Nice try, but it was too late. The seriously spectacular weirdness was already starting …
Flickers of light danced around the toilet cubicle.
Sparkles cartwheeled around my head.
And then just as soon as the mini fireworks show started, it stopped.
‘Thing – what did you do?’ I asked, uncrossing my useless fingers and glancing around the small space. All I could see was the same cream plastic walls, the same white cubicle door, the same square grey floor tiles.
‘Not know, Rubby!’ it mumbled sheepishly, twisting its tiny hands together.
Doof!
I jumped. There’d been the softest little thump under my bottom, as if someone had knocked on the underside of the toilet lid I was sitting on.
Gulp.
I stood up, scooping Thing into my arms, and stared down at the closed toilet seat.
Did I dare flip up the lid to see what had doof-ed?
Before I could get myself in a tangle of ‘Will I? Won’t I?’s, I shot my arm out.
And with a flick of the wrist, I discovered … that the loo was filled to the brim with cherry tomatoes!
‘Thing!!’ I gasped. ‘Why are there so many tomatoes in the toilet?’
As soon as I said that I remembered Miss Wilson talking about my cheeks being tomato-red. Had Thing heard that just before it fell asleep?
‘I get in big muddle, Rubby!’ it said all alarmed, clinging onto me like a strange hairy baby.
‘All right, but how are we going to get rid of them?’ I fretted, aware that the bell would be ringing soon and I needed to get back to class.
Thing blinked fast before suggesting something.
‘Flushy-flush?’
I gazed down at the mounds of cherry tomatoes, and knew that wasn’t going to work.
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ I said, picking up my fleece with one hand and nudging Thing to clamber back into the hideaway pocket. ‘We’ll run away and pretend it’s got nothing to do with us!’
Pulling on the lop-sided fleece, I hurried out of the girls’ toilets and back along the corridor.
The poor school cleaner – she’d be the one who’d have to sort out the great tomato mystery.
What would she think had happened?
Maybe she’d suspect that all the tomato-haters at school had got extra helpings from meanie Sweeney and dumped them in the loo together.
Hey, it wasn’t such a mad idea.
It once took me six or seven flushes to get rid of all the lettuce leaves …
Hurray!
It was Thursday morning, and I was heading off to school feeling absolutely great.
My cerise-pink holdall was shiny and clean and had nothing in it apart from a hairbrush, some pens and half a packet of chewy mints.
I was wearing my school skirt and shirt, plus a thin blue cardie tied tight around my waist, all with absolutely no large pockets to hide anything in.
It was Jackson’s dad’s turn to walk us to school, and as I wandered next door to meet Jackson and Mr Miller, I knew that Thing was happily snuffling about in the trees at the bottom of the garden, doing whatever Thing liked to do.
Best of all, with Thing safe at home, it meant there’d be no tomatoes in the toilet or other magical mishaps to worry about at school today.
Wasn’t that ordinary and boring and brilliant?
(‘Promise we’re never, ever going to do that again!’ I’d said, once the three of us arrived safely home from school yesterday. Jackson promised. Thing just looked confused and said, ‘What is promise meaning, Rubby?’)
‘Well, hi, there, Ruby! Would madam like a lift to school?’ Mr Miller joked, as I turned into his driveway.
He was holding open the passenger door of his big red car and bowing low.
‘Aren’t we walking today?’ I asked, gazing up at the extremely sunny sun.
As there wasn’t a hailstone or a tornado on the horizon, I expected Mr Miller to say that he had to go straight off to a meeting afterwards or something.
‘It’s Jackson’s fault – he can’t walk very far,’ said Mr Miller. ‘He seems to have pulled a muscle in his calf.’
At that second, I saw Jackson step out of his front door with two very healthy-looking legs.
But as soon as he saw me, his right leg seemed to take a turn for the worse.
‘What did you do?’ I called over to him, as he began limping towards the car.
‘I sort of twisted it.’
‘How?’ I asked.
Jackson squirmed.
‘When I was … uh … brushing my teeth.’
Huh?
What kind of lame fiberoonie was that?
Jackson was covering up for something for sure!
Had he hurt it doing something embarrassing?
Like dancing when he was putting his boxer shorts on and falling flat on his face?
(His bedroom window was right opposite mine. I’d once seen him singing along to loud hip-hop wearing nothing but Bart Simpson boxers. It was enough to give a girl nightmares for weeks …)
‘What’s he like, eh, Ruby?’ Mr Miller laughed, as he climbed into the driver’s seat.
A donut crossed with a big baboon, I thought.
Still, I should be kind and considerate. After all, Jackson had had to put up with a monster telling-off from Miss Wilson yesterday for ‘snoring’, AND he wasn’t allowed out at break times for the rest of the week as punishment.
‘Do you want to go in the front?’ I offered him, knowing EVERYONE prefers to sit there if they have a choice.
‘Uh … no – it’s all right. You can have it.’
That was very generous of Jackson. He wasn’t usually so generous.
I hesitated, wondering if he’d maybe put a whoopee cushion in the passenger seat …
Nope, nothing there.
‘Er, thanks,’ I said warily, as I got into the car, and heard the back door clunk shut.
‘So, how’s school treating you, Ruby?’ Mr Miller began chatting.
Mr Miller must have a degree in chatting, as he is very good at it. He can chatter endlessly about everything, and all you have to do is say, ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘fine, thanks’ in between his bouts of chatting.
‘How slow is this farmer going, eh?’ Mr Miller grumbled chattily, as we got stuck behind a tractor on the country lane that wended and wound its way towards school.
‘Yes’, ‘no’ and ‘fine, thanks’ didn’t seem to work as answers all of a sudden, so I just ‘mmmm!’ed.
Still, since Mr Miller was craning his neck to see the road ahead, I took the chance to peek round at Jackson, who’d been spookily quiet.
I mean, if his dad has a degree in chatting, then Jackson should have one for talking rubbish, so it felt kind of eerie, him being so silent …
‘You OK?’ I mouthed at him, so his dad didn’t suspect that something was up.
‘Yeah!’ he mouthed back.
But he didn’t seem OK.
He was sitting completely stiff and straight, his eyes wide, his rucksack perched neatly on his lap.
That was a perfectly good look for any other kid, but for Jackson it was all wrong.
The ‘normal’ Jackson didn’t so much sit as slouch. And in the mornings, it took him till at least half-nine for his eyes to be properly awake and more than half-open.
‘Right! Should be able to overtake at last, if I put my foot down!’ Mr Miller announced, swerving the car suddenly and accelerating to the speed of light.
‘EEK!’ came a small sound of alarm from somewhere in the vicinity of the back seat.
As soon as the G-force would let me, I turned around and scowled at Jackson.
‘What?’ he mouthed, trying his best to look innocent.
But I knew right then that he was hiding a guilty secret in his rucksack.
It looked as if he’d …
‘Are you really thick, or just a bit mad?’
It was a question I’d been dying to ask Jac
kson for more than an hour and a half.
After getting stuck behind the tractor, we were only just in time for school. The Head Teacher was hustling everyone inside in one great, big, bundled rush, and I lost sight of Jackson.
Then in class, I’d forgotten the other year-group class were crowding in with us for the first lesson, to watch a film about rainforests.
Then straight after that we had art, but I wasn’t in Jackson’s group.
All I could do was shoot him a what-are-you-playing-at? scowl across the paint pots, while keeping an eye on the motionless black rucksack lurking under his desk.
In fact, it took me all the way to break time to get a chance to ask it, and to get Jackson’s useless answer.
‘I’m not thick or mad!’ Jackson protested, talking to me through the slightly open window of the classroom, where he was doing his detention for snoring.
‘So you think it’s completely clever and sensible to smuggle Thing in here again today?’ I whispered, so no one could overhear me.
Though no one was listening – the playground was full of school-kid whoops, high-pitched nattering and roars.
‘Look, I snuck down to the trees to see Thing this morning,’ Jackson began his explanation, ‘and it was asking what we’d do at school today.’
‘So?’ I shrugged.
‘So I told it we were going to watch a telly programme about rainforests as part of our geography topic,’ he carried on. ‘Thing got all excited about the word “forest”, and was absolutely desperate to see the film. What could I do?’
‘You could’ve said no!’ I growled, thinking of the note that was taped up in the girls’ toilets this morning:
Gulp. The tomatoes had been discovered, then!
‘See – I guessed you’d be mad at me, Ruby. That’s why I didn’t tell you.’
‘Well, you guessed right. And I’m guessing that you made up the excuse about having a sore leg?’
‘Uh, yeah.’
‘Just so you could get your dad to give us a lift?’
‘Uh, yeah.’
‘’Cause you thought that would get Thing to school quicker, so it wouldn’t be sick in your bag like it was in mine?’
‘Uh … yeah. But Dad drove too fast and it was still sick,’ Jackson admitted, giving me a goofy, big baboon smile, as though that would make me forgive him. ‘I had to clean out Thing’s fabric conditioner top in the sink just now!’
‘Oh, Jackson!’ I sighed.
I’d just spotted something pretty disastrous.
‘But today’s the last time ever, Ruby!’ Jackson tried to reassure me, not realising what was going on behind his back. ‘I told Thing that. And I told it to behave today. So everything’s totally cool.’
‘You’re one hundred per cent sure about that?’ I challenged him.
‘Absolutely! Scout’s honour!’ Jackson promised.
But we all know how useless Jackson’s promises are, don’t we?
‘So Miss Wilson is going to be OK about what Thing is doing right now?’ I asked, pointing at the group of tables where the paints and brushes were stacked, ready to go back in the cupboard after break.
Thing was holding a squeezy plastic bottle of yellow paint in one paw, and a bottle of red paint in the other, and was paddling in the great gloops of colour oozing out of them both.
‘Nooooo!’ yelped Jackson, whirling away from me and over towards Thing, who was now waddling over Miss Wilson’s plastic folder of notes.
Of course I thought Jackson was the biggest donut in the history of cream cakes for smuggling Thing to school again.
But I wasn’t a meanie (like Mrs Sweeney) and of course I couldn’t just stand there and let Thing be discovered and Jackson get break-time detention for life.
And so just a few seconds later, I’d snuck myself back into school to begin the big tidy-up.
‘Rubby! It so exciting! I see forest on VT!’
‘TV!’ I corrected it, wiping red + yellow = orange footprints off Mrs Wilson’s folder.
‘That forest has birdies and buzzies not in my forest!’
Well, yes. I’d gone for walks in Muir Woods since I was little and never seen any toucans or tarantulas.
‘Thing, can you get back into the rucksack?’ Jackson urged it, trying to stop it walking paint across things it shouldn’t, like Miss Wilson’s folder (again) and the remote control for the overhead projector.
‘I like little furry “eeek! eeek! eeek!” best,’ Thing burbled on, so thrilled by the rainforest programme that it couldn’t contain itself. ‘What animal is little furry “eeek! eek! eek!”, boy?’
‘It was a tamarin monkey,’ Jackson replied. ‘Can you get in my bag now?’
‘I like tammy monkey!’ Thing jabbered on. ‘I not like long thing. What is long thing, boy?’
‘It was a snake,’ said Jackson. ‘Now can you—’
‘I not like snake,’ Thing muttered darkly. ‘I know what it say!’
‘What did it say?’ I asked, grabbing Thing up and attempting to wipe its feet clean with a paper towel.
No matter how much of a rush and a mess we were in, I couldn’t resist knowing what an Amazonian snake had to say for itself.
‘Snake say, “Mmm, I think I eat little tammy monkey!”’
I pulled a face, partly because of what Thing had just said, and partly because Thing was covered in more paint than I had realised.
‘How are we going to clean you up?’ I sighed.
‘Maybe put me in flushy-flush?’ Thing said brightly.
‘Don’t tempt me …’ I muttered, rubbing harder.
‘Here,’ said Jackson, holding up the wastepaper bin with one hand and the rucksack with the other. ‘The end-of-break bell is just about to go!’
Urgh! The whole class would come jumbling in any second now. At top speed, I dropped the furball in the bag and the scrunched paper towel in the bin.
‘OK. Now promise me,’ I said, staring hard at Thing as it peered through the mesh panel of the rucksack, ‘you will not move, or snore, or get into any trouble, or do any magic for the rest of the day!!’
Thing’s tiny claws hooked through the lattice of the mesh, and I could just make out that it was nodding at me.
‘I not doing any of those not things,’ it purred. ‘I promising, Rubby.’
Sadly, it turned out that Thing was as lousy at keeping promises as Jackson Donut Miller …
A dark storm-cloud hovered over us.
Which was strange, because we were sitting in the brightly lit dinner hall.
‘What,’ bellowed the dark storm-cloud, ‘is THIS!’
The dark storm-cloud was wearing a white pinafore and matching hat and a name badge that read ‘Mrs Sweeney, Catering Assistant’.
‘It’s … uh … some noodles?’ I mumbled, wondering why exactly Mrs Sweeney was pointing at my plate, and why it was annoying her so much.
‘What,’ Mrs Sweeney bellowed some more, ‘is wrong with them?’
I glanced down again at the wiggly wodge of uneaten noodles.
The stress of keeping Thing undercover had messed with my appetite, I guess.
Then again, the noodles were particularly disgusting today. The cook had boiled them so much they’d practically turned into gluey mush. (Not my favourite lunch.)
‘Er, nothing,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m just not very hungry today!’
‘What a WASTE!’ Mrs Sweeney tsk-ed fiercely, making me feel as if I was personally responsible for all the starving children in the world.
Phew; she seemed about to stomp off … but then found something else to moan about.
‘You!’ she barked at Jackson.
Jackson jumped in his seat, then checked his own plate for wrongness.
But apart from a stray pea, there was nothing on it. He was much too greedy to let a little thing like worry put him off his food.
‘Rules!!’ snarled Mrs Sweeney, flicking her tea towel at the sign on the wall behind us. ‘What does number FIVE sa
y?!?’
‘It, uh …’ Jackson fumbled, ‘it says, “Keep bags off the tables and chairs”.’
‘So you can read, then?! Well, how about doing like it says and putting your bag on the floor! NOW!!’
Mrs Sweeney lunged forward, as if she was going to remove the offending rucksack herself.
But Jackson beat her to it and grabbed his bag and its delicate contents before meanie Sweeney had a chance to cause Thing any lasting damage.
‘We were leaving anyway!’ Jackson mumbled, and screeched back his chair.
I followed him quickly, noticing that we were just about the last people in here. All the other kids had already disappeared into the sunshine of the playground.
And most of the dinner hall staff had stomped off to the steaminess of the kitchen, laden with mountains of dirty dishes.
BRINGGGGGGG!!! the end-of-lunch bell suddenly deafened us.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked Jackson, as soon as we were outside. It looked like he’d been about to head off to the main school building, instead of the gym hall, which was just across the way.
‘Oh! I forgot it was PE today!’ he said, happily.
Looking this way and that, he checked no one was around before hoisting his bag up to his face.
‘Hey, Thing!’ he muttered directly to it. ‘You’ll like watching us do PE! At the beginning, we get to go on a big bouncy square called a trampoline. When it’s my turn, I’m going to pretend I’m jumping on meanie Sweeney’s head …’
‘Trampling,’ repeated a tiny purry voice from inside the bag. I could just see a glint of big eyes and a wet black snout through the mesh section.
‘Shhhh!!’ I told both Jackson and Thing.
After just a few strides, we were already at the gym building, and needed to concentrate.
‘Shhhh!’ repeated the little purry voice, always on the lookout for new words to learn.
‘Ruby means “be quiet”,’ Jackson told his bag.
‘Jackson – I’m shushing you too!’ I whispered in a warning voice, as we went inside to join Miss Wilson and the rest of our class.
The Dreaded Noodle-Doodles Page 3