‘Well,’ I say, ‘if he really loves you, I don’t think his offer will expire straightaway.’
Mum smiles at that. Which makes me feel better than I did before. Maybe I should tell her about Leon, show her the exploding baby and all the Indians marching through the cartoons above our heads. I’m thinking how to say it when we hear this really eerie sound. ‘Yeoow…’
‘Is that your cat?’ Mum asks, alarmed.
‘Yeooow…!’ This time the wail’s louder and more drawn out.
‘It doesn’t sound like her,’ I say. But some animal is definitely howling on our front step. I go through the mud room and open the door. ‘It is Poppet.’ She’s got another one of those little striped creatures in her mouth, this time with the head still attached, hanging limply from where she’s gripping it firmly by the neck. No wonder she sounded funny, with her mouth stuffed full of fur.
Mum comes up behind me and gasps. ‘She’s caught a chipmunk.’
‘Naughty Poppet,’ I say, thinking of the cute characters with buck teeth in Disney cartoons.
‘She’s not naughty,’ Mum defends her. ‘She’s a farm cat. She’s supposed to hunt.’
‘I guess so.’ I step out beside Poppet, who drops the chipmunk at my feet.
‘I think she’s offering it to you,’ Mum says, ‘like a present.’
‘Yuck!’
‘Meow?’ Poppet inquires of me in her normal voice.
Mum says, ‘You should be flattered. Think of all the effort she went through to get that.’
Sometimes Mum surprises me. She has a lot of stupid ideas, but underneath she’s really smart. I give the poor little chipmunk a nudge with the toe of my runner. ‘Thanks,’ I say to Poppet, ‘but I’m not hungry right now.’
Thursday 13 September
9.30 a.m.
I’m lying in bed in my freshly painted upstairs room, half asleep, composing an email to Vi in my head. ‘Even the light is different here. It’s softer than in Australia, like a painting. And I’m different, too. You asked if I’d met any cute boys. As a matter of fact, I have. Maybe I’ll ask him out, because here in America I’ve gotten brave, and everything I say comes out just how I intended.’
That thought wakes me up – plus I have to blow my nose. Again. I sit up and pull a tissue out of the jumbo box beside me on the bed. No wonder I felt so crappy last night. This morning I woke up sick, and not just from eating too many peanut butter cookies. My throat hurts and I’ve got a temperature. Mum offered to stay home with me, of course, but I could tell she really wanted to go to her college. Not least because one of the other accounting students has asked her out for a drink after class. A male student, I’d guess, by the guilty look on her face. I told her to go ahead and enjoy herself, even though she’s breaking Rick’s heart.
‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ I croaked. ‘I’ve got a cold, not cancer.’ Plus Nadine’s going to come up and see me. Before she left, Mum rang Nadine to thank her for the cookies and the frozen sweet corn she sent home with me yesterday, and she told her I was sick.
‘She said she’d run up at lunchtime,’ Mum told me.
‘Run? She’s pushing eighty.’
‘I assume she meant in the car,’ Mum chuckled. ‘She said she’d bring you some soup.’
I clutched my belly and groaned. ‘I don’t want to eat for a hundred days.’
Mum looked at me in an indulgent sort of way and said, ‘Well, if you do start feeling peckish, there’s always that chipmunk Poppet brought you.’
I’m not hungry yet, but I’ve drunk the glass of water Mum brought me and I’m still thirsty. I could use some apple juice. Seeing as we haven’t got around to hiring a maid, I guess I’ll have to fetch it myself. I get out of bed, pull on some trackie daks, and slip a hoodie over the T-shirt I wear for pyjamas. I’m just about to step into the corridor when I hear something. The sound of the front door opening downstairs. Followed by footsteps, walking across the dining room.
Heart hammering, I dive back into bed. Where I tell myself not to panic. Maybe Nadine’s here early? No. Fear grips me around the throat when I realise that in all these kilometres of silence, I would have heard her car. Whoever’s down there didn’t drive to get here. And now they’re walking towards the stairs!
I jump out of bed. Damned if I’ll be like the boy in that story Dad told me when I was little, the one who cowered under the covers while a corpse ascended towards him, moaning, ‘Give me back my liver.’ I can hear feet tromping up our stairs now.
I look around for a weapon and grab the compass that’s next to my maths book on the desk. I step into the corridor just as someone reaches the top of the stairs.
It’s Leon!
He stops and stares at me. I’m shaking like anything, thinking of the gun he drew in his cartoon and how he looked when he was about to hit that teacher. He’s staring at my baby-blue Tweetie Bird hoodie, which has a stain on it from when Mum and I had poached eggs for Sunday breakfast.
‘Stop looking at me like that!’ I yell as hard as my cold will let me.
He keeps looking. His gaze rises from Tweetie Bird to my face, which makes me even more nervous. ‘Why don’t you just go away?’ I demand. Of course, he doesn’t answer my question, or go away. He takes a step closer. I step back and say, ‘I don’t want a weirdo voluntary mute in my house!’
‘It’s my house,’ he says.
I can’t believe it! It’s as if Poppet had uttered three real words to me. ‘I thought you couldn’t talk,’ I say.
‘I can talk to you.’ He takes another step towards me. His voice sounds kind of rusty.
‘Why me?’ I demand.
‘Because you’re different. I knew you would be.’
‘You don’t know anything about me!’
He’s too close. I hold the pointy end of the compass out towards him. And have to sneeze! I beg my body to hold it in, but it won’t. I sneeze once, then again, covering my nose with my hand because I don’t have a tissue. My fingers are drenched in snot. Suddenly he’s beside me, handing me a big paper serviette with Starbucks printed on it. I take it, wipe my hand on it, then blow my nose.
Why’s he being nice to me? Does he want me clean before he wallops me? Whatever, he doesn’t have a right to barge in here!
‘Why aren’t you at school?’ I ask him.
He looks at me like he’s deeply insulted. ‘Why aren’t you?’ he counters, sounding like a normal human.
Suddenly I realise something, and relief flows through me. He isn’t stalking me. He didn’t know I’d be here. But that doesn’t stop me being annoyed at him. ‘I stayed home because I’ve got a cold, obviously.’ I cough a couple of times to prove my point. ‘It doesn’t matter to me why you’re wagging, but you shouldn’t be here, so give me your key.’ I hold out my hand.
He stares at it in disgust, like it’s still got a glob of snot on it.
‘Hand over the key,’ I repeat.
He shakes his head slowly, like he can hardly believe what he’s just heard. ‘I don’t need a key to get in my own house,’ he says.
I drop my hand. Guess I’ll have to talk to Mum about getting locks on the windows. In the meantime, how do I get rid of him? Just because he’s said a few things doesn’t mean he’s not a total whacko. In my left hand, I’m still clutching the compass.
He’s standing between me and the stairs. He’s so tall, and at close range like this I can see he has muscles. If I did manage to get past him and run, I bet he’d catch me in about two seconds.
He looks down at me and says softly, ‘You don’t need to be afraid.’
‘Thanks for your permission,’ I answer, my voice gritty with germs and nerves, ‘but I wasn’t planning to be afraid of a freak like you.’
He looks hurt, as if he’d just given me a beautiful present and I’d tossed it in the rubbish bin.
Now I feel bad for being mean to him. This is getting weirder by the second. I just want him to leave! I wish I’d taken up Mum’s
offer to stay home with me.
‘Yeoow…’ Our conversation, if you could call it that, is interrupted by the same eerie howl Mum and I heard last night.
‘It’s Poppet,’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘The cat.’
‘I know it’s the cat,’ he says, as if I’m an idiot. But I’m smiling because I’ve thought of a way I might dislodge him from my path. I say as chummily as I can manage, ‘Let’s go see what she’s caught.’
He hesitates a second, then turns and goes down the stairs. And I follow him. I don’t know exactly what I intend to do. Call Mum? Run to Nadine’s? It doesn’t seem so urgent now that he’s not looming over me. Anyway, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to hurt me. Maybe he’ll leave of his own accord.
‘Yeoow…!’ Poppet calls again. Leon goes through the mud room, opens the front door and she walks in, a tiny animal hanging by the scruff of its neck from her teeth. I’m about to tell Leon the cat’s not allowed in the house, especially with prey in tow, but then I remember I’m pretending to be friendly. Poppet gently lays the teeny animal at Leon’s feet, where it wiggles and lets out a high-pitched cry.
‘Is that a mouse?’ I ask. ‘Why didn’t she kill it?’
Leon reaches down and scoops it up. Then he holds it out to me in his big, cupped hand. ‘It’s a kitten,’ he says.
This time he didn’t speak to me like I’m an idiot, but I feel like one. ‘It is?’
‘Yep. Born a few minutes ago from the look of it. And I bet there’s more where that came from.’ He opens the door and Poppet runs out.
Leon hands me the squirming little animal. I’ve never seen a newborn kitten before, only ones in the pet shop that could already run around and play. This one’s white fur is still wet in places. Its ears are stuck to the sides of its head and its eyes are sealed shut. But it can cry all right. Every ‘Mew!’ it lets out is louder than the one before.
‘It’s the wrong time of year for kittens to be born,’ he says. ‘That’s why Maisy wants to bring them in here, where it’s warm.’ Maisy? I never thought about how she used to be his cat.
‘How come you didn’t take her with you when you moved?’
‘We did. She came back.’
‘Yeoow…!’ Leon opens the door, and sure enough Poppet walks in with another kitten. This one’s ginger, with a little white face the size of a dollar coin. Leon holds his hand low to the floor and Poppet drops her baby into it. Then she’s out the door again.
I look from my kitten to the one Leon’s holding. ‘Won’t she like… reject them now that we’ve handled them?’
‘No. Why would she?’ He’s got that tone again, but maybe he doesn’t think I’m an idiot. Maybe that’s just the way he talks.
‘Let’s get a box for her,’ he says. ‘There’s a hundred or so down in the cellar.’
The cellar? Not sure if I like the sound of that. But somehow, watching him cradle a bit of butterscotch-coloured life in his hands, he doesn’t seem so scary any more.
‘How come you stopped talking?’ I ask him.
He looks disappointed, as if I shouldn’t have to ask such an obvious question. Just when I think I’ve made him clam up again, he says angrily, ‘Nobody would listen.’
‘What do you mean, nobody?’
‘Nobody!’ he snaps. ‘Everybody around here, everybody at that stupid school where they pretend they’ve got something to teach, they never listen to what’s important!’
‘Well, what is important?’ I ask.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even look at me as he silently places the kitten in my hands.
He turns and opens the door to the cellar. As he’s going down the stairs he calls back, ‘Don’t tell any of them I talked to you!’
He doesn’t wait for me to answer, so I talk to the kitten. ‘What do you think of that?’ I ask the tiny mewing fur ball. ‘The weirdest boy in the county chose me!’
Monday 17 September
12.30 p.m.
‘Imagine if Mischa Barton came in here to eat,’ Jazz says, picking up a dried-out potato wedge and popping it in his mouth.
‘Why would she do that?’ I ask, looking around the now-familiar cafeteria.
‘Well, they could do a reality show where celebrities have to survive in a normal school. She’d be like, “Me? Eat wedges? I only have cigarettes and Coke Zero for lunch.”’
I laugh at his imitation of Mischa’s expression and voice, then decide to have a go myself. ‘“Please, get me away from those burgers. The smell’s letting calories into my nose!”’
‘Can they do that?’ Jazz looks puzzled.
‘What?’
‘Can calories sneak in when you smell fattening stuff?’
‘I don’t think so!’
I shove my own cheeseburger aside. It’s the best thing they’ve served here so far, but a few bites is enough. I don’t want to regain the weight I lost while I was sick. It’s my first day back. Now Amy’s got my cold. She called me last night to tell me she wouldn’t be coming to school today. She sounded awful, like her throat had barbed wire in it.
‘How come you keep looking at him?’ Jazz asks me.
‘Who?’
‘You know who. Weirdo povo Leono.’ He nods to the far table, where Leon’s sitting with his back to the grease-coloured wall, munching on an apple from a paper bag.
‘I’m not looking at him,’ I protest, but as I say it I realise I was. I looked at him a few times in class this morning, too, but he didn’t glance in my direction once. He kept his head down, drawing, like he always does. When he came to our house he acted like I was the soul mate he’d been looking for forever, and now he just totally ignores me. I mean, I didn’t expect him to come back and sit beside me on the bus or anything. I don’t even know if I’d want him to do that, but he could act like he vaguely knows me from somewhere.
I was thinking after he left our house the other day that it’d be kind of cool if I could help him, get him to talk to people again. I’d be like those teachers who get autistic kids who everybody thought were retarded to add up millions of numbers in a millisecond.
‘Do you like him?’ Jazz asks, jarring me out of my thoughts.
‘No!’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes! He’s weird, like you said.’ I don’t want anybody to know I was daydreaming about teaching a total nutter.
‘Good.’ Jazz smiles like he’s got a secret of his own.
Saturday 22 September
3.00 p.m.
The kittens are eight days old. I’m sitting on the floor out in the mud room beside the cardboard box that Leon found for them, holding my favourite. Her colours are the exact opposite of her mother’s – except for her feet. Where Poppet’s black, she’s white, while her four miniature paws are black. Plus she’s got a splash of black on her forehead.
It didn’t take as much persuasion as I thought to convince Mum to let Poppet stay inside with her babies. When she got home from college that day I used the skills I’d learned in debating and had my arguments ready, including the fact that she’s never let me have a pet and I might end up stunted emotionally. In the end she said, ‘All right, as long as you clean up after them and explain it to Janice if she drops around.’
The kittens trust me now and don’t screech when I pick them up. The one I’m holding cuddles up in my hands, and I put her against my chest. Her warmth and her newness remind me of my baby sister when she was first born, which is why I’ve named this kitten Alice. The blue-grey one is Vi. And the ginger, who’s the biggest and fattest, is Matthew. Not that Matthew’s fat any more. And not that I have any idea whether the kittens are girls or boys.
Mum’s gone to her Weight Watchers meeting and won’t be home for at least a couple more hours. The sun is slanting through the big window beside the front door, making me sleepy. I lean against the wall, close my eyes and think of the human Vi and Matthew, 15 000 kilometres away on the other side of the planet. I imagine them chatti
ng in home group, buying iced donuts from the canteen, walking to our spot under the peppercorn tree. I can see them so clearly, and yet it’s hard to believe they’re doing the same old things, day after day, all without me.
With my mind in Australia I start to drift off to sleep, when a sudden sound startles me, making my heart take off like a 747. Someone’s knocking on glass. I look around wildly and see a tall figure standing at the big window beside the front door. It’s Leon. He just stands there with his arms at his sides, staring in at me.
‘Go away!’ The words shoot out of my mouth before I can think. He keeps standing there, looking at me. As my mind returns to being fully awake, I remember he’s probably not here to hurt me, but that doesn’t stop me from being mad at him. He’s ignored me for a whole week, so I’m not about to run over and welcome him in.
Turning away from him, I gently put Alice back in the box and give all my attention to Poppet and the kittens. Vi and Matthew are nursing lustily, their tiny paws kneading the fur on Poppet’s belly. As soon as I let go of Alice, she nuzzles up to a nipple and latches on, too. I put my thumb and forefinger around Vi’s tiny chest to feel the vibrations of her purring. Part of me wants to say to Leon, ‘Isn’t it cool how they can already purr?’ He was the one who made this nest in the cardboard box with an old jumper and some bits of soft blanket he brought up from the cellar. And I could tell from the way he held Vi when she was still damp from being born that he loved her.
Before I can stop myself, I look up to see if he’s still there. He is. As far as I can see, he hasn’t moved. He mouths a word. I think it’s ‘please’. He gestures for me to open the door and begs me with his eyes to do it. Jeez, he’s a weird person. I go over and jerk the door open. He still doesn’t move, so I step out onto the landing. He’s wearing a backpack. He doesn’t bother with hello, so neither do I. Instead I ask him, in a voice that doesn’t sound very nice, ‘How come you wouldn’t even look at me at school?’
Escape from Year Eight Page 6