My Life and Other Stuff I Made Up
Page 8
I close my eyes and wish that everything would stop hovering, that everything would go back to being boring and normal.
I don’t really remember much after that. It feels like I fall into a deep sleep that I might never wake up from.
7 am. My alarm clock goes off. I fling an arm over and knock it off my bedside table.
BANG!
My eyes snap open.
‘Tom, you’ll break that clock one of these days,’ says a muffled voice from the kitchen.
I sit up and look around my room. Why am I in bed? is the first question that enters my mind. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and gently put my feet down. They touch floorboards. I stand and look around at my wardrobe and bookcase, my mouldy sandwich, my three pairs of undies. They’re all sitting on the ground, just like they used to.
Suddenly I get it. I’m dreaming. Otherwise I’d be in my backyard with a thousand broken bones. And all the furniture in my room could not crash from the ceiling to the floor in the night without getting broken and without even waking me. No way. I’m dreaming. But I don’t want to wake up. I like this. If I wake up now I’ll only be waking into hoverlife, which is a nightmare. So I pretend not to know that it’s a dream.
I walk slowly, carefully, over to the window. I get ready to pull the blind, frightened of what I’ll see.
‘One …’ I whisper to myself. ‘Two …’ I take a deep breath. ‘Three.’ I pull the long white cord, revealing the world outside.
Green grass. Our street. Birds tweeting. My regular junk on the lawn. Nothing is a mess. The cars aren’t smashed to pieces. Everything is perfect.
I run to my bedroom door.
‘Mum!’
I swing the door open. The smell of coffee and toast. I walk into the lounge room. The couch isn’t hovering. Neither is the coffee table, lamp or rug.
Mum is in the kitchen buttering toast. Regular toast. Not hovertoast.
‘Why’s everything down?’ I ask.
‘Huh?’ she says, putting the butter in the fridge and crossing back to the bench.
‘Why isn’t everything hovering?’
Mum turns and looks at me, blank-faced. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about Tom, and I’m late. What do you want, Vegemite or honey?’ she says.
‘Um … honey,’ I say. I can’t believe this. She honestly seems to not know what I’m talking about.
I go out the back to look around. Everything looks like it always does. Everything looks … kind of dull.
But then I see something. Bando is up in the corner of the yard near the passionfruit vine, doing what he does every morning, like clockwork. When he finishes, he turns quickly and looks at what he’s done. He growls at it.
Then he backs up and runs into the house, top speed.
And that’s how I know that it happened.
Bando knows.
Everything hovered. Just for one day. It really did.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Paul Jennings for writing the wonderful short stories that I grew up on.
Thanks to Edensor Park Public School. kids for brainstorming Tough Nana ideas with me at BookFeast 2010. And to the students at Wallacia, Mulgoa, Glenmore Park, Regentville, Surveyors Creek, Nicholson Street, Lightning Ridge, Collinsville, Scottville and St John Bosco schools for brainstorming NanFight and Hover Everything ideas with me. Cheers to the Byron Young Writers’ Boot Camp, too. Thanks to Finnian O’Connor for his annoying ideas. I had fascinating Hover Science discussions with Mike Mansted, Shave, Charlton Hill, Michael Pryor and Dr Karl. Thanks to Sophie Hamley, Zoe Walton and Brandon VanOver for being my teachers and for encouraging my creative endeavours, no matter how weird or gross they may be. Cheers to Gusto Gordon for making Tom complete. Thanks to Amb, Hux and Luca for being funny, imaginative and keeping me on my toes. But, mostly, thanks to Joey ‘Jaws’ Chestnut for eating 68 hot dogs in ten minutes. You’re an inspiration to us all.
About the author
Tristan Bancks is a children’s and teen author with a background in acting and filmmaking. His books include My Life and Other Stuff I Made Up, My Life and Other Stuff that Went Wrong, Two Wolves, Mac Slater Coolhunter, Galactic Adventures: First Kids in Space and the Nit Boy series (about a kid with the worst case of nits in world history). Tristan’s young adult novel it’s yr life was co-written with actress/author Tempany Deckert. His short films as writer/director have won a number of awards and have screened widely in festivals and on TV.
Tristan is excited about the future of storytelling and inspiring others to create. He is currently working on an immersive cross-platform story for kids. Check out Story Scrapbook, his free multimedia story brainstorming app, and chat to Tristan at www.tristanbancks.com
About the illustrator
Gus Gordon is an author and illustrator. He writes books about motorbike-riding stunt chickens, dogs that live in trees and singing on rooftops in New York. Gus lives with his wife and three kids on the northern beaches of Sydney, where he has written and illustrated over 70 books for children, including Herman and Rosie, Wendy and A Day with Noodles. Herman and Rosie was a 2013 CBCA Honour Book.
Gus has visited over 300 schools around Australia and loves speaking to kids about illustration, character design and the desire to control a wiggly line.
Visit Gus at www.gusgordon.com
MY LIFE AND OTHER STUFF THAT WENT WRONG
Is your grandpa super-angry? Has your nan ever tried to climb Mt Everest? Have you started your own playground freak show? And have you ever risked your life to save your pet rat from certaindestruction?
I have. I’m Tom Weekly and this is my life. Inside the covers of this book you’ll read lots of weird-funny-gross stories and learn the secret of my strangest body part. But I guarantee that won’t freak you out as much as the story of how Stella Holling, a girl who’s been in love with me since second grade, tricked me into kissing her.
Available now
MAC SLATER, COOLHUNTER 1: THE RULES OF COOL
Mac’s just crashed the latest prototype of his flying bike in front of practically the whole school. So when the creators of Coolhunters approach him and tell him he’s an Innovator, Mac thinks they’re crazy.
They offer Mac a trial. He’ll vlog all the cool stuff coming out of Kings Bay for a week. If he wins he’ll travel the world, uncovering stuff he loves and reporting it via Coolhunters, a massive online space dedicated to the coolest things on earth.
But hunting cool ain’t easy. Mac’s opponent, Cat DeVrees, wants the gig real bad and she’ll do just about anything to get it.
Mac Slater, Coolhunter 2: I NY is also available now
TWO WOLVES
‘Gripping and unpredictable, with a hero you won’t forget.’ – John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
One afternoon, police officers show up at Ben Silver’s front door. Minutes after they leave, his parents arrive home. Ben and his little sister Olive are bundled into the car and told they’re going on a holiday. But are they?
It doesn’t take long for Ben to realise that his parents are in trouble. Ben’s always dreamt of becoming a detective – his dad even calls him ‘Cop’. Now Ben gathers evidence and tries to uncover what his parents have done.
The problem is, if he figures it out, what does he do? Tell someone? Or keep the secret and live life on the run?
Available now
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Version 2.0
Published by Random House Australia 2011
This edition published in 2014
Text © Tristan Bancks 2011
Illustrations © Gus Gordon 2011
The moral right of the author and the illustrator has been asserted.
A Random House book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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www.randomhouse.com.au
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
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First published by Random House Australia in 2011
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Author: Bancks, Tristan
Title: My life and other stuff I made up/Tristan Bancks;
illustrated by Gus Gordon
Edition: 2nd ed.
ISBN: 9781742744421 (ebook)
Series: My life; 1.
Target audience: Primary school age.
Other authors/contributors: Gordon, Gus
Dewey number: A823.4
Cover and internal illustrations by Gus Gordon
Cover and internal design by Astred Hicks, designcherry
Tristan Bancks is an ambassador for Room to Read.
Find out more at: www.roomtoread.org/australia
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