G'day, America Read online

  This was my big chance.

  EVEN WITH THE GALLETTA MISSION UNDERWAY, I still had time in between doodles (and band rehearsals) to concentrate on becoming a hipster. By the third weekend of me working at Gudonya, I felt like I was halfway there. Sid ha taught me how to tell a mocha from a macchiato, what crema was and the trillion little things that coffee nerds get excited about.

  The only trouble with all of this was, Hills Village didn’t, y’know, have any coffee nerds.

  “No problemo, bro,” Sid said when I pointed this out. “We’re just gonna have to educate the population, mate.”

  I had my doubts, but that’s exactly what Sid did. Inside three weeks, Gudonya began picking up a solid clientele and so did the yurt. Yep, sweaty yoga was a hit. Hills Village—where the most freaky thing that happened was half-price bowling every second Tuesday at Lane-O-Rama—was taking to sweaty yoga big time. And, despite my very best efforts to stop her, Mom had even signed up. As you can imagine, I took this news well.

  “There’s no need to be crabby about things you don’t understand,” Mom said. She was holding a fish slice and using it to emphasize the conversation. “Just because it’s something I’d like to try. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t.”

  Because you’re my mom! I wanted to say, but I didn’t because (a) it was a dumb thing to say, and (b) because, if there’s one sentence guaranteed to send my mom into TMMM (Total Mom Meltdown Mode), it’s me saying stuff like that. Truth is, I didn’t know why I was bothered about Mom doing the class. What did I care? It wasn’t like I had to go along or anything. Mom had done zip to deserve me being sarcastic. She worked hard, she took great care of me, all the good Mom stuff. I knew I should do the right thing and SHUT MY GREAT BIG TALK-HOLE. But I didn’t.

  “Bikram yoga,” I sneered, putting a spin on the word “Bikram” for some unknown reason. Sorry, Mom, said a little voice inside my head while my actual voice said nothing.

  Mom raised an eyebrow. “I bet you’ve never even seen what Bikram yoga is like.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said in a triple extra-sarcastic voice so she would think I knew everything there was to know about Bikram yoga.

  At that point, I actually had zero idea what it was. I mean, I knew it was hot and sweaty, but I had no real details. How hot? How sweaty? Did it involve chanting? Humming? Headstands? Human sacrifice? The fact was, I knew as much about Bikram yoga as I knew about quantum physics (which is exactly zip, in case you were wondering).

  So I decided it was time to find out.

  BIG MISTAKE.

  Like a majorly major, I-really-wish-I-hadn’t-done-that kind of mistake. By the time I’d finished my undercover fact-finding mission, this was how my eyeballs felt:

  But let’s hit rewind. The 6 pm Tuesday class was in full swing when I arrived. I figured I’d sneak up to the yurt—I mean, how do you even get a yurt? Run down to the Yurt Shop? Make a quick trip to Yurts ’R’ Us? Order online at YurtMart.com?—and see if I could find a gap to peek through. I wasn’t proud of myself weaseling around like a … well, like a weasel … but I needed to know what kind of gig my mom had signed up for. The plan was just to take a quick look and then skedaddle out of there.

  I waited outside and listened. I could hear the whirring of six heater blowers and the faint lilt of pipe music. You know, the kind that’s supposed to make you feel like you’re on some long-lost mountain in Peru. They probably recorded it in Des Moines or somewhere. But it sounded peaceful, I had to admit. Soothing. Maybe this Bikram yoga stuff was okay, after all.

  I cracked open the flap of canvas and copped a blast of hot air to the mush. It was like dunking my face into a bowl of soup. It was so humid it took me a moment to take in what I was seeing and a few more seconds for my brain to process the full horror.

  The fog cleared to reveal Sid standing on one leg at the front of the class with one foot placed at an angle on his standing knee. His hands were clasped in front of him and his eyes were closed (which I was glad about because it meant no one saw me). There were about twenty people in the yurt, all facing Sid, all in the same pose.

  And all naked.

  OKAY, OKAY, EVERYONE, calm down.

  Maybe I was exaggerating a teeny-tiny bit. They weren’t completely naked, but there was definitely waaaay too much skin on show for my liking. And it’s not like I can just wipe the memory clean. That will take years of therapy. YEARS.

  The image of Mrs. Schultz in her short-shorts and sports bra is one that will be forever burned onto my retinas. I didn’t even want to think about what might have happened if my mom had been there.

  Just so you know, it’s not like I’m some nut who freaks out about people in their undies. The problem was the kind of people who were there in their undies! When I tell you that Principal Stricker was one of them, and that they were all sweating like chili-guzzling Scandinavians in a Saunathon, you’ll start to get an idea of the mentally scarring experience I’d had. In addition to Stricker, I spotted Hairy Harry, the scary biker dude from the gas station; Darlene, the head of the Hills Village Civic Society; Rajeev, the sometimes short-order cook at Swifty’s; Mayor Thompson; plus a whole bunch of others.

  Who knew that Hills Village had such a thirst for Bikram yoga? I remembered thinking—while my eyes were being boiled alive—that it was a sign of Sid’s immense Hipster Power. I bet most of the people in the yurt hadn’t even heard of it until Sid moved to town.

  As the pipes wound down, Sid opened his eyes, spread his arms wide, leaned forward, and placed his forehead against his knees. The class followed suit and I almost fainted as the nearest person to me—Hairy Harry, wearing only a shiny red thong—bent forward enthusiastically.

  Then things suddenly got a whole lot worse. With a loud ping, the rear part of Hairy Harry’s massive sweaty thong snapped off and flew across the yurt at the speed of light, splattering around my face like an alien octopus coming out of a spooky alien pod.

  My screams could be heard in Mexico.

  WITH EVERYTHING THAT had been happening with Miller the Killer and the yurt and THE MISSION to cover Dingbat Wall in Jeanne Galletta-pleasing drawings, I’d sort of semi-forgotten to mention that—ta-da!—Kasey Moran aka the Egg Girl and all-round Roller Derby Queen was coming to visit! The Sydney Spitballers (Kasey’s team) were touring the US and Kasey had fixed up to come stay with us in between games. It was just as well because my main man, and holder of the World’s Funniest Dude title, Flip Savage, was spending a semester on the East Coast while his dad was working a contract. I may not be the most popular kid at HVMS—all right, all right, no need to agree so quickly!—but my status was in danger of dropping from loser to downright loner.

  Anyway, if you don’t already know, Kasey and yours truly are pretty tight. We’d been through plenty the last time I’d been Down Under. I really liked Kasey and was looking forward to showing her Hills Village … which I figured would take about eight minutes. Still, now that I was working at Gudonya, I could at least take her somewhere that would feel like home. Somewhere Australian.

  The last time I’d seen Kasey, we’d just saved the Golden Blades Stadium (home of the Sydney Spitballers) from demolition at the hands of a crooked property developer: see Middle School: Million-Dollar Mess Down Under for deets. It had been a total Khatchadorian triumph, if I do say so myself (and I do), so I was sorta, kinda expecting Kasey to be excited to see me again. Which just goes to show how much I know.

  “Kase!” I yelled, waving like a lunatic as she stepped off the bus.

  “Rafe!” she yelled back, then ran over and kicked me in the shins.

  Hard.

  IF YOU’VE EVER been unexpectedly kicked in the shins, you’ll know that it’s one of the most painful places to be unexpectedly kicked. No flesh to cushion the impact, see? And Kasey is something of an expert in shin-kicking. That was, after all, exactly what she’d done to me the first time we met, but, I’ve got to say, I still wasn’t expecting it.

  So, when I was
done hopping around like a demented frog—I don’t even know if frogs have shins, but you know what I mean—I turned to Kasey. “What was that for, Moran?” I yelped.

  “That’s for the man bun, doofus.” She pointed to the top of my head. “If that doesn’t deserve a kick in the shins, I don’t know what does. And there’s the sign too. Cobber? Who says ‘cobber’? It’s practically racist.”

  “What’s wrong with my man bun?” I rubbed my shin and tried not to cry. “And I thought Australians called everyone ‘cobber’. Isn’t it friendly?”

  Kasey threw her bag at c. “In 1885 maybe, and I shouldn’t have to explain the man bun. Now, show me the sights!”

  “The sights?”

  “Yeah, you know, the best parts of town. There’s got to be heaps of things you blokes are proud of round here.”

  In Australia, I’d seen the Sydney Opera House gleaming white against a perfect blue sky, I’d gasped at shimmering pods of dolphins leaping out of crystal-clear water, I’d watched the sun rise over the vast red expanse of the Outback, and I’d discovered 40,000-year-old cave paintings by flickering torchlight.

  I looked around at the Hills Village Bus Depot.

  It was a concrete building that might have looked good around, say, 1972 and sat at the end of a strip mall featuring the Korean Nail Palace, a 7-Eleven, a boarded-up computer repair shop, KwikStop Dental, and a tanning salon. On the other side of the depot was the disused Hills Village train station and a second-hand auto dealership. I swallowed hard and tried to look optimistic.

  “How about a coffee?” I said, steering Kasey toward Gudonya.

  BEFORE WE GET to the part where Kasey meets Sid, there’s something I’ve got to admit.

  I was sort of trying to sneak in the information about me having a man bun so as to avoid everyone having a TOTAL MEGA-GIANT FREAK-OUT BRAIN SNAP over it. Man buns, or topknots, kind of seem to have that effect. Peeps either love ’em or hate ’em. No in-betweens.

  I tried out the new look upstairs in my room for a while. I didn’t spend too long getting it right. No more than two hours.

  Okay, three.

  Maybe four.

  When I finally got it looking the way I wanted, I checked the mirror one last time then strolled downstairs and into the kitchen, hoping no one would notice. I mean, it’s only a hairstyle, right?

  Wrong.

  My family acted like I’d walked in naked—worse, maybe. My ever-lovin’ fam fell fairly and squarely into the man bun ‘hate’ camp.

  I played it ice-cool, which is pretty difficult when your grandma is poking at your head with a fork and saying stuff like “That’s how Susie Armstrong used to wear her hair” and “You know this means we’ll have to leave town, right?”

  Georgia—once she’d stopped zipping round the room like an untied balloon—crept closer, eyeing the man bun like it was a rare creature.

  “The Greater Crested Topknot,” she whispered in a pretty good imitation of that David Attenborough dude, “is rarely seen outside it’s natural habitat. Here we see one nesting quietly on Doofus Idioticus, one of the unsuspecting local creatures …”

  “Mom,” I said. Jules wouldn’t stand by and listen to her only son being teased mercilessly, would she?

  “Knock it off, Georgia,” Mom said.

  See? I was right. I could always depend on—

  “Don’t tease Rafe about his wig,” she added, exploding into howls of laughter.

  “A WIG!” Georgia squealed, pretending to faint.

  Mom was doubled over, clutching her stomach and laughing so much she was struggling to breathe.

  “Is that thing a wig?’ Grandma tugged at my man bun. “Oh my!”

  “Of course it’s not a wig!” I yelped, jumping away. “Do you honestly think I’d be wearing a wig?”

  I may have been more convincing if my man bun hadn’t chosen that exact moment to roll off my head and bounce across the kitchen floor like a hairy tennis ball.

  “It’s not a wig!” I yelled, running after it. “It’s a clip-on man-bun hair accessory!”

  My loving family wasn’t listening. They were too busy laughing. Mom did look sort of sorry about it … but she was still laughing.

  I stomped out of the room, only stopping to pick up my man bun and clip it back into place. What? It’d cost me $19.95 and I wasn’t going to waste that kind of money.

  “I’m sorry, Rafe! Come back!” Mom yelled, but it was too late.

  IT’S FAIR TO say that our visit to Gudonya didn’t go to plan.

  It wasn’t a complete disaster, but I guess I’d hoped Kasey would be a bit more enthusiastic about Sid than she turned out to be. After all, I was going to be spending most of my time there and it would help if Kasey liked the guy. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s do things in order.

  When we walked in, the place was a customer-free zone and Sid was nailing a box of plastic rabbits to a wall. I might have thought the decor was weird a few weeks back, but now it seemed … cool.

  Sid looked up, a yellow rabbit in one hand and a hammer in the other. “G’day, bro,” he said, flashing Kasey a smile. It was a nice smile, a welcoming smile, a smile that deserved a smile back. “I’m Sid.”

  Kasey’s face didn’t exactly light up. To be honest, she looked about as happy as someone who’d just stepped in something nasty on the sidewalk. Barefoot.

  “Kasey,” she said, nodding coolly. I should add that when I say she nodded, Kasey moved her head about two millimeters. It only just scraped into “nod” territory.

  Sid’s smile vanished quicker than donuts at a police station.

  I looked at Kasey, puzzled. Where had that famous Aussie friendliness gone? I’d figured two Aussies meeting each other overseas might have been a good deal less frosty than where this seemed to be headed. We’d only just arrived and the temperature in Gudonya had already dropped ten degrees. It was practically arctic.

  “Another Australian, huh?” Sid said. “You’re a long way from home, man.”

  Kasey nodded again. “You too … man. Where are you from?”

  “Sydney,” Sid replied.

  “Which part?”

  Sid turned back to nail another rabbit to the wall. “Oh, all over.”

  “And your name’s Sidney Harberbridge?”

  “Last time I checked.” Sid hammered a nail through a rabbit ear.

  Bang!

  “Kind of a weird name,” Kasey said.

  Sid picked up another rabbit. “Uh-huh, blame my mom and dad.”

  Bang!

  It might have been my imagination, but Sid seemed to be hitting those nails a little harder each time. Kasey looked like she was about to say something else, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to make things any better. Sid picked up another soft toy, but this time he missed the nail and—BANG!—flattened the rabbit’s face into mush.

  “Okay,” I said, stepping forward. I was going to have to find out what was bugging Kasey about Sid, but that would have to wait. Right now it was time for me to Stop the Awkward.

  SID HARDLY GLANCED at us as we left. He looked completely at ease, as if the frosty face-off between him and Kasey hadn’t happened. As a rule, I’ve noticed that hipsters don’t “do” anger. It was only the almost-impossible-to-see quivering taking place at the tips of Sid’s waxed mustache that told me he was ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS.

  I hoped Kasey hadn’t totally messed things up between me and Sid. I mean, I knew he was a bit of a Terry Try-hard sometimes, but I liked working at Gudonya.

  “What was all that about?” I said, once we were safely away from the cafe. I was carrying Kasey’s bag and it weighed about as much as a minivan. “And what have you got in here? A walrus?”

  “Yeah,” Kasey said, rolling her eyes again. “You got me. That’s what’s in there. A walrus.”

  I wasn’t carrying Kasey’s bag because of some being-a-gentleman type deal. I was carrying it because she flat out told me to carry it. Kasey is like that sometimes: bossy. I w
as starting to question whether having her stay with me in Hills Village was a good idea, after all. (Although, as things turned out, it was A Very Good Idea, but we’ll get to that later.)

  “Don’t change the subject.” I hoisted the walrus bag into an easier carrying position and pointed a finger at Kasey. “Why did you go all Ice Queen on Sid back there?”

  “Oh, puh-lease,” Kasey said. “Sidney Harberbridge? Who has a name like that?”

  “Maybe he just likes the name? Or maybe he’s telling the truth?”

  Kasey stopped walking and looked me straight in the eye. In both of them, really. She looked me straight in the eyes. “Mom?”

  Had Kasey lost her marbles? “Uh, I’m not your mom, Kase,” I said in that fake calm voice you’d use if you were trapped in an elevator with a rabid wolf armed with a flamethrower. “You’re in Hills Village, remember? Now, let’s get you home. You can take a nice long lie down in a dark room and—”

  I saw Kasey’s shin-kicking foot twitch, and took a step back.

  “No, you idiot,” she huffed, “I’m talking about how Sid said ‘mom’ instead of ‘mum’. Aussies don’t say ‘mom’.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  Kasey leaned in close and jabbed a finger in my chest. “The diff is this, Einstein: Sidney Harberbridge is about as Australian as you.”