Freddy Tangles

by Jack Brand

  So anyway, she chucked a massive spasm trying to get the cockroach out of her hair.

  I got into trouble for that but it was nothing compared to what happened at school.

  In class, the teacher gave Scarlett Magnusson the job of calling the roll. Mr Brody hardly ever lets students do it, but he was busy so he gave it to Scarlett.

  She was reading out our full names for fun…

  Phillip Stephen Nguyen … Here!

  Grace Seeyan Park … Here!

  Robert Gregory Pickleberry … Here!

  People were laughing a bit at everyone’s middle names and I knew that my name was next. I was a bit embarrassed because my full name is stupid, but Scarlett didn’t read it out.

  She just started laughing and said, ‘Like, oh my god. That’s so funny.’

  Mr Brody said, ‘Come on Scarlett, just finish the attendance, please.’

  But she didn’t. She picked up a black marker from Mr Brody’s table, went to the whiteboard and said, ‘I have got to show you this.’

  And she wrote my whole name out on the board.

  She wrote ‘Frederick Augustus Reginald Tangles’.

  Only she wrote it like this…

  Everyone started laughing because there on the board was the word FART.

  Scarlett called out, ‘FARTBOY!

  Is FARTBOY here?’

  I didn’t answer because that wasn’t my name. Some of the kids started pointing at me going, ‘Yeah, there he is, there’s FARTBOY!’

  Mr Brody grabbed the whiteboard eraser and wiped at my name on the whiteboard but it wouldn’t come off. He said, ‘Oh Scarlett, you used the permanent marker. Oh well, we’ll get that off at recess.’

  RECESS!

  Before recess at least five other kids came into our class to deliver messages and they all laughed at the board. We also have a window on one side of our classroom that looks out onto a hall where kids walk past all the time. Word must have spread because heaps of kids came to the window to have a look.

  By the time it was recess, the whole school was calling me FARTBOY.

  And it’s not that I don’t like the word fart. It’s a great word, one of my favourites for sure. Like, all I have to do is say fart or say, ‘Uh-oh, I just farted,’ and everyone laughs. Or if I change the words of a song, like if the words were ‘Ooh yeah, I love you with all my heart’, I can sing, ‘Ooh yeah, I love you with all my fart’, or ‘I love to fart with all my heart’, or ‘I fart you with all my fart’ and everyone laughs.

  Fart was a great word because it made me funny, but now … now everyone was laughing at fart but the fart was me!

  AND I MEAN EVERYONE!

  It was nonstop. Everywhere I looked there was someone saying something about me being Fartboy.

  So I stood near the teacher in the playground to stop everyone saying things, but Kathy Siddle still came up and said, right in front of the teacher, ‘Hi, smelly Fartboy.’

  The teacher raised her eyebrows at Kathy and said, ‘That’s not very nice, Kathy.’

  And was I relieved, like, at last some help.

  Then Kathy said, ‘But his name is Frederick Augustus Reginald Tangles, and if you take the first letter of each name it spells FART.’

  The teacher thought about that and said, ‘Oh, so it does! F-A-R-T, fart, very good.’

  GOOD?

  And off walked the teacher as if everything was okay.

  So I’m left standing there next to Tabby, who says, ‘What would you rather be, a Fartboy or a Burpgirl?’

  Everyone said Burpgirl, even the boys.

  So there I was, one Fartboy in a school full of Burpgirls. The were saying that burps don’t smell so they would rather be a burp than a fart and I agreed, saying, ‘I’m a Burpgirl too then,’ but they wouldn’t let me.

  Mr Brody did manage to clean the whiteboard at last, but it was too late.

  At lunch I was getting teased all the time. I asked Blocker what I should do and he said, ‘In Russia they say: you cannot stop the river, it will flow as it chooses.’

  I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Like, what river?

  Blocker explained, ‘The flow of the river is the teasing words. You can’t stop a river flowing, can you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Well, the teasing is the river.’

  Whatever. At least Block stuck by me, even after someone said to him, ‘You must like the smell of farts to sit next to him.’ (This was actually almost true, because Blocker once told me that he liked the smell of his own farts.)

  But that wasn’t the point. The point was that I didn’t smell like farts!

  The whole thing was so stupid … as stupid as my name!

  When I got home I told Mum everything. I finished by saying, ‘And it’s all your fault!’

  I told her that I wanted my name changed immediately and that she had to come up to the school tomorrow and announce at assembly that she made a mistake with my name and it was fixed now so they should stop calling me Fartboy.

  Mum didn’t seem to think that was a good idea, even after Jessica came in and said, ‘Hello Fartboy, how are your farts today?’

  I said to Mum, ‘You can tell them my new name is Simon, okay? Like, Simon Matthew Augustus Reginald Tangles so that way I’m SMART.’

  Mum said she didn’t like the name Simon and that I was being silly. So I went and found the dictionary because the dictionary is never silly, and I looked up the word fart.

  It said a fart was a release of intestinal gases through the anus, usually with an accompanying sound.

  That didn’t sound very silly to me. That sounded serious! Mum just laughed, saying how she always found farts funny and not very serious at all.

  Fine then. I called her a fart. I called her Fartmum.

  ‘How do you like that?’

  It only made her laugh even more.

  It was so frustrating!

  Mums don’t understand anything!

  So I went to the park.

  Blocker, Tabby, Cooper and Scabs were already there. None of them mentioned anything about me being Fartboy at school. They were all feeling sorry for me.

  I said to them all, ‘Look on the bright side, at least my day can’t get any worse.’

  Just as I said it, Sid Malone and his gang rode into the park and came straight for us.

  I never should have said it.

  Suddenly being called Fartboy didn’t matter at all. Who cared? Call me Fartboy all day long and I’ll say yeah hi I’m Fartboy … anything! If only Sid Malone wasn’t

  riding straight for me. But he was, and the last thing he said to me before this was, ‘I’ll get you later, Freddy dead-ee.’

  We all looked at each other not knowing what to do.

  Sid stopped right next to me and said, ‘Whatta we got here then?’

  None of us knew what to say, so we didn’t say anything.

  Sid pointed at Scabs’s head where it was shaved and had stitches. He laughed really loud.

  ‘HA! Good haircut!’

  Tabby was about to do something stupid, like call Sid a name. I could tell because her lips had gone all tight, and she always did that when she was about to yell something. So I elbowed her and said to Sid, ‘He’s got stitches in his head from where a tree fell on him.’

  ‘So?’ Sid shot back. ‘I’ve had stitches in me head too, hundreds of times, and it wasn’t no stupid tree that did it. It was in a fight!’

  We all looked at each other again.

  Just saying the word fight seemed to make a fight really close to happening, and then it was like for sure when Sid’s gang started whacking their fists into their hands.

  Sid shoved me hard and barked,

  ‘You got any money?’

  I shook my head.

  It wasn’t the only part of me that was shaking, either. I was shaking so much that if coins were in my pocket, they would have rattled.

  I looked across at my friends. They were in trouble too, exc
ept Tabby.

  She was shouting at the gang guy near her, saying how she had four older brothers and if he touched her then he would get it and here, she had forty cents and he could have it because he looked like a homeless person who needed it!

  She was amazing. The rest of us were stuck, though, and I saw only one chance.

  I had to unleash my power…

  If ever my laser-beam eyes were going to work, it had to be right now…

  I latched my stare onto Sid and stared so hard that my eyeballs actually started to hurt.

  Sid picked me up by the front of my shirt.

  ‘What are you lookin’ at?’

  That only worked to my advantage, because now my eyes were really close to his.

  ‘STOP STARING LIKE THAT OR I’LL MAKE YOU STOP!’

  I kept staring. Now was the time, with all hope lost and the hero about to get smashed … this was the moment when my eyes would blast out laser beams!

  I refused to even blink.

  My eyes were watering bad, but I still didn’t blink or look away because this WOULD WORK…

  And I would save everyone!

  Only nothing happened.

  No way could laser beams work through all the water that was pouring out of my eyes.

  I started blinking.

  Before I knew it I was talking. I blurted out, ‘Everyone at school called me Fartboy today.’

  I don’t know why I said it. I just had to say something, do something.

  Sid put me down and said, ‘Is that why you’re crying, cry baby?’

  His face was staring down at me and it was like the whole sky was filled with this fiery freckled snarling planet with big ears sticking straight out.

  ‘I’m not crying,’ I said. ‘Just, just got something in my eye.’

  ‘It’ll be my fist in a minute,’ Sid laughed. If only I could run away. It was my only hope.

  The problem was, even if I could have shaken free from Sid, my legs were too jelly to do anything.

  Then he said, ‘Fartboy, eh? Yeah, you do stink.’

  His friends laughed. ‘Yeah, you stink,’ they kept saying.

  At least they were laughing, which was better than punching. I had to keep talking.

  ‘Yeah, this kid at school called me Fartboy, so I clobbered him.’

  ‘Clobbered him, eh?’ Sid liked that kind of talk.

  ‘Yeah,’ I blabbered. ‘Then I bashed all his mates. And then … and then I got in trouble with the principal!’

  My words sounded so stupid to my ears, like the biggest, most obvious lie. I’ve never hit anyone. I wanted to stop talking but the words kept coming out.

  ‘Stupid principal.’

  Sid nodded like he knew a lot about principals.

  ‘So they called you Fartboy, did they?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That school of yours is good at calling people names.’

  That seemed like a weird thing for Sid to say, almost friendly. I asked, ‘What do you mean?’

  For a moment I thought he was going to tell me, but instead he snarled, ‘Nothin’!’

  He pointed at my bike and I couldn’t believe what he said.

  ‘So you want to ride with us, Tangles?’

  Ride? With SID?

  He wanted me to ride in his gang!

  There was no way I wanted to do that. I just wanted to get away, get home.

  I said, ‘Oh yeah, sure, oh but I can’t, Mum won’t let me. I’m late for home already.’

  ‘Your mum!’ laughed Sid. ‘Who cares about your mum?’

  ‘Yeah, not me.’

  ‘Then let’s go. Stuff your mum.’

  ‘Um … okay.’ I couldn’t think of a way out.

  ‘Oi, Malone!’

  A man was standing there with two dogs.

  ‘You leave those kids alone.’

  Sid snarled at him, ‘You can’t tell me what to do, old man.’

  ‘Maybe not, but my dog can.’

  He had two dogs, a big brown muscly one and a little white fluffy one. I think he was talking about the big one because it was growling and you could see its teeth. The little one looked angry too, but more like an angry white tennis ball.

  Sid left, saying all sorts of rude things. I breathed out the longest sigh of relief, and so did Blocker, Cooper and Scabs. Tabby just grumbled about bullies and who did they think they were?

  Scabs said, ‘I think your day’s getting better now, Freddy.’

  ‘Think you’re right, Scabs.’

  The dog that had saved my life was now wagging his tail and flopping out a friendly tongue so I put my hand out to pat him, only, I really wish I hadn’t. The little white fluffball next to him jumped up and chomped onto my finger.

  I couldn’t believe it!

  It bit down on my finger really hard. I tried to flick it off but it wouldn’t let go.

  I freaked. It was hanging onto my finger and I could feel its teeth digging in even deeper. I thought it might even bite my finger off!

  I started spinning.

  I thought it might fly off but no, it just used my spinning like I was some crazy carnival ride for fluffy white dogs!

  The man who owned the dog caught it as it flew past and tried to pull it off my finger.

  But the little furball wouldn’t let go until the man like, pulled open its jaws. Then he blamed me for upsetting his dog!

  No way was my day getting any better!

  Of course Tabby had to ask, ‘What would you rather be, a person bitten on the finger by a tiny dog, or a tiny dog stuck way up in the air like dangling over a cliff and only hanging on by your teeth?’

  Even though no one said anything, it was obvious everyone was feeling more sorry for the dog than for me.

  On the way home I asked Tabby how she managed to make the gang guy stay away from her.

  ‘Oh, that. I have four older brothers, so I know how to stop them. I find their weakness and attack it. I know all my brothers’ weaknesses, so they’re all afraid of me.’

  That was exactly what my sister was doing to me with my deep sleeping!

  ‘And what was that gang guy’s weakness?’

  ‘Easy. He’s a coward. That’s why he’s in a gang. So I threatened him with my older brothers.’

  When I got home I showed Mum my finger and she freaked.

  I don’t get it! She thought it was funny that I was called Fartboy by the entire school but then she freaks over a tiny dog bite. How does that work?

  Mum said I might have to get a needle for the bite. A needle? A NEEDLE! No way was my day getting any better! She said I would have to go to the doctor tomorrow as it was too late today and that meant I couldn’t go to school.

  Hmmmm … no school.

  A needle or school?

  If Tabby had given me that choice, normally the answer would have been school. Who wants a needle? But that wasn’t the real question.

  The real question was: a needle or getting called Fartboy? Maybe a needle wasn’t so bad.

  So at last, that was the end of my worst day ever.

  The problem was, all the badness from my worst day ever overflowed into the next day.

  Starting with the doctor!

  Doctors are scary. Sid is scary too but different scary. I think the main difference is that doctors smile before they hurt you, while Sid smiles after he hurts you.

  But at least doctors never tell lies. When they tell you this needle won’t hurt a bit, it’s true; it hurts a lot!

  And that’s not all they do. Once I had a splinter in my foot that was so big it nearly didn’t fit in the car. It hurt so much that if someone even looked at the splinter it hurt even more!

  So Mum took me straight to Doctor Malvoy who looked at my foot and smiled, so I knew what that meant, only he didn’t just look at my foot to make it hurt more, he gave it a squeeze.

  A SQUEEZE!

  Sid could never have hurt me as much as that squeeze did.

  So I showed Doctor Malvoy my dog-
bitten finger and he smiled … before giving my finger a squeeze.

  WHY DOES HE ALWAYS SQUEEZE?

  At least this time it didn’t hurt so much as it was just a little dog bite so I was lucky. But I really think Doctor Malvoy should stop squeezing things.