“An accident!” He shook glass off his feet and tried to find somewhere safe to step. “I saw you tip the tray over with my own eyes!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. But teachers never think you mean it.
Mr Shaw took a deep breath. “Right, Jemima, very carefully put your shoes back on then go and wait in the science office, please. And could someone fetch the technicians and tell them what’s happened?”
Lottie’s hand shot up to volunteer.
In the office, a few minutes later, Mr Shaw said he appreciated that being weighed in front of my class might have been uncomfortable. Might. I stopped listening after that. The last thing I needed was a lecture from the inventor of the Banan-ometer. He said I’d have to see Mrs Savage at lunchtime and that I was to work in the science office for the rest of that lesson and break time. It smelled of coffee and my stomach was spinning like it had VFTS-102 in it. That’s the fastest revolving star. It spins at a million miles per hour. But even feeling like that was better than seeing my weight up on the screen.
I know that weight is partly gravity. And if I lived on the moon, I’d hardly weigh anything at all. Unfortunately, I live on Earth. And I have a teacher who thought it was fun to find out I weighed more bananas than anyone else on the planet.
At lunchtime, Miki waited with me outside Mrs Savage’s office. I imagined this was how Anne Boleyn felt in 1536 when she was waiting to be executed. Only she got to wear a special royal robe, not a Clifton Academy blazer with an ink stain on the sleeve. I looked up at the brass sign on the door. Mrs Savage had an adjective for her surname like me. I knew from previous experience that it suited her.
“Jemima.” Mrs Savage’s face appeared round the door. “Do come in.”
Miki whispered, “Good luck,” as I pulled down my blazer sleeve to hide the ink stain under my fingers.
Inside her office, Mrs Savage put her elbows on the desk and leaned her fingertips against each other, creating a kind of squashed rhombus shape. Her nails were coral-pink, so she was breaking her own school rule about nail varnish. “Now,” she said softly, “I’d like you to tell me what happened in your science lesson this morning.”
“It was an accident, miss.”
She glared at me.
“I mean, Mrs.”
Her glare intensified.
I gulped. “Savage.”
She huffed. “An accident?” She turned to her computer screen and clicked the mouse a few times. “That’s not quite the way Mr Shaw describes it. ‘She deliberately knocked over an entire tray of conical beakers’.” Her voice went up at the end like she was asking a question.
“It could have been the angle,” I said. “From where he was standing, Mr Shaw’s field of vision would have been limited. I’m not saying he’s lying just—”
She put her hand up for me to stop talking. It was pretty rude of her, but I didn’t point that out. It was what my dad would call a mature decision.
“Jemima, that’s not what I mean. This incident occurred as you were being weighed, isn’t that right?”
I swallowed.
“Because I am sympathetic to the fact that some of our students might be a little” – her eyes travelled down to my stomach then quickly back up again – “reluctant to have their weight shared with their class. I do understand.” But Mrs Savage didn’t understand. Teachers don’t get stuff like that. I looked away and she carried on. “If you’d have simply spoken to Mr Shaw at the start of the lesson, you could have—”
“It wasn’t that, Mrs Savage,” I said. “It was just an accident.” I kept my eyes on the desk in case she was good at telling when people were lying. I thought about the most inhospitable planet in the universe. It’s called HD 189733 b and it’s sixty-three light years away. It has rainstorms of glass, and winds that go five thousand miles per hour. Even living there felt more appealing to me than getting weighed in front of an audience.
“Well,” Mrs Savage said, “whatever the reason, I’m sure you appreciate breaking school equipment is rather serious. I’m afraid you’ll have to pay for the damage. So, I’ll be calling your father this afternoon.” A smile spread the entire width of her face. “You may go.”
I slowly stood up and headed outside. My dad was going to kill me. If Mrs Savage was an emoji, she’d be the smiling pile of poo.
That afternoon in maths, any time I moved even the slightest bit, Lottie ducked and said, “Look out!” When Mrs Lee asked me to solve the “problem of the day” on the board about congruent triangles, Lottie whispered, “Uh oh, she’s going to smash something again!” So I told Mrs Lee I wasn’t sure how to work it out. Lottie was always worse in maths because Miki wasn’t in our class. And because Mrs Lee was about two hundred years old and never noticed anything.
At the end of the lesson, Mrs Lee said she hoped we would all be taking the Brainiacs test next week.
Lottie turned around and said, “I doubt they’d have a TV camera wide enough to film you.”
I wanted to tell her why that was obviously untrue. But the logical part of my brain seemed to disappear whenever Lottie Freeman opened her mouth. I don’t know why. Maybe part of me still wanted her to like me.
Dad was on his phone when I got back from school. From the look he gave me, I knew he was speaking to Mrs Savage. He waved an arm at me then pointed at the sofa.
Jasper said, “Unlucky,” and pushed past me to go upstairs. “That’s what happens when you break the school rules, sis.”
Jasper likes rules. I do not like my brother. He ran to the top of the stairs then pretended to fight his way into his room with an imaginary lightsaber.
“I thought you said playtime was over, Jasper!” I called after him, but Dad shushed me and pointed to the sofa again. I dropped my bag by the stairs and plonked myself down.
“Yes,” Dad was saying, “I do apologize. She can be a bit difficult sometimes, yes…there were a couple of things last year, but nothing serious. Yes, her attitude really. Oh, the goldfish crowd-funder thing, I’d forgotten about that…and there was a small issue in drama, yes… Jemima reads a lot, you see, Mrs Savage, and she gets these ideas…”
I sighed loudly enough for Dad (and probably Mrs Savage) to hear. The crowd-funder was Auntie Luna’s idea. It wouldn’t have happened if Clifton Academy had given the goldfish in reception a decent-sized tank. And it wasn’t my fault Miss Nisha’s dramatization of the French Revolution was unrealistic. As if somebody sentenced to death would do a shimmy roll. Teachers always overreact about everything.
“Yes, it’s an awkward age!” Dad said. “Honestly, the amount of times she’s threatened to report me to the United Nations for breaching her human rights! Ha ha! Yes…exactly! Hormones!”
My dad was beyond embarrassing. I sank as deep into the sofa as I could without the cushions falling off.
“Thank you for being so understanding, Mrs Savage. I assure you, Jemima will be on her best behaviour for the rest of term.” Dad put his phone on the kitchen table and slowly shook his head at me.
He looked like he was about to explode. Conical beakers must be really expensive.