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Flip Side: About Face

I'm sitting in class and the room's as hot as an oven. I can feel little cold drops of water dribbling down my back. My hands are sticky wet. It's too hot to work. Too hot to think. Nobody's doing any work in the classroom because of the heat. The teacher's leaning back against the wall, fanning himself.

I'm supposed to be doing math, but I'm not. I've started a drawing of stairs, right across the whole page. They're wobbly stairs because I can't draw very well. They twist, like someone's grabbed them at each end and screwed them round. They look like butter stairs. Melting stairs.

I can see out the window from where I sit. The sun is very bright, so I have to squint. It dazzles me. The playground is burnt brown, and the trees along the fence line are drooping. Their leaves are turning brown too, like autumn brown. Only it's not autumn. It's summer, and the leaves should be green.

It was really strange coming to school this morning. The bus broke down halfway so I had to walk. Me and heaps of other people had to walk. We walked wherever the tar wasn't too sticky. That's another thing; the roads are melting, on account of the heat. Black tar is coming up through the stones, and trickling along the gutters. Just like the drops of water trickling down my back.

And there are fires everywhere. Some of them are too big to put out. Yesterday there was a fire in the plantation on the hills. Mum and Dad and I stayed up late last night to watch it. Fantastic! There were flames going up into the sky like a wall of red, and smoke came over the whole city, and we could hear the roaring noise of the flames from miles away! The fire brigade just let it burn. They didn't have enough water for it. They spent all night going about the city, trying to stop smaller fires, until they ran out of water. After that we just watched parts of the city burn.

Dad says we have to try to live normal lives. He says it's better than going into a panic, or sitting around at home waiting to die. He says we have to just keep doing what we usually do every day, and ignore the heat. But it's so dangerous in the city. That makes it really difficult to be "normal". Some people have gone mad. They run about shouting things. They say it's the end of the world. They scream like I don't know what! Dad says to keep away from people like that, in case I get hurt.

Lots of kids didn't come to school today. Some of them were too sick with the heat. A few of them have died. One of my mates copped it this morning. One minute he was fine, and the next he was lying on the floor. I


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