Monday

Even though I knew it was all going to hit the fan with Waddlehead and Danielli this afternoon, I was more than happy to be entering the grounds of St. Andrew’s. This was a Mum-Free Zone, which translated into a guilt-free, end-of-guts-churning zone. No, I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty tonight, but at least for the moment I had escaped.

I walked past the bloke I winked at on Friday afternoon. He was the main man of the brothers, that’s why his statue was stuck right where everyone could see it. The front of the school looked old, like one of those posh English boarding schools. Lots of sandstone and gardens, with a bell tower on the main building that made sure everyone in the area knew how important the place was. But it was the only building like that. The rest of the school was brick and concrete, and then farther back, so no one could see them, they stuck the demountable schoolrooms. That’s exactly what St. Andrew’s was like. It thought it was a cut above the rest, but when you really got down to it, it was just the same as any other school except that it was majorly strict, and the gates that kept us in were fancy gates.

I could hear the senior quad before I got within thirty meters of it. If someone came up with a way to take the sound from boys schools and make it into fuel, they would be a trillionaire and everyone could stop freaking out about the world’s energy crisis.

I walked past the canteen and swung into the quad to find a full-scale handball competition in progress between Years 11 and 12. No doubt the brainchild of Tim and Jock, who have not yet come to terms with the fact that with the passing of every year they are moving away from childhood. They spend most of their energy trying to keep themselves at twelve.

No way that was out, man! I’m not going anywhere!

See.

Jock looked around for someone to acknowledge his cries of injustice and found me.

Willo! My hero! At which point he knelt down in his square, careful not to lose his position, and bowed.

Get up, you wanker. This is all your fault.

No way, mate, don’t you go blaming me. I only offered five bucks. I didn’t think even you’d be that cheap.

At this point the other boys joined in.

Whooo!

Nice arse, Will! How about you and me make a date for the toilets at lunchtime?

That was Tim—he always made it his job to push things too far. The other boys followed.

You’d want to be careful the boys on Oxford Street don’t track you down.

Well, it wasn’t as if the Lakeside girls were exactly throwing their phone numbers out the window.

Yeah, but I heard they were throwing up!

At this point they were falling into one another they were laughing so hard. I walked away to dump my bag to the sound of their triumphant hand-slapping, shaking my head as I went.

This was exactly how it had been for the past four years. The usual piss-taking and shaking of hands that greeted every morning. This was what I knew. This was where I belonged.

I came over and took my place on the line. Jock was still refusing to get out and no amount of yelling from the other blokes was going to shift him. Eventually the game started again. The St. Andrew’s boys were a mixed crew, the seniors even more so because we had blow-ins from other schools for Years 11 and 12. It was one of the selling points in the glossy brochure the school tried to flog every year: St. Andrew’s, a college that celebrates diversity or some such crap. And it was crap because most of the time all they ever went on about was making sure we all looked and acted the same.

Over near Danielli’s office was where the wogs hung out. The wogs—a title they proudly gave themselves, even though Danielli always told them off about it, and he was one himself—were made up of mainly Italians and Greeks, with a spattering of Croatians. The skips—the Aussies, another title Danielli didn’t like—hung out on the seats outside the senior classrooms. They were a combination of footy-heads, a few skaters (though normally the skaters would be with the druggies) and some classic yobs. The Asians took up what was left of the seats next to the skips. Danielli didn’t get too worked up about the Asian label but he was always very careful about acknowledging their different nationalities. This was something Jock didn’t figure out until last year, when St. Andrew’s was running its own version of the Soccer World Cup. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t just have an Asian team and why they had to split into Korea, China and Japan. Then there were the Lebs—Danielli did get really worked up about that one. They hung out with the wogs and the skips, but mainly the skips, maybe because most of them played league, not soccer, who knows?

The goths and the druggies hid under the stairs of Harrigan block. There weren’t very many of them and they weren’t exactly hard-core. The extent of most of their gothdom was their dyed black hair, although the talk around the quad was that one of the Year 12 guys actually wore white makeup and black lipstick on the weekends. And the druggies, well, they were pretty harmless and didn’t do much more than smoke the occasional spliff.

That left the rejects, the kids who’d been backpackers all their school life, moving from group to group, not quite sure of where they fit in. Some of those guys ended up in the library, and others found each other and spent their senior years hanging out together anywhere they could find a clear space.

Us? We took up three long seats underneath the walkway from the quad to the library. We were mongrels, a hybrid of all the groups: a couple of footy-heads, soccer players, good students and musos, assorted Filipinos, Lebs, wogs and skips. We were the easygoing crowd. We did well enough at school, which meant we had to fight hard not to end up in the nerd category. At various times in our school careers we had all engaged in several incidents which guaranteed our we may be smart but we are certainly not geeks reputation.

Me, I was a soccer-playing skip, an honorary wog, though I’d pulled out this season. I just wasn’t interested. Something else Danielli had given me a hard time about. I thought about what he had said about me being different from last year. I didn’t know what to think about that. Danielli and the others reckoned I was going through a difficult time. No doubt they’d collect the moon incident as further evidence to support this finding.

I just wish they’d get over it. So I’ve changed, who cares! But I wasn’t going to think about that until 3:30 p.m.