‘Worse than this?’ Amy prongs a limp disk of carrot and holds it up on her fork. It drips a pale yellow liquid onto her plate.
‘At least you can tell that it’s a vegetable. The most popular thing at our canteen is a potato cake in a roll.’
‘What’s a potato cake?’ Even Jazz’s puzzled frown is cute.
‘Well, first they take a potato and cut it into slices as thin as pieces of paper. Then they dip them in batter and deep-fry them.’
‘You’re kidding!’ Amy squeals.
‘Nope. They put batter on everything and deep-fry it, even the Mars Bars.’
‘No!’
‘Australia sounds really weird,’ Jazz pronounces solemnly. ‘You’d better not go there, Amy.’
Actually you can’t buy deep-fried Mars Bars at our canteen, but I have heard of them. I think you can get them at a fish-and-chip shop in Wangaratta.
‘No wonder you take your own lunch,’ Amy says to me in a comforting voice.
Jazz adds, ‘Here only kids like him do.’
I look over to where he’s pointing, to the very back of the room. There’s Leon, at the end of a table, alone, with a brown paper bag in front of him. From this distance, he doesn’t seem so scary.
‘He can’t afford this gourmet cuisine,’ Jazz comments, taking a bite of his pasta bake.
‘He’s got a povo lunch,’ I say.
‘A what?’ Jazz and Amy both giggle. Jazz says in a fake Aussie accent, ‘We no understand your lingo.’
‘You know, povo. As in… poverty, I guess.’ Saying the real word makes me feel mean. He can’t help it if his parents are short of money. ‘I shouldn’t make fun of him,’ I say. ‘I don’t even know him.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Jazz makes the crazy sign beside his ear. ‘He’s nutty as a fruit cake.’
‘Yeah,’ Amy nods. ‘He’s madder than a hog with its throat cut.’
‘You mean he’s got a kangaroo loose in the top paddock?’ I heard Will say that about a mate of his once. Why did I have to repeat it? But Amy and Jazz are laughing like I just made a world-class joke.
‘I told you she’d be fun,’ Amy splutters to Jazz.
He’s still smiling as he says, ‘I wish you never had to go back to Australia.’
4.30 p.m.
Whew! I’ve survived my first day at the school in the middle of nowhere. As I walk up our driveway towards the farmhouse, which seems even whiter and bigger than the day we arrived, I can hear the bus lumbering up the hill and then stopping to release another kid out of its folding door. This sure is different from Melbourne, where the traffic whizzing by and the neighbours’ kids yelling and the trams rattling past and the planes overhead form a mishmash of sound which I mostly ignore.
I sit down on the front step and listen till the bus becomes a whine in the distance, then fades away altogether. Have I ever been this alone before? Even the little cheeping birds are silent.
‘Poppet?’ I call. No cat appears, even though over the weekend she seemed to learn that name. I wonder where she is. Hope she’s not lost. As for Mum, she said she didn’t know exactly when she’d be back from college, but she’d make sure it was before dark. When’s that? We’ve been here for three nights but I forgot to notice what time the sun sets.
Something’s making me too scared to go in the house. Before, it didn’t seem creepy at all. But now I’ve seen Leon, his weird vibrations have followed me here.
He stared at me again, on the bus on the way home. In the afternoon they drive the route the opposite way from in the morning, so we got to his place before mine. And just as he went down the bus steps, he turned and looked right at me for ages. As if he’d been waiting to do that all day. The bus driver barked at him, ‘Leon, are you plannin’ on spending the night here?’ So finally he got off.
Amy kind of shuddered beside me and said, ‘He must be the creepiest kid in the whole state.’
Thinking of him now, I start to feel mad. What right has he got to make me scared? I haven’t done anything to him! He’s not going to turn me into a sook who needs her mummy to be here when she gets home from school.
I stand up and let myself in with the key Janice gave me. How brave am I? I decide I’ll reward myself with something sugary, then remember there’s nothing good to eat. Mum said she’s not going to buy any more of the Little Debbie snack cakes Janice left us along with her yummy casserole. The fudge brownies and oatmeal cream pies were especially irresistible, which is why Mum’s refused to get a fresh supply. ‘We’ll both get to England looking like prize Iowa hogs if we keep pigging out on American junk food,’ is how she sensitively expressed her point of view.
I wander upstairs to my room, which I really like. It’s about four times bigger than my one at home. The pale yellow walls are freshly painted, which makes me feel like somebody wanted me to be here. At the far end of the room is a big white closet with slatted doors, and a small blue dresser sits beneath the big window that overlooks the road. As I plonk my school bag on the desk I remember I’ve got homework for history and English, but I can do that later. Right now I want to have another look at one of the other rooms up here.
Of course, Mum and I had a quick squiz at all of them after Janice left on Friday night, because she didn’t actually say they were off limits to us. Most of them are crammed full of tables and shelves and boxes and old suitcases without wheels and more beds than you’d need for a family of ten. By then, Mum was looking kind of bewildered again. She said, ‘Well, Janice didn’t exaggerate when she advertised the place as fully furnished.’
There was one room that wasn’t crammed full, though, and now that I know Leon used to live here, I think it must have been his. I don’t know why I need to go in there again. Maybe to get back at him for looking at me like he had a perfect right to make me squirm. It’s down the other end of the corridor from my room.
I go and stand in the doorway. It’s a long, narrow room. The wall opposite me is painted a deep rose and the two side walls are covered with this weird wallpaper, kind of like newspaper with splotches of colour. Right in the middle of the room there’s a bed with a scratchy-looking wool blanket in tan and red. Next to it is a little round table. Where’s his other stuff? I guess he could have taken it with him, or shoved it in one of the other rooms.
I go over and take a closer look at the newspaper on the walls. Only it’s not newspaper. It’s tiny little cartoons that someone’s drawn, with even tinier writing underneath each one. Suddenly I remember Leon in history class this morning, hunched over that piece of paper. Did he do all this? Draw all these pictures, write all these words and paste them on his walls? It must have taken years.
I move right up close to one of the drawings and realise it’s part of a cartoon strip. In the first frame there’s an Indian woman with a baby on her back. In the second frame he’s drawn one of those long, old-fashioned guns. Yuck! In the third frame, he’s made the baby explode in flashes of red. He’s drawn a tiny arm with perfect little fingers, at least five centimetres away from what’s left of the baby’s body. I kneel to peer at the minuscule words underneath the cartoon. Wish I had a magnifying glass, but if I squint I can just decipher the chicken scratchings. Every spring we came here. We called it the Land between Two Rivers. We walked from the Missouri to the Mississippi before the leaves turned golden red. Many times we returned here. You have been here such a short time, though to you it feels like lifetimes. The spirits you call God will help us to walk between the rivers once more.
Jeez, he really is weird! I can feel the same vibrations in here that he was sending out at school: dark and chilly. Something is telling me to get out of here, fast. I don’t want to let him scare me, but I could use some exercise. I bound down the stairs, stop briefly in the kitchen to grab a banana out of starving desperation, then head out the door. And there’s Poppet, under the maple tree that grows near the house.
‘So you decided to come back!’ I call to her. I go over to say hello, but she does
n’t answer because she’s got her mouth full of something totally gross. She’s gnawing on a little furry animal with a stripe down its back. And no head.
‘And I thought this banana was disgusting,’ I say. I’ve only had a bite, enough to remind me how this is my all-time least favourite fruit. I toss the rest over the fence into the cornfield.
‘It’s completely biodegradable,’ I tell Poppet.
She looks up at me like I’m annoying her, then goes back to tearing flesh off her prey.
‘See you later,’ I say and take off down the road. The gravel crunches under my runners as I jog along, cornfields stretching out to the far-off horizon on both sides of me. It feels great to be out in the sunlight. The only moving thing I can see is a green tractor coming towards me, about a kilometre away. I turn the corner and jog the opposite way from where the bus went.
I’m passing a farmhouse that’s about half the size of ours when a big brown dog comes running out. What if he bites me? But he’s not barking, he’s wagging his tail like anything. He parks himself right in my path and looks so happy to see me that I stop and give him a pat. He likes that. He walks towards his driveway, then looks back as if to say, ‘Come on, follow me.’
‘I don’t think I should,’ I answer.
Now he starts barking, loudly.
‘Spot!’ A skinny old lady has appeared in the farmhouse doorway. ‘Git back in here!’
Spot, who is absolutely brown all over without a single spot, comes over to me and clamps his mouth gently around my wrist, then tugs me towards the driveway. ‘Stop that!’ I yell. He’s not biting me, but I don’t like his slobbery grip anyway. He lets go of my wrist and looks up at me like I hurt his feelings.
‘You come on in too, Kaitlin,’ the old lady calls.
This is creepy. Everybody here knows me, even the dog. But I figure I might as well meet my next-door neighbour. Wait till I tell Vi that ‘next-door’ here is like a kilometre away. I follow Spot up the driveway and the old lady ushers us into a small, cluttered kitchen.
‘Name’s Nadine,’ she says. ‘I was thinkin’ you might pass by this way. Otherwise I was gonna bring this up to you tonight.’ She waves towards the table. Amongst the newspapers and crossword books and coffee cups there’s a tall round cake on a blue plate, iced in white swirls and topped with cherries.
‘That looks good!’ I’m not just being polite. My mouth’s watering at the sight.
‘It’s my mother’s recipe,’ Nadine explains. ‘Sour cream chocolate. The cream cheese frosting was my idea. Anyways, sit down and we’ll have us a piece.’
She doesn’t have to invite me twice! The dog looks on, dribbling longingly, as I let a chunk of heavenly moist cake melt on my tongue. Nadine scolds Spot, ‘You act like we never had company before.’ She slices off a piece of cake, slides it onto a plate and puts it on the floor. Spot finishes it off in two huge gulps, then scooches the plate around the floor, licking off every last molecule of icing.
‘How come you call him Spot?’ I ask.
‘All my dogs have been Spot. Got my first one when I was seven. The Whitmers, they lived up past the old Clyde schoolhouse, their hound had pups and they let me have the pick of the litter. She lived to be twelve and a half, just like they all did. This one’s Spot number five.’ She gives him a pat as he pushes the plate past her.
On top of the fridge, beside a jug of dried flowers, there’s a long-haired white cat.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Coconut.’
‘Have you called all your cats that?’
She gives me a look like I just asked the world’s dumbest question. ‘That’d be an insult to a cat.’ She chuckles, then says, ‘My great grandson thought of her name when he was two years old. Her hair reminded him of that shredded coconut they sell at the grocery store.’
Nadine offers me a second slice of cake and my mouth wants to say yes, but I think back to the way Evan was looking at me in that Las Vegas restaurant and reply with, ‘No, thank you.’
‘You settled in all right up there?’ Nadine nods in the direction of our place. ‘Anything you need?’
‘Not that I can think of,’ I say. ‘Except maybe some good food like this to have once in a while. My mum’s on a diet.’
‘Ha!’ Nadine sounds pleased. ‘You take the rest of this with you, see if you can tempt her.’
I feel my face go red. ‘I didn’t mean…’
She doesn’t let me finish. ‘That’s what I made it for,’ she says heartily, shoving it towards me.
I won’t say no to a cake this good, but there’s something else on my mind. ‘You know them pretty well, the people who own the house?’ This time I nod towards our place.
‘Yep. Pretty well. First time I saw Carrie was when I went to visit her and her mother up at the hospital in Marshalltown, a day or two after she was born. Prettiest little thing you ever saw. There weren’t no indication she’d turn out the way she did.’
‘You mean crazy?’
Nadine gives me a sharp look. ‘You heard that already?’
I squirm under Nadine’s stare, then admit, ‘Amy, this girl in my class, she told me Carrie talked to a cardboard cut-out of that popcorn guy.’
‘Hmmph,’ Nadine snorts. ‘Took about one minute for that story to spread from here to the county line.’
‘I didn’t mean to insult her!’
‘I know you didn’t. I just don’t like Carrie bein’ the town entertainment. That girl’s got a heart of gold. She can’t help it if her brain plays up on her, any more than I could stop my hip hurtin’ when it got bad.’
Nadine, squishing black crumbs with her fork, is lost somewhere in the past. Suddenly she looks up at me. ‘Carrie’s boy, Leon, he’s in your grade, ain’t he?’
‘Yeah, he is.’ I try not to sound too interested.
‘Leon and me,’ Nadine says slowly, as if she’s still looking far back, ‘we used to be great pals. He spent a lot of time down here when he was little, when his mama was goin’ through her rough spells. He could talk the hind leg of a donkey then.’ She chuckles at the memory, then grows serious. ‘I raised four kids, and they all got mad at me now and again when they were teenagers. But none of ’em ever got as mad at me as that boy has.’
Now I can’t hide my curiosity. ‘Why’s he mad at you?’
‘That I can’t tell you, seein’ he ain’t said a word to me for nigh on a year.’
Wednesday 12 September
9.00 a.m.
I wonder what he’s drawing. Actually, I bet I know. More tiny Indians. More teeny little words that you’d need a microscope to read. We’re in English and Leon’s up the front, sitting by himself like he does in all the classes. It’s like there’s an invisible wall between him and the rest of us. I feel like going over and jerking the paper away from him and telling him to pay attention to the current human race.
‘Okay,’ the teacher says, ‘why do you think Jess needs to do all that running?’
Looking at the teacher, I’m suddenly stabbed with homesickness for Mrs McBain. This teacher looks frumpy in comparison. And she doesn’t smile at us and make jokes like Mrs McBain does.
We’re discussing a novel I read in a hurry over the last couple of nights. It’s called Bridge to Terabithia. It’s old, but I thought it was pretty good. I was trying to finish a sheet of questions about it on the bus this morning, but Amy wouldn’t stop talking long enough to let me concentrate. Most of what she said was pretty interesting, though. One thing she told me was, ‘Old Wart Nose teaches this book every year. My mother read it when she was in eighth grade.’
‘Your mother went to the same school?’
‘Sure.’
‘And she had the same teacher we do?’
‘Yep. Mom said she didn’t have warts then, but she was already crabby.’
‘I’ve never even seen my mother’s school,’ I said. ‘It’s somewhere in England. Kent, I guess.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Amy moaned.
‘Why?’
‘I wanna go to England!’
‘I’m going there for Christmas,’ I admitted.
‘That is so not fair!’ She looked totally tragic. ‘You get to go everywhere!’
The teacher Amy calls Old Wart Nose is talking again. ‘Craig, why do you think Jess runs so hard?’
Craig’s tall and skinny and has crooked teeth. I keep picturing him with a piece of straw sticking out of his mouth. ‘Uh, I’m not sure,’ he mumbles.
‘Have you read the book, Craig?’
Craig shakes his head. ‘Haven’t had the chance yet. I been helpin’ my dad fix the corn picker.’
Mrs Johnson (that’s the teacher’s real name) sighs disgustedly and turns towards Leon. I can’t believe it. She’s speaking to him right through his invisible wall. It’s the first time I’ve seen a teacher acknowledge his existence. ‘Leon,’ she says, ‘what did you make of this novel?’
He ignores her and continues scribbling.
She says in an irritated voice, ‘Come on, I know you’re capable of giving us your opinion. I realise the other teachers are waiting for you to participate when you’re ready, but I happen to think you might miss out on a lot of education before that time comes.’
He keeps on ignoring her. She walks over to his desk and stands right next to him. Too close.
‘Leon,’ she says, looking down at the top of his head, ‘it must take a lot of energy to keep up this act. Why don’t you just answer me?’
Suddenly he stands up. He’s taller than her. Now he’s looking down at her, with such hate in his eyes that my heart is thumping harder than when he stared at me. The class is silent, waiting to see what will happen.
‘Leon,’ Mrs Johnson says in a way that’s meant to provoke, ‘if you want to follow in your mother’s footsteps, then keep right on going the way you are.’
Leon takes a step towards her and raises his arm like he’s going to hit her. The class gasps. Leon lowers his arm, but he’s still staring at her.
Escape from Year Eight Page 4