Cool School

by John Marsden

  ‘You’re welcome to try,’ you reply, with a big smile, and the two of you walk away, hand in hand.

  ook,’ you say, ‘I would be a pretty happy Vegemite if you could tell me something about the Cosmic Criminal computer game.’

  The kid looks kind of troubled.

  ‘I know everything about that game,’ he says. ‘I can certainly teach you how to solve it. But are you sure you want to?’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course I do.’

  ‘It’s just that sometimes . . . sometimes the solution to a mystery can be more dangerous than the mystery itself.’

  The way he says it makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, but you push those feelings away.

  ‘Of course I want to solve it,’ you say. ‘Every one wants to solve it. I don’t believe you know the first thing about it. I think you’re just bluffing.’

  He shrugs. ‘Come to the computer room,’ he says.

  You follow him there, wondering what you’re getting yourself into.

  In the computer room it only takes you a few minutes to get the game loaded. You play it fast and furious with the kid watching over your shoulder, until you get to the point that you always stick at, the point at which everyone gets stuck. There’s nothing in front of you but a blank wall and no matter what you try to get through it, you can’t.

  ‘OK, what do I do?’ you ask.

  ‘Are you still sure you want to solve it?’

  ‘Yes! Stop asking me that.’

  ‘All right,’ he shrugs. ‘It’s it on your own head. You have to fire bullets at the bricks in the following order: third from the top in the fourth row, fourth from the top in the third row, fifth from the bottom in the second row, second from the bottom in the fifth row.’

  He sounds so confident that you no longer doubt him. You do as he says, and to your astonishment the wall suddenly collapses. You’re looking at a wonderful new landscape. It takes you a while to realise what it is: it’s the Science block of your own school, right there on the screen. You look up at the kid with your mouth open. It’s amazing. You can hardly believe it. But suddenly you see mortar fire, coming straight at your character from a guerilla hiding in the window of one of the laboratories. You don’t hesitate. You aim your rocket launcher at the Science block on the screen and fire. ‘No!’ yells the kid, right in your ear.

  The building on the screen disintegrates. From outside the window there’s a rumbling noise. The computer room is rocked by a giant explosion.

  Bits of rubble go flying past the window. You hear screams and sirens.

  You look at the little kid again.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  K,’ you say. ‘Do it.’ Almost at once a row of As appears on the screen. Not only have you now got As for subjects like English and Maths and Social Studies, you’ve also got them for Divinity and Attendance. You’ve even got an A for Violin, and you’ve never touched a violin in your life. You can’t tell the difference between a violin and a guitar.

  But there’s no time for second thoughts. You can hear someone coming along the corridor, so you ask the kid how to save your new marks. ‘F for file,’ he whispers. You hit the key, turn the computer off, and get out of the room fast.

  A couple of months pass. You don’t do any schoolwork, you muck around in classes, you get in trouble every day and twice on Tuesdays. ‘How come you never seem to have any homework?’ your parents want to know.

  ‘It’s cool,’ you answer, as you flick another button on the remote control. The holidays roll around, and on the second day the reports arrive. You’re totally confident. You take them in to your parents and throw them on the kitchen table.

  ‘Have a gander at these,’ you say. ‘I think you’ll be surprised.’

  Your mother tears open the envelope and takes out the sheet of white paper. She slowly reads out the grades.

  ‘F, F, F, F, F, F, F.’

  ‘What?’ you scream. ‘There must be some mistake!’

  You rip the sheet out of her hands and read it. There’s no mistake.

  You even got an F for Violin. You still don’t do Violin. Your parents are going sick at you. You’re gated for the whole holidays. The TV is sold. You have to spend six hours a day doing schoolwork. You can’t wait for term to start, so you can find out what went wrong. Also, so you can get away from the prison routine at home.

  Sure enough, first day back you see the butter-menthol kid. You rush straight up to him, and pour the whole sad story out.

  ‘Don’t blame me!’ he says. ‘We did everything according to the book.’

  Ten minutes later you still don’t have any explanation, despite yelling at each other till you’re both red in the face. Finally he says: ‘Look, let’s go through this carefully and see where we went wrong.’

  Carefully you discuss everything you did in the computer room, step by step. Nothing seems wrong, until:

  ‘And then you pressed Alt F to save it?’ he asks.

  ‘Not Alt F,’ you say. ‘Just F.’

  ‘F!’ he screams. ‘F?! You pressed F? You stupid turkey! Don’t you know anything? You gave yourself straight Fs! And you know something else? You deserve them!’

  hat . . . what do you want?’ you ask nervously.

  ‘I want you!’ he snarls.

  At the word ‘you’ a whole gang of his friends leaps out from behind trees and telegraph poles and bins. They all have weapons: baseball bats, cricket bats, rocks, flame throwers, .38 revolvers, surface-to air missiles, nuclear bombs, and Paddle-pop sticks.

  ‘Help!’ you scream. But it’s too late. They set upon you and smash you into a messy pulp. Next thing you know you’re floating on a cloud, looking down on a group of people in a graveyard. They’re standing around a hole in the ground. In the hole is a coffin. Everyone’s crying.

  You recognise your parents, your brother and sister, your last teachers, your neighbours.

  ‘Such a fine human being,’ they sob. ‘Such generosity! Such personality! Such talents!’

  ‘Used to borrow my tapes without asking,’ your brother mutters, but no one except you hears him.

  ‘Always took the window seat in the car,’ your sister mutters. No one hears her either.

  ‘Such a hard worker,’ the adults sob. ‘Such modesty! Such courage! Such a sense of humour!’

  ‘This is getting boring,’ you think. Anyway, you’re distracted by a funny ache in your back. You drop your shoulders and wriggle a bit, but it won’t go away. You put your hand back and feel your shoulder blades. There’s a strange feathery growth there. No, there are two strange feathery growths. As you feel them, they get bigger and bigger. Suddenly you realise what they are. You take an experimental run along the cloud and, sure enough, you find yourself rising easily, lifted by your flapping wings. Above your head comes the sound of harps. You fly up towards them, as the voices of the mourners fade away.

  ‘Such leadership! Such compassion! Such an angel!’

  nough is enough,’ you decide, and run straight at the window.

  ‘Stop!’ the Principal cries, but you’re determined to make your escape.

  You’ve done a lot of high jumping, so you figure you’ll have no trouble leaping through the window. It’s only a metre from the floor, and it’s open. You get to it, take a big jump and make it easily. Only then do you remember that you’re on the third floor. Seems like this is high jumping of a different kind; jumping from something high. You fall with a bloodcurdling scream. It curdles your blood, let alone the people watching from the ground. They politely get out of the way as you crash beside them.

  When you awake you’re in a hospital bed. Your legs and arms are both in traction, your neck is in a surgical collar, your head is bandaged and your jaw wired. There’s a nurse standing there. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘how are we today?’

  ‘I don’t know how you are,’ you try to say, ‘but I’m a mess.’

  Your mouth is so sore the words come out as a
mumble.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘think positive. Remember if you believe you can do it, you will.’

  ‘OK,’ you think, ‘I believe I can go ice skating in New York City, right now.’

  Nothing happens. The nurse leaves the room, but five minutes later she’s back again. ‘You’ve got a visitor,’ she announces. You look up, and there’s the Principal, standing there unsmiling. Your jaw’s still hurting from the two sentences you mumbled at the nurse, so you wait for the Principal to do the talking. But you’re nervous. Just how much trouble are you going to be in?

  o,’ says the Principal, ‘you seem to have a few problems.’

  ‘Um, mmm, mmm,’ you mumble.

  ‘That’s too bad,’ he says.

  ‘Um, mmm.’

  ‘But it’s nothing to the problems you’re going to have when you get back to school!’ he shouts suddenly.

  ‘Urgle, gurgle?’ you ask, your eyes opening wide in shock.

  The Principal speaks softly now, but every word comes whispering through your ears and floats around in your brain.

  ‘Impersonating a teacher!’ he says. ‘Have I got some punishments for you. You will copy out the dictionary twelve times. You will mow the school lawns, using a pair of blunt nail clippers. You will learn volumes one and two of the Encyclopedia Britannica off by heart and recite them to the whole school at assembly. Every morning you will clean all the windows of the school from the inside, and every afternoon you will clean them from the outside. I’ll teach you to drag the good name of my school through the newspapers,’ he hisses. ‘You’ll be thirty-five years old before you finish the detentions that I’m going to give you.’

  ‘You have some more visitors,’ the nurse announces, coming back into the room.

  Your parents enter, holding bunches of flowers and grapes, and armfuls of books and magazines. It sure is a relief to see them. Your mother notices the Principal standing there.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I was hoping I’d run into you.’

  She hands the Principal a sheet of paper. He takes it.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s a writ,’ she says grimly. ‘Claiming half a million dollars from you and the Education Department for inadequate supervision of my child.’

  ‘Glub, glub,’ says the Principal. At least you think that’s what he says. Suddenly he sounds like he’s the one with a broken jaw. He holds the writ like it’s a piece of second-hand toilet paper. But to you it’s like a passport out of your troubles. You roll your eyes at your mother and make frantic noises.

  ‘What is it, dear?’ she asks, coming to your bedside and patting your brow. ‘My poor darling diddums, what did the nasty horrid school do to you?’

  You wriggle your eyebrows at the Principal.

  ‘Is half a million not enough?’ she asks. ‘Would you like me to make it a million?’

  ‘No, no!’ you cry. ‘Nuffing, nuffing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ she says in amazement, falling backwards. ‘You can’t be serious! Nothing?’

  But the Principal is looking at you with new hope in his eyes.

  ‘S’right,’ you say as firmly as possible, grinding the words between your teeth. ‘Nuffing.’

  The Principal hurries to your bedside.

  ‘What a fine example to your fellow students!’ he says in delight. ‘What a paragon of virtue. What an honour to have you in our school. How would you feel about being school captain?’

  ‘OK,’ you say, after a moment’s reflection. After all, there’s nothing like a happy ending.

  he gives you a sweet smile.

  ‘Are you comfortable there, dearie?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  ‘Because I do like my students to be comfortable.’

  She goes out for a moment and comes back with a cup of hot chocolate and a portable TV. You lie back and prepare to enjoy yourself.

  ‘Got any good videos?’ you ask.

  ‘Why certainly, dear.’

  You spend the morning watching TV. For lunch you send out for a pizza, and charge it to the school’s account. Every half hour the Principal pops her head in. ‘Are you happy?’ she asks. ‘Am I doing enough? Anything I can do to improve?’

  After a few hours of this you get sick of it and tell her not to bother you again. She disappears, fast. You lie back and pick up the remote control to start another video. Only one little nagging doubt worries you. What are you going to do tomorrow? Just how long can you get away with this? You reach for the white pages and look up the list of schools. It’s a nice long list, and every school has a Principal.

  Should take you a few months to work your way through that lot. You settle back in your armchair and press the ‘play’ button.

  can explain,’ you say to the Principal.

  ‘You’d better,’ he says, the light glinting on his glasses.

  ‘This class had no teacher,’ you say. ‘It was in a state of pandemonium. Quite disgraceful really. I felt it my duty, as a responsible student, to take charge. I may be new to the school, but that doesn’t mean I have to put up with sloppy behaviour from my peers.’

  ‘Er, quite,’ the Principal says. You’ve definitely shaken him. He turns to the rest of the class.

  ‘I just wish,’ he says, ‘that you would all show this kind of maturity and good sense. It’s the sort of attitude we see too rarely nowadays. Why, when I was your age, I was always helping out the teachers by letting them know when my classmates did anything wrong.’

  The students don’t look too impressed, but the Principal turns back to you.

  ‘You’re a fine example to the others,’ he says. ‘I’d like you to drop into my office at lunchtime. I’ve just received entry forms for the Student of the Year Competition. I think you might be our choice.’

  Sure enough, with the Principal’s strong backing, you win the competition, and a month later you leave for a year’s study in Hawaii. That’s your prize for being student of the year. What’s it matter that no student at the school has spoken to you since your first day? You’re off to Honolulu, and the surf’s great!

  uckily you only feel the first fifty or sixty violent blows to your head and body from his powerful hands, feet and head. After that you’re unconscious.

  When you regain consciousness you’re in a white room with a cross on the wall opposite you. You’re in a bed with rails around it. It’s got a white bedspread and white sheets and there’s a woman dressed in white standing at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I’m Doctor Secada.’

  You don’t say anything.

  ‘We’ve managed to put you back together,’ she says. ‘But it took some doing! We had to use a few transplanted parts. Liver, heart, lungs, just stuff like that. And you know something? Medicine’s made such progress that we were able to use animal parts! Yes, you’re now the owner of a pig’s heart, a pig’s liver, a pig’s intestines and a pig’s pair of lungs. You’ve got more pig parts than human parts! Isn’t that a funny thought!’

  And she goes out laughing, while you lie there in shock and disbelief.

  A moment later a nurse comes in with a tray. There’s a few covered plates on it. ‘Doctor says you can have some food now,’ she says, ‘so I’ve brought you a tray. Would you like something to eat?’

  Suddenly you feel an enormous overwhelming hunger. It’s so powerful you feel faint. You open your mouth to answer the nurse.

  ‘Oink oink,’ you say.

  ying there with your eyes shut, waiting to be beaten to a horrible pulp, you hear a strange sound. Is it thunder beating through the air? Is it someone who ate baked beans, cheese and eggs for breakfast? Is it a small earthquake? No, it’s the sound of human laughter; a loud rumbling noise that reverberates around your head. You open ten per cent of one eye, very cautiously, and peer upwards. It’s the guy himself, as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and yes, he’s laughing. It’s a real belly laugh. He’s laughing so hard he can’t control himself. He’s having as
much trouble standing as you were. In fact a moment later he collapses with laughter. Trouble is, he collapses right on top of you. Crack! That’s the sound of one of your ribs breaking. ‘Dammit,’ you think, ‘I wish he’d just beaten me up. He probably wouldn’t have done as much damage.’

  ou’re a well brought up child. You’ve been taught to say please and thank you and sorry. You say ‘please’ when you want those little luxuries of life like food and drink; ‘thank you’ when you take a breath of air; ‘sorry’ to everyone and everything for whatever happens. You apologise to your shoes in the morning for the painful messy day that you’re about to put them through.

  So, you know that when you’ve done something wrong you have to own up.

  You’re sitting in a school assembly and the Principal’s voice is booming through the hall. ‘I know who did it,’ he shouts. ‘I know who’s responsible. And if that person doesn’t own up I’ll punish the whole school. You’ve got till 3.30 this afternoon.’

  You leap to your feet.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ the Principal roars.

  ‘I’m owning up,’ you say. ‘It was me who did it. I’m sorry.’

  There’s a stunned silence. The Principal stands there gazing at you in bewilderment. His mouth is open, like a seagull trying to swallow a sausage roll.

  ‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’ he says.

  He takes a big gulp.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he says. ‘This has never happened before.’

  He takes off his glasses and wipes his face. He looks dazed. He stands there helplessly for several more minutes. Finally the Deputy Principal takes him gently by the arm and leads him off the stage.

  A teacher standing behind you hisses at you. ‘See!’ he says. ‘See what you’ve done? You’ve destroyed him. You’ll have this on your conscience for the rest of your life.’