G'day, America Read online

  “What kind of band are we?” I asked. I’d realized by now that nothing on the planet was going to stop Miller from either:

  (a) making me be in his stupid band; or

  (b) pounding me into mush.

  Unsurprisingly, I opted for (a).

  “How would I know?” Miller growled. “That’s your job, Khatchadorian. You’re the creative genius. Right, genius? Duh.”

  Yep. So, no pressure.

  ON MY WAY home from school, I was still trying to figure out how I was going to get out of Miller’s grand plan, when I turned the corner and saw something so HUMUNGOUSLY un-Hills Villagey, my lower jaw hit the sidewalk with a CLANG! and bounced straight back up. All thoughts of Miller and his music dreams blew straight out of my head as I gazed in wonder at a sight never before seen in Hills Village: a man bun.

  Yup, that’s right. An actual real-life man bun. A topknot. A—Wait, hold on just a second. Maybe I’ve got ahead of myself.

  Do you all know what I’m talking about when I say “man bun”? What am I saying? Of course you do. You guys probably live in cities awash with hipsters. You’re likely knee-deep in man buns and waxed mustaches and oiled beards.

  Not in Hills Village. The nearest we’ve gotten to a genuine hipster was when they made that movie in town (see Middle School: Hollywood 101 for deets). There were a few goatees and no-sock wearers floating around for a while when that was happening. But even then there was nothing like this dude. He was the real deal. A full-blown hipster.

  I’ll begin with the man bun. It was a big one, which suggested this dude really needed a man bun otherwise his glossy locks would come down to his knees. Below the man bun was a face—would’ve been real weird if there wasn’t, right?—which was mostly hidden behind a black beard that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a pirate ship. This impressive bit of face fungus was topped off by a waxed mustache with curly ends. He was wearing a retro nylon shirt so nasty that it had to be hip, and no shoes.

  Don’t get me wrong. If this guy didn’t want to wear shoes, that was entirely his biz. But wearing no shoes in Hills Village? That’s dangerous. I mean, it’s not like our town is a total dump or anything, but we have our fair share of broken glass, doggy doo, and suchlike. This dude was committed.

  The hipster was standing in front of a hardware store that had shut down last year. There was a fresh coat of paint on the door and newspaper over the windows. A sign that read GUDONYA: COFFEE, VINYL, YOGA hung from a repurposed pallet. He turned and noticed me staring. “G’day,” he said. “Howzit gwan, mite?”

  The hipster was Australian.

  Life in Hills Village had suddenly got a whole lot more interesting.

  NOW, THOSE OF you who’ve been paying attention to all things Khatchadorian will know that, when it comes to Australia, I’m pretty much an expert. I’ve been there, like, THREE times. I’ve had some mega-great, awesome times in Oz and met a bunch of totally cool people—in fact, one of them was about to come visit me (more on that later)—but I’ve also had a few less good things happen Down Under. For instance, there was that time I got chased out of the country by a pack of bloodthirsty zombies, and that other time I broke my leg, not to mention the time I stood on a crocodile and—wait, you can go read all about it for yourselves. Trust me, a lot of Khatchadorian-related stuff went down Down Under, so when I hear the word “Australia”, or meet an actual Australian, my response is … complex.

  But, whatever my feelings are about Oz, one thing was for sure: I had the Australian language nailed.

  I know you’re thinking:

  *Buzzer sounds*

  UHHH, NUUUH!

  Wrong.

  Australians don’t speak English. They speak a little known language called Strayan. To talk Strayan, there are some rules you have to follow. They’re pretty simple rules (just like most Aussies … ha-ha, only kidding). Gulp.

  1. Always shorten a word and add “-o” or “-ies” or “-ey” to the end. So “ambulance” becomes “ambo”, “service station” becomes “servo”. Geddit? Your “relatives” are “rellies”, and “mosquitoes” are “mozzies”. A “fireman” is a “firey”, and a “kangaroo” is a “roo”. Wait, that doesn’t fit …

  2. “Mate” can be added to the end of any sentence. As in “Can you grab me a sausage, mate?”, or “Prime Minister, when are you calling the next election, mate?” Note: your “mate” can be everyone and anyone, from your gran to a total stranger. It’s not unheard of for an Aussie to call the Queen of England “mate”.

  3. If you draw out the “a” in “mate”, it can be used as a kind of thank-you or warning. So if your friend buys you a ticket to the movies, you can thank her with a smile and a “Maaaaaate!” If your friend tells you he’s going to try to swim across a crocodile-infested river while wearing a suit made of raw meat, you can warn him with the exact same word but said while frowning.

  4. Words can run into one another, like cars in a low-speed traffic accident. “Go on” becomes “gwan”, “Good on you” turns into “Gudonya”, and so on.

  There are a lot more rules, but you get the idea.

  So, when Hills Village’s only hipster spoke to me, I knew exactly what he was saying. “Howzit gwan, mite?” translates to “How are things going with you, my friend?”

  “All good,” I replied, “mate.” See, I was straight in there speaking fluent Strayan, like I’d just stepped off a plane from Sydney.

  The hipster paused and looked at me more closely. “You’re not Strayan, are ya?”

  “No, mate,” I replied. “But I’ve been a few times, mate. Love it, mate.”

  Okay, I admit I was overdoing it, but the hipster looked impressed. He stuck out a paint-spattered hand.

  “Good to meet ya, fella! Put ya paw right there! Sid’s the name. Sidney Harberbridge.”

  I blinked.

  Sidney Harberbridge? Did he think I was born yesterday? Sidney Harberbridge as in THE Sydney Harbor Bridge?

  “Yeah, mate,” the hipster said. “I know you’re thinking: What kind of a name is that?”

  “No, I wasn’t. I didn’t. I mean, hey, like, whatever,” I burbled. I do that a lot—burble—when I get embarrassed.

  “My folks musta had a sense of humor, hey?” He waved a hand at the sign. “Whaddya think?”

  “It’s Aussie for ‘good on you’, right?” I said. “What are you selling? The coffee makes sense, but where does vinyl and yoga come into it?”

  Sid grinned. “Glad you asked, mate! Lemme show ya,” he said, swinging open the front door. “This joint is sick!”

  I stepped into Gudonya. If only I’d known that things would never be quite the same again (or at least not until the end of this story).

  OKAY, LET ME cut to the chase here.

  Gudonya was basically a shop that sold coffee (organic, cold-drip, triple-filtered Tasmanian espresso, if you must know. And, no, at that point I didn’t have a clue what any of that meant either) and vinyl—as in the big old, black plastic records your grandparents used to buy back in Ye Olden Times. You know the ones? Like this:

  Sid was also planning to hold yoga classes in a tent on a spot of wasteland between Gudonya and Vic’s Auto-Lube next door. When I say “tent”, I mean “yurt”. (Sid corrected me when I called it a tent.)

  Pay attention to that yurt as it comes into the story later.

  “I’m going to run Bikram yoga in there,” Sid told me. “That’s, like, hot yoga. Everyone gets heaps sweaty. Frees up the chakras like nobody’s biz, yeah? Got a heap of bookings already from the leaflet, yeah?”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what a chakra was, but I wanted to play it cool. And, by the way, I thought, Good luck with persuading anyone in Hills Village to do sweaty yoga, buddy. People round here … Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly trust stuff like that.

  Sid’s mention of a leaflet suddenly reminded me that I’d seen something like that attached to our fridge door. I hadn’t really looked at it properly because (a) it
was Mom who’d put it there; and (b) it was Mom who’d put it there. I don’t mean I pay no attention to what my mom’s into—she’s pretty cool for a mom, tbh—but you know what it’s like. Moms do mom stuff and I guess I’d tuned it out.

  After Sid had given me the tour of the shop/cafe/ whatever it was, he picked up a guitar, sat on one of the upturned crates he had instead of chairs, and started to pick out a tune. “So, mate, whaddya think?” he asked.

  What did I think? I blinked. Adults usually never asked me that. I looked around at the racks of vinyl, the upturned crate chairs, the vintage posters on the walls, the turntable cranking out some song I’d never heard, the concrete floor (hipsters don’t like carpets), the blackboard listed with retro breakfast cereal on offer (the only food Gudonya served), the stack of ’90s video games, the graffiti across one wall (“That was, like, already there when I moved in, so I just left it as it was …”), and the jar of handcrafted Peruvian kazoos (given free to loyal customers). You get the picture. Was he kidding? I LOVED EVERY FREAKING INCH OF THE PLACE!

  “Yeah,” I said lazily, with my eyelids half-closed, “it’s okay.”

  Sid stopped plunking the guitar strings and pointed a finger at me. “The cool approach, hey? I like it. You’re a natural hipster, kid,” he said with a smile. “Want a job?”

  “Here?!” I squeaked. I tried again, this time with less enthusiasm. “Here?”

  Better.

  “No, at the 7-Eleven. Yes, of course here. General coffee duties, mopping up, sales … and you can have as much Cap’n Crunch as you can eat.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  Sid held out his hand and we did one of those way cool upright handshakes. Like this:

  “Welcome aboard.”

  Sayonara, Swifty’s! So long, suckers! It felt great having a new job—and in Hills Village’s first hipster cafe, of all places.

  Later on, WHEN EVERYTHING WENT COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY WRONG, I’d remember that feeling and wonder why I didn’t—wait, I’m getting ahead of myself again. Why don’t you get comfortable? This might take a while. Sit back, pull up a chair and let me tell you what happened …

  THE NEXT DAY I was back at school. Woo-hoo.

  I managed to avoid Miller in the morning, but he grabbed me at lunchtime to check how I was going with the IMPOSSIBLE job of turning me, Miller, and Jason Chang into a band.

  Of course, I’d made completely ZERO progress, but one glance at Miller’s face told me that was not news he was even in the neighborhood of being ready to hear. I’ll say this for him, once he gets hold of an idea, it sticks … just like me. We may have been buddies back in London, but deep down he still blamed me for Bobby Flynn barfing all over him on the plane (don’t ask). Plus, don’t forget Miller was still totally Miller the Killer, buddy or not.

  “Yeah,” I croaked, once I’d persuaded him to unclamp his paw from my throat—when I’d said he grabbed me, I meant that literally. “I’ve found someone to teach me guitar.”

  I figured I could maybe ask Sid later, which made it practically true. In any case, I had to say something if I wanted to keep breathing. There’s only so long you can be lifted off the ground by your throat.

  “How are you doing with the drums?” I gasped, in an effort to distract him. He put me down and I sucked in oxygen like my life depended on it.

  “Drumming is hard, Khatchadorian,” Miller growled. “Getting good at the drums is gonna take up all my time, okay? Which means you gotta learn to play the guitar, write the songs, and work out how we’re gonna win the comp. Not just enter it, understand? Win.”

  “No problem,” I squeaked.

  With a grunt, Miller stomped off, the ground shaking under his feet. He stopped to bite the heads off two passing seventh graders who’d been dumb enough to look at him.

  If I was going to keep my own head, I needed to figure out what to do—stat. I liked my head. It was the only one I had.

  UNFORTUNATELY, THE NEXT lesson was music. That was the last place I was going to find out how to get a band up and running.

  “Hold on,” I hear you say, “surely music lessons are precisely the place you’d learn about that kind of thing?” And I’d say, yes, in some schools that might be true. The problem was our music teacher. Miss Murgatroyd wasn’t exactly … musical. In fact, she was tone-deaf, couldn’t play a single instrument, couldn’t sing, and seemed to hate everything there was to hate about music. I wasn’t going to learn anything from Miss Murgatroyd. I trudged into the lesson and sat down next to Shayleen Hoyt.

  “Hey,” Shayleen hissed, “you hear about Murgatroyd?”

  “No,” I said, once I’d gotten over the shock of Shayleen Hoyt speaking directly to me. Shayleen was one of the cool kids and hadn’t said a word to me since third grade. If she was talking to me now, the news about Murgatroyd had to be gigantic. “What about her?”

  Shayleen looked at me as if I’d just said I’d never seen the moon or something. “You mean you haven’t heard about what happened with her and the kettledrums?”

  “No,” I repeated, as the unfamiliar feeling of hope rose in my chest. “I’ve heard nothing. What happened?”

  “She’s been suspended, or kicked out, or whatever they do with music teachers!” Shayleen whispered gleefully. “Word on the street is, we’ve got a new teacher this semester.”

  A new teacher? That sounded promising. That sounded like the answer to all my problems. Maybe this new teacher was going to be someone young (y’know, born in this century) and cool who (a) knew everything about music, including how to (b) play guitar, and was willing to (c) give up all of their spare time in the next month to stop me from getting pounded into mush.

  I was so excited I forgot to ask Shayleen what Miss Murgatroyd had done with the kettledrums.

  THE DOOR TO the music room opened and my heart sank. Our new teacher was bald and way, way old—about fifty. He wore a gray suit, dark gray tie, and black shoes, and was carrying a briefcase. He looked like an accountant. A very boring accountant on a dull day in January.

  This guy was definitely not the answer to my not-getting-pounded-into-mush plan.

  “Good afternoon, class,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion. (It was actually pretty impressive how little emotion he exhibited.) “My name is Mr. Mann. M. A. Double N. And I will be your music teacher this semester.”

  Oh great. “A. Mann” was our teacher. They should have sent a robot.

  “What happened to Miss Murgatroyd?” someone piped up from the back of the classroom.

  Mr. Mann began rummaging around in his briefcase. “There was an … incident,” he said, pausing to cough. “Involving … kettledrums.”

  As we waited for him to explain (he didn’t), I wondered if I was maybe being too quick to judge. Just because Mr. Mann looked boring, had a boring voice, and wore boring clothes, it didn’t mean he was going to be boring. He could be the best music teacher we’d ever had, for all I knew.

  One thing he did have was a little S-shaped scar high up on his left cheek. You could hardly see it, but it was there all right. It was the only thing about Mr. Mann that suggested he might possibly not be the most boring teacher on the planet.

  We watched as Mr. Mann pulled out a thick wad of paper from his briefcase and started passing it around the class. “German composers of the nineteenth century,” he droned. “Test next week.”

  Well, that just goes to show what you get for being an optimist. I put my forehead on the desk and groaned. It was confirmed. Mr. Mann was the most boring teacher on the planet.

  WORKING AT GUDONYA was definitely different to working at Swifty’s. For a start, it smelled different: of coffee (natch), but also of incense and cool.

  Yes, cool.

  Betcha didn’t know that cool even had a smell, did you? Well, ace reporter Rafe Khatchadorian is here to tell you that cool does indeed have a smell and it smells exactly like a hipster cafe. Not that I had much to compare it to. Swifty’s just smelled of grease and disappoi
ntment.

  There were some other pretty neat things about working at Gudonya. There was the music, for a start. Sid always had a record spinning on the turntable; usually some totally obscure band I’d never heard of but knew was cool.

  When the place was quiet, Sid didn’t get on my case about doing stuff. At Swifty’s, there was always some lousy job or other to be getting on with even if it was completely pointless. Swifty didn’t believe in paying someone to sit around doing nothing, but Sid didn’t seem to mind me flicking through the albums, or sketching when it was quiet. One of the best things about Gudonya—maybe even the best—was that Sid not only tolerated me drawing, he encouraged it. I know I don’t make a big deal about drawing and art, but when someone likes your stuff, it really helps, y’know? Without getting all fancy about it, Sid liking my drawings made me feel like a thirsty plant getting a cool drink of water. Okay, maybe I got too fancy, but that’s what it felt like.

  And Sid didn’t stop there. When he saw me drawing pictures of some of the customers, he pinned a few of them up on a wall. I wasn’t sure at first—especially as the drawings weren’t all that flattering—but people seemed to like it if they made it onto the wall. It became a thing. Before too long customers were asking me to draw them, and the crazier I made them look, the better and the more they’d pay me (yep, actual money). Plus—and this is a majorly major plus—they impressed Jeanne Galletta.

  “You should totally fill that wall, Rafe,” she said one day, when she’d come in to see what the fuss was about. “It would be cool.”

  It. Would. Be. Cool.

  With those four simple words, Jeanne Galletta had changed my noodly-doodles into A MISSION. I was going to fill that entire wall and then she’d fall madly in love with me. Sid’s encouragement was one thing, but for Jeanne Galletta, I’d have doodled enough to cover the Great Wall of China. I’d have doodled until my fingers bled, until the world ran out of trees, until … you get the picture. Basically, I would do A LOT of drawing.