2

Just because you’re older than me, just because you’re an ‘authority figure’ doesn’t mean I’m going to automatically respect you. You know what I mean? I really like English, I really do, but every time Miss Shaw opens her mouth I just can’t take her seriously. And not because she’s a chick – my mum’s staunch as. You’d better listen to her or she’ll waste you, even if she’s a short-arse. I can’t respect Miss Shaw because all it takes is a couple of jabs – not actual punches, I’m not looking to get expelled, I’m not that stupid – just a sneer, a rolled eye, a little joke – and she’s all:

Boo-hoo, boo-hoo,

Detention for you,

Now, go see the principal too.

That was all me by the way – Miss Shaw wouldn’t know a rhyme scheme if she fell face first into it. Is it just me or does that make you think of muff diving? Miss Shaw: the lesbo poet teaching muffs tongue twisters.

She smells

Like sea shells

The muff of Miss Shaw …

Purple prose, eh? BOOM! See? Like I need her to teach me anything.

She’s one of those teachers who says, At least they’re reading, and assigns us the latest supernatural romance.

It’s bullshit.

You don’t have doctors giving fatties junk food saying, At least they’re eating, do you?

So instead of a proper teacher who can discuss with me why Huxley had a hard-on for zippers or why Winston finally broke in 1984 – you know, an actual lesson – I’m stuck here listening to a summary of the human/werewolf/vampire love triangle.

If either of them had any pride in their species they’d have snapped that girl’s neck for being a whiny bitch.

Miss Shaw spins a yarn saying that the book is good because the characters are our age, they’re going through what we’re going through, we can relate. Like half of us could relate to a white chick with a thing for dogs and dead dudes.

I reckon Miss Shaw just wants to be sixteen again. I reckon she has a hard-on for the young guys in the movies. You tell me what the difference is between an old fulla getting his rocks off looking at teen porn on the internet and a bunch of dried up old biddies creaming themselves when a sixteen-year-old werewolf takes off his shirt. Pedos, all of them.

I hope Miss Shaw doesn’t ask me to ‘participate’. All I bloody need is another detention for telling teachers what I think. Not that any of them really want to know what I think. I reckon some of them are amazed I think at all.

Now before you dismiss what I’ve got to say with an eye roll, a tut, and a shake of the head, let me just say that I have nothing against education. Or even teachers (well, some of them). But you’ve got to admit that some of the teachers see us as enemies too. How about the time when we were dissecting rats and Mr James goes Hey look at this and he pulls the penis up and snips it off and all the guys in the class double over and he laughs? Or Miss Barnes, who will throw whatever’s in her hand at you if you’re talking? Or Miss Russell, who threw that basketball at me really hard when I was telling some chick about my skills, branded me in the head with it, and then, smart as, goes, Those skills, eh Bugs? Last term, even Miss Shaw said to us You’re really nice kids, I’m sure. It’s a pity you’re all going to fail.

That’s the kind of shit we put up with every day, you know?

 

And I like to learn. Finding out how the world and shit works is actually interesting to me. But high school, man. High school. I’m just not sold on it. To me, high school is a classic example of a dystopia. I’m not being smart either. Seriously. Check it out:

Conformity:

Green College V-neck jersey.

White formal shirt (must be worn with tie).

Green College tartan skirt (not rolled at the waist, must hang 10 cm above the ground when kneeling).

Black stockings.

Plain, black, flat, lace-up shoes (no ballet/sneaker/skateboard/ casual/sporting type footwear; no coloured sections, coloured trim or coloured laces).

Hair ties must be plain black, white, brown, red or green.

Make-up and fingernail polish is not allowed.

Restricted freedoms:

See above, plus add in school hours and schedules.

Constant surveillance:

Teachers everywhere, and we’re one year-nine-gets-punched-in-the-toilets away from CCTV.

Censorship …

 

‘Be quiet, the lot of you!’

Sometimes, Miss Shaw has the best timing, I swear.

‘Now I know some of you are still in holiday mode …’ Miss Shaw looks straight at me when she says this, no shit. At least someone noticed that I was gone. ‘But you all need to start thinking about what you’re going to be doing next year.’ Miss Shaw wags a course book at us like she’s telling off a naughty dog. ‘Course planning, OK people? Think carefully about your choices. Year thirteen is important.’

Year thirteen. Now there’s a good name for a dystopia. After thirteen years they are unleashed upon the world. Can they survive? Can the world survive them?

Thirteen. You know in some places around the world there’s no such thing as a thirteenth floor, they just skip right over to the fourteenth. Thirteen echoes back to Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane – it is betrayal, it is death. It is the number of years that I will have served before they churn me out as a fully fledged automaton, marching in time with the rest of the world.

Miss Shaw gives a pile of papers to each of the geeks sitting in the front row – take one, pass them back, take one, pass them back – we’ve done it so many times, in so many classes, for so many years that we don’t notice it any more. It’s just automatic; we’re cogs doing exactly what they expect of us. When the pile arrives at me I hold it in both hands, wondering what would happen if I just threw the lot in the air, or ripped them up. What would happen then? Would my small act of rebellion ripple out across the school? Would there be chaos? For a short while would I be triumphant? Would my name be whispered beside lockers, a kind of nod and wink to those who resist? Would it be detention or my head trapped in a cage with a hungry rat? But I’ve been conditioned so well that I’ve taken one and passed them back before I even realise it. How much more of my life is just a reflex, a habit? Are the choices on this page actually real, or am I just following my programming?

Fuck. Classic dystopia. Tick, tick, tick, tick and tick.

‘So, to make sure you guys actually read the book and fill out the form we’re going to spend the last twenty minutes going through the course books, OK?’

Translation: You guys take care of yourselves while I read my vampire kiddy porn and think of the boys in the First XV.

I look out the window. A group of year eights are being led around the school by a kid who has barely been at the school six months – her uniform still hangs around her body as if it has been taken from the packet this morning; new and unbroken, like her spirit. She shares the excitement of the kids she leads – hell, it was only a year ago that she was being led herself – look at the buildings! Look at the field! Look at the gym, the hall, the tuckshop! All so new and big and grown up!

Grown up, because that’s all you want to be then. Here I am about to lock in the direction of my life and I would trade it in a second to be one of them – new and unmoulded. Those endless Saturdays just skating through life, not realising what I had. Maybe that’s why Miss Shaw likes to read about teenagers; she thinks her life was less complicated then. And I guess life is for the teenagers in the novels that she reads, but that’s fiction, not real life.

 

I was barely older than that kid, that time that the teachers rounded up all us kids – actually rounded us up – no shit, it was like the teachers were header dogs. I reckon you could hear the principal blowing on a shepherd’s whistle and calling out Get in behind Mr Jackson … Stay Miss Barnes … Come around, come around …

Anyway, there’s all us kids – OK, all us Māori kids – rounded up for a ‘seminar’ on Māori ‘achievement’. What it really was – a bunch of loser seniors saying how hard they’d worked to pass. Just pass. And then they hit us over the head with statistics about how most of us would fail; most of us would amount to sweet F.A. And it was supposed to be motivating. Well, I bet there were a couple of people in there like me who wanted it even more after we were told that we couldn’t have it.

But I could see it in the room. Everyone else was slouching in their chair; they had this look in their eyes – defeat. See, if they’d read 1984, they would have known that it was Big Brother just trying to keep them down. Then maybe more of us would feel the urge to push against their stats because we would see that it is all about control. Them controlling us.

OK, yeah, if we had all read the book, then I guess we’d all have felt defeated, knowing for certain that the state would crush us no matter what we did. So maybe if we had just read up to the sexy parts, you know, the meetings in the park? Yeah, the fully ‘adult’ version, if you know what I mean. If we’d just read up to the part when they believed that they could be free, maybe we’d have believed it too?

This is how I see it: you know when you’re a little kid and they teach you to high jump with that scissor kick thing? And apart from the kids that run from the right even though they’re goofy and knock the pole down no matter the height, most of the kids are fine and clear it. Until it gets too high, and now everyone’s like that goofy kid. That’s when the teacher goes Let me show you the Fosbury Flop – and it’s like a magic trick: you can sail right over even if it seems way too high. That’s what they should be teaching us: how to clear the bar, not how high it is above our heads. That’s what I reckon, anyway.

On the way out Jez said to me: What’s the point in trying if I’m gonna suck anyway, eh Bugs?

 

I flick through the course book, marking the pages of the courses I will apply to take.

‘Bugs. What have you got next?’

Stone Cold sits behind me. So it turns out that she’s in my classes, not Jez’s; wasn’t that a pleasant surprise? They have home room and we all have life skills together, but for the rest of the day I have his monkey on my back. Awesome.

‘Bugs …’

I can feel her breath on the back of my neck. I want to lift my shoulder blades up, push my collar up to my hair and protect that little strip of skin from her mouth, but I don’t want her to see that she affects me.

‘Chem.’

‘Oh cool. Me too.’

‘Bugs, Charmaine.’ Miss Shaw loves it when she can break out her authoritarian voice. ‘Are you two going to be gossiping for the rest of the class?’

‘Oh we weren’t gossiping, Miss. We were discussing what will happen next, y’know, in life? I thought that’s what we were meant to be doing, thinking about the future Miss?’

That shuts Miss Shaw right up. Stone Cold has this way of talking to adults like she’s their equal. It’s kind of cool, I guess. Me, I think that kind of stuff but don’t say it, because however stupid or misguided an adult is, they’re still an adult. I’m still going Yes Miss No Sir Take one pass them back – that’s what I’m programmed to do.

‘Bugs, do you ever listen?’

Stone Cold is standing at my desk, her books held against her flat-as hip.

‘The bell? Chemistry? Come on.’

Me and Stone Cold walk ‘together’ to chem. I say ‘together’ like that because we’re not really ‘together’. To be ‘together’ kind of implies that it’s voluntary for both of us.

‘It’s just so good to have someone to hang with. In class.’

We walk past the common room. Jez is sitting on the big overstuffed armchair that the dean brought in from her bach. Jez raises his eyebrow at us. I nod back and Stone Cold does a strange little flutter with her fingers, one of those toodle-oo waves they do in TV shows from the olden days.

In chem we have assigned seats, so I take my place way back in the back row by the window while Stone Cold sits by herself at the front. At least I’ll have chem to myself.

Our teacher, Mr Young, is anything but. He’s one of the teachers who remembers my mum from when she went to this school. In my first class with him, he called me by my mother’s name. For once I was glad for the chorus that followed me: It’s Bugs Sir. BUGS. Even then it took a couple of terms before he got used to it. Maybe it’s the years of teaching that’s done his memory in. Too many Kellys and Marcias and Fionas, too many Bretts and Garys and Justins: our names have faded and thinned like his old pink shirt tucked into his brown polyester pants.

‘All right class. As you know, we have some year eights touring around the school. That means today’s class is going to be less about me and more about you. Yes, welcome to the exciting world of revision.’

Stone Cold puts her hand up. Mr Young looks at her as if he is unsure if she is really there or if she is a trick of his memory.

‘Sir, I can’t revise something I haven’t learnt.’

‘Indeed. You cannot know what you do not know …’

Mr Young writes the sentence in big letters on the board up the front and stares at it.

‘Sir!’

Mr Young turns around and seems startled to see us. I make the mistake of laughing.

‘Bugs.’ He clicks his fingers at me. ‘You and the new girl …’

‘Charmaine.’ Stone Cold says her name like she’s sick of hearing it.

‘Right, sit next to Charmaine and get her up to speed, OK?’

I just look at him, like he’s in some foreign film and I’m having trouble with the subtitles.

‘What’s wrong? This will be good practice for you, for when you’re a teacher.’

A teacher? Why on earth would he think I’d want to be that? Has anyone noticed anything I’ve done in the past four years that I’ve been here? Has any of it screamed I want to be a teacher? To rub it in, Stone Cold says, ‘I can see you as a teacher,’ and her smile is a hard slash across her face, her lips pressed tightly together, and I know what she really means is: I can see you as a loser, as a peddler of rules and outdated ideas. I can see you stuck in this hick town, I can see you Bugs – a tiny little insect just waiting to be squashed.

‘Ow, that hurt!’ Stone Cold pulls her hand to her chest and rubs where my textbook connected with her hand.

‘Sorry, it slipped.’

Mr Young is putting on his lab coat. It is dark blue, so he looks more like a mechanic than a mad scientist.

‘Here’s the scene, folks. You all try to look intelligent and studious …’ He fills a balloon with hydrogen, ties it off and lets it float to the ceiling. ‘And I’ll provide the theatrics.’

I remember this. When I did my tour, I remember shuffling into this classroom, still reeling from the size of the school. And the students! I honestly would have thought that some of the seniors were teachers if it weren’t for the uniforms. We’d shuffled into chemistry straight from physics (where you could put your hands on a plasma globe and have your hair stand on end – that was really like a sci-fi movie) to … a balloon. Whoop-de-doo. Then Mr Young lit an ice block stick and attached it to the end of a long ruler and inched it close to the balloon and …

BANG!

We’d all jumped, and the senior kids behind us snickered. It had all been over in seconds, but in my mind it had slowed right down – I could see the flame touch, the gas ignite and expand, the rubber of the balloon collapse as the flames stretched out and around and under and then nothing – exhausted, spent, gone. What impressed me most was that something ordinary, something that you played with as a child, had the potential to be something else, something deadly. Yeah, potential.

I was suckered into chem by parlour tricks and flame licks and now I’m revising molarity calculations with a bitch.

‘What are you laughing at, Bugs?’ Stone Cold has an annoying way of saying my name; she kind of pops the B.

‘Nothing. This is boring. Do you want to do an experiment?’

Stone Cold follows me as I walk up to the supply room behind the board.

‘What are you doing, Bugs and …’ Mr Young snaps his fingers at Stone Cold.

‘Charmaine, Sir.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I’m getting some magnesium and a Bunsen burner, Sir.’

‘Ah! I cannot let students just help themselves, I will get the supplies you ... hello young chemists.’

The first group of year eights walk in and Mr Young is no longer interested in us. We have the supply closet to ourselves. I grab a Bunsen burner, the gas hose, some tongs. I find some magnesium and snip a bit off from the roll. Stone Cold lingers by the glassware.

‘Grab one of those dishes so we can weigh the magnesium …’

Stone Cold grabs a few test tubes instead.

‘These would be awesome for shots.’

She shoves a test tube down between her breasts.

‘Here,’ she says, handing me two, ‘Put these in your bra.’

I look at the test tubes and then back at Stone Cold – two?

‘Your tits are bigger than mine. Just shove them in while he’s not looking.’

She rolls her eyes at me. She’s opening the buttons on my shirt and before I can protest the cool glass slides between my bra and my skin.

‘Look, if Sir catches us then he’ll be in bigger trouble for looking at our tits then we’ll be in for taking a couple test tubes.’

BANG! The flame has finally met the balloon, and I scramble to do up my buttons as Stone Cold, cool as, goes out of the supply cupboard to smile and clap with the rest of the class.

‘And now one of our students will perform an experiment for you. Bugs?’

I struggle out of the supply cupboard with the equipment clutched to my chest. Everyone in the room is looking at me. Stone Cold is no help; she just stares along with them.

‘Hands up who likes fireworks?’ Every hand goes up. ‘Come along, Bugs, set it up on my station, where everyone can see.’

Mr Young takes the Bunsen from me and I pull my chest away just a fraction in case he brushes my breasts by mistake. I want to fold my arms and hide my chest, but he holds out the tongs and the magnesium to me.

‘Dazzle them.’

I light the burner and adjust the flame so that it burns a clean blue.

‘Don’t look directly at it,’ I say as I plunge the metal strip into the hottest part of the flame. It burns so brightly white that even from the corner of your eye it flashes behind your eyelids for longer than the actual reaction.

I put the tongs down on the pile of magnesium oxide as the class claps, and I notice that Stone Cold is beside me taking my bow.

‘Chemistry, folks. It can explain many of the world’s mysteries. Thank you, Bugs …’ Mr Young looks at Stone Cold. Don’t acknowledge her, Sir, she didn’t do anything.

But before he can say anything, Stone Cold’s big-arse lips are flapping. ‘And Char-MAINE.’ Each syllable dripping with sweet venom.