Free My Life and Other Massive Mistakes by Tristan Bancks Page A

wonder if China would be interested?’
    Jack continues his mining project.
    â€˜What about body parts?’ I suggest. ‘You know, for people who need a replacement. On Mum’s driver’s licence she has to say whether she’ll give away her kidneys when she dies, but what if they could get a nice, fresh, living kidney? That’s got to be worth a bit.’
    â€˜What about hair?’ Jack says. ‘For old guys having hair transplants.’

    â€˜That’s pretty good.’ I get my maths notebook out of my backpack and jot in the back.
    Kidney
    Hair
    â€˜An arm?’ I suggest. ‘I wonder how much you’d get for an arm … My left one really gets in the way when I sleep. Sometimes I get pins and needles and I can’t feel it anymore and it’s so bad I think it’s someone else’s arm in the bed and they’re trying to rip my face off.’
    Kidney
    Hair
    Arm
    I bite my thumbnail again and my frontteeth click together. ‘What about teeth?’
    â€˜Teeth?’
    I wiggle my top front tooth, then the ones around it. Then the bottoms.
    â€˜The tooth fairy pays five bucks a tooth, and I have maybe six baby teeth left, including the ones right up the back. That’s 30 bucks.’
    I quickly jot down the figures.
    Jack’s eyes dance and he starts wiggling his teeth like mad.
    â€˜I’ve got four, maybe five,’ he says.
    â€˜That’s a lot of cash just sitting there in our mouths doing nothing. Come inside.’
    We head in to my house and go straight to the bathroom. We both open wide and try to count our baby teeth in the mirror. We think we might have $65 or even $70 in untapped assets.
    â€˜And when I stay at my nan’s, the tooth fairy gives ten bucks,’ I tell Jack.

    â€˜No way.’
    â€˜Yes way.’
    â€˜When are you staying there next?’
    â€˜What day is it?’
    â€˜Friday.’
    â€˜I could stay tonight.’
    â€˜Well, let’s rip out a few of your teeth,’ Jack says.
    â€˜I’ll go get the pliers.’
    I run to the laundry, excited. I can’t believe Jack and I have come up with a business idea that’s actually going to work. We are geniuses.
    I find the head torch in the camping tub. I grab the pliers from the toolbox. I bolt back into the bathroom, flick on the torch and gaze into the mirror at all those beautiful, gleaming white gems inside my mouth.
    â€˜What’s the point of teeth, anyway?’ I ask Jack. ‘Apart from eating.’
    â€˜They’re annoying,’ Jack says. ‘Mum makes me brush mine, like, once a day.’
    â€˜I have to do mine twice,’ I tell him.
    â€˜That’s ridiculous,’ Jack says. ‘We should just rip ’em all out now. Imagine if you only had five teeth. You could brush them in 20 seconds rather than two minutes.’
    â€˜All we gotta do is bust ’em out.’
    I hold up the pliers.
    Jack and I look at them.
    They’re kind of old-looking and rusty, and when I try to pull them apart they squeal.
    â€˜I think they were Pop’s. Maybe they need a bit of oil,’ I say.
    â€˜Yeah.’
    I go to the kitchen, bring back the canola oil spray and I spritz the pliers in the bathroom sink. I open and close them a few times and bright orange rust drips onto the white porcelain basin.
    â€˜What are we waiting for?’ Jack says. ‘Open up.’
    Before I saw the pliers right up close, Isuspected they were old. But now I can see that the pincers are kind of jagged. They look like they must be pre-war. I’m not sure which war but it may have been one that was in the Bible.

    â€˜I wonder…’
    â€˜You wonder what?’
    â€˜I wonder if we could just wiggle them out instead?’ I suggest.
    â€˜That’ll take forever!’
    â€˜You want to go first?’ I grab the brutal, rust-crusted implement and hold it up to Jack’s face like I’m ready to