Mucked Up (3 page)

Here I am running alongside the Science Block with my bag on my back. As I get closer to Admin Block I can hear the Quad Raid going on in the quad – yahhhhing and girl-screaming and crazy-laughs. There are kids here and there who survived the Quad Raid and are running around, not really knowing what to do or where to go: a girl is freaking out, green slippery stuff in her hair like massive snot. She has two friends with her who are laughing. One of them has a bit of snot on her that must have bounced off the first one.

Not funny, Alisha / It is funny / It’s not!

Also a bunch of little Year 7s are running past, maybe ten of them with bags on their backs, puffing their guts out.

You see ’em? They were dressed as zombies /
Were they zombies? / Yeah they were zombies!

A couple of Year 9 soccerdicks who I kind of know, Anton Vasillis and his mate Brodie Something, are leaning on the wall near the corner of Science Block, doing that heh-ha fear-laughing that people do when they are pretending to not be scared but you know they are.

How about those smokebombs, heh-ha? / Insane,
heh-ha

War is a mad thing and this is what it looks like. There will be lots of horror and pain and fear today but you just gotta keep going. C’mon, Zurb, get your legs going faster and keep running—

‘Oiiii, Zurb!’

Someone behind me yelled that but I don’t stop running just in case it’s a Year 12 tricking me with a sneaky name-calling trick.

‘
TOM ZURBO-GOLDBLATTiii
’

But then I think, what Year 12 would know my name? So I stop and turn. Cesar Hildago has his bag
on his back and a skateboard
under his arm. He is a profesh skater from my year who everyone respects massively. He is famous because he once did a nosegrind on the handrail that goes down the wheelchair ramp outside the handicapped toilet. No idea what a nosegrind is but I think you do it with a skateboard.

‘Lookin’ da bizness, Zurb,’ he says and I go ‘Yard Duty’ and he says ‘Sick.’

Never can tell if he’s being sarcastic or not because he’s got a bad case of stoner-face so it’s always the same stupid smiling head. He comes up close and I see his ears have big floppy holes in them cos he wears plug-earrings on weekends but he has to take them out at school. ‘Seen … the quad, man?’ he asks and I say ‘Nah, came through Teachers’ Carpark’ and he says ‘The place is wasted.’

He’s never been friendly to me before because he rides skateboards and wears plug-earrings on weekends and I don’t do either of those things. But it’s pretty cool that he wants to talk to me: he says ‘They put … bins on top of the … footy posts …’

‘How’d they do that?’

‘Nobody knows … it’s crazy stuff. Hey, I’m gonna ditch school, man … wanna come back to mine? Smoke choof?’

‘Oh yeah well, sounds good but I got I.T. and need to work on my video project so soz, man, mebbe another day we can smoke some … chuff.’

‘Choof.’

‘Yeah.’

He stands there with that stoner-face so I stand there and smile back and then he pushes me into a bush.

REASON THREE

Reason Number 3 why Tom Zurbo-Goldblatt has snuck into school this morning like a scaredy little dickweed and is now on the ground in a bush . . .

Because of something that started a couple of weeks back which has become the new school thing. You can be just walking outside minding your own biz and someone will pop out of nowhere and push you into a bush. It’s just this random act called Bushing which is a combo of ‘pushing’ and ‘bush’ and which is why everyone’s walking far away from bushes at the moment. Last week Marcus Rugless was going to the office to pay his excursion money and he got an Xtreme Bushing in the rosebush outside Admin Block. He was crying with his little girl-voice and had to go home early cos he got cut by thorns. Assistant Principal Bitchface Fruehling went on the PA and said bushings were banned but everyone’s still doing it. No one listens to Bitchface.

So when Cesar Hildago got all friendly with me and asked me back to smoke chuff, choofs, whatevs, that was just a way for him to get close enough to give me a bushing – and now I’m in a bush and he’s run out the back gate. Though as far as bushings go, this effort is very lame cos he didn’t even push me into a proper bush, it’s just a small plant thing growing beside the wall of the locker shed. And it’s also kind of good that I got bushed because I’m a bit hidden on the ground and something bad is going on near me, in the gap between C Block and D Block …

NO PLEEEEEEZ

Five zombies dressed in army-camo jackets are chasing some little wuss and have trapped him against the wall. They’re chucking eggs at him and the eggs are smashing all over him.

AHHHHHH NO NOOOO

Little wuss is screaming, getting blasted, covering his head with his hands but that just makes the Zombies in Army-Camo chuck the eggs even harder. Lawwwd it’s brutal: the wuss finally gets away from them, runs up the steps and into the door of C Block and the Zombies in Army-Camo run off in the opposite direction going haw haw haw. If I hadn’t got a bushing from Hildago, it might’ve been me getting blasted – this was a Bushing of Excellent Luck. Soon as they’re gone I get up off the ground, shake off the ground-dirt, and run like hell to the double doors of Admin.

Up the steps …
Through the doors …
And …
I’m inside …

You know those war-movie scenes where there’s an army hospital and all the dying soldiers are flopped round bleeding with their legs and heads hanging off? This is what the inside of Admin looks like. You got a girl standing near Bursar’s counter with blue water all over her uniform; must’ve been from the Smurfs with Guns. That stuff won’t come out easy in the washing machine, you’d have to use special stain-busting stuff they sell on TV. And there’s the girl with the green snot all in her hair and her two friends still laughing about it. The snotted girl is getting even madder about this.

You know what’s funny? / What? / Not you,
so shut up!

A couple of Year 10s who I do not know are near the door to Assistant Principal Bitchface Fruehling’s office, looking pretty devastational with vommy stuff on their backs. Some kind of baked bean goop that someone’s chucked at their backs: just the look of it makes you wanna vom.

Next to the plastic potplant is the little flat-faced freckle-freak. He’s got yellow egg crap all over his flat face and hair and clothes and I realise he was the little wuss who got attacked by the Zombies in Army-Camo. The whole side of his face is egg-wounded and he’s got an eggy stink too. He gives me a sad face as if to say ‘I wish I didn’t stay in the Japanese garden’ and I go ‘Haha, dickweed, serves ya right for kicking me out, HAHAHAHAHA’ but of course I don’t say it out loud – I only think it in my head because he looks like he could beat my arse. But I think it really loud.

????????

Lawwwwwd, whassat?

From the far end of the corridor, something’s coming. Something: not an animal or a person. Sort of a bent-over something coming out of the shadows, with wet hair hanging over its face like a long-haired horror-ghost.

It’s waving at me like it wants to grab me and each time it steps closer I step backward because it has a smell that is very wrong.

‘Zurb …’

It stops and lifts its sloppy
wet hair off its face and I see it is my best mate.

‘Ravo!!!! What happened to you?’

Ravo starts doing that suck-in crying thing that
little babies do when they’re trying not to cry: ‘… well … hhhHHH … I got sprayed by … hhhHHH … two guys in hoodies …’

‘Gangstas in Hoodies?’

‘… hhhHHH … yeah I was just sitting on the bench … hhhHHH … beside the bin … hhhHHH … waiting for you all … hhhHHH … to show up … hhhHHH … and

…’ This could take some time but I must be a good mate and listen.

‘… and then they snuck up behind me … hhhHHH … with a massive spray-thing …’

‘A Weapon of Mass Spray-Destruction?’

‘Yeah … hhhHHH … and it was filled with … hhhHHH … with …’

But he doesn’t have to tell me what it was filled with, I worked it out from the stink. Abie’s my adopted sister from Vietnam and Mum wants her to feel at home so she cooks lots of Vietnamese food, and Vietnamese food uses lots of…

‘… hhhHHH … fish sauce …’

If you haven’t ever smelt Vietnamese fish sauce, it’s kind of what poo would smell like if it came out of a person who’d just eaten poo. It must be extra-bad for Ravo cos he has a huge nose: everyone calls him Nostrildamus because he can smell anything that steps into his smell-zone, and at the moment he is in the centre of his own smell-zone.

‘… hhhHHH … then they just kept spraying me … hhhHHH … and spraying me … hhhHHH …’

‘Didn’t you hear about the Quad Raid on Facebook?’

‘… hhhHHH … you know I’m not allowed on Facebook …’

True dat, his gran banned him cos she thought his profile pic was too suggestive. It was him with his huge nose and hairy legs, in a basketball singlet and shorts.

Ravo lives with his gran – his parents work overseas somewhere – and she’s pretty strict and old-fashioned. She wears a big scarf round her neck and calls everyone possum and has a gift and craft shop called Ravenscroft’s Gift & Craft Shoppe that sells windchimes and dreamcatchers and disgusting jams and pinecones with glued-on eyes. His gran’s pretty nice and all, but. Ravo reckons if someone stabbed her with a knife, she’d still say ‘Ta possum’ then bleed out orange and fig marmalade.