Idolism (10 page)

“I daresay he’s asking for it. What with the way he behaves and everything.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But that’s because nobody really knows him that well. As I said, he’s a good guy, really. He’s honest. That’s a quality that seems rather underestimated.”

“I’m going to have to take your word for it, I suppose.”

I pushed the door open, and we stepped out into the playground. The air was crisp and clean and smelled of spring. We slowly negotiated our way through clusters of screaming middle schoolers until we reached a quieter corner of the playground. Our conversation about Tummy had come to an end, and we walked in silence for a while.

“So what do you do?” Michael finally asked.

“What do you mean, what do I do?”

“I mean, when you’re not at school getting annoyed by everyone.”

“Well, when I’m not at school I usually get annoyed by everyone outside of school.” She laughed.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, well. People are strange, aren’t they? Most of them are anyway. I mean, look around you. Which of these people would you like to waste your spare time with? I don’t know, I just don’t seem to get along with most people. It’s not that some of them aren’t really nice and friendly, but when I get to school on a Monday morning, the very last thing I want to talk about is
The X-Factor
, or football results, or whatever else has been on TV over the weekend. So I’m really glad, almost relieved even, when the school bell rings and I can get inside and listen to Mrs Hamilton talk about the Napoleonic wars or something for an hour. I don’t really have anything against anybody, but the lack of intellectual stimulation I get from my peers is just a major turnoff. If your life revolves about reality TV shows, shopping, and Facebook, then that’s fine, suit yourself. But don’t expect me to feign any interest.”

“I see.”

“Oh my god,” I said and put my hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t ... Please tell me your life doesn’t revolve around reality TV shows, shopping, and Facebook!”

“No.” He laughed. “No, it doesn’t, don’t worry. I don’t watch reality TV, I hate shopping, and I don’t even have a Facebook account.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. “And to answer your question, I read a lot, play the piano, and help out at the animal shelter twice a week.”

“The animal shelter?”

“Yeah. I love animals. For some reason I find it much more difficult to get annoyed by animals. Compared to humans, I mean.”

“Right. So what you are saying is you don’t really like people.”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t put it like that. I do like
some
people. There are some truly great people around, but they’re preciously few. Like, maybe one in a hundred, which means ...” I looked around. “There may be a total of four or five really cool people in this school. Unfortunately they get so easily lost in the crowd.”

We had been walking in silence for a while when all of a sudden Julian—another guy from our class—ninja’d his way past Michael and me, turned around and beamed at us with his big blue eyes.

“Check this out,” he said and handed Michael a piece of paper. Then he looked at me and said, “Hello, stranger.”

I frowned at him, and I could see the boyishly mischievous sparkle in Julian’s eyes, the pleasure he derived from confusing people.

“Um, I’ve been in your class for six years,” I said, only mildly annoyed. “My name is Ginger, remember?”

“Is it really?” Julian’s eyes got even bigger. “I thought your real name was Emily?”

“Then why are you calling me ‘stranger’?”

“Because you’re so strange,” Julian whispered in a creepy, half evil villain, half madman voice.

Michael closed his eyes and rubbed his eyebrows with his thumb and middle finger, trying not to feel too embarrassed.

Julian gently thudded Michael’s shoulder with his fist. “You all right, mate?”

“Fine,” he said, although it didn’t sound very convincing.

“Good, good. Anyway, read this. I have to go, my planet needs me. Talk to you later.” He looked at me. “By, stranger.”

And he ran off like a seven-year-old who had just seen an ice cream truck.

I looked at Michael. “Do you have any friends that are not completely bonkers?”

He pondered the question for a moment. “No. Sorry.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I said, slightly amused. “So what’s this?” I looked at the piece of paper in his hand.

Michael looked at it too. “It’s a song that Julian wrote. Apparently it’s called
Wistful Thinking
.”

“Oh,” I said sneeringly. “Someone’s a little poet.”

“You have no idea.”

“Can I see?”

He handed me the piece of paper. I read Julian’s lyrics, and by the time I was finished I couldn’t help but smile.

“Not bad,” I said. “So, do you guys have a band or something?”

“More like
or something
. I mean, yes, technically you could call it a band, although we don’t actually write our own music or anything.”

“You write your own song lyrics but not your own music? How does that work?”

“You want me to show you?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

That same afternoon I made my way over to Michael’s house. It was a posh looking place in an affluent area. Rumour had it that Michael’s dad had it custom-built and paid for it in cash, using just some of the insane amounts of money he had supposedly made as a software developer at Microsoft in the early 1990s.

I walked up to the door and rang the Tetris-themed bell.

A few moments later the door opened, and a very tall, very handsome man looked down at me. “Oh hello. You must be Ginger?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Michael’s dad.”

He held out his hand and I shook it. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, Ginger. Come on in. Michael’s in his room.”

Michael’s room was downstairs, in the basement. I knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. Michael wasn’t alone. Julian was sitting on the couch and reading a book. Tummy was lying in one of the armchairs, eating a bag of crisps. Michael was at his desk, punching keys on his laptop computer. When I opened the door they all looked at me.

“Hello, Ginger.”

“Hi, Ginger.”

“Hey.”

Michael’s room looked surprisingly unsurprising. It was a typical boy’s room, in a way. There was a couch and two armchairs, a TV, an unmade bed and a desk with a laptop computer and two computer monitors on it that belonged to the two computers under the desk. In front of the TV on the floor there were a PlayStation and an X-Box. Cables everywhere on the floor. On the walls there were several posters, but they weren’t posters of football teams or half naked female singers or film stars or anything. One was a chemical periodic table, one was an artist’s impression of the Milky Way galaxy, one was a tree of life with images of everything from one celled organisms at the bottom to the primates, chimps, gorillas, orang-utans and humans at the top of the tree. This wasn’t just a boy’s room. It was a geek’s room, and I felt strangely at home right away.

The Gospel According to Michael – 4

I was sitting in biology class, in the back row, pretending to listen to Mr Beaumont’s ramblings about the inherent beauty of DNA and trying not to fall asleep because I had been up all night working on MINDY, when suddenly my phone began to vibrate in the pocket of my trousers. Of course we weren’t allowed to have our phones switched on during school hours, but I didn’t know anyone who actually switched their phones off at school. It usually wasn’t a problem as long as the phone was in silent mode. One time Tummy had forgotten to put his phone in silent mode, and it started blaring out Beyoncé at top volume in the middle of a Maths exam. It killed everyone’s concentration, which didn’t exactly help Tummy’s popularity. The teacher confiscated the phone, and Tummy had to have his mum pick it up at the headmaster’s office after school. He was grounded for a week, and he never forgot to put his phone in silent mode again.

I took my phone out of my pocket but kept it beneath the desk so Mr Beaumont wouldn’t see it. I had a new text message from Tummy. It read, ‘Hello Michael.’ After his previous experiences one would think that even a guy as dim as Tummy would be more careful about using his phone in class and do it only if it was for something really important that couldn’t wait. ‘Hello Michael’ didn’t seem that important. I looked up. Tummy was sitting two rows in front of me, his head propped against his left hand. With the right hand he was scribbling whatever Mr Beaumont was saying in his notebook. I crumpled a piece of paper into a little ball, and when Mr Beaumont was facing the blackboard, I threw it at Tummy’s head. He turned around and frowned at me.

I mouthed ‘What?’ at him. He frowned even more and mouthed back, ‘What what?’

I shook my head and dismissively waved my hand at him, which is international sign language for ‘Forget it’. Tummy’s frown turned into a scowl, and he shook his head at me. That’s when Mr Beaumont turned around.

“Do you have a question, Mr Lewis?”

Tummy bolted in his seat, looked at Mr Beaumont and stammered, “Y-yes, Mr Beaumont, sir. How do you spell deoxyribonucleic acid again?”

Mr Beaumont sighed. “Yes, it’s very complicated. I will spell it out for you, Mr Lewis. It’s D-N-bloody-A!”

The class laughed, and Tummy’s head turned bright red. “Thank you, sir.”

I was just about to put my phone back into my pocket when it started vibrating again. It was another text message, this time from Ginger. It read ‘Hello Michael.’

I looked up at Ginger who was sitting in the front row, leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed. She had been sitting like that ever since the beginning of the lesson. She didn’t need to write anything down. In biology she was an A* student. She didn’t look as if she had been touching her phone any time recently.

Something fishy was going on. Before I had the time to put my phone away, it vibrated again. Another text message. It was from Julian and it read ‘Hello Michael.’ Julian was sitting right next to me, and if he’d been using his phone, I would have noticed. He looked at me, frowning because he could see the confused look on my face. I showed him the text message that had supposedly come from him. He looked at me again and raised an eyebrow. That’s when my phone vibrated again. And again. And again, until I finally switched it off.

An hour later we were sitting in the school canteen, Julian, Ginger, Tummy, and I sharing a table, having lunch and staring at my phone that was on constant vibration now. Ever since that first text I got from Tummy during biology class, I had received a total of 126 messages from Tummy, Julian, Ginger, Tummy’s sister, Tummy’s mother, Ginger’s dad, and a couple of random people whom I sort of knew but who weren’t even supposed to have my number. All these messages read ‘Hello Michael,’ and I was seriously worried about this obviously very severe breach of security.

“How is this even possible?” Ginger asked. “I mean, how can my mobile send out text messages without me doing anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be a software bug?”

“All of a sudden? On everyone’s phone except mine? You haven’t been getting any messages from me, have you?”

I looked around. Ginger and Julian shook their heads. Tummy was checking something on his phone and suddenly said, “Are you kidding me?” He looked at me with his eyes wide open.

“What is it?”

“I’m being charged for all those messages to you!”

Julian and Ginger immediately grabbed their phones to check their billing accounts.

“Me too,” Julian said.

Ginger nodded. “Michael, you need to stop this or we’ll all be broke by the end of the day.”

“Stop what? I’m not doing anything!”

“This is probably a scam from the phone company,” Tummy said. “You know, they just send out random texts from people’s phones so they can charge them. Bloody bloodsucking bastards!”

Once again I went through the ever growing list of messages. “What I don’t understand is how I can get all these messages from people who don’t even have my number. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“They’re all people you know, though, right?” Ginger asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “There are a couple of unknown numbers. Anyone know who this is?”

I showed them one of the numbers. Julian and Ginger shook their heads, but Tummy said, “That’s my aunt.”

“I don’t even know that woman. Did you give her my number?”

“Why would I do that? My aunt isn’t into younger men.”

“Did you guys know that every person in the world is on average connected to every other person in the world by only six steps?” Julian asked. We all looked at him. “It’s a theory called
Six Degrees of Separation
. For example, Michael, your dad used to work for Microsoft, right?”

“He did. Way back in the early 90s.”

“Has he ever met Bill Gates in person?”

“Yeah, a couple of times.”

“There you go. You know your dad, your dad knows Bill gates, Bill Gates knows the President of the United States. That’s only three steps between you and the President; or us and the President, for that matter, because we all know your dad as well. Now imagine how many people Bill Gates and the President of the United States know personally. We’re connected to all these people by only three or four steps. The world is a whole lot smaller than you might think.”