‘Sure, there’s Mover Island, a piece of land that moves from place to place. The people who live there could go to sleep near a country like Canada and wake up next to a country like Australia or Greenland. The problem is, they’re hardly ever dressed for the weather and sometimes freeze or boil to death in their beds.’ That got me thinking about Lyle, who I would like to put on Mover Island.
At lunchtime I was swinging and playing a game in my imagination – until Lyle came along. In the game, I was swinging over a big gully. The object of the game was to swing high enough so that my feet looked like they were touching a certain cloud in the sky. If they couldn’t touch that cloud, I would be sucked into a gully of brain suckers. I had fun doing that until Lyle came over and did an under-duck and pushed me out of my swing. I landed in brain-sucker gully and was really mad. So I yelled some Gaelic words at him and then called him a name he’d understand. If Lyle was in a pit of brain suckers, and he was the only food they had in months, those brain suckers would starve to death. I really wished right then that I was a stinkpot turtle that releases a foul scent when its predator attacks. But the only thing that stank right then was Lyle.
Lyle ran to Mrs. Wardman. I watched him as he talked to her, and I knew he was snitching. Mrs. Wardman listened to him, and then she looked over at me and made a motion with her hand for me to come over. As I walked over to her, I had seventeen thoughts go through my brain. Then I had a thought about there being seventeen thoughts, and that made it eighteen.
Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Lyle says you called him a rude name. I don’t know what it was and I’m not even going to ask you, because saying it once is enough. I don’t want you to call names again, is that clear, Phin?’
I nodded my head, but I was really, really mad. I hadn’t told on Lyle for pushing me, so why did he tell on me for calling him a name? He does it all the time, and not behind my back like some of the other kids. Lyle’s the biggest front-stabber there is. I said ‘Whatever’ to Mrs. Wardman, but I said it really low so that she could hear me only in her unconscious.
I wished really hard that red fire ants would swarm Lyle. Their sting hurts as much as wasp stings. The problem is there aren’t many red fire ants around here. They’re usually where it’s warmer. Then I started thinking that maybe with global warming, they would begin a giant march north and eventually end up here.
This made me think about climate change and how the earth is heating up. Scientists say that if it heats up by more than two degrees, we’ll all be in big trouble, and it’s heating up even faster than anyone thought. Thinking this made me feel shivery inside. When I told Bird I was feeling worried, he tried to distract me by getting me to pretend the teachers could shoot laser rays out of their eyes and we should dodge them. But I just didn’t feel like it.
I tried putting a stick between my teeth to make my mouth into a smile, but it didn’t work. Bird said I looked like a jack o’ lantern, and then he put a stick between his teeth too. When he did that, I saw something black crawling toward his mouth.
I said, ‘Umm, Bird, I think you should take that stick out of your mouth.’
He said, ‘Why?’ but it sounded more like Eiiii.
Then I said, ‘Because there’s something about to crawl into your mouth, and it’s something that people might eat in Cambodia but we don’t eat them here.’ Actually, 80 percent of the world’s people eat insects of some kind, which means they can’t be all that bad for you, but just as I was about to mention that to Bird, he saw the beetle too. He flung the stick really far, and it hit a Grade 5 kid on the back. That kid turned around and pushed the kid behind him, who must have been confused. Bird started dancing around and shivering. He was still shivering and saying, ‘Gross, gross, gross,’ when the bell rang. That made me smile a little bit for real.
We mostly did boring stuff the rest of the day, so to keep myself from falling asleep, I made up a game to play each time Mrs. Wardman told us to take a Duo-Tang out of our desk. The game was if I reached in with my eyes closed and pulled out the right one on the very first try, I got fifteen points. If I got it on the second try, I got ten points. Third try was worth five points and fourth try got a big fat zero. The goal was to get at least fifty points by the end of the day. I only got to forty-five.
The only good part of the afternoon was silent reading, when I got to read a book about dolphins. I learned that a dolphin mother sometimes has a dolphin midwife with her when she gives birth. The midwife pushes the baby up to the surface as soon as he’s born so that he can get a breath of air. I also learned that if you plug a dolphin’s blowhole, that feels to a dolphin like how covering your mouth and nose at the same time would to you. I wondered what that would feel like. I tried holding my breath to see what it felt like, but I didn’t really think that would be the same.
After school, my mother showed up to take me home but I told her that I wanted to walk home today.
She said, ‘But, Phinnie, I’m already here.’
I said, ‘But I really want to walk home.’
My mother sighed and said, ‘Fine then, walk home.’
It was a good thing I did because on the way, I saw a plastic shopping bag on the side of the road. I picked it up and put it in my backpack because it could blow out to the ocean and a sea turtle or an albatross could choke on it. Albatross babies are fed things like plastic lids and Lego blocks by their mothers, who find them floating in the ocean and mistake them for food. Every year thousands of babies die because plastic gets caught in their throats and esophaguses, which makes them choke or starve to death. I wondered why the person who littered the plastic bag didn’t think of that.
When I got home, my mother wasn’t there. In a few minutes she showed up and told me that she had had a little talk with my teacher. This is never good news. I sucked in my breath and held it as long as I could. I remembered the rule of threes when I did this. The general rule is that you can live three minutes without oxygen, three days without water and three weeks without food. I was careful not to hold my breath for longer than the count of fifteen, because I wasn’t sure that rule was completely accurate.
My mother still hadn’t said anything else, so then I took another big breath and did the same thing over. She said, ‘Phin, what are you doing?’ I didn’t say anything right away because I was still trying to let out the air I had breathed in and didn’t want to break the pattern of it. She crossed her arms.
When all the air was out, I said I was just breathing, waiting for her to get to the point. She said she was getting there but was waiting for my full attention. I said I could never give her my complete full attention because some of it had to be used for things like breathing and blinking my eyes. She said most people could do those things without paying attention. I said not me because I had to keep part of my mind on those things in case they got out of control.
My mother said, ‘I heard you used a few select words today, Phin. What was that all about?’
‘Lyle pushed me. Twice.’
‘Well, I hadn’t heard about that part. Did you tell Mrs. Wardman?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you should have. Lyle needs to learn a lesson. You’d actually be doing him a favour by telling on him.’
‘I don’t want to do him any favours.’
‘You know what I mean, Phin. You’d be doing everyone a favour,’ said my mother.
Then I told her that Lyle had pushed me before today too. She got really
