I'd been pretty devastated when I first heard what Cat said. But I was far from devastated when the result flipped onto the screen at eight this morning. Tons of people on the site had revolted against her, giving us our biggest win ever. Paul and I got over 50,000 votes and Cat had less than 20,000. The comments on her piece were way harsh, too. Even Speed weighed into the debate, calling for calm. Cat was not happy.
'In terms of what happened with last night's vote,' she said to the assembly, 'which was totally unfair, but whatever. I just want to say that I totally stand by what I did by showing this freak up for who he is.'
Boos from the audience. Mr Debnam moved from the side of the stage towards the mike. Cat spoke louder over the booing.
'I believe you have to stand by what you think and just say it. Shut up, everyone, and listen! This is all a game and you do what you can to win. I'm not ashamed of –'
'Enough!' said Mr Debnam. 'Teachers, can you please identify those who were booing, Jacob Kennedy in particular, and I'll see them and you, Catherine, near the main doors. That is not the way we behave in assembly.'
Cat scowled at him and slunk away off the stage.
'Now, Matt, if you can –'
'Mac,' I said.
'Sorry?' he said.
'My name's Mac,' I said.
'Right. OK, Mac, if you can give us a very brief report and try not to make it an advertisement for yourself but, rather, give us some insight into what it has meant to be given this opportunity.'
As I took the mike there was a whole bunch of cheering. It was weird.
'Um, thanks,' I said. 'Um, I just want to thank my mate, Paul.' I was more nervous than I had been before the test flight. There were a few whistles from the back and Paul went red. 'We've kind of done this together. Um, yeah, look, it's been really good and, um ...' I sounded like a footy player being given Man of the Match. I had to pull something out of the bag.
'I just want to say that the thing that maybe I've learnt this week is just that you never can tell. I never thought of myself as cool, I s'pose.'
Muttering in the audience. Probably people saying, 'Damn straight. You got that right.'
'But then these guys gave me this chance and they saw something in me,' I said. 'And this week we've hunted some really cool people doing some really great stuff. Like all our inventions and the kitesk8 and my dad's lightning farm and –'
Cheers from the crowd.
'At the beginning we kind of had no chance of winning this thing but it's come down to the wire and I just want to say that if there's something you're juiced on, um, whatever it is, if it's something where you're feelin' the flow and the rest of the world just disappears, give it a go and you never know.'
Mr Debnam took the mike.
'Thank you, Matt,' he said.
I leaned into the mike again. 'That's Mac. And if anyone's seen our camera, can you let me know?'
I scanned around for Jewels. Unbelievable. She was sitting up front with Cat and her followers. She wouldn't make eye contact with me.
'Be scary,' I said into the mike and Paul and I left the stage.
There were cheers from the audience. Tons of applause.
The bell rang and I headed for the door. My ma had written a letter to get me off school right after assembly. Paul's mum wouldn't write him one but he'd try to bust out after lunch.
I had two small problems to solve – a bike that wouldn't fly and a missing camera to find. I had a hunch about who could help me find the camera.
'Hey! Jewels!'
I was at the top of the stairs that led from the canteen down to the main building and I could see the back of her head in the middle of the crowd.
'Jewels!' I screamed again, louder this time, as I dodged down the stairs.
''Scuse me. Coming through,' I said.
'Watch out, mate,' someone said.
I hit the bottom of the stairs and caught a glimpse of Jewels looking back at me from a window inside the building as she hurried off towards Art. She looked so guilty. I ducked into the hall and pushed through the crowd, racing after her.
We had Art together every Friday morning so I hung around till after class had started. But no Jewels.
35
Run
I broke into a jog, my breathing shallow, heart rate up. I knew they were after me from the second I stepped off school grounds.
You know when someone's following you and they haven't even made a sound but you know that they're there? When I'd speed up, they'd speed, too. When I'd slow, they'd slow. And every step I took was taking me further away from school and anyone who'd stop them from doing whatever it was they had planned.
I knew that one of the guys was Egg, Cat's boyfriend, the year ten dude who had supposedly maimed a kid with a killer tackle at his last school. Another guy was Soren Berryman, Cat's cousin from year eleven, and I wasn't too sure who the other guy was. Together, they looked like the front row of a very ugly forward pack.
My feet pounded on hot tar, melting in parts. Another searing day. My bag beat against my back. I pulled the straps tight, speeding up but trying to make out like I was doing the same pace. My head thumped with the extra blood that had shot up there to deal with the panic. Not panic. I was trying to be cool. And I had reason to be:
I hadn't done anything wrong.
Maybe I could outrun them.
They probably weren't even after me. Maybe it was just in my head.
I didn't really believe any of this but I had to tell myself something to relax. I came to where the buses pulled in. I still had a couple of hundred metres of road running through bushland before I hit the main road. There was a track off to the left that not too many people knew about. It took you through some gnarly mangroves and spat you out on the beach up near the shops. I tossed up whether to duck in there and hope my knowledge of the track would help me outrun them, or whether to just stay on the school road. But no cars were likely to come along at this time of day, so chances were that they'd catch me in the next hundred metres or so and who knew what they'd do?
Stupidly, I decided to go with the short-cut. I veered up onto the footpath near the mouth of the track. I could hear three pairs of feet smacking against tarmac as they ran after me. I was trying to look casual. Just going for a jog, you know, keeping fit in the blistering heat of a day that was pushing mid-thirties already.
As I was passing the opening of the track I made a sharp turn and I was quickly swallowed up by thick, scrubby mangrove trees. Hopefully I was out of sight. I put the foot down and powered through, scratching my arms and legs up pretty bad as I ran into the darkness. I knew I had to get to the creek before they entered the track if I was going to have a chance of losing them. My arms fired up and down like pistons and the ground was a blur beneath me. I wanted to look back but I couldn't afford to slow down. Sweat stung my eyes. I wiped at them with my forearm but it was thick with salty perspiration, too.
I hit the top of a small hill that led down to the creek and I glanced over my shoulder, seeing flashes of colour moving fast through bushes.
'Ay!' said one of them.
Damn. I powered down the slope towards the creek. Rocks slipped out from under me. I was moving so fast I wasn't in control. My legs were tumbling down the slope, my feet working hard to keep a grip. The bottom of the track near the creek was covered in tiny pebbles and I hit the anchors, trying to slow myself so that I could hop across the water. But as I slowed, my feet slipped and I fell, tearing skin off my legs and back.
It stung. I touched a leg and felt blood but, just then, Egg and the others came over the rise and started bolting down the hill towards me.
All I had to do was get over the creek and run three hundred metres before the track came out at the beach, but I was pretty knackered. I got up, hopped across one rock, then another, the creek streaming beneath me. Then I jumped onto a log and ran across it, taking me all the way to the other side.
When I hit the bank I decided to take a gam
ble. I stopped to shove the log away. Egg and the others were nearly at the creek edge. The log was heavy but I got some movement. With another shove, it started to drift away and I gave it a kick, leaving an impossible jump between the last rock, in the middle of the creek, and the bank that I was standing on.
As I turned and started racing off through the track I could hear grunts and groans as they jumped over the rocks. Then a splash and a scream from one of them. Then a whole bunch of splashing and swearing as the three of them made their way across the rushing creek.
I tried to power along the track but my legs were jelly with nerves and exhaustion. The guys were only about ten metres behind now. But they were big. My only hope was that size or ugliness would slow them down. I was an OK runner, had been to regional cross-country a couple of times, and I was light, so if I could–
Slap. Something heavy landed on my back and spun me around. Egg's hand. We were face to face, him breathing, panting and towering over me.
'Why didn't you slow down when I yelled?' he said, out of breath and spraying spit on me as he spoke.
'I don't know,' I said.
'We only wanted to talk,' he said, face covered in tiny beads of sweat, eyebrows and ears bright pink.
'Right,' I said.
'But that was before you made me run through the creek, you little turd,' he said.
The guy I didn't know arrived. He was even bigger and uglier than Egg, with a head like a battering ram. Soren straggled up and doubled over, pinching his waist like he had a stitch.
'What're you gonna do about these wet shoes?' Soren said.
I looked down at them. What'd he expect? Was I carrying a blow-dryer? Did he want me to breathe on them? Piggy-back him home to mummy?
'What're you laughing at?' he said.
'Nothing. Just ... What do you want me to do?'
'Don't be smart, mate,' Soren said.
'Shut up, Sozza,' said Egg. 'Now I'd like to mess you up right now but Cat asked me not to, so you can thank her for that – but make sure that whatever you have planned for tonight, don't submit it, OK? Even if you think you want to win and you want the glory and whatever, it's not worth it for you, all right?'
I looked him in the eye.
'All right?' he said, louder, tightening his grip on the back of my neck.
'Yeah. All right. No. I said yes,' I said.
'Well, say it louder next time,' he said, loosening his hold. I took the chance and slipped away, stepping back along the track.
'I'm serious,' he said, the three of them shrinking away as I backed up the path.
'You hear me?' he said.
I didn't answer. I was about fifteen metres away and I turned and broke into a jog, powering through to the beach. I didn't look back.
36
Crash-landed
I could hear a high-speed whirring sound coming from our workshop. Through a window I caught a glimpse of a wild-haired man chugging on the pedals of our trike with his hands. The trike was upside down on the workbench. I unlocked the chain and pulled the door.
My dad looked up. 'Why's my wing got holes in it?' he said.
'Why weren't you there and how'd you get into our workshop?' I fired back.
He glared at me. He wasn't used to me answering back.
'I was asleep,' he said. 'And I came in through the window.'
He adjusted something with a spanner and then powered away on the pedals again.
'You weren't dragging the wing on the road, were you?' he called over the sound of the whirring. Then he looked at me again, knowing that we had been.
'We're only beginners,' I said.
He scratched his head, trying not to get angry. But he let me have it anyway.
'To drag a paraglider wing across tar? That is just the most ludicrous thing I ever heard.' Then he went on and on talking about how dumb we were. After a while I'd had enough.
'You're not exactly perfect yourself!' I said.
'And what's that meant to mean?' he asked.
'Do you know how much hell I get at school every time you get arrested?'
'I'm standing up for my beliefs,' he said.
'Yeah, I know, and you asked me not to contact you and you didn't tell me when you got out and you still haven't achieved anything by sitting in a cell for three weeks.'
'Excuse me,' he said.
'No, I won't,' I said. I was fired up. 'You haven't even spoken to me about what happened in the protest or what it was like getting locked up. You're my dad, right? I'm fourteen. You're the one I look at to see what I should be doing in this world and you won't even talk to me.'
'Well ...'
'You think you can tell me what to do and the way things should be done and you don't even know yourself. Do you know that there are people who stand up for what they believe but they don't go to jail or ignore their families? Why aren't you one of them?'
My dad was silent. I waited for him to get up and walk out. That's what he'd usually do. But he didn't. He just sat there looking out the dirty window towards the mangrove trees for what seemed like forever.
'I'm not a great talker. Never have been,' he said.
We were both quiet for a long time.
'I'll tell you about it one day,' he said. 'But when I'm ready. Not now, all right?'
He let out a breath and said, 'Come here.'
I stood, not really wanting to. I walked over to him. He handed me the spanner. 'Hold that there and twist it when I say,' he said. He chugged on the wheels again. 'Now,' he said. I twisted and he stopped pedalling.
'Tell me what happened this morning.'
So I did. I told him the whole thing. The aborted take-offs, the tangled lines, the cars reversing out, the smash on the dune.
'That explains why the frame's twisted,' he said. 'And the rear axle's slightly bent. When's your mate getting here?'
'After lunch. When he gets out of school,' I said. 'Can you fix the wing?'
'We'll take it to a shop. You never fix a wing by yourself. Too dangerous.'
'How much will it cost?' I asked him.
'Don't worry about that,' he said. 'Help me lift this off here, will you?'
37
Not A Great Night For Flying
By 2:36 p.m. a filthy storm was brewing. Major warnings. The worst we'd seen in ten years, they were saying. Hailstones the size of small rockmelons were already falling a couple of hours up the coast. Rooves peeled off houses like scabs off a knee. The wind lifted three pigs from a sty and dumped them on a freeway, causing a semi to smash. Pure evil in the sky and it was heading our way.
I pedalled the trike hard down Harper Lane and slipped down Styne. The feather that Mum had given me was taped to the handlebars. I needed all the good luck charms I could find. Paul was riding his skatey and my dad was on his beat-up bike somewhere across town. We'd split up but we were all heading to the same place – McMasters Beach. We had to be low-key. A trike like ours was not something you saw every day on the street. We needed to get it safely to its hiding place before school was out and Cat discovered what was going down.
There were only two ways to get to McMasters – the winding cliff road or riding the sand from beach to beach, taking advantage of low tide and weaving your way through the rocks. The cliff road was the only way for cars to get in or out of McMasters and news of some weird dude on a three-wheeler with riggings for a wing would get around that little community pretty fast. It was the kind of toy that even the rich, old dudes who lived at McMasters would cut off a limb to have a ride on.
I rolled down the boat ramp near The Rock, my jaw juddering up and down with the lumpy concrete. When I hit sand I tried to power through but it was too soft. So I jumped off, picked up the trike and made a beeline for the hard stuff.
Sand raged across the beach, pricking my legs like a thousand needles. I still had my school uniform on. No time to change. Our plan was to get into Cat's party somehow and find our camera. If I made it inside, I seriously needed some new clot
hes. Speed might've thought uniform was cool but two hundred kids at a party on Friday night might think differently.
It was pretty scary knowing that we still didn't have the cam. Worst case, we could use Paul's phone again but it was pretty bad in low light. The party was due to kick off at five so that Cat could submit her vlog for eight and then party into the night. We planned to hit the sky at seven, in front of the entire party, just as the sun was going down.
The water at the point was thick with surfers. The waves were over two metres and people were getting hammered.
I worked my way around the rocks on the sandy patches. At one stage I had to stop and climb over a treacherous stretch of jagged stuff but mostly it was smooth. I pedalled onto McMasters at 2:55 p.m., ducking in behind a clump of rocks at the bottom of my favourite sand dune. The surf was still massive round at McMasters but the wind wasn't so bad. In fact, it seemed almost too still.
I peered over the rocks. Cat's place was a hundred metres up the beach. I could see someone outside, either cleaning the pool or setting up for the party. Was Cat already home? Maybe she'd got off early, too. I imagined myself soaring over the party, the looks on everyone's faces.
I couldn't see if Dad and Paul were at the meeting place at the top of the hill yet. Sometimes it really didn't pay to have low-fi parents with a no mobile policy. What was the point of Paul having a phone if I didn't?
Five to three. Time to make a break for the hill. There'd be kids everywhere in ten minutes' time. The person up at Cat's looked my way. I ducked, waited a few seconds, then checked again. They were walking back inside. I quickly wheeled the bike around the rocks, along the bottom of the sand dune and up the stairs to the grass. Then I jumped on and pedalled up the road.
As I made it to the top, where McMaster's met the cliff road, I heard an 'Oi!' Paul and Dad were over to my left behind a row of pandanus trees. I heard a deep mechanical groan and looked up to see the school bus coming around the corner. Disaster. I rolled the trike into the treeline just as the bus swept past. The driver saw me but I didn't think any of the kids did. I spied Cat's head in the back seat but she didn't turn my way.
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