Bella's Backyard Bullies Read online

  ‘Give us our ball back!’ says the smallest boy, who is wearing a cap.

  Grace tiptoes across the glass-littered floor and picks up the boys’ soccer ball. ‘This one?’ She spins it on her right index finger. ‘Finders keepers, sorry!’

  The mop-haired boy turns to the others. ‘Forget about it. We’ll get it later.’

  They run out of the yard without looking back, leaving Max behind.

  ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, little brother,’ I say. ‘Come up here.’

  Max drags his feet towards the treehouse.

  ‘Inside,’ I say. ‘Now.’

  I’m not usually so bossy, but Max needs to learn right from wrong.

  Max climbs the ladder. When he sees the glass scattered around the room his eyes widen. ‘I’m sorry, Bella,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know they would be so bad.’

  Emily puts her arm around Max. ‘Who were they?’

  I bend down and take one of his hands. ‘I know you don’t like to be a dobber, but we’re not going to let you go until you spill.’

  Max sighs. ‘They’re the Vernons,’ he says. ‘They’re brothers. They just moved here. I was having a kick around with them at the oval – Grace’s brothers were there too – and I invited them back here to play some video games.’

  Emily unlatches the ceiling flap of the secret storage space I built in the roof of the treehouse. She takes the ball from Grace and throws it inside. ‘Well, one thing’s for sure, the Vernons, or should I say vermin, aren’t getting their ball back anytime soon.’

  The vermin Vernons and Angry the cyberbully. Our list of enemies seems to be growing.

  I don’t mean to brag, but my house is big. Really big. I guess you could call it a mansion.

  Sometimes, though, I’d rather live in an apartment like Chloe’s. It’s small but it’s never lonely. I’m sleeping over there tonight – and it’ll be just me, Chloe and Yiayia at dinner.

  ‘Would you like some tea, Bella?’ Yiayia asks.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I say.

  ‘Just let me set up my telescope first,’ says Chloe. ‘I can’t wait until it gets dark!’

  ‘Off you go, then,’ says Yiayia. ‘Don’t let tea stand in the way of such excitement.’

  Chloe is so lucky to always have Yiayia around. My mum, who I share a surname with, was born in Delhi and that’s where her parents still live. My dad, whose last name is MacKenzie, was born here but his parents live in the Northern Territory. I can count on my fingers how many times I’ve actually seen any of my grandparents in the flesh.

  Yiayia pours us chamomile tea while Chloe sets up her telescope on the balcony. I watch as she assembles the tripod and positions the long tube on top. She takes the cap off the eyepiece and dusts the lens.

  ‘The sky is so clear,’ Chloe says. ‘Wait until you see what’s up there, Bella.’

  She comes inside and takes a cup from Yiayia. The three of us start sipping.

  ‘Did you read the myth of Andromeda, Bella?’ Yiayia asks.

  I pull the encyclopedia from my backpack. ‘Yes, Yiayia, thank you for lending this to me. But I didn’t like the story much.’

  Yiayia smiles and puts the book back on the shelf. ‘I didn’t think an anti-princess would approve,’ she says. ‘But you see now why Cassiopeia should not have cared so much about her daughter’s beauty, just like Emily’s mama when she put her in that pageant. Is the sea monster still bothering Emily?’

  She’s talking about the cyberbully. I think ‘sea monster’ is a good codename.

  ‘We haven’t heard any more,’ I say. ‘But some pesky boys have been giving us a little trouble.’

  Chloe’s too distracted by the telescope to talk about the vermin. She heads back to the balcony. ‘Okay, I think it’s dark enough.’

  I wrap a blanket around my shoulders and join her. She looks through the telescope and slowly pans across the sky.

  ‘Don’t stay too long out there, paidi mou,’ Yiayia calls. ‘You’ve been out every night this week.’

  Chloe lets out an excited ‘Yay!’ and locks the telescope into place. ‘There, that’s what I saw last night. Have a look, Bella.’

  I switch places with her. The telescope is pointing towards one bright star.

  ‘Wow, Chloe,’ I say. ‘What is it?’

  Chloe is madly jotting down numbers on a piece of paper. They look like coordinates of some sort, but they don’t make any sense to me. ‘Bella, I think I’ve discovered a comet,’ she says. ‘Do you see the tail?’

  I look back through the lens and concentrate. I see it, like a fuzzy flying tadpole – the star definitely has a tail.

  ‘Yes, there it is,’ I say. ‘I think you’re right.’

  Chloe’s positively buzzing now. ‘I photographed it last night too, and recorded its position,’ she says, setting up her dad’s fancy camera on another tripod. ‘I didn’t want to get my hopes up, because the observatory says it’s best to confirm any sighting on a second night. I went online to try to identify it, but couldn’t find it anywhere. I can’t believe it hasn’t been discovered already. This is a dream come true, Bella. We could be making history.’

  I feel so proud. Chloe won the science fair last term with her diorama of the solar system, but that doesn’t come close to this. Kids like us could be reading about this moment a hundred years from now and dreaming about finding their own comets.

  ‘You could be a star,’ I say. ‘A star astronomer, that is, not an actual star. You know what I mean.’

  We both laugh and take another look into the sky.

  I decide our treehouse needs an observation deck. Or maybe a retractable ceiling. Or maybe a planetarium. There’s a universe full of possibilities.

  Grace looks like a camel. A single-humped one.

  Somehow, she manages to smuggle a soccer ball to school every Monday without her dad noticing how bulbous her backpack is. She’s coaching an Anti-Princess Club team. They train once a week during lunch.

  Grace shoves her bag into her pigeonhole and takes her seat next to me. ‘I’ve got a great idea for training today, Bella. Can you design a maze I can set up for the team to run through?’

  She has barely finished the question before I’m sketching lines in my art pad. My maze will amaze.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop. It’s our teacher, Ms Bayliss, coming down the corridor. She wears sky-high heels that make her teeter like a toddler. I may be a designer, but painful shoes for fashion’s sake are something I just don’t get.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop. The chatter in the classroom hushes to a murmur as her footsteps become louder. Clip, clop. Clip, clop.

  I’m madly trying to finish the maze when Grace taps me on the shoulder and moans, ‘Oh, great.’

  Ms Bayliss is standing in front of the whiteboard with a boy whose blond hair is pulled into a ponytail.

  ‘Vermin!’ Grace whispers.

  It’s the second-biggest Vernon brother.

  ‘We have some new students starting at our school today,’ Ms Bayliss says. ‘And we’re lucky enough to have one of them in our class! Please welcome Matt Vernon.’

  Grace and I keep still as the rest of the class claps.

  Ms Bayliss notices and frowns in our direction. ‘Matt and his brothers are quite the soccer players, Grace,’ she says. ‘So I thought you would have lots in common. Perhaps Matt would like to sit next to you and Bella – you can pull the desks together if you want.’

  Matt shakes his head so furiously it’s as though Ms Bayliss has asked him to sit next to a live volcano. ‘No way.’

  He sticks his nose in the air and marches to the back of the room, kicking the leg of our desk on his way past.

  ‘Hey!’ Grace yells.

  ‘Er, mind your step, Matt,’ Ms Bayliss says. ‘Let’s get on with today’s spelling lesson, shall we?’

  I shut my art pad and look at the board. Ms Bayliss starts writing out our weekly spelling list.

  Grace covers her mouth to hide a giggly
snort.

  ‘What is it, Grace?’ Ms Bayliss asks.

  Grace is struggling to shake her snorts, so I cover for her. ‘It’s the word “rodent”,’ I say. ‘It just reminds us of a nickname we have for someone.’

  Ms Bayliss narrows her eyes suspiciously. ‘Sounds like a nasty nickname, girls. That’s not like you.’ She turns her back and keeps writing.

  ‘The rodents are the horrid ones,’ Grace whispers. She writes a note and passes it to me under the desk.

  I pull some leftover dinner from my lunch box. It’s a kati roll, which is a spicy mixture of meat and vegetables wrapped up in flat bread called paratha. Mum doesn’t cook much, but when she does it’s always something my grandparents used to make her in India.

  ‘What are you up to?’ I ask Emily. ‘You don’t usually bring your laptop to lunch.’

  ‘I just had a quick bit of coding to update on the club website,’ Emily says. ‘I figured now would be a good time because it’s the middle of the school day and no one’s online.’

  Beep.

  ‘Sounds like you spoke too soon, Emily,’ Grace says.

  Chloe chuckles as she peers at Emily’s screen to see who has just logged in. Then she gulps.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask, moving to Emily and Chloe’s side of the laptop.

  ‘How did they get access to the chatroom?’ I ask as Emily types back.

  ‘Angry had to create an account to get access to our chatroom,’ Emily says. ‘I’ll see what personal details they entered.’

  She brings up a page that lists the latest members to join and clicks on the name at the top.

  ‘Well, that’s no great help,’ Emily says. ‘I’m going to have to fix this sign-up process to try to stop false names being used.’

  She flicks back to the chatroom screen.

  Emily scratches her chin. ‘Revenge for what? We haven’t done anything to anyone.’

  She’s right. Our only enemies seem to be the vermin Vernon brothers, but we don’t know why they’re picking on us, and we don’t have any evidence to suggest they’re Angry.

  I suddenly have an idea. I scan the playground. A couple of girls are skipping nearby, some more are playing handball and a group of boys are sitting on the ground eating their lunch.

  ‘Keep Angry online, Emily,’ I say. ‘Grace, Chloe, let’s do a quick run around to see if we can spy anyone on their computer.’

  Grace takes off, and Chloe and I split up to head to other areas of the playground.

  I spot the vermin Vernons huddled under a tree near the canteen.

  ‘Hey!’ I call out.

  Matt looks around, then quickly turns back to the others. They seem to be scrambling over something.

  I sprint right up to them as the mop-haired vermin uses his heel to push his backpack underneath a picnic table.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asks.

  ‘Got a computer in that bag?’

  ‘So what if I do?’ Mop Hair sneers. ‘There are hundreds of kids here with computers in their bags.’

  Briiiiiing, briiiiiing. Briiiiiing. Briiiiiing.

  I stand strong, ignoring the sound signalling the end of lunch.

  ‘That was the beeeellllll, Beeeellllllaaa,’ Mop Hair says. ‘You’d better run along to class, Beeeellllllaaa.’

  ‘Well done,’ I say. ‘You’ve learnt my name.’

  Emily appears by my side, carrying my backpack. ‘Angry logged off a few minutes ago,’ she tells me. ‘There’s no use questioning these guys right now.’

  I throw my backpack over my shoulder and head off with her as the vermin Vernons make rude farting noises behind our backs. So original.

  ‘Even if it wasn’t completely obvious they were trolling our chatroom, they hate us so much that one of them has got to be Angry,’ I say. ‘But what have we done to them?’

  I’m the only anti-princess on the bus today.

  Emily and Chloe live walking distance from school and left for home together. Grace’s mum picked her up to take her to athletics practice in the city.

  I head for an empty seat next to Jay. His mum is a nurse at the hospital where my parents both work as doctors.

  Jay’s family comes over to my place for dinner sometimes. He’s a pretty good artist too. We painted a mural together on Max’s bedroom wall last year: a great white shark eating a killer whale.

  ‘Hi, Jay,’ I say. ‘What’s been happening?’

  He shuffles over to make some space. My bum is halfway to the seat when a paper plane hits him in the back of the head.

  ‘What the heck?’ Jay asks.

  There’s laughter from the back of the bus.

  It’s the vermin Vernons. All four of them sitting together.

  ‘Don’t worry about them,’ I say. ‘They’re troublemakers. New in town.’

  Another plane glides past my head.

  ‘Awwwww, missed,’ a voice says.

  Jay cranes his neck around. ‘Hey, leave her alone.’

  The vermin start a round of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’. A couple of other kids join them.

  ‘Are you a girl lover?’ asks the littlest vermin.

  I roll my eyes. I remember boys like this from second grade. They’d run around the swings, yelling ‘girl germs, girl germs’ as if we carried some sort of infectious disease.

  ‘Grow up, vermin,’ I say. ‘Oops, I mean Vernons.’

  Matt Vernon, AKA Rat Vermin, cracks his knuckles and walks over to our seat. ‘What did you call us?’ he asks.

  ‘Sit down back there!’ our bus driver calls out.

  Jay ignores him and stands up to meet Rat Vermin face-to-face. ‘I told you to leave her alone.’

  Now this is totally unacceptable. Jay knows I’m an anti-princess. I don’t need rescuing!

  I wedge my arms between Jay’s and Rat’s chests and push them apart.

  ‘Get over it,’ I say. ‘It was just a stupid paper plane, and not a very good one at that. Don’t you know the difference between a glider and a jet? You should’ve made a heavier nose and sleek, small wings if you wanted to get any speed out of it. Best stick to playdough, vermin.’

  The bus comes to a halt and I lose my balance. Rat Vermin falls on top of me and scrambles away as if touching me is the most disgusting thing that’s ever happened to him.

  Our driver storms up the aisle, huffing and puffing. Beads of sweat fly from his bald head as he waves his arms in the air. ‘Your parents will be hearing about this!’ he yells. ‘I want all your names and phone numbers now!’

  As I dust myself off and write down my mum’s number on the driver’s clipboard, Rat Vermin hisses in my ear, ‘Watch your back.’

  Watch your back. I know those words.

  It’s usually Emily who would call an emergency meeting of the Anti-Princess Club. But today, I’ve taken it upon myself.

  ‘I’m glad you’re all here,’ I say. ‘This is big.’

  Grace, Chloe and Emily are sitting on cushions in the treehouse waiting to find out why I’ve called them over.

  I gaze at the ceiling. I wonder if I could turn our secret storage cupboard into a dome for that planetarium.

  Emily senses my distraction. My mind does wander when I’m in design mode. ‘Earth to Bella. Shall I call the meeting to order?’

  I refocus. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I declare this emergency meeting of the Anti-Princess Club open,’ Emily says. ‘What exactly is the emergency, Bella?’

  I pin a printed copy of the hate mail to the corkboard on the wall, grab a yellow texta and highlight the subject.

  ‘Those words,’ I say. ‘Matt Vernon, AKA Rat Vermin, said those same words after throwing a paper plane at me on the bus this afternoon.’

  Grace and Chloe gasp. I can tell they’ve come up with a verdict already. Matt Vernon – guilty of cyberbullying.

  ‘So he sent the hate mail,’ Chloe says. ‘That’s my hypothesis. I haven’t studied much criminology, but there are loads of theories we could test from sociology, psychology
or anthropology.’

  I turn to Emily. She is the one targeted by the cyberbully. ‘What do you think, Emily?’

  She scratches her chin. ‘It could just be a coincidence.’

  ‘You’re right, Emily,’ Chloe admits. ‘Correlation doesn’t imply causation.’

  Emily takes down the piece of paper and studies it again. ‘The email talks about the beauty pageant, but that was in April. And the vermin Vernons are new in town…so how would they know about that?’

  Emily is super smart, but she’s too humble for her own good. She is oblivious to her celebrity status.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ I ask. ‘You didn’t have to live here to know about the pageant. The footage was all over the internet.’

  Emily nods, but she still doesn’t seem certain. ‘I just don’t know,’ she says. ‘Something doesn’t make sense.’

  Grace takes the email and re-reads it. ‘Catsmum is the username,’ she says. ‘If only we knew what that meant.’

  Emily racks her brain. ‘The mum part suggests it’s a female, which steers me away from the vermin,’ she says. ‘And do we know anyone who has a cat they really love?’

  We sit thinking of all the people we know who own cats.

  ‘I bet if I did a survey, there would be more than two hundred cat-owning people that go to our school alone,’ Emily says. ‘If only we could narrow it down to a female who loves her feline so much that she considers it her baby.’

  She opens her laptop. ‘Let’s set a new mission.’

  MISSION SEA MONSTER:

  Confirm the identity of the cyberbully.

  ‘All in favour?’ Emily asks.

  Grace, Chloe and I scream in unison: ‘Yes!’

  It’s time to set some rat traps.

  Chloe has invited all the original anti-princesses, as well as Yiayia, to witness her star-making moment at the observatory.

  Grace and I live nearby so I doubled her on my bike. Yiayia drove Emily and Chloe in the restaurant van.

  ‘Professor Jenkins will be with you shortly,’ says the receptionist behind the front desk. ‘Make yourselves comfortable in the foyer.’