Jonty and Mike grew frustrated at being ignored by their friend and eventually Mike snapped.
‘That’s it, I’ve had enough!’
He sneaked a tennis ball out of his backpack and hurled it at Boris, while Mr Croxall was writing on the whiteboard.
‘Ow!’ Boris jumped up glowering at Mike. ‘I was trying to concentrate on my work!’ he shouted.
Mr Croxall whipped round and looked at Boris, who was staring so furiously it seemed like he might explode. ‘Brockman, calm down,’ he said slowly.
The tennis ball bounced around the floor between the desks, but Mike just stood there, stunned at Boris’s anger.
‘Sorry, sir.’ Boris sat down quickly.
‘Did you throw that ball?’
Mike didn’t answer.
‘Answer me!’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘Go to the principal’s office immediately!’
‘That’s so unfair. You never used to send anyone to the principal’s office! Why now?’ Mike smarted.
‘You heard me!’ Mr Croxall pointed to the door. If Brockman was an example of what happened in the principal’s office, he would happily send everyone there.
‘But, sir —’ Jonty tried to defend him.
‘NOW!’
Just as Mike started to move, a voice came over the school loudspeaker system. ‘Michelle Moore, Adam Bayes, Meena Shah report to the principal’s office.’ It seemed that Mike was not the only student behaving badly.
At break the whole school was talking about the number of students who had been sent to the principal’s office. The three from Jonty’s class were nothing; Mr Needham had sent his entire Year 10 Physics class.
‘Something’s definitely up,’ said Jonty. ‘Boris has been taken over by aliens or something.’
‘And Anastasia hasn’t texted anyone all morning,’ Miranda added. ‘That’s seriously weird.’
‘Nelson Barrow, Michael McDougall, Lynn Anderson, report to the principal’s office.’ The loud speaker again.
Lynn Anderson was in the group talking to Jonty. She looked up in alarm. ‘I’ve haven’t done anything,’ she said. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong!’
‘Don’t go,’ said Jonty suddenly. ‘It’s not right. You shouldn’t have to go just because some official voice tells you to.’
‘I’ll be in even more trouble, if I don’t. Besides, it could because I did really well at something,’ she said. No one believed her.
‘You don’t have to go,’ Jonty argued.
‘I do,’ she said, tears welling up in her eyes. She swallowed hard, waved goodbye and headed for the principal’s office.
Everyone in the schoolyard stared at the speakers, waiting to see who would be called next — terrified that it would be them. The speakers crackled again. ‘Adam Rubner, John Dyason, Elizabeth Hall report to the principal’s office.’
Prune was sitting on the steps by the library, near where the other students were talking. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said out loud. Everyone turned round.
‘Who cares if you’re sorry?’ Miranda said.
‘It’s my fault. I was using my fortune-telling cards to predict when Croxall was coming back and I kept doing them over. You’re not supposed to do that, see — the cards get angry. And then The Tower came up, which is the worst possible card. It means disaster and that’s exactly what’s happened.’
‘What — you played a game of cards and now the world’s ending?’ Miranda said.
‘Honestly, Prune, this is serious. Go back to your crystals or whatever,’ someone sneered.
CHAPTER 10
A SPOT TEST
Over the next few days, one student after another was sent to the principal’s office. Jonty kept waiting for his name to be called. As each day passed and he hadn’t heard it, he dreaded going to school even more. His name was sure to come up next.
Everyone who went to see the principal came back different. One by one, nearly all of Year 7 paid attention, answered questions brilliantly and behaved perfectly.
Jonty arrived at school one morning, sure that he would be called today. He found a row of students sitting on the library steps, which was now the hot place to be. They were from Year 10 and they all had the same book resting on their knees. They read at exactly the same pace, turned over the same page at the same time. He watched them for a moment and walked off to find Boris and Mike, hoping that perhaps they might be normal again. It wasn’t much of a hope. Neither of them had responded to a text for days and their MySpace profiles had disappeared.
Across the schoolyard, neat students were sitting quietly, learning. He heard two girls and turned suddenly, recognising the voices of Anastasia and Miranda, but he couldn’t work out what they were saying:
‘Oui, puisque je retrouve un ami si fidèle, Ma fortune va prendre une face nouvelle.’ Anastasia was reciting the lines of an ancient French play.
‘Ca c’est Andromaque de Racine!’ replied Miranda, identifying the source of the lines.
‘Hi!’ Jonty held up his hand to say hello. They walked right past him, testing each other with further lines in French. Their phones were nowhere in sight.
Finally Jonty saw Mike and Boris sitting on a bench under one of the shadecloths. They looked extremely neat. A perfect small knot in Mike’s school tie was pushed right up to the collar. It was spotless. He used to be proud of the stain collection on his tie. He would hide it every weekend so his mum couldn’t wash them out.
‘Hey, Mike,’ Jonty said. ‘What’s going on?’
Mike finished the page he was reading and then looked up slowly. ‘I’m busy,’ he said. He was reading Physics in Context: the Forces of Life. It was a Year 12 textbook and hundreds of pages thick. Mike had always struggled with science. He could barely say what an atom was and now he was reading this massive textbook.
‘Have we got a test?’ Jonty was worried he had missed an announcement about first period, which was Science.
Boris snorted and rolled his eyes at him. ‘We don’t need a test to make us learn,’ he said, actually looking at Jonty for the first time in days. ‘We don’t need anything — especially not you.’
He had muttered the last words so Jonty wasn’t sure if he had heard properly, but he tried to be friendly. ‘What are you studying?’ he asked brightly.
Boris looked up from his book with a hard smile. ‘Townsend, don’t tell me you’re actually interested in quantum physics?’ he sneered.
‘Actually, Brockman, I never thought that you’d be interested in quantity physics,’ Jonty retorted.
‘Thinking never was your strong point, was it? And it’s quantum, not quantity, from the Latin for “how much".’
Jonty took a step back and shook his head. ‘Why are you being so mean?’ he asked quietly.
Boris laughed and Mike looked up from his book with a grin. Boris stood up and took a step forward so that his face was right in Jonty’s. ‘Because you make it so easy. You’re like a mouse running around on the wheel in its cage. It thinks it’s having a good time, when all the creatures with real brains are pointing and laughing at how dumb it is. And the best part is, you don’t even know how stupid you are.’
Jonty pushed him away. ‘We’re meant to be mates!’ he shouted.
‘Mates?’ spat Boris. ‘What a primitive concept! We don’t have mates. We have study colleagues.’
‘What do you mean we. Who’s we?’
‘Everyone — except you. Now, get out of our way. We have a class to go to.’ He stepped around Jonty like he was a pile of dog dirt.
‘Come on, Mike,’ Boris said. ‘I can feel my intelligence drop, just standing next to him.’ He and Mike tried to walk off.
‘What’s happened to you?’ Jonty grabbed Boris’s shoulder and looked into his eyes, trying to find a sign of his old mate. He couldn’t see anything he recognised.
Boris held his gaze and then glanced down at Jonty’s hand. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he growled and walked away.
‘You’re not my friend,’ Jonty muttered quietly to himself, as he watched Boris go off. The bully that looked like his mate was someone else. He wasn’t the same person.
When Jonty got to Science, there was only one seat left — in the back row, next to Prune. Boris was already in the front row, impatient for the start of the lesson. As he walked to the back, Jonty saw Nathaniel sitting in the second back row. Normally he would be up the front. Jonty shrugged. ‘Welcome to the back!’ he said.
Nathaniel turned away. He was tired. He had spent most of the night studying Pythagoras. It had taken him days, but he had finally got his head around it all at two in the morning.
Jonty sat down next to Prune. ‘Do you know if we’re having a test?’ he asked.
‘Are we having a test?’ She jumped and shouted.
Nathaniel turned around and shook his head. If there was a test, he’d have known about it.
Jonty breathed a sigh of relief.
Mr Needham entered, wearing a fresh lab coat and a smile. Normally he was really grumpy, but today he grinned as if he were really looking forward to the class.
‘As some of you may know, we’re having a Physics Pop Quiz today.’
‘What?’ Nathaniel’s hand shot up, but Mr Needham ignored it.
‘It’s just a bit fun, but to make it interesting you can earn up to five points towards your end-of-year mark.’
Boris turned round and smirked at the panicked faces up the back.
‘Right,’ said Mr Needham, sweeping onto the first question. ‘Question one — who can define “kinematics” for me?’
Jonty blinked. He had never even heard of kinematics. Last week in Science they had named the parts of a worm. Now they were talking forms of energy he’d never heard of.
‘Do you have any clue what’s going on?’ he asked Prune.
She looked out from her long hair. ‘Perhaps we’ve been sucked into a time warp,’ she suggested. ‘We are now several weeks into the future. It can happen, you know. Just enjoy it; we’ll probably travel back to our regular time soon. It happens to me all the time.’
‘This is not a time warp.’ Jonty groaned and put his head on the bench.
‘So what’s your explanation?’ she said.
This could not be right. Jonty’s best friend had dumped him and was joyfully answering Physics questions and here he was, stuck listening to Prune de Luca bang on about time warps. The world had gone mad.
At the end of class Nathaniel tried to speak to the teacher. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I was unaware of any test. When was it decided?’
‘The Advanced Physics Study Group decided last night that they wanted one,’ said Mr Needham.
‘There really is an Advanced Physics Study Group?’ Nathaniel thought it had just been a trick to get him to the Misery Mall café.
‘Aren’t you a member, Nathaniel?’ Mr Needham looked puzzled for a moment. Then his face changed as if he had realised something. ‘Oh — of course. Well, never mind.’
‘Mr Needham, how do I join the Advanced Physics Study Group?’
The teacher smiled and tilted his head as if he almost felt sorry for Nathaniel. ‘You’ve got a bit of competition now, haven’t you! Look — ah — I’m sure you’ll catch up soon and then one of your fellow students will invite you to join.’
‘But how can I catch up if I don’t join the group?’
‘Indeed!’ Mr Needham laughed and walked off, leaving Nathaniel even more puzzled. He couldn’t believe that suddenly everyone was more intelligent than him.
The school loudspeakers crackled again. ‘David Coyne, Barbara Chmielewski, Lucy Coulter, report to the principal’s office!’
Nathaniel sighed. If seeing the principal made your intelligence skyrocket, he wished they’d call his name too.
CHAPTER 11
WELCOME TO MY WORLD
‘David Perry, Mark Hughes, Julie Fox, report to the principal’s office.’ Announcements all day, every day. Even at home Jonty could hear the voice of the principal’s assistant in his head, summoning students to his office — but he was never one of them.
Mannington High became quieter and quieter. Once, lunchtime had been a riot of noise: girls screaming as tomato sauce blood bombs splattered on their uniforms; boys shouting through a game of footy, balls flying around. Now Jonty was reduced to kicking a ball against a wall on his own, because there was no one to play with.
He decided to kick a few practice shots at goal on the school soccer pitch. He would have to pretend there was a goalkeeper. He kicked the ball, chased after it and dribbled his way round, imagining himself in the 2014 World Cup Final in Brazil, leading Australia’s against-the-odds charge to victory.
But there was no victory. Jonty’s imagination crashed. There was no World Cup stadium, no cheering crowds, no Brazilian defenders to get past. There wasn’t even a pitch anymore. It had been dug and planted with rows of seeds.
Two Year 12 students intercepted him immediately. Jonty recognised them: they used to be the forwards on the school rugby team. They picked him up and carried him backwards away from the field, leaving his ball on the grass.
‘What are you doing? Where’s the pitch gone?’ Jonty asked, kicking his legs in the air.
Year 12 were developing a modified form of wheat, adding fish genes to it to enhance the protein content. The new grains had been planted on the pitch. The forwards from the rugby team were now protecting the experimental crop.
‘We are expecting it to further enhance our brain power,’ one of the forwards added, as they walked with Jonty between them.
‘Why are you wasting time with a ball?’ the other asked as if it were the strangest thing in the world.
‘Have you been sent to the principal?’ they said.
Jonty shook his head.
‘This is a controlled area,’ they announced, and walked even faster. ‘You’re not allowed here.’
They dumped him back on the hard schoolyard surface and ran back to the pitch to scare some birds away.
‘Stupid rugby players,’ Jonty muttered to himself. You wouldn’t catch soccer players planting a pitch with seeds.
Now, even more bored, he wandered over to the school canteen. The students waiting to be served stood silently looking ahead in a straight line. They ordered their salad roll or veggie burger and squirted tomato sauce neatly onto it. Then, one by one, they moved off, ate their food, put the wrappers carefully in the bin and sat down to read a book. It was like they were on a conveyor belt in a factory.
Jonty plonked himself on the ground with his head in his hands. He missed his friends, the noise, the blood bombs. He was the only real person left in the world. ‘You’re a bunch of robots!’ he shouted at the students reading in unison on the library steps. No one answered. They didn’t even look up. There was no noise at all. All he could hear was the sound of pages being turned.
Suddenly, the library doors flew open and shouts rang out. Jonty jumped up, relieved that something was actually happening. Prune de Luca and Nathaniel Bennett fell through the doors of the library, pushed by Henry the Octopus. He had thrown them off the computers. Prune had been ‘wasting’ valuable study time by reading a website about unicorn sightings. Nathaniel had been trying to read an article on advanced kinematics.
‘Get off and give the computer to someone who can do something intelligent with it!’ Henry sneered.
Jonty ran up, determined to teach Henry a lesson. All his frustration at being alone, shunned and bored boiled over. He was bursting to land a punch on Henry. Bounding up the steps, he flew at Henry, hoping to flatten him.
Henry simply stepped back into the library and swung the doors shut again. Jonty crashed into the glass and dropped to the ground. Through the doors, Henry looked down at him shaking his head. And there was Boris next to Henry with a smirk on his face.
‘That was smart,’ said Nathaniel sarcastically. He put his hand out to help Jonty up. Jonty thought about pulling him down. Nathaniel was so
small, it wouldn’t take much. But he didn’t: he was grateful that anyone was speaking to him.
‘This school has gone completely crazy,’ he said to Nathaniel and Prune.
‘Of course, children wanting to learn would be a strange concept to you,’ Nathaniel said.
‘But they’re all ignoring me. It’s like I don’t exist!’
‘Welcome to my world,’ Prune said. ‘The whole school’s been ignoring me or teasing me since we started here. This —’ She put her hands out and turned around. ‘This is better, because it’s only ignoring. No names, no tricks …’
‘No imaginary study groups,’ Nathaniel added.
‘We’ve got to do something!’ Jonty said. ‘It isn’t right.’
‘And what do you propose?’ Nathaniel waited for an answer.
Jonty thought, while Nathaniel stood there with his eyes wide open. ‘I can’t think of anything,’ he admitted.
Prune pulled her hair away from her face and looked hard at him. She felt a bit sorry for Jonty, but not too much.
‘Come on, Prune. It’s time for English. And further educational humiliation,’ Nathaniel said.
Jonty watched them go. There was no point in his going to English. He probably wouldn’t understand anything and he had more important things to think about. He had to come up with something to do. Croxall thought he was thick, Boris called him a mouse and Nathaniel reckoned he would never think of anything to do about the school. Jonty would prove them all wrong.
* * *
English was even worse than Nathaniel expected. Everyone had completed homework on The role of women in Shakespeare’s middle comedies.
‘Excellent work, everyone,’ announced Ms Brown. She sat on the front edge of her desk and beamed. She didn’t have to worry about where she sat now. There were no more drawing pins.
She handed back their homework. ‘Boris — fascinating insights on Rosalind in As You Like It — 98 per cent. Anastasia — I liked your feminist approach. 97 per cent. Miranda — you took an unusual angle and it paid off. 88 per cent.’
‘What?’ Miranda looked up sharply. ‘What was wrong with it?’
The Trouble with Sauce Page 4
