Ali Jackson Changed the World: It's amazing what one girl can do when she puts her mind to it

By A G McAdams

She's starting grade six, and her best friend Jemima doesn't want to be friends any more. Ali Jackson doesn't know why.

Shell-shocked, and stuck in a slump, her analytical nature helps her to see through the hurt. Bouncing back, she finds that focussing on little fix-it projects takes her mind off Jemima, and stops her feeling sad.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Spinnaker Red
• Release date: Apr 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9780645791914

A G McAdams

A.G. McAdams was born in Melbourne in 1973 and lives there today with their partner and three children.

Book preview

1

Dressed and ready for school, Ali Jackson stood and stared at the flowers. Why had she not seen them before?

She had. They were there every time she came down the stairs. They hadn’t moved since yesterday. Still in the vase, on the table by the door. Still dead.

So why did she suddenly notice them today? And why was it such a problem?

Ali wondered why anyone bothered buying flowers anyway, if they were just going to die. They were dead from the moment they were cut, probably a week before they were bought, and by the time they got to your house, they were well and truly past their used-by date.

Pointless. Like Ali felt inside when she looked at them.

A large brown, crispy dead petal broke off a flower and fell to the table, crunck. It joined the other petals, maybe 15 or 20 of them now, gathered lifeless and dry around the base of the vase.

Ali stared. Pointless.

She wondered why nobody had cleaned them up.

She heard her Dad coming from the top of the stairs, breathing loudly through his nose, like he had a tennis ball stuck up there. Flop…, flop…, flop, was the sound of his feet.

‘Morning Petal,’ he said brightly, coming to a stop behind Ali.

Ali wondered why her Dad would refer to the light of his life, his only daughter, as petal; the dead thing on the floor.

‘Morning Dad. Gonna throw those flowers out?’ asked Ali hopefully.

‘Yeah,’ he said enthusiastically, but he didn’t. ‘Big day?’ he asked, ignoring the flowers, and just saying the next thing on his mind.

‘Huge,’ said Ali without emotion, and tired of idle chatter.

‘Terrific!’ Dad forced a big smile and turned to walk into the kitchen.

Ali watched him flop his feet the rest of the way through the hall and into the kitchen. He wore tired old, worn out Ugg boots with a hole in the toe of one where his sock poked out. He was wrapped in a plum red and black dressing gown, and his hair stuck up like he had just gotten out of bed.

Ali turned back to the flowers and stared despairingly. Hanging her head, she walked slowly to the kitchen, and stood in the doorway surveying the scene.

Her Dad now sat at the kitchen table reading the morning newspaper. Ali’s Mum, in contrast to her Dad, looked very neat and well groomed, fully dressed and ready for work. She wore an old-fashioned apron tied around her waist so her clothes didn’t get dirty. From the quantity of food on the kitchen table, Ali could tell she had been up for some time preparing breakfast.

Her Mum looked up and saw Ali standing in the doorway dressed for school. Her eyes lit up.

‘Morning Sweetheart. Pancakes?’ greeted her Mum, always ready for a chat.

‘I’ll just have juice,’ replied Ali.

‘You have to eat Pumpkin,’ she walked over to Ali with a plate of pancakes.

Ali wondered if she meant that she had to eat pumpkin, or if she was calling Ali a pumpkin. Maybe she thought Ali looked like a pumpkin. She was worried now. It was probably all the pancakes she ate.

Ali took a plastic bottle of juice from the fridge, filled a glass, jammed the plastic lid back onto the bottle by pushing it down hard with her hand, and grabbed the fridge door again by the handle. The handle came off in her hands, broken cleanly away from the fridge door.

Ali got that feeling you get when you are about to explode. That feeling when everything’s been building up inside you, and it all comes out at once. It kind of burns in your ears, and then you say all the things you shouldn’t say, and you regret saying them, but you can’t take them back.

She stood there staring at the fridge, holding the handle with one hand, and the bottle of juice in the other. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, trying her best to let the feeling pass. She exhaled loudly.

It was no good. She exploded. ‘How does the door handle just come off Dad!?... Mum!?’ she fumbled. ‘How does that just happen? What’s wrong with this place!?’

Why had all these little things not bothered Ali before?

She stormed out of the room. Her Mum and Dad watched her go from behind the newspaper and pancakes. Frozen, they looked at each other, wondering what had just happened.

Ali poked her head back around the corner. ‘And the flowers are dead!’ she shouted, as she turned and stormed out the front door.

2

A throng of students pushed and shoved their way past Ali, through the doorway and into the classroom, like she wasn’t there. The occasional student avoided hitting her, but most collected Ali with a shoulder, or an elbow, or a careless backpack. They didn’t do it deliberately. It’s the way herds of animals move, oblivious to everything in their path, like buffalos to a precipice.

Ali imagined all the kids walking to the edge of a cliff and stepping off, falling into a big pile on the ground below.

Was it always like this? And why did she suddenly care?

A dog-eared piece of torn carpet about the size of a large pepperoni pizza slice flopped back and forwards hypnotically where the hallway met the classroom. A wool runner extended with the flow of traffic another four feet into the room. The runner occasionally caught on someone’s sneaker and was pulled a little more, inch by inch, tearing at the literal fabric of the school.

Why had she not noticed something so clearly dangerous until now? It had obviously been getting worse for quite some time.

As if to signal the end of the line of bodies, the school bell raptured the air, and the students found their seats, chatting and laughing, the sound just one collective murmur.

Ali stood and stared at the tear in the carpet. The murmur in the classroom petered out, and the other kids all found their way to their seats as their teacher, Mr Beardall, entered the room.

The door slammed in Ali’s face. It shocked her awake and out of her trancelike state. The carpet flapped over once more with the wind from the closing door. Definitely a tripping hazard, Ali thought.

She looked up and through the upper glass section of the door and into the classroom. All the students were now sitting at their desks, still niggling and throwing bits of eraser at each other, as Mr Beardall arranged his belongings on the teachers’ desk at the front of the room.

He had a well-groomed hipster beard that Ali thought suited him. She wasn’t sure if he grew a beard because of his name, or if it was just a coincidence. She thought it was funny that his name matched his appearance, like how Mrs Petersen down her street looked remarkably like her dog.

After considering for a moment just turning around and going home, Ali opened the door noisily and shuffled in, slamming her back pack down on the desk in front of her and taking her seat. No one looked around. No one noticed.

Normally Ali loved school, but right now, there was nothing Ali found more boring, than an hour of English class. Fortunately, the introduction last year of laptop computers allowed Ali to look at whatever she wanted on her computer screen for the majority of any class, and with a swift flick of the wrist, change desktops as the teacher walked near her, to make it look like she was working.

Today though, laptops were closed