One thing for sure. I was no chance of beating Martin without help. So straightaway I joined the after-school swimming sessions that Mr Heatherington, our PE teacher, was running for anyone who wanted to prepare for the carnival.
Martin didn’t show up, of course. He thought he didn’t have to practise to thrash the rest of us. And he was right. Besides, he had his real swimming club outside of school to train with.
My only hope was that he wasn’t anywhere near in full training mode yet. To have any chance at all, I knew I had to catch him off guard. It’s not that I’m a bad swimmer, I guess. It’s just that I’ve never thought much about it before. Just jump in and go like crazy is my method. But Mr Heatherington showed me what I was doing wrong with my strokes and how I could kick slower but smarter and still go faster! After a few sessions, I was swimming better than ever before!
Meanwhile, my plan in class that week was to keep my head down and not draw any more attention to myself. I didn’t want any more ERIC VALE – EPIC FAILS thrown at me. But it seemed that the more I tried to do everything right, the more everything went wrong!
Here are the week’s highlights of what Mr and Mrs Rodriguez would call my epic delayed successes!
MONDAY: At lunchtime I’m in the queue at the tuckshop and I’m waiting for the little Year Two kid in front of me to finish with the tomato sauce bottle. He’s squeezing and thumping it and hardly anything’s coming out. The tuckshop mum says, ‘You’ll have to put a bit more muscle in, sweetie. That one’s about done.’
Then I notice Aasha Alsufi sitting by herself under a tree and I smile at her but she just stares at me with her big brown eyes then goes back to scribbling in her diary.
Oh well, no one else had been able to get a smile or a word out of her either. When I turn back the Year Two kid is finished. Finally! So I grab the sauce bottle, aim it at my pie and give it the Iron Man’s Mother of all squeezes.
And tomato sauce spurts out of it like it’s exploding from a high pressure fire hose! While I was looking at Aasha and trying to get her to smile, the tuckshop mum must have changed the old bottle for a full one. Three rows of kids at the tuckshop are spattered with sauce. It looks like a massacre!
Miss Cahill is on playground duty. She glances over.
She starts shrieking, ‘Get the first aid kit! Call an ambulance! Don’t panic, anyone! Evacuate the school! Run for your lives!’ Everyone else is screaming or shouting stuff at me. Not nice stuff. All except Chewy. He’s just wiping sauce off himself and off the kids around him with his sausage rolls and chomping into them.
Right beside me is Meredith Murdoch. Her glasses have a fat line of red plastered across them and it’s dribbling down her nose and cheeks. But I can still feel her eyes burning into me. Then she yells out …
TUESDAY: I accidentally leave the lid off our class ant farm after I was on roster to feed them. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if Clayton Whitman-Byrnes hadn’t brought his fancy cupcake display for Show and Tell that day. Clayton wants to be on Junior Master Chef. I think he’ll make it, too, because those cupcakes must have been really delicious. Judging by how much the ants liked them.
WEDNESDAY: Somehow Mrs Booth in the library gets me mixed up with some girl in Year One called Erin Dale, and when she’s reading the overdue books out over the intercom for the entire school to hear, she says, ‘Eric Vale. Year Five. You have two books overdue: Baby Wu Wu’s Adventure and Ducky Takes a Waddle!’
THURSDAY: I think I’ve survived the day without a disaster! Yippee! Then we have a Drama class in the last lesson and we have to act out a scene from a movie. Chewy and I are put in a group with Macie Hudson and Sasha Bronski. We want to do something from X-Men. The girls want to do something from Harry Potter. The girls win. As usual. I have to play Harry Potter. Chewy has to play Dobby the house elf because the girls reckon Chewy looks ‘just like him!’. I’m not sure this is a good thing. It could be the ears. And his size. And everything else about him.
Anyway, Macie Hudson draws a big lightning bolt on my forehead and round glasses on my face with a washable marker pen. I look stupid.
Then when the bell goes for the end of the day we discover that of course Macie picked up the wrong pen! Yes, it’s the permanent one. So I have to ride home in the bus painted up like a stupid boy wizard. Everyone laughs. Lots of people ask me if I’m looking for Platform 9 ¾. And I get challenged to about a hundred games of quidditch. They think it’s hilarious.
FRIDAY: I’m playing soccer before school. I’m a defender. The ball comes bouncing to me and because I don’t want to have any epic fails, I take a big kick at it to clear it right away from my team’s goal. But I miskick it completely and it heads for our classroom. It’s going straight at a window!
I put my hands over my ears waiting for the big crash. But it goes right through without a sound because the window is open! YEEEESSS! Thank you! A minor epic win! My luck is definitely changing at last!
I run into our classroom. There’s a bunch of girls standing around a desk. On the desk is a big cake. Or what’s left of a big cake. It must have been a birthday cake, but it’s hard to tell because it’s been completely smashed like a bomb has gone off inside it. But I can see a bit on the floor with ‘HAPP’ written on it in red icing.
And then I see another bit with ‘SOP’ on it. That bit is squished on the front of a dress. Inside that dress is Sophie Peters. She doesn’t look like she’s having a very happy birthday.
Then I notice that Sophie Peters is holding a soccer ball. My soccer ball! It’s covered in cake and cream. So is Sophie Peters. So is Li Wan. So are all the other girls. The only one not covered with gobs of cake and cream is Aasha Alsufi. That’s because she’s sitting way down the back of the classroom by herself. I smile at her. But she stares at me the same way as the other girls are. Like I’m a cake murderer!
Sophie Peters is way too nice to say it, but I know exactly what she’s thinking.
And then, just to top off the week perfectly, on Friday afternoon when I’m packing my bag to finally go home, I see the picture I drew of myself at the beginning of the year for our Who Am I? unit. It’s pinned up on the noticeboard with everyone else’s. But it’s looking worse than Chewy’s self-pootrait.
Someone’s drawn a big ‘L’ on my forehead and given me clown hair and a clown nose.
They’ve also written ‘Loser’ on my shirt.
Except they spelled it ‘Looser’.
Which is kind of funny when you think about it. But I wasn’t smiling.
I pulled it down, screwed it up and threw it in the bin. If only it was that easy to get rid of my stupid nickname!
Every spare minute I had on that weekend I spent imagining myself beating Martin Fassbender in the freestyle final at the school swimming carnival on Monday.
Positive thinking for positive results!
On Sunday night I started getting really nervous. The next day was supposed to be the scene of my epic win. But a swimming carnival was like a school assembly – just the sort of place where, if you weren’t really careful, you could actually end up having the epic-est of all epic fails.
At least I had one thing going for me. On the day I’d get to wear my brand new super-cool swimmers! Mum had gone shopping and she’d finally bought the ones I’d been bugging her about for ages. They were shiny and white with little skulls on them and yellow lightning flashes down the side. Super-cool!
Of course Mum also went and bought me some teeshirts that weren’t quite so cool. But they ended up being super-awesome compared to the pyjamas she got for me, which were the least cool thing in the entire universe. Can you believe that the top had Sweet Dreams! written on the front in tiny kisses? And the shorts were white with little teddy bears all over them!
‘Well, they were an absolute bargain, sweetie – sixty per cent off! – and I thought they’d look so cuuuuute on you. Besides, who’s going to ever see them?’
Hello, Mum! Have you noticed I’m not in a cot any more and I actually go to the toilet all by myself? Sometimes mums just don’t get it. She even made me try them on, but then I just left them on the kitchen table.
But freaky pyjamas weren’t my problem. My problem was the next day’s swimming carnival and all the things that could go wrong for me there. I knew I had to be totally prepared. Like the big sign above Chewy’s desk says, ‘If you FAIL to PREPARE, you are PREPARING to FAIL!’
I prepared this table:
By the time I’d finished drawing up my table and preparing everything for the morning it was getting late and I was pretty tired. I jumped into bed and turned off the light. I’d covered every possibility. Nothing could go wrong!
As I lay there with my eyes closed, I pictured myself slicing through the water in my new super-cool swimmers and leaving Martin and everyone else for dead. I could see myself flying down the pool. I was certain to win! No more epic fails for this Eric Vale! Time for an epic …
My alarm goes off. It’s six o’clock already! It’s still mostly dark. I hit the snooze button and roll out of bed. I’m half asleep but I’ve run through my preparations so many times in my head that I know exactly what I have to do without even thinking.
First I use the bathroom. Then I return to my room. I feel around for my new super-cool swimmers. I find them right where they should be – on the back of my desk chair where I left them last night. I strip off and put them on straightaway.
No chance of leaving them behind now! Then I tighten the drawstring and do it up with a special super-tight triple bow. Then I decide to give it one more knot for good measure. I grab the sides of my swimmers and yank down as hard as I can. Those babies aren’t going anywhere fast! I’m leaving nothing to chance. Already I’m feeling more relaxed!
Next I pull my sport shorts on over my new super-cool swimmers. Then I fumble around my desk and find a tube of sunscreen and start to smear it on. I can hardly keep my eyes open. I’ve covered my whole face and neck before I switch on my small desk light and lean close to the mirror.
EEEEEEEEEEK!
One of those Avatar guys is staring back at me! I’ve been using the blue sunscreen by mistake! Wait. Doesn’t matter. And you know why? Because it actually looks really good. It makes me look like a true Blue supporter. My teammates will love it. Hey, what about that? I’ve had a tiny win already! Things are really looking up! This is going to be my day!
I leave my face blue and attack the rest of my body with the clear stuff. I go over every square inch at least three times. I almost dislocate my arms and tie myself into a knot trying to do my back, but I don’t miss a spot. When I’m done I finish getting dressed and jam on my hat. No sunstroke for me!
My bag is already packed from the night before so I take it into the kitchen and fix myself some breakfast. When I’m finished I rest my head on the bench.
Half an hour later I wake up when Mum comes out to make my lunch. I drag my head up.
‘Huh? What time is it?’
‘Just past seven, sweetie. Awwwwwwwwwwww, look! You’re all blue! That is so cuuuute! You’re still my gorgeous little Smurf boy, aren’t you?’
I run to the bathroom and scrub off all the blue sunscreen and replace it with clear stuff. Back in the kitchen I shove my lunch into my bag and kiss Mum goodbye. She makes a big dopey sad face and pretends to wipe tears from her eyes when she sees I’ve been de-Smurfed. I shake my head at her.
It’s time to go and I’m spot on schedule!
I’d done everything right. I was feeling epic fail-proof. All I had to do now was beat Martin Fassbender at the annual Moreton Hill Primary School Swimming Carnival. I was thinking super positive for super positive results!
The time had come for Eric Vale to have the EPIC-EST-OF ALL EPIC WINS!
