Sketcher by Roland Watson-Grant Page B

Jackson songs and singing them back to her, like she wouldn’t notice. Psssh. That hypocrite Suzy would just sit there on the steps during recess sipping the cold drink Marlon bought her day after day, pretendin’ to love those tunes. After a while Frico couldn’t bear to see him sufferin’. So he told Marlon: “Look. Lay off the lunchtime concerts, man. She’s laughin’ at you.” My boy prob’ly thought Frico just wanted to thin out the competition, so he kept up the karaoke. But my brother knew what he was talking about. That Suzy Wilson is damn lucky Frico didn’t use his sketching powers to make her ugly, cos I reckon he wouldn’t have had to sketch too much. Now, in spite of everything, Suzy didn’t really bother me apart from the yappin’ and takin’ my friends for a ride, but then somethin’ happened one day during recess.
    I was listenin’ to some music on Marlon’s cassette player. While I was tappin’ my fingers to the beats, Suzy Wilson comes and pulls off the headphones and asks how come I didn’t hang around her like Marlon and the others. I wanted to say, “Cos you’re a yapper.” But I thought that would be nasty, so I tried to be clever. I told her, “Naw kid, you’re too young for me. I’m really into your aunt though.” Soon as I said it, Suzy’s jaws dropped, her eyes bugged out and I knew I was dead.
    So there I was in Principal Phillips’ office watchin’ this half-willin’ ceilin’ fan havin’ a borin’ conversation with a typewriter that was clickety-clackin’ in the back room, when Moms walks in, demanding to know why her son was sent to the principal for saying he liked one of his teachers. Now Phillips, he’s the principalest-looking principal you’ll ever see: he pushed back his glasses with his finger, stroked his double chin as if he had a brand-new point of view, and as usual started with a quote from some long-ago guy:
    â€œMrs Beaumont, have you ever heard the saying, ‘A child unbridled is a public report of domestic misdeed’?”
    â€œSo my kid is a horse?”
    That was prob’ly the first time I saw Phillips stop dead in his tracks. He just sat there silent, and the smell of fresh exam papers came out of that room with the noise of the faraway typewriter, and it just made me feel sick all of a sudden.
    â€œYou see, Mrs Beaumont,” says the principal in the end, “it’s not so much what your son said that got him into trouble: it’s what he was doing when he said those words... Terence, do you mind showing your mother?”
    Aw, dammit. Now, I honestly didn’t remember what I was doin’ at the time. And I meant no disrespect for Miss Lambert. I was just tryin’ to look cool in front of her niece. But now ol’ Screwdriver Phillips wanted me to demonstrate some dumb thrust-and-grind move for Moms in front of pointychin Suzy. Look, I can’t even dance, man. And lemme tell you, Moms hates anythin’ that looks like disrespect for other people. So yeah, that day I got punished twice because of damn Suzy Wilson. But I didn’t care about all that: that goddess Fiola Lambert and I were meant to be together, even if Suzy would be my niece-in-law or whatever you wanna call it.
    Now, even though I always put my hand up in her class (and that made the others call me mon petit chou , which is supposed to mean “teacher’s pet” or somethin’ like that), technically speakin’ Miss Lambert didn’t know how I felt. SoI figured I had to get her attention. And it couldn’t be that whole corniness of a present or an apple on her desk. Hell, who does that? Plus I ain’t got no money for no presents. Of course, even though I had just turned nine, I had a brother who could sketch a picture of me and magically make me look all grown up and handsomer in real life, but he was