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always make you feel sick in the gut. It’s that time when you remember all the crap for school that you haven’t done over the weekend and are too tired to do now, which means you know you’re going to get in trouble for it tomorrow. Or in my case, the fact that I had had all weekend to tell Mum everything before it hit the fan, but I hadn’t.
    But that’s how the
you can decide whether you tell your parents
thing works. The whole time it sits in your belly reminding you that there’s something you have to do. Then you go and catch up withthe boys, kick the soccer ball around, hang out in your room messing with chords on the guitar, and you forget. But then you hear your mum singing in the kitchen, happy after working in the garden all day, or you watch her settle back with a glass of wine and a chick flick and that’s when it hits. It comes up from your gut and sits in your mouth like you want to vomit it all out. Then you see that she’s dressed in her home trackies she’d never be caught dead in anywhere else, lying on the couch laughing at the telly, and you know you can’t. You just can’t. So you walk back to your room and decide that, like most things lately, it’s better to swallow and pretend that it’s gone away.

Monday
    Even though I knew it was all going to hit the fan with Waddlehead and Danielli this afternoon, I was more than happy to be entering the grounds of St. Andrew’s. This was a Mum-Free Zone, which translated into a guilt-free, end-of-guts-churning zone. No, I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty tonight, but at least for the moment I had escaped.
    I walked past the bloke I winked at on Friday afternoon. He was the main man of the brothers, that’s why his statue was stuck right where everyone could see it. The front of the school looked old, like one of those posh English boarding schools. Lots of sandstone and gardens, with a bell tower on the main building that made sure everyone in the area knew how important the place was. But it was the only building like that. The rest of the school was brick and concrete, and then farther back, so no one could see them, they stuck the demountable schoolrooms. That’s exactly what St. Andrew’s was like. It thought it was a cut above the rest, but when you really got down to it, it was just the same as any other school except that it was majorly strict, and the gates that kept us in were fancy gates.
    I could hear the senior quad before I got within thirty meters of it. If someone came up with a way to take the sound from boys schools and make it into fuel, they would be a trillionaire and everyone could stop freaking out about the world’s energy crisis.
    I walked past the canteen and swung into the quad to find a full-scale handball competition in progress between Years 11 and 12. No doubt the brainchild of Tim and Jock, who have not yet come to terms with the fact that with the passing of every year they are moving away from childhood. They spend most of their energy trying to keep themselves at twelve.
    No way that was out, man! I’m not going anywhere!
    See.
    Jock looked around for someone to acknowledge his cries of injustice and found me.
    Willo! My hero! At which point he knelt down in his square, careful not to lose his position, and bowed.
    Get up, you wanker. This is all your fault .
    No way, mate, don’t you go blaming me. I only offered five bucks. I didn’t think even you’d be that cheap .
    At this point the other boys joined in.
    Whooo!
    Nice arse, Will! How about you and me make a date for the toilets at lunchtime?
    That was Tim—he always made it his job to push things too far. The other boys followed.
    You’d want to be careful the boys on Oxford Street don’t track you down .
    Well, it wasn’t as if the Lakeside girls were exactly throwing their phone numbers out the window .
    Yeah, but I heard they were throwing up!
    At this point they were falling into one another they were laughing so hard. I walked away to dump