A Rose as Black as your Heart

(12) Old Maria

Chapter 12

Biology has this real weird element to it that seriously makes you want to kill someone.

And since I’d grown kind of used to my classmates, I decided to make a voodoo doll of our teacher.

“Trav,” I hissed, as Travis sat next to me, drinking in almost every word the teacher said, “Stop being such a nerd and lend me some blue tack.”

Travis glanced at me and raised his ginger eyebrows. “Uh... why?”

“You’ll see.”

Travis shook his head. “Every time you say that, something bad always happens.”

“Trust me, if this goes well, everything’ll be just peachy.”

Travis glanced at me suspiciously, eyes narrowed. I gave him a sunny smile, and with a roll of his eyes, he handed me a long stick of blue tack.

I began shaping the gooey blue lump into a figure of our teacher Miss Bolivar. Sadly, sculpture-making had never really been my thing. Miss Bolivar looked more like a stretchy alien than a human. Once I’d finished creating her, I began sticking drawing pins and pencils in her saggy blue flesh. Beside me, Travis snorted.

“What?”

Travis shook his head, still snorting with laughter. “You make a crap voodoo doll out of blue tack, stick pins in it, and you can’t figure out why I’m laughing?”

A grin crept over my mouth. “Okay, point taken.” I waggled my eyebrows. “Want to help?”

Travis looked confused. “Uh... help?”

I held out a pencil. He looked at it, then at me, and then he grinned. He took it, and we both began furiously stabbing Miss Bolivar. The voodoo doll version, obviously.

“Um...” The shy girl who sat next to me peered at the mutated voodoo doll cautiously. “What’s that?”

“Miss Bolivar. Want to help?”

The shy girl looked at me with wide, terrified blue eyes that reminded me of a rabbit and shook her head, her blonde ringlets bobbing. I shrugged and returned to my stabbing with Travis.

Travis’ friend leaned round him to get a look. “Is that Miss Bolivar?”

“Sure. Want to help?”

“Um... okay.” Travis’s friend shrugged, so Travis passed him a pencil, and the three of us carried on our enthusiastic stabbing.

“You three! What’s going on?” Miss Bolivar peered over the front row in an attempt to see what the hell we were doing.

“Nothing,” I told her blankly. After a pause, Travis and his friend carried on his stabbing with me.

“Well, whatever nothing is, you can stop,” Miss Bolivar snapped. “Nancy! Pay attention, too!” She turned back to the board while Nancy, the timid girl next to me, went brick red.

“On second thoughts,” she whispered to me, “can you pass me a pencil?”

I grinned as I passed her my pencil case. “Glad you’ve joined the dark side. We have cookies.”

~***~

By the time the lesson was up, about ten people were all attempting to stab voodoo Bolivar. When she came back over to see why we were still stabbing a desk, all that was left were some shreds of blue tack. I told her there had been a bug. I don’t know whether she believed me, but she still gave us all a detention for damaging school property, which I thought was seriously unfair (so there were a few scratches in the desk- who cares?).