Will Read Online Free Page B

my bag to the sound of their triumphant hand-slapping, shaking my head as I went.
    This was exactly how it had been for the past four years. Theusual piss-taking and shaking of hands that greeted every morning. This was what I knew. This was where I belonged.
    I came over and took my place on the line. Jock was still refusing to get out and no amount of yelling from the other blokes was going to shift him. Eventually the game started again. The St. Andrew’s boys were a mixed crew, the seniors even more so because we had blow-ins from other schools for Years 11 and 12. It was one of the selling points in the glossy brochure the school tried to flog every year:
St. Andrew’s, a college that celebrates diversity
or some such crap. And it was crap because most of the time all they ever went on about was making sure we all looked and acted the same.
    Over near Danielli’s office was where the wogs hung out. The wogs—a title they proudly gave themselves, even though Danielli always told them off about it, and he was one himself—were made up of mainly Italians and Greeks, with a spattering of Croatians. The skips—the Aussies, another title Danielli didn’t like—hung out on the seats outside the senior classrooms. They were a combination of footy-heads, a few skaters (though normally the skaters would be with the druggies) and some classic yobs. The Asians took up what was left of the seats next to the skips. Danielli didn’t get too worked up about the Asian label but he was always very careful about acknowledging their different nationalities. This was something Jock didn’t figure out until last year, when St. Andrew’s was running its own version of the Soccer World Cup. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t just have an Asian team and why they had to split into Korea, China and Japan. Then there were the Lebs—Danielli did get really worked up about that one. They hung out with the wogs and the skips, but mainly the skips, maybe because most of them played league, not soccer, who knows?
    The goths and the druggies hid under the stairs of Harriganblock. There weren’t very many of them and they weren’t exactly hard-core. The extent of most of their gothdom was their dyed black hair, although the talk around the quad was that one of the Year 12 guys actually wore white makeup and black lipstick on the weekends. And the druggies, well, they were pretty harmless and didn’t do much more than smoke the occasional spliff.
    That left the rejects, the kids who’d been backpackers all their school life, moving from group to group, not quite sure of where they fit in. Some of those guys ended up in the library, and others found each other and spent their senior years hanging out together anywhere they could find a clear space.
    Us? We took up three long seats underneath the walkway from the quad to the library. We were mongrels, a hybrid of all the groups: a couple of footy-heads, soccer players, good students and musos, assorted Filipinos, Lebs, wogs and skips. We were the easygoing crowd. We did well enough at school, which meant we had to fight hard not to end up in the nerd category. At various times in our school careers we had all engaged in several incidents which guaranteed our
we may be smart but we are certainly not geeks
reputation.
    Me, I was a soccer-playing skip, an honorary wog, though I’d pulled out this season. I just wasn’t interested. Something else Danielli had given me a hard time about. I thought about what he had said about me being different from last year. I didn’t know what to think about that. Danielli and the others reckoned I was going through a difficult time. No doubt they’d collect the moon incident as further evidence to support this finding.
    I just wish they’d get over it. So I’ve changed, who cares! But I wasn’t going to think about that until 3:30 p.m.

Period five
    All right, boys, let’s make a start .
    Mr. Andrews, Advanced English. Cool dude even though he