My Life and Other Stuff That Went Wrong Read online

  About the Book

  Is your grandpa super-angry? Has your nan ever tried to climb Mt Everest? Have you started your own playground freak show? And have you ever risked your life to save your pet rat from certain destruction?

  I have. I’m Tom Weekly and this is my life. Inside the covers of this book you’ll read lots of weird-funny-gross stories and learn the secret of my strangest body part. But I guarantee that won’t freak you out as much as the story of how Stella Holling, a girl who’s been in love with me since second grade, tricked me into kissing her.

  Praise for My Life and Other Stuff I Made Up

  ‘A serious dose of pant-wetting, cringeworthy stories … and we love ’em!’ DMag

  ‘A sort of Aussie tall-tale version of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid.’ Booklist

  ‘Equal parts absurd and raucous, and sometimes a little gross.’ School Library Journal

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title

  Freak

  Rarnald the Rat

  What Would You Rather Do? (part 1)

  Everest

  The Fig

  The Babysitters

  Don’t

  Kids Stink

  What Would You Rather Do? (part 2)

  Morris by Raph Atkins

  10 Funny Books

  Tom’s FunLand

  Your FunLand

  I Think I Hate My Dog

  The Last Kiss

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the Book?

  Hey,

  I’m Tom Weekly, and this is my life. I write stuff down and draw pictures to make sense of all the crazy stuff that happens to me. Like when Jack and I started a freak show in the playground, and when Stella Holling tried to kiss me, and when my nan decided she was going to climb Mt Everest.

  So here it is … my second book of weird, funny, sometimes gross stories. (Whatever you do, don’t read the first book. It’ll give you dumb ideas that adults will not appreciate. Like eating sixty-seven hot dogs in ten minutes. Or building a teleporter. Or pretending you have appendicitis to get out of detention with your school librarian.)

  My friend Raph has a story in this book, too. If you want to send me a message or a joke or one of your own weird stories that I could stick in my next book, I’m at:

  [email protected]

  Giddyup.

  Tom

  ‘Roll up! Roll up! He’s the most hideous freak you have ever laid eyes on! He’s disgusting! He’s disgraceful! He will make you vomit!’

  ‘Settle down,’ I whisper to Jack through the thin red curtain.

  ‘What?’ Jack asks, poking his head inside.

  ‘You don’t have to say they’ll vomit.’

  Jack rolls his eyes and shuts the curtain. ‘You will not vomit!’ he announces in the same ringmaster voice. He goes on to use words like ‘gasp’ and ‘horror’ and, ‘This lunchtime only. Just two dollars!’

  I am sitting inside a small red teepee that Jack and I have built under the trees at the far end of the bottom playground. The teepee is made of long, straight branches and a red sheet from my house.

  Jack thinks this pop-up freak show will make us wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, and I need cash to buy a birthday present for Sasha, something that will convince her to go out with me again. I want to prove to her that I’m not selfish and weird like she says.

  ‘You ready for the first customer?’ Jack asks, poking his head back inside.

  I look at my socked foot, nervous.

  ‘I guess,’ I say.

  Jack whips open the curtain and says, ‘Welcome! Welcome!’

  Brent Bunder appears. He is a giant bulldozer of a kid with diggers for hands. He fills the teepee.

  ‘Take a seat,’ I squeak.

  Brent Bunder lowers himself awkwardly onto one of the kindergarten chairs we have borrowed. It strains and moans under his weight.

  ‘This better be good,’ he grunts. He is red-faced and sweaty, like he just guzzled a bottle of hot chilli sauce. He looks uncomfortable, crammed into the tiny space. I want to run but I can hear Jack outside dropping another coin into his lunch box.

  So I slowly peel my limp, grey sock down over my ankle. Over my heel. Down my foot. Brent watches on as I close my eyes and reveal my toes.

  Silence.

  I open one eye.

  And there it is.

  My foot.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  Four toes. Slightly webbed. Like a cartoon duck. It has been that way since birth. I have never really shown anyone apart from Jack and my family. My sister says it is proof that I’m a mutant from another planet.

  Brent Bunder looks on, expressionless.

  ‘There are only four,’ I explain helpfully. Brent Bunder isn’t exactly top of our year in maths.

  Still nothing.

  ‘There are meant to be five,’ I say.

  He pokes my toes with one gigantic finger, like he is checking that they are real, that I haven’t bought them from a magic shop.

  Eventually he says, ‘So what? You’re deformed. Is that what I paid two bucks for? Now I can’t buy an iceblock, and I’m hot.’

  ‘Well …’ I say, looking up at him. He does look hot. His face is speckled with tiny beads of sweat.

  ‘I want my money back.’

  ‘Sure. No problem,’ I say.

  Jack’s face appears through the gap in the sheet behind Brent. He shakes his head and mouths the words, ‘No way.’

  I look at Brent. Angry, sweaty, bulldozer Brent. He could crush me like a can. How can I make this worth two dollars?

  ‘Would you believe a bear bit it off?’ I say, half-joking.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well …’ My mind whirrs, scanning for ideas. ‘When I was little we lived in Canada and … I was two years old and playing down by the creek at the back of my house, and this … black bear, a big one, came along and …’

  Brent Bunder looks totally suspicious.

  ‘And he started growling at me, but he was over the other side of the creek. And I crawled away but this grizzly –’

  ‘You said it was a black bear,’ Brent says.

  ‘This black bear started swimming across the creek, and when he reached my side he … attacked me,’ I explain.

  ‘Attacked?’

  ‘Well, he bit me. On the foot. Bit the toe clean off. My mum heard screaming and she ran down to the creek. When she saw the blood dripping down the bear’s chin and the missing toe, she fainted and –’

  ‘Bears have chins?’ Brent questions.

  ‘Well, yeah, the furry bit just below their mouth.’ Brent leans forward, looking me in the eye. ‘And my big sister picked me up and ran two k’s to the hospital, and they stitched me up. That’s why the toes are sort of webbed. Because of the stitches.’

  Brent fixes me with a distant look, like he’s replaying parts of the story in his mind. ‘What happened to the bear?’ he asks.

  ‘Um … I d’know. It went off into the forest and … maybe it ate some other kid’s toe. Maybe it wanted the complete set,’ I suggest. ‘Y’know. Collect all five!’

  I hold his glare, waiting for him to punch me really hard in the nose or rip the teepee apart in a rage. But, instead, he says, ‘You’re a freak, mate. I love it.’ He stands and turns to go. ‘Oh, by the way, I want a third of the profits.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m big and you’re small.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll be back at the end of lunch to collect.’ Then he ducks outs
ide. ‘It’s awesome!’ he announces to the other kids. ‘You wait till you hear how it happened.’

  And that is it. From then on, I am unstoppable. I tell each kid a different story and swear them to secrecy. The tales get taller every time.

  ‘A shark bit it off,’ I tell Morgan Brett.

  ‘As if. How?’ he asks.

  ‘My dad’s a fisherman. For the first two years of my life we lived on a trawler at sea, and one day he netted a shark about a metre-and-a-half, two-metres long.’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘The shark slipped out of the net and slid across the boat’s deck. I was crawling around, playing with my jack-in-the-box, and the shark’s mouth came to rest right near my foot.’

  His eyes widen. I make a chomping sound and a snapping motion with my hands. Morgan is gobsmacked.

  ‘Next!’ Jack shouts.

  And so it goes.

  I tell Millie Randall my toe was trapped in a piece of machinery.

  Another kid, that a flesh-eating disease rotted it off.

  Caught in the spokes of a motorbike.

  Trampled by a horse’s hoof.

  Hacked off by a chainsaw.

  Lost in a bet.

  Jack warns me to pull back on the stories, but I’m on a roll. By the time the last kid leaves the teepee near the end of lunch, we have fifty-eight dollars in cold, hard change. For the first time in his life, Jack was right: we are rich!

  I have just started packing up the chairs when Sasha pokes her head into the teepee.

  Sasha. The cutest girl in Australia. My ex-girlfriend.

  ‘Hey, Tom,’ she says, real sweet. White jumper, hair in a ponytail, eyes like blue sky.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘What’s the freaky thing that everyone’s talking about?’

  ‘Nothin’.’

  ‘I want to know. I’ve paid my money.’

  There is no way I can show Sasha my freaky foot.

  ‘Jack, we have to make a refund,’ I call out. ‘The bell’s about to go.’

  Jack pokes his head through the curtain next to Sasha. ‘It’s okay. We still have time.’

  ‘No we don’t.’

  ‘Yes we do.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Do.’ He mouths the word ‘sixty’ to me.

  Sixty bucks. That’s how much we will have if I show Sasha my missing toe. A nice round sixty. Twenty for Jack, twenty for me, twenty for Brent Bunder, the filthy scoundrel. Four weeks’ pocket money for one hour’s work. Enough to buy Sasha’s present.

  ‘Are you going to show me or not?’ she asks.

  ‘Just give me a moment,’ I say.

  I slip out of the teepee to find Jack and Brent waiting for me.

  ‘I am not showing Sasha,’ I say.

  ‘Show her or I’m keeping the money,’ Jack replies.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was my idea.’

  ‘It’s my foot!’

  Brent makes a throat-slitting motion with one of his giant sausage fingers and points towards the teepee.

  So I scowl and go inside.

  I sit down.

  Me and Sasha. And the toe. The missing toe.

  ‘What’s so bad?’ she asks.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  I start to peel the sock down.

  What should I tell her? The truth? Or one of my stories? I don’t want to mess this up. I don’t want to ruin my plan of marrying Sasha and having three kids and a Labradoodle and a house overlooking the ocean with secret passages and revolving bookcases.

  Over the ankle, over the heel.

  Don’t do it, I think.

  Sasha looks on, fascinated.

  Over the foot, over the toes and …

  There they are in all their freakish glory.

  Boom.

  Sasha stares. Little creases appear in her forehead.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she asks quietly.

  Um, I think. I don’t want to lie to her but she deserves a good story, a better story than anyone, just for being Sasha. ‘I was born like that’ just isn’t worth two dollars. So I open up my mind and the story seems to fall from the sky.

  ‘When I was four my sister’s guinea pig escaped from its hutch,’ I say, intense, serious. ‘But this was no ordinary guinea pig. It was twice the size of a regular one. Feral. I think she found it in the bush. I was in the sandpit playing cars one day and I heard its claws on the concrete path. I turned and saw it coming for me. I backed off into the corner of the pit. I threw a Matchbox car at the beast, but it just raised a paw and batted it away. I screamed but Mum was out front cleaning the car and didn’t hear me. It climbed up on the wooden edge of the sandpit and reared up on its back legs, like a wrestler ready to launch himself off the top turnbuckle. I freaked and ran. It chased me across the grass, up the back steps and halfway across the veranda, then it pounced, ripping my toe out of the socket with its razor-sharp teeth. I screamed and clutched my foot as it retreated to its hutch to pick the flesh off the bone and digest its gruesome meal.’

  Sasha stares, open-mouthed. I breathe hard. I have given it everything. It is a story worth five bucks, not two. It is a movie, really. Dreamworks will probably want to buy the rights. It is the greatest story about a feral guinea pig ever told.

  I look at her.

  She smiles. She looks so beautiful it hurts.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ she says.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Tell me what really happened. Were you just born like that?’

  I feel like an idiot. So I say the obvious thing: ‘No. That’s what really happened.’

  ‘Tom,’ she says, trying to make me smile. But I won’t. I’m in too deep now. I have to see this through. Otherwise she will think I am a liar, and she will never marry me, and we will never own a Labradoodle.

  ‘That’s the truth,’ I say.

  She shakes her head. ‘Why would you look me in the eye and lie to me, tell me such a dumb story.’

  Dumb! She actually says the word ‘dumb’.

  ‘And then you don’t even have the guts to admit you made it up.’

  ‘But I didn’t!’

  Sasha stands. ‘Jack was right. You are hideous. Not your toes. Just you.’

  ‘But –’

  She vanishes through the curtain. I chase her.

  ‘How’d that go?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Yeah. Great,’ I say, pushing past him.

  ‘Sasha!’ I call, but she’s walking off across the playground and out of my life.

  ‘I’m telling everyone you’re a liar!’ she shouts. ‘You’ll have to pay every cent back.’

  ‘Wait. Sasha. Please!’

  She keeps walking. I’ve blown it. This is the worst moment of my life, until …

  I feel a heavy hand on my shoulder. It spins me around.

  ‘I want my money. Now.’ It’s Brent Bunder. He is not smiling.

  ‘But –’

  Jack is standing just behind Brent. Jack pulls the elastic waistband on his track pants forward and pours all the money out of his lunch box and into his undies.

  ‘You … idiot!’ I say. I can’t help it.

  Brent turns to Jack, and Jack starts running away with all the money. I twist out of Brent’s grip and sprint across the playground – one shoe on, one shoe off. Brent gives chase. I hit the basketball courts, my bare, webbed foot slapping against the tar. I catch up with Jack and we bolt towards the front gate of the school. Jack’s underpants are jingling like mad.

  ‘You’re scrubbing that money clean,’ I snarl at him and look back to see Jonah Flem, Morgan Brett, Millie Randall and Brent Bunder racing after us. And, further back, Sasha, standing with her arms crossed. My classmates, the girl I love and the school’s resident giant are after my blood.

  ‘You’re dead!’ Brent Bunder screams.

  So Jack and I keep running – a cheap sideshow freak and a scam artist. As we pick up speed, the coins begin to rain down from Jack’s pant legs, leaving a golden trail of li
es and broken dreams.

  We stop at the gate to catch our breath. Jonah, Morgan, Millie and Brent are grabbing all the coins off the ground and stuffing them into their pockets. ‘We’re rich!’ Morgan shouts.

  ‘Bonehead!’ Jack says, and he kicks me. As he does, one last coin drops from the leg of his pants to the ground, and I swoop on it before he does.

  ‘Gimme that!’ Jack demands, but I back away quickly, rubbing the moisture off the coin and holding it up in the sunshine. Our last two bucks. It glints like a magical nugget of hope … and it fills me with a possibly brilliant idea.

  ‘Do you reckon, if I bought Sasha a sausage roll with sauce for her birthday, that’d be enough to make her want to go out with me again?’

  Jack growls, runs at me and mashes me into the ground.

  Rarnald the Rat is my best non-human friend. (And sometimes I like him better than I like Jack.) Rarnald has been on the run in our house for years. No matter what Mum does, she cannot catch him. He is Indestructo-Rat, with a heart as big as a horse. Tonight, though, she has had it up to here with him (about halfway up her forehead). She says Rarnald is going down, and I’m on a desperate mission to save him.

  When I was little, Rarnald and I were besties. We did everything together.

  Exercise.

  Make each other laugh.

  Eat snacks.

  Perform tricks.

  Rarnald was awesome. Is awesome. He’s about five years old now, which is pretty old in rat years. If he were human he would have a hearing aid and his pants pulled up under his armpits. But he looks after himself.

  ‘Stop encouraging that rat, Tom!’ Mum has always said. ‘Rats are disgusting. They’re a health hazard. Wash your hands.’

  ‘But he’s my friend.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Boys cannot be friends with rats. Go and get some real friends.’

  So she set a trap. Not a Buddhist rat-trap that catches the rat alive but a giant, vicious rat-smacker. That’s how angry she was. She put a chunk of tasty cheese in it, which I thought was pretty funny.