Ashes from Ashs

I was running late for school. I’d never been late for school in my life and I didn’t want to start now. I ran outside and jumped into my dads Commodore. As I squealed around the corner out of our driveway my dad yelled at me to stop but I couldn’t be late for school. I was approaching the corner, picking up speed, I couldn’t be late. I hit the breaks to take the corner but I realized too late that the car was doing one hundred and fifty. The car rolled over and over and was halted by a large white gum. Slowly, I opened my eyes to observe the havoc that was the wreckage of the car. There was blood everywhere, snakes all around me and a cow was being abducted by aliens in the paddock next to me. Then I heard an ambulance siren coming closer. I awoke to find it was my alarm going off.

I switched off my alarm clock and leapt out of bed. I put on my grey shorts and shirt with the ASHS crest mounted on the breast pocket. They are the latest fashion at school and are very popular as everyone wears them. As I departed the room I swept up my grey tie and deftly secured it around my starched collar. When I emerged, Mum just finished making my breakfast. It was my usual meal of flame grilled toast with extra charcoal; Mum says it’s good for my digestion. I brushed my teeth and hair, got my bus money and went outside to line up for the four thirty bus.

When the bus arrived I got on and paid my twenty dollars and looked around for a seat. As usual there were four people wedged onto each seat and the centre walkway was almost full. I grabbed onto a pole just as the bus started moving and noticed that some of the other kids didn’t have anything to hold onto. I don’t think anyone minds being packed onto the bus so tightly because it stops everyone in the walkway falling over. As we skidded to a halt at the next stop I heard the usual screams of pain as a couple of people knocked their front teeth out on the seat in front of them. Last week by the end of the trip twenty seven people had lost their front teeth, fifteen had split their skulls open and seven were dead. We weren’t doing too badly that trip, when I got on there were only seven injuries that I could see. After picking up people from three airports, five train stations, fifteen shopping centres and twenty different towns we arrived at school and exploded out of the near bursting bus doors.

As I was waiting for my friend to arrive on one of the free orange buses I thought to myself how lucky I am to be able to catch the Transperth bus even though I have to pay for it. I feel sorry for my friend, Ryan, because he lives out of town away from all our friends and I. It’s only fair to compensate him by letting him ride the free orange bus with its personal plasma screen TV, Play Station 2, leather lounges and waitresses that deliver as much food and drink you can take. It makes me feel a lot better knowing that he isn’t missing out on anything.

An orange bus pulled up in front of me and Ryan walked off.
“Hi Bruce, hows it going”, he said as he walked towards me.
As the bus took off again it covered us in a cloud of thick, black smoke which must have stopped a bus driver seeing Ryan because he ran him over and kept driving. I couldn’t see anything wrong with him apart from his leg, which looked like one of those boomerang things we’d been shown in society and environment, but there wasn’t any blood so he must have been okay.

I helped Ryan limp off to first session which was sport. In sport we’re doing pole-vault which is really fun except it hurts when we land because we have no landing mats, the principal says that it helps to make our legs stronger.
Ryan limped up to our sports teacher, Mr Savage, and said, “Excuse me Mister Savage, I was wondering if I could go to the nurse for a minute because my leg really hurts and there’s blood coming out of my ear”.
Mr Savage told him he would be fine and to get him warmed up made him run fifteen laps of the oval then take his turn at pole-vaulting. After doing the laps Ryan grabbed his pole and started running towards the bar, screaming in pain every step he took. He did a great jump and went sailing over the bar. Unfortunately when he landed his shin bone burst through his skin and sprayed dark red blood everywhere. Mr Savage yelled at him for ten minutes then suspended him for messing up the school and trying to deliberately sabotage the schools good reputation and image. I feel a bit sorry for Ryan but if he’s going to go around the school bleeding on everything and trying to ruin the schools reputation he deserves everything he gets.

On my way to next session which was Society and Environment I saw a fight so I ran over to watch. The fight was over when one kid pulled a knife on the other and stabbed him in the neck. A teacher arrived and told the winner of the fight that he had 10 minutes yard duty at lunch. Sometimes I think about how much the teachers care about the students. If the teacher had called the police the kid would have gotten a criminal record and had no chance of getting a good job all because of a harmless fight. I thought about this and realised how much the teachers really care about us.

I arrived at my class five seconds late because of the fight so Mr Rissole told me to sit outside. I thought this was very kind of him, letting me sit in the sun and relax, until it started raining but he couldn’t have known that it would do that. Five minutes later Mr Rissole came out and said I would be spending some time with him at lunch and told me to come inside. When I sat down at my desk Mr Rissole told me I had to do a twenty minute speech about why Ethiopia is a third world country and I was only allowed six lines of notes he gave me. My speech lasted for nineteen minutes and fifty seven seconds. Because it wasn’t twenty minutes long Mr Rissole failed me for Society and Environment for the whole year. I listened to two other people and then the siren went.

I walked down to the canteen to get my recess but when I got there I found out the prices had gone up again. The day before the sausage rolls had been twelve dollars each, now they were fifteen dollars. I didn’t have enough money to buy recess so I went hungry but it isn’t so bad, I need to lose some weight anyway. While I was sitting down waiting for the siren to go a teacher came up to me and told me to pick up some rubbish that wasn’t mine.
I said to her, “But miss this rubbish isn’t mine”.
She said that it was just to help the cleaners and make their job a bit easier so I walked around the school and picked up all the rubbish I could find until the siren went.

Next session I had science. I’ve never really liked science because all we do is copy notes off the board and do tests. This session we had to copy fourteen pages of notes about sound waves and echoes.
After writing the ninth page I said to my teacher, “Why do we have to copy so many notes. Can’t we just read it”?
She said that we wrote so much to help support Australia’s paper making industry. When she put it that way I decided to copy out the notes twice to use as much paper as possible. My paper had made in China written on it. I’ve never heard of that town before, it must be in the eastern states.

At lunchtime I went back to Mr Rissole to spend some time with him, I think he actually wanted to get to know me better. When I arrived I sat down at a desk and waited for him to start talking to me. Instead he pulled out a pile of tests and started marking them. I thought he was a bit shy so I decided to try to start a conversation with him.
“So, hows it going Mister Rissole, can I call you Rissi”? I asked.
Instead of talking to me he said that I had earned lunchtime with him so I think he’s starting to like me. When the siren went he told me to go to my next class and to go back there the next day.

My next class was English but we had an assembly instead. We put our bags in the class and walked down to the gym. When I got there I squeezed inside and found a space on the cold, hard granite floor to sit on. When everyone had piled in and the teachers had sat on their padded chairs the assembly began. When kids complain about the seating at assemblies the teachers say that it’s to stop the children falling off their chairs and hurting themselves. I thought that the teachers are very brave sitting on chairs and taking the risk of falling just to look after us; it shows once again how much the teachers care for us. I don’t mind the assembly going on for a long time because it helps give us useful information about the school but it’s a bit annoying when it goes on until eight AM the next day like it did this time. When we walked out of the assembly, although some people got taken out on wheelchairs because their legs had fallen off, I decided there wasn’t enough time to go home and come back again so I walked over the road to get some breakfast from Quix. On my way back over the road I didn’t look for cars and halfway across I got hit by a sheep truck …..

Bryce Lightbody                                                                                            21/11/2004