St Grizzle's School for Girls, Goats and Random Boys

by Karen McCombie

  You know, I think I’d like to.

  Today started on the wobbly side, but it’s got better. After art we had lessons that were almost normal (though back at my old school we weren’t made to do star-jumps between maths and English sessions to “shake free” our energy). Even if Mrs Hedges served lunch and tea with a sour face, the food was pretty yummy. And showing off what I do best (directing my mini-movies) to my new friend Yaz has made me feel less all-alone. So maybe it would be kind of fun to hang out by the campfire, since I’m stuck here for another night at least.

  I’m about to say so when Yaz jumps in.

  “Nope, we’re all right as we are, aren’t we, Dani?” Yaz says confidently.

  “Suit yourself,” Swan says with a couldn’t-care-less shrug.

  As the door thunks closed behind her, I look over the heads of my ex-toys and gaze at the scene on the back lawn down below.

  Zed is being pushed across the grass by blond, tangled-haired Klara, who’s panting and laughingly complaining about how hard it is. That’s cos Blossom is standing barefoot on the armrests of the wheelchair, hands outstretched, yelling “I’m King of the World!” as Zed grips her round the waist to stop her from falling off.

  “Idiots,” says Yaz, coming to gaze out of the window, too.

  “Definitely,” I hear myself agreeing with her.

  But as Klara, Zed and Blossom disappear into the woods, I feel my sunshiny glow fade and long blue shadows sneak back in.

  First lesson on a Wednesday morning, you’d normally find me partnering up with Arch in PE, in the gym that always smells of feet.

  But that was at my old school and nothing is normal at St Grizzle’s.

  This Wednesday, my first class of the morning is a whole school science lesson. There’s classical music playing softly in the background, the Newts have all come in wearing their clothes back to front, a goat is snoring under the teacher’s desk and someone has just snuck up behind me in a wheelchair.

  “Fnnnntttt!”

  Zed’s rubber tyres were completely silent on the lino just now, unlike his snigger.

  “That is SO funny,” he says, grinning at the image on my screen, the one I was just showing Yaz.

  “Shh!” I whisper, checking that our teacher hasn’t heard him. I don’t want to get into trouble for being on my phone. Luckily Miss Amethyst’s too busy trying to get the giggling Newts to settle down, which is a bit like trying to herd skittering kittens.

  So I sneak a look back at my screen again and Zed’s right – it is funny. It’s a selfie of Arch with the title ‘What class is like without you’. It’s a photo of him snoozing at his desk.

  And there’s another funny something on my phone this morning. I missed a call from Granny Viv when I was at breakfast and, listening back to the message, all I could make out was a whole bunch of snuffling and schlurping noises. Then Granny Viv bursts in and says, “That’s just Downboy saying hello!”

  Less funny and more important was the message from Mum, apologizing for the game of Missed-Call Ping-Pong we’ve been playing the last couple of days. Of course I’m still cross with her for sending me here, but it has been nice to hear her voice, and her Penguin conference stories. In today’s message, she said she’s pretty sure she’s got something sorted at last about school and that she can’t wait to tell me about it!

  I showed Yaz the message on the way to class. She reckons Mum and Gran will have made up, and that Gran’s going to come back from Wales, and that I’ll go and live with her – which would be great, even if it does mean sleeping on her tiny two-seater sofa with my knees up to my chin every night. Yaz also reckons that Mum will be here on Saturday morning, as soon as her conference is finished, and that I’ll be packing the ex-toys in the car and waving goodbye to all the girls and goblins of St Grizzle’s – and Zed the random boy, of course.

  In the meantime, I just need to be patient and—

  “Teach!”

  A vision in layers of purple slams her hands down in front of me on the desk.

  I blink up at Miss Amethyst, whose puffs of grey hair are tinged with mauve.

  “Sorry?” I say in my mouse-squeet.

  “As the eldest in the school, I expect the Fungi to help teach the younger children from time to time. It’s a useful Life Skill, you know! So, are you up for it, Dani?”

  “I don’t think I—”

  “Of course you can,” Miss Amethyst says confidently, rolling up the sleeves of her purple cardie. “Here are some fun worksheets on the Food Chain. It’s on the whiteboard, too. Just talk the Newts through it and help them with the questions. Now the rest of us are heading outdoors, for a hands-on biology session!”

  And with that, Miss Amethyst strolls over to the classroom door and holds it open, ushering Swan, Zed, the Conkers and Otters out into the corridor.

  The Newts, who were madly chitter-chattering and scampering around the desks till a second ago, are now staring at me, stock-still.

  “But I don’t know what I’m doing and—”

  “Nonsense, Dani. You’ll rise to the challenge, I’m sure!” booms Miss Amethyst. “Just make sure you put your mobile away first, though, dear.”

  The sight of her raised eyebrows as she exits the room make me blush. So being left with the Newts is really a punishment for being on my phone, isn’t it?

  For a second, the silence presses heavily as I stare at the Newts and the Newts stare at me.

  It’s broken by Blossom.

  “Would you like to see me tap-dance, Dani Dexterer?” she says, and begins tippitty-tappetting noisily and out of time.

  The other Newts start giggling, whooping and clapping along, also out of time.

  Then there’s even MORE tippitty-tappetting as Blossom accidentally dances on to Twinkle’s tail, making her wake up, clatter upright and “MEH!” loudly in annoyance.

  “Stop!” I shout as loudly as I can and hurry over to the front of the room, plonking myself on to Miss Amethyst’s chair. “What I’d like you all to do is sit down.”

  I gaze from the worksheets to the whiteboard – they don’t match up. Help!

  “I said SIT DOWN!” I call out, above all the shrieking and giggling.

  In a panic, I press arrows back and forth on the computer keyboard. Page after colourful page on science topics pops up, but not one of them is about Food Chains. Help, help, HELP!

  “We ARE sitting down!” I hear Blossom say.

  I give a quick glance up from the computer and see … an empty classroom.

  Then the tops of a few heads give the joke away – the Newts are all hunched cross-legged on the floor between the tables.

  This is AWFUL.

  What am I going to do with these daft little girls till Miss Amethyst gets back?

  I didn’t know it was possible to be burning hot and freezing cold at the same time but my insides suddenly feel exactly like boiled ice cream.

  I’d give anything to be hanging out with Arch right now in the whiffy gym instead of being trapped here with Blossom and her gang of goblins…

  Then a memory pings into my head, of me and Arch doing some science project round at his one day. Mucking about online and only half-heartedly doing our research, we found the funniest video. It was called ‘The Periodic Table Song’ and the words were just the names of ALL the gases and chemicals there are, sung over super-fast, old-time waltzy backing music. Ignoring our project, me and Arch spent the whole afternoon bouncing around his bedroom and learning the song – and all one-hundred-and-something elements in the Periodic Table.

  Ka-boom!

  That’s it! With my fingers flying on the computer keyboard, I find what I’m looking for and press the play arrow.

  “THERE’S HYDROGEN AND HELIUM…”

  As soon as the goofy song and video starts up, girls pop up from between the desks like inquisitive little meerkats.

  Yesss!

  I’ve got them.

  For the whole of the video clip, ten heads nod,
ten pairs of eyes sparkle, ten dirty faces beam.

  Watching them, part of me is hopeful that I can turn this gaggle of Newts/goblins/meerkats/whatever into a Chemistry Choir that’ll impress both Miss Amethyst and the rest of the school – all nine of them.

  The other part of me suspects they’ll just blow raspberries and run shrieking and roaring out of the classroom door in their back-to-front outfits, leaving me with:

  a) Twinkle, and

  b) my trainer laces unexpectedly tied together.

  But I have to try, right?

  “OK,” I say, as the song ends. “Are we all ready to sing along?”

  “Yeah!” cry the Newts.

  “Meh!” bleats Twinkle.

  Wish me luck, I think to myself…

  Who knew washing-up is another Life Skill?

  Lulu certainly thinks so, which is why each of the classes at St Grizzle’s take their turn in the kitchen, cleaning the cups and plates, pots and pans after tea. (Yaz also thinks it’s because our head teacher can’t afford to hire any more staff till there are a lot more pupils. Which means it’s never going to happen, obvz.)

  I don’t mind washing-up, though – I do it all the time at home with Mum. We chit-chat while the radio babbles away in the background, and everything’s sparkling and clean before we know it.

  It’s kind of like that this Wednesday evening in the big school kitchen, only instead of Mum, I’m passing warm soapy dishes to Swan. She in turn piles the dried washing-up on to the waiting lap of Zed, who then zooms and puts it all away on shelves and in cupboards.

  “We’d normally have music on,” says Swan, “but that needs repairing…”

  I look over where she’s nodding and see a silver radio on the windowsill. A white lead dangles down … then stops a few centimetres above where a plug must have been.

  I’m about to ask what happened to the missing piece of cable when I glance out of the kitchen window and see the probable culprit.

  In the evening sun-filled garden, I see Yaz sitting at a picnic bench, doing a maths test paper for fun, completely unaware that Twinkle has ambled off with her fluffy pencil case for pudding.

  Anyway, me, Swan and Zed wouldn’t be able to hear much of what was on the radio even if it was working. The Newts are all roosting in the trees outside, dirt-streaked legs dangling from branches as they yell ‘The Periodic Table Song’ over and over and over again.

  (I may regret teaching them that, no matter HOW impressed Miss Amethyst was with the Chemistry Choir.)

  “Right, all done,” says Swan, drying off the last glass and passing it to Zed. “Coming to the campfire tonight, Dani?”

  I HAD planned on doing what I’ve been doing the last couple of evenings – moping, messaging and watching my mini-movies for the twelfty-trillionth time, maybe with Yaz again, if she’s up for it.

  “Please come, Dani!” said Zed, giving me his freckly nosed, pleading-puppy look.

  The thing is, there’s no point in me hanging out with everyone. I can’t go starting to be friends with all these weird people when I’m going to be leaving super-soon, can I?

  But then I look back out into the garden and sigh…

  Out there, everything is bathed in warm orange light, the butterflies are doing a little happy dance from shrub to shrub and wood smoke is curling and swirling above the treetops.

  Gazing at all that I realize the last thing I want is to be cooped up in the dorm again.

  I want to feel cool grass between my toes, have a closer look at the tree house that’s being built and hopefully toast marshmallows by the fire (instead of having them fired AT me).

  It’ll be OK to have a little fun. It doesn’t mean I like it here at St Grizzle’s.

  “Yeah, why not,” I say, pulling the plug out of the sink and letting the soapy water gurgle away.

  “Cool!” says Swan, looking pleasantly surprised. “I’ll just go get my spray paint from the dorm…”

  “She’ll get her what?” I ask Zed, not sure I heard right.

  “Wait and see,” he grins back.

  A fluttery sort of uh-oh rumbles in my tummy…

  The fluttery uh-oh carries right on rumbling.

  Cos I’m seeing all right, and I don’t much like what I’m seeing.

  Swan has climbed up the ladder to the wonky-but-cute, half-built tree house and is shaking a can of black spray paint, about to graffiti school property.

  “You’re not seriously going to do that, are you?” I call up to Swan.

  She turns and possibly grins at me (it’s hard to tell, she’s wearing a white mask over her nose and mouth).

  “Shouldn’t we try to stop her?” I ask Zed, aware that as the oldest in school, we should maybe be setting a good example to the younger ones.

  I glance around at Toshio, too – he’s currently on campfire duty as a ‘responsible’ adult – but all he does is smile and give me a thumbs up, while nodding his head to the music blasting in his headphones.

  Zed’s not any more reassuring. All he does is tap the side of his freckly nose and wobble his eyebrows teasingly.

  I feel my heart pitter-pattering… I know Lulu runs this school a little differently. A little looser. A little arty-fartier. But surely even SHE is bound to be as angry as the most ordinary, old-fashioned head teacher if she sees some ugly TAG spray-painted over something the students have been working on so hard.

  “Please, Swan!” I begin to beg her. “Don’t do—”

  But with a fizz and a hiss she does.

  And what she does is long arcs of black, going this way and that.

  One arc swooping down turns into a body. Two arcs swooping up become wings in flight. With smaller, quicker bursts, a head and beak take shape.

  When she finally finishes and jumps back down to earth to join us, me, Zed and Toshio are transfixed by the sight of the huge and perfect crow, now flying by the side of the crooked tree-house door.

  “How do you do that?” I ask her in awe.

  “Just practise with lots of smaller drawings first,” she says with a pleased smile.

  I think of the colourful birdie flock above her bed and realize Swan must’ve painted those herself. Wow.

  “I’ve got a whole folder of bird drawings under my bunk,” she carries on. “And that’s why it’s good to be able to lock the door to the dorm. It doesn’t just stop the Newts invading; it stops goats from eating your artwork.”

  Then a totally unexpected thing happens – we both snigger at the same time.

  And here’s the MOST unexpected part. With those matching sniggers, it’s like something’s twanged and loosened and relaxed between us. It’s almost – and this is freaky – as if we were friends.

  I glance round to see if Zed’s giggling, too.

  Oh. He’s not. In fact, he looks worried.

  “Er … Swan, are you sure you locked the door to the dorm before you left?” he asks his sister.

  “Course I’m sure I—”

  When Swan stops mid-sentence and looks behind me, I know something has gone wrong. BADLY wrong. NOISILY wrong.

  I turn and see Twinkle – happily crunching on a T rex.

  MY STAR ACTOR, T REX!

  I lunge at Twinkle and she leaps delicately sideways.

  I lunge again and she leaps the other way, with a perky kick of her back legs.

  I lunge one more time and she boings neatly out of my grasp.

  “Please, tell her to ‘heel’!” I shout over at Swan as I chase the goat and the half-chewed dinosaur around the campfire.

  Swan – like Zed and Toshio – is struggling to breathe she’s laughing so hysterically, which means she’s no help at all.

  You know, I have SO had enough of St Grizzle’s School for Girls, Goats and Random Boys.

  GET ME OUT OF HERE!

  Lulu might’ve wished us a “Happy Thursday!” over the tannoy this morning, but the atmosphere in the Fungi dorm was pretty gloomy.

  “Look, I said I was sorry,” Swan an
nounced, standing over my bed, a towel draped over her arm and a toothbrush in her hand.

  But I was too upset to answer her back. Swan didn’t understand – she thought my dinosaur was just a dumb toy, not something precious that reminded me of Arch and home and everything I missed.

  Instead, I rolled over and buried myself under the duvet, so that any more of Swan’s empty words and fed-up-with-me sighs were just muffled nothings.

  But now, an hour later and in Lulu’s office, I heard a different sort of noise.

  *SQUOOOFFFLE-pfffffffffff…*

  The last time I was in a head teacher’s office was at my old school, when Mr Robinson wanted to praise me for my 100 per cent attendance. It felt horribly awkward sitting down on his creaky plastic visitor’s chair.

  But sitting down in Lulu’s office is a whole new level of awkward. I lowered myself into the beanbag as carefully as I could just now, but it still made that embarrassing soft’n’squelchy noise.

  “Would you like a meringue? The triplets made them,” says Lulu, pointing to a plate on her desk that’s piled high with wonky blobs that look like slightly singed, melted lumps of foam. (When I saw Mr Robinson he offered me a chewy toffee that glued my teeth together so all I could dribble was “Ang-ooo” when he gave me my attendance certificate.)

  “No, thank you,” I say, nice and clearly.

  I’m not just being non-greedy. Yesterday afternoon, I passed the kitchen when Otters class were having their cookery lesson with grumpy Mrs Hedges and saw…

  • one of the triplets drop the whole tray of meringues on the floor

  • another triplet gather them all up

  • the third triplet dust floor fluff off the meringues with the corner of the top she’d been wearing for the last three days.

  “Anyway, you must be wondering why I’ve asked you here, Dani,” says Lulu as she carries on watering the jungle of plants in the room.