‘Because he was still here when I came out,’ I say, ‘right in the middle of the wreckage.’
Bando comes to the lounge room doorway from the kitchen, panting loudly, smiling his goofy, black-lipped smile.
‘Bad boy!’ Mum says. ‘Sit!’
Bando drops, rests his chin on the floor, looking guilty. I feel kind of bad. But only kind of.
‘I think we should sell the dog,’ Mum says, glaring at him.
I laugh. I know she’s joking but it’s still nice to hear.
‘Go and get me the vacuum cleaner.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
I head off down the hall, not skipping but close. I think she’s buying the story, which means that, in one slick and cunning move, I have framed Bando and destroyed the ugliest bowl in the history of ceramics. I wrestle the vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard and head back up the hall.
Mum is kneeling on the floorboards, scraping the pieces together with her hands. Tiny fragments fall into the cracks between the boards. I plunk the vacuum down next to her.
‘Thanks,’ she says quietly, sniffling.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
Bando gets up and snorts through the broken bits again.
Mum wipes her nose. ‘I remember the man I bought this bowl from,’ she says. ‘A little old guy at the market in Marrakesh in Morocco when I was backpacking. Looked like he was a hundred years old. He made this for his wife who’d died, and he said that he wanted me to have it.’
‘Really?’ I ask. ‘I thought you got it from a garage sale down the street.’
‘He said my eyes reminded him of hers. Didn’t even want me to pay for it, but I did. Can you plug this in?’ She hands me the cord and I drag it across the lounge room to the power point. I can feel a little lump in my throat. I didn’t know any of this.
Bando is sniffing around the drawers where I put the treats.
‘Bando! Outside!’ I plug the power cord in.
‘Tom … What’s this?’ Mum says. She picks up a small, dark-brown piece from the floor and inspects it. ‘This doesn’t look like my bowl.’
‘Huh?’
She pokes her finger at a gooey residue on the piece and rubs her fingers together. ‘Saliva.’ She sniffs it. ‘It smells like tuna.’ She sniffs again. ‘No, more like … liver.’
I swallow so hard I almost swallow my lips.
‘Why on earth would there be a liver treat in among the broken pieces of my bowl?’ she asks, turning to me.
Bando is really sniffing that drawer like mad now.
I shrug. ‘I wasn’t there. Maybe …’
‘Show me your headphones.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Show me.’ She grabs my headphones out of my hand. She snaps on the lamp that sits on top of the drawers where the bowl once sat. She holds one of the earbuds up to the light.
‘Hmm,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Interesting.’
I can feel the heat of the lamp. I undo the top button of my pyjamas. It feels kind of warm in here.
She wipes her pointer finger over the earbud and then studies her fingertip, close to the naked bulb of the lamp. She almost looks professional.
Even with my top button undone I’m burning up. I wipe away the sweat trickling down my temple.
Mum dusts her fingers on her dressing-gown and stands. I have never noticed how tall she is before. She towers over me. I can see right up her nostrils. They are wide and horse-like. She is an angry horse-detective.
‘Did you have anything to do with this, Tom?’ she asks, looking into my eyes.
Bando growls.
‘No,’ I say.
Her nostrils flare wider. ‘There appear to be liver treats in among the broken pieces of my favourite bowl and trace elements of liver treat dust on your headphones. You seem to know detailed information about the breakage of the bowl, even though you were not in the room at the time. Your breathing is short and you have sweat running down your face.’
‘But …’
She raises a finger and looks at me in a knowing way. ‘I’m taking a walk through your mind right now, Tom Weekly, and I am sensing panic, confusion, a spiralling sense of fear … and a wish that you had never set this whole thing in motion. Am I correct?’
It seriously feels like she’s walking down the dark corridors of my brain, shining a torch into places even I haven’t seen.
‘I’m going to ask you one more time, Thomas … Did you have anything to do with this?’
Bando growls again. He’s pawing at the little brass handle on the drawer. It squeaks and knocks against the timber.
Mum twists the lamp just slightly so it shines in my eyes.
‘TOM?’
That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. My head is about to explode. I only have one choice …
‘NO!’ I yell. ‘It was him!’ I point at Bando, the evil yet cute Labrador.
Bando barks and scratches the drawer with his claws. Mum rips it open, reaches in and pulls out the open bag of liver treats.
‘Why are these treats in this drawer and not in the kitchen, Tom Weekly?’
‘Would you believe Bando put them in there?’ I ask.
‘You’re grounded for two weeks. Clean this mess up.’ Mum slams the drawer and heads off down the hall, leaving me and Bando staring at one another.
‘Oh, by the way,’ Mum says, poking her head back into the room. ‘I made up the story about the Moroccan man and his wife. I was testing you and I’m very disappointed that you didn’t admit to what you did. I bought the bowl at a garage sale at number seventeen.’
She disappears down the hall again.
I can’t believe it. Outsmarted by a dog and conned by my own mother.
And she calls me dishonest.
Bando yawns excitedly and smiles his goofy, black-lipped smile, looking up at me as though he’s my best buddy.
Like I said, I think I hate my dog. And I wish I was him.
Stella Holling is after me. I am hiding behind a tree – a very large gum tree over near the bubblers on the top oval. I am scared. Stella Holling is on the other side of the tree, and six or seven kids are watching us. Every now and then she makes a break and tries to catch me, and if she catches me she will kiss me, and I do not want that to happen.
Not again.
Stella Holling has been in love with me since second grade. I’m not saying that to brag. (Believe me, nobody would brag about that.) It’s just a fact. Ask anyone. Back in Mrs Freedman’s second-grade class I bent over to pick up a red pencil, and she kissed me on the cheek. Stella Holling, not Mrs Freedman.
Weird, I thought. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again.
But it did.
Many, MANY times.
And now I’m on the run. Stella has just eaten a packet of strawberry jelly crystals. Dry. Out of the box. That makes it even worse. A thousand times worse. Stella goes cuckoo when she eats sugar.
‘Get him, Stella!’ a couple of girls from my class call out, giggling like chickens a few metres away. Stella dashes around the tree, catches me off guard and grabs the back of my shirt. I panic and run, only just managing to escape. She chases me around the tree twelve times before she stops to catch her breath, and so do I, in the same places we started. She really means business today – she usually gives up after ten minutes. She has been chasing me all recess. I think she’s been training for this.
‘Pssst!’
I turn. Stella is leaning around the tree, where the kids watching us can’t see. Her eyes are spinning from the jelly crystals and she is dripping with sweat. She speaks in a sharp, dangerous whisper. ‘Either you kiss me on the lips now, Tom Weekly, or I want you to pay back every cent of the money you’ve borrowed from me.’
This sometimes happens when the sugar starts to wear off. Stella turns mean and tells me she hates me. I can’t remember how much money she has given me. She has always offered it so freely. Whenever I’m hanging around the ca
nteen looking hungry, which is a lot, she gives me her spare change to buy chips or an iceblock. I thought she was just being kind. What a fool. What a stupid, blind fool I have been.
‘You owe me seven dollars thirty-five, in case you’re wondering,’ she whispers fiercely, then she runs at me, but I make it around the tree.
‘Kiss him, Stella!’ Jack calls out from the crowd of onlookers. That’s what best friends are for, right?
‘I can’t kiss you,’ I say in a low voice. ‘You know that I like Sasha. And you gave me that money. You never said you wanted it back.’
‘Sasha Schmasha,’ she says. ‘And I do want the money back. I’ll tell Mum you stole the money from me. Bullied me. It’s your word against mine.’
Stella’s mum works in the school office and is pretty pally with the principal.
‘You wouldn’t do that,’ I say.
She gives me her ‘just try me’ look.
This is bad. Stella is a dangerous person. Mad, bad and dangerous. How can she twist things like this?
Seven dollars thirty-five.
I try to remember how much I have at home, how much I have stashed in the hole at the base of the tree near the post office. But who am I kidding? I’d be lucky to have two dollars all-up.
‘Made up your mind yet, you little baby?’ she whispers.
‘I’m thinking,’ I say.
One little kiss. That’s all it is. And the debt will be paid. Seven dollars thirty-five for one second’s work. When I leave school and get a job, if someone offers me seven dollars thirty-five a second that will be, like … four hundred and forty-one dollars a minute or twenty-six thousand four hundred and sixty dollars an hour. That’s over a million bucks a week.
One kiss and I’ll be a millionaire! Sort of.
So I do it.
I hold up my hands in surrender, walk around the tree and stand next to Stella, who is grinning her head off.
‘Whoo-hoo!’ a few of the girls cheer. Jack claps. They watch on, excited, knowing what’s coming.
Stella turns to me. She closes her eyes and smooshes out her lips. They look like a dangerous sea creature – something a small fish might find on a coral reef and think is safe but then – ssssssslp! – gone. Never seen again. I wish I was kissing a crocodile. Or Ms Trunchbull from Matilda. Or Jabba the Hutt. Someone or something less scary than Stella Holling.
The kids are chanting: ‘Go! Go! Go! Go!’
I have to get this over with. It’s not like she hasn’t kissed me a thousand times before. I lean forward. She leans forward. I can feel jets of air spewing from her nose. I can see her freckles in close-up. I can feel the warmth of her face. Our lips are almost touching. I can still back out. I can still run. I can …
But I don’t.
I kiss her.
On the lips.
Stella Holling.
The kids go dead quiet.
The world stops spinning.
It’s like we have fallen through a wormhole in space, where a second does not feel like a second. It feels like a week, a month, a year. Suddenly I am being paid 0.0000000000000003 cents an hour, rather than twenty-six thousand four hundred and sixty dollars. This is sweatshop labour. The United Nations should step in to stop this kiss. Nobody in the history of time has ever worked this hard for seven dollars and thirty-five cents. It is the longest and worst second of my life.
In my mind there is an explosion of colour, like fireworks, and then a rapid-fire series of pictures: Stella and me cutting a wedding cake, Stella and me standing next to a ‘For Sale’ sign with a ‘SOLD’ sticker across it, Stella and me with two freaky-looking kids, Stella and me in a nursing home with sloppy food dripping down our chins. A twisted version of everything I have ever dreamed of for Sasha and me is happening with Stella instead. This kiss is rewriting my future. I can’t handle it anymore, and I feel myself travelling backwards through the rainbow-coloured wormhole and then … Pop!
I leap away from Stella and wipe my mouth.
I feel older. Not like a teenager, but like I am eighty, like my entire life has been wasted on that kiss.
There is cheering. Lots of it. The girls and Jack point and laugh, but the cheering is much louder than that. I look over past the bubblers towards the school fence and I see them – about fifty boys from the high school across the street are lined up along the fence in their green-and-grey uniforms, clapping and whistling and shouting things that I probably shouldn’t repeat. They have seen it all.
A voice rings out across the playground from the speakers attached to the side of the main building: ‘Thomas Weekly and Stella Holling, report to the office immediately!’ It’s the principal’s voice. ‘Thomas Weekly and Stella Holling. There will be no kissing in the playground. I repeat, students are not permitted to kiss one another in the playground. Report to the office.’
The high-school boys go wild, and every kid in our playground who didn’t see the kiss now starts howling and hooting.
I look to Stella, expecting her to be looking at me all misty-eyed after kissing the boy of her dreams. But, instead, she wipes her lips and scrapes at her jelly-crystal-stained tongue and says, ‘That kiss was disgusting!’
Right in front of everybody.
The girls stop laughing and just kind of stare at me with pity. Maddie and Jessica put their arms around Stella and lead her to the bubblers, where she rinses her mouth, as though I am the crocodile or Trunchbull or Jabba the Hutt.
And you know what the worst part is? Sasha is standing there looking at me and shaking her head. It is worse than the fifty high-school boys, worse than the principal’s office.
‘It didn’t mean anything!’ I say, but she turns sharply and walks away.
‘That was bad,’ Jack says, coming up beside me. ‘Stella burnt you so bad.’
‘I know but –’
‘You should move away.’
‘Huh?’
‘If you ever want to have a girlfriend, you should move away to, like, Venezuela or somewhere.’
‘Where’s Venezuela?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know, but you should go there because no girl is ever going to forget that kiss.’
‘But I …’
‘Seriously, dude. Venezuela,’ he says.
At lunchtime I’m all alone and I walk past the canteen. I never want to eat another packet of chips or another iceblock as long as I live. Those things only lead to having to kiss girls, and kissing girls only leads to trouble.
Stella Holling is standing in line. I look away, walking faster, trying to escape before she sees me.
‘Tom!’ she calls.
I glance back. I can’t help it. She waves me towards her. I want to ignore her, but I feel bad about everything so I slink over.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It was the strawberry jelly crystals. They kind of make me –’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘You really should stick to blueberry.’
We stand there for an awkward moment.
‘Do you want some money for an iceblock?’ she asks.
I look her in the eye. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
Stella shakes her head.
‘You’re the weirdest person I have ever met,’ I say.
‘I know.’ She holds out seventy cents.
‘I’m not kissing you again,’ I say.
‘As if I’d want you to,’ she says.
Stella makes it to the front of the line and buys me an iceblock. She knows my flavour. I know I shouldn’t eat it but it’s lemonade, so I take the iceblock and bite into it. The cold, lemony goodness slides down my throat and washes away the horrors of the day. I feel better, and maybe I won’t have to move away to Venezuela after all.
‘You know what?’ Stella says as we shuffle away from the canteen.
‘What?’
‘I was only kidding before.’ And she gives me this weird look. ‘The kiss wasn’t really disgusting …’
Then she makes a face that scares me slightly. It’s a look I’ve
seen before, like a dangerous sea creature a small fish might find on a coral reef.
I drop the iceblock and run.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank students at the following schools and events who helped me to write this book. I shared story ideas and we brainstormed renegade toddlers, dangerous backyard theme park rides, ways to frame a dog for a crime and despicable things that brothers and sisters do to one another. Thanks to year 8/9 writing students at Brisbane Girls’ Grammar for introducing me to star-nosed moles. Thanks to Ipswich East SS year 5/6 kids, Calamvale Community College year 5/6/7s, Ascot SS, Brisbane Boys’ Grammar middle-grade writing group, Sydney Writers’ Festival Primary School Days participants 2012, Cowan and Brooklyn PS, Brookfield SS, Chatswood Hills SS, Roselea PS, Grace Lutheran, Kuraby SS year 6/7 writers group, Nobby SS, Greenmount SS, Our Lady of Mt Carmel Coorparoo, St Laurence’s College, Berrinba East SS, Trinity Lutheran College, Marymount College, St Augustine’s, Mullumbimby Library school holiday kids, Expanding Horizons Camp at Barambah, Tara Anglican School for Girls years 7 and 9, and the Bardon Young Writers Week participants 2013.
Extra-big thanks to Gus Gordon, Zoe Walton, Sophie Hamley, Brandon VanOver, Dot Tonkin and the booksellers, librarians and teachers who share my books with kids and tirelessly promote literacy. Cheers also to Raph Atkins for being an all-round funnyman and creative talent.
Tristan Bancks is a children’s author with a background in acting and filmmaking. His books include the My Life series, Two Wolves, the Mac Slater Coolhunter series, Galactic Adventures: First Kids in Space and the Nit Boy series. Tristan is excited about the future of storytelling and inspiring others to create. Visit Tristan at www.tristanbancks.com
Gus Gordon has written and illustrated over 70 books for children. He writes books about motorbike-riding stunt chickens, dogs that live in trees and singing on rooftops in New York. His picture book Herman and Rosie was a 2013 CBCA Honour Book. Gus loves speaking to kids about illustration, character design and the desire to control a wiggly line. Visit Gus at www.gusgordon.com
My Life and Other Stuff That Went Wrong Page 8
