And, as the song fades, we collapse under the water in a group hug. Normally I would love this, but right now I can’t take my mind off the blank pages in my Passport. As we surface, I’m glad it’s dark in the pool and we are all soaking wet.
No one spots the tears rolling down my face.
6
‘Party over?’ Felicity says, walking over and sitting down at the edge of the pool.
I am floating on my back in the water, counting the stars. I pretend not to hear her. She kicks water onto my face. I cough and splutter and dive down to the bottom of the pool. I wish I could stay here. I wish she would go away. Maybe if I stay down here long enough she will.
She doesn’t.
When my lungs are about to burst I rise to the surface and find my smile. I paste it on. ‘Oh, hi, Fliss.’
‘Hi,’ she says. Then she bursts into tears.
I climb out of the pool and try to hug her, but she pushes me away. ‘You’re all wet.’
I dry myself as she continues to cry. When I’m sure most of the drips are gone, I sit down next to her and try to hug her again.
This time she lets me. ‘Oh, Paige,’ she sobs. ‘I really liked him.’
‘He wasn’t good enough for you,’ I tell her, copying what Mum always says to Felicity whenever she breaks up with someone. ‘If he can’t see how beautiful and caring and loving you are, then he’s a jerk.’
Felicity erupts into more sobs. I just sit there and wait for her to stop crying.
Eventually she calms down. ‘So how was your last day at primary school?’ she asks, scrubbing tears off her face with her fist.
I look at her in surprise. She never asks about me. ‘It was awful,’ I say. ‘I felt like I was invisible during the water fight, then when I got home, I realised my Passport had no——’
‘Our water fight was the best,’ Felicity interrupts, smiling. ‘I remember it was so hot that day even Mr Muir joined in. And then the assembly was awesome. Matthew Vosevski and I got our certificates first because we were the school captains. Mr Tovety went on and on about the good job I’d done and about how he didn’t know how I managed it, what with winning the state netball title, the regional swimming championships and the district debating final.’
I stare down at the pool. I don’t want my sister to see my tears.
She leans close to me and bumps her shoulder affectionately against mine. ‘It doesn’t get any better than that, Paige. High school sucks.’
As hard as I try, I can’t stop my shoulders from shuddering.
‘Hey,’ Felicity says, suddenly noticing the tears streaming down my face. ‘I didn’t mean it. High school is going to be fine. In fact, it’s going to be more than fine. Next year will be great. Different teachers. New school subjects. Different kids coming in from different schools.’
I start to brighten up.
‘And, as for me, I’ll find a new boyfriend, so don’t you worry about that, Paige,’ my sister adds. She kisses the top of my head and stands up.
‘I’m going to go and find my Passport,’ she announces. ‘Whenever I’m feeling down all I need to do is read that and it always cheers me up.’
I wait until she is gone, then I grab my Christmas bear and retrieve my Passport from under Dad’s magazines in the pool shed. In my bedroom, I bury the Passport at the bottom of my wardrobe. I should just throw it away, but I can’t. There are three lovely comments in there from my three best friends. They’re still important, even if those friends were making up for the fact no one else had written anything.
I shower the chlorine off my body, pull on my pyjamas and go to find my parents and kiss them goodnight.
They are deep in discussion in the lounge room. So deep that they don’t even hear me walk in. Mum is talking to Dad in a low, angry voice.
I try not to eavesdrop but it’s hard when I’m in the same room.
‘It’s your job,’ Mum hisses.
Dad stares at her for a moment. He has dark circles under his eyes and he looks tired. ‘It’s not just my job, Nic,’ he says. ‘That’s the whole problem.’
I cough. Mum and Dad look up.
‘Thanks for letting me have a party tonight,’ I say.
‘Did you have fun?’ Mum asks. ‘Sorry I didn’t get out there much, but I could see everything was under control.’
‘Yeah, it was great,’ I lie. ‘A great way to say goodbye to Juniper Bay Primary School.’
‘All good things come to an end, Paige,’ Dad says. My mother glances sharply at him.
I’d like to stay and talk to them a bit more, but I can tell I am interrupting something. Maybe Mum is cross because Dad has to work tomorrow. She always likes us to spend the first day of the holidays together as a family. I decide to leave them to it. ‘Well, goodnight,’ I say, kissing both of them on their flustered cheeks.
I plod back down the hallway and climb carefully into bed without chucking my teddy bears on the floor. I bury my face in the white synthetic fur of my new bear.
My empty Passport is the last thing I think about before falling asleep.
And my empty Passport is the first thing I think about when I wake up. I climb out of bed and fetch it from my wardrobe, thinking that maybe everything has just been a bad dream. But when I see the scuffed corners I know that it all happened.
Empty pages.
Empty Paige.
Mum, Dad and Felicity are still sleeping, so I go out to the pool and begin cleaning up the mess from last night. That’s one thing about me, anyway. I might be invisible half the time, but I’m always the one who tidies up after everyone else.
Two hours later there is still no sign of movement inside the house. Felicity often sleeps in until noon, but Mum and Dad are usually up by now. I tiptoe to their bedroom door and listen. I can’t hear anything, so I wander back up the hallway. I make myself a bowl of choco pops and sit down at the breakfast bar to eat them. It is only then that I see the note.
I’ve gone out for some fresh air. Don’t worry. I will be back.
Ian
I wonder why Dad made a point of saying he is coming back. Then I remember the fight he was having with Mum last night. He must be telling her that he isn’t going into work today after all.
After breakfast I decide to go out for some fresh air, too. I put on my swimsuit under a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. I slip my feet into my old rubber thongs and squash a cap over my hair.
I let myself out the front door and walk past the park at the end of my street. Then I turn along the road that winds down to my old school. I stop outside the fence near the basketball court. The school is empty. Even the garbage bins have been collected and locked up under the buildings so that vandals have nothing to use as missiles. I try to remember all the fun I had at Juniper Bay Primary School, but all I can think about is yesterday, and my empty Passport and how horrible everything was.
I cross the road and trudge the last two blocks to the beach. It is a smile-shaped beach with white sand. Green headlands rise up to the north and south. Norfolk Island pines have been planted at regular intervals along the paved promenade. The car park behind the surf club and the cafe is almost empty, despite it being a warm day. People must have already left for their summer holidays or be doing their last-minute Christmas shopping.
The tourists don’t arrive in Juniper Bay until Boxing Day. That’s when the carnival sets up on the south headland. The caravan parks become packed and the smell of fish and chips and salt and grease fills the air. My family loves summer in Juniper Bay and we never go on holidays at this time of year. ‘Why swap one beach for another?’ Mum always says.
I am hot and exhausted from my long walk and all I want to do is throw myself into the sparkling turquoise water. But then I spy some of the kids from school spreading out their towels on the sand inside the flagged area. I pull my cap down and hurry past them. I can’t face talking to them now I know how unimportant they think I am.
I leave the beach and, after a while of aimless wande
ring through the streets, I take my phone out and text Elfi.
Fancy hanging out for a bit before your rellies arrive? I text, thinking that maybe I’ll pluck up the courage to tell Elfi about my empty Passport if I can see her without the others. Maybe she’ll be able to explain why everyone thinks I am invisible.
But when I press the send button, my phone bleeps at me, and a message flashes up on the screen. Message sending failed, it reads, and I remember that I am out of credit.
I decide to head over to Elfi’s house anyway.
Ping! Ping! Ping! I stand under the window on Elfi’s back lawn and toss three dried-up seed pods at her bedroom window. It is our secret signal. She does the same when she comes to my house and wants to talk without having to answer Mum’s questions about how her parents are.
The window slides open after the third hit. A large woman in a white nightdress glares down at me. ‘Ja?’ she says.
The German relatives have already arrived.
‘Oh, um … I’m very sorry,’ I begin.
A second woman and a third come to the window. They are also wearing nightclothes, even though it is now eleven o’clock in the morning.
‘Guten Tag,’ I say in my best and only German. ‘Is Elfi home?’
Five small dishevelled heads pop up in front of the women at the window. They point and giggle. ‘Elfi, Elfi,’ they squeal.
The first woman turns her back. ‘Elfreda!’ she calls, and then says something in German that I don’t understand.
Elfi’s mother comes to the window. ‘Paige,’ she says, ‘I thought Elfi told you she is busy all holidays.’
‘Yes, Mrs Guttenheim, she did,’ I say. ‘And I’m very sorry to interrupt, but I really need to see her.’
‘No, Paige. She has family here, all the way from Germany. Plane-lagged family. And you’ve woken them.’
‘I’m very sorry about that, but … but it’s important.’
‘No,’ Mrs Guttenheim says. ‘If I let you see Elfi today, you’ll be around here every day and she’ll never get to know her cousins.’
‘Just five minutes, please?’ I plead.
‘Sorry, Paige,’ Mrs Guttenheim says. She slides the window closed.
I can see Elfi in the room behind her. Her shoulders and hands are raised in a shrug. She dares to lift a finger in a wave before her mother tugs the curtains across.
I walk back up Elfi’s driveway. Suddenly the bathroom window slides open.
‘Paige,’ Elfi hisses.
‘Hi,’ I whisper. ‘Full house?’
‘Yeah,’ Elfi says. ‘It’s mad. What are you doing here? Are you bored with the holidays already?’
‘I … I wanted to talk to you about school. About our Passports.’
Elfi glances behind her. ‘What about them?’
‘Well, mine was …’ I don’t know how to say the words.
‘Elfreda!’ Elfi’s mum calls from somewhere in the house.
Elfi jumps. ‘Coming, Mum.’ She begins to slide the window closed again. ‘I’m sorry, Paige. I can’t talk now. Maybe if you come over in a couple of weeks my mum might let me out for good behaviour.’
I nod and wave my fingers feebly, but Elfi has already gone.
I walk back home again, feeling stupid and invisible. Suddenly I bend down and scoop a small sharp stone from the ground. I pull back my right arm and hurl it at a telegraph pole as hard as I can. It pings off the sun-hardened wood and skips across the road, coming to a stop in the gutter on the other side.
I hit it! It doesn’t make me feel any better, though. I inspect the dent the stone left in the pole. You can barely see it. I have not left a mark at all.
7
Felicity looks like she has just stumbled out of bed when I get home. Her eyelids are puffy, as though she has been crying all night, and her hair is a mess. She sits down at the kitchen bench, her chin in her hands.
‘Thank goodness you’re home, Paige,’ she says.
I smile at her, glad that I’ve been missed.
‘Can you decorate the pool area for me?’ she continues. ‘Dad was going to help me, but he’s gone into work this afternoon, after all. I can’t do it because I’ve totally overslept and now I have to lie down with cucumber slices on my eyes.’ She slides a box of crepe paper and other decorations towards me.
‘Sure, Fliss.’ I wander past the spare room on the way to my bedroom. The door is closed but the smell of sandalwood incense tells me Mum is in there. I wonder if she is cross that Dad went into work when he said he wouldn’t.
I sit out at the table by the pool all afternoon, cutting up green and brown crepe paper. Then I wrap it around the pool fence so that it looks like jungle vines.
Felicity brings out a box of toys. ‘Arrange them carefully,’ she says.
I toss rubber snakes and crocodiles into the pool. I place stuffed tigers, monkeys and parrots in the pot plants. At the bottom of the box is a panda. I attach it to the paling fence that marks where the end of our yard backs onto the yard of our neighbour, Mrs Johannssen, who lives in the next street.
Felicity comes out in the late afternoon dressed in a tiger-print bikini. She looks really cool and she has straightened her hair so that it is as sleek and smooth as a brand-new Barbie doll’s. Her eyes are outlined in black pencil that sweeps up in the outside corners, making her look like a cat. And her fingernails and toenails have been painted orange.
‘You look amazing,’ I tell her.
She glances around the pool yard. Her eyes rest on the rubber snakes in the pool. ‘They’re tree snakes, not water snakes,’ she says.
‘Do you want me to get them out?’
She sniffs, then says, ‘I just want everything to be perfect.’
So I sit on the edge of the pool and sweep the water towards me with my hand. The snakes just bob about in the middle of the pool. Felicity watches me. She looks so sad. I take off my shorts and my t-shirt and ease myself into the pool in my swimsuit. I swim over to the snakes. I grab them, hop out and wrap them around the pool gate with their tongues poking out at anyone who enters.
‘You’ll have to get changed now,’ Felicity says.
‘Why?’
‘Because you can’t serve the food and drinks at my party if you’re dripping wet.’
‘I’m allowed to come to your party?’
‘Of course. Go and put on your khaki shorts and that khaki t-shirt. You can be the game warden, keeping the animals fed and watered.’
I jump up and down and go to hug her. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’
Felicity pushes me back before my arms reach her. ‘You’re all wet, Paige.’
I rush inside to get ready. I can’t believe I’m invited to my sister’s pool party! She is the most popular girl on the planet. If anyone can give me some tips on how to get noticed and be liked, then it’s Felicity and her friends.
As I am getting changed I hear some girls laughing and walking down the side path outside my room.
I run back out of my bedroom and bump into Dad, who has just come home. ‘Slow down, safari girl,’ he says. ‘What’s the rush?’
‘I’ve got to serve food and drinks at Felicity’s party,’ I tell him as we walk down the hallway together. ‘And the animals are starting to arrive.’
‘You have fun then, Poss,’ Dad says.
‘Maybe you could help me, Dad? Fliss invited her whole class.’
Dad sighs and loosens his tie. ‘I’m a bit tired. I’ll come out later.’
I watch as he goes into the kitchen and sits down at the bench, his head in his hands.
When I get back outside, four girls have arrived at the party. Like Felicity, they are dressed in animal-print bikinis. One is lion print, another is zebra print, a third one is cheetah print and the last is leopard print.
Mum is at the table in the pool area, preparing jugs of punch.
‘It’s like a safari out here!’ I say to her, and grab one of the jugs.
Mum smiles. ‘Thanks for
serving the guests, love.’
I walk towards Felicity’s friends, but I hesitate before I get there. I don’t know what to say to these high-school girls.
‘Justin is so-o-o gorgeous,’ the girl in the leopard-print bikini is saying to the others.
‘Well, tonight you could sink your claws into him, Christy,’ says the girl in the zebra-print costume. They all laugh.
‘Well, I’m going to pounce on Adam tonight,’ says the girl in lion print. ‘I’m just wild about him.’
‘But, Skye, he’s with Felicity,’ the girl in the cheetah print says.
‘Not any more,’ says Skye.
‘Really?’ the girls say.
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ Skye says. ‘You know how Felicity never says anything. But I think something happened yesterday.’
I take a few steps closer to the girls. ‘Punch?’ I manage to say.
‘Thanks,’ the girl called Christy says. She takes a glass and studies me briefly. ‘Are you Felicity’s sister?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m Paige.’
‘I didn’t even know she had a sister,’ says Skye. ‘She must keep you a secret.’
I nod and smile, feeling silly.
‘So, speaking of secrets,’ Christy says to me, ‘is it true that Adam dumped Felicity?’
I glance across at Felicity, but she is greeting some boys who have just arrived.
‘Come on,’ Skye says. ‘You can tell us. We’re Felicity’s friends. We just want to help her.’ She puts her arm around me and draws me into the circle.
I look up at the tall, beautiful, confident high-school girls.
‘No,’ I whisper. ‘Felicity dumped him.’
The girls gasp. ‘Why? What happened?’
All eyes are on me. I feel like a spy who’s been caught with top-secret information. The girls are looking at me with interest. ‘Um … she caught him kissing someone else.’
‘Who? Who?’ The girls sound like owls. They crowd towards me.
I catch Felicity staring at me. She jerks her head towards the boys who are throwing their gear beside the potted palm on the decking. Then she heads off to greet the next bunch of girls who have just walked through the pool gate.
Give Me Four Reasons Page 4