15
Chapter 15
I put my ribbon back in my bag for school, but this time I put it right at the bottom of everything. There was no way it was going to fall out again. But there was also no way I was going to leave it behind. I needed it with me, whether something happened with Baylor or not.
Coco stroked my arm on the bus. ‘It’ll be okay. Just be cool.’ She looked out the window. ‘Oh, here we are.’ Her head started craning around behind her. I guessed she was trying to see if Baylor had arrived yet.
‘Also, be nice,’ she said. ‘You know, like …’ She took a breath in and let it out, like she was trying to explain something to me. ‘Like, try to fit in, okay?’
I gave her a look. ‘I’m Charlie Franks. I’m fine. Just let it be.’ I shrugged her hand off me and jogged off the bus.
Nothing happened.
At least, nothing happened that I noticed. There were no fights, no raised voices, no tears, no anythings. I said ‘hi’ to everyone and smiled, made sure I had shoelaces to tie and books to organise. At recess I ate with them, then went to play soccer, and at lunch I sat listening to their conversations about clothes and selfies and makeup and boys until the bell went.
Nothing.
Baylor was normal, as far as I could see, so I shrugged my shoulders and tried to shut Coco up. She was still trying to get in my ear and tell me to ‘do something about it’ and ‘fix it’ and ‘fit in’. Finally, after about three trips to the bathroom in which she pretty much whispered non-stop to me, I told her to lay off.
‘There is no problem, Coco. Seriously. It’s fine, I’m fine, we’re all fine. I did nothing and it’s all gone away. Chill out.’
At home, I dumped my bags, cleared my head from school mode and headed out to ride with Cupcake down at Ness’s place. She and Tessa were out for the afternoon, and James was with Coco as usual. Jumping was all I wanted to think about, and Cupcake was the only one I wanted to communicate with. We cleared a high rail ten times in a row and only quit when Cupcake was even more sweaty than me.
‘Are you good?’ I asked her. ‘Are you too hot? We’ll have to work harder at the next show.’
From across the side of the stall, Fozzles must have heard me and made a nickering noise. I poked my head around to say hello and she nuzzled into my cheek. Her tummy looked seriously huge. Was she going to keep stretching and stretching until the foal just burst right out of her? My skin felt weird just thinking about it.
Mum was also looking pretty massive when I went back in to the house for dinner. She was up and eating with us, but had to run to the bathroom during dessert, so she went back to bed after. We were all kind of used to it, really.
Dad called out to her from the table. ‘You right, love?’ and we listened for her weak, ‘Yeah,’ before we kept eating, but no one did anything else. Not even me.
I felt bad when I finally got into bed after finishing my homework and cleaning up Dad’s terrible attempts at kitchen duty. I’d tried to say goodnight to Mum, but she was already asleep. Her blankets had to cover a much bigger lump in the bed these days, and again, my skin felt weird. The idea that there was another person inside her made me feel creeped out.
I was even more creeped out when I thought about the fact that I’d been in there too once. It was double creepy to think that I’d been in there with Coco and I shuddered. Eeew. There were some things you just shouldn’t think about because they’re gross.
And there were some things you shouldn’t think about because they’re scary.
Like death rates for women who have babies after the age of forty. I’d spent some time secretly googling after Ness told me all that stuff about vets and hospitals and births that can go wrong. Dad’s answers, while I’m sure he thought he was being up front and reassuring, didn’t really cut it for me. I needed proof everything was going to be alright, not just my Dad’s say so.
First I typed in, ‘Will my mum die having a baby?’ and nearly freaked out. Apparently, at forty-seven, she was a ‘high risk’ mother and there were about ten gamillion things that could go wrong. I shut my computer super quick and went in to see her, but I couldn’t tell her why I was nearly crying because I figured it would just make her upset too, so I had to make up a story about how I hit my knee on the fence and it really hurt. She was nice, and tried to look for a bruise, but of course it was made up.
Anyway, just seeing her with that tummy sticking out made me too terrified to even sit and chat with her, so I made up some reason to leave the room—putting ice on the fake bruise, I think—and got out of there.
I’d been feeling guilty ever since.
Every day I had the same two thoughts buzzing around at the back of my brain, regardless of what else I was doing. One, would Fozzles be okay? And two, would Mum be okay? They cycled around and around and wouldn’t let me go. Sometimes it was just the words. Other times there were pictures that went with them—pictures of Mum in hospital, or me crying, or Fozzles lying on the floor and not being able to get up.
I tried super hard but I couldn’t dislodge them. They were there, eating little bits off the edges of my happiness. Nibble, nibble, nibble. Chew, swallow, spit.
I didn’t like it.
The only thing that seemed to get them to at least be a bit quieter was thinking about you know who again. The pinching had worked for a while, but then he came back, complete with his very own PowerPoint presentation in my brain. It replayed all the pictures of the times I’d ever seen him—the first glimpse across the fence at the show, him walking down the road from the slushie stall—in slow motion sometimes—and his profile picture and name from his Facebook page. It made my heart go quicker and my hands get sweaty. Sometimes I even imagined him talking to me. My brain had somehow created some kind of imaginary footage of him and me in a conversation, except I could actually see myself (which obviously wouldn’t be possible in real life).
The other thing that was weird about it was that I never got to hear what we were actually saying. I had no idea if he was talking about the footy and the team he supported or if he was asking me if I liked hot chips. Or whatever.
I didn’t want to think about Jake Smith because it made me feel weird. Kind of like I wasn’t myself. I mean, I’m Charlie Franks. I never worried about what other people think of me. At least, not until this point. Now, everything was different. Now, even though I said to myself that I didn’t care about him, I just knew if Jake Smith ever actually spoke to me, and didn’t like me, my life might be over.
At least, I would probably cry in my bed for possibly three days. Or more.
Probably more.
The whole idea was terrifying.
So I was stuck between worrying about my mum and my horse dying, or worrying that Jake Smith might not like me. Neither option was great, but it was understandable that I was going to pick Jake Smith, even if it made me into some kind of cranky, weird-feeling mess all day. Packing my Champion ribbon into my bag in the morning was the only thing that made everything start to be even a little bit okay.
I couldn’t tell Mum about any of this. I didn’t feel like I could tell Coco because she’d just have teased me, and I didn’t feel like I could tell Ness either. She’d just try to convince me that everything was going to be okay, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be convinced. Better to talk to Ness about horse stuff. On that topic, at least, we were on the same page. Plus, she was entering me in one more competition. It was another show in a bigger town about two hours’ drive away.
‘Good practice for Inter-schools,’ she said to me when she first told me about it. ‘The competition’s pretty tough, but I think you can do it.’
At four am, on show day, with Cupcake already groomed and braided and rugged up, waiting for Ness to arrive with the float, I was getting dressed for competition. We had a collection of jackets and jodhpurs now, cobbled from various places and people who’d given us some hand-me-downs.
Normally I just pulled out whatever was on the
top of the pile, or first hanging in the cupboard, without even turning on the lights, but that morning, Jake Smith popped into my head. I tried to swat him out, but he stayed, resolutely having opinions about what I was going to wear.
I swallowed hard and thought of Baylor and her super cute jackets. I should change mine, I thought. Definitely. But which one should I pick? Coco might have helped me, but at four am, I wasn’t willing to run the risk of waking her up.
I pulled out all the jackets. Which one would Coco think was best? How would I possibly know?
In the end I chose a black one. It had a small stain on it, but I figured no one would notice, with all the dust and muck and everything that got all over us at shows. And black seemed like a pretty safe choice. Coco might even approve.
It was a long drive down the coast. Tessa sat in the front with Ness and seemed sleepy, so I had the back seat of the Pajero to myself, trying not to think too hard. Now Mum, Fozzles and Jake were disappearing from the centre of my head, and Baylor was taking their place again and, with her, enough nervous feelings to make me think about vomit and the possibility of asking Ness to stop the car. I opened my window instead, breathed deeply and then reached down into the bag I’d packed, and touched my ribbon.
‘You’ll be fine, right?’ said Ness, over her shoulder from the front.
‘Yeah, ’course.’
‘Tessa said that Coco told her you’d been getting a bit of grief from that Baylor girl.’
I shrugged. ‘A bit. I’m just ignoring it.’
‘Good choice. She’s a bit of a princess. Can’t handle having someone around who’s as good as she is.’
‘Better,’ said Tessa, indignantly. ‘Charlie’s heaps better than her.’
‘Not heaps,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘I’ve beaten her once.’
‘Yeah, and you’ll beat her again today, won’t she, Mum?’
Ness laughed. ‘Who knows what’s going to happen? All I know is, Charlie will do her best. She always does.’
The weather had turned from stinking hot at the previous shows to humid, with patchy bits of rain. Tessa and I left our bags beside the car and swapped between riding in the events and holing up in the float, reading and chatting. A few hours later, when we got too hungry to resist the wafting smells of gozleme and pizza that were baking in one of the stalls, we headed out to feed our growling tummies.
‘There she is again,’ said Tessa, seeing Baylor walking towards us with a slushie in her hand. ‘I mean, I don’t go to school with her, but I can tell she’s just like, the biggest show-off ever.’
I shrugged my shoulders. I thought it, but I didn’t want to say it. ‘She’s okay.’
‘Seriously? She’s so mean. Coco told me. And you’re so nice. I don’t know how you can even stand her.’
As Baylor passed us, Tessa made a big point of turning her head right away and sniffing loudly.
‘Don’t,’ I said when she’d passed, and Tessa and I turned ourselves to watch Baylor walk away from us. ‘She’ll just get meaner. And I don’t care, really.’
‘Look at her,’ said Tessa, with disdain in her voice. ‘I mean, look.’
I did look. But what I saw wasn’t what Tessa probably saw, which was Baylor’s new jacket, and super shiny riding boots and matching everything, and slick dark hair. What I saw was something gold and purple, hanging out of Baylor’s bag off her shoulder. It was the same colours as my Champion ribbon, and it had black letters on it.
I pulled my bag off my shoulder and dug into it, reaching my hand right around the bottom of it, grabbing at anything I could feel.
‘What are you doing?’ said Tessa. ‘Did you lose something?’
I ran to the side of the path, onto a patch of grass and dumped everything out of my bag. Out fell my wallet, a jumper, a book and other bits and pieces I’d shoved in there last night.
Everything except my ribbon.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I told Tessa. ‘You go. I’ve got to go back to the float.’ I scrabbled everything back into my bag, threw it over my shoulder, and started back down the path after Baylor. She wasn’t far in front of me and I was going pretty fast, but I didn’t want to catch up with her just yet. Instead I wanted to see what I’d seen before. Had my eyes been playing tricks on me? Maybe I was seeing purple and gold everywhere I went. I just had to be sure.
My feet crunched on the gravel path beneath me and I was breathing hard. Baylor had shifted her bag on her back so that I could only see one side of it. I tried to crane my head around so I could get the other side in view, but it didn’t work.
Maybe not, I said to myself, and stopped, just when I was about ten metres behind her. I imagined it.
Just then, the wind blew. It created a cloud of dust around my feet, whipped my ponytail around my face, and put a shudder through my clothes. It also caught a little tail of a purple something poking out of Baylor’s bag. I narrowed my eyes. The something fluttered and danced behind Baylor, like a bird showing off its feathers. Purple, gold and white. A Champion ribbon. I was sure of it. Baylor was carrying a Champion ribbon. And mine was missing.
I ran back to the float and found Ness looking for me, frantic. ‘They’ve just started calling you for the next event. Where’s Tessa?’
I pointed towards the gozleme stall. ‘Up there. I’ll get her.’
‘No.’ Ness almost shouted. ‘You get ready.’
Ness ran up the path to find Tessa and I went to get Cupcake. My head was spinning, and my breath was coming fast.
‘Come on, girl,’ I said to her. ‘We’re on.’ I pulled myself on to the saddle, and pressed my legs together. ‘Walk.’ As we headed towards the entrance gate to the arena, I could tell Cupcake was tetchy. I’d done everything too fast and hadn’t calmed her down enough.
I gathered my thoughts, and tried to slow down my breathing. I’d sort out the ribbon later. Right now, we just had to compete.
‘Good girl,’ I said to her, letting my shoulders lower and my neck get relaxed. ‘It’ll be okay.’
She calmed down and we went into the arena together and began to take the jumps. One, over. Two, over. Three, over. And then we rode around to the fourth jump. As we took the corner, out of the side of my eye, I saw something I really didn’t want to see. It was something that made my heart go fast, my hands slip with sweat, and my knees buckle. Beneath me, Cupcake must have felt my anxiety rise. She got upset. She reared up, her front legs in the air; I pulled back on the reins, and she twisted away from the pressure. It didn’t work. She threw me off.
I landed on my back, on the ground, with the sky spinning above me.
Ooof.
Ouch.
It wasn’t Cupcake’s fault. It was mine.
Jake Smith got in my eye line, and I was off my horse.
16
Chapter 16
I fell out of a tree when I was six. I misjudged a branch I was reaching for and missed it, landing half on my knees and half on my side. It winded me and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. It was bad. But this was worse.
Way worse.
For a moment, everything went black and there was a really loud ringing in my ears, like my brain had kind of shifted in my head. When the noise subsided I opened my eyes and saw only stars and brightness, so I closed them again. They told me later I was out for three minutes or so. When I didn’t get up after half a minute, Ness was over the fence, running out to me, while Tessa was sent to catch Cupcake, who apparently ended up prancing around looking a little bit foolish.
‘You okay?’ Ness’s voice broke into my ear-ringing. I tried the opening eye thing again, to see her face staring right down at me. ‘The ambo’s here. Don’t move.’ She stepped back, and there was a flash of blue sky and a blink before another face stared down into mine.
‘Charlie, is it?’ It was a man with a deep voice. ‘I’m Rob, the ambulance officer. Do you know what happened?’
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I wasn’t about to tell Rob I came off my ho
rse because I saw a boy at the fence.
‘Charlie?’ Rob’s voice was still calm. ‘Can you talk?’
‘Yes.’ At least that question was easier. My voice sounded like it didn’t quite belong to me though.
‘Can you tell me what day it is today?’
‘Saturday. The show.’ I moved my arm up to my face stiffly. My nose was itchy.
‘Good stuff,’ he said. ‘What’s your horse’s name?’
‘Fozzles. I mean, Cupcake.’ I saw a question flit across Rob’s face, and then heard Ness’s voice explaining it to him.
‘She was riding Cupcake today. Her horse is at home.’
‘Cool.’ He seemed relieved. ‘You’ve moved your arm. Can you move the other one?’
I lifted my other hand up from the ground and put it down again. It worked. My legs worked too, both of them, and my head lifted up as well. As I brought it up, I looked around me to see practically half of the people at the whole show gathered in a group around me. The other half, still sitting in the stands, had their heads turned towards me as well.
Great. How embarrassing.
‘I’m going to help you to sit up now,’ said Rob. ‘When you feel ready.’
I felt ready. The quicker I got off the ground and back onto Cupcake, the better. ‘Can I finish my round? I don’t want to lose the points.’
Rob raised his eyebrows and I heard Ness laughing behind me. ‘I think you’re probably done for the day, kiddo. Sit up with me on the count of three, okay?’
As I came off the grass, my head felt dizzy for a few moments.
‘How’s that?’ asked Rob. ‘Bit strange?’
‘A bit.’ But the dizziness passed and a few minutes later I was able to walk off the arena with Rob on one side and Ness on the other, to cheers and applause.
‘They never clap that much when you win.’ I forced the words out and gave Ness a wry smile.
Charlie Franks is A-OK Page 10