In the second week of the academic year I started at my new school, Redtree. They put me in the wrong form, the Bottom Feeders, while they put some poor kid with the same name as me in the Golden Form where he was out of his depth and started to drown. On the Friday I gave up on girls forever, and I completely meant it, but then the following week I found true love. You ever get the feeling life is laughing at you? Me and Jess, we fell all the way, hand in hand. By the end of that week, probably because I was on a bit of a high, I discovered the Unified Theory to Life, the Universe and Everything. So my star was rising nicely, only then, the Wednesday after that, I killed someone and had to go on the run. Oh, and then I died in a car crash.
So, all in all, it was cracking up to be a fairly uneventful year, but what happened next really squeezed everybody’s lemons!
Everybody’s story finds its way into The Badtime Bedtime Storybook.
There’s Amanda, fresh out of the secure section at Yellow House, whose emotions manifest physically, like the boil of her insecurity that blossoms on her forehead on her first day at Redtree. And there are more emotions where that one came from.
There’s Racer Boy Steven, cast adrift in the Golden Form due to an admin error, whose stream of consciousness is a psychedelic dream but when he tries to write stuff down it looks like a baby has crapped on a piece of paper. But the boy can drive like a maniac.
There’s Writer Boy Stephen, who sees things so clearly he has transcended rebellion, and now he just wants to find the perfect pebble on the beach.
There’s Finn, Racer Boy’s little sister, who buys and sells bellybutton fluff, toe jam and other bodily by products for a profit. This is the sign of the times.
Nothing ever seems to happen and yet the constant change is relentless, merciless. Strange entities are abroad in the town of Windburn and there’s a rumour that there’s a rumour that somebody saw a nun with ice skates.
© 2012 by Ian Moore