by James Roy
I was already a bit worried about the other kids asking why we were going to the library but I’d taken Nerdstrom aside at recess and said that if anyone asked he was to tell them that he was having an extra violin lesson, and I’d tell them that I was going to the principal’s office to report in, sort of like a parole thing. Nerdstrom agreed (although I don’t think he liked the idea much) and that was all kind of sorted out.
That is, I thought it was sorted out until Mr Sigsworth said, at about five minutes to two, ‘Triffin, Max, don’t forget your appointment at two.’ Then he handed us a bright yellow library pass, and I was surprised, then confused, then shocked, and finally peed right off, especially when a couple of the other kids started going, ‘Ooooo! Triffin and Quigley in the li-bra-ry, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.’
Then Josh Hargreaves said, ‘How come they get to go to the library while we have to stay here and do maths?’ I was holding my breath waiting for Mr Sigsworth’s answer. And guess what it was? I couldn’t believe my ears! He actually said, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be doing maths as well, Josh.’ I mean, hello! Everyone knows that Nerdstrom is really good at maths and I’m like, well, unmotivated. So it was really obvious to everyone in the class that scaredy little Treefern Nerdstrom was going to be helping big, stupid Max Dumbo Quigley with his maths.
I held Mr Sigsworth responsible. Why even have a plan if you’re going to stomp all over it on the first day? Even if you are an OK teacher, which I thought he was.
Anyway, me and Nerdstrom went into the library, and I was feeling kind of embarrassed, but when we walked in we were the only ones there except for a bunch of kindies over in the picture book section. And there were these two kids who were kind of wrestling with each other, and the librarian went over and totally ripped into them, which was heaps funny.
I wanted to stay and watch, but Nerdstrom was all, ‘Come on, I’d like to get this over with’, like it was going to be more of a big deal for him than for me.
So we gave our library passes to Mrs Lalor, who’s the grouchy old library assistant who makes the photocopier stop working, and found a table in the corner. Nerdstrom sat down, and I sat down as well, and he opened up a folder and took out all these pages and stuck them in front of me and said, in this trembly kind of voice, ‘This is what Sigsy gave me to do with you.’
‘I don’t want you to help me,’ I said.
‘I know, and the feeling is mutual.’ Then he coughed a bit, and said, ‘I don’t think you need my help anyway.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’
And I thought he might leave it there, but he didn’t. He said, ‘Because I think you’re just lazy, and since I was forced into this just as much as you were, why don’t you just start doing the questions while I sit here and read my book, and if you have any questions you can talk to me then. But I don’t want to talk about anything else.’ And he took out some fat, nerdy fantasy book the size of a house brick and started reading it, probably hoping I wouldn’t notice how much he was blushing.
But I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, back up a bit, Nerdstrom. Did you just call him Sigsy?’
‘Yeah, so what? Everyone calls him that. You call him that.’
‘Yeah, I know, but I’m me and you’re you. So don’t try to be cool when you’re not.’
But then he said maybe the most annoying thing of all. He went, ‘Listen, don’t get mad or anything, but I reckon the sooner you start improving at your sums, the sooner we can go back to living our separate lives. And I think we both want our weekends back, don’t we?’
And I nodded, which especially annoyed me, having to agree with him, but it was a fair point.
‘Fine, read your stupid fat geek-book,’ I said, which maybe wasn’t the cleverest thing I could have said, but I was a bit caught out by this sudden attitude that Nerdstrom was giving me, and I had to think of something fast. But I did make a mental note to sort him out properly once I’d done my time at Camp Nerdstrom.
So there I was, sitting there trying to figure out these maths questions. Or half trying, anyway, because the other half of me was trying to work out how I could get right under Nerdstrom’s skin without making him refuse to help me. And I was having a hard time. I mean, I was having a hard time with both those things. The maths was hard enough, but then there was the other thing, and both together meant that my brain was starting to kind of wrinkle at the edges. So I looked up at Nerdstrom, and he was right deep in his book, which had this stupid picture of some guy in armour sitting on a horse in front of this huge mountain with snow on the top. Actually, it looked pretty cool, but I figured that since it was Nerdstrom’s it probably couldn’t be.
Then he noticed me watching him and looked up, and I said, ‘You know, I could use a bit of help here, Nerdstrom.’ He sighed, slid a bookmark into his book and put it down on the desk. ‘All right, but remember that you asked me for help. So if you tell anyone that I wanted to help you, I’ll deny it.’ How ridiculous was that! I certainly didn’t intended to discuss it with anyone, and he should have known that.
So he leaned over and got his pencil and just kind of went, ‘This one here? OK, the five will go into eight only once, so that means there’s how many left over?’
And I said, ‘After you take out five?’, and he nodded and I said, ‘Three.’
‘Right. So the three goes there, which makes the five into thirty-five, doesn’t it?’
And that was when I saw what he was doing, and said, ‘So that means if five goes into thirty-five seven times, the answer is seventeen, doesn’t it?’
And Nerdstrom could have been a total jerk and gone ‘Duh!’ or ‘Oh, aren’t you a clever boy!’ or something like that, but he didn’t. He just nodded and said, ‘There you go,’ and he went back to his book with the knight on the front.
Then I said, ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do for our assembly? Has Sigsy talked to you about that? Because you were away the day he told us.’
‘How do you know I was away?’ Nerdstrom asked. ‘Have you been stalking me?’
‘As if,’ I said. ‘So has he told you about it?’
I was enjoying watching Nerdstrom’s shape change. He was starting to look like some of the air had leaked out of him. ‘Yeah, he’s told me.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ I asked. I pointed at his book. ‘Are you going to bore everyone to death with tales of swords and spells and Klingons?’
That got his attention, and some of his air seemed to come back. ‘Klingons are actually from Star Trek, not fantasy, and I don’t even like Star Trek all that much. And no, I don’t think I’m going to bore anyone to death. I’m working on it. Don’t worry about it, OK?’
‘Does it scare you, performing in front of all those people?’ I asked, because I knew that it did.
Nerdstrom looked me right in the eye and said, ‘You know it does. I’m reading now. Leave me alone.’
So I did. But I knew I’d made him think.
Later, when the bell went, I said to Nerdstrom, ‘You go out first.’
‘Why?’
‘Because neither of us wants to draw attention to this whole maths thing, do we? So we should leave separately, to avoid people noticing.’ After some of the attitude he’d been giving me, I totally expected him to tell me not to be stupid, but he didn’t.
Later, when I was picking up my bag and stuff from the classroom, Jared came up to me and said, ‘So, how was your vege-maths class?’
And I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But he didn’t believe me at all, and he said, ‘I know what’s going on. I worked it out after what Sigsy said.’
‘It’s not what you think,’ I said, but Jared just smiled.
‘I think Nerdstrom’s helping you with your maths. Why else would you go to the library together?’
‘If you tell anyone …’
‘You’ll what?’ He laughed. ‘The thing is, you and Nerdstrom doing maths together just doesn’t … well, it doesn’t a
dd up!’ Then he totally cracked up.
Although Jared is definitely my best friend in the whole world and always will be, I was so close to punching him in the head right then. But I didn’t, because there were people around, and that’s the main reason.
And anyway, like I keep explaining, that’s not my style.
18 CAMERON LEARNS (SOME OF) THE TRUTH
That Thursday I had a meat pie for lunch and it was nice. It actually was.
What wasn’t nice was how the night before went. Mum and Dad asked me how the first day of tutoring had gone. That would have been OK, except they asked at dinner time, and of course Cameron was there and he didn’t know about the tutoring yet, and his ears totally pricked up. ‘What’s this about tutoring?’
‘Just forget it,’ I said, but of course Cameron wasn’t going to forget it, because he’s a bit like a guard dog who can smell fear, except I wasn’t scared. But he knew it was a sensitive subject, so he just waded in.
‘Oh, is little Maxine finding school a bit difficult? You do know what difficult means, don’t you, Maxine? It’s a big word that means hard. That’s right, hard, as in not easy.’
Mum was shaking her head at him and telling him to stop, but Cameron doesn’t listen to Mum very much, so he just kept going.
That’s when Dad said, ‘Cameron, that’s enough. We just thought that Triffin and Max could offer each other something valuable.’
But as soon as Cameron heard Dad say ‘Triffin’, it was like he’d just been given free tickets to Disneyland. ‘Triffin? Triffin? You’re being taught maths by Nerdstrom? That’s why he was here the other day?’
‘How do you know Triffin?’ Mum asked him.
‘How do I know Triffin?’ (Which was a really dumb thing to say, since he was just repeating exactly what she’d said. And it’s not even rhetorical.) ‘I know Nerdstrom because I used to see him all the time before I went to high school. I remember this one time …’ And then he started laughing so hard that I thought mashed potato was going to come out his nose. Once he’d managed to stop laughing, he told us some story about the time he helped some other boys flush Nerdstrom’s head. I thought it was pretty funny, but Mum and Dad just looked annoyed.
When Cameron had finished his story, Dad cleared his throat and said, ‘Are you done, Cameron? Can we finish our dinner without stories about heads in toilets? Thank you.’ It was hard for me and Cameron not to look at each other and laugh like mad. But at least Cameron seemed to have forgotten about me being taught maths by someone my own age.
Or so I thought. After dinner I was in my room and Cameron came in, or rather he just stood at the door, and he said, ‘So, how is my mate Nerdstrom? Is he really as smart as they say? I mean, he’s only teaching you, so how smart would he have to be?’ This was so funny that I thought I might actually stop breathing, I was laughing so hard. Not.
So I said, ‘Hey, it’s OK. You know why? Because I’m letting him think that I’m fine with him helping me, but that just lets me get close to him so that when the time comes to really sort him out, he won’t suspect a thing.’
Cameron just laughed. ‘Kind of like one of those keep your friends close and your enemies even closer things?’
‘Yeah, exactly like that.’
Cameron just shook his head and went off to his own room. Sometimes I really hate him.
But he hadn’t mentioned the weekend visits, so I guessed that he didn’t know about those yet. And I wasn’t in any big rush to tell him, either. I figured he’d find out soon enough.
It looked like I’d be doing tutoring with Nerdstrom twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, and I wasn’t even sure how long for. I asked Mr Sigsworth that, and he said that he’d be keeping his eye on my progress and staying in contact with our parents, which I thought might have been his way of saying ‘I haven’t really thought about it yet.’
Typical.
19 THE DEVELOPMENT OF CASEY
That Friday I had tutoring again, and it was OK, I guess. Nerdstrom was still the same. He just sat down opposite me in the library and said, ‘I’m reading. Don’t disturb me unless it’s something really hard.’
‘Hard for me or hard for you?’
‘Just don’t disturb me unless you think your head’s going to explode.’
Then I wished I could make my head explode, just to see the look on his face. But then I’d have an exploded head and it would be hard to see anything, which would suck, but it would be almost worth it just to imagine the freaked-out look on his face.
There was something else. A couple of the other kids had already caught on to what was going on and were calling Nerdstom ‘The Professor’. I didn’t start it, though. Well, not on purpose, anyway. I might have accidentally called him Prof when we were lining up for assembly. And sometimes that’s all it takes.
Casey Reeves is pretty cool, it turns out. He’d come over to us from time to time, but not too much. I mean, I certainly didn’t want a Year One kid hanging around all the time, but with him it was a bit like having a really cool pet, like a snake or a performing tarantula who eats mice whenever your friends come over. I could just kind of say, ‘Hey Casey, I dare you to go over there and tip that girl’s drink over’, and he’d totally do it, and he didn’t say I’d told him to do it, which was great.
The thing was, I had Casey convinced that if he wanted to keep being the toughest kid in the junior school he had to do whatever the toughest kid in the whole school dared him to do. And that toughest kid was me, and Jared sort of, especially when I was off school. And that kind of dare was totally safe for me, because even if Casey did tell the teachers that I’d dared him, I probably wasn’t going to get a detention for it, and Casey was just going to get told not to listen to older kids like me. So it was all good. And Casey did whatever I dared him to do, and a couple of times he even got put on detention because of stuff I told him to do.
But he never blamed me, which was the best thing of all, like I said.
20 APRIL FOOLS DAY
That Saturday Dad was away on his Army Reserve weekend. He left on the Friday afternoon, all dressed up in his soldier stuff, looking like a bit of a hero, to be honest. (Not a very smart hero, obviously, since he had a badge reading QUIGLEY stitched on his shirt, just in case he forgot his name.) The last thing he said to me as he went to get into his mate Ernie’s car was that I should be good. ‘Your mum’s got her Natureway Cosmetics party tomorrow, so behave, all right?’ he said.
Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah, I was thinking. What he’d forgotten was that Saturday was April Fools Day. Having April the first on a Saturday was probably a good thing for a number of kids at school. It’s safer for them that way, with kids like me and Jared on the loose. Plus they don’t have to strain their brains trying to work out which of the announcements are real and which are the teachers playing jokes. Like the principal, Mrs Bryce, announcing that the pet elephants are not to be sponged down in the girls’ toilets under any circumstances, for example. Hilarious.
Normally I love April Fools Day. Take last year, for example. It’s amazing the different responses you see when someone sets off the fire alarms at school just as everyone is coming out for lunch. For a start there’s the screaming, panicky stampede, which is kind of cool, except for that one person who sort of got a bit crushed in the mad rush. But seriously, who comes to school with crutches? If you’ve suffered an injury that makes crutches necessary, you should be making the most of it and not coming to school at all. But when you’re the only staff member who knows how to make the computers work in the library, I suppose it’s best that you make the effort to come to school. Even with crutches. And especially if you’ve been using crutches to get around since you were four. But you shouldn’t be trying to carry an iMac as well as use crutches. I mean, that’s just stupid.
There are a few different responses from the teachers when someone presses the fire alarm. Some of them scream and run with the kids. Others stand in the middle of the hall and shout
‘Don’t panic! Remain calm!’ Some look wide-eyed and pale, as if this is the single worst nightmare they’ve ever had in school. And there are some who do remain calm and say to the kids, ‘All right, just leave your bags and go out into the quad. It might be a real fire or it might be a false alarm, but we’ll work that out later. It’s OK, Amanda, there are no real elephants.’ They’re the boring ones.
Then there’s Mrs Bryce. She’s the one who stands in the quad directing the teachers and telling them to remain calm. She’s also the one who talks to the firemen in their yellow pants and jackets for a while, then starts turning slowly in a circle, going, ‘Where’s Max Quigley?’
The worst thing is that all this happened just before midday and ended about half an hour after midday, so by the time I got to actually say ‘April Fool!’ it was too late. That’s one of the April Fools Day rules. Which is probably why Mrs Bryce didn’t laugh when I said it. Neither did the boss of the firemen.
But the most disturbing reaction was from my parents, who didn’t see the funny side of it either. I’m not sure how many hundreds of dollars it costs for two fire engines to come out to our school for a false alarm, but I do know that I didn’t get any pocket money for most of last year.
Since April 1 this year was a Saturday, like I said, I wasn’t at school. Also, I was still grounded from baseball, so I couldn’t even do anything there. So I had to make do with getting out of bed early and sneaking into Cameron’s bedroom with a bowl of warm water and gently lowering his hand into it. He didn’t even wake up when he wet his pyjama pants, and I was able to sneak back out and dispose of the evidence. At breakfast I asked him why he’d had a morning shower instead of an evening one. He said it was none of my business, and I said, ‘Which little piggy are you?’