Chapter 5

Without greeting Mr Thomson, I enter the science room, place my bag on a table, and sit in silence, avoiding eye contact with Mr Thompson and Nina.

‘Late again, Magnus,’ he huffs with his hands-on hip.

I shrug my shoulders and look away. Nina is sitting four tables away. It’s obvious she also isn’t happy to be here.

‘Well, if you two think you are both going to sit here in silence, then you have another thing coming,’

Nina and I turn our attention back to Mr Thomson.

‘I have borrowed some tools and a spare tabletop from the woodwork room. You will both spend detention fixing the table you broke,’

‘What! But I never broke it,’ Nina protests.

‘Do not care, Nina, now come and take this hammer,’ he growls.

I abruptly step down from my chair and march to the teacher’s desk, muttering and mumbling in dissatisfaction. Nina takes the nails and hammer, and I carry the tabletop. Nina kneels next to the broken table and assesses it closely. I kneel opposite her and place the tabletop down.

Mr Thomson walks towards the class doorway. ‘I will be back in thirty minutes. I expect the table to be fixed.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I say, waving him off.

Nina clears her throat. ‘Take the legs off the broken table. Then we can nail them into the new tabletop.’

Without saying a word, I take hold of the legs and go to pull it off, but Nina interrupts me, tapping me on the shoulder with a screwdriver.

‘Just unscrew them like a normal person. Otherwise, you will either bend the legs or break them like you did the table,’

Ignoring her suggestion, I pull the leg, ripping it off, but the leg is bent and crooked as she foretold would happen.

‘Great one, Magnus, a broken table and a bent leg, just great,’ she huffs.

‘Well, you fix it if you think you can do better.’

‘If you didn’t break it in the first place, Magnus, I wouldn’t have to fix it.’

Our hands are on our hips as we glare at each other, grizzling in silence.

‘Unbelievable,’ she says and kneels by the other leg and unscrews the good leg with the screwdriver, as I should have done.

As she unscrews the last nail, the metal leg falls towards her. I grab it just before it hits her head. She looks up in shock, but I’m not sure if it’s because she was about to be slapped across the head or because I caught the leg before it knocked her out. I take the leg over to the new tabletop and hold it in place. She is still silent; her mind plays over what just happened.

‘Well, are you going to come to screw this in while I hold it or not?’ I growl.

She shakes her head at her thoughts and kneels right beside me. Our legs touch, and I want to smile, but I don’t. Her dainty hands twirl the screwdriver in circles until the four screws are in. I lean across her lap to grab the bent leg, our faces so close for a moment that I smell her sweet breath reminding me of candy. Her lips have a clear coat of lip-gloss, I guess the strawberry flavour. I try to bend the leg back in place, but I seem to make it worse. Nina lets out a giggle, then quickly places her hand over her mouth to hide her smile. Something flutters inside my stomach at the thought that I just made her laugh like that. It’s a pleasant feeling, unlike the one I have had for years that carries a sense of doom.

She finishes screwing the bent leg in, and we stand back to look at the table that is on a slant. I place a book on it, and we watch as it slides off and bursts into laughter.

‘What do you think Mr Thompsons is going to say?’ Nina sniggers.

‘Eh, who cares? It was fun making it, but then again, I don’t want another detention,’ I say, picking up the fallen book and placing it under the foot of the bent leg. The table is now levelled out.

We burst into laughter again, and the fluttering I feel inside grows. Mr Thomson walks into the classroom. ‘I hope the table is… finished,’ he trails off, looking at the bent leg propped up on a book.

‘Magnus and Nina, detention again next Wednesday.’

‘But!’ we both try to argue with him.

‘I told you both to fix it, not mangle it more! Now go home before I decide to call your parents,’ he yells.

Nina and I both gulp and run out the door together. Seeing as we both live at the Packhouse, we both walked towards home together in silence, but it was a pleasant silence though.

Walking along the grass, she sees a baby bird chirping near a tree and rushes over to it. I follow her and watch as she scoops it up.

‘The poor thing has fallen from its nest,’ she says as she stares up at the tall tree. ‘I’m going to put it back in its nest.’

‘You can’t climb up there, Nina. This tree is taller than what I would climb,’ the bird chirps in her hands. It’s pretty cute to look at. I gently scratch its little head to reassure it. It relaxes and snuggles further into Nina’s hand. I can feel our bodies radiating warmth and realise how close I’m standing to Nina. I take a step back, giving her space.

‘Well, I can’t leave it here, Magnus. So I’m going up there with or without your permission,’ she says and grabs onto the first branch.

‘Fine, but I’m coming with you, only because if something happens to you, I will get the blame for it.’

Nina laughs. ‘You won’t get the blame for my actions, Magnus,’ she says, now on the third branch.

I climb below her in case she accidentally falls. I don’t want her to get hurt.

‘Uh, yeah, I will. I always get blamed for anything you pull.’

Her laugh echoed through the trees as she grabbed the tenth branch. It was like beautiful music to my ears.

‘Don’t be so absurd, Magnus. You think too highly of yourself. I get into plenty of trouble myself each day, although once upon a time we used to get into trouble together and we had so much fun doing so,’

I laugh, ‘Fun? Anything we did as a child was far from fun, from what I remember,’

‘Well, you remember wrong,’ she says.

I look down at the ground. We must be at least forty branches high.

‘Enlighten me then,’

‘Okay, remember when the laundry overflowed with bubbles, and we would play hide and seek to find each other?’

‘Yeah,’

‘Well, Magnus, that was your idea to fill the washing machine up with bubble bath and turn it on, and if you remember, I took the blame for it.’

I forgot she had taken the blame for it. She had to mop it all up and went to bed without supper. I snuck into her room and gave her a sandwich that night.

‘And then there was the night we wanted to watch the moon from the roof. We went climbing through May’s bedroom window, but when you tried to open it, it wouldn’t budge. You used such force that the whole window fell out and crashed onto the pavers outside. You went and hid in May’s wardrobe, and I took the blame,’

She is right. I remember now. My parents would have been so mad at me for wanting to climb onto the roof in the first place, let alone breaking a window in the process of it all. I had run straight to the wardrobe and hid inside and watched through the crack as May decided not to hide and took the blame instead.

‘Well, I got in so much trouble because I wanted to protect you. You were my best friend. So I thought it would be fun to play a couple of pranks on you in return for some fun so that we would be even. The next morning, I heard the warriors say they would need to release some water from the dam. You were refusing to have your bath the day before anyway, so I thought it would be funny to have you stand in the creek while the water washed over you. I knew you were twice the size of most kids, so the water would only reach your waist. Still, you acted so dramatically that day as if you were going to drown when you could have just stood up and watched it flow past you, and you never spoke to me again until now,’ she says, giving me a sad look for a moment before looking away.