The Mag Hags

by Lollie Barr

  Don’t do stuff just because your friends are doing it

  You should listen to good friends, as they hopefully will have your best interests at heart. Be careful though, there is a lot of peer group pressure out there! Girls can brag about what they get up to, but sometimes they want you to be just like them, especially if they’ve got regrets around what they are doing because it helps justify their own behaviour. Never do anything just because your friends are doing it. Listen to your own heart and ask, ‘Will this experience benefit me or hurt me?’, then make your decision.

  Keep it to yourself

  Sex is always going to be gossip fodder. Keep your private life private. Only tell a select few friends that you trust with your innermost secrets, and ask the same of him.

  Don’t give away your virginity easily

  All the girls agreed that having intercourse is such a big decision and one you carry with you your entire life. So try and make it a positive one. Make sure you’re emotionally ready. Honestly, there is no rush, because once you’ve given away your virginity, you can’t get a refund.

  So make it special.

  If you’re going to do it, then be safe

  The girls had numerous stories of friends that weren’t safe and ended up with unwanted pregnancies and sexual diseases. So if you do make that decision, make sure you play safe: always use condoms, no matter what he tells you. Remember there’s more at risk than just your reputation.

  ‘God, I wished I knew that before … you know, the whole Nate thing,’ said Cat when she had finished reading the story.

  ‘Great job!’ said Mand. ‘It’s fantastic.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Belle, ‘let’s work out how we’re going to illustrate it. What about a picture of a really hot guy?’

  ‘That excludes just about every male at Baywood High. It’s like we’ve got a permanent hot-guy drought in this town,’ said Mand, laughing. ‘What were the guys like at your old school, Belle?’

  ‘It was all girls,’ said Belle. ‘Not a guy in sight, never mind a hot one.’

  ‘Why did you leave that posh boarding school to come to Baywood High anyway?’ asked Cat, who was never shy of asking difficult questions, as the Tyler interview had proved.

  ‘Leave?’ said Belle. ‘I was kicked out!’

  ‘Freakin’ hell, Belle,’ said Mand. ‘I never had you pegged for being the rebellious type. What did you do?’

  ‘Well, there was quite a list – smoking, drinking, general obnoxiousness, sneaking out at night, but the clincher was when I set fire to a bin during mother and daughter day. My counsellor said I was acting out.’

  ‘What’s acting out?’ said Wanda. ‘Sounds like you were in a play or something.’

  ‘It means when something is bothering you and, instead of dealing with it, you know, you do something stupid, like set fire to a bin or something, call the fire brigade from the phone box across the road from the school and leave your prints all over the phone,’ said Belle with a self-effacing smile. ‘If it wasn’t for my dad, I could have had a criminal record.’

  ‘Really?’ said Cat. ‘Wow, I’ve always seen you as such a good girl!’

  ‘Essentially I am,’ said Belle. ‘My counsellor reckoned I was just missing my mum.’

  ‘When did she die?’ asked Mand tentatively. ‘If that’s not too much of a personal question?’

  ‘No, that’s okay. I kind of feel that I know you well enough to tell you now. I was nine. My mum had breast cancer, she was only thirty-nine. I don’t remember too much about it, but the funeral was horrendous, everybody crying but me. I remember thinking, why is this happening to me, but kind of not feeling anything at all. Like I was numb.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Belle,’ said Mand, showing her soft and compassionate side for once. ‘It must have been really tough.’

  ‘I don’t want to bring you all down.’ Belle was suddenly embarrassed at sharing so much. ‘It’s just that this magazine has helped me to feel like I’m starting to wake up again. Like I have a purpose, I’m not just existing, I’m actually living.’

  Cat reached over and placed a hand on Belle’s arm. ‘Babes, you’re not bringing us down,’ said Cat, and the other girls nodded in agreement. ‘You’re just being honest about who you are. It kind of makes us understand you more.’

  ‘What?’ said Belle. ‘Why I was such a cold, stuck-up cow?’

  ‘Well, kind of,’ said Mand. ‘Actually, er, you were a little frosty.’

  ‘It’s called self-protection.’ Belle leaned her elbows on the table, putting her head in her hands. ‘And just when I start to feel that life is actually worth living, along comes Reanne to ruin everything.’

  ‘Look, me and Debs have been asking about Reanne at Out for Kicks,’ said Cat. ‘We don’t have anything concrete but we’ll get something on her, trust me. We’ll find a way to stop her, I promise.’

  ‘I’d like to believe you but sometimes it feels like I have no control over my life,’ said Belle. ‘Like stuff happens to you and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.’

  The girls all nodded in agreement. They might not have lost their mum at a young age, or have an evil stepmother to contend with, but they all knew exactly what it was like to feel powerless. Like when you’re swimming in the calm sea and suddenly a wave comes out of nowhere and picks you up, tumbles you until you lose your bearings, go completely arse over tit, and find sand in every orifice in your body. Life can be like that – smooth one moment, rought the next.

  On Sunday at 3.30 pm, the girls turned up separately at Hoolio’s, with Mand arriving first for a change and waiting outside the glass front double doors for the other girls. There was an air of apprehension as the five of them trooped inside to find out what state Belle’s laptop was in. Hoolio was downbeat for once, which only added to the heightened sense of gloom.

  ‘Hello, ladies,’ said Hoolio, his trademark smile nowhere to be seen. ‘Would you like to come through to the office?’

  The girls walked through the spotless stainless-steel kitchen, where not even the smell of Hoolio’s cakes could lighten the mood. The office was covered in memorabilia from Hoolio’s glory days – there was a gold record for ‘Diggin’ It (In the Mood for Love)’, framed photographs with other celebrities with dubious hairstyles, a pin board covered in receipts, and a desk as messy as Hoolio’s kitchen was clean and ordered.

  There on the office chair sat Belle’s upside down laptop on the white towel that was now splattered pink.

  ‘Right,’ said Hoolio, turning the laptop up the right way. The white keyboard had turned a sickly plum colour. ‘Shall we begin the begin?’

  ‘No, wait,’ said Maggie. ‘Let’s all hold hands for luck.’

  The girls silently formed a circle around Hoolio and the laptop, their heads bowed in a silent prayer.

  ‘Okay, we’re ready,’ said Maggie finally.

  Hoolio pressed the laptop’s start button. There was a grinding noise as the computer crunched, whirred, choked and spluttered, trying to come to life.

  ‘Come on, baby,’ said Belle her eyes fixed on the black screen. ‘Do it for mama!’

  A set of green horizontal lines flashed across the screen then disappeared. ‘That’s weird,’ said Belle. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before.’

  ‘Oh my god, please, please,’ said Wanda squeezing Cat and Maggie’s hands so tightly, they were likely to have bruising the next day.

  Then, as if by magic, a picture of a golden sunrise over a beach appeared. ‘It’s working – that’s my screensaver!’ screamed Belle. ‘I took that picture. It was from our last holiday. I got up early, I –’

  The girls dropped each other’s hands and jumped around the room, high-fiving each other and laughing and hugging.

  ‘Where did you store the files for your magazine?’ asked Hoolio, plugging in his external hard drive into the computer’s firewire socket. ‘This will be the real test.’

  The icon of the hard drive popped up
on the screen and Belle showed Hoolio where the hundreds of Mag Hags files were stored. He quickly started dragging them over and depositing them into the external hard drive icon.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Maggie. ‘This is so excellent, we’re saved …’

  Just at the moment, the smell of prawns sizzling on the barbecue filled the room.

  ‘I’d better get this baby out,’ said Hoolio, ejecting the hard drive icon, ‘before she –’

  Just then there was a crackle, a pop accompanied by the sound of an old man with the world’s nastiest head cold spluttering into a hankie. Then the screen went blank.

  ‘Shit, bugger, shit, shit, shit,’ said Mand.

  ‘Did you get it, did you get it all?’ said Belle, her voice frantic.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Hoolio. ‘We’ll have to see what we managed to save when I plug the drive into my computer.’

  It was another excruciating wait while Hoolio booted up his computer and connected the firewire lead from his hard drive into his computer. ‘Right,’ he said, bending over his computer. ‘Let’s have a little lookey here, shall we?’

  Hoolio opened up a few documents and the girls crowded around the screen as their stories came to life, cries of ‘Thank you’ and ‘Yes!’ punctuating the air. There was the future formal fashion shoot, with Belle’s amazing collage, and thank god, the Tyler interview, but there were also a whole bunch of files that were entirely corrupted, which Hoolio just couldn’t open including, Mand’s ‘So you want to change the world?’ story, The Vultron feature, Wanda’s ‘How to look glamorous on a budget’, Maggie’s problem page, and the music reviews page.

  ‘So, girls,’ said Maggie after checking the schedule in her notebook. ‘Here’s the deal – about half of the magazine files have been corrupted and half have been saved. Looks like we’ve got a lot of work to do before we hand in this assignment.’

  ‘Then let’s do it,’ said Belle. ‘Let’s just go for it.’

  At least something had been salvaged. The girls agreed to spend every bit of their spare time working on the magazine. They had come this far, they wouldn’t let it just slip away.

  The girls worked tirelessly as the deadline loomed. Everything else was put on hold: netball training (Belle and Wanda), dentist (Wanda, to find out if she did need braces); flamenco dancing (Maggie, the stomping made her feel powerful), studying (all the girls put their other school work on the backburner) and, most importantly, telling one’s father that his soon-to-be wife was still hooked on her ex-boyfriend and only wanted him for his money (Belle – sometimes the hardest things in life take a while to work up to).

  To save time, Pierson waited a discreet distance from the school gate and the girls piled into the Rolls Royce and were driven up the hill to the mansion. This was driving Reanne completely insane, as she was organising her wedding – surely Pierson should have been at her beck and call?

  The silver wire with the hangers soon started to fill with pages that had been written and designed. Because of Kylie Mannigan, there were some stories that Belle and Wanda had to design over again, which was incredibly frustrating; still, it was amazing how much they remembered and how much better they could make them the second time around.

  Belle and Wanda were constantly bickering with the words girls – Maggie, Mand and Cat – asking them to cut words from the stories they had lovingly crafted to fit in with the design. There were heated discussions over which headlines were better, which photo more effective, but slowly and surely the magazine came together.

  Tempering the seriousness were moments of hilarity when the girls would stop work and fall about laughing. Like when Mand and Cat were captioning ‘Celebrity Love Map’, a guide to who was doing who, which made Hollywood seem like an incestuous little pit. Or when Mand read out her article about getting her bikini line waxed for the first time, which had them all in stitches.

  The girls would plug their MP3s into the speakers and take turns DJ’ing, so every afternoon there would be something different playing. Mand would never ever have thought that she would have enjoyed jumping around to Jason Jones, and had to admit that even cheese had its place.

  Mrs Biggins took to having five teenagers in ‘her’ house surprisingly well, considering she was about to have a huge wedding party in ‘her’ garden. Every afternoon when the girls arrived there was a freshly baked cake or a tray of muffins, and jugs of juice or a pot of English Breakfast tea with tea leaves, which made the girls feel very special as they strained the tea through a silver strainer from a fancy silver teapot.

  Belle suspected Mrs Biggins’s enthusiasm was due to the absolute horror that she was about to be usurped as the lady of the manor, once Reanne got her greedy paws into Adrian. The Mag Hag project at least provided a distraction from the wedding being organised in a whirlwind around them. Belle figured that if she ignored Reanne’s very existence, didn’t give the wedding the slightest bit of energy, then the impending nuptials would never happen. But judging by the Indian marquee that was being set up on the lawn, unless Belle got some dirt on Reanne quick smart, then she really would become her stepmother, and that thought was so overwhelming, Belle could barely even entertain it.

  ‘You okay, Belle?’ said Cat.

  ‘Sorry, I was thinking about Reanne. I’ve no idea how I’m going to stop her marrying Dad.’

  ‘Debs and I have got a kickboxing lesson tomorrow,’ said Cat. ‘Let’s see what we can find out.’

  ‘Thanks, Cat, but I’m afraid we’re going to need a miracle.’

  Cat secretly suspected she was right – after casing the joint for weeks, there wasn’t even a hint of a rumour about Sol and Reanne. She hadn’t got a single piece of hard evidence, and with days to the wedding, she honestly didn’t know if she would.

  Since Cat and Debs had been frequenting Out for Kicks they had actually found something to bond over. There was something they loved about slipping into their tracksuits and then pounding the living bejesus out of a punching bag. Cat even trimmed her ridiculously manicured nails to pack more of a punch. Kickboxing was something that neither of them ever would have thought was them but sometimes when you do things that aren’t really you, you discover who you really are.

  Evelyn couldn’t believe the change in Debs; her cheekbones were making a reappearance after being lost beneath the calories that come from eating two family-sized chocolate blocks a day. But it was more her mental attitude that had shifted. Debs the lounge lizard suddenly had more energy than she knew what to do with – so she had begun jogging to the gym three times a week to practise her punches and kicks on her own. Well, it was more of a half-run, half-walk, but the point was, she was doing something.

  On this particular Tuesday afternoon, Evelyn had taken the day off sick – a mental health day, as she called it – and was driving the girls to their kickboxing lesson.

  ‘Wow Debs, you’ll be a size 8 before you know it,’ said Evelyn in her cloyingly chirpy voice. ‘Then you’ll see why I was trying to get you motivated.’

  ‘Mum, do you have to claim the credit for everything?’ piped up Cat from the back seat. ‘This isn’t about Debs getting the body you’ve always wanted for her. It’s about her doing something that she actually loves doing.’

  ‘All I was saying is that Debs is –’ said Evelyn defensively.

  ‘I am in the car, Mum,’ said Debs, addressing her mother directly for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime. ‘Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.’

  ‘I do know that, Debs,’ said Evelyn. ‘But you know, healthy body, healthy –’

  ‘Mum, you just don’t get it, do you?’ The kickboxing had released all sorts of emotions in Debs and she was suddenly finding the strength to face all sorts of demons. ‘The reason I let myself go is because I could never have your body, so why bother trying?’

  ‘If you’re trying to blame me for your love of junk food –’ said Evelyn.

  ‘Mum, it’s about my shape. You’re al
ways going on about how I take after Dad’s chunky side of the family. It is hardly great for self-esteem, if you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘Come on, Debs,’ replied Evelyn, her determined chirpiness starting to turn shrill. ‘Cat never eats junk food. You were never allowed junk food as a child.’

  ‘Don’t know if you noticed, Mum, but Cat never eats anything unless she’s worked out the calories beforehand!’ Debs was really letting loose now. ‘You’ve messed us both up with all your dieting and obsession with our dress sizes.’

  Cat sat dumbfounded. Debs had hit a raw nerve. Ever since she’d read Mand’s article about body image, she had realised how much she thought about food.

  ‘Cat eats sensibly!’ said her mother forcefully.

  ‘Not ever having what you want isn’t sensible, it’s deprivation,’ said Debs. ‘Why don’t you ask Cat why she’s more afraid of a chocolate bar than a man with a machete?’

  ‘Caitlyn?’ Evelyn only ever used Cat’s real name when the situation was deadly serious.

  ‘You do pile on the pressure, Mum,’ admitted Cat, relieved to finally tell her mother how she felt. ‘Like the time you wouldn’t buy me a pair of jeans until I’d lost my “rump” as you put it. Do you know how hard it was to shrink down to a size 8 and try to maintain it?’

  Evelyn knew exactly how hard it was – she’d been doing it all her life.

  ‘Mum, I know you mean well, but it really hurts when I only feel accepted by you when I’m thin,’ said Cat as the car pulled up at Out for Kicks. ‘There’s an article in our magazine about it. You should read it.’

  ‘You’ve got to stop being such a body Nazi, Mum,’ said Debs. ‘Go and eat a cake or something. Might make you feel better.’

  ‘I just want what’s best for my girls, you’re all I’ve got. I try to do my best …’ said Evelyn, her eyes suddenly moist with tears.

  ‘Yes, Mum, we know,’ said Cat, her heart softening although she knew that Evelyn actually having a piece of cake was far fetched. Nana is even a bigger body-Nazi than Mum, thought Cat, so she had a lifetime of ingrained habits. Cat vowed to get over herself and stop the cycle. She turned to her mother and smiled. ‘It’s the three of us against the world, Mum. It always will be.’