My Best Friend and Other Enemies

by Catherine Wilkins

  The room falls silent, and Terry stands up, contrite and apologetic. I can’t help myself. I move his stool back a foot. I think he’ll notice, but he doesn’t. When Mrs Cooper tells him to sit back down, he does an amazing comedy pratfall straight on to the floor. The class erupts.

  Eventually Mrs Cooper restores order and then really tells me off for moving the stool. I feel a bit bad, actually, but I still think it was worth it. It was really funny. And he is a joke thief.

  Oh, I love art. I wish I could stay there forever. But I can’t. I have to go to other lessons and be given evils by CAC if I happen to make eye contact with any of them. It would be much better for everyone if my whole timetable was art. I mean, imagine how many cartoons about the school being like hell I would be able to get done then?

  “We make a good team, you and me, don’t we, Toons?” says Tanya, catching me at lunch. “Oh my life! What about that assembly? Bare jokes. We should do more. You any good with spray paint?”

  “Um …” I falter, faintly worried. “I’ve never really tried.” Which is true.

  “We should try it out sometime. You’ll be needing a tag for your gang anyway, won’t you?”

  Ha! Yeah, as if my gang that does battles with badgemakers needs a proper graffiti-on-a-public-wall signature that tells the police we’ve been by. Oh my goodness! I absolutely cannot get involved in proper tagging and spray paint graffiti. For one thing, my mum would kill me. And for another thing, my mum would kill me.

  “I don’t know, Tanya,” I say, pretending to consider this. “I feel like I work better on paper at the moment; that’s what I really want to concentrate on.”

  “Suit yourself,” she replies quite amicably.

  Ah, well. I have at least enjoyed my few heady days of feeling like a rebel because of a cartoon someone else told me to draw. But now I have been reminded that, in reality, I am actually quite scared of authority.

  When I get back to 6C at the end of lunch, there is another piece of posh white card on my desk. This time it’s an envelope with “To Jessica” written on it in swirly writing with one of those cool silver pens they sell in Smiths that I really want to get.

  I glance up at Natalie and Amelia. They are sitting with the rest of CAC a couple of metres away. They see me pick up the envelope but they’re pretending to be nonchalant and ignore me. I wonder what it says. Ohh. I hope not something really horrible.

  I open it, and to my surprise, inside is an invitation. An invitation to a CAC outing: bowling on Sunday! I’m invited? I’m invited! I scroll down, the letter talks about Natalie hoping we can all be friends! I’m included! (So she doesn’t mind that I hung up on her.) Oh my God, this is amazing!

  “Hey, guys, I think I can make this,” I call out excitedly, waving the letter at them. I can’t help but grin. We can all finally be friends.

  They take one look at me and then burst out laughing. I freeze. That’s not good. “Are you sure, Jessica?” asks Natalie coldly. “Have you read it properly?”

  “Um,” I say, trying to re-read the letter but feeling too nervous to be able to take in any of the words. I feel really hot.

  “Are you definitely free that day?” adds Amelia. I look at the date. It’s last Sunday. They have given me an invitation to a past event. I was never invited. Embarrassment and mortification wash over me.

  Well, I have to hand it to them: they have raised my expectations and then dashed them spectacularly.

  I’m not going to lie to you. I’m angry. I am very angry. I am livid, in fact. I feel hot under the collar every time I think about it. I can’t believe they did that.

  The injustice of it! I sit there seething through my afternoon science and history lessons. How dare they do that! I am not some idiot that’s desperate to hang out with them. How dare they make it look like I am. If anything, I was doing brilliantly without them.

  OK, I know I hung up on Natalie, and that’s mean. But that is no reason to pull something like this on me.

  Ohh. I can’t believe they did this. I can’t believe they made me look so stupid. Maybe I should just rise above it and not even react. I mean, that might annoy them more than trying to retaliate. They probably want me to be upset.

  Yeah, that’s it. I’m going to rise above it. Leave them to their silly games. I know I’m not a bad person. I know I don’t want to go on their stupid outings. I mean, obviously, there was a time when I did, but I don’t any more. And I didn’t when they tricked me with that stupid letter.

  I don’t have to care about their nonsense. I’m just going to rise above it and ignore it. I finish my last lesson feeling slightly better. I’m above this. I don’t need to care.

  I have to walk past CAC on my way out of the form room. “Hey, you should really open your post on time,” comments Cassy as I pass. Amelia giggles.

  “Yeah, we would have loved you to come otherwise,” says Amelia.

  I feel my temperature rising, but I am determined to keep my cool. “I think you are all really out of order,” I say calmly.

  They think I’m immature, do they? Well, listen to this – I’m going to sound like a grown-up. “I’m not even angry, I’m just disappointed,” I add.

  I glance at Natalie, who won’t catch my eye. “Natalie, how could you let them do this?”

  “Natalie, how could you let them do this?” Amelia imitates me, but making me sound like a whiny baby.

  I feel my temperature rising, but I ignore Amelia and continue to address Natalie. “I thought you said you wanted to be my friend.”

  “Aw, be my fwend …” Amelia and Cassy continue to impersonate me. Natalie still won’t look at me.

  “Nat—”

  “Whatever, Jessica. It’s like you said, isn’t it? We’re in rival gangs, after all.” Natalie interrupts me and gives me a filthy look. (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think she’s still quite annoyed I hung up on her.)

  It’s more than that, though. The thing is, the more I think about it, the more I’m worried I might have overreacted that day, now I look back on it. The rest of the phone conversation did seem genuine, and now I wonder if Natalie really was reaching out to me and is now understandably annoyed that I rejected her. But I can’t exactly explain that now, or take it back, can I? And it still doesn’t justify this.

  “All right, fine,” I say, feeling my temperature rising further. I really hope I’m not bright red. Calm thoughts. I am calm. “If that’s how you want it to be. Enjoy the rest of your life.” I turn and walk away from them.

  Hmm. OK. Well, I think I very nearly did rise above it. Kind of slightly fell at the last rising-above-it hurdle. We can probably all agree that the rising above it plan hasn’t one hundred per cent worked. I think I may need to address this now. But what can I do?

  So. What has two thumbs and no plan of attack or revenge of any kind? This guy. You can’t see me, but I am pointing at myself with my thumbs – but subtly: I’m on the bus home. I don’t want to make a fool of myself. I have a whole gang of people specially to do that for me. Ha. Aaagghh.

  God, I feel miserable as I enter my house. But something is different. There is no smell of dinner being nearly ready. I clock a rucksack sitting at the bottom of the stairs. My sister’s rucksack. My sister – my sister is home! I love my sister!

  “Tammy? Tammy?” I call out.

  “In here,” comes Mum’s voice.

  I enter the kitchen excitedly, but find my mum, dad and sister all looking angry, and apparently mid-discussion. No one seems pleased to see me.

  “Well, let’s not— Look, we can talk about this later,” says my mum to Tammy. “Your father and I need to crack on with dinner.”

  “Oh how convenient,” says Tammy, her voice heavy with sarcasm. (Why is Tammy ignoring me? Say hello!)

  “Tammy!” I say. “Well, don’t look too pleased to see me, then.”

  “It’s not you I’m not pleased to see,” says Tammy. I go over and hug her. Tammy adds to my mum over my shou
lder, “Whatever you do, don’t let helping the world get in the way of domesticity, will you?”

  My mum turns away and starts muttering angrily to my dad. I catch the words “living end” but not much else.

  “Say it to my face,” says Tammy. “Or why don’t we put it to a family vote?”

  “Don’t you dare,” hisses my mum. (I have no idea what is going on, but Tammy appears to have really angered my parents.)

  “Now, look here, Tammy,” begins my dad.

  “Jessica—” says Tammy.

  “No,” interrupts my dad.

  “Jessica, how would you like to have a lovely pet dog?” asks Tammy.

  “Really? I would love that!” I say.

  “No,” says my dad.

  “I’m involved with a rescue shelter and we really need to find homes for the dogs. But Mum and Dad here don’t seem to want to take one. They said it would be too big an adjustment for the family. But you’d like it, wouldn’t you? I think everyone should vote. Where’s Ryan?”

  “No,” says my dad again.

  “Oh, can we? Can we please have a dog?” I ask excitedly. “They need rescuing. Please?”

  Tammy folds her arms across her chest and looks at my mum with a very smug expression on her face. My mum looks like she wants to murder Tammy. “This really is the living end,” she says.

  My dad catches my mum’s look and changes tack. “How about a nice cup of tea?” he says.

  Well, eventually the shouting dies down and my parents make us pasta. We’re still on the economy drive. (“Which is just one of the many reasons it would be ludicrous to get a dog.” They sent me to my room after dinner, but I could still pretty much hear everything.)

  Having a dog would be great. I could train it to attack Amelia. I fantasise about that for a moment, then there’s a knock at my bedroom door and Tammy comes in.

  “Hey, Jess, sorry about all the commotion,” she says, and flops on to my bed. (Though, to be honest, whilst it was happening, Tammy looked like she very much enjoyed being at the centre of a shouting match.) “It’s a shame our parents are so shortsighted,” she adds, sighing.

  “Yeah,” I say uncertainly. “Um, are they?”

  “God, yeah.” Tammy exhales again. “They’re just myopic.”

  “What does myopic mean?”

  “It means short-sighted.”

  “Right, yeah.” I nod, trying to look thoughtful.

  “How are you, anyway? Still cartooning? Ryan loves his badge just a bit, eh?”

  Oh, I love my sister. I love it when she comes home. (Apart from the shouting, obviously.) Suddenly I’m just talking away to her, going on about cartoons, and she seems really interested. I show her a photocopy of the hell-school one and she loves it.

  “I am so impressed with you, Jessica,” she says. “Sticking it to The Man. Good for you.”

  Hmm. I’m not sure I can say that that was exactly what I was doing with that cartoon. “Well, it was Tanya Harris’s idea,” I tell her.

  “Tanya Harris sounds great. Stick with her,” says Tammy.

  “Yeah,” I say uncertainly. Though part of me wants to laugh at that statement.

  “Anyway, what happened to Natalie? I thought she was your best friend?”

  “Oh, well. That’s a long story.”

  “I’m all ears,” says Tammy.

  So I tell Tammy the whole sorry mess, about the falling out, and the gangs, and Joshua and the basketball team. I even tell her about the mean trick with the letter. I wasn’t sure I was going to mention that. I’m still kind of embarrassed about it. Tammy listens to the whole thing patiently, occasionally saying, “Oh yes,” or “Good for you,” until I am finished.

  “And the thing is, Tammy, I just don’t know what I can do about it.”

  “Well now,” says Tammy, pausing for effect. “You have the key to what you can do about it right here.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You’ve got to play to your strengths. You are a cartoonist. Don’t underestimate the power of a satirical cartoon. That’s one of the great ways the masses can undermine The Man. The workers can bring down the system. You have power at your fingertips.”

  OK, I keep hearing people say stuff like this, especially with all the protests and financial stuff going on. I don’t fully understand it, but apparently 1% of the population control or own all the wealth of the other 99%. We (the masses) are the 99% and we should totally get our way with stuff because there are more of us. But, the 1% (“The Man”) are in charge, so they make everything suit them.

  Tammy seems convinced the masses can undermine The Man with a satirical cartoon, but no one ever fully explains how. And as far as I can tell a satirical cartoon is just a cartoon making fun of the bad things that corrupt, important people do. But the corrupt, important people are normally so rich they probably don’t care anyway.

  “Do you really reckon?” I say, unconvinced.

  “Totally. Amelia is like a dictator. If you mock her, and laugh at her, her followers will lose faith in her and she will lose her power.”

  “That sounds brilliant,” I say cautiously.

  “Because it is brilliant,” Tammy assures me. “I’ll leave you to it. Get cracking.” And she leaves my bedroom.

  I hear her walk along the corridor to Ryan’s room. “Razza! My main man! How would you like a dog?”

  Hmm. OK. A satirical cartoon. A satirical cartoon about Amelia. Could that work? Is it even a good idea? I love my sister, but she does seem to enjoy and gravitate towards conflict and drama a bit.

  I mean, if I made a cartoon about Amelia, surely that’s nearly as bad as her encouraging everyone to bully me in the first place? I mean, doesn’t that count as stirring? What if it makes everything worse? Plus I really have no idea how to go about doing it.

  I remember seeing a political cartoon in history once. It was about how in the lead up to the Second World War, the Allies let Hitler do loads of stuff he wasn’t supposed to that broke treaties or contracts or something. The cartoon I saw showed a broken wall being fixed with a giant piece of paper that said “I will be good, signed Adolf Hitler,” and the caption at the bottom read: “Our new defence”.

  I really liked that cartoon. Apparently, it was because Prime Minister Chamberlain (who was a bit of a softie) thought if he got Hitler to sign a treaty promising peace, war could be avoided. But Hitler didn’t care about the treaties, ’cause he didn’t mean it, and he kept doing stuff anyway. (A bit like when Ryan says he’s sorry he’s got his toys everywhere, but he doesn’t mean it, because he keeps doing it again.)

  Then finally Hitler invaded Poland and the Allies had to say, “Enough’s enough,” call his bluff and have a war. A bit like when my mum tells Ryan if he hasn’t stopped shouting by the time she’s counted to three, he will be sent to his room. Then, after three, my mum has to send Ryan to his room otherwise he will become an out-of-control tyrant. (Well, it’s a bit like that. I’m not saying my little brother is like Hitler.)

  Anyway, a cartoon about Hitler is quite serious. Maybe Tammy means more like Gary Larson? I have a look through my Gary Larson book. (I love my Gary Larson book.) My eye ends up resting on the cartoon of some cows having a barbecue, and one cow has a speech bubble saying to the host, who is cooking beef burgers, “You’re sick, Jessy! Sick, sick, sick!”

  Maybe I could draw Amelia as a cow having a barbecue but dressed like Hitler? Um. Hmm. I feel a bit out of my depth. Maybe I can’t do this. Let’s have a think.

  What is Amelia like? She’s vain, superficial, shallow, snobby and insulting. And clique-y and obsessed with fashion and rude to people she thinks are beneath her. And y’know, why does it matter if my jacket came from Primark? Who gets to decide what’s rubbish, anyway? I don’t see how having more money makes you a better person.

  So Amelia has completely the wrong priorities. But how exactly can I mock that? I mean, I suppose I could try to exaggerate them for comic effect. I mean, it is like she
thinks the “right” clothes are more important than caring about people. She’d probably exclude Mother Teresa and Gandhi because their clothes weren’t expensive enough. Maybe I could draw that? Um, no. OK, let’s have a bit more of a think about this.

  I ponder for ages. Loads of ideas float round my head, which I keep discounting as I think. Maybe I could make a comic strip mocking Amelia’s gang for being shallow but it’d be better as just one picture. I think about drawing a cartoon of Amelia as a weasel making fun of a stoat who isn’t wearing a cool enough jacket, but it just doesn’t seem powerful enough, somehow.

  Think, Jessica, think. What does Amelia care about? Well, fashion. What would upset her? Apart from having to shop at the same shops as me.

  Then I have a brainwave and I remember how mean some fashion magazines can be. Like sometimes they have a picture of a famous actress on the red carpet or something, and they put a tick or a cross by her outfit, like the outfit was homework and she’s done it all wrong. (When, really, no one asked for the magazine’s opinion and the actress might really like her dress.)

  Or there’s that “Circle of Shame” thing where a magazine has photos of celebrities showing sweat patches under their arms or wrinkles under their chins, and they mock them for not being well groomed enough. (Even though everybody sweats and has wrinkles, and that’s normal.)

  That is the sort of thing that would upset Amelia. That would probably be her worst nightmare. But I can’t just do that, or it’s like I agree that fashion is important. I will have to turn it on its head and do a parody …

  Yeah! Then I can mock the mean things about fashion and Amelia all at the same time. Brilliant. I’ve decided. I am going to draw Amelia as “The Hellfern Juniors’ Fashion-Victim Sheep”. It’s a bit of a long-winded title, but I figure I should build on the earlier success of the Hellfern brand. Plus that makes it more relevant to everyone.