‘It’s huge,’ Mum gasps as we turn into the driveway.
‘Yep,’ Janice agrees as she undoes her seatbelt. ‘Big enough for the two of you, anyways.’
Mum looks alarmed as she takes in the acre of lawn that surrounds the house. ‘Who’s in charge of mowing all this?’ She sounds worried for the first time since we left Australia. Her idea of gardening is glancing out the bungalow window and commenting on how the weeds are taking over since Will left for England.
‘I’ll bring my mower out,’ Janice says, ‘or Bob might do it when he comes home on a weekend. It’ll only need to be cut a couple more times before the frost sets in.’
‘Okay, then.’ Mum sounds preoccupied. ‘Bob didn’t live here alone, did he? He must have a family, with this big place.’
‘Yep. They moved in with Carrie’s sister, beyond the timber.’ Janice flips her fingers leftward, to indicate some trees way out on the other side of the cornfields.
‘Why didn’t they go with him?’
‘Carrie’s a handful right now. And… well, they got other problems.’ Despite Janice’s love of talking, she doesn’t seem to want to elaborate. And Mum must still be worrying about gardening duties or something, because she doesn’t think to ask who Carrie is.
8.00 p.m.
‘That Chevy we talked about is ready to go. Max from the garage is gonna run it out first thing tomorrow,’ Janice promises as she settles her giant basketball bottom back into her car.
‘Okay,’ Mum says. She’s left her excited voice back on the highway. Now she sounds tired and kind of bewildered.
To compensate, Janice is more cheerful than ever. ‘I got you a real good price. She’s got a few miles on her, but she runs sweet as a spinning top.’
‘That’s good,’ Mum says.
Janice slams her car door shut, then rolls down the window. ‘Don’t forget that casserole I left you in the fridge. You’ll both feel a whole lot better once you’ve got some good food into you.’
‘Thanks.’ Mum manages a smile. ‘That was thoughtful of you.’
It’s nearly dark now. We’re about to head inside, when something catches my eye. I turn and at first I think it’s only a shadow, but when I look closer I spot four little legs, and three white feet. ‘Hey, Mum, look – a cat!’
‘Where?’ she asks, turning around.
‘There!’ I say, pointing at the spot where an animal was two seconds ago.
‘Hmm,’ Mum says.
There’s nothing there now. Weird. The cat must have snuck off. Unless I was just hallucinating.
The gravel crunches under Janice’s tyres as she backs out. At the end of the driveway she stops and rolls down her window again. ‘Nuke it for five minutes!’ she calls out. ‘On high.’
‘I assume she’s talking about the casserole and not your so-called cat.’
‘Mum!’ But I’m glad she’s made a joke.
‘Ah! What’s that?’ Mum screeches. The cat’s rubbing against her leg.
‘See, I’m not crazy,’ I tell her smugly.
‘I guess not,’ Mum admits. She reaches down and pats the cat’s head. ‘We wouldn’t really stick you in the microwave, would we, Poppet?’
The cat follows us to the door, but stops politely and sits neatly on the front step. Once we get inside the house, Mum turns to me and asks in a posh voice, ‘Where shall we dine, darling? In the parlour, the breakfast nook, or the master bedroom?’
We’ve never seen so many rooms in one house before, each with its own special purpose. Right now we’re standing in a big, enclosed porch, which Janice called the mud room. ‘You’ll need this when the first snow comes,’ she explained. ‘You wouldn’t want to be trackin’ wet boots straight into the kitchen.’
Janice gave us a quick tour of the house before she left. She also showed us my room, which is upstairs.
There are five or six more rooms up there, but they all had their doors shut. When I asked Janice about them, all she said was, ‘You won’t be needin’ those.’
Monday 10 September
7.33 a.m.
‘Meow?’ Poppet enquires, looking up at me with her golden eyes. She’s asking me why I’m standing at the end of the driveway, peering every which way like an ignorant dill.
‘I already told you,’ I snap, though it’s not her I’m irritated with. I soften my voice and pat her head. ‘I’m waiting for the school bus.’
The woman who registered me for school last Friday told me to wait here and the bus would appear at 7.30, give or take a couple of minutes. I didn’t think to ask her which direction the bus would come from. I scan the road to the right and then the left, following it to where it turns a corner, winds up a hill and disappears, but I can’t see a bus. Or a car. I can’t see a single thing that moves. All I can hear are some birds that make little cheep cheep noises – nothing like the loud, rude squawks that come from the gum tree in our garden back home.
I’ve never been in a place that’s so quiet and empty in my life. I pick up Poppet and hold her close, to prove to myself that I’m not the last living mammal in the universe. It’s 7.34 now. I knew a bus wasn’t going to come all the way out to this house and pick me up personally, for free. Maybe I misheard that register woman, and I’m supposed to go to a central meeting point. But I’m sure she said, ‘Just wait at the end of your driveway.’ Mum’s already driven off in the Chevy with the steering wheel on the wrong side, in a hurry to get to her precious college, so I can’t consult with her. Actually she did offer to wait with me till the bus comes, but I’m sure the kids would get a great first impression if they saw me out here holding hands with my mummy.
Anyway, I don’t want her here. She’s the one who got me into this stupid situation, where I have to be the new kid everybody gets to feel superior to. What if I’m wearing something totally peculiar? The register woman said the school doesn’t have a uniform, the kids just wear jeans and T-shirts, which is what I’ve got on. Black jeans I brought with me from Australia and a Roxy T-shirt Mum got me in LA. Roxy is really popular at home, but here, who knows?
‘Meow!’ Poppet is struggling in my arms. I set her down and she runs off.
‘A girl like you… you don’t need to care what anybody thinks.’ In my head I hear Evan’s voice, the guy I had ‘à la mode’ with in Las Vegas. Nearly every day since then, or at least as often I can convince Mum I need to go online with the laptop, I’ve talked to him on MSN. He says if I don’t like school in Iowa, I can come to Tennessee and visit him. Which is what I might do if the kids here don’t like me. Go on down to the highway, stick out my thumb and head south, like in the country and western songs Mum discovered over the weekend in a cupboard full of CDs.
What was that? I heard a faint rumble, coming from the right. I strain my eyes to see over the cornfields and at last it appears, way off in the distance where the road looks only half-a-metre wide. A yellow school bus, just like in American movies.
As the bus lumbers towards me, growing bigger and louder, I cling to how I feel when I’m chatting with Evan. So what if that yellow monster is full of American teenagers with perfect white teeth like on The OC? I don’t care what they think! I’ll only be here for a few months, and I’ve already got friends. Just because they’re on the other side of the planet doesn’t mean they’re not my good mates.
It’s here. The bus stops in front of me and its doors fold open. The driver, an old guy with a tanned wrinkly face, nods at me as I walk up the steps. He’s wearing a green baseball cap that says, ‘Pioneer Seed Corn’.
There’s only a few kids on the bus. For some reason, in my imagination it was packed.
‘Kaitlin!’ a voice calls out. I look over the heads of some little kids and see a girl about my age sitting halfway down the bus, waving at me. She’s smiling. ‘Come sit here,’ she says, scooting over by the window and patting the seat beside her.
Is this a trick? My feet are walking towards her while my mind issues a warning: ‘Watch out, remember t
he cool girls last year? They invited you to sit with them, and then they sucked you in big time.’
I glance up the back and see a couple of tall boys giving me the once-over, just like I dreaded. I turn away from them and plonk myself down beside the smiley girl. Thank goodness she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, just like the register woman promised. Black jeans, and a black T-shirt with the outline of a tall Texan hat in pink sequins.
‘How’d you know my name?’ I ask her.
‘Janice is my aunt,’ she says. ‘That’s a cool top.’
I send a little prayer of thanks up through the bus roof. ‘Who’s Janice?’
‘The lady who rented you your house.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ How could I have forgotten that? Living in the middle of nowhere has already started to drain IQ points out of my brain.
The girl doesn’t seem to mind. ‘I’m Amy,’ she says. ‘I’m in eighth grade. You are too, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ I nod. Amy’s looking at me as if she really wants me to like her. She’s pretty, but not too pretty. She wouldn’t be a challenge to Olivia in her prime, but her bluey-grey eyes are really nice and she obviously hasn’t inherited her aunt’s fat genes.
‘Maybe we’ll be in the same form,’ I say, hoping I don’t sound like too much of a suck.
‘What’s a form?’
‘You know, like the different groups of year eights.’
‘Wow,’ Amy says, as though I just told her something really interesting. ‘You must go to a big school. We’ve only got one eighth grade. How many have you got?’
‘Six, I think, or maybe it’s seven.’
‘Gee, isn’t that scary?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘there’s this girl with red hair that sticks out a kilometre and these green eyes that make her look like she’s Freddy Krueger’s daughter. She’s pretty scary.’
Amy laughs.
She seems so nice… but so did the cool girls when I first met them.
The bus has stopped in front of a house that’s a lot more modern than the one we’re living in. It’s one storey and brick. A boy who looks like he’s too young to be in school clambers up the steps. As he sits down next to another little boy in a seat near the front, Amy leans close to me and whispers, ‘Isn’t he cute? He’s my cousin.’ Then she says, as if she’s apologising, ‘Well, he’s my second cousin really. His dad’s my first cousin.’
‘Are you related to everybody around here?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she chuckles. Then she gets serious. ‘I know everybody, though. It’s really boring.’
‘Why?’ I was just feeling jealous of her for having her family all collected in one place.
Amy sighs raggedly. ‘I see the same old stuff, day after day. My parents don’t even believe in taking vacations. You’re so lucky you get to travel!’
It’s weird, having somebody look at me with envy in their eyes.
The bus has stopped again, at an old-fashioned farmhouse like ours. Another boy gets on, only this one’s not little. He’s tall, with wavy hair so black it glistens. When he gets to the top of the bus steps, he stops and looks down the aisle. Straight at me. He stares at me like… I don’t know… like he’s been waiting to find me. My heart starts to pound hard and I’m not even sure why.
‘Sit down before you fall down, Leon,’ the bus driver growls. The boy turns around abruptly and sits in the first seat, next to a little girl who moves as far towards the window as she can.
‘That’s the weirdest guy in the whole school,’ Amy tells me in a quiet but disgusted voice. ‘Unfortunately he’s in our grade.’
‘How come he was looking at me that way?’ My voice comes out a bit panicky.
Amy seems surprised that I’d even need to ask that question. ‘I guess he’s mad at you for living in his house.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Didn’t Janice tell you? Him and his mom have moved in with Joyce. That’s his mom’s sister. His dad, Bob, he’s gone off to Kansas City.’
‘Oh yeah, Janice did mention Bob. She said he might come back to mow our grass.’
‘He’s the only normal one in the family. Carrie, that’s Bob’s wife, she’s totally crackers. This one time, she was in the grocery store and she starts talking to this life-sized cut-out of Orville Redenbacher. She’s like, “I told you it was too hot to weed the tomatoes, but you had to go and be a big man, didn’t you?”’
I giggle. ‘Who’s Orville Redenbacher?’
‘He’s the popcorn guy. Don’t you have that in Australia?’ Amy sounds appalled. ‘It’s like the best brand ever. Don’t let your mom buy Pop Smart, whatever you do.’
We’ve turned a corner and stopped at another house. This time a girl gets on. She’s older than us, and flounces right past without looking, heading straight towards the back seat, head held high like the swans at the botanical gardens back home.
‘She’s a senior,’ Amy tells me. ‘She’s been trying out for varsity cheerleader since she was a sophomore and finally got picked…’
Amy says more, but my brain can’t take it in. It’s too worried about how that guy, Leon, was looking at me.
10.00 a.m.
‘Have you ever met Heath Ledger?’ a girl sitting at the back of the classroom asks.
‘No,’ I admit.
‘How about Nicole Kidman?’ the boy next to her chimes in. ‘Have you met her?’
‘Class,’ the teacher scolds, ‘I don’t think we should assume Kaitlin has met any famous Australian people just because she comes from there. I’m sure you can think of some more intelligent questions than that.’
We’re in history class. The teacher made a big deal about having a new girl from Down Under and said the students could take a few minutes to ask me questions.
A girl in the front row, the fattest person I’ve ever seen in real life, raises her hand. ‘Have you ever been in a bad accident and had to be rushed to hospital in an airplane by the flying doctor?’
‘Well… no.’
Everybody’s looking at me, waiting for me to say something intriguingly foreign. Except for the weird guy, Leon. He’s sitting at a table by himself, at the end of the front row near the windows, and he’s not paying attention to anybody. He’s hunched over a piece of paper, writing. It must be about six-point because his fingers are making such tiny little movements. He started as soon as we got in the room and hasn’t looked a millimetre to the left or right since. Only straight down, as if what he’s writing is the most important thing anybody ever thought of.
A girl with silver fingernails and a tight blue T-shirt with a gold eagle is asking me a question. ‘Don’t you think koala bears are the cutest animals ever?’
‘Sure,’ I agree.
‘Have you ever had one?’
‘Huh?’
‘You know, for a pet.’
She’s a cool girl. I can tell from the adoring way her friends are looking at her, and also she sort of glitters. Her eyes and the silver hoops in her ears and even her scruffy runners are somehow lit up. Like Tiffany back home.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I’ve got two koalas. Identical twin girls. Their names are Lulu and Daisy. They can do somersaults through hula hoops and balance plates on their heads.’
‘Well,’ the teacher says, ‘thanks for that, Kaitlin. I’m sure we all learned something there. We’d better get to work now. Open your books to page fifty-two, please.’
I haven’t got a textbook, so Amy shoves hers over for me to share. ‘That was cool,’ she whispers. ‘I so have to visit you.’
If she ever does, I’ll so have to train some koala twin girls in a hurry.
‘Amy wants to visit every country in the world,’ the boy on the other side of Amy tells me. His name’s Jason. Amy introduced me when we finally finished gathering up kids on the bus and got to school. She told me to call him Jazz, cos that’s what everyone else does. Now he’s leaning forward so he can see me. ‘She’s already saved up six hundred and seventy-five doll
ars babysitting,’ he says. ‘Her mom thinks it’s for a new saddle.’
‘Okay, that’s enough chitchat,’ the teacher shouts over our clatter. ‘Let’s get down to business.’
I guess the civil rights movement is pretty interesting, but I can’t keep my mind on what the teacher’s saying. My eyes keep veering over to Leon. As far as I can tell he hasn’t looked up from his writing once. So how come I still feel like he’s staring at me?
11.00 a.m.
The bell clangs just like an Australian one. I guess it’s recess. I’m not sure what to do. Should I just assume Amy wants me to go with her?
Suddenly, the fat girl who asked about the flying doctor appears beside me. ‘Kaitlin,’ she says shyly, ‘I’m Simone. Want me to show you around or anything?’
‘Um…’ I’d kind of like to talk to her. I’ve never known anyone who’s clinically obese before.
‘Kaitlin’s occupied,’ announces Amy, grabbing my arm and steering me out the door.
‘Occupied!’ laughs Jazz, who’s walking beside us. ‘You make her sound like a rest room!’
12.15 p.m.
It’s lunchtime, and I’m still with Amy and Jazz. They’ve sort of adopted me. We’re sitting at a long table in the cafeteria, a huge echoey room that’s kind of like a restaurant. Except there’s not much choice on the menu because it has to meet nutritional requirements set by the government. But it’s cheap. Mum was thrilled she only had to fork out a few dollars a week for healthy lunches and that she wouldn’t have to think about shopping for ham or Vegemite or peanut butter.
When I think of the extreme weather conditions we used to eat those sandwiches in back home, I can’t wait to tell Vi and Matt that here we get to eat inside, in comfort.
‘You mean everybody brings their own lunch in Australia?’ Jazz asks. He’s really cute, with short light-brown hair and freckles. And green eyes.
‘We do have a canteen,’ I say. ‘But you can’t eat in there. And the food’s crap.’
Escape from Year Eight Page 3