Heist 1: The Great Chocolate Caper

Where All Things Begin

Monday Afternoon

This particular tale begins right at that moment when all things begin, which is when you don’t actually realise that something is about to begin. It was an insignificant Monday lunchtime, just like every other insignificant Monday lunchtime.

Or so I thought.

There I was, living my best ordinary teenage life, walking to the school canteen to get something to eat. Which, if you have been in a school like mine, you would know is more like traversing a battlefield than a relaxing stroll.

One hop right to avoid a spitball. A quick dodge left to narrowly save my eyeball from a paper plane. A leap and a jump over the wad of gooey pink chewing gum. A skid around the corner to flatten myself against the wall and avoid five burly Year Ten footballers who were charging along, squishing everything in their path.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

‘What are you looking at?’ growled a voice.

Ah, you see what I mean? I didn’t focus for two seconds and some senior-high kid was about to eat me for lunch just because I didn’t realise I was staring at him. I walked straight past, head down, trying to look anywhere but his beady eyes. Thankfully, I noticed just in time his outstretched leg, stuck out for the tripping. Gripping my bag strap, I jumped over the foot and con­tinued the perilous journey to lunch.

Your feet have gotta be nimble in high school – head on a swivel, eyes peeled for any great big SOMETHING that might be hurtling through the air toward you. For instance, the avocado that was about to turn my face into a smashed-avo breakfast. I ducked, swerved, pivoted and twirled down the corridor, narrowly avoiding a green splattering.

Such wariness in the school corridors is especially necessary when you’ve only just graduated to high school a few months earlier. From king of the primary school play­ground to scum of Year Seven. On the social ladder I wasn’t much higher than the sticky gum I had just leapt over.

Whoever decided that the transition to high school should happen right at the time of awkward stumbling limbs, a body that feels too big, weird hair growing in strange places and a voice that might hiccup into a badly played violin at any moment . . . they should be court-martialled.

So, there I was, attempting to get lunch, avoiding school bullies and just generally trying to stay alive in a body that felt like it would betray me at any moment.

Welcome to Year Seven.

‘Andy! Andy! Have you heard? Andy!’

I knew the voice behind me, but I chose to ignore it. Still, she persisted.

‘Andy, wait up. Wait up!’

Marlie Balooby. That is her actual name. Can you even believe that? I’ve known her since we started primary school together. Yep, seven years of primary, and then she was the only other kid from our primary school who came to Bellington High. She thought that meant we’d be friends here. I did not. Hence, why she was now chasing me down the corridor.

Reluctantly, I turned around to greet her. Bouncing curly brown hair, a big toothy smile, olive skin and glasses so thick her green eyes looked magnified. She was the kinda person who answered EVERY question in class and did ALL the homework and so, all the teachers LOVED her! Marlie was the epitome of everything I did not want to be known as in high school . . . A nerd girl.

As in, she’s the nerd girl. I’m a nerd boy. No! I mean, I am not a nerd boy. Just a boy. Just your average, brown-haired, slightly skinny, freckly faced ROCKSTAR! Okay, all of that is true except for the rockstar bit. In primary school, I admit, I was the kinda kid you’d find practising a magic-show routine, or looking up into space with a telescope, or reading through an encyclopedia. Yep, if you can believe it, my parents still owned a set of encyclopedias. But now I was in high school, I had put all that behind me. I was determined to be one of the cool kids. Or, at least, cooler than I had been.

On that particular Monday, Marlie had somehow collected at least a metre of toilet paper on the bottom of her shoe. It trailed along behind her, licking up into the air like a kite that had forgotten it was actually a thin piece of paper used to wipe people’s . . . Anyway, you get what I mean.

I could see others around, all sniggering in their disdain, about to call out some humiliating taunt. That is, until they saw who they were sniggering at. Every single one of them quickly stifled their laughter and nervously looked around to make sure they hadn’t been seen.

The whole school knew that Marlie Balooby was under the protection of her brother, the infamous Henry Balooby. Or, as he was more commonly known, The Cleaner.

Now, he is someone you don’t want to get caught staring at. His nickname was not, as you might assume, because he had a side job as a cleaner. No, The Cleaner was named as such because of a toilet. Yep. That’s right. He had his own cubicle in the boys’ toilets. Cubicle Three.

Not a cubicle used for what you might usually use a toilet for – the launching of submarines. No, this cubicle was known for something much more flush-worthy. Namely, the wailing head of a little junior-high kid like me, or for anyone else who would be silly enough to tease his beloved sister. He could clean the insolence right out of them with one flush of that loo.

The Cleaner. I shuddered at the thought.

‘Gosh, you walk fast for someone with such small legs,’ said Marlie as she reached me, out of breath. The limp she’s had all the time I’ve known her might have slowed her down, but it certainly didn’t seem like it.

‘Sorry . . . I, ah . . . have to get to the canteen before the last . . . um, roll-in-a-roll goes.’ A roll-in-a-roll being a sausage roll, all toasty and crusty and meaty and warm, put inside a big, buttery hot-dog roll and covered in a bucket of tomato sauce. It was basically a clogged artery in a meal and it was delicious.

‘Oh, don’t worry. My brother has a standing order of three of those each lunchtime, and most of the time he only eats two. I’ll just get you one of his.’

‘No. No. Don’t! I mean, thanks for the offer, but . . . I’ll be okay.’

I could just picture the laughter on The Cleaner’s face as his sister begged a roll-in-a-roll while I stood awkwardly at her side. That was NOT something I was willing to let happen.

‘Have you heard?’ Marlie asked again.

‘Heard what?’ I replied nonchalantly, turning to keep walking.

‘That school is cancelled next Monday?’

That got my interest. ‘What? No it’s not. I haven’t heard anything about it.’

‘It is. I just found out. The teachers have something on. I don’t know, a development day somewhere offsite or something, and they’re doing building works here, too.’

‘Oh geez, really? Wow, cool. Ah . . . thanks. Now . . . I gotta . . .’ I was edging away, trying to escape the con­versation before anyone started connecting me with her.

‘So, what are you gonna do?’

‘When?’

‘What are you gonna do next Monday?’

‘Oh, um . . . stay home, I guess. ’Cause it’s a school-free day, like you said.’

‘Right. But maybe, like, I wonder if, maybe, we could hang out or something?’

‘Oh. Right, ah . . . look . . . ah, I ah, I . . .’ I really couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘I, sure . . . maybe . . . let’s play it by ear, okay?’

‘Yes. That’ll be amazing. I’ll tell my brother you’re coming.’

‘Cough. Choke. Gurgle. Cough.’ (That was me, expressing my horror by having a completely justifiable coughing fit.) ‘What?’ I asked, recovering.

‘My brother, Henry – I’ll tell him you’re going to come over to our house on Monday, just so he knows.’

‘Ah . . . Um . . .’

I don’t know if you have ever heard the phrase ‘catch 22’ before. It basically means that with any choice you make, you are doomed to fail. Like choosing between jumping into a plummeting elevator or staying trapped in a room full of grinning clowns. Either way, you’re pretty much dead meat.

I was now going to have to either rock up to the Balooby household, or have a one-on-one conversation with the toilet bowl in Cubicle Three. Talk about being stuck between porcelain and a punch-in-the-face. Sheesh.

‘You don’t have to do that. I’ll just come. It’ll be great. Yeah, that’s fine,’ I responded, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

However, as is the way, by the next class it had spread around the entire year that McGee was going on a date with Balooby. By home time, everybody in the school knew. Including, gulp, The Cleaner. The bus trip home was nothing short of humiliation. Every kid I walked past spluttered a, ‘Cough, Balooby sucks. Cough, cough.’ All followed by a surprisingly well synchronised ‘Oooooooooh Balooooooooby!’ from the whole bus as I left. I guess they figured that if they all joined in the taunt, then The Cleaner wouldn’t flush all their heads. In my rage, I hoped they were wrong.

By the time I got home, I was a frazzled stick of dynamite, a short fuse ready to blow. My mum’s cheerful greeting sounded like fingers scratching down a blackboard.

‘Welcome home!’ she chirped from the kitchen. A surprise. Not the chirpiness, but Mum being in the kitchen. In our house, that room is solely under the occu­pancy of my father, a super-passionate chef. Like, wildly passionate. A Chef Consultant, they call him. Designing menus for the latest hoity-toity restaurant about to open in our town.

Our kitchen looked more like an evil scientist’s laboratory than a place to make a sandwich. Pots and pans of boiling multicoloured sauces. Test tubes with who-knows-what in them. Strange odours. Smoke from liquid nitrogen as my dad, with his big red gloves, froze some kind of dessert. I really cannot complain, though. We ate like royalty in this house. Or perhaps we were just lab rats forced to take part in Dad’s culinary experiments. Either way, I was happy with that arrangement.

That’s my dad. My mum, however, she couldn’t cook if her life depended on it. I guess monkeys don’t need exotic foods. She’s a zoologist. Works at the local zoo looking after all the animals. And she loves her job. So much so that she often brings it home. The animals, that is. She takes care of the sick native ones in our backyard when they need more care than in just her working hours.

She doesn’t just love her job, she actually loves everything, my mum. Absolutely everything. An eternal optimist. It is SO annoying.

‘Ughhh,’ I mumbled as she made her way from the kitchen to the front door.

‘How was your day, dear?’ she asked with way too much cheer.

‘Fine.’

‘Of course it was. But tell me something interesting that happened.’

‘Nothing. Nothing happened, all right?’ I said with an overly bitter conviction, thus giving the game away entirely.

‘Honey, are you okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ I lied, and stormed to my room. Thankfully, she didn’t follow. An hour passed of me angrily throwing a red rubber ball at the wall before my dad appeared with a soft knock on the door.

‘Mate, you in there?’

‘Maybe,’ I said with no enthusiasm. The door cracked open.

‘Just got some quail legs with tamarind glaze and fig chutney for your pre-dinner snack here, buddy.’

Dad walked in carrying what would be better served in a five-star restaurant than wasted on a grumpy teenager. Thankfully, I really liked the fancy food Dad made.

‘Ughhh. Thanks.’

‘You all right, mate? Mum said you were in a slight bit of a mood when you got home.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, picking at the quail like it was a pile of cold French fries.

‘Right . . . But, just say you weren’t, would there be something that would cause you to . . .’ he pointed up to the wall, ‘redecorate?’

It was only then I realised that the white wall now looked like it was blushing from the many circles of rubber red smudged all over it, stained by the bounce of my ball.

‘Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realise.’

‘Nothing a lick of paint won’t fix.’

My dad was not the type to get angry. I know some parents would go full-on-Godzilla mode if their child had redecorated the wall with a red rubber ball. Not my folks.

That wall had once been filled with pictures of galaxies and nebulas and planets and star charts. I’d taken all of them down when I started high school. Now, it looked like the remains of a strawberry battlefield.

‘I just . . . I hate high school. It sucks.’

‘Oh, mate. Sorry, I thought you loved learning new stuff. You always have. Things a bit harder in high school, though, hey?’

‘You can say that again.’

‘Oh, mate. Sorry, I thought you loved learning new stuff. You always have. Things a bit harder in high school, though, hey?’

‘Shut up, Dad.’

‘Sorry. It was some low-hanging fruit for a dad joke. I was just picking some papa-joke berries. Would you like some papa-joke ber–?’

‘Oh my gosh, Dad, I can’t even . . .’

‘Right. Right. Sorry, mate. Tell me what’s making high school hard?’

‘It just . . . it sucks. I do everything to not stand out and be so . . . I don’t know . . . nerdy . . . and . . . then Marlie –’

‘Oh, I like Marlie, she’s the one from your old school. The one with the –’

‘Big head and even bigger mouth . . . yes.’

‘No, I was going to say, the one with the big brains, just like my son.’

‘Ah, she is so annoying.’

‘Andy, sometimes the people who seem really annoying in our lives are, well, more than that.’

‘Good talk, Dad. Yep. More than annoying. You’re absolutely right she is.’

‘You know what I mean, don’t you? I know it sounds clichéd, but don’t judge Marlie ’cause she’s different to you. She might actually be more similar to you than you realise. You never know, she might just be the very friend you need.’

‘Pffft! Doubt it, Dad. She was always so frustrating at primary school, and now she’s the only one who came to Bellington High and so she’s –’

‘Lonely?’

‘I was going to say clingy.’

‘Hmm . . .’

‘I don’t know. I’m not really hungry, Dad. I’ll just eat the quail and go to bed.’

‘All right, mate. Remember, though, Mum and I are just down the hall if you need us. Well, your mum will probably be elbow-deep in wombat poo, but she’s around.’

‘Gross, Dad.’

That’s it. That’s where it all began, this whole caper (not the Mediterranean edibles). Did you notice? Probably not. I didn’t, either. But, as I said, that’s the way with the beginnings of things. You don’t even realise that they’re happening until you’re swept off the ground like a wayward balloon heading straight into a hurricane. For now, Monday had come and gone and, by the end of it, I had agreed to a play date with Marlie, been teased on the bus by a chorus of gigantic prats and painted my bedroom wall in angry circles of red.

What I didn’t know was that, one week later, instead of being on a date, that Monday would actually be the day Balooby and I would be saving the entire human race. But, I must not get ahead of myself. To under­stand the Monday, you have to understand the Sunday and the Saturday and the Friday and the . . . well, you get the picture. So, let’s talk about the Tuesday, six days before the heist.