'A flying skateboard,' said the boy.
'Watch where you're going,' said the father. 'Those things ought to be banned on the beach. There're kids everywhere.'
They dragged their children back up to their towels. 'I want to go in the water,' the boy cried.
'You can't. It's like Pitt Street down here,' said the father.
'I want to fly,' said the girl.
'Don't be silly. It's dangerous,' said the mother.
Paul and Denson arrived, out of breath, Paul still filming on the run.
'How was that?' he screamed, pointing the camera in my face.
'Would've been better if I hadn't nearly killed the tourists. But, apart from that, it was insane.'
Denson unstrapped my feet and turned the board over in his hands.
'No dings,' he said. 'You're lucky. Some of those moves were random.'
Then he undid my harness and walked up the beach to the dune to check the wing over. We followed him up and took a seat on the sand.
Paul and I shot a quick piece to camera with both of us onscreen, Paul holding the cam out in front of us. When we were done he busted a Space Food Stick out of his pocket. He loved those things. I thought they were pretty wrong but I was so hungry I could've eaten a small dog.
'I'm going for a ride,' said Denson after inspecting the kite.
'Mind if I film?' said Paul.
'Go for gold. I'll drop into the Arts Estate someday,' he said, 'pick up some footage. Let me know if you need a hand.'
He gave me five and strapped on, slid down the dune, got the wing up and caned back along the beach, somehow tacking into the wind and pulling some outrageous air.
'It's nice how light that thing is,' I said. 'Our bike is like trying to get a horse airborne.'
'Yeah, and I like the beach-start. No hill, no jump.'
'Yeah, but we need to stay in the air for longer than the sk8board. It was cool but I wanted to hang there once I was up,' I said.
'So we need something that's going to drive you forward in the air,' said Paul.
We sat there for a minute thinking about it. A bunch of seagulls flew past, flapping hard against the wind.
'Flapping wings,' I offered. Paul and I loved throwing ideas round like this. Our flying bike was suddenly getting its Flow back.
A kite-surfer was carving it up at the other end of the beach. I started picking Space Food Stick out of my teeth.
'We should vlog Space Food Sticks,' I said. 'No one eats these things any more and I'm kinda coming to like 'em. Do you think we'll ever go to space?' I asked. But Paul was looking up, thinking about something. A twin-engine, propeller-powered plane was buzzing out over the water. It looked like a seaplane.
'Maybe we need a propeller,' Paul said.
'On the bike?'
'Maybe. Maybe on your back. Somewhere,' he said, still watching the seaplane heading out over the lighthouse. 'We can get into the air. And if we make the bike lighter that should be even easier. It's just staying up that's a problem, so –'
'So we need something to propel me so that I can kind of drive through the air,' I said.
'Yeah.'
'That is an awesome idea,' I said. 'I'm so glad I came up with it. Like you always say, I'm the brains of us. Or is it you that's –'
'It's me,' said Paul.
'That's right.'
'You're the guts,' he said.
'The guts,' I repeated.
'Stick to flying,' he said.
'Flying,' I said. 'Let's go get this piece on the web. If we lose today it's all over.'
23
Dinner Rush
'Paul's mum gave me a call today.'
My mum and I were in our tiny kitchen, at our fold-out table built for two. The light was warm. We could hear cicadas chirping at us through the flimsily attached flyscreen.
I was chucking back the food as fast as I could. It was 8:15 p.m. and Paul was out in the workshop building the trike. His idea of a perfect meal was sausages without the skin and egg whites so he usually skipped dinner at my place. Raw broccoli and zucchini didn't really juice his goose.
'Oh, no,' I groaned through a mouthful. 'How was that?'
'Fine. Sort of,' Mum said. 'But I can't keep avoiding her. She wants to know what's happening with this cool-finding thing.'
'Hunting,' I said.
'Hunting. She wants to have a meeting about it,' she said.
'Oh, no.'
'Don't "oh no" me. You're the ones not keeping her filled in on what's happening. Or me,' she said, looking at me. 'So what is happening?'
I sculled a glass of water to wash a giant lump of uncooked rice down.
'It's no big conspiracy,' I said.
'Mac,' she said.
'Sorry, Ma, but it's not. We're just, I don't know, doin' this thing and if we win we get to check cool stuff out. That's all.'
'And what about the girl? Cat?' she said. 'I wasn't sure about her energy. She seemed –'
'It's cool, Ma. I can handle it. I gotta go help Paul. We're tryin' to get the bike up again by Friday.'
'Well, we have a meeting with Paul's mum tomorrow at Paul's place. Four o'clock!' she called as I slammed the bus door behind me.
I heard it open again. 'Tomorrow at four!' she called out.
'Got it,' I said as I headed for the workshop, past the backpackers eating their cheap Wednesday night curries.
My mum was such a worrier sometimes.
24
Propeller
Thursday morning. 7:02 a.m.
'Hello-o?' I called out.
Dogs going wild.
'Hello-o!' I called out again. 'Dad?'
Paul and I were standing at the base of my dad's houseboat but the ladder wasn't down. It was about a three-metre climb up to the deck and the slope of the hull was against us.
'Maybe he's out,' Paul said.
'My dad never goes out,' I said. 'You saw how lumpy that milk was the other night. He drinks it even when it looks like cottage cheese just to avoid going to Woolies.'
I looked behind us towards the big shed.
'Let's go have a look around,' I said. 'We don't have much time.'
My dad's shed was an incredible place. If you couldn't find something there, it wasn't worth finding. It was about as big as the hall at school. One end was taken up by an electricity transformer and a bunch of other stuff for his lightning farm. The rest was rows and rows of pretty much any kind of junk you can imagine.
'You start at that end. I'll check down here. I swear he's still got it,' I said.
Paul and I scanned aisle after aisle. There were fish tanks and old bikes, aerials and farming equipment, boat steering wheels, half an old car, bottle openers and Samurai swords, a Super 8 movie projector, something that looked like the shell of an atom bomb, the carcasses of maybe fifty TVs, a bird aviary, two slippery-dips and my dad's prized collection of forks.
After about fifteen minutes of searching I heard a call from the far end of my row.
'Here it is! I got it.'
When I arrived Paul was holding a propeller in a cage – an old paramotor that Dad had picked up at a garage sale and said that we'd do up together one day. You used the prop for powered paragliding, so you leapt off something high with a wing but you also had a propeller to push you through the air. I'd pleaded with him to let me have it but he'd said it was way too dangerous. But that was when I was ten. Now I was practically a man.
'It's kind of broken,' said Paul.
It was true. Half the propeller was hanging off and the cage was dark orange with rust.
'That's OK,' I said. 'We'll fix it. Let's go.'
I helped Paul carry the prop through the shed and then kicked the door open. My dad was standing outside waiting for us. He was leaning against a fence-post, covered in grease, holding a spanner and some parts.
'What you got there?' he asked.
'Um,' I said.
'That doesn't look like an um. Looks like a paramotor,' he said. 'What
you gonna use that for?'
'Well,' I said, looking at Paul, who suddenly had bubbles of sweat above his top lip. 'We're still trying to get the bike in the air.'
'Mmmmm,' he said.
'And ... we tried to call out for you but you didn't hear and we just... I thought that maybe I was old enough to handle this now.'
Dad took a few steps towards me and grabbed the prop. In daylight it looked even more useless.
'You want to fly with this?' he asked.
'Yeah?' I said, not so sure anymore.
He stood and looked at it, all its broken bits, for an uncomfortably long time.
'When?'
I looked at Paul again for some kind of reassurance. His face was almost white. 'Tomorrow afternoon,' I said, my voice cracking.
My dad peered at me through the wild mess of hair and beard that covered his head. He looked kind of like an angry yeti without the snow.
'Well, that's just stupid,' he said.
'Sorry,' I said.
'No, it is,' he said. 'I mean, you want to kill yourself, go for your life. It's all yours but I suggest you turn round, put it back in the shed and get out of here.'
I thought for a second about taking it but I was scared to tangle with Bigfoot, so Paul and I headed inside.
As Dad walked off towards the lightning field he yelled, 'And bring back my wing.'
Yeah, right, I thought. Saturday he'd have his wing back. Saturday when my life would take a whole different turn. If I was still alive, that is.
Paul and I dumped the prop where we'd found it, shut the shed and caned off down Lighthouse Road. I hit the beach for half an hour's practice handling the wing before school. No trike, no board. Just me and the paragliding wing, a giant 'chute far above my head. The wind was blustery and it tore me around the sand a bit but my control was getting better. When big gusts came through I managed to hold it steady. I practiced running in 'S' shapes along the beach and nearly tore an arm out of its socket a couple of times. No one said flying came easy. I skated along the sand on my heels, getting lift-off a couple of times. I can't tell you how good it feels – bare feet on sand, doing twenty or thirty k's an hour and hanging on for sweet life.
By five minutes to eight, Paul and I were sitting in front of a monitor in the library watching Cat's Wednesday vid.
25
Geeks Or
Revolutionaries?
Cat's vlog was on skirt lines, saying that skirts were two centimetres shorter in Kings Bay this summer.
'Really groundbreaking research,' Paul said.
But she did model the skirts for the camera – which kind of tempted me to vote for her myself.
At eight Paul refreshed the page. As we waited the couple of seconds for it to load I felt a big lump of fear in my throat.
'This is it,' I said, knowing it could all be over.
The results pinged up onscreen.
32 384 for Cat.
33 182 for us.
We won by 798.
'Can you believe that?' I said to Paul as we sat there staring at the screen.
'Hardly a landslide victory,' he said.
'Don't be a deadbeat. Is that all you can say? We're still in the game!' I said.
'Yeah, but –'
'Yeah, but nothin'. We are cooking, old man. We're totally gonna win this thing now.'
Paul low-fived me and we read the user comments.
these dogs are gettin their geek on and im lovin it.
– Shadyboy, Cape May, USA
Who are these totally odd Aussie kids? I like the bloke with the big nose and the skinny arms.
– Sam, London, England
when does this kitesk8 board start selling in france? i want two. and i want mac to teach me how to ride.
– JulieH, Aix-en-Provence, France
These guys are just rockin' it now. Cat's getting worse every day and these guys are howling.
– RockFish, Christchurch, NZ
This isn't even coolhunting. It's uncoolhunting. Like skateboards have never been invented? These geeks are trashing the whole perfection of the hunt.
– Cat DeVrees, Kings Bay
Geeks or Revolutionaries? I say Revolutionaries. Who says coolhunting has to be about products and makeup and how well you dress and haircuts? These guys are hunting Imagination, something you'll never know about, Kitty Litter.
– Paulo, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
As we cruised to class for first period I felt like I was flying, like we'd actually got the bike in the air and I was coasting right over the top of everyone. It was 2–1 to Cat at the top of the second half. If we could win these next two days we were going to New York and I'd be a coolhunter. Me. Mac Slater. The kid without a computer or TV at home. The kid with a rat on the loose somewhere in his bus. The kid whose bedroom overlooks the chicken factory. The kid whose dad did time for standing up against nuclear.
'Hey, man, nice one,' said a guy walking past in the hall.
'She's such a rabbitface. I'm glad you beat her,' said a freckly year seven girl.
'Yeah, I hope you guys crush her,' said the guy walking with her.
I sat in class – double Maths first-up. My worst nightmare. Cat came to the door of the room and spent about five minutes hugging Rain.
Oprah, our teacher, got stuck behind them. (She was a dead-ringer for Oprah Winfrey. Sometimes I expected Dr. Phil to drop in half-way through a lesson.)
'Excuse me, girls. Have you not heard the rule about hugging in the hallways? Break it up or head to the office.'
The embrace came to an end and Cat skulked into the room, head down. Her cheeks were all red like she'd been crying. I felt a bit guilty. I didn't know she'd take the loss so hard.
Rather than sitting up the front like she usually did (none of her group were in our class so the front was as far away from normal people as she could get), she walked down the aisle. She came directly towards me. I looked around, wondering where the spare seat might be. And there wasn't one. I started to panic. Was she going to hit me or stab me or something? Maybe she was a black belt and she was going to kung-fu my butt or beat me to death with a chair. What if she head-butted me or went for an eye gouge? Pulled off a special move and froze me? Imagine getting beaten up by a girl in front of the whole class. I seriously didn't need this right now, so soon after the hammering of the past couple of days.
What she did was much worse than any of this.
'Can I sit next to you?' she said.
It was like an old Western movie when the bad dude walks into the bar and the music shuts off and everyone stops talking and turns to him. The whole class was watching. I looked at the seat beside me where my bag sat.
'Wh ... Here?' I asked.
'Aaah, yeah,' she said, like I was an idiot.
All eyes were on me.
'Yeah, well, I just, um, yeah. Let me just –'
'Quiet, everybody. Sit down please, Catherine,' Oprah said to Cat.
I picked up my bag and my books tipped onto the floor. And my lunch. (Mum had packed celery with peanut butter inside, a pack of sultanas and the leftover veges from the night before. It was like a five year-old's lunch. And everyone saw it.) While I scrambled round under the table Cat squeezed into the chair. I tried not to look at her legs.
'OK, yesterday I left this equation on the board. Who thinks they can solve it?' Opie asked.
'Sorry,' I said to Cat as I awkwardly crawled back up into my seat.
She smiled at me. 'That was a good win,' she said.
I looked into her face, checking for sarcasm. 'You serious?' I whispered.
'Yeah. I totally respect winners.'
'But what about what you said on the web?'
'Mac!' Oprah called. 'You seem to be talking to your new friend.'
Everyone turned to us again and I went beetroot.
'You must know the answer. Why don't you come up here and share it with the rest of us?'
'No, I –'
But Opie was holding out
the whiteboard marker and she had that look in her eye. I got up from my chair and scuffled towards the board. Kelton Knightley stuck out his foot and I tripped but stayed on my feet. A few girls laughed. Oprah was working on the board and didn't see it. I wanted to rip his nose off but I kept my cool. I didn't need any more attention this morning. I made it to the board and she gave me the marker.
'Um ...' I said. There were figures on the board I'd never even seen before. Were they Egyptian maybe? Paul was our numbers guy. I was on words and action.
'If you are going to be a pilot, Mac, you had better learn how to count. Any other geniuses in the room?'
Pretty much the whole class stuck up their hands as I slunk back to my seat.
'Cat?' said Oprah.
Cat pushed back her chair and brushed past me in the aisle, super-casual. With a few swift strokes, she jotted an answer, dropping the marker on the rack under the board.
'Good,' said Oprah. 'At least someone has been paying attention. Perhaps you can assist your friend there.'
Cat sat down next to me. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'Like we're ever going to use this stuff.' That made me feel a little better. I tried to concentrate on the class but it was like I was wearing earmuffs. Cat DeVrees was my entire world. My eyeballs were kind of hurting from peering at her out of the side of my sockets.
'Anyway,' she whispered once Opie had sat down and left us to jaw on a bunch of numbers. 'I just wanted to say that you and I are cool. It's good you won. That beach skateboard kite thingy looked divine against the sunset.'
'Yeah, I wish we'd invented it.'
'You guys invent quite a bit of stuff, yeah?' she said.
'Yeah.'
'Where do you do it? Do you have, like, a garage or something?'
'A workshop. Over at the Arts Estate,' I said. It felt good to be chatting to her. She had this really smooth sound to her voice and she was really well-spoken.
She stopped working and looked at me.
I looked up from my book.
'What do you say to us trying to be civil to one another?' she said. She always used words like 'divine' and 'civil'.
'Really? Didn't you totally diss us on the website?'
'I was just a bit hacked off that I'd lost,' she said. 'But I'm absolutely fine now. What do you think? Friends?'
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