Jacinta Takes a Walk
Copyright© 2025 by BarBar
Chapter 31: War and Truce
My Period 3 class was History with Mr Lester. He’s a decent teacher and I’ve been enjoying his class all year. Who knew classes could actually be enjoyed? I always thought they had to be endured and that was it. He always had the tables in the room arranged in a big circle. He said it encouraged discussion.
I walked in and I saw that Mr Lester had broken the circle into four little sections. Mr Lester immediately pointed me to a seat in one of the sections. The other students coming in seemed to know which section to sit in.
In my section were Lachlan and Minh, who are both in my Japanese class, and Sephton, who’d been in all of my classes last year, but we only share History this year. Minh is a bit of a brain, to be honest. Her family is Vietnamese. Her parents own a mini supermarket near my house. I see Minh in the shop all the time. I mean my old house. And I guess I should say that I used to see Minh in her parents’ shop all the time. I doubt if I’ll be going there much any more. Minh speaks fluent Vietnamese (well, it sounds fluent to me), and fluent English, and is the best student in our Japanese class. As far as I know, she’s the top student in nearly every class she’s in.
Mr Lester started off the lesson. “Is everyone ready? Good. On Friday, we split into groups and each group did some fast research to get an overview of a different revolution in history. We had a list of focus questions to help us stay on track. Today, we’re going to hear a quick report from each of the groups. Let’s do this in their historical order. We’ll start with the American Revolution.”
One of the other groups stood up and moved into the middle of the circle. Then they each took turns reading out some basic information about what had happened during the American Revolution. The dates, who the two sides were, how long the fighting went on, some of the significant people involved and what they did, the outcome, and so on. It turns out, the American Revolution started in 1775 and basically resulted in the American colonies breaking away from Britain and King George 3rd, and making their own republic.
Everyone else was taking notes. I took notes.
Australia is pretty lucky. We didn’t have to fight a war to break away from Britain. We told them we didn’t want to be part of Britain any more, and they said okay. Mind you, we didn’t break away completely. Their king is still our king, but that’s just for ceremonies and stuff.
When they finished, the class clapped the group and they returned to their seats.
“Well done,” said Mr Lester, “Next up, we’ll look at the French Revolution.”
He pointed to our group. The others in my group stood up. I wasn’t sure what to do. Minh handed me her page.
“Read from the start down to there,” she whispered, pointing at the end of the second paragraph. “You start us off.”
I stood up and joined my group as we walked into the middle of the room.
The notes were neatly written and very easy to read. So I stood there and read out the information. It was basically what was going to be Minh’s introduction. It talked about how, starting in 1789, the French people overthrew and executed King Louis 16th, and established a republic instead.
Once I was done, I handed the page back to Minh, who picked up the story from there. Sephton and Lachlan each did their bit in turn.
The class clapped and we sat down. Then the other two groups took their turns.
The next group covered the Xinhai Revolution in China from 1911 to 1912 which ended the Qing Dynasty, where six year old Emperor Puyi was forced abdicate. This then led to the establishment of the Republic of China.
The last group covered the Russian Revolution of 1917 which was actually two revolutions in the same year. The first overthrew Tsar Nicholas 2nd, who was basically their king, and established a Provisional Government. The second, later in the same year, overthrew the Provisional Government and put the Bolshevics in power, led by Vladimir Lenin. After several years of fighting, Russia became the Soviet Republic.
Everyone, including me, took a lot of notes.
Once that was done, Mr Lester asked for general comments about similarities and differences between these four revolutions. The most obvious similarity was that each of them was against a hereditary king or emperor and resulted in the formation of a republic. Mr Lester explained that being a republic simply means that those countries don’t have a hereditary king as their leader, like Britain and Australia do. The most obvious difference was that the American Revolution resulted in America breaking away from Britain. That’s compared to the other three, where the nation remained in one piece but they replaced their monarchy with their new government.
Even though it’s called a revolution, Mr Lester said the American Revolution was actually a War of Independence, which is a different thing again and involves a section of the nation fighting to become an independent country. He mentioned a couple of other Wars of Independence from history such as Mexico’s against Spain, and Greece against the Ottoman Empire, and the Kurds against Iran.
That raised the question of how successful different revolutions were, which led to a conversation about how to define success when talking about that sort of thing.
At one point, I put up my hand.
When Mr Lester pointed to me, I said, “I notice you picked four revolutions that were against a monarchy. What about the ones that were against a different form of government?”
Mr Lester’s eyes lit up with excitement. “That’s an excellent point. Can you think of an example of such a revolution?”
“Uh,” I said, frantically trawling through my memory. “What about the Chinese Communist Revolution? They overthrew a democratic government, to establish the communist one. Didn’t they?”
Mr Lester winced. “I’m not sure how democratic the KMT were, but still, that’s an excellent example. Let’s open this up a bit. Can anyone think of other revolutions, from history, other than the four we’ve mentioned? Was the revolution you’re describing successful? If you can say anything about the governments before and after, that would be good.”
A few people were able to contribute revolutions in different places around the world, like revolutions in Iran and Egypt and Mexico and Indonesia. Then Lachlan mentioned the American Civil War.
Because of Lachlan’s comment, Mr Lester asked us to discuss the difference between a civil war and a revolution. Different people said different things and everyone disagreed with each other. It got confusing, until Mr Lester helped us out by telling us that for the most part a civil war involved two factions within the country fighting for control but not necessarily for a change in the type of government, though it can result in that. On the other hand, a revolution was usually a large part of the population trying to change the type of government.
Mr Lester finished the lesson, by saying, “Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be taking a deeper look at each of those four revolutions, with a particular focus on how they began. Did a protest turn into a revolution? Or was it an organised coup that always intended to overthrow the government? Was the government doing something that riled up the population? Were there external factors that the government had little or no control over.”
He took a moment to look around the circle and make sure we were all listening. We were.
“We’ll go in the same order as we did today, so we’ll start with the American Revolution. In our handful of lessons on each revolution, we’re not going to become experts. The point of this course is to learn how to investigate these questions. We want you to think about what information you need to answer the question ‘Why?’ We want you to recognise and evaluate the different sources that you look at. How reliable are they? How informative are they? How biased are they? How could you locate other sources that would expand your understanding. Can you use information drawn from other, similar situations to fill in the gaps where we don’t have sources?”
He stopped talking for a moment and looked around the circle. His eyes were alive with excitement.
“I’m looking forward to the next few weeks. Diving into the nitty-gritty is the fun part of studying history. That’s the end of today’s lesson. We have a few minutes until the bell, so talk among yourselves.”
Mr Lester then started walking around the room, talking to individual people. When he got to me, he said he was pleased with my contribution, particularly since I’d missed the research lesson on Friday. He also said that he was happy to see me so engaged in the class discussion. He moved on to Minh and congratulated her on her detailed research in preparation for the talk. He kept moving around the room, with an encouraging comment like that for everyone.
The bell went and I joined the people shuffling their way out of the room, then made my way to the Old Building for my Maths class. Mr Hale has something wrong with his leg so all of his classes are scheduled into the same classroom on the ground floor of the Old Building, right next door to the staff room that he uses.
He was sitting at the front of the class as everyone came in and sat down. I sat down next to a window. I was usually on my own, but today Scarlet’s friend, Banhi, came and sat next to me. Then Minh sat down next to her.
They said hi to each other, and to me. I said hey back. It was all very friendly. I was soo not used to having people choose to sit next to me. Banhi saw the plasters on my knuckles and asked me what happened.
Minh leaned around Banhi and said, “I heard you punched Miss Griffin in the face during Japanese class.”
I frowned at her. “You were in that class.”
She grinned. “I know. When someone told me that’s what happened, I laughed.”
“So what did happen?” asked Banhi.
I shrugged. “I punched a fence.”
“Was it being o-fence-ive?” asked Minh with a giggle.
I had to give it to her. That come back had been fast. And it made me laugh.
Mr Hale had a projector that he used to show what he was talking about on the screen behind him. He always had prepared slides, but then he would use a digital pen to scribble on his computer so that it would appear over the top of his slide. He explained the maths for the day. A couple of people asked questions, and he scribbled some more on the slides as he explained. Everyone took notes and were nodding along.
I was a bit lost for some of it. I’m not that good at maths. It turns out that behaving like a shit for two or three years worth of maths classes means you miss out on a lot of basics that are essential for understanding Year 10 maths.
Mr Hale finished his explanation and set us the exercise we were to complete from the textbook. I don’t have a textbook so I stood up and walked to the side of the class where Mr Hale had a few spares of all the different books used by his different classes. I grabbed a copy of the Year 10 book and went back to my seat.
After opening my books, I started work. The first question in each exercise is usually easy and I was able to do that okay. I got to the second question and I was already stumped. I looked back through the notes I’d taken while Mr Hale was talking and they didn’t make sense.
I nudged Banhi. “How do you do Question 2?”
She showed me her answer. That didn’t help.
“How did you get from the question to what you wrote for your answer?”
“I used this rule,” she said, pointing at a rule in her notes.
“Just substitute the numbers into the rule, and what pops out is the answer,” said Banhi.
I had that same rule in my notes. Mr Hale had just finished demonstrating that rule, along with a bunch of other stuff. I felt dumb.
I tried using the rule and it worked, just like it was supposed to.
“Thanks,” I said.
The next few questions were a bit like number 2 so I was able to make some progress and feel like I understood something. That was cool.
A junior student knocked on the door and came in to hand Mr Hale a note. The junior student turned and left while Mr Hale read the note. He looked up and caught my eye, then gestured for me to come up to the front of the room. Once I was at his desk, he handed me the note. It was from Mr Peterson. He asked me to come to his office, without drawing too much attention to myself.
I looked at Mr Hale with a puzzled expression on my face. He opened his hands out to say he didn’t know what that was about either.
I shrugged at him and walked out of the class with the note in my hand. It didn’t take long to get to Mr Peterson’s office. The door was closed and he wasn’t inside. I sat on the naughty kids’ chair outside his door and wondered what this was about. As far as I knew, I hadn’t done anything wrong in the last couple of hours. It was only a couple of hours since the last time we’d spoken. Maybe Miss Griffin was still stirring up trouble for me.
I didn’t have to wait long. Mr Peterson poked his head out of the Conference Room further down the hallway and saw me. He said something to the people inside the room and then stepped out, closing the door behind him. He ushered me into his office and closed the door as I took my accustomed place on the seat in front of his desk.
I waved the note at him. “I thought you broke up with me before recess,” I said. “Is this you begging me to come back to you? Is our secret affair back on?”
He ignored my comments and sat down behind his desk.
“Jacinta, I have a Year 8 boy named Brad Semeth, and his father, in the conference room. The father is claiming that you attacked the boy on Friday night and stole money from him. The father is demanding that I punish you, and warn you to stay away from his son, and so on. My gut is telling me that the father doesn’t know the whole story. Did you attack this boy? I’d like to hear your side of the story.”
I looked at him, feeling a little bit stunned. I hadn’t thought Brad would go crying to his father about this. Or that the father would then raise a stink with the school. Maybe the father had seen Brad come in with his wet pants and demanded an explanation.
“You’re definitely not hearing the whole story,” I said. “Do you want me to go in and tell the dad what really happened?”
“I can’t ask you to do that,” he said. “A confrontation like that without an adult on your side is not a good idea.”
I waved my hand, dismissing his concern.
“You’ll be on my side. I’m pretty confident of that. I mean, it’s not like the father is going to start punching me or anything. Not here, in front of you, inside the school building. Let’s go. I’m ready to talk to this man.”
I stood up and walked to the door. Mr Peterson shrugged and followed me.
The conference room had a huge rectangular table in it with about 12 chairs around it. We entered the room near the head of the table. On one side sat Brad and his father. His father was a big version of Brad. He was solidly built with a square jaw and super-short hair. I’d guess he was a builder or something like that. At the other end of the table sat a woman I’d seen around the school but I wasn’t sure of her name. I knew she had some official position but I had no idea what. She had a computer open in front of her. She seemed surprised to see me walk into the room.
Mr Peterson led me into the room and to a chair opposite Brad. He sat down next to me. Brad saw me sit down and I saw a moment of fear in his eyes. He looked down at the table.
Mr Peterson started things off. “Mr Semeth, this is Jacinta Mells, the girl we’ve been discussing. We might benefit from hearing her side of the story.”
Mr Peterson looked at me. I looked at the father.
“I gather you’ve been told I attacked your son and stole money from him last Friday night. Is that right?”
Mr Semeth scowled at me. “Look at you, you’re so much bigger than Brad. What are you doing attacking him like that? I should sue you. My boy was terrified.”
I frowned at him. “I’m a minor. I don’t think you can sue me.”
“I’ll sue your parents, then,” he responded.
I snorted. “Good luck with that, they’re both dead.”
His jaw worked behind his mouth. Then he said, “That means I have to sue your guardian.”
I was puzzled. “I’m not sure how that’s going to work. My guardian died last Thursday. I didn’t get a new guardian until Sunday. Technically, last Friday night I didn’t have a legal guardian. I’m sure the lawyers will have fun with that. And my new guardian, I don’t even know his name. But he’s like, the guy in charge of the DCP, so I’m sure he has some pretty good lawyers.”
The father looked at Mr Peterson. “I want her suspended. I want her kept away from my son. She threatened to castrate him if he complained to anyone. I should go to the police.”
“What?” I said. “I never did that.”
I looked at Mr Peterson. “What does castrate mean?”
Mr Peterson cleared his throat. “It means to, um, remove someone’s testicles.”
“Oh,” I said. I glared at Brad. “I totally did that. I totally told him I’d rip his balls off, but that was nothing to do with whether or not he told anyone. Was it Brad? Did you tell a little fib to your father? Why don’t you tell him why I really threatened to do that thing, castrate you?”
Brad kept looking down at the table. Judging by how tense his body was, my taunting was getting to him.
I looked at the father, he was looking back and forth between me and Brad with a puzzled expression on his face.
“How much did Brad tell you I took from him?” I asked the father.
“Er, he said it was about $30.”
I looked at Brad. “Well! That was another fib, wasn’t it?”
Brad was looking trapped.
“I took exactly twenty two dollars from you, Brad. Didn’t I?
He didn’t answer, of course.
“Brad,” I said. “Do you have your wallet with you? Take it out and put it on the table.”
Brad hesitated. I looked at the father. “Seriously, this is important. I’m not going to touch it, I swear. I just want him to put it on the table.”
“Take out your wallet, Brad,” said the father.
Brad miserably took his wallet out of his pocket and put it on the table. Even with the wallet closed I could see that it was thick with notes.
I looked at the father. “You might want to check how much money is in there.”
He looked curiously at the wallet, picked it up and opened it. He shuffled through the notes, then looked at his son.
“You showed me an empty wallet,” he said to his son. “Where did all this money come from?”
Brad looked down at the table.
“So, Brad,” I said. “Tell your father exactly how much money I took from you.”
Brad shook his head in defiance, but he was still looking down.
“Bradley,” said his father, his voice thick with warning.
“Twenty two dollars,” blurted at Brad.
I nodded. “Good boy.”
I can be a condescending bitch when I want to be.
“Now,” I continued. “Your phone was in your pocket on Friday night. Did I take your phone?”
He shook his head.
“No, I didn’t touch your phone. A lot of that money was in your wallet on Friday night, wasn’t it?”
He nodded, miserably. Still not looking at anybody.
“So, Brad, tell your father why I took exactly $22, and left the rest of the money, and left your phone.”
Brad stared at the table. He knew he was trapped. He’d lied to his father and now he was about to be exposed in front of both his father and Mr Peterson. He had nowhere to hide. It was hard not to laugh at him.
The silence in the room stretched out as we waited for Brad’s answer.
“Bradley,” his father almost growled. “I would really like to hear why she took exactly $22 and left the rest of that money and your phone. That doesn’t sound to me like she randomly decided to rob you. Tell me what happened. And no more lies.”
The tension in the room was so thick you could almost feel it.
“That’s how much I took off the kid,” Brad admitted, finally, his voice full of misery.
“What kid?” asked the father.
“A tiny little nine year old boy,” I explained. “A little buddy of mine. He’d finished playing basketball and wanted to buy a snack at the petrol station shop. He’s half the size of your Brad over there. Brad and his friend Hudson decided to beat up my little buddy, steal all his money, and push him into that muddy ditch next to the petrol station over the road from here. If you want evidence, that little boy’s father has some nice colour photos of the two huge bruises that the kid’s sporting after Brad and Hudson punched him.”
The father was looking shocked.
“That little boy’s father was pretty steamed,” I said. “He may well go to the cops and make a report about your charming little Bradley, and his friend Hudson. For all I know, he’s done it already.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Now here’s the funny thing. I’ve been where Brad is now often enough to know how the system works. You came here to demand that I get suspended or something for attacking Brad. But all this happened after school hours and off school property. Mr Peterson isn’t allowed to suspend me for that because it’s nothing to do with the school. Just like Mr Peterson can’t suspend Brad for what he did to that little kid, no matter how much he might want to. But if you hadn’t come to school to make all those demands, you wouldn’t have found out the truth of what happened.”
“Yes, well,” said the father. He glared at Brad. “No wonder Bradley didn’t want me to come here, or go to the police.”