Mars? Yeah Right!

Chapter 2

2

Another thing that confuses me about boys is the way they can change practically overnight. I mean, one day they're this tiny, annoying kid with a bad haircut and skinny arms, then they go away to, like, the Gaeltacht or something they come back and bam! Insta-hottie. It's like they can freaking shapeshift or something. A clear indicator of alien powers if you ask me.

 I myself had first hand experiance of this, thanks to the sudden metamorphosis of my neighbour and one-time childhood friend, Kevin McGregor.

When I first moved to the town, aged seven, Kevin was a small skinny nine year old with scary hair, buck teeth and freckles. We became good friends and played together almost every day. But then he turned twelve and everything changed. We just kind of drifted apart for some reason. I think it was because that was the year Kevin went into first year. Clearly I, a fourth- class kid, wasn't cool enough to hang out with a secondary schooler like him. See, even though Kevin's only two years older than me, he's three classes ahead of me in school, thanks to his mother's eagerness to get him out of the house as soon as possible (What can I say? He was an energetic child).

I never really saw Kevin after that. We went to seperate schools and had different friends. We soon developed a "friendly neighbour" sort of relationship. You know, where you wave to each other across the street but never actually speak? I mean, occasionally, mam would get me to go over to give Mrs McGregor a message and he'd answer the door, but for the most part, the contact between Kevin and I was minimal. It continued like that for the next four years. Then Kevin went on a six month exchange trip to America and I hadn't seen him since.

Until last summer that is.

I had just finished second year and had recently turned fifteen. All was fine and good at first, I was delighted to get off school and was envisioning three and a half months of peaceful, lesson-free days. But then my report card came, putting an end to all my dreams of quiet laziness.

To this day, my parents still can't fathom how I  could fail science so badly, yet still manage to get an A in every other subject, even though I must've told them about a gazillion times that the test was all about physics and physics just confuses me. I mean, biology I can do. Chemistry I can handle. But physics?

Forget about it.

Which was why mam and dad got this "fantastic" idea to enlist a tutor for a part of the summer to help me improve my grade. As you can imagine, I was skipping for joy when I heard the news.

NOT.

I tried to talk them both out of it, I really did, but after attempt number a million and one, mam just got exasperated and was all "this is your future, to need to do well or you could end up failing you Junior Cert and becoming a hoboe, blah blah blah".

Whatever. Since when do a person's entire Junior Cert results hinge on whether or not they know how to find the density of a bouncy ball? 

Anyway, I gave up trying to convince her otherwise and instead concentrated on praying hard that I wouldn't come down one Saturday morning to find my actual science teacher eating a breakfast bagel at my kitchen table. I don't think my heart would react well to that kind of an image first thing in the morning.

The scary thing is, believe it or not that could actually happen. Dad teaches Irish and Geography at my school and was perfectly able to call in a favour from one of his more scientifically-inclined co workers.

Which is why I thanked Baby Jesus when I heard my mother tell him that under no circumstances was he to create an akward situation by bringing one of my teachers home to help me.