‘Darrin! You’re hurt!’
‘Get off!’
He hurled her off him and raced into the dining room, dripping blood every where. I was already sitting down at the table, next to the policeman. For safety.
Sis came in after him. ‘Darrin! Are you all right?’
He totally ignored her. ‘I’m gonna get you, Monster!’ he yelled.
The policeman couldn’t speak because his jaws were glued shut with cheese-on-toast. Mum always overdid the cheese. Stone Face said I obviously came from a very violent background.
The policeman finally managed to unstick his teeth. He said he’d take Darrin to get his wrist bandaged. Sis said she’d do it. Darrin said, ‘Like hell.’
Off went the policeman, Stone Face and Darrin. Back up the stairs, waggle waggle, huff puff, hiss, went Sis.
‘I don’t know what you’ve done, Monster, but you’ve upset your sister terribly,’ said Mum. My mouth hung open. Another injustice. I couldn’t believe it. I shoved a whole slice of cheese-on-toast in. What else could I do?
Mum, Dad, the vet and I were chewing away in silence one moment. The next moment was filled with a long, high miaaaaaaauw!
The vet and I had to fight to the death for possession of Pus. The vet was winning. He reckoned I was a cruel, violent boy, an unsuitable pet owner. He reckoned he knew hundreds of lovely homes Pus would love.
I didn’t have any arguments. I just kept saying, over and over, ‘He’s mine!’
Then the most amazing thing happened that has ever happened since the big bang at the beginning of the universe. My sis came out of her bedroom, down the stairs into the dining room, and said, ‘If you don’t let Monster have the kitten, I will personally throw myself out my bedroom window.’
Everyone was stunned, especially Mum and Dad. ‘Yes, dear. Certainly, dear,’ said Mum.
I grabbed Pus. Then Sis burst into tears and ran back upstairs. Mum ran after her. I guess she was checking the window latch was locked.
The vet said we were an impossible family, a most undesirable environment for a growing kitten. He left.
Dad said Pus would have to live in the garage, never, ever in the house. That was fine with me. I’d been thinking of moving into the garage for some time.
After I’d finished all the cheese-on-toast I went upstairs to thank Sis.
‘Slave!’ she bellowed. ‘I’m sending you on a quest.’
She hadn’t forgotten I was her slave until Friday. It was still only Monday.
‘What quest?’
‘Repeat after me. I. Will. Get. The. Letter. If you don’t repeat it now I will make sure the kitten is mine forever, and you’ll be at Aunt Mildew’s!’
‘I will fight dragons and floods to get your letter back for you,’ I said through clenched teeth. If you’re a slave, you might as well suck up to the boss.
Sis was charmed. She said the kitten was now hers. ‘It’s called Fluffy.’
‘Fluffy! That’s a dreck name!’
‘Is not.’
‘Is so. He’s called Pus.’
‘Is not.’
‘Is so!’
What I thought with one tiny bit of my brain was: if I get the letter, I won’t let on. Then she’ll have to go on being nice to me forever and ever in case I find the letter, or until Darrin Egan tells her to get knotted.
What I also thought with another bit of my brain was: how do I go about getting the damn letter? Do I ask B4 for it? Would he give it to me?
From another bit of my brain, the special Monster trick-making part, the answer came: of course not, Monster. You’ll have to devise a very clever trick indeed.
7
I got up super-early on Tuesday to play with Pus. He was knee-deep in two of the bowls of his mini-bar, which he shared with the ants and some flies and a cockroach family. He was very bouncy, like a ball.
It was a relaxing time, before my big quest. Today I was in search of the lurve letter.
I walked past the teachers’ car park and watched Stone Face arrive in a taxi. I saw B4 in the canteen at playtime, stuffing himself with pies. Then I tracked him across the playground and into the little kids’ cloakroom. I watched him nick three lunches, but I couldn’t do anything about it. If I told on him, no one would believe me.
When he came out of the cloakroom he hid behind the trees at the bottom of the field, where no one’s meant to go. He gulped down the yoghurts and bananas and only stopped when a buzzy blowfly arrived to share the lunch with him. He hurled the food down and ran. B4 doesn’t like insects. Must remember that. It could be useful.
At lunchtime B4 was standing on a rubbish bin peering through the louvres of the girls’ toilets. I was leaning against the wall of the girls’ toilets, looking around at B4, when my arm was grabbed by someone and pulled nearly out of its socket. The someone turned out to be the dreaded Darrin Egan. I whimpered for mercy. He marched me off to the duty teacher and told him he’d caught me spying on the girls!
‘I will phone your parents,’ the duty teacher said. ‘You need counselling if you’re spying on the girls in the toilet.’ Great. The school thinks I’m a pervert now.
I spent the rest of lunchtime picking up rubbish off the field, which included all the mess B4 had made with his stolen lunches. Fair? I don’t think so.
All afternoon we had boring science. For homework we had to do a probabilities study. Everyone had to roll dice and keep records of how often the six came up. Pointless, because we don’t even have a casino in our town. I’d think up something much more useful.
After school I tracked B4 to his home. He lived in a smart place with an ultra-neat front lawn. The lawn gave me an idea for a little trick that’d put him in his place and show him just who he was up against.
I didn’t find the letter. It wasn’t lying spread out in the middle of the lawn. I couldn’t break into his house. That’d be too risky. What was I meant to do?
Back home I checked the mailbox first. An envelope with bad handwriting on it. To Sis. It was from either Egan or B4. I put it in my pocket. Why would either of them write a letter when they could text her? It didn’t make sense.
I played a game with Pus, then I took him into the kitchen for a change of scene. Mum and Dad were at work so it was safe. Pus was fully recovered from whatever horrible thing B4 had done to him. When I held him in my hand he scrambled up my T-shirt onto my head. I had scratches all up my neck which went well with my striped suntan.
I did my probabilities homework. First I toasted a whole loaf of bread. Then I mega-buttered each slice. I added honey to some. I ate some. Then I dropped the rest, one at a time, onto the floor while I stood on the bench. Ninety per cent landed buttered side down, which is what I expected. Then I held Pus a metre or so off the ground and dropped him. He landed on his feet. I’d expected that, too. I wrote down: ‘Cat landed on feet when dropped on floor—100%’.
Then I did the clever and amazing thing that meant one day I will be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. I tied a piece of buttered toast around Pus, with the buttered side upwards on his back. I dropped this package to the floor and discovered it landed buttered side up 100% of the time.
I had discovered a way of making sure buttered toast landed butter-side up when you dropped it.
I let Pus race around the kitchen while I wrote my homework out neatly on a piece of paper that was somehow covered with butter grease.
‘Hey, why’s Fluffy—’ Sis ran into the kitchen, slipped on butter that was somehow on the floor and crash-landed into the cupboards. She opened her eyes and mouth, and was going to scream at me. I whipped the letter out of my pocket and put it on the bench.
‘Letter for you.’
She tried to scramble up, but the floor was like an ice rink. Pus was skidding around on it, too, and they looked like an ice skating couple having an argument. I got a tea towel to wipe the butter off the floor. Sis grabbed it, stood on it and hauled herself up. All the front of the cupboard was buttery now, too.
‘It’s B4,’ she said, reading the letter. ‘He wants me to go to the mall with him tomorrow afternoon. Or else he’s going to scan that letter and put it on the school’s server! Nooooo!’
She told me, between blubbers, that someone had written bits of the letter on the whiteboard in her classroom before school today. She reckoned Darrin saw it. Sis reckoned she could never, ever in a million years go back to school.
I wasn’t having that bit in the letter about the belch written on a classroom’s whiteboard.
I had to get that letter. But how?
When Mum arrived home she slid across the floor quite gracefully, then had a total spaz about the butter. I’d put Pus back in the garage by then. He went to sleep sucking butter off his front paw. It was cute as.
When I got back inside Sis was in her room composing a note in reply to B4’s. She’d decided she’d have to go to the mall with him if I hadn’t got the letter back by then. I thought and thought. An idea was trying to get out. It was stuck in the folds of my brain. It—
At last! A trick with a bit of style!
I set my alarm for midnight.
8
At twenty past midnight on Wednesday morning I was standing by B4’s neat-as-a-fitted-sheet front lawn. I was wearing my usual clothes plus a pair of Mum’s black tights over my head. I’d cut a large hole for my nose so I guess I looked like a tall, dark bird with a white beak. I could see the article in the newspaper:
Mr C. Heaps saw an ostrich in Greenwood Place with a can of heavy duty oven cleaner under its wing. Mr C. Heaps said he hadn’t been drinking and was wide awake at the time. The Forest and Bird Society says they are very excited because the Oven Cleaning Ostrich Bird was thought to be extinct.
I planned to burn a sign into B4’s front lawn in the deadliest oven-cleaner spray Mum had in her cupboards. But I didn’t. I was just aiming the spray when a cop car cruised around the corner. I ran down between two houses and into the woods at the back. I sat there for ages. Then I heard footsteps. I pulled the tights down so they covered my glaring white nose. I tried to look like a bush with a pair of tights on it. I tried so hard to look like a bush I nearly sprouted leaves out my ears. Someone crept past me. The moonlight slanted onto the someone’s head and nose. I was expecting a policeman. It wasn’t a policeman. It was B4.
That was bad enough. The shock was that he had something that looked like an air gun with him! Was he on his way to blow Sis to bits? I noticed he dodged the moths and got all squirmy if one fluttered into his face. He sure hates insects, I thought.
I waited until he was out of sight then I ran for home, a quick way only I knew. I ran as fast as you can when you’ve got two tights legs hanging down your back that keep getting caught in bushes.
There was no weeping Sis, no screaming Mum. I was in time. As we have a two-storey house B4 couldn’t get in the bedroom windows from the outside. I know. I’ve tried it oodles of times. He would have to come up the stairs. I got a cardboard box, sat in it outside Sis’s door, and wrapped myself in my duvet.
I was on guard, waiting for B4 and the air gun. I figured I could be a human shield. The cardboard and duvet would take most of the pellets. I had the oven cleaner in my hand, to be used only in dire emergency like being shot at. I felt more wide awake than I’d ever felt in my whole life.
Next thing I knew it was morning. I was being woken by Dad who came rushing out of the bathroom, yelling and screaming and foaming at the mouth.
‘Monster!’
Dad had looked out the bathroom window and nearly cut his throat on his razor from the shock. His pride-and-joy lawn was ruined. Someone had sprayed weedkiller all over it. Someone always meant me. I slid under the duvet in the box.
‘What does it say?’ I asked from deep under the bedding.
‘You know,’ he shouted. ‘You did it.’
Mum came galloping up the stairs to see Dad foaming at the mouth. She stopped and stared at me.
‘What are you sleeping there for? Oh, what is the matter with you, Monster?’ She sounded worried.
I stood up. The oven cleaner rolled onto the floor. Dad swooped down and picked it up. No doubt about it. They knew I was the lawn sprayer.
Then Pus jumped out of the box. ‘Why is that cat inside? Get rid of it!’
‘But—’
‘Get rid of it!’
I took Pus down to the garage. B4’s tagging on the lawn was just a mess. No style. No message. He’d just gone ballistic with the weedkiller.
My punishments started. ‘Monster, take the rubbish out! And clean out the rubbish bin! There are flies all around it. And bring the newspaper in!’ Mum yelled at me from the front step.
The newspaper headline said Victim of Vandal’s Shooting Spree. There was a picture of a dead cat that had air gun pellets in it. The owner, a Mr Egan, said someone was a sicko out there. The Egans’ cat! I felt real ill. But I also felt real angry. I grabbed the phone from Dad who was in the middle of a dial. I dialled the vet. I told him I knew who did that to that cat. And I knew why.
He said I had a ‘reputation’ and he didn’t believe anything I said. I phoned the cop. He didn’t believe me either. I ran upstairs and told Sis. She believed me, but a fat lot of use that did. She’d been sulking in her room since B4 took the letter. She wasn’t going to defend me. I was totally alone in the world. And that creep, that psycho B4, was roaming around killing innocent cats!
I ran downstairs. Dad was on the phone, demanding an urgent appointment with a psychologist. ‘Or else,’ he said, ‘or else he’ll have to go away.’
‘To Aunt Mildred’s,’ said Mum.
‘Much worse than Aunt Mildred’s,’ thundered Dad.
9
It was still only Wednesday. I staggered to school, so tired there were black dots in front of my eyes. Could I be the first person in the known universe to see black holes? I guess so. We had school assembly where the principal announced a thief was stealing lunches. And someone—the principal stared at me—had ruined a teacher’s car. If anyone had any information about either of the crimes they must tell the principal as soon as assembly was over.
I watched B4 sidling down the corridor to the principal’s office so I whizzed around and stood under her open window. Summer is excellent for eavesdropping. B4 told her I was the lunch stealer and that I also painted Stone Face’s car.
Thanks a zillion, B4, you skunkhead.
In the playground on the way to maths I met Darrin. Before he beat me up I thought I’d tell him Sis was at home, locked in her bedroom, pining away for him. He ignored me. In fact he went out of his way to cut me dead.
Thanks a zillion, Darrin Egan, you loser.
I was summoned to the principal’s office after playtime.
‘You seem to have gone off the rails,’ she said mildly, flicking a fly away as she spoke. She sounded bored and totally unimpressed. She phoned Mum. Mum sounded unbored and so impressed by the thought of a major meeting at the school the next day, she was wailing down the phone. The principal explained, in her bored way, that the school counsellor would be present, my teacher, and probably other experts, ‘in view of the gravity of the situation’.
Sis didn’t go to school. But she had to go to the mall with B4. She had no alternative. He was going to pick her up at home. She blubbered all this to me. No way was he setting one sicko foot in my house! I made Sis wait for him in the garage. When he went in there I noticed he shivered when he saw the spiders, ants and midges. He told Sis he’d give her the letter back when they were in the mall.
I might be Monster the trickster, but I couldn’t let my Sis go off to the mall with the worst bully in the world without shadowing them, could I? I had to be there if Sis needed me.
I jumped on my bike and whizzed down to the mall and waited.
When they arrived, B4 marched Sis up the long ramp from the car park, past people taking their trolleys down to their cars. At the top of the ramp was a palm tree with seats around it. They sat down
there and waited. He didn’t talk to her. Nothing. I hid halfway up the ramp in a little alcove shoppers could pull into, to let faster ones overtake.
I was so busy staring up at Sis, making sure B4 didn’t get up to anything gross, I didn’t notice a kid striding up the ramp, past me and then past them. Well, I did notice, but only when it was too late. It was Darrin Egan. He must have thought I was a pervert, spying on my sister. I realized B4 had planned the whole thing just so Darrin would see him and Sis together, and think Sis was going out with him. When Egan had gone, B4 got up, laughing. He didn’t give Sis the letter. He started running down the ramp.
Oh, no, you don’t, B4! I can get you this time!
My trickster mind acted at car-chase speed. I grabbed some dishwashing liquid out of the trolley of a woman who was walking past. From my alcove I squirted it onto the ramp just before B4 rushed past. One of his feet hit the dishwashing liquid at speed then accelerated to hyper-drive and shot out in front of him so fast he almost split in half.
Then his back foot hit the liquid and shot out in front at full rocket-thrust speed. His back arched. His head waggled back and forward. He hit the anti-slip rough strip and shot into the air. Up, up, and then boom! He crashed into a pile of empty boxes at the bottom of the ramp.
Yeah! Gotcha!
I looked back and there was B4, sitting on his bum, his back to the wall, his legs stuck out in front of him, and a cardboard box over his head. I cheered.
I grabbed a newspaper from the woman’s trolley, slapped it down on the dishwashing liquid, then raced up the ramp.
‘Sis! Your slave. At your service.’
I yanked her up and dragged her into the ice-cream shop. I’d figured she’d be on for treating me to a double-header after that little trick. I was horribly wrong. All she could whinge was, ‘You didn’t get the letter.’
Some people are never satisfied and totally unable to appreciate the skill of a great trick.
That evening Sis’s behaviour was so strange, Mum was real worried. Sis wouldn’t even leave her room to come to dinner. Mum blamed me. She said I must have done something horrific to Sis and that I was a nasty little boy.
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