Read Online The Day the Ear Fell Off by T.M. Alexander - Free Book Online Page B

Amy. ‘Mum’s home,’ she yelled. ‘She says ten minutes and then it’s tea for you and chucking out time for them.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘Right,’ said Bee. ‘We’ve got ten minutes to work out the Tribe initiation.’

a load of useless ideas
    Copper Pie spoke first.
    ‘It’s easy. We storm the alley with guns. I’ve got four – a spud gun, a cap gun, a water pistol and a cowboy gun with a holster that doesn’t do anything but looks
good.’
    Bee and I said, ‘No.’
    ‘Same,’ said Fifty.
    ‘We can’t do that,’ said Jonno. ‘It’ll start a war.’
    Copper Pie’s eyes lit up.
    ‘We could scare them though, couldn’t we?’ said Bee. ‘We could wear balaclavas and run down the alley shouting. That would scare me.’
    ‘And me,’ I said. ‘I’d be scared wearing a balaclava.’
    ‘Same,’ said Fifty. ‘And I don’t look good in hats, they squash my hair.’
    ‘You’re all wimps,’ said Copper Pie, but he didn’t mean it . . . I don’t think.
    ‘Really we should tell the Head and leave it to her to sort out,’ I said.
    Everyone groaned.
    ‘The alley’s not school property. She wouldn’t do anything,’ said Bee.
    ‘So, apart from storming them, which is unlikely to work, we’ve got no ideas,’ said Fifty, nicely summing up the situation.
    There was a pause while we all had a think (or pretended to anyway). I was concentrating really hard on a solution that would make Tribe look good, rather than evil. I hoped the others were too
(except Copper Pie, who can’t think ‘nice’). Because we’d given ourselves a label, I felt we had to live up to it. A gang could wear balaclavas and all that, but not
Tribe.
    ‘Why do you think they do it?’ asked Fifty.
    More silence.
    Fifty said it again. ‘Those girls in the alley, why do you think they stop everyone and tease them?’
    I shrugged to show I wasn’t deaf, I just didn’t have an answer.
    ‘Because they can,’ said Jonno. ‘Because there are loads of them.’
    ‘There must be fifteen at least,’ said Copper Pie. ‘That’s a rugby team.’
    ‘Safety in numbers and all that,’ said Bee. ‘It makes them brave.’
    ‘Yeah, I bet they wouldn’t be so brave on their own.’
    Ping. Something that Copper Pie said made a light bulb come on in Jonno’s head. It was so obvious we could almost see the light shining through his eye sockets. We waited for him to reveal
all.
    ‘Go on, Jonno. We know you’ve thought of something,’ said Fifty.
    ‘Maybe I have,’ he said. ‘They’re brave because there are lots of them. Maybe we could split them up.’
    ‘ Qué? ’ said Bee. Another one of her pet expressions. It means ‘what’ in somewhere she went on holiday.
    ‘Do you know anything about herd behaviour?’
    ‘You mean listening?’ I said.
    ‘No. Not “heard” as in ears. We’ve done ears, remember! “Herd” as in cows.’
    ‘Like “flock”,’ I said to make it clear I understood.
    Every other name for a group came next, not all of them in the dictionary.
    TRIBERS’ FAVOURITE WORDS FOR GROUPS
    • A crash of rhinoceroses
    • A murder of crows
    • A scrum of Copper Pies (made up by Fifty)
    • A flange of baboons
    • A prickle of hedgehogs
    • A general knowledge of Jonnos
    • A library of Keeners (made up by Fifty)
    • A parcel of deer
    • A nuisance of cats
    • An implausibility of gnus
    • A bossiness of Bees (Anonymous)
    • A runt of Fiftys (also Anonymous)
    ‘Cut,’ said Bee, slicing the air with her hand. We shut up.
    ‘So they’re a herd of girls and they move in a pack. How does that help?’
    ‘Herds all go the same way, don’t they?’ said Jonno.
    ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’ Bee can be horrible sometimes.
    ‘Well, I read somewhere that if one animal splits off in another direction the herd will let him go, but if two animals bolt the herd assumes there’s a good reason for it, like a
predator they can’t see, and they all follow.’
    ‘Thrilling,’ said Bee, hands