Henry Hoey Hobson Read Free Page B

bespectacled trio of boys in the room, ‘–and I expect nothing less from you girls as well.’
    It was all I could do to stop myself slamming my head into the laminex top of my desk. This was even worse than I thought it was going to be. Mini-man Paulson had just killed any chance of me ever making friends in this class.
    He should have just hung a big ‘Nigel-No-Friends’ sign around my neck. Nothing puts other kids off quicker than thinking you’re a bit of a lonely bugger. The best way to guarantee that you’ll never make any friends is to advertise that you don’t have any to start with – they’ll stay away in droves, trust me.
    Being a Nigel-No-Friends stinks. Hanging around a Nigel-No-Friends makes everyone think you stink too. Stink by association. Stink squared. Basic maths.
    Don’t believe me? Then answer me this. When was the last time you made friends with anyone your mum told you to be nice to? Stanley seems a bit lonely – why don’t you invite him over?
    Bet you jacked up, soon as the words were out of her mouth. Bet you automatically came up with ten good reasons why you couldn’t invite Stanley over. Even if you didn’t mind him in the first place, the very fact that your mother was pushing the friendship as an act of charity would be enough to put you off, big time.
    Kiss of death, coming from your mum. Imagine the turbo-charged back-pedalling involved when your headmaster orders you to buddy up with a Nigel-No-Friends. Stink squared, cubed and multiplied by infinity.
    At this rate, I wasn’t going to have any friends till I was thirty.

CHAPTER FIVE
    â€˜Want to play?’
    I’d been watching the crazy, inexplicable handball game in the echoing undercroft below our classroom for the best part of five minutes. Instead of answering, I pushed myself to my feet and dusted myself off, quickly doing the maths.
    ...Five minutes with Sebastian, at the start of lunch break, scouring the boys’ toilets for vampires before giving the Preps, Year Ones and Year Twos the all-clear.
    ...Five minutes to peel and eat the orange and down the vegemite sandwich I’d brought for lunch. (Gotta love the labour-intensive orange. Tomorrow I was bringing two, to help fill in my day.)
    ...Five minutes trying to make sense of the bizarre game unfolding before me, while the girls danced up a storm at the other end of the schoolyard.
    By my reckoning, that still left thirty whole minutes of lunch break to fill in. I felt the braces rasp against my inner lips as I squeezed out a smile. Just a sliver; I didn’t want to tempt fate and reopen old wounds.
    â€˜Sure. Thanks.’
    The three of them had been playing a fast-moving, round-robin version of handball that I hadn’t seen before. It looked like they were making it up as they went – the rules kept changing, without notice, as soon as someone yelled something incomprehensible from the sidelines.
    â€˜With four of us, we could play dunces, if you like.’ They looked at me like I’d suggested playing naked. ‘What? You don’t like dunces?’ I asked.
    The mop-headed kid – Joey Castellaro – shrugged. He started bouncing the ball, slowly, not bothering to look, trusting that it would find his hand after each bounce. ‘It’s all right. Bit boring, that’s all.’
    â€˜I don’t mind,’ said a voice from behind me. ‘Dunces is fine.’
    It was the kid who’d asked me to join in. The name sticky-taped to his desk read Jironomo Marquez but Mr Paulson had pronounced it He-RON-o-MO MarKEZ and everyone just called him Hero.
    Hero was a pair of front teeth with a little Spanish kid tucked in behind. He didn’t look like he was going to grow into those teeth any time soon. But, you know, maybe in time ... maybe if his parents were really tall...
    I yanked myself back out of my head – maybe I should get a grip and stop talking to