by Greg James
But we’re getting distracted.
“Go on, then,” Murph’s mom encouraged him as she pulled up outside The School. She leaned over and opened his door. “Be brave!”
Murph gave her a resigned look, swung his bag over his shoulder, and jumped out of the car.
As his mom drove off around the corner she beeped the car horn. This is classic mom embarrassment or, to use the technical term, mombarrassment.
Other acts of mombarrassment include:
- Kissing you goodbye in front of your friends
- Calling you by your baby nickname in front of your friends (Murph’s was “Honeyhugs.” When his mom had used it in public two schools ago, he’d actually been glad he was about to move again)
- Telling you to “stop showing off” in front of your friends
- Asking if you have a girlfriend/boyfriend in front of your friends
- Asking if you have a girlfriend/boyfriend in front of the girl/boy you want to be your girlfriend/boyfriend
- Singing loudly in public
- Cleaning your face by licking a finger
- Asking if you have a handkerchief, as if you were a fancy lady from the olden days
After what seemed to be the world’s longest beep, Murph threw his mom a half smile, half please-stop-beeping face, waved meekly, and hefted his bag onto his shoulder to begin what was to become the single most bizarre day of his life so far.
The school gates were open, but there didn’t seem to be anybody around. Murph wandered across the yard and through the open front doors, calling out “Hello?” in a tiny first-day-at-school voice. But there was no reply.
Just inside, Murph found a scratched wooden desk with an ancient-looking computer on top. He decided to settle down on the uncomfortable plastic chair behind the desk to wait for whatever happened next.
At Murph’s last school there had always been plenty of activity as the first bell loomed closer. Parents chatting, kids rushing around, cars double-parking or getting chased out of the drop-off zone by the unusually fierce crossing guard. But here everything seemed to be much quieter. He watched kids walking calmly across to the gates, and spotted a dad dropping his daughter off in a very sleek black car. Two much older boys sauntered past him, and he thought they must have smuggled a firework in, because there was a loud bang just as they rounded the corner.
“Nice Cape, Howard!” he heard one of them say, and they both laughed.
Neither of them was wearing a cape, but that still didn’t make it funny as far as Murph was concerned.
The only thing that seemed different for a while was that everyone seemed to be heading into school rather quickly and quietly. It was all very organized, even without a crazy crossing guard to keep things in order.
But as the start of the school day drew nearer, things did begin to cross the line into weird. In fact, they leaped way over the line and came closer to “What the cheese and pickle salad is going on here?”
While he waited for someone to come and tell him what to do, Murph gazed out the window. It was a gray, rainy day, but suddenly, a bright yellow figure underneath an umbrella appeared out of the low-hanging clouds and drifted rapidly down and out of sight behind one of the school buildings.
Murph couldn’t believe his eyes. Was he tired? Was he hallucinating? Was he going mad?
Maybe it was a giant canary, he thought.
He quickly rationalized this idea away, remembering that giant canaries aren’t a thing (but wishing briefly that they were), and then tried to work out what had just happened. He had to find out what this lemon-colored thing was.
He got up from his desk and dashed out, following the trajectory of the giant canary—or the thing that couldn’t possibly be a giant canary, not least because of the umbrella. He turned to the left, traced the direction of the figure in the sky, and raced toward the fields.
Next to a side door marked Coatroom, he saw a yellow figure flicking water off its arms and doing that openy-shutty thing that has no name, that you use to make umbrellas dry.
In fact, let’s give that thing a name right now. From a short list of three—flofting, blatting, and flumphing—we have selected the word flumphing, and we hope you like it.
The figure was flumphing an umbrella vigorously.
Murph approached quickly as the figure glided into the coatroom. Just as the door was closing, he twisted his body to try and slip inside unnoticed. But instead he skidded on the wet floor, careered inside like an ice-skating rhino, and collided with a damp yellow wall.
As he scrambled to his feet, he was relieved—mostly—to find that the figure he’d seen flumphing the yellow umbrella wasn’t a giant canary but a very normal-looking, bespectacled girl.
“Sorry! Hello! Um, did you, fly . . . sorry, canary . . . boots . . . massive bird, it’s raining . . .”
Murph was panicking. He wasn’t great with girls at the best of times, let alone when they had, quite literally, just floated into his life.
“Hello, clumsy,” replied the girl, calmly taking off her glasses and doing that grown-up polishing thing on the end of her obviously yellow woolen scarf. “I’m Mary. Who are you?”
Murph was so shocked that an apparently occasionally airborne girl was making conversation with him that he momentarily forgot his own name.
“Mar— . . . Murph.”
“Well, Mar-Murph, lovely to meet you. Are you a new student too?”
This was the moment for a really world-class comeback.
“Yes,” Mar-Murph replied sheepishly.
“Okay, well, help me off with this coat and I’ll show you to our classroom,” commanded Mary.
Again, this seemed to Murph like a great cue for a devastatingly funny line. A real zinger.
“Okay,” he said, helping umbrella canary girl gather up her belongings while approximately twenty-seven immediate questions buzzed unhelpfully around his head.
Murph picked out one of those questions as they zipped through the hallways. He thought he’d go for the big one first: “Um, Mary . . . did you just come to school, you know . . . through the, er, through the actual air?”
“Yep,” replied Mary, like it was the most normal thing in the world, “but let’s keep that between us two, shall we? I don’t think I’m really supposed to. But it’s quicker than walking, and I was late.”
“Okay, cool, just checking,” replied Murph breezily, trying desperately not to freak out. “Also . . .” Murph had another question. “Are you called Mary because of Mary Poppins?”
“Who?” replied Mary, looking confused.
“Oh, nothing. Just thought, y’know, because of the umbrella sky thing . . . ,” burbled Murph.
“What are you burbling on about?” said Mary, raising her eyebrows at him so they rose over the rims of her glasses like two hairy blond suns. “Right, here we are. Follow me. This is Mr. Flash’s classroom.”
“Mr. . . . Flash?” Murph just had time to say before she bundled him through the door.
4
CT
To begin with, Murph was relieved to find that everything inside the classroom looked more or less normal. Two teachers were standing at the front of a class of kids all noisily settling into chairs and dumping their bags under desks. One was the chiseled-chinned teacher he’d met at the school gates. He greeted Murph with a very hearty “Ah, good morning to our new arrival!” and began moving toward him, holding out an upraised palm as if introducing a minor celebrity.
Mary looked impressed. “How do you know Mr. Souperman?” she asked Murph.
“Mr. . . . Superwhat?”
Mary shot him another one of her looks. She did looks. “Boy, you really are new, aren’t you? Mr. Souperman’s the headmaster. I’ll save you a seat.” She whisked off.
It was becoming apparent to Murph that Mary was taking him under her wing, even though she didn’t have any wings.
Murph grinned up at the headmaster in a bemused way.
“Morning, Mr., er,
Souperman.”
“Ready to get started with that flying?” He beamed.
Murph nodded politely back at the big friendly face, although midway through the second nod, his eyes widened slightly as a thought occurred to him. He glanced over at Mary. Flying . . .?
His brief thought was rudely interrupted.
“Right, then,” Mr. Souperman said, striding to the door. “Mr. Flash will get you going.”
Mr. Flash? thought Murph again as he scuffed his sneakers over to the desk next to Mary and sat down. Sounds more like something you scrub the bath with than a teacher.
Like the headmaster, Mr. Flash seemed to have been spending some time in the gym. Like, weeks at a time. His upper arms bulged as if his shirtsleeves had been stuffed with cuts of roast pork. His head was bald and extremely shiny, and his mouth was almost entirely obscured by a droopy red mustache. He was wearing army fatigues tucked into tall black boots.
As the before-class commotion continued he raised his chin so that he was looking down his nose at everyone.
“SHUUUUUUUUT UP, THEN!” he barked. Gradually the shuffling and chatting came to a stop and the class regarded him in silence. His left muscle seemed to ripple slightly of its own accord. He abruptly turned his back and began to scribble on an old-fashioned blackboard, talking as he did so.
“My name, for the benefit of our new arrival,” he said, squeaking the chalk with a noise like a gerbil being squashed, “is Mr. Flash. And welcome”—squeak, squeak—“to your first lesson today.”
The list of things that confused Murph about his new school was growing all the time. He could now add the fact that they still had blackboards, as if it were the twentieth century. But the list was about to get much, much longer.
MEANWHILE . . .
“Every story,” declared Nektar, “needs a villain.” He attempted a dastardly laugh but it came out a little too high-pitched, so he quickly turned it into a cough.
Nektar was dressed completely in yellow and black. His boots were bright yellow, his pants jet black. Above a yellow belt, he was sporting a black shirt topped with a yellow vest. His head was almost completely covered by a black helmet with bulging yellow eyepieces and topped with two quivering antennae. Basically, if you’re not getting the picture yet, he had really gone for a theme.
He was in a mean mood. Wasps usually are.
Anyway, more about him in a minute. Don’t forget him, will you? The big guy who’s half wasp.
Right, back to Murph . . .
Forty minutes into Mr. Flash’s lesson, Murph sat at the back of the class feeling as though his brain had been removed, played with by a kitten for ten minutes, then gently replaced. He sat with his mouth open and his brow furrowed, trying desperately to work out what was going on.
At his previous schools, classes had had names like English, math, or PE. Mr. Flash’s class was called CT, but for the life of him Murph couldn’t work out what it stood for. At first he went through the obvious options, like Computer Technology—but there were no computers involved. Then as things got odder, he wildly thought that it could stand for anything. Cheese Toppling? Cat Tickling? Clown Trolling?
As far as Murph could work out, it seemed to be some sort of bizarre role-playing exercise, and he could only assume he’d missed something vital in the first few weeks of the year. But he’d missed school before and usually had no problems catching up with the odd times table or creative writing assignment about what he’d done over Spring Break. This lesson made him feel like he’d been to outer space for break and landed on a totally different planet.
It started off with a boy with red hair and cheeks standing up in front of the class and striking a pose with his hands on his hips. Mr. Flash looked at him approvingly: clearly this guy was a star student.
“Right, Timothy,” beamed Mr. Flash, “let’s see how you’re progressing, shall we?”
Timothy began to strain as if he were trying very hard, but failing, to use the toilet. Beads of sweat broke out on his oversized forehead, his ruddy cheeks becoming maroon.
Mr. Flash gestured toward an old-fashioned gray TV set that was standing in the corner of the room. “Concentrate now, Timothy,” he growled. “Focus on the impact point.”
“Impact point?” Murph mouthed, turning to Mary and giving her a quizzical stare. He’d expected her to look as baffled as he felt, but instead she gave him another cool raise of those eyebrows and a jerk of her head in the direction of Timothy.
But before Murph could turn back, there was a loud fizzing noise and a sharp flash of light. When he did look forward, there was a thin stream of smoke rising from the back of the old TV and Timothy, who was now almost entirely beet-red, was looking rather pleased with himself.
“Well, it’s a start,” said Mr. Flash. “Well done. But please do continue to use the remote when you’re at home for the time being. We don’t want another letter from your parents, do we?” Some of Timothy’s friends in the front row giggled at this, and one of them tapped him on the shoulder as he sat down, as if to say “nice one.”
Murph wondered what he’d just missed. Clearly the red-faced boy had done something to the TV, but how? And what? And why wasn’t he in trouble? Murph had once hit a TV at his old school with a badly aimed sneaker that he’d been trying to throw to a friend, and he didn’t get a “well done.” In fact, he’d had to go around and wipe down all the other TVs to apologize.
But there was no time to ponder this further. Mr. Flash was ordering someone else to the front of the class.
It was the girl who’d been sitting on the other side of Mary. She had long dark hair with green ends that straggled over her face. Her sweater was baggy and her jeans were ripped. Mr. Flash didn’t look quite as enthusiastic this time.
“Right. Morning, Nellie,” he said in a resigned tone of voice.
Nellie didn’t speak. She stood at the front of the class staring at the ground and shuffling her dirty white sneakers.
“Tell us about your Cape, then, Nellie,” coaxed Mr. Flash.
She’s not wearing a cape, thought Murph. Actually, Nellie was dressed as if all her usual clothes were in the wash.
She didn’t respond to Mr. Flash’s question. Murph thought he heard her let out a small squeak, but it was hard to tell, because at that moment there was a rumble of thunder from outside. A sudden gust of wind opened one of the windows and sent a pile of paper flying. Mr. Flash marched over and slammed the window closed.
“Very nice, Nellie, thank you,” he said.
She gets thanked for looking at her toes and not saying anything? This was even weirder than that time at Murph’s previous school when Gavin Honeybun had brought in his mom’s old mop for show-and-tell and pretended it was a horse.
“Great Cape from Timothy this morning, I think you’ll all agree,” Mr. Flash was saying. “Progressing very nicely indeed. Nellie . . . well, she gave it a try, didn’t she? Now, what about hearing from the newest member of the class? Murph, is it?”
Murph shuddered into action like an old tractor. His legs lifted him into an upright position, even though he didn’t recall asking them to extend. Before he knew what was going on, he was facing the class, who were looking at him expectantly. Everyone except Nellie, who was still staring at the floor.
“Now, mind the fans,” cautioned Mr. Flash, pointing up to the ceiling where a couple of plastic fans were rotating slowly. “Don’t want sliced boy, do we?”
He winked at Murph.
Murph stared back at him blankly. Mr. Flash might as well have been speaking French. A horrible suspicion was growing at the back of Murph’s mind like unwanted mushrooms, a suspicion that he was very much at the wrong school. He had no idea what he was expected to do. In fact, he was half expecting to wake up and discover that the whole thing had been a weird dream brought on by a huge cheese overdose the night before. Murph loved midnight cheesery.
“Clear a space,” warned Mr. Flash, and the front row scraped their chairs backward,
looking excited. “Come on, then, Mr. Cooper. Show us your Cape. We haven’t got all day.”
Why do people keep saying “cape”? thought Murph. Was this some kind of mime workshop? Would he have to pretend to be a flower growing from a seed next? He was just about to have a stab at miming wearing a cape—which we’d all have loved to have seen—but unfortunately, that very second, the bell rang.
“Ah, saved by the bell, eh?” said Mr. Flash, looking at Murph with one eyebrow raised. “Well, you’ll be first up in CT tomorrow, so don’t think you’re off the hook. Maybe get some practice in tonight, eh? In secret, of course—I’m sure you know the rules.”
By now the class were grabbing their bags and heading for the door. Murph turned on his heel and went with them, with his brain fizzing like the still-smoking TV in the corner.
5
Kid Normal
As Murph leaned up against the hallway wall, enjoying the feel of the cool paint against his befuddled brain, he felt a sharp poke in his back. It was Mary.
“Not the most impressive of starts, was it?” she asked him, screwing up the corner of her mouth.
“Well, it’s a bit hard to be impressive when you’ve got absolutely no idea what’s going on,” Murph blurted out. “What on earth did I miss over the last few weeks? Was that . . . role-play? I hate all that stuff. We had a woman come into my old school and spend the afternoon making us pretend to be the farm animal we feel closest to. I was a goat.”
Mary glanced at his hair and nodded sagely. “Yeah, I would have said goat. Or sheep. Your eyes are quite far apart,” she said.
“Thanks a lot. Anyway,” said Murph, “you’ve got to help me out.” Behind Mary an old man, who seemed to be some sort of janitor, was pushing the broken TV on a cart. Murph gestured at it. “What was that all about? What does CT stand for?”
“‘Capability Training,’ of course,” replied Mary, moving to one side to let the janitor pass. “You know, when you show everyone how you’re getting on with your Cape.”
