Today was Monday, which meant school, which meant I couldn’t look for the peacocks. I walked to school with Diana, except I didn’t really walk with her because she was walking with Tom Golding and together they were slower than snails. I like Tom Golding (because he always smiles and says ‘Hi, Cassie’ and ‘See ya, Cassie’), but I don’t know much about him (because he doesn’t say anything else to me and because even though Diana is always talking to him she never talks about him).

Diana is in secondary school and I’m still in primary but we both go to the same place. This is because my town is small and only has enough kids for one school. The downhill part of the school is primary, and the uphill part is secondary. There isn’t a fence or anything between the two halves, but everybody knows that secondary starts at the downball courts. Only secondary kids play on the downball courts, and if you’re in primary the only times you can go past them are when you’re doing lunch orders or walking to the oval for PE.

At little recess on Monday I went to sit near Jonas on The Snake Stairs. I used to sit with some of the Grade Six girls but they didn’t like it when I told them how I had seen a UFO, or that my Aunt Sally can read minds. One day when I went to sit with them they all ran into the fort and didn’t come out. It took me a while to figure out that they were superheroes and had turned invisible so they could go save the world. Once I came up with that story I didn’t feel so sad about not sitting with them anymore.

The stairs are The Snake Stairs because one day last summer Miss Shilling came out of the back of the art room to wash the paint trays and saw a tiger snake go under the steps. Mr Bennett (our school principal) called the council to find it, but they couldn’t, so instead they put up signs near the steps that say:

DANGER! SNAKE!

And now Jonas is the only kid brave enough to sit there. Jonas isn’t scared of snakes. He saw one once near the river behind his house. When I asked him what he did, he said, ‘Nothing.’ He just stood there, and then the snake slid away. This story was interesting to me because before that I had never thought that doing nothing might be the best way to deal with something.

Because I’m so afraid of snakes, I can’t sit on the stairs with Jonas, so I sit on the footpath across the grass from him and we yell at each other. On Monday at little recess I yelled at Jonas, ‘What’s Buddhism?’

I thought Jonas might know something about Buddhism because he has his own computer in his room and the Internet, which is one of the reasons he knows so many facts and is always saying, ‘Did you know?’ Another reason Jonas knows facts is because his parents take him on holidays to places like Cambodia and The Mediterranean, where they go to museums and art galleries and jungles. Next week Jonas’s parents are taking him on a big overseas holiday to Europe, so he can collect even more facts about France and viaducts and pizza.

A lot of kids think Jonas’s facts are annoying, but I think they’re interesting. Jonas knows interesting facts about everything, but his favourites are shark facts. He knows more about sharks than anything else. He has shark stickers on his books and on his school bag. He has a shark hat, a shark pencil case and shark shoelaces. He knows so much about sharks that sometimes I wonder if he secretly is one.

‘It’s a religion,’ Jonas yelled back. ‘From India.’

‘But what does it do?’ I peeled my banana and put some extra oomph on the word ‘do’ to emphasise it.

‘It doesn’t do anything,’ Jonas yelled. His glasses started falling down his nose and he pushed them back up. Jonas wears glasses even though he doesn’t really need to, because he thinks they make him look like Stephen Hawking, who is his favourite scientist.

‘But church is a religion and it does things,’ I yelled back. ‘It prays, and it sings, and it passes the collection plate.’

‘Buddhism’s not like that. Buddhism’s about thinking, and thinking isn’t doing.’

‘Yes it is! Thinking is a verb!’ I knew I was right because we went over verbs last week. Verbs are doing words (like running and jumping and spitting), which meant thinking was doing. Jonas knew it, too, because he is smart and always gets A-pluses in everything. One detail you should know about Jonas, though, is that he doesn’t like to be wrong.

‘Yeah. But,’ Jonas yelled (quietly).

‘Yeah, but what?’ I yelled (loudly).

Jonas was chewing his Vegemite sandwich extra slow. I knew he was waiting for the bell to ring, like when Carlton was ahead in the Grand Final last year and they just did kick-to-kick until the siren went. Jonas is clever like that.

Jonas and I are opposites. I know a lot about reading and writing and stories, and he knows a lot about science and maths and facts. Some kinds of opposites don’t go together very well (like ovens and ice cream, or dogs and cats), but some kinds of opposites do (like knobbly jigsaw pieces and holey jigsaw pieces, or sweet and sour). Jonas and I are the good kind of opposite, and that’s the first reason we are friends. The second reason we are friends is because Jonas is eleven-turning-twelve (like me) and he can read at a Year Seven level (like me). The third reason is because both of our dads are secondary-school teachers (my dad teaches English and Jonas’s dad teaches science) and so sometimes they visit each other on weekends and after school. Jonas doesn’t call his dad ‘Dad’, though—he calls him Peter, and he calls his mum Irene. This feels right in one way, because those are their names. But it also feels not-right in another way, because usually kids call their mums and dads Mum and Dad.

And the final reason Jonas and I are friends is because last year Jonas came to my birthday party. It was a dress-up party and Jonas’s costume was Neptune, who is the God of the Sea. He had a wand shaped like a bolt of lightning and some green crepe paper that looked like seaweed around his head. We ate cake and chips and danced outside until it got dark. It was the best birthday I’ve ever had, which is a big thing to say, since I had already had ten birthdays in my life. But that was the only one so far where I’ve danced outside at night with the God of the Sea.

Because Jonas is my friend I decided to change the subject to save him from not-knowing more about Buddhism. So I took William Shakespeare’s feather out of my bag and showed it to him.

‘Cool,’ Jonas yelled.

‘Do you want to help me look for some peacocks?’ I yelled.

‘Okay,’ Jonas yelled back.

And then the bell rang, and little recess was over, and Jonas was a Peacock Detective, and this story could keep going.