gunge

Hildy shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden stool in the science lab of her school. Her laboratory-mate Mateus sat next to her at the intensely polished sink/table. He was peering at the wide screen down at the end of the room over the grease-spiked-hairdo'ed heads of the other students in Classroom 5. They both had their right hands laid palms-up over their left hands in front of them, respectfully, as prescribed. The posture with the hands made Hildy think of a picture of the Buddha she had once seen in an encyclopedia - wouldn't it be hilarious to have those long droopy earlobes too?, she thought.

There was a quiet as everyone waited for the instructor to say something. It was so you could hear some of the younger kids breathing, with drooly mouths and sniffling runny noses. She was friends with Dora, who sat at the front, and hated Peter who sat behind and who you could hear whispering bad words and sometimes whipped gobbed up bits of paper at the girls' hair.

She thought as she glanced at him with disdain for his childish full lips and mouth ajar, what a suck-up Mateus was. She reckoned he was the type of boy that sometimes ate his own earwax. Observing little boys' fingers could lead to these nasty deductions. Weren't they all so horrible? Why couldn't they at least trim those hideous, snot-scraper nails of theirs? Boys were awful! Awful!

The weird, gross part of the lesson was about to begin, so she bit her lip. Last time, they had inverted a grasshopper to see it's stomach sac. The whirring mechanisms behind the chute off to the side of their desk that conveyed the specimens hadn't started yet. When they did, it put her teeth on edge.

Instead of letting the anticipation bother her, she let her mind wander and stared vacantly over at another pair of pupils alongside the two of them. One, a girl she didn't know well in a moth-eaten wool skirt, was picking spots on her neck solicitously. The boy adjacent was well-known and made-fun-of for only owning two shirts which he turned inside out and alternated wearing one on top of the other to put the dirtiest side furthest away from him every few days. His hands were not in the prescribed position either, they were on his knees and the fronts of his trousers showed streaky deposits of hand-grease. Boys were disgusting and hideous! Hildy's old-fashioned tortoise-shell glasses were smeary too she knew, but she smiled knowing it meant that you couldn't easily always see where she was really looking, especially if she tilted her head away from you.

In the course of her star-gazey assessment of the other children and the long, narrow classroom in which they were arranged like bowling pins, or shampoo bottles, she spotted something like a sort of gunge on the side of the sink. It was nearest to Mateus, but facing her, and she had never noticed it before. The gunge was an odd colour to describe. At first she thought black, and then noticed green streaks which then seemed blue. It was weird. Her eyes widened as she became hypnotised by the strange stuff. It wasn't just a smear, it had a form and a body. It seemed to have a life of its own. She stopped thinking about the puerile habits of her classmates and focussed on this glistening, pulsing mass.

Suddenly, the gunge spoke.

"Hildegard, where is your lunch?" Hildy scrunched up her face. "I threw it over the school fence because I hate that awful tuna sandwich."

"What will you eat for lunch then?" Hildy ran a tongue over her teeth. "Dora lets me have some of her packed lunch - I don't mind just an apple."

"Which boy do you like?" Hildy bared her teeth at the question. "None of them. THEY'RE ALL AWFUL."

The gunge was not perturbed by her vehemence. It went on.

"Which boy is the most awful?" Hildy smiled. "Peter, naturally. He's absolutely horrible and horribly horribly hideously awful. He plays with himself at lunch, and he, he swears. He says all the awful words. The other girls say he smells too."

There was something happening on the screen now up at the front and she was aware that in the periphery of her vision, Mateus was fidgeting. She willed the strange conversation on regardless.

"What would you most like to be doing?" asked the gunge. Hildy paused to consider. "I just like looking at people. I love just imagining what everybody's thinking, and what they might be doing even after I've stopped looking at them."

The gunge then ceased to be an object and became a small portal for her to look through. Inside a tiny spot in it, she saw the heads of the students in their rows and sat properly at their desks. She saw them all including herself, and they were all watching the screen, and not minding being looked at by her. This experience had been getting more and more absorbing, so Hildy found she had stopped holding her hands in the prescribed manner and had leaned forward on the desk, her glasses moving down her nose a bit.

Then the whiring started and she looked up and saw Mateus perched expectantly and the spell was broken.

"Frog today" he said matter-of-factly, and a glass dish with a belly-up dead frog rattled out of the chute. "We're gonna do a frog today" and he wiped his bottom lip with a yellowy finger and a quick intake of breath, not looking at her.

Hildy smirked. "Let's get to work then, Mateus" she said.