We flew back to the present day.
It was still Friday. I walked into the playground.
From the corner of my eye I saw the benches in the covered area. Safe, shadowy, quiet, out of the way. The perfect place for a hostile, isolated kid with a throbbing amygdala. The benches seemed to be calling my name. I could see shy kids sitting there. There was that girl Amy with the glasses, and the other usuals. I wanted to sit with them, but I forced myself to turn away.
Things were becoming clearer to me.
I had mysteries to solve. The biggest one was the mystery of me.
And somehow, the mystery of me was connected to the biggest mystery in the universe: the mystery of Time.
I needed to get my displacement under control. And I had to find out more about my mum. The only thing to do was to win myself some more time.
I was on the verge of entering Twilight—from there, it was a one-way street to Nowhen. Ms Blit said that there was no point hiding at home.
‘You need to learn how to live a normal life, how to cope with stress, how to build up a support network, and how to deal with difficult people and situations without losing control. And you need to learn all that right now,’ she said. ‘It’s the only thing that will buy us time.’
First, I tried to twitch my zygomaticus muscles into active service. Nothing happened. I pulled out my Steadtler Norris HB and stuck it in my mouth sideways. It helped. Now I could feel where those muscles were.
Ms Blit had warned me against leaving the pencil in my mouth. She said it made me look crazy. So I just kept it in there for ten seconds and then took it out again, hoping my smile would stay in place. I practised making my eyes bigger, to work the oculi and labii muscles.
I tried to remember people’s names as I walked past them in the playground.
‘Hi, Arthur Desmond Kwan. Hello, Stefanie Elizabeth Honeyfield. How’s things? Hey, Adam David Grishin. You okay?’ Then I remembered that Ms Blit had told me to try it with first names only. ‘Yo, Lauren. Hey, Rebecca. What’s up? Hi, Chris. How’s it going?’
Some of them ignored me, but I reckon I got a half-friendly grunt from two or three of them. I was smiling. I was using people’s names. What else? Oh yes! Be interested in things.
I noticed that Cheryl Wolowski was doing a cat’s cradle thing with elastic strings.
‘Hi, Cheryl. What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘By the way, in case you’ve forgotten my name most people call me Stinky Poo.’
She looked at me curiously. It’s hard to be rude to someone who’s rude to themself.
I remembered a really good rule that Ms Blit had taught me. When you walk through a playground or a party, always aim for clusters of people in odd numbers: three or five or seven. The chances are high that one member will be feeling left out of the conversation and will be happy to talk to you.
There were five kids by the basketball net. They were talking about something they had seen on TV. One kid— I didn’t know his name—was standing slightly away from the others. Perhaps he was too shy to join in. He had some cards in his hands.
‘Hi, mate. What are those cards?’ I said, nodding at him. ‘Do you collect them?’
He showed me one bearing an image of some sort of train.
‘I collect Japanese bullet train cards. I’ve got more than a hundred. Wanna see?’
I kept nodding slowly.
He talked for the next eight minutes about his collection. It was incredibly boring, but I was really good. I kept smiling and working my trapezius muscle—also known as nodding.
He looked pitifully grateful. Clearly bullet trains were the only thing he could talk about and he had never found anyone with the patience to listen to him before.
‘Thanks,’ I said, holding out my hand.
He smiled and handed me a card. ‘I’ve got two of these. You can have one,’ he said.
‘Yeah, maybe sometime,’ I said.
‘You want to come to my place and see my card collection?’
I felt almost like a normal kid. I was going to conquer this.
Before the bell rang for the end of break time, I went to the drama studio where the school chess club was meeting. Ms Blit told me that since I had trouble with verbal things I should try non-verbal activities.
Do you know the best way to play chess?
With pauses, that’s how. Lots of pauses. Everything that happens in chess is followed by a pause. Somebody makes a move, and then there’s a pause. The other guy makes a move, and there’s a pause.
Also, you need to be incredibly clever to win, and I’m incredibly clever. (Have I mentioned that before?) Chess suited me perfectly.
Although I didn’t win (the other player was more experienced), I was quite sure that I would eventually be the school chess champ, if not the champ for the whole district of Easterpark North. Life was going to be okay.
The latter part of Friday morning was taken up by biology class with Mrs Stele and I was feeling remarkably calm. Mrs Stele was quite strict about silence in class, and this played straight into my hands.
I spent most of the lesson ‘chatting’ with John McCloud. We passed an exercise book between us and wrote notes to each other. My almost-four-second displacement was no problem at all.
It turned out that John was also an Everworld Combat Plus Special Edition fan. Can you believe it? His characters even fought my characters regularly. In fact, he had killed several of mine the other night while I was sleeping on the carpet.
By lunchtime, when John and I walked down the steps to the playground, I was feeling more relaxed than ever before.
Then Melanie Peet ran up to me.
‘Come on, Poopface. Come on, Poison Cloud,’ she said. ‘It’s time for the Void of the Year competition in the school hall. You two are the only nominees. All the kids are going. Eliza’s got a quiz ready and it’s going to be amazing.’
‘Don’t go,’ said John. ‘Just ignore her.’
‘If you don’t go, then you automatically get the title,’ she said. ‘And you’ll be branded a coward for the rest of your life.’
‘Don’t go,’ John repeated. ‘I’m not going. You can’t win against people like Eliza.’
I knew he was right. But when I saw large numbers of students streaming into the hall I felt a gulp of nervousness in my throat. Would it be more stressful to face Eliza now, in front of everyone, or to run away and know that she was orchestrating all the kids in school to hate me?
With a sigh I followed Melanie Peet into the school hall. John ran away, to hide in the toilets. I’m going to keep calm, I told myself. I’m just not sure how.