6 Peeping Tom
It was a whole week before I saw The Goddess Lucy again. A whole week! What an agony of waiting. She is only in my Art class and we only have Art once a week, but I usually see her around the school at break times. I’d been on the lookout for her all week but I hadn’t seen her. Not even a peek. Maybe she was off sick. Oh my God! I hoped it was nothing serious.
‘What if it’s something serious?’ I said to Ang.
‘You are something serious,’ he said. ‘Lucy has turned your brain to mushy peas.’
‘What’s wrong with mushy peas?’ I asked. I like mushy peas. With chips.
‘For brain matter?’ was all Ang said, as if that somehow proved his point. Then he went off to look for his PE kit which he’d left behind in one of the classrooms. It was all right for him. Girls liked him. They were always smiling at him and texting him, even some of the older girls. I couldn’t see the attraction myself, but then I’m not a girl so what would I know?
Without Ang I was at a loose end so I went off to hang around outside the girls’ lockers, which is this thing I sometimes do. And before you even think it: No. I am not some kind of Peeping Tom pervert. It’s just that I have more chance of running into Lucy outside the girls’ lockers than anywhere else. She is always in there gossiping, combing her hair, sneering, unrequiting me, that sort of thing. Last week I saw her twice. Unfortunately, she saw me too and called me a Peeping Tom then ran off giggling with her mates. Who was this Tom guy anyway? Probably some innocent young boy trying to steal a glimpse of the one he loved and he ends up getting labelled a pervert. Love is cruel.
There was no sign of Lucy at the girls’ lockers and I got fed up being stared at by the other girls with that ‘go away you creep’ look, so I decided to give it up and go help Ang find his PE bag. A true friend, that’s me. But I didn’t get very far because as soon as I turned around I bumped into a six foot tall and six foot wide wall of yeti.
‘What are you laughing at, Wright?’ he said.
He was always saying that to me. And he was always calling me by my surname which annoyed me and made me want to start all my responses to him with wrong.
‘Wrong,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t laughing.’ Which was true. I wasn’t. I was pining.
‘Yes you were. I saw you,’ The Yeti said and pushed me back against the lockers. There was an enormous clang as my head and shoulders hit the metal doors and a gaggle of girls came running out oohing and aahing and wanting to know what was going on. And wouldn’t you know it? There was lovely Lucy looking right at me and my feet didn’t even touch the ground. Not because I was walking on air at the sight of her but because The Yeti had me lifted off the ground with his ugly fat hands. This was bad. This was seriously not cool. No one fancies the boy who is being lifted off the ground by a thug, and whose lips are going blue because the thug’s big fat fingers are cutting off their air supply. Cyanotic! I could just hear the casualty staff call out, Get the crash trolley. I watch a lot of hospital dramas with Mum.
The Yeti looked over at the girls, smiled through the veil of hair that hung over his hideous face, and smashed me against the lockers again. Just for show. My head was really starting to hurt now. But worse, this time my glasses fell off and when I moved automatically to try and get them I nearly choked to death on his grip.
‘'If I catch you laughing at me one more time, you’re dead,’ The Yeti said and set me free.
Then he stepped back and on to my specs. My NEW specs. I heard them crack. The girls gasped.
‘Oopsy,’ The Yeti said and turned to walk away.
I looked at my broken new specs. I looked at Lucy. Then I completely lost it. I forgot that I am a five foot nothing, six stone weakling. I charged after The Yeti and hurled myself at him and I actually managed to knock him down. Ang says this is because I got him unaware, that I would never ordinarily be able to take him down as I’m not strong enough. Thanks Ang.
Well, you can imagine the scene: one long haired yeti flailing around face down on the floor, all arms and legs waving madly, while a six stone weakling sat on him. We must have made a real picture because a crowd had gathered and were laughing and clapping and chanting: Fight! Fight!
No! No! I was thinking, but it was too late. The Yeti was up off the floor and had me pinned to the wall again. He was just about to sink his fist into my face when Mr Higgins the Biology teacher came along. Thank you, all the angels and saints and the royal family. All I needed was a broken face to match my broken specs.
Mr Higgins marched us both off to the headmaster’s office. Then something surreal happened. Instead of yelling at The Yeti and giving him a month of after-school detentions like he should have, the headmaster went all soft. On The Yeti! He didn’t even shout at him. He told us he expected more of us. Us! I was the victim here. Then, worst of all, he gave The Yeti one lunch time detention. One measly lunchtime detention! while I got an after school detention again. How unjust is that? And then something even more surreal and a bit creepy happened. As the headmaster was ushering us out of his office he asked The Yeti how his mother was doing. So that was it. The headmaster had a thing for yeti mamas! Creep-alicious. I couldn’t wait to tell Ang. Then I remembered that I had yet another Thursday detention and all the fun went out of it. Mum would go berserk. And I’d broken my specs. I didn’t know how I could face her. And to make matters worse she had been acting really weird lately, not going to work and bursting in to tears all the time. Take the other day: I walked in to her room when she was tying a scarf around her head. She had pulled all her hair out of sight and the scarf was wound really tight around her head and tied at the back. I didn’t like it.
‘What do you think?’ she asked me. She was all smiles. Too smiley. She looked like a loon. I didn’t want to upset her so I said,
‘Nice. But it would be even nicer if you just let a tiny bit of hair show.’
And you know what she did? She burst out crying, ran off to the bathroom and locked the door. Sound familiar?
So I knew something serious was up but I couldn’t figure out what. There’d been no sign of Dad so it wasn’t that, and every time I asked what was wrong she just said she had hay fever. She obviously thinks I am a total dimwit who can’t tell the difference between sneezing and crying. So you see, I didn’t think I could tell her about The Yeti and the glasses; I didn’t think she could take it. She was like one of those crazies you see on TV dramas who cry for no good reason then kill someone. I didn’t want that happening. Especially if the someone was me.
