Freddy vs School Read online

  And he grinned, and got a look in his eye that I can only describe as an actual EVIL GLEAM.

  “Let’s settle this.”

  “Settle this how?” I asked.

  … he said.

  “Human versus Robot. Let’s see who’s strongest, once and for all. Unless you’re too CHICKEN.”

  And he did this big smug grin. Henrik can be SO ANNOYING. It’s like he thinks just because he’s bigger and stronger than anyone, that means he can do what he wants. And that is literally like the definition of INJUSTICE.

  Which, as I mentioned, I am NOT INTO.

  “Do it, Freddy!” said Fernando. “Teach this guy a LESSON!”

  “… you’re on,” I said. “What are we throwing?”

  Henrik grabbed the lunchbox back off Riyad, who was still standing there. “Unicorn Lunchbox,” he said.

  Riyad looked a bit alarmed by this.

  “It’s fine, don’t worry,” I said to him. “I’ll get it right back to you. We just need to teach this guy a lesson. About JUSTICE, and about not picking on people, and about who is ACTUALLY STRONGEST. Okay?”

  “Um,” said Riyad. Which I assumed probably meant yes.

  So we all went over to the edge of the school field, and everyone lined up, and Henrik stepped up to take the first throw.

  “Stand back, everyone,” he said.

  And he sort of spun his arm round and round like one of those guys on the Olympics doing the hammer throw, or the shot put, or whichever one it is.

  The lunchbox was just a BLUR OF PINK. And then he let go, and:

  It sailed out over the field, coming down with a …

  halfway up the football pitch.

  There was some clapping and some cheering and even a couple of WHOOPs. Henrik did his biggest smuggest grin and said, “Beat THAT, Robot.”

  Anisha sent someone off to retrieve the unicorn lunchbox, and Fernando went to stand where it had landed as a marker.

  “Do it, Freddy!” shouted Fernando, from up the field. “Show him!”

  I double-checked that there weren’t any teachers out on the field, but it was okay, we had the all-clear. So I decided to really teach Henrik a lesson, and give everyone a show, and use my SUPER ROBOT STRENGTH to throw this sucker …

  Everyone was clapping and cheering and yelling “FREDD-Y! FREDD-Y!”, and I decided that being a Superhero was definitely EVEN BETTER than being a Celebrity.

  So I did just like Henrik had, and spun round and round with it, until the lunchbox was like a PINK TORNADO, and then just as I was about to throw it …

  I completely lost my grip and the lunchbox flew out of my hand backwards, going incredibly fast, right towards …

  … Miss Obasi. Who was walking across the playground, holding a cup of coffee.

  “Look out!” someone yelled, but it was too late. The lunchbox CRASHED into her coffee cup, sending it flying, and then the mug and the lunchbox hit the ground, both of them smashing apart into tiny pieces with a massive …

  Miss Obasi gave this bizarre sounding noise, sort of a GYEAAARGGHH, and jumped like three feet in the air.

  Just then, my big brother Alex came walking round the corner of the playground and saw the whole scene.

  Pieces of broken mug and pink plastic and spilled coffee, and bits of Riyad’s lunch, SPRAYED all over the playground. And Miss Obasi standing there clutching her chest and shaking like she’d just had a HEART ATTACK.

  And everyone standing around staring at me.

  And without even slowing down, Alex just said “Nope,” and turned around, and walked back around the corner.

  Alex is not very helpful sometimes.

  Mr Javid came charging out of the school huffing and puffing. He ran over to Miss Obasi to check she was alright. And then, without even asking anyone what had happened or who had done it, he looked over, glaring. Right at me. And he said:

  Just assuming it was me that had done it.

  I mean, yes, okay, it was actually me that had done it.

  But it is not nice to assume.

  “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed,” Mum said to me on the Skytube home, after she’d had to come in to school for yet another Meeting, this time about the Lunchbox Incident. But it sounded like she actually was angry, and I pointed this out.

  “Okay, yes! Fine! I am angry AND disappointed!” Mum said, QUITE LOUDLY. But then everyone in the carriage started looking round, so she went back to using her quiet voice.

  “Everything we talked about … you promised me you’d try. And now that’s your first strike, and you’re just two more incidents away from being expelled. And how long did you last?”

  I was about to answer, but then I realised that this was probably a trap, because she actually knew the answer already.

  “One day,” she said.

  “It wasn’t my fault!” I protested. “I was FIGHTING INJUSTICE!”

  “You broke some poor boy’s lunchbox. You almost gave your teacher a heart attack. What part of that, exactly, is ‘fighting injustice’?”

  And when she put it like that, I had to admit it didn’t sound very good. I was pretty sure I had been fighting injustice, but then everything got … confused.

  We sat in silence the rest of the way.

  When we got home, Mum went into her lab and was banging things around even louder than usual, and through the door we could hear occasional bits of EXCITING SWEARING.

  Even though my mum is an amazing robot scientist, she did not actually build me and Alex. We are adopted, which means she is our mum even though she did not build us?

  Anyway, the EXCITING SWEARING from her lab seemed like it was going to carry on for a while, so after a bit, Dad decided that maybe me and him and Alex should go for a little walk down the park.

  “You have to understand,” Dad said as we sat on a bench, “It means a lot to your mum, you guys going to that school. Making it work. She had to pull a lot of strings to get you there. Call in a lot of favours.”

  “Don’t know why she bothered,” I muttered super quietly, but apparently not quietly enough, because Dad gave me the HARD STARE.

  “She bothered,” Dad replied, “so that you’d have a chance to make friends, and have normal lives, and just … be people, and not spend your whole lives in a lab being monitored and tested and, and …”

  … and I think he must have run out of steam or, like, lost the use of language or something, because he just kind of threw his hands up and went “gahhh!”

  “Hey, Dad?” said Alex. “Is it okay if we fly for a bit?”

  “Fine,” said Dad, taking a deep breath. “Don’t go above a hundred metres, okay? I don’t need you guys interfering with hover traffic.”

  And then he got like a haunted look in his eyes, and muttered “… not after the last time.”

  “We’ll be careful, promise,” said Alex. And because Alex is so GOOD and PERFECT and has apparently NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG, that was good enough for Dad.

  If I try and talk to Alex at school he acts confused and pretends we are not related. Which doesn’t really work because we basically look exactly the same. And also, ARE BOTH ROBOTS. Which is a bit of a giveaway.

  Alex started school years before I did, after we were adopted, when I was still just a baby. He was the first robot to ever go to school. And everyone always says how good he was, how he never caused any trouble or blew anything up with lasers or accidentally set fire to anything.

  Anyway, with GOOD AND SENSIBLE AND PERFECT Alex supervising, we are sometimes allowed to fly at the park. We blasted off, and it was really nice to just fly. Just bomb around and dive and swoop and do loop-the-loops and just … get up above everything.

  After a bit, Alex landed gently on the top of this really tall tree in the middle of the park. And I came down to join him, and we sat there in the branches, looking out over the park and the buildings, and the hover-traffic drifting through the sky, and all the way across to the Mega-Skyscrapers over Canary Wharf.

  “I know what it’s like, Freddy,” said Alex, after a bit. “I remember what it was like when I first started school. Mum never said this to me, exactly, but I could tell … a lot of people never wanted me to be there.”

  He paused for a minute, looking off into the distance. A bus drifted overhead.

  “And it’s hard. Because everyone treats you like you’re this … social outsider,” he continued. “And they’re always watching you, every day. Watching and … waiting for you to mess up. Wanting you to mess up. Because if you mess up, you prove them right.”

  “Right about what?” I asked.

  “That you’re different,” Alex said, watching a bird land on a nearby branch. “That you’re not like them. That you’re just … you know. A Dangerous Robot.”

  “But … you never got in trouble,” I said. “Like, never. As I am always hearing. How did you do it?”

  “You’ve just got to … try and keep your head down, you know? They’re all watching you, so you just … don’t give them anything to look at.”

  I thought about what that would be like. Not giving people anything to look at. Not being a Celebrity or a Superhero any more.

  Not being anything.

  Honestly? I did not like the sound of it, AT ALL. But I didn’t say anything.

  “You can always blow off steam when you’re back home,” Alex continued. “Fire off your lasers, blow up some of the training droids at Mum’s work. Come here and fly about. Just not at school, yeah?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it.”

  “While you’re there, you just keep quiet,” Alex continued. “Inconspicuous. You nod, you smile. You blend in. You don’t give them an excuse.”

  “I can do that!”

  Alex looked at me.

&
nbsp; “… can you, though?” he asked.

  “I can! I totally can!” I yelled, standing up on the branch and shaking my fists at the sky.

  But just then the branch broke, and I fell out of the tree and landed in a bin, and it made a massive …

  … and an old lady had a funny turn and fell over into a hedge.

  And okay, I admit, that was not a very good start.

  So all the next week at school I was trying to do like Alex said and Keep My Head Down and Be Quiet And Inconspicuous, and stuff.

  So it was one lunchtime that week that I ended up sitting next to …

  Riyad.

  I was still feeling a bit bad about Riyad.

  “Hey. Um. Sorry,” I said, as I sat down. “About, y’know …”

  Riyad didn’t look up at me. We both looked down at …

  … his lunchbox.

  Someone had put it back together with duct tape, but it was still all bent out of shape, and I don’t think the lid closed properly any more, and the unicorns were all scuffed up so they still looked like unicorns, but kind of Weird Broken Zombie Unicorns.

  “I was trying to help,” I said. “And to FIGHT INJUSTICE, and stuff. But then, um, I sort of got carried away, and everything got all mixed up, and … anyway. Sorry.”

  Riyad just kept looking down at the lunchbox.

  “I know that cartoon’s for babies,” he said, not meeting my eye. “But we watched it when I was little, and my mum … she doesn’t get it …”

  “Hey,” I said to him. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve still got some magic unicorn pyjamas at home.”

  Riyad finally looked up at me. He even smiled, a bit.

  “I mean, don’t tell anyone. Obviously,” I added quickly.

  So I mostly ended up hanging out with Riyad that week. It actually turned out to be super fun, because he is really into SCIENCE and so was very interested in, you know, me being an AWESOME ROBOT. We started doing a thing at lunchtimes called …

  … where I would run him through a lot of the questions people always have about what it is like to be a robot and how we work and stuff. For instance …

  Riyad even had a bunch of LESS-frequently-askedquestions, about how our reactors work, and our onboard information systems, and stuff like that. To be honest I didn’t know the answers to most of them, but it was still nice to have an excuse to TALK ABOUT MYSELF A LOT.

  And it was quite fun just to be able to, like, do Robot stuff. The stupid CODE OF CONDUCT meant I wasn’t allowed to use my lasers or rocket boosters or whatever but, as Riyad pointed out, I could still do lots of cool things that weren’t in the CODE OF CONDUCT.

  For instance, I borrowed the Secret Robo-Communicator Watch back from Fernando so Riyad could have a bit of a play with it.

  Apparently it has all these functions we’ve never even used, like Map References and Augmented Reality and stuff.

  It even has a HOMING FUNCTION, where Riyad could make it send a signal and I would suddenly see these big blue floating arrows appear in the air that only I could see, pointing the way to the watch, wherever it was. It was like magic! We played SECRET ROBO HIDE AND SEEK to test it out, and by following the arrows I could always find Riyad, even when he hid behind the BINS.

  Anyway, all this was pretty fun, so I decided that Riyad should join the S.O., which is a cool gang I started with Fernando and which I AM THE LEADER OF, whatever Fernando says. The one other member is Anisha, who always says she doesn’t actually want to BE a member, but Fernando says it’s not really a gang if you only have two members so Anisha is a member WHETHER SHE LIKES IT OR NOT.

  Anyway, I thought that since Riyad was so smart and good at science-y stuff he could join and be like our Science Officer. And Riyad said he didn’t really know what that meant, but okay. And Anisha said great, you’ve got a new member, that means I can leave now, right? And Fernando said NOBODY leaves the S.O.

  And Anisha said several rude words in Punjabi, but she hung around, which meant we had four members, which meant the S.O. was officially a PROPER GANG now!

  Which should have been great, but unfortunately …

  … that was when things started to go a bit wrong.

  All of us were out on the field – me, Fernando, Anisha and Riyad, the whole S.O. – and Fernando was … being very Fernando, basically. My mum says that Fernando is “an Instigator”. I think this means that he is always coming up with ideas that DO sound super fun, but it is often the kind of fun that ends up with me getting in trouble for blowing things up with lasers.

  As well as being my Best Friend (Human), Fernando is also the DEPUTY LEADER of the S.O. He actually claims that HE started it and that therefore he is the Leader, but that is just ridiculous. Why would he be the Leader? He does not even have lasers or rocket boosters or super strength or ANYTHING.

  No one can really remember/agree on what S.O. stood for in the first place, so now we just change it to … whatever seems like most fun at the time?

  * Sometimes it stands for SECURITY OFFICERS, and we go around looking for Bad Trouble and SPYING on people.

  * Sometimes it stands for SECRET ORGANISATION, and we are a cool Organised Crime Gang and we come up with EVIL PLANS and stuff.

  * One day it stood for SANDWICH OBLITERATORS, and we spent all lunchtime just straight-up destroying each other’s sandwiches.

  That last one was really fun, but then the egg mayonnaise from Fernando’s sandwich accidentally went all over the floor, and Mr Latif the P.E. teacher slipped on it and twisted his ankle, and that was pretty much the end of the Sandwich Obliterators.

  Anyway, today we were all out on the field and Fernando had decided that today, S.O. stood for Stuntman Operations! Which basically just meant he was trying to persuade me to give him a Rocket Piggyback around the football pitch.

  “I dunno, man,” said Anisha. “I’m pretty sure Rocket Piggybacks are against the CODE OF CONDUCT.”

  “Go on. Do iiiit,” Fernando said.

  Sometimes I think my mum is right about Fernando being an Instigator.

  Riyad looked around nervously. “Who’s on playground duty?” he asked.

  “Miss Obasi,” said Anisha. “But I just saw her go inside. I think she’s gone to the loo again.”

  “It’s all that coffee,” said Fernando, and we all looked at each other sadly. It is a real problem.

  “That gives us … three minutes,” said Fernando. “Plenty of time.”

  I was tempted to just do it. Rocket Piggybacks ARE really fun, because (A) I get to fly REALLY FAST while Fernando hangs onto my back and tries not to fall off, and (B) I get to hear Fernando yell amusing rude words every time he thinks he is going to DIE.

  But no, I was trying to be GOOD! Now that I only had two strikes left, suddenly it didn’t really seem like loads any more? So I was really trying to stick to the CODE OF CONDUCT. And, frankly, Fernando was NOT HELPING.

  I said to Riyad that maybe we should go off and do some more Robot Research together instead, and Fernando suddenly got really annoyed.

  “Stop being LAME!” he yelled. “We used to do Rocket Piggybacks all the time! It is our thing!”