by Van Badham
My eyes widened with alarm. ‘Brody spoke to you?’
‘About fifteen minutes ago,’ said Mr Tripp.
I fought the distraction of thinking that I might be sitting where Brody had sat. ‘I’d prefer to remain anonymous,’ I said after a self-conscious squirm in my chair.
‘Sophie,’ said Mr Tripp in a stern voice, ‘the mayor is very keen for you to receive a formal thanks from the town at a ceremonial dinner. You have earned these honours and they could be very useful to you – on scholarship applications to university, for example. A portfolio with press clippings that demonstrate civic values is much stronger than a portfolio without them.’ Something a little greyer lit Mr Tripp’s expression as he added, ‘Not to mention what the profile of our students does for the reputation of the school.’
‘What’s Brody doing?’
‘Brody will not be participating in these kind of activities.’ He said this in a tone of warning mixed with finality that I could tell he had practised for decades. My blood heated. Brody had dumped me in a situation I didn’t want to be in because he didn’t want to be in it, either.
‘Mr Tripp,’ I said, my hand cramping around my necklace, ‘I’m overwhelmed. I’ll have to talk to my parents about this stuff first.’
‘Of course,’ said Mr Tripp. ‘I will be calling them anyway. I just wanted you and I to have a chat before I did.’ His face softened. ‘And to tell you, personally, on behalf of the school, how proud and impressed with your conduct I am.’
Don’t trust him, said my internal voice, vibrating through the stone in my hand. I didn’t. I smiled. ‘Thank you, Mr Tripp,’ I said.
Mr Tripp stood. I did too. ‘Make sure you make that extra effort in Mathematics, eh?’ he said.
He smiled, I smiled, and he gently shut the door.
I walked away from the office and straight towards the canteen, my head full of Brody Meine and my fists clenching with incipient rage.
38
There were twenty minutes left of Ancient History that I could’ve still attended, but I was so angry with Brody for naming me to Mr Tripp that I knew I would never be able to concentrate.
As I walked into the empty asphalt playground the morning light was harsh on my eyes. I texted Michelle: It was just about enrolment. CU recess and Lauren: I hate Brody. He is scum. Stomping towards Art, I made the decision to sit on the carpet outside the classroom and brood until the bell rang.
When it did, I barged into a class of juniors before they’d even left the room. I took my seat and thumped my bag on the table.
When the last had gone Ms Jackson said, ‘Sophie, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I replied in a high-pitched voice, tearing my pencil case and notebook from my schoolbag.
Ms Jackson hovered on the other side of the classroom, as if stepping nearer would get her singed. There was an uncomfortable silence until the others started to arrive, but Ms Jackson busied herself by issuing large rectangles of art paper, inkwells, paintbrushes and black felt-tip pens to the desks.
‘Jel’enedra, what is going on?’ Ashley said as soon as she saw me.
‘What does that word actually mean?’ I asked, more fiercely than I wanted to.
‘It means “little sister”,’ she said, sitting down. ‘In Romany. I found it in an online dictionary. You okay? What happened with Mr Tripp?’
Something suddenly held my tongue. ‘They’re making my enrolments double value next year,’ I deflected. Her eyes were big with curiosity, as if she could see there was something I wasn’t telling her. ‘It just puts me under a lot of pressure.’
Ms Jackson announced today’s task: using pen and ink to illustrate the symbols from our dreams.
‘Year 12’s no big deal, you’ll be fine,’ Ashley said in a soothing voice once Ms Jackson had gone to the other side of the room to demonstrate to the other corner-table dwellers what she wanted.
‘You sound like you’ve been through it all before,’ I said. I stared at the paper and wondered if I should draw a mermaid, an octopus, a pet store or Brody Meine with a spear through his heart.
‘I missed school for a while back in Brisbane,’ said Ashley. ‘When I came down here, I had to repeat.’
I looked at her. ‘Why? Were you sick?’
‘Something like that.’ She said it in the voice I remembered from last week, the adult voice. When she asked, ‘Ms Jackson, can I use my own brush today?’ her voice was so much younger that she didn’t sound like the same person.
Ms Jackson assented and Ashley promptly unzipped her pencil case, retrieving from it what looked like a red lacquered fork.
Now I must have looked curious because Ashley explained, ‘They call it a Ki-Pi. It’s Chinese.’ She dipped it into an inkwell and started to draw.
As Ashley drew I found myself searching for the lines around her eyes again. Her eyelids were caked with heavy mascara and thick gold eyeliner, but the wrinkles were gone. I tried to recall the strange words of warning she’d given me last week, and my eyes drifted towards what Ashley was drawing. Thin strokes on the page were thickened and some of them she painted with water, dripping dots of ink into the damp lines to stain them grey. The line formed into a shoe.
‘Why did you tell me to stay away from Brody Meine?’ I said suddenly. I thought I was asking the question to myself and was surprised that the words came out of my mouth.
Ashley breathed in. ‘Because you’re new, and he’s trouble,’ she said, not lifting her eyes from her paper. ‘You’re vulnerable, Sophie. You don’t want to get drawn in.’
‘They told me about that guy from Shoalhaven,’ I said, watching Ashley swirl ink in a well with her strange Chinese pen.
‘Yes,’ she said, in that deep, old voice. ‘You’ve been wise to avoid him.’
‘My mother—’ I began. Again, the words were coming out of my mouth without me meaning them to. I stopped speaking but my eyes were trailing the loops of the Ki-Pi.
‘Go on,’ she said.
I shook my head, and tore my eyes from Ashley’s artwork. I looked at the ceiling for some seconds and discovered that my eyes stung. Ashley stopped drawing and sat perfectly still, staring at me. As she did, lines shrivelled into relief around her eyes – folds of skin that were ancient, reptilian.
I gasped – jumped up. Ashley gave me a quizzical look, face young again. ‘What’s wrong, Soph?’ she said.
‘Overactive imagination … overactive imagination …’ I chanted both to her and myself as I walked around my stool. I gave a brittle laugh. The further I strayed from her, the cooler the air felt around me.
‘Sophie, what is going on with you today?’ called Ms Jackson from the corner tables.
‘Everything’s fine!’ I sang back to her, putting my hands on my head, trying to free myself from Ashley’s gaze.
Moving my stool a few inches away from where Ashley was sitting, I sat down again – and gave another nervous laugh. ‘I appreciate you looking out for me,’ I said to Ashley, my eyes firmly on my own, half-scribbled piece of art paper.
I heard her scratch at her paper again but I forced myself not to look at it. Instead, I dipped my pen in the inkwell and connected some clumsy lines into the full image of a mermaid. The closer my face lowered to the page, the more intricately I drew circles for the mermaid’s tail and the further I seemed to be from whatever weird fog had just clouded me.
My concentration derailed when Ms Jackson approached and leaned over Ashley’s desk. ‘You draw so well, Ash,’ she said. ‘Come look at this, class.’
My classmates gathered around Ashley to peer at her drawing. I stayed in my seat.
Ashley’s face was a teenager’s again – overly made-up and shiny with lip gloss, bright-eyed at the compliment from the teacher. When she said, ‘I have weird dreams,’ to Ms Jackson, it was the voice of the young person. Normal. Seventeen.
The image on her art paper was of a grey snakeskin shoe resting on a black road. Behind it, white flames licked at a
black night sky and consumed a street of houses.
Ashley looked at me and blinked.
39
‘So what’s the problem with your enrolment? Why’d you have to miss Ancient?’ asked Nikki, chomping at some kind of caramel bar.
The group had assembled behind the Technology labs for recess and it took a few seconds before I realised everyone was looking at me.
‘It’s about assessment, it’s fine,’ I said.
‘You look majorly stressed out,’ said Michelle.
‘You should eat something,’ chomped Nikki.
‘Ashley Ventwood is a freak,’ I snarled.
‘Then why’re you sitting next to her in Art?’ I almost didn’t recognise the voice that said this, because I didn’t think Rob had ever spoken to me before. I didn’t answer him.
‘Are you sitting with her?’ asked Fran.
‘A couple of days ago she apologised to me for being weird,’ I explained. ‘And she’s been really nice and—’
‘A freak being nice is still a freak,’ said Nikki. ‘Stay away.’
The group sat around me but I couldn’t make my eyes focus on them – instead, my brain traced the blocks and lines of Ashley’s drawing: the snakeskin shoe, the street on fire … ‘It’s like she’s actually trying to frighten me,’ I said. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because you’re new,’ said Michelle.
‘Was she, like, mentally tortured by everyone when she was new? Is she trying to settle some score by acting like a demonic psycho?’
‘Maybe she just doesn’t like you,’ said Belinda.
I barely concealed a groan of contempt.
‘Just don’t sit next to her,’ said Rob.
‘Yeah, she’s a dog anyway,’ said Garth.
But I was really angry now. ‘And she’s got this weird obsession about me and—’
Brody.
The sentence died on my lips as the thought that came after it led to another and another and another.
‘Soph?’ asked Michelle.
‘Oh God,’ I said. My head collapsed into my hands.
‘Dude, just ignore her,’ said Kylie, with concern.
I slid both palms over my eye sockets and pressed them in. This was a trick my mother had once taught me to make myself see more clearly. She said the warmth and pressure of the hands against the eyes increased blood flow.
What she probably meant was that sometimes you have to stop looking at everything in order to see it properly. Now I could.
40
My promise to Mr Tripp to pay attention in Maths had always been a false one; when I sat down for the fourth class of the day, I didn’t even open my textbook. I just closed my eyes and put my head in my hands.
‘You all right?’ asked Mr Gazzara, approaching my desk. He said it in a way that revealed he hadn’t learned my name yet.
‘Headache,’ I lied.
‘You want to go to the nurse?’
‘No. It should pass,’ I said.
He stood over my desk for a moment then turned back to the blackboard. Kylie and Fran, I could hear, scribbled notes to one another in agitated concern. It endeared them to me when Kylie leaned over and whispered, ‘Fran says we can pick you up from your house tonight if you want to go home for a bit.’
‘I’ll be fine in ten minutes,’ I said, and sank into the cloudy blindness of my thoughts.
The worst part was that the match made sense.
They were both smart, older than everyone else, and Ashley and Brody were both new to the school. Maybe neither of them had any friends and so no one in our year noticed that they got together. Then the incident occurs at the soccer game. Brody’s suspended and the school’s horrified. Ashley is the smartest kid in the year, she’s already repeated once and she knows the teachers will freak out if she’s attached to a boy with a behavioural problem who’s one more fight away from an expulsion. So Brody and Ashley minimise fuss and sit apart in class, walk past one another in the hall. It’s none of Trippy’s business, or anyone else’s.
Then that idiot Sophie Morgan turns up. She’s naive and completely infatuated with Brody. Ashley does everything she can to warn Sophie away without revealing the relationship. Sophie doesn’t get it, keeps hanging around and maybe Brody likes the fresh attention.
Ashley and Brody go to Belinda Maitland’s party and have a fight. Brody storms out. Randomly, he runs into half-drunk, infatuated, overimaginative Sophie Morgan and, to punish Ashley, kisses Sophie in the street. After all hell breaks loose with the fire, Brody’s given time at the hotel to repent on his actions. He tells Ashley everything, and promises to stay away from Sophie. Ashley takes pity on Sophie, who doesn’t know what she’s stumbled into, and befriends her in Art. Ashley hints that she knows everything and paints the scene of the kiss. You’re new and he’s trouble, says Ashley. You don’t want to get drawn in.
‘Do you want me to go to the canteen and get you some chocolate milk or something?’ whispered Kylie in my ear.
Exhausted, embarrassed, I found myself nodding.
Kylie stood and negotiated with Mr Gazzara to leave the classroom. I stared into the blackness of my closed eyes and knew that the time had come to have an honest talk with Brody.
41
‘Okay, in your pairs, please,’ said Ms Dwight. ‘I want you to sit facing one another.’
Chairs were hoisted over desks and the room was rearranged.
‘Greg, I think I want to match you with Ashley, and Louise with Justin today,’ she said. ‘You’re going to see if you can re-enact the discussion that was faced by England and France when Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935. One of you will be the Prime Minister of France, the other the English foreign minister. Using the notes I’ve given you, I want your pairs to come to a mutual decision about what action, if any, your countries should take. I’d like you to write up your conclusions in a summation on the last page of the handout. I hope that sounds like fun.’
Ashley must have felt confident about the art appreciation lesson she’d given me before recess: she sat with her back to me on the other side of the classroom, trying to distract Greg Shoal with the handout.
Brody Meine and I were staring at one another without expression. Once Ms Dwight had sat at her desk, he replayed his trick of lifting the handout in front of his face.
Minutes passed. I decided the only thing worse than being stared at by Brody’s cold, green eyes was not being stared at by them.
‘I think we should invade Italy,’ said Brody through the handout. ‘I don’t trust that Mussolini guy. Do you?’
‘That would activate their alliance with the Germans,’ I said. ‘If we attack Italy, they’ll attack France.’
‘Come on, 1919,’ he said, ‘they’re going to do that anyway.’
‘Brody, please tell me what this has all been about,’ I said.
‘The lead-up to the Second World War,’ said Brody, still not lowering the handout, ‘or so I’ve been assured.’
Frustrated, I pushed the paper away from Brody’s face. He averted his eyes from me. ‘Don’t be like that,’ he said quietly.
‘Are you seeing Ashley Ventwood?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said, still looking away.
‘Would you tell me if you were?’ He didn’t move. ‘Would you tell me why you blabbed to Tripp about the fire?’ I said, more angrily.
His eyes glared at mine. ‘I don’t think there are many things I’d tell you in the middle of a crowded classroom,’ he said, barely moving his lips.
‘And that’s it?’ I bristled. ‘That’s how it ends?’
Brody dropped his gaze. ‘No, it ends with Anglo–French complicity in the Italian annexation of Abyssinia, a large public outcry and a lot of high-level resignations,’ he said, writing on the handout with a retractable pencil. ‘You need to reread your notes, 19.’
Brody slid his handout towards me and took up mine instead. He nodded towards the sheets he’d put in front of me. ‘If that answer’
s wrong, you can rub it out,’ he said, holding up an eraser and then placing it between us on the table.
I glanced down at Brody’s handout: History book room. Eastern end of this corridor. Ten minutes after lunch.
Blood shot to my cheeks and I couldn’t speak. Brody had re-erected the wall of paper between our faces and my heart was beating like mad. Whether it was because I was excited, furious or losing my mind, I couldn’t tell.
I picked up the eraser and rubbed the pencilled words from the handout page.
‘Okay,’ I said when my breath came back. ‘Okay. Yes.’
42
I suffered through an agonising lunch break, during which the girls fussed over me as though I were a pet invalid. I was careful not to reveal why I was still at school even though I had two frees after lunch. I walked with Michelle in the direction of her German class. We parted ways at the door of the building and I travelled on to the girls’ toilets.
Four minutes after the bell, I was washing my hands, then my face, in the water of the taps, listening to the cool splash of water against the steel basin.
Seven minutes after the bell I strolled past the canteen, up to the eastern door to the main building. Inside, my eyes adjusted from the bright glare outside; I turned to my left and towards the staircase.
Nine minutes after the bell, and one step after another, and I was almost at the History book room. Then infatuated, overimaginative Sophie indulged herself for sixty seconds outside the door, envisaging Brody Meine behind it in his tight checked shirt and snakeskin shoes, standing perfectly alone in a night street before a storm, where a row of houses were not yet on fire.
At exactly ten minutes after the bell, I put my hand on the door handle of the History book room – and discovered it was locked.
43
My forehead broke into an instant irate sweat. I felt like kicking the door in, but I jerked the locked door handle instead. The muscles clenched in my jaw; a terrible force stirred in my arms to scratch the door into splinters and begin smashing things. I barely restrained myself from letting out a furious roar. The effort of restraint was exhausting – I slumped against the door and felt the wetness of my forehead stick against its glossy blue paint.