Fifteen Love
Page 1
The Girlfriend Fiction Series
1 My Life and Other Catastrophes Rowena Mohr
2 The Indigo Girls Penni Russon
3 She’s with the Band Georgia Clark
4 Always Mackenzie Kate Constable
5 The (not quite) Perfect Boyfriend Lili Wilkinson
6 Step Up and Dance Thalia Kalkipsakis
7 The Sweet Life Rebecca Lim
8 Cassie Barry Jonsberg
9 Bookmark Days Scot Gardner
10 Winter of Grace Kate Constable
11 Something More Mo Johnson
12 Big Sky Melaina Faranda
13 Little Bird Penni Russon
14 What Supergirl Did Next Thalia Kalkipsakis
15 Fifteen Love R. M. Corbet
16 A Letter from Luisa Rowena Mohr
www.allenandunwin.com/girlfriendfiction
R. M. CORBET
This edition published in 2009
First published in 2002
Copyright © Robert Corbet 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Corbet, Robert, 1959-
Fifteen love / R. M. Corbet.
1st ed. ISBN: 978 1 74237 015 6 (pbk.)
Series: Girlfriend fiction ; 15
Previous ed.: 2002.
For secondary school age.
Subjects: Dating (Social customs) – Fiction.
Teenage boys – Fiction. Teenage girls – Fiction.
A823.4
Cover design by Tabitha King and Bruno Herfst
Cover photograph by Getty Images / Stuart McClymont
Text design by Bruno Herfst
Handwriting ♣ by Amelia Price
Set in 12.5/15 pt Fournier by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
www.allenandunwin.com/girlfriendfiction
For Kate
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
About the Author
One
MIA
Boys are immature. They only use one per cent of their brain. They only ever talk about cars or sport. They only ever think about sex. I read somewhere that boys think about sex – on average – once every fifteen seconds! That’s four times a minute! Two hundred and forty times per hour! I checked on my calculator – it’s a total of 5,760 times a day, assuming boys also dream about sex . . . If this is true, it is a real worry. Fifteen seconds is barely enough time to say hello. No wonder boys never make any sense when you talk to them.
There is one boy at our school who is not like the others. Will Holland definitely has something on his mind. Most lunchtimes he sits alone on the grass, wearing a tracksuit and looking very out of place. He eats his lunch, then he lies back on the grass, staring up at the sky for ages and ages. What does he see up there? What does he think about?
Is he interested in meteorology?
Is he worried about global warming?
Is he watching out for UFOs?
Will Holland is a mystery. My friends say he’s either an escaped criminal or else he’s suffering from some incurable, highly infectious disease. They think just because Will doesn’t hang out with other boys, he must be hiding something. But I think he’s interesting. I mean, boys don’t have to play basketball, do they? They don’t have to be the kind of nerd who lusts after computer-generated sex-goddesses with breasts made of high-density steel, and slobbers uncontrollably whenever a real girl walks past. Do they?
Will Holland isn’t like that. I’m sure he has other things on his mind. I swear, even if I had a figure like Lara Croft, he wouldn’t even notice me.
WILL
Mia Foley is not as pretty as she thinks she is. Without her long dark hair – which she keeps swishing around as if she’s in some kind of shampoo commercial – she would be quite average-looking. Without her big brown eyes and long lashes, her smooth white skin and rosy-red lips, her beautiful smile and her perfect teeth, Mia Foley would be very ordinary.
Every lunchtime she and her friends sit together on their seat. Every lunchtime it’s the exact same seat, as if there’s a plaque that says Reserved for Mia Foley and her two bimbo buddies, then below in small print, Guys please line up and wait your turn. Every day I see new guys come along to try out. They stand there with their hands in their pockets, pretending it’s all very casual, when really they’re pumped up and trying to make an impression. Then the hands come out of the pockets and the circus starts:
Roll up! Roll up! Pre-senting the a-mazing, the a-stounding, the death-defying des-per-adoes! They juggle! They swing! They spin basketballs on their fingertips! They throw things! They fight! Just sit back and enjoy the show, ladies, until the tightrope-walker falls flat on his face and the clowns come to take him away.
Mia and her friends like the attention. They smile and laugh, but they never ask the boys to sit down and join them. In the end, their eyes start to glaze over and it’s time for the circus to pack up and leave.
When the guys have gone, the girls huddle together and talk in low voices.
I have no idea what they talk about.
I wish I was a fly on the wall.
I wish I had a tape recorder and a hidden microphone . . .
MIA
‘The tracksuit is watching you again,’ says Renata.
‘No he isn’t.’
‘Mia! Are you blind?’ says Vanessa.
‘Just short-sighted, remember?’
‘Didn’t you say he was kind of cute?’ says Renata.
‘I never said that.’
‘He’s okay-looking. I’d lose the tracksuit, though,’ says Vanessa.
‘Lose it? He lives in it. I don’t think he owns any other clothes,’ says Renata.
‘Pee-ew! Stinky!’ Vanessa screws up her nose.
‘Give him a break.’
‘I mean, a tracksuit is for inside the house, right?’ says Renata.
‘I’ve heard some people do actually play sport in them,’ I say.
‘Sport?’ says Vanessa. ‘How tiresome!’
Vanessa and Renata are my two best friends. We share our lunches. We share our Tic Tacs. And we share our troubles. Mostly, our troubles are boy troubles, and mostly they’re Vanessa’s boy troubles, because it’s Vanessa the boys are mostly interested in.
Vanessa is a big flirt, to put it politely. She wears cardigans that are three sizes too small, just to show off her pierced bellybutton and so she can push right up close to guys, as if she’s trying to pop the buttons. Vanessa has this way of looking at guys that she does without thinking. She does it to the ones she’s interested in, but she also does it to complete strangers – guys on the train who are ten years older, for example. Hence the boy troubles.
&nb
sp; (My mum says I’m allowed to get my bellybutton pierced, but my dad says I’m not. He says there are ‘medical reasons’, and just because he’s a doctor he wins. The truth is my dad thinks having a pierced bellybutton is the same as having sex. Diagnosis: AIDS and/or an unwanted pregnancy. But I don’t care. One day, I’ll just go out and do it anyway – get my belly-button pierced, I mean.)
Vanessa has two kinds of boy troubles. Either it’s two guys fighting over her, or else one guy who’s been driven to the edge and can’t help making a fool of himself. Renata and I try giving Vanessa subtle hints. We tell her to tone it down if she wants guys to leave her alone, but then she gets her nose out of joint and won’t talk to us. Vanessa is unpredictable when it comes to guys. She can spend weeks playing hard to get with a gorgeous boy, then suddenly go out with a serial killer.
Renata is like Vanessa in some ways, but in other ways she’s the exact opposite. She’s just as pretty as Vanessa and goes to the same trouble with her hair, but she’s not so confident. Renata is Yugoslavian and her parents are pretty strict. She’s been in Australia for ten years, but she still won’t talk about the place where she was born. My dad told me Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not a real country, he said. But if anyone ever mentions Yugoslavia – or Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, any of those places – Renata goes a bit pale. I think some of her family must have got killed or something.
Renata says Vanessa is good for us. She’s always telling us how nice we look and encouraging us to be more upfront with boys. Vanessa is the ‘it girl’ at our school, so there’s never any shortage of boys around. The trouble is, boys are always at their silliest whenever they’re trying to impress girls. There’s no limit to the shameless depths they will go to.
WILL
Thank you for calling Girlfriend magazine. Please press 1) if you wish to subscribe. Press 2) if you wish to know what girls talk about. Press 3) if you only want to know what ‘a certain girl’ talks about. Press 4) if you really just want to meet ‘a certain girl’, but have no idea how to go about it.
Should I subscribe to Girlfriend magazine? Or should I buy a sample copy first? I could buy it from the supermarket. I could slip it in between the Nutri-Grain and the muesli flakes, so that no one would even see it.
‘It’s for my sister,’ I could say, if anyone asked.
Except that I don’t have a sister.
If I subscribed, the magazine would be posted once a month, hopefully in a plain brown envelope, clearly addressed to me, so that no one else would open it.
Because I do have a brother, and I don’t want him getting the wrong idea.
I have heard that parts of Girlfriend magazine can be quite intimate. I have heard that the sealed sections are extremely intimate! I have glanced at the letters where girls reveal their innermost secrets. I want to know how girls think, but my real reason for buying Girlfriend magazine is less sleazy than that. I need Girlfriend magazine for research purposes. I need to know what girls talk about. If I’m going to talk to Mia Foley one day, I need to be prepared.
Mia Foley is an up-to-date kind of girl. She dresses like the girls in Girlfriend magazine. She is easily beautiful enough to be on the cover of Girlfriend magazine. But that doesn’t mean Mia actually reads it. And besides, Girlfriend is a magazine for girls. It’s all about what girls say to other girls. It’s probably about boys. And if I ever meet Mia Foley, that is one subject we are definitely not going to talk about.
The trouble is, when boys talk, we talk about things. We exchange information. We are interested in the facts. Girls may not want to know about carburettors or shock-absorbers, but they are impressed by boys who know stuff. Any stuff – magnetic fields, microbiology, hydraulic engineering – it doesn’t really matter what. Girls like guys who know stuff. It makes them feel comfortable. They feel like the guy has other interests, that he’s not in danger of getting hopelessly obsessed about them. Stalkers, I’ll bet, have very little interest in the facts.
If, hopefully when, I do meet Mia, we should have one of those magical conversations that just click. What a lovely day, she might say.
Yes, I would reply. The forecast top temperature is twenty-seven degrees, I believe.
Don’t you wish it could always be this nice, she might say.
Then I would explain how the earth tilts on its axis as it moves around the sun, so that the chance of it being twenty-seven degrees and sunny every day was pretty unlikely. And anyway, we would both agree, life would be pretty boring without a change of season.
Then Mia might say, I read in Girlfriend magazine how the weather affects what we feel.
Girlfriend magazine? I would say. Isn’t that mainly for girls?
MIA
‘You did WHAT?’ I say.
‘You did WHAT?’ says Renata.
Renata and I are shocked and stunned. Vanessa has truly outdone herself this time.
‘I sucked his toe,’ she says.
‘His big toe?’ says Renata.
‘Naturally,’ says Vanessa.
‘You took off his shoe?’ I say.
‘And his sock,’ says Vanessa.
‘Was it clean?’ I ask. ‘His toe, I mean. Not his sock.’
‘Pretty clean,’ says Vanessa.
‘And what did he do, while you were sucking his toe?’ says Renata.
‘He went a bit crazy,’ says Vanessa. ‘He told me he loved me!’
‘He DIDN’T!’ I say.
‘But he’s not even your boyfriend!’ says Renata.
Vanessa hides her face in her hands. ‘He is now,’ she says, softly.
I shake my head in disbelief. Renata can’t stop laughing. She laughs until she has tears running down her cheeks and cramps in her stomach. There is something not quite right about the way she is laughing.
Vanessa and Renata are my two best friends, but even best friends can be weird sometimes. Sucking boys’ toes isn’t something I want to leap straight into, I must admit. It might sound old-fashioned, but toe-sucking isn’t something I want to rush right into. It’s not something I would ever do on a first date. It’s not my idea of romance. If you ask me, toe-sucking is something that should happen much later. It’s something a girl should only do with someone she really loves, only if she really wants to, and only after he’s had a long, soapy bath.
WILL
It all started in the woodwork room. The teacher wasn’t there yet and my workbench was the only one with an empty seat. I was minding my own business – crushing my pencil in my vice – when in walked The Most Beautiful Girl in the Whole Wide World. There are beautiful girls in movies and in magazines, but this girl was something else. She was real! And she was coming straight at me!
The Most Beautiful Girl in the Whole Wide World sat down beside me at my workbench, as my pencil cracked loudly up the middle. She looked at me, then at my pencil. I was stumped. I didn’t know what to say.
On the back of her hand she had written Don’t forget V! in red biro.
Don’t forget V!?? I have never seen anything so mysterious and exotic in all my life. But before I had any time to think about what V was, before I could think of anything to say, Mia had put on her glasses and realised where she was.
‘Woops!’ she said. ‘Wrong room!’ Then she stood up and walked out.
That was it. Forget about V. The Most Beautiful Girl in the Whole Wide World was gone. V for Vanished. When I looked at her seat, I wanted to reach across and touch it, to run my fingers across the smooth, polished wood. It was all I had left.
V for Vacant . . . ? Vacuum . . . ? Vapour . . . ?
It ruined my whole day. Actually, it was longer than that. Woodwork classes were tragic for at least another month. I made a pencil-box and filled it full of broken pencils. The empty seat stayed empty, but I couldn’t give up hoping that Mia might make the same mistake again. I imagined she might come in and sit down on her seat again, just for old times’ sake. So I guarded it, just in case.
‘Is that seat ta
ken, mate?’
‘Yeah. She’ll be back soon.’
Who was I kidding? Mia was never coming back.
V for Venus . . . Velvet . . . Visitor . . .
I started checking the timetable after that, to see where Mia’s classes were. Without really meaning to, I started wandering past her classrooms just to sneak a glance at her. It sounds like something a psychopath would do, I know, but I couldn’t help it. And every time I saw Mia, she looked even more beautiful than I remembered. Her hair was more shiny, her face was more perfect. Until, one day, Mia looked up and saw me staring at her. I tried to smile, but she acted like she didn’t even know me.
That’s because she didn’t even know me.
V for Victim . . . V for Vegetable . . .
After that, I gave up spying on Mia in class, but lunchtimes weren’t so easy. I tried to act normal and just do the things you normally do, but out of the corner of my eye I was always looking out for her. If I ever did see her, or even someone who might have been her, my body felt like a robot being operated by remote control. My limbs would move in unexpected ways. My eyelids would twitch and my neck muscles would go into spasm. I have to admit it – I had a slight problem with Mia Foley.
WHO CAN YOU TURN TO?
The school counselling service is
available for students who:
are having difficulty making friends
are experiencing disruptions in their personal lives
are having trouble studying
are uncertain about their future
The school counsellor, as it turned out, was also the music teacher. I don’t know if Ms Stanway has any counselling qualifications, but there’s obviously a connection between psychos and music – just look at Marilyn Manson. It didn’t matter, though, because from the moment I sat down in Ms Stanway’s big comfy chair, I knew I couldn’t say I was there because of a girl.
‘It’s spiders,’ I said, instead. ‘They make me feel . . . anxious.’
Ms Stanway had long white fingers with pale-pink nails. She pressed her index finger to her chin, as if she were trying to make a dimple.
‘How do you mean, exactly?’