Timothy and the Phubbers

by Ken Kwek

  Text © Ken Kwek 2018

  Illustrations © Lolita Chiong 2018

  Published by Epigram Books

  www.epigrambooks.sg

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of the Proprietor or Copyright holder.

  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  NAMES

  Kwek, Ken, 1979-, author | Chiong, Lolita, illustrator

  TITLE

  Timothy and the Phubbers

  written by Ken Kwek, illustrated by Lolita Chiong

  DESCRIPTION

  Singapore: Epigram Books [2018]

  IDENTIFIERS

  OCN 1027471325

  ISBN 978-981-47-5797-3 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-981-47-5798-0 (e-book)

  SUBJECTS

  LCSH: High school students–Juvenile fiction

  High schools–Juvenile fiction

  CLASSIFICATION

  DDC S823–dc23

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1

  Blood, Sweat and Flies

  A splodge of red snot oozed from Timothy Pong’s nostril and dripped onto the empty plate in front of him. Great, he thought. He was having a nosebleed.

  Timothy looked to his left and watched as the lanky boy next to him pulled a pinky out from his own nose and touched it to his tongue, as if sampling a hot sauce. The lanky boy was having a nosebleed too.

  Timothy shuddered. He was slight and short for a twelve-year-old, with small eyes, a button nose, and a haircut that looked like someone had overturned a ramen bowl on his head. Just ten minutes ago, he had strolled into his new school, trying very hard to look cool and casual (and trying even harder to hide his quivering nerves).

  Timothy had an enormous appetite despite his small stature. His parents had neglected to give him breakfast that morning, so his first mission was to find the canteen.

  It was 7.00am, half an hour before the first bell rang at Bangsvale Secondary School. Timothy scanned the menu of the Malay rice stall, then the Chinese noodle stall and the Indian vegetarian stall, before deciding on some dim sum from the snack stall. He ordered two large buns (one pork and one chicken) and a mug of Milo, then settled down at the nearest table to eat.

  As he bit into the pork bun, he noticed a skinny, scruffy Eurasian boy staring at him with big, hungry eyes. Timothy sighed and so, it seemed, did his stomach which let out an almighty groan as he picked up the chicken bun and held it out.

  “Want one?” said Timothy. “I’m Pong, Timothy Pong.”

  “Thanks,” said the other boy, “I’m Rudy Baptista––”

  Before Rudy could say anything else, a tubby, pimpled brute swiped both buns right out of Timothy’s hands. His name was Big Burt and he was at least five times the size of Timothy. Big Burt loomed over Timothy with his two accomplices: Darren, who looked like a Chinese Justin Bieber, and Tsai Koh, who just looked feral.

  “Ooooh, look, Tsai Koh, fresh meat!” said Big Burt, tossing him one of the buns.

  Tsai Koh snarled and tore into the bun with his teeth, his eyes darting about wildly. Timothy thought Tsai Koh was a psycho. Which was understandable.

  Big Burt stuffed the other bun into his ginormous mouth and swallowed it in one go. Then he picked up Timothy’s mug of Milo, gulped it down and let out a loud, triumphant burp.

  Timothy was too terrified to say anything and kept quiet but Rudy rose to his feet. Rudy was almost double the height of Big Burt. Though he was much ganglier and looked like an empty tube of toothpaste. Still, his height was impressive.

  “You can’t do that!” Rudy squeaked.

  Timothy grimaced. Any potential to intimidate Big Burt was quashed by the shrill voice of a damsel in distress that Rudy had also been “blessed” with.

  “It’s his food! Pay him back!” screeched Rudy, with about as much authority as a kitten meowing.

  Big Burt laughed. “You can’t do that! It’s his food! Pay him back!” he mocked.

  By now a few other students, mostly first- and second-years, had gathered at a safe distance to gawk at the inevitable showdown brewing between the two new boys and the older bullies. Someone passed a bag of popcorn around.

  Big Burt nudged his mate, “Darren, what shall we do with these babies?”

  Darren flicked his hair with a toss of his head, clicked his tongue and sized up the new first-years, his eyes gleaming. “Tsk tsk tsk… This is our table,” he said, leaning in. “You have to pay rent to sit at our table. Understand? Five dollars per sitting.”

  “Five dollars?” said Timothy.

  At that, Timothy got up to leave. He motioned Rudy to go with him, but Tsai Koh pushed them back down into their seats.

  Darren snapped his fingers and held out his hand for cash.

  “N-no,” Timothy stammered, trying but failing to summon courage in his voice. Cold sweat started oozing from his pores. “We’re not g-giving you our m-money.”

  “No?” said Big Burt.

  “Owoooooo!” howled Tsai Koh as he moved in on Timothy and Rudy and mashed their faces together so that their noses squished like grapes in a juice press.

  The students who had gathered to watch the action winced. It was the hardest nose-squish in the history of nose-squishes. It sucked the air right out of Timothy and Rudy so they couldn’t even yelp. They squirmed in pain as Tsai Koh held their heads together, whilst Darren rifled through their pockets and fished out their wallets.

  “Tell anyone and you’re dead,” said Darren. He turned and glared at the crowd which dispersed within seconds. An empty popcorn bag fluttered to the ground.

  Tsai Koh released his grip. Rudy blinked away the tears in his eyes, and could just make out a blurry Big Burt and Darren turning away. As suddenly as they had appeared, all three bullies scarpered off.

  Those were my first ten minutes of secondary school, thought Timothy, glumly. I’m doomed.

  It was 7.10am. Timothy took a tissue out from his pocket and wiped his bloody nose. Rudy stared blankly into space with blood dribbling down his chin.

  “You’re dripping onto the plate,” said Timothy.

  “Sorry,” said Rudy.

  “Don’t be sorry. Want a tissue?”

  “Is it edible?”

  “No, it’s for wiping your nose.”

  “Oh, then no, thanks.”

  Like his new friend, Rudy had also arrived at school that morning on an empty stomach. Mr and Mrs Baptista were terrible cooks who couldn’t differentiate salt from sugar. They ran a food stall in their neighbourhood hawker centre.

  “I can’t believe we got robbed,” said Timothy.

  “My wallet was empty so technically only you got robbed,” said Rudy.

  The fact that one of the wallets the bullies had run off with was completely empty comforted the boys slightly.

  “I’m gonna be in 1B,” said Timothy.

  “Awesome. Me too,” said Rudy.

  The two boys looked down at the plate where their blood now mingled.

  “We’re not just classmates, we’re blood brothers now,” said Rudy.

  Timothy realised there was an upside to the situation: he had, very quickly, found a cool new friend. The boys bumped fists.

  “Too bad about the buns. I’m so hungry I could eat a fly,” said Rudy. And with that he spanked a fly on the table and popped it into his mouth.

  Timothy looked at Rudy. His new friend was cool, but he was also disgusting.

  2

  Mud-Bogeys

  Timothy and Rudy’s showdown with the older b
ullies was the talk of Bangsvale Secondary School.

  The two friends had soon gained a reputation as the newbies who, like Caesar (not Caesar the Roman emperor, but Caesar the chimp from Planet of the Apes), had the gall to say “no” to their terrorisers.

  Word of their heroism (or lunacy, depending on how you look at it) had a mixed effect: they made a few new friends, especially among the science geeks (more on them, later), and it attracted some rather unwanted attention, too.

  In their first month of school, Timothy and Rudy endured:

  An episode of malicious nipple-pinching.

  A hailstorm of exploding mangoes.

  An “accident” with superglue.

  A case of personal property damage.

  Three attempted kisses from girls with bad breath.

  There were other attacks that are simply too ugly to illustrate.

  Apart from attending classes, doing homework and doing more homework, it seemed Timothy and Rudy spent all their time in school dodging assaults from bullies and hugs from rotten-smelling girls. It was exhausting.

  “If this is what a month is like, how are we going to survive four years?” It was the fourth Friday of the first term and Timothy was counting off the days and weeks left of school like a prisoner counting down his time left behind bars.

  The boys were in the gym changing room, cleaning mud and grass off their faces. Or rather, Timothy was cleaning mud and grass off his face, and Rudy was eating the mud and grass.

  Earlier, Tsai Koh had ambushed Rudy in the school field. He kicked Rudy’s soccer ball out of the field – out of the school, in fact – then shoved his head in the muddy grass, before winding him up in the net of the goal like a freshly caught garoupa.

  Timothy sacrificed his chocolate popsicle by sticking it down the back of Tsai Koh’s trousers. Tsai Koh whirled round and pushed Timothy’s face in the grass, before running away with cold buttocks and a dark stain on the back of his trousers.

  A group of girls laughed at Tsai Koh, thinking he’d not made it to the toilet in time. It was the sort of double-edged victory that filled Timothy with despair.

  “If we don’t defend ourselves, we’re suckers. They’ll keep coming at us,” he said. “But if we hit back, they’ll come at us even harder. We’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”

  “We’re just damned,” said Rudy matter-of-factly. “But thanks for having my back, bud.”

  “I can’t go on like this,” said Timothy, remembering his lost popsicle.

  He watched Rudy pick a ball of mud-flavoured snot (or snot-flavoured mud) from his nostril and eat it. “I can’t spend all my secondary school years wasting food and cleaning mud off my face.” “Better mud than blood,” said Rudy.

  “Better mud than blood.”

  “Easy for you to say,” said Timothy. “You eat that stuff.”

  “It’s better than my folks’ cooking,” said Rudy. “Poor Mum and Dad.” He meant poor literally.

  “Will this never end?” cried Timothy (a little over-dramatically). “We should tell someone! Like Mrs Loo, or Madam Tooh, or Mr Foo. Anyone whose name rhymes with ooh who’ll sympathise with us.”

  “What can they do?” said Rudy.

  “I don’t know,” groaned Timothy. “We won’t know till we try.”

  “Look, we’re not snitches. And we’re not a lost cause either,” said Rudy. As he said it, he leaned into the sink, drank from the tap and slurped another mud-bogey from his nose into his mouth.

  “Dude,” said Timothy.

  “Dude,” said Rudy, wiping his wet hands on his shirt. “You want to know when all this will end? It will end when we hit puberty. It could happen any time. It could happen tomorrow. You’ll have a growth spurt and turn into a giant. My voice will break and I’ll have the manliest growl in school. Boom! Nobody will mess with us then. Our suffering will end. And some of the girls without bad breath might actually pay attention to us.”

  Timothy pinched the bridge of his nose. He had heard Rudy’s puberty spiel the week before, and he had not grown an inch. Rudy’s voice was still as high-pitched as any soprano’s.

  “I’m glad you’re excited about growing leg hair and becoming a baritone. But I don’t think we can count on puberty to save our skin. We need help.”

  But where would that help come from? Timothy wanted to tell his parents. But he had a strong feeling his mum and dad would not listen to his complaints. After all, Timothy had not really spoken to his family in years.

  3

  Phubbers

  Timothy lived on the fifteenth floor of a shiny condominium building with four phubbers: his father, mother, older sister and the family’s maid.

  Phubbers are a subspecies of human beings. They can be identified by the faint, but persistent, glow of LED light on their faces. Phubbers tend to communicate almost exclusively through digital machines or apps, and have difficulty making eye contact.

  Mr Pong was a trader, though what it was he traded had always been a mystery to Timothy. He wore crisp long-sleeve shirts and leather shoes that were so shiny he could use them as mirrors to check his reflection in.

  Timothy’s dad was constantly sending messages on his two phones while tracking figures on his two laptops. When making actual conversation, he tended to use numbers and acronyms more than words.

  A typical Mr Pong sentence might sound something like this: “I’ll buy two hundred of SPLH at $1.75, o.k.? Immediately! Or it will go up to $1.80 by 5.00. What? You’re at the 7-Eleven? Oh, then can you help me buy 4D?”

  Mrs Pong was a stay-at-home mum, meaning she was a mum who stayed at home. Timothy’s mum was addicted to two kinds of tablets. The first was called Xanax. The second was an iPad on which she constantly watched Korean dramas, most recently The Heirs. These dramas made her cry a great deal.

  Mrs Pong styled herself like a Korean soap actress, which is a kind of actress who uses a lot of soap to whiten her skin. She also thickened her eyebrows and sported false eyelashes, even when she slept. But Timothy’s mum rarely slept, as there were too many Korean dramas to watch.

  Timothy’s older sister, Tara, was a whiny fourteen-year-old who had inherited Mrs Pong’s vanity. Unlike Timothy’s mum, however, Tara was not into Korean dramas as even half an episode was too long to hold her attention. Tara preferred half-minute videos on YouTube.

  Sometimes, when Tara was in the mood to really focus, she would watch two-minute videos. Her favourite online videos featured a pretty young American teenager filming herself talking incessantly about herself.

  The fourth phubber in the Pong household was the Filipino housekeeper, Christina Aguilera, who was not, and did not look anything like, Christina Aguilera from The Voice but sang just as passionately.

  Christina Aguilera was never seen without a pair of earphones in. She did all her chores plugged into Spotify. Whether she was cooking the Pongs’ meals or cleaning Casper’s poop from the kitty litter, she would be singing her heart out.

  Whilst each of Timothy’s family members had their own interests, they were united by a shared enthusiasm for the ultimate phubbers’ game: Pokémon Go. In Pokémon Go, players use the GPS function on their phones to chase, lure and capture alien creatures hidden across the planet.

  It was a game that once caused Mr Pong to board the wrong plane on a business trip; that caused Mrs Pong to drive her car into a fire hydrant; that enticed Tara to trap herself in a large freezer at the local Cold Storage.

  Playing Pokémon Go and comparing Pokédexes were what passed for “family time” in the Pong household – which made Timothy feel rather left out, since he didn’t have a phone. His parents believed no twelve-year-old would know how to use a phone responsibly, and so refused to give him one.

  Timothy’s desire for a phone only intensified the day he tried, at dinner time, to tell the phubbers about his oppressors in school.

  “Dad, when you were a kid, were you ever bullied at school?”

  “What?” said Mr Pong wi
thout looking up from his iPhone. “What happened at the pool?”

  “Not the pool. School. There’s this group of older boys, these douchebags from Secondary 3. They’ve been beating up on Rudy and me.”

  “You and who?”

  “Rudy.”

  “Who’s Ruby?” asked Mrs Pong without looking up from her phone. “I hope you’re not getting involved with girls, Timmy. You’re too young to get involved with girls.”

  “Rudy, not Ruby, Mum! I don’t know any Ruby. And Rudy’s a boy. He’s my classmate. I was saying, these older kids, they’ve been—”

  “I caught a Totodile! I caught a Totodile!” squealed Tara.

  “A Totodile?” cried Mrs Pong, having forgotten about Ruby.

  “What! I can never find a Totodile!” said Mr Pong, whose other phone (the Samsung) was beeping loudly. “Oops, sorry fam, got to take this. BRB.” Mr Pong picked up his Samsung and left the dining room for his study.

  “Mum! Sis! Are you listening to me?” cried Timothy.

  “What is it, Timmy?” asked Mrs Pong. “Why do you need a bag? I just got you a new bag.”

  “No, I said there are these douchebags—”

  “Oh, it’s terrible! This Choi, the way he picks on Cha!” Mrs Pong was now back on her iPad, watching The Heirs. “Oh, he’s so horrible, I CAN’T STAND HIM!”

  “Stop screaming, Mum!” screamed Tara.

  “I can’t take it! It’s so upsetting!” Mrs Pong said, beginning to cry. Her tears caused her fake eyelashes to peel off her eyelids and drop into her wonton soup, which upset her even more. She ran to the toilet, weeping.

  Timothy knew that confiding in his parents would be difficult, but their inability to listen to him was still frustrating. “Sis?” he said sadly.

  “What, Timothy?”

  “Can I borrow your phone?”

  “No.”

  “But what should I do about the bullies in school?”