lawnmower is a push-mower. It takes a while, but the three of us fill the dinghy with Mr Mancini’s things and then line them all up on his verandah to dry.

  They look like museum pieces.

  Mr Mancini gives us a chocolate biscuit each and a glass of lemonade from a bottle he takes out of the cupboard. He must not realise you’re supposed to keep in it in the fridge. It tastes like aspirin. He puts the porch light on and sits down with us for a drink.

  He looks like a museum piece.

  We go back to my house and tie the dinghy to the porch. We might need it again if it doesn’t stop raining.

  Alex says, ‘Hey! Remember last year on camp when we went to the beach, but the tide was out? And there was no water?’

  ‘And Wesley stepped on a rock?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. And he had to get a tetanus injection?’

  ‘And the bus got stuck in the mud …’ I say, starting to laugh.

  ‘… And we left half our stuff behind,’ says Alex, laughing too.

  Now that this year’s camp has been cancelled, I don’t mind talking about all those good times. But I feel relieved and disappointed at the same time. It’s kind of like getting all prepared for doing a talk in front of the whole class then being told you don’t have to do it. Like the feeling you have after eating four chocolate eclairs. A bit pukey.

  Alex and Braden stay a bit longer then go home to their drier houses. Both their parents say they’re more than happy to have me stay with them, but I’m more than happy not to. I want to lie in my own bed and listen to the plink, plink, plink of water dripping from my ceiling into the saucepan from the rice cooker.

  And the clonk, clonk, clonk of all the neighbours’ stuff hitting the side of our house as the river flows past it and out into the street.

  We’re all really happy because Term 2 has started without a boring assembly. We just hear Mr Wilson’s voice announcing over the PA system that it rained all holidays. As if we didn’t know.

  ‘Students found playing in the water or, uhhh … bringing muddy shoes into their classrooms will get a detention,’ he says. ‘And I don’t want to hear of any students going anywhere near the water tanks.’

  At recess, we make sure we’re behind the water tanks because we don’t want Mr Wilson to hear about it either. The tanks have overflowed and there’s a whole bunch of insects, spiders, snails and slugs hanging out down there with us in the water.

  Alex is busy making sure the teacher on duty is not looking in our direction when I see this snail climbing up the side of the water tank. It’s moving pretty fast. Snails usually just sit there or hang around in groups, but this one is really going.

  ‘Hey, Braden!’ I say. ‘Check out this snail. Look how fast he is!’

  ‘It’s not so fast.’

  ‘It’s faster than any snail you can find,’ I say, watching the snail reach the top of the tank.

  ‘Oh, yeah? Want to bet on it?’

  ‘Yes I do, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Oh. Okay, then.’ Braden starts to look worried. ‘How much?’

  ‘One dollar.’ I grab my snail gently by the shell. ‘No, no. Hang on. Two dollars.’ I pull the snail off the tank with a shlwaap.

  Braden looks around the other side of the water tank to find a snail. There’s quite a collection there; biggies and littlies. None of them look as lively as my guy, though. He picks up a big one.

  I grab a stick and scratch a start and finish line about thirty centimetres apart on the side of the tank. We attach our snails to the tank and watch. My snail takes off as soon as he latches on. Alex agrees to be the race official in case it’s close. While my snail passes the finish line, Braden’s snail is just poking his head out and looking like he’s going to drop off and hit the ground. I offer a rematch in case his snail wasn’t sure what the procedure was. The next time it does move a little. In the wrong direction.

  ‘Ha-ha!’ I say. ‘You owe me two dollars!’

  ‘I don’t have two dollars.’

  ‘That’s okay. If you get another snail we can have a re rematch at lunch.’

  Alex wants to have a go, too, so at lunchtime Jun keeps a lookout for teachers and is the race official. Braden finds a new snail but it’s almost as hopeless as the old one. It goes around in circles while my snail wins three times in a row. This time there are several witnesses to the speed and agility of my snail. A little cluster of Preps are watching from a distance. I hope they don’t think this is a buddy activity and draw pictures of it for Miss Agostino. A few kids have found snails and want to race my snail. Instead I put him away in my lunchbox with some grass and a few leaves.

  ‘Anyone interested in being beaten by Alonso can meet me here tomorrow,’ I announce.

  ‘Alonso?’ Alex starts laughing. ‘What kind of name is Alonso?’

  ‘Actually, it’s the name of a world champion Formula One racer. Someone else who excels in their field.’

  I don’t tell Alex I thought up the name then. I hope there is a driver called Alonso. Either that or no one knows if there is or there isn’t. Fortunately, the bell goes so I don’t have to say anything more about it.

  Alonso seems happy enough in my lunchbox, waving his googly eyes around, so I decide to keep him there in my room overnight. Noah and I are supposed to take our lunchboxes into the kitchen after school but I hardly ever do it and Mum hardly ever cares until the next morning when it’s not there. Then she gets frustrated and says, ‘Jesse! Do you mind telling me where your lunchbox is?’ as if it’s somewhere different every day.

  When I arrive at school the next morning, I see Peta at the gate. She’s not really doing anything or talking to anyone.

  ‘You can race Alonso at lunch if you want,’ I tell her. ‘With a snail, I mean.’

  We both peer into the corner of my lunchbox. Alonso is going up the sandwich divider so fast I have to put the lid back on to stop him falling out.

  Peta says, ‘Who says I want to race your snail? I have other stuff to do. Besides …’ she pauses for a second. ‘I could easily find a snail to beat your snail.’

  That’s the kind of remark I would expect from someone who knows they can’t find a snail as fast as Alonso.

  At lunchtime, there are about twenty more kids at the snail racetrack. At least half of them are Preps. Huong and Amy are sitting under a tree in the mud, examining snails and lining them up in pairs for some reason. It looks like Thomas Moore is putting something in his pocket, but I don’t go up and ask him what he’s doing because I don’t want him to tell me. I’m needed at the racetrack, anyway. Alonso has eight challengers lined up already.

  By the end of lunch, Alonso is still champion. He’s undefeated. Well … almost undefeated. Braden’s snail wins one race, but I think Alonso let him win to be gentlemanly.

  A true champion.

  I should have asked Peta if she wanted to race one of the other snails. One a bit less intimidating.

  Thomas Moore comes over and watches me put Alonso back in my lunchbox. He’s holding about four snails in his hand.

  ‘We found a hundred twin snails,’ he says. ‘See? Look … they’re twins. I found them with Huong and Amy.’

  ‘They’re not twin snails,’ I tell him, examining them. ‘They’re just snails.’

  ‘Not these ones … those ones,’ Thomas Moore says, pointing to Huong and Amy’s collection of snail pairs around the tree. ‘And I
saved the other ones for you …’ He reaches into the pocket of his school jacket and brings out a massive bunch of snails. Like about fifty – a tennis ball of snails.

  ‘You can’t keep snails in your pocket,’ I say. ‘Go and put them back.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then nothing. You should be back in class.’

  ‘You should be back in class,’ he says and wanders off to put his snail ball under the tree.

  I watch him run across the courtyard and into the Prep room. I hope Miss Agostino doesn’t ask him why he’s late. It’s a good thing no one believes anything he says and stops listening to him after about two minutes.

  At the end of the day, Jun says Peta didn’t have other stuff to do today because he saw her on the steps with Leini and Gina at lunchtime.

  ‘They weren’t letting kids into the corridor to get their lunchboxes,’ he says. ‘Then after lunch, they weren’t letting them put their lunchboxes away.’

  ‘What was Peta doing?’

  ‘Oh, not much,’ Jun says. ‘She was telling kids to get off the steps. Same as Leini.’

  It’s not very interesting working for Leini. A lot of what she does is kind of pointless. I wonder if Peta knows you can access the corridor from the other end.

  When I arrive home, I think about Amy and Huong lining up all those snails. They do look a bit similar when they’re all together. I take Alonso out and draw a little ‘A’ on his shell with non-toxic marker. I don’t want someone claiming Alonso is their snail or swapping him for an inferior one.

  The next day I feel a bit panicky when I see about fifty kids down at the racetrack at lunchtime. Some of the newcomers don’t even know what’s going on. They think everyone’s lining up for something and stand at the back of a nonexistent queue that’s going nowhere.

  In the middle of the races, Minha turns up and pushes her way to the front of the spectator area. She overheard some kids talking in the canteen line, saying that animals are being used behind the water tanks for entertainment and profit. She threatens to expose the whole operation unless we agree to her terms.