Me, My Dad and the End of the Rainbow, page 2
‘I mean both of you. Nobody else’s parents really go. It’ll basically just be a massive waste of time.’ I tend to look at the floor when I’m lying, which is exactly where I was looking when I said this.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Mum said, the tears already forgotten. Her mood could switch like the weather these days, from the brightest sunshine to the greyest rain at the drop of a hat. ‘I’ll be there front and centre to hear about all the great things you’ve done this year. I can hardly wait!’
‘Me either,’ I muttered.
‘See you later, honey!’ Mum called. ‘And please don’t shuffle, sweetheart, dreadful for your posture!’ My posture, to be honest, was the least of my problems.
Vale Gate High is a hodgepodge of old and new buildings, crammed together to make the only secondary school for miles around. The older parts sag against the newer ones for support and look as if they are one strong wind away from collapsing. Every kid from our town goes to Vale Gate High. Well, unless they fancy the hour it takes to get to the Academy.
As soon as you walk through the Science block of our school and out into the courtyard, you see it – a great mix of kids with barely two looking even vaguely similar. There are the students who have accessorized their school blazers with enough pins to hide the fabric underneath; the ones who have tried to push the strict dress code and added a flash of colour to their uniforms with jackets and hoodies and scarves; the tall kids, the short kids, the kids who’ve apparently stopped growing altogether; those who walk like zombies to their next class while others sprint between them. Like every other school, walking into Vale Gate High is like gaining free entry to the zoo, and you never quite know what you are going to see that day.
I was halfway across the courtyard, heading towards my locker, when Caveman Kyle, who was looking in the opposite direction, came barging into me. I stumbled back, already trying to locate the closest teacher in case things took a turn for the worst. But Caveman Kyle was too busy holding a student council badge above his head, laughing like pure evil as the kid he’d taken it from jumped up and down trying to reach it.
Kyle doesn’t know I call him Caveman, by the way. In fact, nobody but Seb and Bell know about that nickname and that’s only because they use it too. The reason Kyle doesn’t know about his nickname is because we call him that behind his back. I got this trick from my mum. She’s always talking about Mrs Fielder from number eleven and Mr Quarterman from number seven. I heard her telling Seb’s mum – who’s called Sabine – that Mrs Fielder and Mr Quarterman are friends, which seems to be something of a scandal if Mum’s smirk and raised eyebrows are anything to go by. However, she doesn’t tell Mrs Fielder and Mr Quarterman that she knows they’re friends. She just smiles and waves when she sees them together, then goes straight home, picks up the phone in one hand, a glass of wine in the other, and calls Sabine.
Anyway, Kyle is the most popular kid in Year Seven for reasons I can’t quite fathom considering he’s not all that nice or all that funny either. He was the first to sprout a hair on his chin and someone once told me he had three on his chest, but that was just a rumour. I think it’s because of this that he sits at the top of the Year Seven pyramid. Me and Seb are perilously close to the bottom of that heap, but having Bell by our side has boosted our status a little.
Sending a prayer to the skies that the student council kid would just leave his badge and ask a teacher for a new one, I slipped past Kyle and ducked into a throng of passing drama kids. When I got to my locker, Bell and Seb were already there, too embroiled in an argument over a video game to notice my arrival.
Seb is short and slight and always pushing his glasses up his nose to stop them from falling off his face. His jaw kind of juts out a little, but I think it’s because he clenches his teeth together when he’s doing just about anything. He’s the shortest but the oldest and by far the wisest of us all. Sometimes it feels a bit like being best friends with a walking, non-stop-talking encyclopaedia. He never brags about it, though. Not unless he’s trying to get one-up on Bell anyway.
We met when we were toddlers, and even then, Seb was smaller than I was. Our mums took us to the same playgroup, plonked us down next to each other and became fast friends, so it would’ve been weird if we didn’t become best friends too. I still hadn’t started talking by then, and it was Doctor Sammy’s suggestion that I mix with other kids. I guess you could say Seb played a huge part in how I finally started to speak, not least because he never shuts up. Seb talks a lot when he’s nervous, which is all the time and something he’s definitely inherited from his mum. He talks a lot when he’s happy or when he’s sad, when he feels awkward or angry or confused. And when his mouth isn’t doing the talking, his eyes are doing it for him, darting about like green pebbles that never quite settle. He sometimes hides behind his hair, which flops down into a sandy-coloured fringe that covers his eyes when he’s embarrassed.
Then there’s Bell. She’s taller than both of us, and we kind of look like we could be brother and sister, with our brown skin and full cheeks. She has a small scar above her left eye, a pale pink that slashes through her eyebrow. You can only see it when you’re up close. She says she can’t remember how she got it, which must mean it came about because of something really embarrassing.
Seb and I met Bell at the arcade a couple of summers ago. She was furiously shouting at one of the screens while shooting a bunch of invading aliens, her hair tied back in black waves so it wouldn’t get in her way. We watched in awe as she cleared that level, then the next one and the one after that, her usually soft brown eyes hard and full of fire. At one point, as she neared the all-time high score, she ran out of lives, a countdown flashing on the screen.
‘I don’t have any coins left!’ Bell gasped, watching the seconds trickle away along with her chance to write her name in the machine’s history books. I quickly dug in my pockets and fished out my last coin, slamming it into the machine just in time. Bell grinned and gave me a quick high-five before turning her attention back to the game. By the time she’d finished, she’d beaten the all-time high score by almost double and our friendship was confirmed.
She’s the natural leader of our little trio, confident and bold, sarcastic but kind. If Seb is the one who’s freaking out, Bell will be the one to calm us all back down. She’s also super competitive and great at pretty much every video game ever invented, which is what Seb and Bell were arguing about when I arrived.
‘I’m just saying that it’s an unfair advantage when your mum isn’t listing the dangers of mobile phones and how being outside after six p.m. increases your chances of getting a summer cold,’ Seb said moodily.
Bell scoffed. ‘I had Jack screaming from the next room the entire time we were playing, that’s no excuse.’ Bell’s baby brother had announced his arrival less than three months before. We used to go to Bell’s house all the time before he was born. Now, Bell will get out of her house at any cost – Jack’s apparently competing for the loudest wail on record, much to her disdain. ‘I got you fair and square, just like every other time. I’m starting to think I could beat you with one hand on the controller.’
Seb struggled to turn his stutters into a coherent sentence even though they’d had this argument a million times before. He glanced wildly in my direction, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. I knew a cry for help when I saw one.
‘What’s up?’ I said, opening my locker and throwing some of my heavier books inside.
‘Seb’s a sore loser, but what’s new?’ Bell smiled smugly in Seb’s direction while he leaned back against the lockers, clearly exhausted.
‘Long night?’ I nudged Seb, who looked as if he were about to fall asleep standing up, and gently pulled him in the direction of our form room. Bell shrugged off the squabble and propped him up from the other side, so we were basically carrying him through the doors and across the courtyard.
‘I reached the first rank and took a beam to the head two seconds later. A full night’s work lost, completely up in flames,’ he mumbled, barely picking up his feet as we weaved between crowds of students, none of whom were in a hurry to get to where they needed to be. ‘I’m not tired. I’m just broken.’
‘How many times do I have to tell you to save the game as you play?’ Bell chimed in. Her gloating was short-lived as a Year Nine barged past, knocking me and Seb sideways. ‘Hey! Watch where you’re going!’
The squabbling about the night before continued as we joined the line outside our classroom but I was too busy thinking of the phone call with Doctor Sammy to really notice. Staring off into space, it took me a minute to realize that the back and forth between Bell and Seb had stopped.
‘Long night?’ Seb mimicked, confirming that I looked as tired as I felt.
‘You can say that again,’ I muttered, ignoring the sarcasm.
‘Hi, Archie!’
I blushed as Amber appeared, waving cheerily in my direction as she joined the back of the line. I tried to mumble something, anything, that wouldn’t make me look like I still didn’t understand the use of words. A spluttered yelp escaped my mouth instead, which made one of Amber’s friends cackle raucously. Bell rolled her eyes and tried to hide me from view.
‘I know you can’t have reached the first rank before me,’ she said, trying to bring us back to the conversation as we filed into the classroom. ‘I’ve seen you play, you’d be lucky to make it to the fifth.’ We took our seats, three chairs lined up next to each other at a table in the back of the room. ‘Soooo… what’s up?’
I usually tell Seb and Bell everything, and I mean everything. They’re still the only people who really know what happened to Dipsy, the family hamster, two summers ago, and they’ve never told a soul that I once scored three out of a hundred in a maths test. I wish I could tell you that total was a result of me not trying. Alas, I thought I’d tried pretty hard that day.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said slowly, wondering how best to explain that I knew for sure something was wrong but didn’t have any concrete evidence to back it up. ‘Things are just a little weird right now.’
‘Five?’ said Seb.
The three of us have a simple code for how bad a problem is. One is the least bad, of course. Five is the average. We haven’t had a ten in a while.
‘Five.’ I nodded. Considering I didn’t know what was actually wrong yet, I thought it was probably best not to get ahead of myself.
I quickly explained about the phone call from Doctor Sammy as Mrs Greene hurried through the door, beginning the register before she’d even sat down at her desk.
‘Hmm,’ mused Bell when I’d finished. Her eyes narrowed a little. She loves a mystery to solve and had recently become fond of diving into books about horrible crimes that made my stomach lurch at the thought of them. ‘That is strange,’ she said.
‘Very,’ agreed Seb. ‘Have you asked your mum what it’s about?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not sure I want to hear the answer.’
‘Well, maybe start there and see what she says,’ Bell said under her breath as Mrs Greene shot a warning glance in our direction.
‘I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,’ Seb added, although his face said otherwise.
Knowing Seb, he had probably already imagined a hundred of the worst possible scenarios that could happen. But I’m not sure even he could have guessed what was actually going on.
CHAPTER 4 A VOLCANIC ERUPTION OF GIGANTIC PROPORTIONS
With Parents’ Evening looming over us, the day crawled by with the urgency of a snail. I couldn’t tell if my nerves were about the prospect of teachers telling my parents how distinctly average I’d been all year, the phone call with Doctor Sammy and the mystery of Mum and Dad, or an evil combination of them both.
In our fifth and final lesson of the day – Chemistry, unfortunately – I was so worked up about literally everything that I forgot to pay attention to the fizzing test tubes hovering over my Bunsen burner. By the time I’d realized that I was seconds away from setting the entire Science block on fire, they were too burnt to salvage. The heat had turned the test tubes black and a pungent smell wafted around my station. Great. Everything was going just great.
The final bell should’ve cheered me up a little, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what might lie ahead. Of course, to make matters worse, Dad was running late for Parents’ Evening. When he pulled into the car park, a whole twenty-three minutes later than planned, Mum’s lips were pursed, her face pinched. She could’ve been chewing on a lemon, which seemed to be her constant mood whenever she saw Dad these days.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Dad said before he’d even opened his car door. He held his hands up in mock surrender. ‘Bob needed one more file looking over before I left.’
‘A FILE!’ Mum all but screeched, as if she’d never heard the word before. ‘We’ve been waiting here for half the bloody night!’
‘Twenty-three minutes, Mum,’ I sighed.
‘Oh, that’s it, take his side!’ Mum’s voice was now just an octave below hysterical.
‘Let’s just get inside, shall we?’ Dad looked down at me while Mum continued to mutter to herself. ‘Ready, Maverick?’
‘Do we haaaaave to do this?’ I tried one more time. ‘Parents’ Evening is dumb, and it doesn’t even mean anything.’
‘Something you want to tell us?’ Dad’s eyes narrowed as he studied my face. I looked at his shoes, trying to hide the involuntary blush that creeps up my neck when I’m about to be caught lying.
‘No,’ I eventually muttered, defeated. ‘I guess we should just get this over with.’
‘Yes, let’s,’ Mum sniffed. ‘I suddenly feel exhausted.’ With one last glare at Dad, she turned on her heel and marched towards the doors, her nose in the air.
‘I suppose I’d better not tell her why I was really late,’ Dad said in a low voice.
I frowned. ‘What were you doing?’
‘I might’ve stopped for a double cheeseburger.’ He grinned. ‘And I don’t regret a thing.’
We both giggled but quickly pretended to cough when Mum spun around to see what we were up to. Yep, this was going to be just about as much fun as I had expected.
* * *
‘You’re right, they are acting weird,’ Bell mused when we finally got inside. ‘I thought we’d got over that stage already.’
We stood at the bottom of the Art department stairs, waiting for Seb. Mum and Dad were standing two metres apart, talking to Bell’s parents. Her dad had baby Jack strapped to his chest. For once, the baby wasn’t making any noise and had instead resorted to drooling on his dad’s shoulder.
Bell was right – my parents looked painfully awkward standing next to each other. We’d had the Everything Is Terrible phase at the beginning, but over time, that’d eventually faded into some kind of… peace? Sure, things had been far from perfect, but at least they’d stopped fighting like cat and dog. Now we seemed to have come full circle and back to where we’d started. This just made me even more certain that there was a piece of the puzzle that I was missing, or that was being kept away from me on purpose so I couldn’t complete the picture.
‘I tried to get them to cancel,’ I said quietly. ‘They can barely be in the same room for more than sixty seconds without arguing.’ I wondered if they’d argued when they’d visited the Bakers’ house together. It seemed likely.
‘My parents can’t be in the same room for more than sixty seconds without doing that weird, mushy thing grown-ups like to do,’ Bell said.
As if on cue, her dad wrapped his arm around her mum’s waist, planting a kiss on the side of her head. She giggled. Bell blew out her cheeks, pretending to heave. Even Jack seemed to gurgle his disgust.
‘So unnecessary,’ she said. ‘Give me parents who hate each other any day of the week.’
‘We should swap and see how long it takes for you to go running back to the mushy side of things.’
Bell studied the two-metre gap between my parents. ‘I think I’ll pass, but thanks for the offer.’
‘I already hate everything about this,’ said a familiar voice behind us. When we turned around, Seb looked like he was ready to puke.
‘Why do they insist on telling our parents how well or badly we do in school every year?’ His voice shook, like it does when he’s nervous. It doesn’t take much to work Seb up into a panic. He’s his mother’s son after all.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Bell said. ‘Didn’t you like, pass Maths early or something?’
‘That was Science! And I barely scraped by in Geography this year. Miss Blum is going to hang me out to dry, I know it!’
‘You got seventy-five in the last test,’ I said in an attempt to calm the situation before Seb fainted.
‘And?’ he said.
‘It was out of eighty!’
Bell rolled her eyes. ‘You need to relax, Seb. I heard unnecessary stress causes wrinkles and premature something-or-other.’
‘And where did you hear that?’
‘Cassandra’s mum.’
I snorted. ‘Cassandra’s middle name is Star Petal, I don’t think you should trust what she says.’
As if on cue, the jangle of a thousand bracelets floated down the corridor. Sure enough, there was Cassandra Star Petal Beaumont alongside her mum, whose arm, the source of the sudden racket, looked like it had been dipped in gold. She wore a floor-length skirt and sandals, showing off a gold ring on each of her toes. When Bell hung out at Cassandra’s house, she often came back talking about the apparent health benefit of avocados, something which tickled Dad when I told him.
‘Students of Vale Gate High!’ The booming voice at the top of the stairs belonged to Mrs Jones, our head of year. ‘And, of course, parents. If you’d like to follow me, Parents’ Evening is about to begin.’
