Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  ‘She did, eventually,’ said Joel. ‘At about three in the morning. Fran spent hours at the stupid afterparty at Belinda’s before she made up some story about her dad coming to get her and walked all the way from Belinda’s along the highway in her heels and her long red dress.’

  There was a pause. Over the course of the conversation, Joel Morland had gone from looking sorrowful to bitter.

  ‘Did she … ?’ I couldn’t contain my curiosity. ‘I mean, how serious did it get with Rob?’

  ‘Fran swore to me nothing that serious ever happened,’ said Joel, draining his Coke. ‘Anyway, they’ve broken up now.’ He stirred the ice cubes left over in the glass with a swizzle stick, then looked up at me. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m weird for telling you all of this. It’s this bar and being back here – and, you know, Sophie, I would do anything to get her back. Anything.’

  ‘I appreciate your trust,’ I said. I noticed that I’d been gripping my pendant too hard again. When I released my hand from it, studs of the silver casing were pressed red into my palm. I had to break this habit, or I was going to end up with another hand injury.

  ‘Why’d you ask me how she was?’ I asked. ‘You see her in Maths every day.’

  ‘She just pretends I’m not there,’ said Joel, popping an ice cube from his glass into his mouth.

  ‘Have you seriously not spoken to her since that night?’

  Joel shook his head and laughed coldly. ‘We were still seeing one another until six weeks ago,’ he said. ‘But since then—’ He crunched an ice cube in his mouth, ‘—nothing.’

  14

  We waved goodbye to the Cool Breezes Bar and the Cabana Bar beyond it, and finally headed towards the elevator.

  Joel sighed as he punched in the ‘up’ button, and I subtly surveyed his face. There was a deep crease in his forehead and I half-wondered if it had been caused by his troubles with Fran. He had gentle eyes, Joel, clean pink skin and babyish lips. I could see he had an athlete’s body, and I wondered what he’d look like if he ever cut his hair. Would Nikki then transition him from ‘total loser’ to the all-forgiving ‘hot’?

  A bell announced the elevator and when the doors slid open, we got in.

  ‘You going to school tomorrow?’ he asked me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Maybe I’ll go, then,’ he said, smiling.

  I smiled back. It had been nice to hang out with someone – and perversely wonderful to learn more about the sins of Satanic Fran.

  He started to say ‘So tomorrow—’ when the elevator came to my stop.

  As I stepped out of the elevator, I heard Joel hold the door open and step out after me. I turned around. The look on his face made me nervous. Last time I’d seen a boy look at me like that, my street had caught fire.

  ‘You won’t—’ he said with a nervous smile. ‘You’re not going to say anything to the girls, are you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Thanks, Sophie.’

  He smiled again, but he didn’t move. Half of me wanted to kiss the crease on his pink forehead and tell him it was all going to be all right. The other half of me stood paralysed with fear that after spending hours telling me how much he was in love with Fran, he was going to try to kiss me. He stood and looked at me, blushing and smiling.

  ‘It was nice hanging out, Joel,’ I said, in the calmest, most unsexy voice I had.

  A door was opened and there was Dad, his ear pressed to my mobile phone, but speaking at me.

  ‘It’s perfect timing, Lauren – I thought I heard her in the corridor and she’s right here,’ he said. ‘Soph, Lauren’s really excited about something and she wants to speak to you urgently.’

  ‘I’ll see you on the bus!’ I said to Joel, and I scurried towards the room.

  15

  Lauren was talking so rapidly I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. It didn’t help that the television in the hotel room was on as well. Dad closed the door behind me and pointed towards a Yarrindi Show T-shirt that he’d laid out on my bed.

  ‘Hey, is that you they’re talking about on the news?’ asked Lauren.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is that what this is about?’

  ‘No—’ she said, but the rest of her answer was lost in noise.

  ‘Just give me a second,’ I said. ‘I’m going into the bathroom so I can hear you.’ I grabbed the T-shirt, walked into the bathroom, closed the door and had my dress unzipped before I sat on the closed toilet seat and said, ‘Okay, shoot,’ into the mobile phone.

  ‘My mother has finally lost it with me!’ she said, joyous. ‘It’s the best day ever! I told her that I didn’t want to stay in Canberra next weekend and she went nuts. It’s not like she’d even booked the hotel room but she did this big speech about planning for my future and being prepared and just to see how far I could push her I turned around and said, “Actually, I’m kind of losing interest in the law. I’m thinking I’d like to go to drama school and pursue a career in musical theatre,” and—’

  I interrupted. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I’d rather eat glass,’ said Lauren with a snort. ‘Of course I’m going to law school, I just wanted to see how she’d react. She exploded! It was hilarious! Anyway – this is the best bit, this is the crucial bit – she gets on the phone to Lucy and accuses her of being this professional bad influence, which is the standard trick. You know, I worked out it’s how she manipulates me, by making me feel like my choices are responsible for upsetting Lucy, this whole divide-and-conquer thing, but that’s not the point. The point is – get this – the point is that Lucy actually phones me and tells me she thinks it’s wonderful that I want to go to drama school and she knows all these film people and she’ll do anything she can to help me out! So while we were having this big, completely bogus heart to heart, I mention that I really need some time away from Mum and the upshot is you and I are going to Lucy’s sinful, sinful burlesque party and we are staying the night in Lucy’s flat in Potts Point!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Totally by ourselves – Lucy’s staying at her new boyfriend’s place in Darlinghurst,’ said Lauren. ‘So next Saturday – if I don’t die of boredom after five whole days in Canberra – you are coming up to Sydney with a suitcase full of all your new clothes because if I am going to be involved in something that could potentially destroy Mum’s relationship with Lucy when she finds out about it, I want to be dressed a whole lot of awesome. But I’ve got to go – Mum’s coming.’

  16

  The next morning I wore my Yarrindi Show T-shirt over my pink dress when I went down for breakfast and collected yesterday’s clothes from the laundry. Changing in front of the mirror, I had a momentary panic that I didn’t have my look right. With only fifteen minutes until the shuttle bus was leaving for school, I did something I knew was either brilliant or insane: for the first time in my life, I brushed my hair into a side ponytail.

  I emerged from the bathroom and kissed Dad goodbye.

  I spent the whole elevator ride considering that if the cool group dropped me on the basis of my ponytail, at least I could spend lunchtimes in the Senior Quad and talk about Archaeobotany with Gretchen.

  Downstairs a group of kids were already waiting for the shuttle bus. Joel was amongst them, in his black T-shirt. ‘I was hoping you’d be wearing the dress,’ he said, walking up to me. ‘Nice pony.’

  I smiled, and gave my hair a confident flick. ‘I thought if it looked stupid I could always plead fire trauma.’

  There were maybe twenty kids of high school age waiting for the bus. Most of them were wearing their Yarrindi Show T-shirts and badly fitting jeans that I guessed had come from the charity store. On the one hand, you could see the relief of kids released from close quarters with their parents; on the other, everyone looked really uncomfortable in their clothes. I saw one of the junior boys who’d had such a great time at school calling me ‘Strippah!’ looking sheepish in his new attire and I couldn’t restrain my sunny smile from be
coming a dark grin.

  Hotel staff handed out ‘snack packs’ in drawstring plastic bags, and we were each given one of the branded hotel pens and a writing pad to get us through the school day. Beyond the glass doors of reception we could see the bus arrive and were ushered towards it. I expected that my first breath of outdoor air would be a lungful of smoke, but I couldn’t smell or taste anything.

  Joel must have thought the same thing. ‘That’s the wind from last night,’ he said. I looked towards the escarpment at the western edge of Yarrindi, where our house was. Above that, I could see a faint haze of smoke, but otherwise the sky was nothing worse than a muted blue.

  Joel and I sat next to one another on the bus. As we trundled along the entire length of the beachside car park, I turned away from the window so I wouldn’t have to look at the rotunda as we passed it. We were exchanging mobile phone numbers when Joel’s attention snapped from our conversation. ‘Did you see that?’ he exclaimed, stabbing his finger at something behind me.

  I swivelled around but all I saw was the park and the distant sea.

  ‘What?’ I said, turning back to Joel. His head was bobbing as he tried to locate what he’d just seen.

  ‘Next to the bus – about a metre away,’ he said, his eyes searching. ‘There was this enormous crow flying right next to us. Man, that was the biggest crow I’ve ever seen!’

  17

  Nikki was standing in her usual place by the school gate when the shuttle bus came to a stop, but she was there alone. As Joel and I disembarked and walked towards her, I saw she was shovelling food into her mouth with ritual enthusiasm.

  ‘Oh my God! Cute outfit!’ she cried though a mouthful of burger. ‘Loving the pony!’

  Joel and I swapped mutual smirks and I tossed my hair with the confidence of Nikki’s approval.

  ‘Hey, I didn’t know you were caught up in the fire,’ she said. It was as if Joel wasn’t there – and he knew it.

  ‘I’ll see you up there,’ he said to me, firing Nikki a sour stare as he walked away.

  ‘See you there!’ I called after him.

  A couple of seconds passed. ‘Joel Morland’s a loser, you know,’ said Nikki.

  ‘He was someone to talk to at the hotel,’ I said.

  ‘Did he talk about Fran?’

  My face was the blank I’d been practising all week.

  ‘You know that he’s totally mad obsessed with her,’ she continued, chewing. ‘They went to the movies once in Year 8 and since then it’s been freaky stalker behaviour. I reckon she should shop him to the cops. He tells anyone who’ll listen that they’re, like, secretly going out.’ She gave a vicious giggle. ‘As if!’

  This was interesting. ‘He didn’t mention her,’ I lied.

  Nikki bit her burger and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Mostly,’ I said, ‘we talked about road-biking.’

  ‘I would have rather stayed with the fire and burned to death.’

  ‘Where’s everyone else?’ I asked. I’d noticed that students arriving at the school weren’t lurking but going straight into the buildings.

  ‘It’s because of the stupid smoke,’ she told me. ‘Like, I can barely smell it, but the teachers want everyone inside – everyone except me, because they don’t want me bringing hot food indoors. They’d much rather I died of smoke inhalation. Hags. I don’t reckon they’ll let us out at recess or lunch either.’

  ‘I’ll stay with you,’ I said.

  Nikki made a grunt of thanks. ‘You still haven’t told me how you got caught up in the fire. You were supposed to be at that thing in Sydney.’

  ‘I got the dates mixed up,’ I said. ‘It’s actually this weekend.’

  Nikki stopped eating, and her burger was motionless in space. ‘So why didn’t you come to Belinda’s?’

  My hand, of course, was on my pendant. ‘Oh, you know. My nanna’s still in hospital, and we were up in Sydney …’

  Nikki grabbed me by the arm. ‘Was it because she made such a big deal about you not coming?’

  A miracle effort of pendant-clutching prevented me from saying, ‘No, it’s because Belinda is a festering swamp demon.’ I transmuted my restraint into a wilting look.

  ‘She is so out of line,’ shrieked Nikki. ‘You’re new. You’re in our group. She is supposed to make you feel welcome. She should have been on the phone to you—’ Nikki’s eyes widened with an anxious snort. ‘Do you think she made that big deal about you not coming deliberately? That she didn’t want you there even if you could have come?’

  ‘She’s got no reason,’ I said, tasting poison.

  ‘It’s the Garth thing,’ Nikki said, nodding her head as she scrunched the burger wrapping into a ball. ‘There was some stupid …’ she grasped for the word, ‘… miscommunication thing going on and she’s totally trying to punish you. Ryan even said—’ Nikki looked so angry I couldn’t believe it was on my behalf.

  She was deep in thought when the bell made its shrill ring and we both started walking towards class. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ve got until recess to think of something. Where are you fourth period?’

  ‘Art.’

  ‘Which room?’

  ‘A2,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ said Nikki, ‘if we’re not being let out, we’ll all have recess in there. I’ll text round the group and make sure everyone’s there when it happens.’

  ‘When what happens?’ I said.

  ‘When I get her back for being a bitch to you,’ said Nikki.

  I rumbled with anxiety. ‘Nikki …’ I began, but she had already pushed open the school doors and disappeared inside.

  18

  All morning, tensions and fears had been flapping at the edge of my thoughts in the shape of a large black crow that was unafraid of a travelling bus. Whatever Joel had seen had reminded me of that scary night at Nanna’s, and that fear took wing with worry about seeing Brody in Modern, about what happened in the fire, about Dad at work.

  The words When I get her back for being a bitch to you, though, had me convinced that a beak and a large pair of talons were going to rip the arteries from my throat before recess was over.

  When I went to my Maths room and discovered a mixture of seniors and juniors in it, I had it explained to me – by a buck-toothed junior kid I did not know – that first thing Monday morning at Yarrindi was not Maths but a short assembly, with announcements over a PA and a rollcall. ‘So how do I know what classroom I’m supposed to be in?’ I asked her.

  ‘Because of what your surname starts with, though it changes,’ said the junior girl, not very helpfully.

  ‘What’s this?’ I said.

  ‘This is half of “C” up to “Chapple”,’ the girl replied. ‘What are you?’

  ‘I’m “M”,’ I said.

  ‘I think “M” is upstairs,’ said another junior, a boy in a Yarrindi Show T-shirt.

  I smiled, said, ‘Thank you,’ and walked out of the room.

  Annoyed that I’d have to stick my head in a series of rooms before ‘M’ was found, I was almost at the bottom of the nearest staircase when my brain processed the implications of ‘M’. ‘M’ might’ve been ‘Morgan’, but it was also ‘Mundine’, ‘Morland’, ‘Maitland’ and ‘Meine’.

  Kylie and Joel were endurable – but Belinda and Brody in the same room? It was too much, and it was too early in the day for too much. Maths was a forty minute opportunity to zen myself calm before I even let myself think about Brody.

  Risking the wrath of a wandering teacher on a hallway patrol was the least of my troubles today; making an active decision to resist the roll room, I walked to the stairs and sat on the bottom step, and waited for the next bell to ring.

  19

  You know he’s totally obsessed with her.

  It’s been freaky stalker behaviour.

  I reckon she should shop him to the cops.

  Maths started. I sat with Kylie and Fran, borrowed a copy of the textbook from the teacher (I still didn’t know his name), g
ot out my hotel pen and notepad and made a desperate effort not to think about my impending encounter with Brody. Opening the book and trying to work lasted about as long as it took for me to decide then and there I was going to drop Maths for Year 12. Then my vision drifted over to the back of Joel Morland’s head.

  Based on what Nikki had said, Stalker Joel would be turning around constantly to stare at Fran like an obsessed crazy – if he wasn’t smart enough to seat himself on the other side of the room and ogle her direct. The Joel in front of me, though, just stared at his own borrowed book, flipped pages and occasionally flicked his black ponytail off his shoulder.

  What was this really about? Joel didn’t, in the ten minutes or so I observed him, look at Fran even once. Fran, for her part, exchanged notes with Kylie and ignored him. Maybe that’s what you would do if you were keeping a relationship a secret, I thought, but wouldn’t you be more jumpy if you had a stalker sitting right in front of you?

  At the precise second Fran’s eyes did seem to light on the back of Joel’s neck, I was distracted by a flash of paper above my book.

  Written on blue-lined paper ripped out of a lecture pad was a note from Kylie. Why were you in the fire? Why didn’t you come to Belinda’s?

  I sighed – I wasn’t in the mood to repeat this story for the third time. My pen hovered over the note as my brain tried to construct the least inflammatory reply. Got dates mixed up for the Sydney party, will tell all later I scribbled over the scrap of paper, then I dropped my gaze back into the indecipherable pages of the book. In my peripheral vision, Kylie, I saw, showed the note to Fran.

  As Fran read it, a faint trace of shame glowed pink on her cheeks.

  Kylie scrunched the note into a ball and looked murderous.

  20

  As the minutes ticked down to the class changeover, the Maths room felt more and more like the casing of a bomb set to explode the moment the bell rang. My situation was this: hang back from Modern and risk Kylie quizzing me on the stupid, stupid Belinda party situation, or escape from Kylie and risk a pre-class encounter with Brody Meine. A third option was to run for the toilet between classes but that would almost certainly make me late for Modern and a big dramatic entrance to the room would certainly signify ‘HEY, BRODY! LOOK HOW I’M IGNORING YOU!’ which I definitely did not want.