Or the cooling of Nathan Pearson: A novella and 10 short stories for young adults

By Stephen J Kimber

A novella and 10 short stories written for young adults (and the young at heart) aged 13+. The novella details a gone-awry plot to make Nathan Pearson, terminal geek, a cooler representative of humanity. In the meantime, the novella's first person narrator, Grif', discovers both the highs and lows of love, friendship and authority. The 1

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inkstained Fingers
• Release date: Jun 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780994344397

Stephen J Kimber

Stephen J Kimber is an Australian author and teacher with over 20 texts published. He has co-authored a number of educational texts in English, History and Geography for John Wiley & Sons (Jacaranda), Nelson Thomson (CEngage), and others. He's the author of the YA novella, Sex and Drugs and Rock N Roll - or the cooling of Nathan Pearson, three plays and many short stories.

Book preview

Chapter 1

About the title

Most of this book was originally written under a title which now embarrasses the hell out of me. It was Steveo who told me it had the interest of a nudists' parade to a blind, deaf mute. (Don't worry, I wondered about the deaf mute bit too.) 'A good title,' he said, 'should sell the book.'

So I came up with my second title: Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n Roll.

He cocked an eyebrow at that one too. He said he hadn't meant for me to write an ad. (Steveo hates commercials, which he says are the best of lies because they're so close to the truth. We don't have a TV at our place although I have to admit he and my mum are both radio fans. What they listen to, of course, ho-hum, ho-hum, is the ABC.) 'Titles should reflect the spirit of the book,' he said.

'But still help sell it,' I said.

He laughed at that. 'Right, an ad but on a higher plane.' He went serious. ' There's nothing wrong with persuasion, ,’ he added seriously, ‘there's a hell of a lot wrong with coercion.'

Whatever that means.

He was looking at me in that way that teachers have. 'So, justify your title.'

I said the sex and drugs and rock 'n roll bit was most people's idea of being a teenager. The trouble is they're right and yet dead wrong.

I said it was almost always the people who weren't good old adolescents who did most of the writing and talking about it and that most of the time they were like some stony-faced minister who gets up in front of his parishioners and tells them what they want to hear. 'Adolescence,' says the stony-faced priest, 'is a time of confusion, a time of great change, of uncertainty, of TEMPTATION.' And of course: he's right! But he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. He's forgotten what it was like, if he ever knew. (You've got to be a bit suspicious of blokes in dog collars; people in uniform are always pushing someone else's line. Or they’re suffering someone else’s line; e.g. students.) That guy in the dog collar is a long way from the front – to use that favourite of English teachers, the metaphor – so what's he know?

'Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n Roll is sort of an ad for being a teenager,' I told Steveo.

He looked at me. 'The best of lies,' he said. 'I'll have to think about it.'

The title you now see before you is, more or less, what the book's about. I dropped the bit about sex and so on because… well, you’ll find out. I added the bit about Nathan because...well, you'll find out that where the sex and drugs and rock n roll was headed, but we never quite got there. So that explains the Or bit, maybe.

Chapter 2

About the author

Let's face it, writing a book's an ego trip. So, I might as well get some facts about little old moi out of the way.

As you might have guessed, I like words. I like using them, I like rolling them around, I like making them sit up and do tricks. That's why I like rap, for instance, not because it's musically brilliant (it isn't) but I love the way they jam-pack the words. I like listening to some of Steveo's Dylan stuff. I like some of the Boss’s songs. I even like poetry – how's that for sick?! I've got a reputation for being bright in a chaotic way. (My report cards tend to say things like; 'Academically gifted but easily distracted,' and 'Has great ability but lacks application.' My mother's personal favourite is, 'Brilliant student – I think?' She likes to waggle that one in my face every now and then. In fact, she's objected to my fondness for parentheses right here on exactly those grounds.) What being bright in a chaotic way means is that some teachers think you're a smart arse. This means trouble. (For instance – here I go with the parentheses again – there was the time early in year eleven when I draped a sheet over my head and came moaning into our form room during roll call. Mrs Healy, our form teacher, had lectured us the day before about our 'appalling lack of a school spirit.' The weather had been too sweet for a sports’ carnival for most of the seniors and they’d stayed away in droves [I hadn’t by the way]. How could I resist it? Mrs Healy is not known for her sense of humour – I should have known better, I guess.)

What I've also got a reputation for is being a pedant. (Look it up, I had to.) Who else calls ( ) parentheses and not brackets. Actually, I picked up the habit from Mr Halloran, or Blinky Bill, as he's known, because he's big and curly haired and has this other habit of rubbing his eyes and blinking when he's trying to solve a really difficult maths problem he's set. He's always setting very difficult maths problems, by the way, and then getting lost in trying to solve them, blink, blink, blink, on the board. I had him for maths last year so I'm not entirely to blame. But being a pedant is not particularly nice. The trouble is, I can't help myself, sometimes. Teachers hate it when you remember something contradictory they said two months, or two minutes, ago. Mothers aren't particularly fond of it either.

My mother's another important fact too. I quite like her, actually, which isn't considered terribly cool in certain quarters. She's an architect, which makes her pretty unique. Steveo, who's as fond of bad puns as me, composed a drunken blues number for her one night at a dinner party: 'Spaced Out Mama' he called it. My mother's been living with Steveo ever since they met at a Year Eight Parent Teacher night just over four years ago. (Yes – I was the cause of true love!) My father's been dead for twelve years but my mother's never forgotten him. She says Steveo reminds her of my Dad. I don't remember him too well so I'll have to take her word for that. Steveo, by the way, happened to be my English teacher last year – until I was excluded as they call it, but I'll keep you in suspense about that. His real name is Garth Stevens, which explains why he likes to be called Steveo, except at school where he's Mr Stevens. The three of us (plus two dogs and a Siamese cat named Kedi, which is the Turkish word for cat) live in a house set into the side of a steep hill. My mother designed it. I guess I think of the house as being like my mother – big and airy and light. (My mother isn't physically big, by the way. She's big hearted.)

Chapter 3

The story - I'm getting there

So far this book hasn't had much to do with the story that ends up with the big climax of me being kicked out of school. (The fact that it ends up with a big climax is the sex bit – just joking.) I knew I'd have trouble with the story. So did my mother. So did Steveo. Just begin at the beginning, he said. But where the hell is that?

Chapter 4

The beginning

All right. All jokes aside I guess it began at about 8.27 a.m. one cool April morning outside J Block. We were all there, the gang of four, as Steveo calls us: Scott, Michael, Nathan and me.

Actually, Nathan wasn't there. (Maybe he was, I really don't remember. For convenience's sake I'll say he wasn't.) He was in fooling around on one of Mr Leggatt's computers, so we discovered. Nat is a computer freak. Scott, who gets in even worse trouble than me because he can't resist getting in the last word, sometimes calls him M.SVersion 7. – short for MS-DosWindows 7 (old technology). (Scott also invented Nat's father's nickname:, 'RAM,' which is short for 'Rigid Arsehole, Mate'. None of us, most particularly the old Nat, likes his father.) To give him credit, Nat doesn't let it bother him, the pay-outs, I mean. But he's a bit sad. He's so heavily into computers it's depressing. He sprouts stuff about the good old days when people actually knew about programming and stuff like MS-Dos. Nathan’s short, stocky and has dark hair cut by someone still living in the fifties, most probably his father, who's into saving money. Nat's one of those people who'll get a bloody nose from a fight he was just walking past. Michael, since we're doing the characters here, is the odd one out. He doesn't say as much as Scott or me but then he probably doesn't get a chance. Actually, everyone wonders why Michael hangs around with us. He's a top sportsman (A Grade cricketer, the school's first choice as lock, holder of the high jump record, runs the 100 in about 2.6 seconds, that sort of thing), our prize winning mathematician, a debater and public speaker and so on and so on and so on. He's polite, good looking and efficient – loved by teachers and (we suspect but he won't say a word either way) by at least two of the most desirable babes in school. What everyone doesn't know is just how bored he is with all that and what a devious bastard he can be. In fact, he helped me put together the 'school spirit' thing; he had a chain that he was supposed to rattle and he was supposed to intone in a voice out of Hamlet, 'Now we've got a school spirit,' as I came moaning in, but he was too broken up with laughter, he says.

Anyway, there we were that April morning. God knows what we were talking about. The usual, I suppose – finding a cure to all known diseases, world peace, how to play the xylophone and why you'd want to, the meaning of life, that sort of thing. Actually, we were probably talking about school and/or girls. Probably both.

The bell went but no one moved. 8:40. Out strolled Nat, looking (as my mother says) like a cat that's just swallowed a canary. This isn't his usual expression; mostly he just squints from staring for too long at computer screens.

It turned out he hadn't been dallying with the computers alone. No, no, no! Melanie Parkes; blonde, 160 centimetres or thereabouts of delicious curves (I've got to admit it), wrapper of men around her little finger, itcher of loins (that's Scott's assessment) and a poisonous bitch to boot, had been with him. She'd batted her eyes at him, leaned over the screen (this is my reconstruction of what happened) and extracted a promise of assistance with her history assignment. He had the grubby little document in his sweaty hand. What assistance meant was that he was going to type it up on his PC laptop for her at home and no doubt edit it as well. (Have you ever noticed it's impossible to type something up on a computer and not touch it up?!)

Annoying is not the word. I suspect that Melanie, ye sole childe of fat-cat parents (they drop her at school either in the Merc' or the Jag'), owns at least 67 PC's, iPads, tablets and sundry laptops, desktops and probably a trained possum that runs in a cage and powers up her USB charger. All right, that's a slight exaggeration, but I'll bet she's got at least two.

'You prize dickhead,' Scott said, 'she's just using you.'

'She's got a virus on her laptop,' old Nat rejoined.

'Indubitably,' said Scott, showing off his vocabulary.

'None of you like her, I know,' Nat said, 'but