Mike by Brian Caswell Page B

couldn’t fight him. If I wanted to commit suicide, I’d jump off the nearest cliff; it’d be less painful and much less embarrassing.
    For a similar reason, I couldn’t try showing him up as stupid in front of the rest of the school. I mean he was. Stupid. The dumbest kid in the whole grade — except maybe for Aaron Herbert, but Aaron was hurt in a car accident when he was five, and he just … forgot things. Besides, Aaron was a really nice kid, always smiling and friendly; do anything for you. The only thing Shane Thomas would do for you was help you finish your lunch on time, or make sure that your wallet wasn’t too heavy for you to carry.
    I hated him. For me, he was a symbol of everything that was wrong with Sydney. My parents certainly had a strange idea of what was best for me.
    It was about then that I hit on “the Plan”.
    It was simple really. Most great ideas are. Shane picked on me because he could get away with it. Just about everyone else in the school had been there since the first day of kindergarten. They all had their groups and they supported each other. I was new, and I hadn’t exactly gone out of my way to make friends, so I was on my own. Victim material. The more I backed down from him, the bigger victim I became, and the less support I could expect from anyone.
    So I had to beat him at something. In front of the whole school. Something that didn’t involve getting my face redesigned.
    Swimming.
    The carnival was over of course. They always had that in first term. But there was still the end of the year. Halfway through fourth term, the whole school had “Water Awareness”, where they taught you to swim, whether you needed it or not. The one good thing — if you could swim — was that on the last day of the whole programme, they had a challenge race. Anyone could enter, and I knew one person who would for sure.
    I’d noticed that Shane always wore his jacket, even on hot days. It had all his award badges sewn on to it. He was incredibly proud of them. If I could just beat him! That would show him. And everyone. And he couldn’t beat me up after that. I’d be a hero. Deep down, I knew that everyone wanted to see him “done”, and if he did pick on me afterwards, it would look like he couldn’t take defeat. I’d have him right where I wanted him.
    Simple.
    And I wasn’t a bad swimmer. In Middleton, we lived just down the road from the pool, and I spent half my life in the water. Shane was strong, and he was trained, but I was what they called “a natural”. With a bit of training … But that was the problem.
    Mum was working, eight to three-thirty, in town. She couldn’t take me to the pool. And it was much too far to walk. I could see my one chance slipping away.
    If only we had a pool.
    Who was I kidding? We couldn’t even afford a Slip-and-Slide. The house had cost everything my parents had — and a little bit more. There were no plans for a pool anywhere in the near future.
    I walked back out onto the veranda. A wasp was hovering about where the nest used to be, looking lost. Poor dumb thing, I didn’t have the heart to kill it, even though I probably should have. I knew how it felt to lose your home.
    I waved my hand at it, and it took off towards George’s house next door. Then I looked across the road.
    She was staring again.
    I’d noticed her before, lots of times, just sitting there, watching. Not just me, but everything. Her house was on the high side of the street, and the land dropped away quite steeply behind us, so she had a great view. I’d never seen a husband. Mum thought she’d heard he’d died, quite recently.
    She did have a dog. I’d seen her walking it sometimes, early in the morning, before it got too hot. She looked sad, lonely.
    I don’t know why I did it, but I waved to her. And flashed my best polite smile. The one I save for