My Life and Other Stuff That Went Wrong (11 page)

Bando growls.

‘No,' I say.

Her nostrils flare wider. ‘There appear to be liver treats in among the broken pieces of my favourite bowl and trace elements of liver treat dust on your headphones. You seem to know detailed information about the breakage of the bowl, even though you were not in the room at the time. Your breathing is short and you have sweat running down your face.'

‘But …'

She raises a finger and looks at me in a knowing way. ‘I'm taking a walk through your mind right now, Tom Weekly, and I am sensing panic, confusion, a spiralling sense of fear … and a wish that you had never set this whole thing in motion. Am I correct?'

It seriously feels like she's walking down the dark corridors of my brain, shining a torch into places even I haven't seen.

‘I'm going to ask you one more time, Thomas … Did you have anything to do with this?'

Bando growls again. He's pawing at the little brass handle on the drawer. It squeaks and knocks against the timber.

Mum twists the lamp just slightly so it shines in my eyes.

‘TOM?'

That's it. I can't take it anymore. My head is about to explode. I only have one choice …

‘NO!' I yell. ‘It was him!' I point at Bando, the evil yet cute Labrador.

Bando barks and scratches the drawer with his claws. Mum rips it open, reaches in and pulls out the open bag of liver treats.

‘Why are these treats in this drawer and not in the kitchen, Tom Weekly?'

‘Would you believe Bando put them in there?' I ask.

‘You're grounded for two weeks. Clean this mess up.' Mum slams the drawer and heads off down the hall, leaving me and Bando staring at one another.

‘Oh, by the way,' Mum says, poking her head back into the room. ‘I made up the story about the Moroccan man and his wife. I was testing you and I'm very disappointed that you didn't admit to what you did. I bought the bowl at a garage sale at number seventeen.'

She disappears down the hall again.

I can't believe it. Outsmarted by a dog and conned by my own mother.

And she calls
me
dishonest.

Bando yawns excitedly and smiles his goofy, black-lipped smile, looking up at me as though he's my best buddy.

Like I said, I think I hate my dog. And I wish I was him.

Stella Holling is after me. I am hiding behind a tree – a very large gum tree over near the bubblers on the top oval. I am scared. Stella Holling is on the other side of the tree, and six or seven kids are watching us. Every now and then she makes a break and tries to catch me, and if she catches me she will kiss me, and I do not want that to happen.

Not again.

Stella Holling has been in love with me since second grade. I'm not saying that to brag. (Believe me, nobody would brag about that.) It's just a fact. Ask anyone. Back in Mrs
Freedman's second-grade class I bent over to pick up a red pencil, and she kissed me on the cheek. Stella Holling, not Mrs Freedman.

Weird
, I thought.
Let's hope that doesn't happen again.

But it did.

Many, MANY times.

And now I'm on the run. Stella has just eaten a packet of strawberry jelly crystals. Dry. Out of the box. That makes it even worse. A thousand times worse. Stella goes cuckoo when she eats sugar.

‘Get him, Stella!' a couple of girls from my class call out, giggling like chickens a few metres away. Stella dashes around the tree, catches me off guard and grabs the back of my shirt. I panic and run, only just managing to escape. She chases me around the tree twelve times before she stops to catch her breath, and so do I, in the same places we started. She really means business today – she usually gives
up after ten minutes. She has been chasing me all recess. I think she's been training for this.

‘Pssst!'

I turn. Stella is leaning around the tree, where the kids watching us can't see. Her eyes are spinning from the jelly crystals and she is dripping with sweat. She speaks in a sharp, dangerous whisper. ‘Either you kiss me on the lips now, Tom Weekly, or I want you to pay back every cent of the money you've borrowed from me.'

This sometimes happens when the sugar starts to wear off. Stella turns mean and tells me she hates me. I can't remember how much money she has given me. She has always offered it so freely. Whenever I'm hanging around the canteen looking hungry, which is a lot, she gives me her spare change to buy chips or an iceblock. I thought she was just being kind. What a fool. What a stupid, blind fool I have been.

‘You owe me seven dollars thirty-five, in case you're wondering,' she whispers fiercely, then she runs at me, but I make it around the tree.

‘Kiss him, Stella!' Jack calls out from the crowd of onlookers. That's what best friends are for, right?

‘I can't kiss you,' I say in a low voice. ‘You
know that I like Sasha. And you gave me that money. You never said you wanted it back.'

‘Sasha Schmasha,' she says. ‘And I do want the money back. I'll tell Mum you
stole
the money from me. Bullied me. It's your word against mine.'

Stella's mum works in the school office and is pretty pally with the principal.

‘You wouldn't do that,' I say.

She gives me her ‘just try me' look.

This is bad. Stella is a dangerous person. Mad, bad and dangerous. How can she twist things like this?

Seven dollars thirty-five.

I try to remember how much I have at home, how much I have stashed in the hole at the base of the tree near the post office. But who am I kidding? I'd be lucky to have two dollars all-up.

‘Made up your mind yet, you little baby?' she whispers.

‘I'm thinking,' I say.

One little kiss. That's all it is. And the debt will be paid. Seven dollars thirty-five for one second's work. When I leave school and get a job, if someone offers me seven dollars thirty-five a second that will be, like … four hundred and forty-one dollars a minute or twenty-six thousand four hundred and sixty dollars an hour. That's over a million bucks a week.

One kiss and I'll be a millionaire! Sort of.

So I do it.

I hold up my hands in surrender, walk around the tree and stand next to Stella, who is grinning her head off.

‘Whoo-hoo!' a few of the girls cheer. Jack claps. They watch on, excited, knowing what's coming.

Stella turns to me. She closes her eyes and smooshes out her lips. They look like a dangerous sea creature – something a small fish might find on a coral reef and think is
safe but then –
ssssssslp!
– gone. Never seen again. I wish I was kissing a crocodile. Or Ms Trunchbull from
Matilda
. Or Jabba the Hutt. Someone or something less scary than Stella Holling.

The kids are chanting: ‘Go! Go! Go! Go!'

I have to get this over with. It's not like she hasn't kissed me a thousand times before. I lean forward. She leans forward. I can feel jets of air spewing from her nose. I can see her freckles in close-up. I can feel the warmth of her face. Our lips are almost touching. I can still back out. I can still run. I can …

But I don't.

I kiss her.

On the lips.

Stella Holling.

The kids go dead quiet.

The world stops spinning.

It's like we have fallen through a wormhole in space, where a second does not feel like a second. It feels like a week, a month, a year. Suddenly I am being paid 0.0000000000000003 cents an hour, rather than twenty-six thousand four hundred and sixty dollars. This is sweatshop labour. The United Nations should step in to stop this kiss. Nobody in the history of time has ever worked this hard for seven dollars and thirty-five cents. It is the longest and worst second of my life.

In my mind there is an explosion of colour, like fireworks, and then a rapid-fire series of pictures: Stella and me cutting a wedding
cake, Stella and me standing next to a ‘For Sale' sign with a ‘SOLD' sticker across it, Stella and me with two freaky-looking kids, Stella and me in a nursing home with sloppy food dripping down our chins. A twisted version of everything I have ever dreamed of for Sasha and me is happening with Stella instead. This kiss is rewriting my future. I can't handle it anymore, and I feel myself travelling backwards through the rainbow-coloured wormhole and then …
Pop!

I leap away from Stella and wipe my mouth.

I feel older. Not like a teenager, but like I am eighty, like my entire life has been wasted on that kiss.

There is cheering. Lots of it. The girls and Jack point and laugh, but the cheering is much louder than that. I look over past the bubblers towards the school fence and I see them – about fifty boys from the high school across the street are lined up along the fence in their green-and-grey uniforms, clapping and whistling and shouting things that I probably shouldn't repeat. They have seen it all.

A voice rings out across the playground from the speakers attached to the side of the main building: ‘Thomas Weekly and Stella Holling, report to the office immediately!' It's the principal's voice. ‘Thomas Weekly and Stella Holling. There will be no kissing in the playground. I repeat, students are not permitted to kiss one another in the playground. Report to the office.'

The high-school boys go wild, and every kid in our playground who didn't see the kiss now starts howling and hooting.

I look to Stella, expecting her to be looking at me all misty-eyed after kissing the boy of her dreams. But, instead, she wipes her lips and scrapes at her jelly-crystal-stained tongue and says, ‘That kiss was disgusting!'

Right in front of everybody.

The girls stop laughing and just kind of stare at me with pity. Maddie and Jessica put their arms around Stella and lead her to the bubblers, where she rinses her mouth, as though
I
am the crocodile or Trunchbull or Jabba the Hutt.

And you know what the worst part is? Sasha is standing there looking at me and shaking her head. It is worse than the fifty high-school boys, worse than the principal's office.

‘It didn't mean anything!' I say, but she
turns sharply and walks away.

‘That was bad,' Jack says, coming up beside me. ‘Stella burnt you so bad.'

‘I know but –'

‘You should move away.'

‘Huh?'

‘If you ever want to have a girlfriend, you should move away to, like, Venezuela or somewhere.'

‘Where's Venezuela?' I ask.

‘I don't know, but you should go there because no girl is ever going to forget that kiss.'

‘But I …'

‘Seriously, dude. Venezuela,' he says.

At lunchtime I'm all alone and I walk past the canteen. I never want to eat another packet of chips or another iceblock as long as I live. Those things only lead to having to kiss girls,
and kissing girls only leads to trouble.

Stella Holling is standing in line. I look away, walking faster, trying to escape before she sees me.

‘Tom!' she calls.

I glance back. I can't help it. She waves me towards her. I want to ignore her, but I feel bad about everything so I slink over.

‘Sorry,' she says. ‘It was the strawberry jelly crystals. They kind of make me –'

‘I know,' I say. ‘You really should stick to blueberry.'

We stand there for an awkward moment.

‘Do you want some money for an iceblock?' she asks.

I look her in the eye. ‘You're kidding, right?'

Stella shakes her head.

‘You're the weirdest person I have ever met,' I say.

‘I know.' She holds out seventy cents.

‘I'm not kissing you again,' I say.

‘As if I'd want you to,' she says.

Stella makes it to the front of the line and buys me an iceblock. She knows my flavour. I know I shouldn't eat it but it's lemonade, so I take the iceblock and bite into it. The cold, lemony goodness slides down my throat and washes away the horrors of the day. I feel better, and maybe I won't have to move away to Venezuela after all.

‘You know what?' Stella says as we shuffle away from the canteen.

‘What?'

‘I was only kidding before.' And she gives me this weird look. ‘The kiss wasn't really disgusting …'

Then she makes a face that scares me slightly. It's a look I've seen before, like a dangerous sea creature a small fish might find on a coral reef.