by Susan Berran
lone desk
and chair
in the
middle
of the
classroom
with all the others now HARD UP against the walls. And even though everyone tried to be sneaky, the scraping and grating of tables and chairs being hauled along the floor, was EAR PIERCING. But the teacher never said a word … because he was busily sneaking his desk backwards too, until it was HARD UPagainst the whiteboard at the front of the classroom.
So Jared reckoned Boris was sooo green and always ‘ running’, that we should call him ‘Phlegm’. But I figured that with all of the ATOMIC WASTE STENCH coming from his butt, and how incredibly fast he was once he got to the loos, that whatever was exiting his body had to be reeeally green and reeeally runny, like frog snot on a roller coaster … so we called him ‘Booga’.
Now where were we?
Ah yes, back to the bus …
… SHOVE …
“Ow! DAMN IT!” I was going to have so many bruises the next day. If he just took his fingers out of his nose he wouldn’t be elbowing me in the ribs all the time. I reckon he must have another secret snot storage area hidden somewhere inside his head. Because he was digging around so deep in there that if it wasn’t snot he was picking then he had to be picking out bits of brain that he’d loosened.
I had it all worked out, I just needed to wait.
… SHOVE …
“Ow! RRRRRR! I was getting sooo crappy. But I had to try and stay calm. It had to look like an accidental shove otherwise I’d be in detention until s l u g s break the sound barrier. As long as it was an accident I’d have to move seats like Mrs Duckson said I would. I’d have a seat all to myself and I could finally get some work done on the next fantastic, incredibly AWESOME master plan.
WOO HOO! FINALLY! Looking up ahead through the bus windshield I could see a really tight bend coming up on my side.
This was it! I was going to jam TofFeE’s arm SO FAR up his snotty little nose that he was going to have to poke a toothbrush in his ear to clean his fingernails.
The bend was coming … he was still picking … closer … still fossicking around in there … nearly … still picking … and … WHAM!!
“Arrhhh Mrs Duckson!” TofFeE SOOKED!
“It was the corner … it was an accident … just like every time he’s done it to me … I couldn’t help it … I’ll move straight away,”
I said sadly, with a secret grin instantly beginning to stand.
“I told you boys! SAM MOVE SEATS! ”
“Yes, Mrs Duckson,” I said obediently. “Woo hoo!” I whispered under my breath.
“Sam, sit next to Boris! ”
THIS SUCKED SO BAD!!
THURSDAY: 9:00am.
Fine Jared, don’t come to school … AGAIN! SEE IF I CARE!
AAAAAW, come on, school sucks! IT’S KILLING ME! If I have to put up with these TURKEYS for one more day on my own I’m going too … I’m going too … well, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll think of SOMETHING!
SEE! I can’t think of anything! My brain’s already beginning to shrivel up and DIE, from hanging around these losers all week. And I’m sooo bored and so far the whole week has sucked sooo much!
It’s just not fair. Why me? How come I always seemed to get all the bum deals while Jared gets all the good stuff. He’s so lucky!
When I WALKIE-TALKIED him late last night, he reckoned he still doesn’t have to come back to school yet.
That’d be right!
He reckons that every time he eats something, even a piece of dry toast, he throws it right back up five minutes later. And that all the throwing-up has made his throat totally red raw so everything he tries to eat, causes absolute agony as he tries to swallow. And he still has this BURNING HOT FEVER that makes him go from stripping off all of his clothes because he’s so boiling hot, to piling on every single doona and blanket in the house because he’s shivering so uncontrollably and feels like he’s buried naked in the ICE somewhere at the North Pole. Oh, and he’s got some sort of boiling red-hot rash all over his body with these BIG pus-filled boils everywhere as well. He reckons he’s sooo Itchy, that it’s driving him absolutely NUTS because he can’t Scratch or the boils will BURST. Even accidentally touching them causes them to spew out their yellowy green pus like mini volcanoes all over the bed. And apparently he’s got diarrhoea so bad that his bum is RED-RAW with just about no skin left from all the butt wiping.
He says it stings like someone is using a MASSIVE electric sander on his butt.
BUT I HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL!
Jared’s sooo LUCKY!
Gee, how good are Thursdays? A fun filled day of Miss Croonarc trying to teach us the thrilling and wonderful subjects of Geography and Science. WOW! I couldn’t wait.
Golly gosh, how wonderfully terrific and sooo excellent that we were doing my favouritest subjects in the whole wide world all day. And without Jared there either, how super dooper. I’d be able to concentrate twice as hard and learn twice as much. Jeepers it was going to be a really fun day. AARRRHHHHH!!!
Geography sucks! I mean, what is the point!? Miss Croonarc was supposed to be teaching us all about how different and wonderful and exciting these places from all around the world are when, let’s face it, none of the kids from around Agnath are ever going to see any of them. So what’s she trying to do? RUB IT IN? Make them jealous? Maybe she’s trying to show them just how CRAPPY Agnath really is by comparison. But I already know how CRAPPY Agnath is, so why couldn’t I just have the morning off?
I’d grown up in the city. We go on holidays up the coast. I know what a skyscraper is! But from what I’ve heard, I reckon pretty much all the kids that live around Agnath think a skyscraper is a type of aeroplane that slices clouds in half or something … and they’ve never been any further than NUNDIE.
NUNDIE is the closest decent-sized town around here. It’s about a forty minute drive from Agnath. But at least it has one decent-sized shopping mall, a toy shop, a few junk-food places and some other decent stuff. Apart from that, the nearest city is three hours, twenty-seven minutes and nineteen seconds away … give or take a few seconds. It’s weird though, all the DIMWITS around here call NUNDIE the ‘city’ because that’s as far as they ever get to go. But then again, they reckon anywhere with more than one pub and less than ten cows wandering down the main street is a city!
Crabby Abbey is probably the only one that has actually been to a real city, though. Her dad’s a foot doctor so he has to go down there every now and then and occasionally she gets to go as well. But just because she’s been there once or twice, Crabby tries to act all snobby and stuck-up. As if she’s got all the latest fashion stuff and all the best toys that you can only get in the city … so she reckons. That’s why she hates me and Jared so much, because we really lived in the city, so we know that she’s totally FULL OF CRAP!
You see every time her dad comes back from a trip to the city he brings something back for her. Then the very next day at school she prances and spins on tip-toes all over the place like a mental peacock in front of a room full of mirrors!
“Look at me, look at me! I’m sooo special. Oohh I’m sooo beautiful, I’m sooo good, I’m sooo blah blah blah … bluuurrrrr!” She’s such a DOUCHE-BAG!
Crabby is sooo up herself. I bet she really has to suck-up massively and beg her dad to bring her back any sort of stuff. He probably does it just to shut her up.
One time Crabby started going on and on and on about how her dad was going to get some big award because he was at some huge hospital in the city where he was the boss of all the other doctors. He was supposed to be teaching them how to sew a foot back on or something. But then me and Jared overheard our mums talking to each other and they reckon that her dad has been going down to the city hospital to finish learning how to trim the mouldy, yellowy, cracked crappy bits off the toenails of people who are too fat to reach their own toes. They reckon the ‘big award’ was actually just th
e certificate to say that he can finally trim toenails all by himself.
That was when I suddenly had another incredibly awesome IDEA!
I told Jared we should try and find out what happens to all of the old toenail clippings. I reckon they would be all yellow and grey and twisted and crappy and cracked with heaps of FUNGUSSY, mouldy stuff growing and crawling all over them. So they’d be absolutely perfect for our incredibly wicked SINGLE SHOT BUG FLUNGERS.
Normally we only used our BUG FLUNGERS during Maths and English. But we’d been working on a way of making them better so we could use them in class, out of class, or any time really. We wanted to be able to shoot stuff further and faster than our SUPER SECRET PHANTASMAGORICAL ULTIMATE DEAD-EYE DART GUN. The DEAD-EYE DART GUN is AWESOME at landing guinea pig poop right on target, which was usually someone’s head. But we needed better distance and BIGGER AMMO. Most of all though, we wanted to be further away from the victim so there would be less chance of us two getting the blame.
So instead of hiding the BUG FLUNGER in our butt-crack like we did with the DEAD-EYE DART GUN, we’d found a better way to hide it. We used an elastic band to strap the Bug Flunger onto the underside of our arm about halfway between the wrist and elbow. That way it was completely hidden by our shirt sleeves.
PERFECT!
We were free to wander about the school waiting for just the right time and just the right target. Then, when the moment arrived we were ready. All we had to do was slide up the sleeve, twist the ruler sideways, so that it now formed a cross with our arm and with the bowl closest to our body. Load the bowl with ammO, aim, pull down the bowl and let go … fire! Flick … whzzzzz … SMACK!
Now all we had to do was get our hands on some new ultra SUPER DISGUSTING AMMO.
We couldn’t exactly just go up to Crabby Abbey and say, “Hey can we have your dad’stotally disgusting, extremely gross mouldy toenail clippings from work?” Otherwise she’d be dobbing us in to Mrs Duckson before she even knew what we wanted them for. We had to find a way of getting hold of them without anyone else finding out. Her dad’s office is in NUNDIE; too far to just zip over, pop in through the window and nick them. There had to be a way of getting him to bring them home and then we could nick them from there.
But then something AWESOME happened. For the first timeEVER, we accidentally learnt something in Geography. Miss Croonarc had been waffling on and on about all of these countries no one’s ever heard of, or gives a rat’s backside about and the animals and birds that live in them. Me and Jared were sitting up the back looking like we were taking lots of notes and writing them down in our FOLDER, as usual. Well, we were writing … in ourAWESOME BULRAVIAN SECRET PLANS FOLDER and it wasn’t exactly Geography we were writing about, AS USUAL. We were working on a real problem … there had to be a way of getting Crabby’s father to give us the toenail clippings. We were scribbling out all sorts of ideas in class and showing them to each other. Suddenly I came up with a fantastically brilliant idea to get hold of the toenail AMMO.
I figured we could make a REMOTE CONTROL helicopter with a camera in the cockpit so we could see where it was going. Attach an arm on one side with a REMOTE CONTROL can-opener and another arm on the other side with a REMOTE CONTROL diamond-tipped glass cutter. Hang a fishing net from below the helicopter and a REMOTE CONTROL claw to pick things up with. Yep, that oughta do it. Then we just had to fly it all the way to NUNDIE, use the glass cutter to get through the window, fly into his office, then use the can-opener to cut into the filing cabinet, lower the fishing net, use the claw to … “Ow! ”
… Jared suddenly poked me really hard and pointed to Miss Croonarc. She was prattling on and on about some rare species of panda that lived in this one little area of this weird little country and it could only eat one type of bamboo and there was none left where it lived so the bamboo had to be shipped in especially for the panda to survive and BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH!
DING DING DING … lunchtime.
Now I could go nuts at Jared for making me lose where I was up to.
“Whaddya poke me for doofus?!” I demanded as soon as we got out the door. “I’d just about figured out how we could get the toenail ammo.”
“WOW, so you thought of it too!” Jared replied excitedly.
“Well derrr, of course I did! It’s sooo obvious!” I shot back.
“So you figured out that we could just say that an animal has been discovered that everyone thought was extinct … and that it lives in some weird little country … and that it only eats a certain type of food that only grows way up in the mountains … and that no one can get to it . . . and that all the vitamins in the food needed to keep the animal alive and healthy can be found in the fungus that grows under human toenails … and that if Crabby’s dad could just send the toenails to us then we could scrape and clean and prepare the toenail fungus for food … and that we could then send it, ready to serve to the rare creature so that it can be bought back from the brink of extinction! Gee, so you figured that all out as well?” Jared said, finally taking a breath.
“Ummm … yes … yes, that’s exactly what I’d just figured out … and I was just about to tell you,” I said confidently.
“WOW, you’re so lucky, Sam. I wish I could think of brilliant ideas like you.”
“Yeah, I know … I am brilliant aren’t I?”
We had it all figured out. As soon as we started to receive the FUNGUSSY GROSS toenails in the mail, we began to experiment on various ways to turn them into our SUPER GROSS ammo. We chucked ‘em into mum’s brand new soup pot and stirred them up with different types of glue until we found the one that worked best. Then we used a couple of teaspoons to shape the mixture into nice tiny little SPIKY egg shapes. Once they’d dried completely they were ready to test out … almost. We noticed something really cool was happening to the little globules the longer we left them sitting there. The glue seemed to be causing a reaction with the FUNGUS. A blueish, greyish, mouldy fairy floss was sprouting and growing so fast that it totally engulfed the SPIKY little globs in days. Like some teeny tiny old lady’s wig had been pulled over the SPIKY eggs. It was so SICK and totally totally AWESOME! Day after day we watched closely, taking notes on which glues gave the best-coloured mould, the thickest mould and the smelliest mould.
Then we were ready!
I got Jared to gather up all our little ‘TOENAIL AMMO SHOTS’ and chuck them into a bag.
“Ouch, ow, ow, ow, OUCH, ow!”
Yeah, I figured they’d be really SPIKY and sharp once they set hard. That’s why I got Jared to pick them all up … I’m not stupid.
Anyway, they were perfect. A bit tricky to handle for loading, but worth it. With our SINGLE SHOT BUG FLUNGERS able to fling stuff further and more accurate than ever before, we just had to figure out the right time, the right place, the right victim … which, let’s face it, was pretty much the first DORK that came along.
The next day at school we worked on our PLAN OF ATTACK. We waited for lunch and recess then watched where everyone went to eat. In our totally AWESOME BULRAVIAN SECRET PLANS FOLDER we took notes and drew up diagrams showing where everyone was at different times of the day. That night we talked to each other on our WALKIE-TALKIES to work out the following days’ activities.
We headed to school earlier than usual the next morning and casually hung out near the boys’ loos. One by one the kids turned up and wandered off into their little HERDS. Then, when the last bunch arrived and poured out of Nick Young’s ’SCHOOL BUS’ … which is really just his beat-up, crappy old van that he uses to take sheep to the sale yards on weekends, we went into action.
The ‘SeVeN DimWiTS’ were all standing around and already chewing on their first piece of grass for the day. A few of them were leaning on the fence, but the ones we wanted were leaning against a tree. TofFeE thomas, Itchy MiTCH and Skidmark Mark were all standing up against a nice big gum tree. PERFECT! And Booga Boris was leaning against a smaller tree all by himself. The poor little tree was
bending over at such a steep angle that you could almost hear it screaming in agony “GET OFF! YOU’RE BREAKING ME!” and holding onto the ground desperately using it’s roots to try and save itself from being ripped from the ground!
We casually strolled past them for a final check. No wind, excellent. Now we just had to keep wandering by and avoid suspicion until we got behind some cover a little further along.
The sports shed was just ahead. We had to stay calm. But the moment we passed the shed and rounded the corner, WE STRUCK!
Jared opened up his jacket and pulled out a handful of the mouldy fairy-floss-covered TOENAIL SHOTS … we spun around and leant against the old wooden structure … pulled up a sleeve each, swivelled the SINGLE SHOT BUG FLUNGERS … “Load!” … we dumped one of the spiky globules into the tiny bowl on the nearest end of the ruler … “Ready” … and pulled it downwards, tightening the elastic ready for firing … “Aim” … we poked our arms around the corner and lined up our targets … “FIRE!” … TWANG WZZZZZ … the Toenail Shots flew like multi-pointed darts dead straight through the air … SMACK SMACK!
“Ow!”
“DAMN!” Itchy and TofFeE were both HIT! Yes!
We instantly let go of our SINGLE SHOT BUG FLUNGERS. In a split-second they’d flicked back around in line with our arms as we whipped down our shirtsleeves and quickly took off around the corner, wandering back out into the open towards the guys. There was no way we could get the blame! We were right there … it was brilliant!
As we walked right by the guys we could hear them whinging about the “bloody biting ants!” and TofFeE thomas had big soggy tears already welling-up in his eyes … he’s such a SOOKY LAH LAH.
We just kept on innocently wandering around the playground doing nothing, but we were actually heading towards our next victims. We just had to wait for a few of the girls to take up their usual spot. Just like the guys, they always sat in the same place, every day, every break. It was the only patch of the school grounds that had some decent grass on it. The rest of the place was pretty much just dirt and rocks.
