Faking Sweet

by J. C. Burke

CALYPSO … 4 days to my partyshhh says: We’re going to Daydream Island together remember?? WE r gonna do more than party there!!

  HOLLY … 61 more sleeps!! (Screw Sydney) says: Haha!! Well gtg …

  CALYPSO … 4 days to my partyshhh says: Cya honey!! We got LOTS more 2 plan. I know a way 2 do it where it won’t be so scary.

  HOLLY … 61 more sleeps!! (Screw Sydney) says: Thnx.

  CALYPSO … 4 days to my partyshhh says: Hey, Jess Flynn is evil. Jess Flynn deserves to fall.

  HOLLY … 61 more sleeps!! (Screw Sydney) says: Jess Flynn is a liar! Jess Flynn deserves to fall.

  CALYPSO … 4 days to my partyshhh says: And who is going to bring her down? Who is going to make her fall??

  HOLLY … 61 more sleeps!! (Screw Sydney) says: I Holly Hankinson am going to bring Jess down! I Holly Hankinson am going to make her fall!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  I was so back on. Bigger and better than ever. It was amazing the difference it made too. I could feel the strength and purpose pumping through my veins. The fact that I was alone in Sydney didn’t bother me either, because that wasn’t how it felt. How could it, when the rest of the week I spent lunchtimes up on the ledge, texting back and forth with Calypso. It was like she was right there with me.

  Nor did I feel dizzy, not once. So a girl fell off and broke both arms? Calypso explained it was no big deal. That’s why she hadn’t told me before. The girl was the school’s stunt princess. Really crazy. Once she even climbed onto the gymnasium roof and swan-dived into the pool.

  Calypso told me if I sat carefully and quietly nothing could happen. But I don’t think she realised how funny some of her texts were. A couple of times I had to grab onto the ledge and hold on for my life, I was pissing myself so much.

  I’d text Calypso and tell her what was going on down below usually between Jess, Isabelle and Saskia. The other ‘it’ girls mostly sat around in a big group gossiping and giggling. They weren’t nearly as interesting as the three plastic fantastics.

  I watched them rub oil into their legs; I listened as they counted the carbohydrates of everything they put into their mouths; I heard Saskia explain things she’d done with boys that I didn’t know was even humanly possible; and I saw them watch and judge every girl who dared walk past their territory. ‘Fat; freak; what’s with the hair? Stacked it on or what?’

  Mostly Jess would say, ‘Please let me do a makeover on her?’

  To which Isabelle and Saskia would reply, ‘You are way too nice!’

  Once they even flirted with a builder who was old enough to be their father. I saw him walk past with a ladder and the three of them called out, ‘Hi, Daddy,’ then burst into spasms of idiotic giggling.

  I actually started looking forward to lunchtimes. It was all going fabulously until Friday when Jess Flynn, the big busybody, two-faced do-gooder had to ruin everything.

  I had just finished texting Calypso, as I had a perfect view of Saskia. She’d lined up five bottles of foundation then tested each one on her inner thigh. Her uniform was pulled up so high I could see the crutch of her red undies. It was classic, Calypso would’ve died to be seeing it. After each go she’d pass the bottle to Isabelle, who’d do exactly the same thing but on her arm instead.

  ‘Too streaky,’ they tisked. ‘Gluggy yuck!’ they squealed.

  But I was an idiot – I should’ve noticed Jess had walked away. After all, she was the one I was meant to be watching. Not the other two bird-brains.

  ‘Holly? Holly!’

  I froze. It was Jess’s voice. Slowly I turned my head to see Jess Flynn leaning out of the Science lab window.

  ‘Holly!’ Now half her body was dangling over and she was shaking my shoulder. ‘Quickly! Get in.’

  Suddenly I felt very dizzy. ‘Don’t!’ I snapped. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘Get in.’ Jess’s hand grabbed the back of my collar.

  ‘I said don’t touch me!’

  But she wasn’t listening. Instead her grip tightened and she had me by the uniform and was trying to drag me up against the window. ‘Get up. Come on.’

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ I screamed again. ‘I’m going to fall.’

  ‘You’re not,’ she screamed back. ‘Just get in.’

  Isabelle, Saskia and others had gathered below.

  ‘Jess?’ they called. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Holly, come on. I think Ms Kalina’s seen you. I swear she’s on her way up here. Get in.’ She yanked a bit harder. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I cried.

  ‘You can. Just take my hand.’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no, noooo!’ My eyes were screwed shut and my fingertips burned as my hands gripped the stone ledge. I heard shuffling around me and felt a hand prising my fingers off the ledge. I couldn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t speak. I was paralysed.

  Jess Flynn was sitting next to me on the ledge squeezing my hand and saying the most appalling thing I had ever heard in my life. ‘Jump, Holly!’

  I gasped.

  ‘Come on, Holly! You won’t hurt yourself, I promise.’ Her grip tightened. ‘We’ll both be in big trouble if we don’t get out of here.’

  I was shaking my head. I didn’t care how much trouble we’d be in.

  ‘Holly, jump.’ I heard the count down: ‘One, two, three.’

  In a flash the grass was coming up to meet us. It was getting closer and closer. I could hear our screams and feel our fingers locked together. Jess Flynn and me were falling to earth. ‘Agggggghhhhhhhh.’

  The shriek was piercing. I rolled over on the grass, feeling for my limbs. Yep, two arms, two legs still attached. Then I realised the scream hadn’t come from me. I looked for Jess. But she was okay too. She was already getting to her feet.

  ‘Noooooooooo!’ Another cry just as blood-curdling as the first.

  Saskia was doubled over in a heap. Had we landed on her? Had we killed her? No, she was starting to move. She was peeling herself off the ground. No, she was definitely alive and uninjured and was striding towards me.

  ‘You idiot!!!!!’ Saskia screeched. ‘You stupid idiot! My foundations! Do you know how much they cost me? Look at them. Go on, new girl, look. You dumb cow!’

  A thousand trillion pieces of glass oozing with brown stuff lay smashed and bleeding on the ground where I’d landed.

  ‘I, I’m …’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘I’m sorry.’ I limped away, hearing the glass trapped in the soles of my shoes scratching along the concrete.

  In Religious Studies I sat far away from everyone and nursed my wounds. At least the ones I could reach, which didn’t include the ones that hurt the most, like bruised pride and battered self-esteem. And let’s not forget the fact that in the last half hour my heart had not managed less than 200 beats a minute; let alone the residual damage of having to get over my vertigo complex in ten seconds flat. I was almost certain to end up with some sort of post-traumatic syndrome.

  But there wasn’t time for self-indulgence as over the intercom a voice boomed: ‘Would Jess Flynn and Holly Hankinson please come to the office immediately? Jess Flynn and Holly Hankinson.’

  The class turned and stared. I got up and hobbled out in silence.

  Two chairs sat on one side of the principal’s desk. Jess was already in one of them.

  ‘Come in, Holly. Take a seat.’ I hadn’t seen Mrs Rosewald, the principal, since my interview here a month ago. It was the same office but the atmosphere then didn’t have the chill I now detected.

  Mrs Rosewald began with the principal’s stare-in-silence number. That one had to be a universal favourite. Predictably, it was followed by a few clicks of the tongue, shakes of the head, then summed up with a long ‘I’m so disappointed in you’ sigh.

  ‘I’m so disappointed, girls.’

  Yep, as I thought. Zero for originality.

  ‘But also I’m curious, very curious as to what you two were doing spending your lunchtime up on the ledge outside the Science lab. That area is strictly out of bounds.’

/>   I squirmed around in my chair. This was going to be tricky.

  ‘Please don’t tell me we have another pigeon lover on our hands.’

  I sneaked a glance at Jess. She was twisting her fingers into knots.

  ‘Please?’ Mrs Rosewald continued. ‘Could someone shed some light on the situation? Jess, seeing as you’ve been a student at St Clementine’s a lot longer than Holly, perhaps you can start us off.’

  We waited for Jess to speak. There was no way I was going to volunteer. I had no idea what my story was going to be, and even less of an idea what Miss Perfect was about to pipe up with.

  ‘I, I went up there, Mrs Rosewald, because I was worried about Holly, um, sitting up there.’

  So she’d decided to play the heroine.

  ‘I know it was stupid to climb out the window but I think Holly froze …’

  And I’m going to be painted as the neurotic new girl.

  ‘I don’t really know what else to say, Mrs Rosewald.’

  ‘Well, a “sorry” and a guarantee you will never contemplate such an act again would be a good start, Jess,’ said the principal.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Rosewald.’

  ‘Now, Holly.’ She managed to squeeze out a ‘you’re new so I still have to be nice to you’ smile. Her teeth sparkled. I wondered if they were real and how much she’d paid for them. Then I realised of course that’s why Mrs Rosewald had gone easy on Jess! She’d obviously received a Flynn orthodontic discount. Everlasting free dental care probably guaranteed Jess the position of head girl too. It certainly scored her a debating award.

  ‘Holly, dear.’ Rosewald was still smiling. ‘I’d like to know why you were sitting up there. I know it doesn’t seem that high, but one of our students had a terrible accident earlier this year.’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’

  ‘Holly, I understand we have a lovely city, and the view of Sydney harbour and the boats is stupendous from up there, but I’m afraid it’s strictly out of bounds. I don’t expect to see you up there again. Understood?’

  Rosewald was about to make me puke. But now wasn’t the time to tell her what a stinking city I thought she really lived in.

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ I nodded.

  ‘Now I’m sorry to tell you both, but I am going to set a detention for this afternoon. It’s important that the rest of the students understand that it is not acceptable under any circumstances to ever be out on that ledge – dying pigeons, harbour views or anything.’

  I welcomed the detention. It was an hour on my own with Jess Flynn. Wouldn’t Calypso be impressed? The other bit that wasn’t bad was the circle of girls that crowded around us afterwards, asking what had happened.

  Detention was cleaning the Science lab. Mr Rufus, the St Clemmie’s maintenance man, gave us a scrubbing brush and a bucket of hot water bubbling with fumes that almost knocked me out with one sniff.

  ‘And rubber gloves too,’ he said, chucking us both a pair. ‘One set of useless hands is enough for this school. I’ll be back in an hour.’

  ‘He’s just trying to rub it in,’ Jess said to me. ‘He’s such a grump.’

  ‘What’s the useless hands thing?’ It wasn’t like I wanted to make conversation with Jess, but two mysteries in one afternoon was too much. Dying pigeons and now this?

  ‘Oh he’s talking about Sarah Finch,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘The girl who fell off the ledge.’

  ‘The stunt princess?’ I blurted.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Well, someone told me she was a bit of a daredevil.’

  ‘Sarah Finch?’

  I nodded knowingly. Maybe it was time to reveal I wasn’t just some dumb new girl.

  ‘I don’t know where you got your information.’ Jess started to scrub the front bench. ‘But Sarah Finch is like the quietest girl in the school.’

  ‘But, didn’t she …?’

  ‘She tried to get a pigeon off the ledge,’ Jess explained. ‘It had hurt itself. I don’t know exactly what happened ’cause she’s in the year below us, but they reckon she was crouching down on the ledge and when she leaned over to pick up the bird it flapped a bit and she lost her balance and fell.’

  I sunk into a stool. ‘What?’

  ‘We were okay ’cause we jumped.’ Jess’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘It’s not that high. I’ve jumped off there before in the holidays.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Sarah fell badly. Her arms got tangled up underneath her. That’s how she broke them. She’s, she’s …’ Again Jess’s voice dropped to a whisper, and she looked around before saying the next bit. ‘She’s really, really fat. Get it?’

  ‘Oh.’ Thoughts thick with confusion were swimming in my head.

  ‘She crushed the bones in both wrists. Her hands don’t work so well now. That’s what grumpy bum was on about.’

  ‘Is she …?’ Suddenly I remembered seeing a large girl at the canteen with a blue cast on both hands. ‘Does she have plaster on both hands?’

  ‘Yeah, blue ones this time,’ Jess replied. ‘Poor thing; she’s just had her fifth operation. That’s why I panicked when I saw you up there. Sorry. I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.’

  I shrugged. Words just weren’t going to make any sense if they came out of my mouth.

  ‘And I didn’t mean to freak you out either, Holly,’ she continued. ‘But I’ve seen you up there. I tried to warn you before. It was a pretty big deal in the school when Sarah fell.’ Jess went back to scrubbing the bench. ‘I don’t know where you got your info about her being a daredevil. I’d be checking up on your source if I was you.’

  ‘Yeah.’ For a while I stared at my hands. They looked pretty useless covered in pink rubber gloves that were floppy at the fingertips. How had Calypso got the story so wrong? ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I went to the back of the Science lab and started to scrub the last bench. For a while the only sound was the bristles rubbing along the steel surface.

  ‘I’m kind of glad we got a detention together,’ Jess said.

  I stopped and looked over at her. Was this the moment it was all going to spill? Now I wasn’t sure I was in the right state for it.

  Jess walked to the back of the lab. I kept scrubbing.

  ‘Well, you know how we have that English assignment,’ Jess started. ‘The character profile we have to write?’

  ‘The one based on Don John?’

  ‘That’s him,’ she said, pointing at me. ‘You’ve probably noticed I’m not very good at Shakespeare.’

  ‘Who is?’ I muttered.

  ‘You are.’ She sounded surprised. ‘You get it and you’re also really good at reading out the parts.’

  By now I was almost scrubbing the steel off the benches. But stopping would risk eye contact, and that was too dangerous. Why was she being so nice to me?

  ‘I know we got two choices for the assignment, but a profile on Elizabethan women …’ She made a big show of yawning. ‘Dull as. I quite like writing stuff; as long as I don’t have to read it out loud. You’ve probably noticed I’m not very good at that either.’

  Would she get to the point? My arm was beginning to ache and I was suddenly feeling overloaded with information.

  ‘Well, I was wondering, Holly, if it’s not too much trouble that is, would you be able to help me, just a bit, with the Don John profile?’

  ‘Um.’ I couldn’t exactly say, ‘Excuse me, I just need to confer with Calypso on that matter.’ And I was hardly up to trusting my own judgement. The Sarah Finch thing had me floored. And now, why was Jess being so pleasant? Perhaps the cleaning fumes had got to her too, ’cause I couldn’t think straight.

  ‘What do they say Don John is again?’ Jess giggled. ‘You see I can’t even remember that, and it’s the whole point of the assignment. Isn’t it?’

  ‘“A plain-dealing villain”,’ I said as I threw the brush in the bucket. ‘That’s what he’s called in the
play.’ I went to the window. Fresh air. That’d help.

  ‘And that’s what we’re meant to be writing our profile on – a plain-dealing villain?’ asked Jess.

  I nodded.

  ‘Are you okay, Holly?’ Jess asked. ‘You’ve gone kind of pale. It’s the cleaning stuff, isn’t it? It stinks. You sit down. I’ll scrub the benches and you talk to me about Don John. That’s fair.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I really didn’t want to be grateful but I couldn’t help it. I stood by the window and took in slow, deep breaths while I watched the last of the students wander out the gates.

  ‘Have you started the assignment?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ Jess answered, ‘’cause I didn’t really understand what we were meant to do.’

  Discussing the Don John thing during detention was surely not breaking any rules. In fact, if anything it stopped us from having friendly chat, which was probably more against the rules.

  ‘The key lines Mrs Gideon wants us to look at are when Don John describes himself as not a flattering honest man but a plain-dealing villain,’ I told her. ‘See, Don John hates Don Pedro, his brother. Actually I think Don John hates pretty much everyone. But the one he wants to get is Don Pedro.’

  ‘Why? What did Don Pedro do?’

  ‘Nothing, really, except that he’s powerful and popular, I s’pose.’

  ‘You’re good at this, Holly. You even remember the lines.’

  Yeah, well, when you don’t have a social life there’s enough time to memorise the entire works of Shakespeare. Of course I didn’t say that.

  ‘It’s just kind of obvious,’ I said instead.

  ‘But Mrs Gideon doesn’t want us to talk about Don John.’

  ‘No. She wants us to make up our own character.’

  ‘Didn’t she say it had to be someone who was jealous and scheming?’

  ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be a real person.’

  ‘Oh, I know a real person,’ Jess uttered. ‘One I could write a hundred pages on.’

  ‘Really?’

  I pulled down the window and locked it. My veins were pumping. We were entering dangerous territory.