Free Spurt by Chris Miles

should swap places,’ said Darylyn.
    Jack stopped. ‘You want to be on TV?’
    Darylyn gave Jack a look. ‘I want to walk next to Reese.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Jack. He put on a whoops face and took a step backwards so that Darylyn could slide into his place. ‘Sorry.’
    Darylyn held out her hand towards Reese, who seemed paralysed for a moment. Eventually Reese reached out his own hand, averting his eyes like he was trying to pass a note in class without being seen. It was only when his hand fumbled its way into contact with Darylyn’s that Reese seemed to relax.
    Great , thought Jack. Now they’re going to forget everything we were just talking about . ‘Maybe I’ll ask Vivi,’ he said, as the three of them got closer to the school gate. ‘Except then I’d have to deal with her new bestie Sampson chipping in his fifty cents. I mean, what a jerk, right?’
    Reese shrugged. ‘He’s okay.’
    ‘Are you serious? He called me a “gherkin-jerker”!’
    ‘Apparently you are a gherkin-jerker,’ said Darylyn.
    Jack wanted to say that ‘gherkin-jerker’ wasn’t even the worst thing Sampson had called him. The others had no idea what had been said in the changing rooms, or on the soccer field. But what could he tell them? If he repeated Sampson’s words, he’d be inviting suspicion that he was, in fact, a ‘baldy balls’.
    Plus, it felt like tattling. He remembered Denny Trimble from Bigwigs being sent home for bagging Hope Chanders behind her back after Blue Team’s mid-season loss in the ‘Host a Grade 1’s birthday party’ challenge. It didn’t seem like something a real man would do. A real man would settle the score one on one. But how could he possibly settle a score with someone who outmatched him as completely as Sampson did?
    ‘He’s still a jerk,’ Jack muttered.
    ‘If you want my opinion,’ said Darylyn, ‘the smacktalking merely indicates a lack of social skills.’
    Reese nodded. ‘She’s right. You should probably cut him some slack, dude. I don’t think he’s had much practice just hanging with peeps.’
    Jack couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In what reality was Oliver Sampson – winner of first division in testosterone TattsLotto – some kind of tragic social outcast?
    ‘Anyway,’ said Darylyn, ‘it looks like you don’t have to worry.’ She pointed to the gate, where Vivi was waiting for them – without Sampson.
    Speak of the devil , thought Jack, and he shall … mysteriously be somewhere else.
    ‘Psst!’ came a voice.
    The three Year 7 girls were lurking under a birch tree on the other side of the fence, next to where Jack was walking.
    Jack hung back, glancing first at his friends, then back towards the Year 7s.
    ‘What do you want?’ he hissed.
    They beckoned to him in unison. Jack wondered which one was ^kitty^cat, which one was {e-girrl}, and which one was Urchn. Then he realised he didn’t know their real names either. Maybe those were their real names?
    Reese and Darylyn were already through the gate and catching up with Vivi. Jack looked back at the Year 7s. On Monday they’d been bubbling over with excitement; now they looked deadly serious. They beckoned again – and before he knew it, Jack was at the fence.
    ‘You were right,’ he told them. ‘They’re bringing back the old contestants.’
    Jack thought he heard one of the girls whisper, ‘Bring back Jack’.
    ‘But I’m not doing it,’ he said, hurriedly. ‘I’m … almost certainly not doing it.’
    ‘Ignore the hater,’ said the first girl.
    ‘What?’ said Jack.
    ‘Ignore …’ said the second girl.
    ‘… the hater,’ said the third.
    ‘Wait,’ said Jack. ‘You mean on the forums?’
    The three girls nodded solemnly in unison. ‘We’re already on the case to uncover their true identity,’ the first one said.
    ‘But we must seek help from higher powers,’ said the second girl.
    ‘The Bigwigs forum administrators,’ the third girl intoned.
    ‘Until then, we’ll