My Life and Other Stuff That Went Wrong (2 page)

Sasha stares, open-mouthed. I breathe hard. I have given it everything. It is a story worth five bucks, not two. It is a movie, really. Dreamworks will probably want to buy the rights. It is the greatest story about a feral guinea pig ever told.

I look at her.

She smiles. She looks so beautiful it hurts.

‘That's a lie,' she says.

‘Huh?'

‘Tell me what really happened. Were you just born like that?'

I feel like an idiot. So I say the obvious
thing: ‘No. That's what really happened.'

‘Tom,' she says, trying to make me smile. But I won't. I'm in too deep now. I have to see this through. Otherwise she will think I am a liar, and she will never marry me, and we will never own a Labradoodle.

‘That's the truth,' I say.

She shakes her head. ‘Why would you look me in the eye and lie to me, tell me such a dumb story.'

Dumb!
She actually says the word ‘dumb'.

‘And then you don't even have the guts to admit you made it up.'

‘But I didn't!'

Sasha stands. ‘Jack was right. You are hideous. Not your toes. Just you.'

‘But –'

She vanishes through the curtain. I chase her.

‘How'd that go?' Jack asks.

‘Yeah. Great,' I say, pushing past him.

‘Sasha!' I call, but she's walking off across the playground and out of my life.

‘I'm telling everyone you're a liar!' she shouts. ‘You'll have to pay every cent back.'

‘Wait. Sasha. Please!'

She keeps walking. I've blown it. This is the worst moment of my life, until …

I feel a heavy hand on my shoulder. It spins me around.

‘I want my money. Now.' It's Brent Bunder. He is not smiling.

‘But –'

Jack is standing just behind Brent. Jack pulls the elastic waistband on his track pants forward and pours all the money out of his lunch box and into his undies.

‘You … idiot!' I say. I can't help it.

Brent turns to Jack, and Jack starts running away with all the money. I twist out of Brent's grip and sprint across the playground – one shoe on, one shoe off. Brent gives chase. I hit
the basketball courts, my bare, webbed foot slapping against the tar. I catch up with Jack and we bolt towards the front gate of the school. Jack's underpants are jingling like mad.

‘You're scrubbing that money clean,' I snarl at him and look back to see Jonah Flem, Morgan Brett, Millie Randall and Brent Bunder racing after us. And, further back, Sasha, standing with her arms crossed. My classmates, the girl I love and the school's resident giant are after my blood.

‘You're dead!' Brent Bunder screams.

So Jack and I keep running – a cheap sideshow freak and a scam artist. As we pick up speed, the coins begin to rain down from Jack's pant legs, leaving a golden trail of lies and broken dreams.

We stop at the gate to catch our breath. Jonah, Morgan, Millie and Brent are grabbing all the coins off the ground and stuffing them into their pockets. ‘We're rich!' Morgan shouts.

‘Bonehead!' Jack says, and he kicks me. As he does, one last coin drops from the leg of his pants to the ground, and I swoop on it before he does.

‘Gimme that!' Jack demands, but I back away quickly, rubbing the moisture off the coin and holding it up in the sunshine. Our last two bucks. It glints like a magical nugget of hope … and it fills me with a possibly brilliant idea.

‘Do you reckon, if I bought Sasha a sausage roll with sauce for her birthday, that'd be enough to make her want to go out with me again?'

Jack growls, runs at me and mashes me into the ground.

Rarnald the Rat is my best non-human friend. (And sometimes I like him better than I like Jack.) Rarnald has been on the run in our house for years. No matter what Mum does, she cannot catch him. He is Indestructo-Rat, with a heart as big as a horse. Tonight, though, she has had it up to here with him (about halfway up her forehead). She says Rarnald is going down, and I'm on a desperate mission to save him.

When I was little, Rarnald and I were besties. We did everything together.

Exercise.

Make each other laugh.

Eat snacks.

Perform tricks.

Rarnald was awesome.
Is
awesome. He's about five years old now, which is pretty old in rat years. If he were human he would have a hearing aid and his pants pulled up under his armpits. But he looks after himself.

‘Stop encouraging that rat, Tom!' Mum has always said. ‘Rats are disgusting. They're a health hazard. Wash your hands.'

‘But he's my friend.'

‘Don't be silly. Boys cannot be friends with rats. Go and get some real friends.'

So she set a trap. Not a Buddhist rat-trap that catches the rat alive but a giant, vicious rat-smacker. That's how angry she was. She put a chunk of tasty cheese in it, which I thought was pretty funny.

‘What are you laughing at?' she snapped as she pried back the metal smacker.

‘Nothing,' I said.

Rarnald didn't eat tasty cheese. He only liked Jarlsberg. But Mum did not need to know that.

She checked the trap every morning for weeks. ‘Still hasn't taken the bait. Maybe it's gone,' she said.

‘Yeah. Maybe,' I said, breaking a chunk of Jarlsberg off the wedge in the fridge and heading to my room.

For a while, life was sweet. My friend was safe. I even built him a little hutch out of Lego.

But, tonight, Bryce is over for dinner and I'm praying that Rarnald lays low. Bryce Smith is a ‘dental prosthetist', a false-teeth guy. Mum, for some reason, really likes him, but I keep kind of messing things up for them. Like the time Bryce gave me a job at the denture clinic and I stacked the delivery bike, spilling teeth all over the road, which were then run over by a garbage truck. Tonight, Mum has threatened me with death if I do anything wrong.

Dinner is going okay and Bryce has just
begun a story about his recent trip to Hong Kong for a tooth conference.

‘I was flying over Hong Kong Harbour, reading a fascinating article about bees,' he says, ‘when, quite to my surprise …'

Mum is slicing up a lemon meringue pie for dessert at the kitchen bench and pretending to enjoy the story when she screams, drops the knife to the floor and leaps back.

Standing there on the bench, on his two hind feet, watching her, is Rarnald.

‘Tom!' she snips.

‘Yes,' I squeak.

‘Come. And. Get. This. Raaaaaaargh!'

Rarnald makes a run for it. He scampers past the fruit bowl, executes a perfect swan dive off the kitchen bench, grabs the curtains in his tiny claws, swings to the ground, dashes under the dining table, making Bryce jump (and squeal, I might add).

Rarnald skids around the corner into the lounge room and slides, cool as anything, under the couch.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

Mum and Bryce stare, horrified.

I am so proud of Rarnald. He's a total action hero. I want to see it again in slo-mo.

‘I'm sorry about that, Bryce,' Mum says, glaring at me. ‘Would you like dessert?'

Bryce swallows hard and politely says yes. He makes a joke about rat meringue pie, which I don't find funny at all. Mum and
Bryce eat a few bites, but I can tell that the night has turned sour. Then Bryce puts down his spoon and says, ‘Darling, would you like some help catching that rat?'

Okay, two things:

1. Bryce calling Mum ‘darling' is weird and wrong.

2. After he just squealed, I hardly think he's in a position to offer to catch a rat as intelligent and nimble as Rarnald.

Mum flicks a knife-like glance at me. She wants to say no to Bryce's offer. She wants to forget it ever happened. I want her to say no. But she doesn't. She says yes. Bryce stands from the table, claps his hands together and wiggles his bushy black-and-silver eyebrows.

‘Now,' he says, heading into the lounge room as though he is about to Sumo wrestle my rat. ‘Help me move the couch please, Tom.'

I look to Mum. Her eyes widen and she jerks her head towards the couch. She fetches
the empty four-litre ice-cream container from beneath the sink.

I grab one end of the couch. Bryce grabs the other. I move slowly and make lots of noise, giving Rarnald ample time and warning to make his escape. But, when the couch is out, there he is, plain as day, surrounded by three-centimetre-thick dust pocked with marbles and twenty-cent pieces and my missing shin pad. Rarnald appears to be gnawing something off his bottom.

Mum closes in on her nemesis. Bryce moves in from the side. Slow and steady. I bump the coffee table and jingle the change in my pocket, but Rarnald continues to gnaw away on his backside like he's performing a lifesaving operation.

‘This is it,' Mum whispers. ‘Rarnald's last stand.'

‘It has a
name
?' Bryce asks.

‘Just focus,' she snaps.

Slowly, stealthily, she closes in, ice-cream container ready. Two metres. One metre. Fifty centimetres. She is ten centimetres away from my friend, and I know that I have to do something.

I cough loudly.

Rarnald looks up, sniffs the air, then blazes a trail through the dust. Mum slams the container down, catching his tail. Rarnald squeals almost as loudly as Bryce. Mum lifts the container and Rarnald escapes – under the couch, across the floor, under the dining table, into the kitchen. We give chase, and I just manage to see him commando-roll under the fridge.

‘Move the fridge!' Bryce orders, marching past me.

‘But –'

‘Move. The. Fridge,' Mum says.

‘Yes, Mum.'

I grab one side. Bryce grabs the other. Mum is poised with the container. This is terrible. Imagine if giant rats, twenty times our height, were hunting us down, sniffing us out, trying to trap
us
in enormous ice-cream containers. It isn't fair.

We wheel the fridge out. There he is again. Rarnald the Rat. Plain as day. Sitting in among the dust bunnies, roach baits and a couple of petrified vegetables. He is nibbling on a long-dead carrot, like he has all the time in the world. Has he lost his little rat-mind? I want to scream at him, tell him to wake up to himself, slap him across his furry snout. Why is he acting like this?

Mum moves in with the ice-cream container. Quiet. Careful. She holds it over Rarnald and, ever so slowly, lowers it. He has no idea, the poor little guy. I have to warn him.

I whack the side of the fridge and Rarnald finally drops the carrot. He looks up just as Mum brings the container down. He spins and slides, low to the ground, like a martial arts master. Rat-kwondo, maybe. As the container hits the floor, he runs right over Bryce's expensive Italian shoe. Bryce squeals again. Mum dives, faceplants on the kitchen tiles and misses him. I swallow a laugh as Rarnald scurries into the pantry.

‘Bryce!' Mum hisses, peeling herself off the floor, wild and unhinged. ‘Are you a man or a mouse?'