The Year My Life Broke Read Free Page A

icepack to his face and glaring at me.
    Second PE lesson: I had a sprained ankle from jumping out of the biggest tree in our backyard at home. But when I told him that I couldn’t run or do exercises he bawled me out again. ‘I saw you walking into school this morning,’ he said. ‘You weren’t limping then.’
    Well, maybe he’d been looking at the wrong person, because I’d been limping all morning like an amputee, and PE’s the last subject I’d be trying to skip. Anyway, he made me do all these runs, even though my ankle hurt like crazy, and he kept yelling at me to go faster.
    The third lesson, he put me with a girl called Amanda, and we had to take it in turns to skip. While we were waiting for Mr Surrey to blow his whistle I held the rope by one end and started whizzing it around, getting faster and faster. Unfortunately, just as it reached terminal velocity I lost my grip and it flew out of my hand and hit Amanda. ‘Oh BEEP,’ I yelled. I’d better not say what the word was but it started with S and ended with T and it wasn’t shoot. Or shut or sheet, although it was pretty close to both of those. Mr Surrey went off for the third week in a row. He put me on the bench again, then at the end of the lesson called me over for a talk. Personally I’d rather be yelled at. ‘You are a disruptive influence,’ he told me, while I stood there with my head down, trying to look ashamed. ‘You’ve been nothing but trouble since you came here. I expect everyone to follow the rules, blah blah look at me when I talk to you blah blah blah don’t like your attitude blah blah blah get out of my sight.’
    Now I have lots of faults, I’m sure; well OK, not that many, but I must admit if I do have one it would be that I’m stubborn and I’ve got a bit of a temper. After three lessons Mr Surrey-style I decided I wasn’t going to make any effort in PE at Tarrawagga. He hadn’t seen me in action during any of those classes and it was obvious that he thought I was a PE loser. OK then, I’d be a PE loser. It fitted with the way I’d been acting at recess and lunchtimes, not joining in any sports. So from then on, when we had cricket in PE I held the bat like it was a tennis racquet and popped up catches that a Grade 1 kid could take with his eyes shut. In basketball, every pass I made got intercepted, mainly because I signalled them ten seconds before I threw them. When we had softball I missed the ball by a metre and went out for three strikes every time. It didn’t take long for other kids to start moving away from me on the bench. Mr Surrey looked my way less and less often and before long I was spending fifty minutes out of every fifty-five-minute lesson doing nothing.
    I gradually became a bit of a smart alec, like, making sarcastic comments when Mr Surrey made a mistake, which was often. This helped him love me heaps. One day he started the lesson by saying, ‘Some of you need to have more self-confidence in your team mates,’ and I said, ‘What about self-confidence in ourselves – should we have that too?’ and he went red in the face and glared at me and told me to run four laps, which I thought was a bit of an overreaction. So when I got back from my four laps and he told me to fetch the bats I ignored the fact that he’d set the oval up for softball and came back with a bag of cricket bats.
    Just stuff like that.
    In a way I didn’t mind that I wasn’t getting anything from PE, even though it used to be my favourite subject. But the truth was, I hated that school more every day. I missed Abernathy so bad it hurt in my heart. I missed Joey who was so funny you couldn’t eat lunch while he was talking in case you choked on your cheese sandwich. I missed Pho, who gave us boys advice about how to chat up girls and how to ask them to go with you . . . and how to drop them when things