The school had a symphony orchestra. And while not all the student musicians were able to read the score properly and keep in time with the conductor, they were able to create a reasonable resonating recognisable tune, about some long dead artist who died in poverty from venereal disease.
And at this assembly Lucas got up to make a speech. It was about how dogs can die of heart worm infections. Katrina sat next to him, tying knots of fine thread together to make a table-cloth.
“Wish me luck,” Lucas said. He didn’t really understand why Katrina didn’t want to wish him luck. He expected just to hear, “Good-luck,” from her lips as he had commanded.
Instead she said, “I’m making a charm.”
Lucas thought, For me? Wow. Hope she’s good enough to make it work.
Katrina wasn’t really doing anything more than making a charming table-cloth though, she wanted to give it to her aunt for a present.
Luke got up on stage and talked about the dead dogs in the neighbourhood. The teachers seemed very interested to hear this, he felt, while the students became rowdy. One even cried out, “Lucas has tape-worm!”
But this didn’t bother him. For he had already cast himself as Luke Skywalker long ago and no one could ever knock down that show. Fools, he thought, they don’t even know the difference between round-worm and tape-worm.
Katrina started to giggle, for she had only just realised Lucas’s play. It added up. He was always talking about Star Wars. And those depressing lines he used like, “I shall walk the skies of heaven one day,” and “Death is a dearth of disaster so dark it chills the skies.”
Katrina was a daughter of a bank manager. But Katrina wasn’t local to the area. She had lived in many other districts. They had moved about due to their father’s work. This made Katrina somewhat savvy. She had a head for things that Lucas would never dream of. And she could calculate extremely sharply. She also knew that it was not a good thing to be idle. And her family all did chores, things that Lucas scorned doing as stuff that, “only poor people do”.
Being no good at sports, the only way Lucas could make himself feel better was by showing people how much money he had.
Katrina just said, “No more of that with me, it is too confusing. You just put your money in the bank Lucas. I don’t want to play exchanging of lunches here. I like my food.”
Lucas was agreeable to this for a while. But he really wondered how he could get Katrina to kiss him if she didn’t care much for his money.
Katrina was talking to a boy from the choir. She’d left her bag open next to where Lucas was sitting. At first all he was going to do was look what she had today. But then decided to put it in his bag and find a bin to put it in. He wanted to get as far away from where he’d been as possible.
Lucas wasn’t thinking about how she’d feel if she found out. He was just thinking about how he could be that hero that saved her, by buying her lunch. Then he would ask her for a kiss. And everyone in the yard would see how much he was loved.
But Katrina didn’t let him buy her lunch. She phoned her dad and told him she wanted to go home. Her dad said, “No you’ll just have to go hungry today. Think of it like a four hour famine and I’ll phone your mother so we can get a nice meal ready for you when you get home.”
And then as she walked out of the staff room and along the corridor, there it was, her lunchbox, in the bin. Without thinking she pulled it out. There seemed to nothing nibbled on or dirty. So she took it outside and sat in her quiet spot.
She was busy eating when Lucas spotted her, he laughed. “Scab!”
Katrina didn’t have any scabs on her knees and she thought Lucas was her friend. But considering where she found her lunchbox, she started adding things together. She didn’t want to say where her lunchbox had been. That would be embarrassing, she was eating what was in it! She did, however, ask Lucas a question; “Do you want some of my lunch?”
Lucas would normally have paid five dollars or more to have some of the delicious things she had made. But this time he said, “No way, yuck!”
She’d pitied Lucas because he had some kind of lung condition. She didn’t sympathise with him, but she had wanted to help him feel better. Her parents had always taught her to be nice to people.
So, here Katrina was, at school assembly listening to a monotone, stilted speech about what dogs get in their hearts. She thought, I don’t really see anything interesting in what he is doing. He’s been mean to me. Why should I bother trying to be nice to him anymore? I think I’d rather sneer at things that annoy me from now on.
At that point Lucas started hiccupping and couldn’t continue speaking.
There were some remarks about what to do to cure this. “Do a handstand!” said one student. “Stick your finger up your arse!” was another. But neither of those seemed appealing to Lucas and he just left the stage and went straight to the nurse’s office. The white walls and antiseptic smells calmed him down.
Katrina didn’t talk to Lucas after that. Whenever she saw him she just said, “Go worm your dog.” And after that not just Lucas, anyone who showed a flabby gut, anyone who breathed a little too heavily. They were all Lucas to Katrina, even when they were not.