by Susan Berran
“Well yeah, I’m sick of Jared throwing up all-over me,” I said totally annoyed.
Yep, shortly after that Mrs Duckson called Jared’s mum and HE got to go home.
No one even asked ME if it was OK with ME that Jared went home, because it was ME who would be left at school all day with only ME to talk to and me to hang out with. Yeah, fine … leave ME alone with ME, see if ME … I mean, I care.
‘ME’ was really peeved off!
And to make matters even worse, it was Art day. Yep, every Monday we have to pair up for a good bludge with Miss Forest. She’s part time and only takes us for Art and Social Skills. She’s one of those really weird total greenies. Everything she wears is made from some sort of plant. Her clothes all look and smell like old straw. Even the sandals she wears look like they’ve been cut out from bark and tied up with string. And she’ll only eat stuff from ‘Mother Earth’, as she calls it.
The whole school knows when she’s eating; she’s so loud because everything is raw! Carrots, corn, broccoli, peas and beans … it sounds as if she’s eating ROCKS! Actually she probably is eating a heap of rocks because all of her food still has dirt on it. She reckons she just can’t bring herself to cook the vegetables because they were alive not long before and might still have feelings. Apparently she has nightmares they’ll come back to get her, as punishment for ripping them out of their dirt homes and tearing them away from their veggie families.
No wonder her teeth are all broken, and no wonder she comes back from lunch with mud packed around the corners of her mouth.
One time, she wandered into our classroom when we were in the middle of cooking with Miss Croonarc. We had a huge pot of water boiling and bubbling away on the stove and me and Jared were chopping up a few carrots. The split second Miss Croonarc dropped some corn into the pot of boiling water, Miss Forest walked in the door. Her eyes instantly zoomed in on the corn slowly sinking into the scalding hot water as if it was purposely being boiled alive.
“ EEEEEEEEEE!” she screamed like a … like a … ummm …
Damn, I can’t think of anything.
… Miss Forest screamed at the top of her lungs, turned away towards me and Jared … WHACK! … just as we whacked a massive carving knife right through the guts of another carrot. Instantly chopping it in half.
THUD! Miss Forest fainted.
It was totally hilarious.
So anyway, me and Jared reckon that very soon Miss Forest is going to be starving, freezing cold and totally naked. Because she can barely pull anything out of the ground to eat. She says there’s proof that vegetables can feel pain just like us, so she feels like she’s murdering them or something.
We once heard her ranting at Miss Croonarc and Mrs Duckson, “Imagine if some giant came along and grabbed you by the hair, yanked you out of the ground and started shaking you about before chopping off your head and dropping you into boiling hot water.”
WOW, is she totally crackers or what?!
So, me and Jared decided to have a little fun and ask her a few questions at recess.
“So, are your clothes made from straw and cotton Miss Forest?” we innocently began with.
“Yes,” she said very proudly. “No animals were used at all. None … not even for my shoes.”
“So absolutely totally all natural then Miss Forest?” we checked.
“Yes definitely! One hundred per cent all natural. Nothing was harmed at all,” she confirmed, now becoming slightly annoyed.
“So how do you know when to pick the cotton and straw?” we continued.
“When it’s the right height!”
“How does it get to the right height?”
“It grows!”
“But if a plant grows, then doesn’t that mean … it’s alive!?”
“Aah well … ummm … you see … ummm … ” Miss Forest spluttered as she started to turn pale and wobble a little.
“And don’t you have to grab the head in both hands and then RRRRIP it out of its home in the ground?”
“Yes, but ummm … it’s different.”
“So it’s kinda like the veggies. They’re plants too. Then you come along and YANK them out of the ground where they’ve been growing peacefully. And because they were growing, that means they were alive!?”
“Aah … well … yes but I don’t drop them into boiling hot water and cook them!”
“Oh,” I said “But if you don’t drop them into hot water and boil them, then doesn’t that mean that you’re … eating them alive!?”
It was sooooo funny. Miss Forest just about FREAKED! She instantly went deathly pale, her eyes started to twitch as if she was going nutso crazy about the whole veggie-plant-alive thing.
A couple of days later, Miss Forest was no longer crunching loudly on dirt and raw veggies. Nope! We’d obviously made her feel so bad about eating her food alive that now she was COOKING EVERYTHING! And turning every single bit of her food into a totally gross, gloopy gloop of disgusting mash. It was kinda hard to tell if it was actually a bowl of food or gorilla boogas, it all looked so disgusting.
So of course, then me and Jared just had to ask her …
“So how do you kill your food now?”
Just to see if we could get her to freak out again.
We nearly wet ourselves when she told us, “Everything that I eat is free to grow, and live its total lifespan to the fullest. Then when it dies from completely natural causes, such as storms, heat exhaustion or just old age, that’s when I RECYCLE it, for food or clothing.”
WHAT!?! This was the biggest, widest, longest, tallest, deepest, most humongous load of bull crap we’d ever heard … EVER! We tried to keep serious faces as she continued waffling on, but inside our guts were exploding with laughter. The other teachers sitting around her all had these really weird ‘you have got to be kidding’ looks on their faces. Their mouths were so wide open a herd of elephants could’ve played leapfrog into them.
So all of Miss Forest’s food grew, ripened, went yucky, went yuckier, went even yuckier, DIED and then she eats it!? EEEWWWWWW!!
No wonder everything is boiled or steamed until it looks like a gloopy pile of yellowy greeny-coloured pus.
We just had to ask her one more teeny-tiny, incy-wincy little thing, though.
“You know when it dies of old age, Miss Forest?”
“Yes,” Miss Forest replied happily.
“Well … so how do you know when it’s dead?” I asked, noticing that Mrs Duckson’s eyes were beginning to sharpen as she stared at me suspiciously.
“Ah, that’s easy,” she said getting quite excited. “When the plant is bright and firm, then it’s ripe. When it goes limp and soft then it’s old and when the plant falls over and starts to rot, then you know it’s dead. Easy.”
“Oh I get it … and when it’s dead you can eat it?”
“Yes,” she replied excitedly.
“So you eat meat now?”
“NO!” she instantly protested.
“But the food has started to rot?” I said.
“Yes.”
“But when food starts to rot it’s because it already has maggots or worms or bugs inside it which cause the rotting. And bugs are meat!”
“Ummm … aarrr … well … umm. ”
“Yeah, the bugs are already in there just eating and growing and pooping and eating and growing and pooping and eating and growing and pooping and …”
“Well I don’t think so, but … ummm … arr … ummm …”
“Yep, I read somewhere that by the time the food hits the ground, some types of bugs are already almost fully grown … and that they’ve eaten their way through over a third of their fruit or veggie home … and that they fill the hole where they’ve been eating with their very own poop to plug it, so …”
“Thank-you boys!” Mrs Duckson suddenly jumped in.
“So that means your rotten fruit is one third meat! Oh, and I also read that …”
“Thank-you! Go away, NOW!”
Yep! That oughtta do it!
Miss Forest was still umm-ing and aah-ing nervously as we left. Except that now she was looking sooo pale and just staring down at her food blankly, slowly poking and prodding about in it, as if she was searching for something buried alive in there. Mrs Duckson and Miss Croonarc were trying to reassure her it was all perfectly healthy … maybe. I reckon Miss Forest should just stick to not eating anything that has a brain. It’d be much safer that way. Actually that’s probably why she chose to live here in Agnath. Because that way if she ever wanted to eat meat again, she could just help herself to a few of the LOCALS. After all, they’re pretty much just walking, talking lumps of meat without a brain.
From then on, we had absolutely no idea what Miss Forest was eating. But it looked like crap and she always seemed to be freezing cold because we’d made her feel so guilty about the plants as well as the veggies. We couldn’t quite figure out what she was wearing either, but it definitely WASN’T from plants any more. It looked more like she’d been going through everyone’s recycling bins and then stuck together a heap of garbage bags and other pieces of crap. It smelt WAY WORSE than anything else she’d ever worn or eaten. It sorta smelt like a mixture of out-of-date milk, mouldy cheese and rotting fruit. We could just make out some bread bags and toilet rolls, but the rest was just mixed-up bits and pieces of garbage. I’m sure I spotted a banana peel or two.
Anyway, Mondays are usually the best bludge day because me and Jared always pair up for Miss Forest’s Art class. We spend half the day doing Art and the other half doing Social Skills. But Miss Forest’s idea of Art isn’t just slapping some paint around on paper. Nope. We all head off to the school’s big green wheely bins and then poke around in them. We forage for ‘GOOD ART REFUSE’ as she calls it. Then we pile everything onto a table, chuck around heaps of glue and sticky-tape, moosh it all together, and give it some fancy-schmancy name. That way, Miss Forest thinks that we actually meant for our pile of crap to look like something ‘Arty faRty’.
Every week Miss Forest goes on and on about how, “Recycling and re-using will save our planet from drowning in garbage”.
Me and Jared reckon she might actually be right! We really wanted to find a way to recycle Crabby Abbey for worm food, to stop all the garbage that comes out of her mouth.
And it doesn’t seem to matter what garbage we chuck together, either. Miss Forest reckons that, “The beauty of recycled art is in its ‘let’s all save the world’ message.” WOW, she can really waffle on about garbage when she wants to.
But me and Jared reckon a pile of crap is always going to be a pile of crap! No matter how high you stack it up … if it smells like a pile of crap and it looks like a pile of crap … then guess what!
IT IS A PILE OF CRAP!
But Crabby Abbey is the biggest, snottiest, suck-up of all time to the teachers – EVER! And every single time we have to do something in pairs, she quickly teams up with Dopey Sophie. Dopey’s like her very own little ROBOTIC suck-up slave or something. Of course, there’s absolutely, positively, definitely no way Crabby will touch ANY of the garbage while it’s so ‘icky and disgusting’. So she gets Dopey to do all of the digging around through the garbage and stuff while she just stands there with a fancy hanky over her nose, directing Dopey which bits to pick up. Once she has all the bits of garbage that she wants to use, then, she gets Dopey to toddle off and thoroughly wash every single little bit before it can be used for their/her, masterpiece. Crabby then tells her where to stand the milk cartons, how to tear the newspapers, what veggie peels to stack where and whatever else has to be done. Once the whole pile of crap is all stuck together she then shows off even more by coming up with a few big words to make it sound posh. Usually some dribble like, “The complexity of modern day life is a mirror of our waste and our inner feelings towards each other and blah blah blah blah crap crap crap crap crap!”
She’s such a HUMONGOUS SUCK-UP!
How come me and Jared are the only ones that aren’t blind? It was crap when it got chucked into the bins and now it’s just a pile of crap glued together out of the bins!
But of course Miss Forest is TOTALLY suckered in by Crabby Abbey every single week. She reckons, “It’s so wonderful how Abbey understands the universal problems of society.”
So she ends up getting top marks every single time! WHAT A LOAD OF BULL!
How does Crabby do it?
But what’s even worse is that me and Jared actually make something useful out of the garbage … like some targets for our awesome one-of-a-kind ‘Sure Shot Dung Flunger’ or a ‘Perfect Poop Presser’ to make our AMMUNITION.
Miss Forest reckons that we’re, “Just not getting the true concept of recycled art”.
WELL DEERRR! We actually managed to turn garbage into something awesome and useful but we don’t get top marks … I just don’t get IT! IT TOTALLY SUCKS!
Anyway, back to the incredibly sucky start of my incredibly sucky week.
Because Jared was chucking a sicky I figured, excellent, Art was going to be a bigger bludge than usual. I could just sit back on my own, stick a banana peel in the top of a toilet roll and tell Miss Forest that it’s a fruit tree.
But no, just to peeve me off, Miss Forest goes and sticks me with Crabby Abbey and Dopey Sophie. She reckoned it might be “good for me”, “beneficial” so that I might “look deeper into the rubbish”.
Look deeper into the rubbish?! Yeah, because if I look deeper into the rubbish I’ll find … hmmm, let’s see, an apple core, some old popcorn, more toilet rolls and yes, EVEN MORE RUBBISH!
What a surprise … NOT!
Yeah, I reckon if you look deeper into Miss Forest you’ll find she’s totally fruit loops batty!
TERRIFIC! Thanks a lot, Jared. He gets the day off and now I have to put up with Crabby trying to show off in front of everyone by very loudly explaining to me why an old juice bottle is a “Window to the never ending struggle with weight loss” and how “Tattered magazines mirror our need for material things” . And get this load of BULL! Crabby reckons a banana peel indicates “the wish to slide into the future”.
It’s the wish not to be hungry, you idiot!
I reckon her head’s been way too close to the rubbish for way too long and blowflies have invaded her head. I reckon the maggots are munching away on her brain! I think she needs to slide right into a nut house!
So then I figured OK, I’ll stack and glue every single toilet roll that I can find, together, to symbolize that Art really really gives me the #@*#s.
But I don’t think Miss Forest got it … or maybe she totally did get it and that was the problem. So now she reckons I definitely need to be in Crabby’s group for the whole day.
Of course Miss Snottynose Crabby Abbey wouldn’t let me touch anything without being totally BOSSY and telling me where to put every tiny little bit. But even then it didn’t seem to matter where I glued things; she still reckoned it was wrong! Whenever I turned around to get something else, Crabby would mumble under her breath and get Dopey Sophie to rip off whatever I’d done and move it. So of course, when Miss Forest came around to mark our work, Crabby started sucking up so hard that I thought her lips were going to be stuck to Miss Forest’s butt FOREVER!
She started going on and on about how she’d really tried to help me understand, “The meaning of different trash for the inner message of recycled art.”
YEAH, RIGHT! I almost threw up my last meal for the inner message of Crabby making me TOTALLY SICK! I wanted to hurl on the spot right then and there. Actually that would’ve >made her art look a WHOLE LOT BETTER!
Yep, as soon as Jared is better we’ll be getting to work on a new invention to help Crabby Abbey understand ‘the meaning of wearing garbage all over her head and the inner message of eating it!’
At least after lunch we usually didn’t work in pairs anymore. So I figured that at least for the second half of the day it wouldn’t matter so much that Jared wasn’t at school. That�
�s when we have Social Skills. It’s always a nice easy bludge, but naturally, today I WAS TOTALLY WRONG!
Does anyone even know what the subject, Social Skills, IS?! I mean … WHAT IS IT!? I always figured it had to be about stuff like how to talk to another person without picking your nose at the same time … but I know how to do that! Someone should tell TOFFEE THOMAS, though; he always seems to have a finger or two shoved up there. Sometimes he looks like he’s trying to play the piano or something, because his fingers are all zipping in and out of his nose so fast.
Hey, maybe it’s supposed to be about stuff like … not washing your hands after the toilet, or talking heaps while you’re eating, or wiping your snotty, runny nose on your sleeve.
Nah, we’re supposed to do that stuff.
But Miss Forest gets us to do all of this really lame weird stuff. Like last week when she had us sitting outside in the dirt with our legs crossed, eyes closed and humming like total DORKS. She wanted us to “Connect with Mother Earth” or something totally lame like that. Which we kinda were … THROUGH OUR BUTTS!
Other times we all have to sit around in a circle and talk about our feelings. Miss Forest calls it “The Circle of Feelings” … what else?
Yeah that’s thrilling … NOT! Listening to Booga Boris talk about how he wishes it was Easter all year round because he’s only allowed to have chocolate on Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and he’s only allowed to drink chocolate on Wednesdays, because his Mum doesn’t want him to have too much.
Then it’s TofFeE Thomas’ turn to start sooking about how everyone picks on him even though his family has been in Agnath for so long that his Dad reckons he should be king of the town. Yeah, King Dorkus Loser, which makes TofFeE Princess Nose-Picker. Yep, I know I said ‘Princess’! Because one time me and Jared snuck-up through the long dead grass out the back of TofFeE’s place and used our very awesome, one of a kind BULRAVIAN MINI FLIP-OUT BINOCULARS to peek through his window. And there he was. Sitting around a widdle table with all of his widdle teddy bears and stuffed animals having the cutest widdle tea party ever … ooohhh. He’s such a SOOKY LAH LAH. We were both laughing sooo hard that I’m sure Jared left a little puddle on the ground.
