by Micol Ostow
“Oh…that makes more sense.” Eliza paused for a moment as all of the conversations she’d had so far that day came rushing back to her. She felt her cheeks flood with color. “I was wondering why everyone was asking me that. I told one person I was going by foot….” She rolled her eyes at her own lameness.
Jess laughed and turned to Nomes. “And you let her just humiliate herself?”
Nomes shrugged. “It was dead priceless.”
Jess laughed again. “No worries,” she chirped, clapping Eliza on the back, “you’ll catch on.”
“So you’re trading with Billie Echols, right?”
“Yeah, I’m staying with her family here.”
“They’re in Toorak, right?” Nomes asked.
“Nah, South Yarra, I think,” Jess replied.
Eliza honestly couldn’t remember, and just shrugged her shoulders as she ate a slice of apple.
“I don’t know for sure, but they’re nice enough, and Billie and I traded a couple e-mails as well,” she said.
“Yeah, they’re good people.” Jess nodded. “We all went to middle school together, but Billie’s kind of into the whole eco-warrior thing—she’s always off at rallies or getting people to sign petitions for the ‘Save the Wombat’ or whatever. It’s good stuff, just gets to be a bit much sometimes, I guess. That’s her best mate Val over there.” Jess pointed to a girl sitting a couple tables away who was wearing her uniform with Crocs. With socks underneath.
Dad’s going to love Billie, Eliza realized. They’ll be able to talk “Save the Whales” for hours. While Billie definitely wasn’t part of Jess’s group, Eliza also realized that St. Catherine’s was a pretty small school, and everyone seemed to know everyone else pretty well.
“Billie’s dad is a riot, isn’t he?” asked Nomes. “He’s a bit of a bogan turned city boy.”
“What’s a bogan?” asked Eliza.
“Someone from the country.”
Eliza nodded, trying to commit the new slang term to memory.
The rest of lunch was spent talking about boys and shopping—two subjects Eliza felt very at home with, even if she didn’t know the boys in question. It seemed that there were several boys’ schools in Melbourne and that the girls had a pretty elaborate ranking system of where the cutest guys were.
It also turned out that the Echolses lived in a great location, near one of the best shopping areas, and the girls all made a plan to spend some time over the weekend exploring the finer points of Chapel Street’s stores.
Eliza decided that, as first days went, this one had been pretty successful.
Over the course of her first week, Eliza slowly began to feel more at home with her schedule and her surroundings. She learned how to take the tram to and from school each morning and would meet up with Jess each day a couple of stops from her own so that they could chat the whole way to school. Eliza found that she had some precious information about what was happening on upcoming seasons of TV shows like Gossip Girl and Lost because they hadn’t aired down under yet. By the end of the week, she felt really comfortable with Jess and Nomes.
At lunch on Friday, Eliza was hoping she’d be invited to do something fun with them over the weekend when she remembered that she was going to have to start her internship on Saturday.
“This totally sucks,” Eliza moaned as she bit into her tuna fish sandwich. “I can’t believe that I have to spend my whole Saturday at this stupid internship.”
“Well, the orientation is this Saturday, but usually it won’t be, right?” asked Nomes, who was eyeing her tray of cafeteria food with great suspicion.
“Not sure. Some of it’s going to be after school on Wednesdays, but we’ll have to do a couple of full days over the weekend here and there,” Eliza replied dejectedly. “I have to do the environmental internship because of my dad, but I guess it could be worse—after all, it’s a day down at the beach, right?”
Jess and Nomes chuckled.
“What?” Eliza implored.
“Nothing, nothing at all. You’ll have a rippa’ at the beach!” Jess said with a toothy grin.
When Eliza had pictured Australian beaches, she’d imagined a tropical paradise lined with gently swaying palm trees and possibly an Australian lifeguard hottie to play Frisbee with or to help her apply her suntan lotion.
But what Eliza got instead was a rocky coastline in the port of Melbourne backlit by factories with not a palm tree in sight.
And the lifeguard? Oh no, there was no such hottie. Instead, there was Mr. Winstone, a thin man in his fifties with a bushy mustache, hairy earlobes, and a very questionable enthusiasm for unpleasant work and unpleasant weather.
The other problem was that since she’d been in Melbourne, the weather had not climbed above about 10 degrees Celsius. Ten degrees Celsius itself didn’t mean much to Eliza, but a little Googling determined that, in fact, it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit that day at the “beach.” So therefore it was more like a sandy, surfy tundra. A sandy, surfy, rainy tundra. It was the middle of winter, after all.
But interning waited for no exchange student, and thus Eliza found herself standing on a cold, windswept rocky beach under gray clouds, wearing rubber waders and a rain slicker and holding a plastic collection jar in one hand.
This stinks. Eliza was shivering down to her waders.
“Four seasons in a day we get ’round here,” Mr. Winstone said with a wink.
“Really…that’s amazing. All four?” It was amazing. In a bad way.
She glared at her collection jar. Apparently part of her responsibilities included taking soil samples and testing them for mineral levels, which would determine the rate of potential erosion. In all honesty, it was a nice counterpoint to the work Eliza’s father was doing at the EPA, which, while all about the environment, didn’t seem to involve much time spent in the environment.
“Now make sure you try to get at least one jar of each of the types of soils listed on your sample sheet, okay?” Mr. Winstone reminded Eliza and the four other students. “You’ll be collecting from different areas of the shoreline so that we can compare and contrast. I’ll then take all the samples back to the lab, and we’ll get a better picture of how pollution is affecting the erosion of our ocean ecosystem—including the creatures that live all through the tidal zones of the bay.”
Eliza spent her day scraping grains of sand into glass jars, trying her best to muster up the enthusiasm the other interns seemed to have. But eco-warrior she was not, and by the time it was over, she was soaked through with rain and seawater and chilled to the bone.
It wasn’t the worst day of her life, but one thing was for sure: there was no way she was going to get a tan of any sort if this kept up.
At least the weather was only going to get better as the semester went along. All she had to do was look at the palm trees that lined the edge of the bay and think warm thoughts.
“Oh, you poor dear. Let me get you a cuppa and some bickies while you get changed into some warm clothes,” Estelle cooed when she saw Eliza standing in the kitchen sopping wet.
After she’d changed into fresh clothes and warmed herself over a cup of mint tea, Eliza started to feel a bit more like a human being. Her fingers were less numb, though they still looked like prunes.
She decided to ask Estelle about something that had been on her mind all day. “Who planted those palm trees by the boardwalk that we passed in the car?” she asked.
Those were lying palm trees. Trees that made you think a beach was a place of sun, warmth, cute boys, and volleyballs. Those palm trees were an insidious form of false advertising by very sick people—that was for sure.
“You mean in St. Kilda?”
“Yes, I think so. That was a joke, right? I mean, palm trees aren’t really native to the area, are they? They were planted by the tourist office or something to convince the world that it’s warm and sunny all the time, right?” Call her paranoid, but Eliza suspected a conspiracy at work. How else would she have ended up
doing her impression of a drowned wombat with the rest of the environmental crusaders?
Estelle laughed. “I suppose it’s possible. Rose-colored glasses and the like. But just you wait until things warm up and we head down to Sorrento; it’s magnificent. Hang in there, and the winter will be over soon.”
Eliza drew another sip of her tea, quiet and thoughtful.
Not soon enough, she decided. Not at all.
Chapter Six
It was bright and early on Saturday morning when Billie cautiously peeled open her eyes. She allowed herself a suspicious glance at the digital alarm clock on the night-stand: 9:30. That meant it was…hmm…around eleven at night back home. No wonder she felt like she’d been hit by a train.
At first, she had no idea why she was even awake—clearly, her internal clock had gone completely screwy from her journey. Then she realized what had roused her: it was the static-y murmur of talk radio floating up into the bedroom from the kitchen.
The Ritters were up. And apparently, eager-beaver early birds. Mrs. Ritter was almost like a caricature of herself. Even her morning radio was no-nonsense.
Groaning, Billie reluctantly sat up and swung her legs around onto the floor. On a scale of one to ten, her desire to be up was something like a two. She knew it was smarter to pull herself out of bed now, though. The harder she was on herself, the faster the jet lag would be over.
She dressed quickly in her track pants, trainers, and a hooded sweatshirt, hoping to head out for a run. From what she’d been able to tell the night before, D.C. was a bit more humid than she was used to. Thank goodness she wasn’t the type to fuss all that much about her appearance; a swipe of lippie and a finger-comb of the hair, and she was good to go.
Downstairs, she was pleased to find Mr. Ritter manning a frying pan. Frying pans were usually good news.
“I figured you might be homesick,” he said, seeing Billie come into the room, “so I thought I’d scramble you some bangers and mash.”
“Thanks heaps, Mr. Ritter,” Billie said appreciatively, “but…actually…aren’t bangers and mash English?”
“Could be,” Mr. Ritter responded cheerily. “To be totally honest, I’m not even really sure what they are. So I was just going to give you some scrambled eggs and toast and keep my fingers crossed.”
Billie giggled. “Scrambled eggs sounds perfect. A proper American brekkie.” She took her seat at the table and glanced across it to where Mrs. Ritter was drinking from a mug almost as large as a dinner plate. It looked as though the mug was brimming with black coffee, and she didn’t appear to be eating anything.
“Aren’t you going to have some?” Billie asked, spearing up a healthy portion of the eggs that Mr. Ritter slid in front of her.
Mrs. Ritter shook her head quickly, making a face that suggested that eating breakfast was a sin on the scale of baby snatching, jaywalking, or indulging in full-fat frozen yogurt. “I’m off to yoga in a minute. Can’t work out on a full stomach.”
“Yup,” Mr. Ritter chimed in. “It’s a regular old Saturday here at the homestead. The missus has yoga, and I’ve got to head in to work.”
Wow. Billie was amazed. Mr. Ritter really was every bit as hardworking and idealistic as she had assumed. She was so thrilled to have the chance to work in his organization—and possibly even alongside of him—this summer!
“Is there anything that I can do?” Billie asked brightly. “I mean, I know that the internship doesn’t start properly until Monday, but if you’d like a shadow in the office today, I’d love to be of help.”
“Nonsense,” Mr. Ritter proclaimed. “After the internship starts in earnest, you’re going to miss having your weekends. You should enjoy yourself while you still can.”
Billie nodded. “There were a few things I was hoping to see.” She blushed, thinking of her guidebook stashed away in a desk drawer upstairs. The thing had so many highlights and colored stickies it looked more like a maths textbook.
Okay, so maybe she was a little bit gung ho about this program. She was a nerd in crunchy clothing. What was wrong with that?
“Well, why not start at the top and work your way down?” Mr. Ritter suggested. “My office is on the Hill, so I can give you a lift.”
Billie knew that “the Hill” was short for Capitol Hill, which was where many of the important government buildings were located. It was definitely the number one stop on her self-guided tour of the area.
She grinned broadly at Mr. Ritter. “Ace,” she said. “As long as there’s time for me to take a quick run beforehand, you’ve got a deal.”
After Billie and Mr. Ritter parted company, she gave some thought to where she might like to visit this afternoon. It was yet another crisp fall day, and so her love of the outdoors won out. Therefore, a stroll across the mall was called for.
She glanced at her dog-eared guidebook, embarrassed at looking like a gawking tourist. She read that the Mall had been officially established in 1965, which was funny to think, since in her mind, the image of the vast expanse of grass was synonymous with Washington, D.C., itself. It was hard to imagine that there’d ever been a time without it.
Billie smiled and took in the cloudless blue sky and the crisp snap in the fall air. She was so excited she thought she might jump up and down, but realized how silly she’d look if she did. She felt lame. Totally and completely lame.
She had good reason to feel that way; at the moment, in addition to the goofy smile she had plastered across her face, she was being twenty different types of conspicuous, the way she kept glancing at her guidebook, and squinting across the lush lawn. She had a sudden urge to peel off her socks and shoes and run across it barefoot, but she had a feeling that that would really make her stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Not to mention, it was possibly illegal.
I’m practically begging to be pickpocketed, she decided at last, coming to her senses and remembering that she’d read D.C. could be dangerous. She stashed her guidebook back into her messenger bag before something was nicked, and resolved to find her way around through sheer determination. The Washington Monument reared up in the distance on the far end of the Mall, framed in Billie’s view like an image from a postcard. She headed across the Mall and toward it. That much, at least, she could handle without a guidebook.
At first, Billie thought that the most exciting thing she’d seen in D.C. was the exterior of the White House (apparently you needed to book a tour of the interior in advance, which she planned to do as soon as she could). Then she visited the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and laid her eyes on the original ruby slippers that Judy Garland had worn in the movie The Wizard of Oz. So for a while, that was number one on her list of amazing sights. Then she wandered through the International Spy Museum, where she had a chance to develop her own spy “alias” and cover story, which immediately bumped the ruby slippers out of the running.
Eventually, Billie had to admit to herself that, all in all, her first weekend in D.C. had been fairly fantastic and there was no use in putting absolutes on the experience when it’d all been great, anyway.
Also great was a run-of-the-mill Starbucks in Dupont Circle, which proved very useful in combating Billie’s incredibly persistent jet lag. She’d been jogging to Starbucks on two consecutive mornings now before the sun rose too high in the sky, relishing the alone time, the fresh air—and the java fix.
Now it was Monday, and Billie’s first day at Fairlawn Academy. She had no idea what to expect. Back in Melbourne, Billie attended St. Catherine’s. St. Cat’s was all-girls, and had a required uniform. Billie longed for that uniform right about now. She had tried on three separate outfits this morning, worrying about her fashion sense, and becoming extra sensitive when she realized she was now trying to impress both the girls and the guys.
She finally settled on a denim skirt, boots, and a long-sleeved polo shirt. It was a uniform of sorts itself in that it looked like something any other American girl might wear. Or so Billie thought. She
supposed she’d just have to wait and see.
She arrived at school early; she was laid-back like the typical Aussie, but she was responsible, as well, and she didn’t want to miss her S.A.S.S. orientation conference, which was scheduled for eight-thirty sharp.
She congratulated herself on her punctuality as she made her way to the guidance counselor’s office on the first floor, only to discover that the guidance counselor in question looked as though he’d been in his seat, at his desk, waiting on her, for at least the last ten years. Although of course that couldn’t possibly have been the case, something about his pallor and his heavy-lidded gaze suggested he, in fact, spent most of his time in his office.
“Ah, you must be Belinda.” A slight man, he pushed his horn-rimmed glasses farther up the bridge of his nose as he peered at her over a sheet of paper. She knew the paper was some sort of background information on her, and she wondered what else, aside from her name, it might say.
“That’s me,” she said. “G’day. But everyone back home calls me Billie.”
Her accent, which she’d never noticed much before, now sounded thick and exaggerated, like a record played at the wrong speed.
“Well, welcome to Fairlawn, Billie,” he amended affably. “I’m Eric Roger, and I’m the guidance counselor here at school. I also oversee our S.A.S.S. Goes Green program.
“I’ve prepared a handbook to help you acclimate,” he continued, passing Billie an immense sheaf of paper.
Handbook? It looked more like a telephone book, it was so thick. Billie didn’t want to be ungrateful, but she already had a binder full of papers from S.A.S.S. Were they trying to smother her with a crush of flyers?
“The one thing that I’d like to stress to you is that Fairlawn may be very different from what you’re used to back home. We’re a progressive liberal arts school, which means that many of our students are artists of one form or another. We have a strong interdisciplinary program featuring dance, creative writing, music, and drama, in addition to the general education requirements of the state.”