The Trouble with Sauce (5 page)

‘David Perry, Mark Hughes, Julie Fox, report to the principal’s office.’ Announcements all day, every day. Even at home Jonty could hear the voice of the principal’s assistant in his head, summoning students to his office — but he was never one of them.

Mannington High became quieter and quieter. Once, lunchtime had been a riot of noise: girls screaming as tomato sauce blood bombs splattered on their uniforms; boys shouting through a game of footy, balls flying around. Now Jonty was reduced to kicking a ball against a wall on his own, because there was no one to play with.

He decided to kick a few practice shots at goal on the school soccer pitch. He would have to pretend there was a goalkeeper. He kicked the ball, chased after it and dribbled his way round, imagining himself in the 2014 World Cup Final in Brazil,
leading Australia’s against-the-odds charge to victory.

But there was no victory. Jonty’s imagination crashed. There was no World Cup stadium, no cheering crowds, no Brazilian defenders to get past. There wasn’t even a pitch anymore. It had been dug and planted with rows of seeds.

Two Year 12 students intercepted him immediately. Jonty recognised them: they used to be the forwards on the school rugby team. They picked him up and carried him backwards away from the field, leaving his ball on the grass.

‘What are you doing? Where’s the pitch gone?’ Jonty asked, kicking his legs in the air.

Year 12 were developing a modified form of wheat, adding fish genes to it to enhance the protein content. The new grains had been planted on the pitch. The forwards from the rugby team were now protecting the experimental crop.

‘We are expecting it to further enhance our brain power,’ one of the forwards added, as they walked with Jonty between them.

‘Why are you wasting time with a ball?’ the other asked as if it were the strangest thing in the world.

‘Have you been sent to the principal?’ they said.

Jonty shook his head.

‘This is a controlled area,’ they announced, and walked even faster. ‘You’re not allowed here.’

They dumped him back on the hard schoolyard surface and ran back to the pitch to scare some birds away.

‘Stupid rugby players,’ Jonty muttered to himself. You wouldn’t catch soccer players planting a pitch with seeds.

Now, even more bored, he wandered over to the school canteen. The students waiting to be served stood silently looking ahead in a straight line. They ordered their salad roll or veggie burger and squirted tomato sauce neatly onto it. Then, one by one, they moved off, ate their food, put the wrappers carefully in the bin and sat down to read a book. It was like they were on a conveyor belt in a factory.

Jonty plonked himself on the ground with his head in his hands. He missed his friends, the noise, the blood bombs. He was the only real person left in the world. ‘You’re a bunch of robots!’ he shouted at the students reading in unison on the library steps. No one answered. They didn’t even look up. There was no noise at all. All he could hear was the sound of pages being turned.

Suddenly, the library doors flew open and shouts rang out. Jonty jumped up, relieved that something was actually happening. Prune de Luca and Nathaniel Bennett fell through the doors of the library, pushed by Henry the Octopus. He had thrown them off the computers. Prune had been
‘wasting’ valuable study time by reading a website about unicorn sightings. Nathaniel had been trying to read an article on advanced kinematics.

‘Get off and give the computer to someone who can do something intelligent with it!’ Henry sneered.

Jonty ran up, determined to teach Henry a lesson. All his frustration at being alone, shunned and bored boiled over. He was bursting to land a punch on Henry. Bounding up the steps, he flew at Henry, hoping to flatten him.

Henry simply stepped back into the library and swung the doors shut again. Jonty crashed into the glass and dropped to the ground. Through the doors, Henry looked down at him shaking his head. And there was Boris next to Henry with a smirk on his face.

‘That was smart,’ said Nathaniel sarcastically. He put his hand out to help Jonty up. Jonty thought about pulling him down. Nathaniel was so small, it wouldn’t take much. But he didn’t: he was grateful that anyone was speaking to him.

‘This school has gone completely crazy,’ he said to Nathaniel and Prune.

‘Of course, children wanting to learn would be a strange concept to you,’ Nathaniel said.

‘But they’re all ignoring me. It’s like I don’t exist!’

‘Welcome to my world,’ Prune said. ‘The whole school’s been ignoring me or teasing me since we started here. This —’ She put her hands out and turned around. ‘This is better, because it’s only ignoring. No names, no tricks …’

‘No imaginary study groups,’ Nathaniel added.

‘We’ve got to do something!’ Jonty said. ‘It isn’t right.’

‘And what do you propose?’ Nathaniel waited for an answer.

Jonty thought, while Nathaniel stood there with his eyes wide open. ‘I can’t think of anything,’ he admitted.

Prune pulled her hair away from her face and looked hard at him. She felt a bit sorry for Jonty, but not too much.

‘Come on, Prune. It’s time for English. And further educational humiliation,’ Nathaniel said.

Jonty watched them go. There was no point in his going to English. He probably wouldn’t understand anything and he had more important things to think about. He had to come up with something to do. Croxall thought he was thick, Boris called him a mouse and Nathaniel reckoned he would never think of anything to do about the school. Jonty would prove them all wrong.

*  *  *  

English was even worse than Nathaniel expected. Everyone had completed homework on
The role of women in Shakespeare’s middle comedies.

‘Excellent work, everyone,’ announced Ms Brown. She sat on the front edge of her desk and beamed. She didn’t have to worry about where she sat now. There were no more drawing pins.

She handed back their homework. ‘Boris — fascinating insights on Rosalind in
As You Like It —
98 per cent. Anastasia — I liked your feminist approach. 97 per cent. Miranda — you took an unusual angle and it paid off. 88 per cent.’

‘What?’ Miranda looked up sharply. ‘What was wrong with it?’

‘Nothing,’ said Ms Brown. ‘It was excellent!’

‘So why did I only get 88 per cent?’ With a look of fury, Miranda leapt to her feet.

‘I need at least 90. Tell me what was wrong with it!’ she demanded.

Ms Brown swallowed.

‘Miranda, sit down,’ Boris said calmly.

She didn’t move. ‘She thinks she’s smart, but what does
she
know?’ she growled.

Anastasia joined in. ‘Sit down, Miranda!’

‘But —’

‘Ms Brown’s giving out the marks as she sees fit,’ Boris said firmly. ‘We are here to learn; not to question results.’

‘Here to learn,’ Mike added. But Miranda didn’t move. Clenching her teeth, she stared straight ahead.

‘Ms Brown, I think Miranda might need to see the principal,’ Boris suggested.

‘Mmm, right — yes, okay,’ Ms Brown said. ‘Whatever you think.’

‘I’ll take her.’ Anastasia stood up, grabbed Miranda’s arm and led her away.

Miranda twitched as she walked. ‘It’s not good enough,’ she muttered. ‘It’s not good enough.’

Nathaniel and Prune looked at each other. Perhaps Jonty was right. Something had to be done. The students were moving beyond weird to downright scary.

With his arms folded, Nathaniel sat in his bedroom, looking at the computer. It was Sunday night. He used to spend Sunday nights studying, looking over his homework and enjoying all the maths equations he had mastered. He loved it when they suddenly made sense to him, but it was weeks since any equations had made sense.

He didn’t have homework anymore. The teachers never set any. Somehow everyone simply found out what was expected. When it came to learning, classes were just the tip of the iceberg. For the first time he could remember, Nathaniel had nothing to do.

He sighed, looked around his bedroom and started tapping his hands on the desk. He was feeling … he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He wasn’t tired. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t angry or annoyed. What was it?

He leant back in the chair until he was balanced on the two back legs. He reached out and touched the edge of the desk with one hand to steady himself, then he let go. He tried to maintain his balance with his arms, but he wobbled, leant too far, then tipped right over and crashed onto the floor.

Downstairs, his mother heard the crash and ran up to his room.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked, when she saw him sprawled on the floor, looking at the ceiling. It was most inelegant.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m — bored!’

That was the feeling. For the first time in his life, Nathaniel was bored.

‘Oh dear,’ gasped Mrs Bennett and walked out of the room. ‘It’s started.’

She would have to speak to his father. ‘Bored schoolboy today,’ he always said, ‘graffiti artist tomorrow.’

Nathaniel stayed on the floor, thinking he had never really looked at his bedroom ceiling properly before. Finally he got to his feet, picked his chair up and sat down again.

He browsed through a few of his favourite sites, but without anything to research, it was boring. He decided to check his MySpace page and almost fell off his chair again, when he saw that he had a message. Someone had invited him to join the
Mannington Liberation Front.
He visited the group’s page.

This had to be Jonty’s work — only he would misspell
hydrochloric.
At first Nathaniel was annoyed that Jonty was being friendly because all his other friends had dropped him. Then he felt a glimmer of satisfaction that Jonty had been reduced to organising a meeting for real in the Misery Mall café, instead of joke meetings.

His satisfaction ended when the image of Miranda’s face from English class flashed through his mind. She seemed so crazy it sent a shiver down his spine. They had to do something.

Nathaniel wanted to learn again. He wanted to be top of the class. As much as he resented Jonty for
all the old tricks he had pulled, this Mannington Liberation Front was his best bet for finding out what was going on. He also knew exactly what was going to happen in Maths on Monday morning. His worst nightmare was about to come true.

By the time he’d had breakfast, got to school and arrived at the classroom door, he knew for certain it wasn’t a horrible dream. Monday morning was really happening. He paused outside the room for a moment, leant against the wall, took a depth breath and stepped inside.

‘What?’ he said out loud. The desk allocation had already taken place and Mr Croxall wasn’t even there.

There was a perfectly neat, but slightly smaller, semicircle of desks pushed up closer to the teacher’s desk. Each one was positioned precisely, without any chalk rings around the legs. On each desk was exactly the same pile of books. Behind each desk sat a student. All the boys had their hair neatly combed and gelled. The girls all had their hair pulled back in a ponytail. Their ties looked like they had been made in the same factory with exactly the same size knot. They all sat with their hands together, resting on the desk. At exactly the same time, each head turned to look at Nathaniel as he entered, and then turned to the back of the classroom.

Nathaniel looked too. This wasn’t the nightmare he expected. He had expected that when Mr Croxall did the desk allocation, he would have the last desk. This was even worse. Right at the back, three desks were pushed together with a large chalk circle drawn on the ground around them. It was the Dumb Circle and Nathaniel knew exactly who it was for. His face went bright red. He could feel the roots of his hair clench. All the other students were staring at him with the tiniest smile on their thin lips.

He looked down, walked to the back of the room and took his seat in the Dumb Circle. He placed his notebook on the desk. He would probably not need it in class, but he’d got it out anyway. He had always been proud of its neat appearance. There were no markings, no scribbles or worn edges. He got his pen out and began to write carefully on the cover in large letters.

He didn’t look up until a hand appeared in front of his eyes. Prune was offering him a crystal. Her face was bright red and her hands were shaking. The silence in the room and the sight of Nathaniel sitting there alone at the back had stung her. He took the crystal and pressed it into his hand as she sat down. He had to admit that, as he held it, he felt better.

The next moment, in swept Mr Croxall. He paused when he saw the arrangement. A smile crept across his lips as he walked around the perfectly
neat semicircle of desks. He tried to find a mistake, but it was faultless.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘some initiative. Excellent.’

Nathaniel wondered where Jonty was. Surely he was going to turn up. He wanted Jonty to be there. He glanced over at Prune and could tell she was thinking the same thing.

They heard the sound of footsteps running in the corridor and suddenly Jonty belted through the doorway, panting. He almost fell over as he saw the new arrangement.

‘Townsend,’ said Mr Croxall, ‘I think even you can work out which desk is yours. Hurry up.’

As Jonty sat down in the Dumb Circle, Prune reached out and pushed a crystal into his hand. He looked at her, smiled and closed his fingers over it.

Nathaniel waited for Jonty to look across at him, too. Jonty seemed afraid of what he might do to him. Nathaniel hadn’t seen him look like that before. He was so big and strong, what could he be afraid of?

Slowly Nathaniel turned his notebook round so Jonty could see the cover. It had the words ‘Mannington Liberation Front’ written on it in big letters. Jonty’s sweaty face burst into a smile. That was all he needed to know.

Nathaniel nodded, feeling better after the humiliation of the Dumb Circle. He realised that if
anyone could sort out what was going on at their school, it was Jonty.

‘Do I need to call the roll?’ Mr Croxall asked.

‘It’s done, sir,’ Miranda announced. After her Friday flip-out, she was quite calm again.

‘It seems as if I’m almost out of a job,’ said Mr Croxall. He did not see the smile that flicked across Boris’s face.