Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  The doorbell rang again.

  I reminded myself that the house was protected, remembering that even yesterday Fran and Kylie had to ask my permission before they could cross the threshold into the house. I blew out the candle and walked to the door.

  When I opened it, a short, attractive forty-something woman with blonde hair stood on the doorstep. She wore a black suit and a grey shirt. She gave me a big smile.

  ‘Hi there,’ she said, blinking eyes heavy with makeup. ‘You must be Sophie. I’m a neighbour of your friend Nikki. My daughter goes to school with you. My name is Jenny Kent.’

  51

  Jenny Kent. The journalist. I remembered her in her dark red suit, standing over a smoke-stained Yarrindi, reporting on the fire.

  I stood in the doorway and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Can I come in?’ she said.

  I shook my head. ‘It’s not a good time.’

  She took a step forward, but as her foot hit the border of the doorway, she retreated to the mat. ‘That’s okay, I understand. Very sensible not to let in strangers. Though you have nothing to fear from me. I’m just here to ask a few background questions – for an investigation I’m doing. Would you be happy to help with that?’

  ‘We haven’t lived here very long – I’m sure I can’t help you.’ I went to close the door, but Jenny Kent knew how to keep it open.

  ‘You’re an interesting girl, Sophie Morgan.’ She rested one hand on the doorframe. ‘There aren’t many teenagers who turn down medals and public praise when it’s offered to them. My daughter wouldn’t. Nikki Cipri certainly wouldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, but I kept the door ajar.

  ‘Now, your friend – Brody – he does have reasons to keep a low profile.’ She leaned forward and said in a low voice, ‘If you have your reasons to stay out of the public spotlight, I’m not going to put you in it.’ More loudly, she added, ‘Can’t, anyway, given that you’re under eighteen. Parental approval and all that. What we discuss here is entirely off the record.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ I said.

  ‘You’re good friends with Brody, though, aren’t you?’

  ‘I just know him from school.’

  ‘You were with him the night of the fire. If you were on a date, that’s your own business. He’s an interesting guy, isn’t he? The fire was interesting.’ She indicated over her shoulder the construction workers and the police tape on the other side of the street. ‘Apparently he’s had another interesting day. Two weeks’ suspension, I heard. He really should be charged. You saw it, didn’t you?’

  I knew I should shut the door but, for Brody’s sake, I wanted to know what she was trying to get me to say. I kept the door open and my face as still as possible.

  Don’t tell her anything, said my stone. I shook my head to it in a promise.

  Jenny Kent thought the shake was for her.

  ‘No?’ she said. ‘Everyone I spoke to told me you were in the corridor today.’

  ‘That’s because everyone was in the corridor,’ I said, trying not to sound too sarcastic. ‘There are heaps of other people you could—’

  ‘You know he broke that boy’s ribs?’ Jenny Kent gave a wry smile.

  I shrugged. ‘They attacked Brody first.’

  ‘Do you think Garth deserved it?’

  ‘I don’t like violence when it happens to anybody,’ I said.

  ‘Then you’ve picked a strange boy to hang around with. It’s not the first time he’s been involved in an incident where someone got hurt. There was a football match last year where he put someone else in hospital.’

  ‘Um – what’s this got to do with the fire?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jenny Kent. ‘That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. People told me he took three teachers down in the corridor before the power blew out and he got distracted. That’s not your average teenage boy throwing a few punches. That’s a very skilled fighter with a sharp understanding of violence. I wonder where he learned to fight like that. Don’t you?’

  ‘Not really. He’s just Brody.’

  ‘That’s a very tolerant and understanding attitude. It seems to be shared by the department of education. Hazel and Nikki tell me Brody’s even been given his own room at the school, where he can go to “calm down” if he gets a bit, you know, riled up. Thing is, no one will tell me just what makes Brody so damn angry.’

  ‘You could ask Mr Tripp,’ I said. He was obviously the person who’d given her my name.

  ‘I don’t think that’s information you’d share with the principal,’ she said. She looked at me and smiled gently. ‘It might be information you’d share with a friend.’

  ‘And if you were a friend, you wouldn’t talk about it to a journalist,’ I said.

  Jenny smiled again. ‘Not without a compelling reason, I guess,’ she said, and started to fossick through her handbag. ‘Thing about people who always seem to be around trouble,’ she continued, pulling a business card out of her wallet, ‘they can’t seem to keep it contained. You know? The boundaries break down. You look on one day while they’re punching the lights out of someone … the next day they could be punching the lights out of you.’

  She looked me straight in the eyes as she slid her wallet back into her handbag. I blinked. She pressed a business card into my hand. ‘Always on that number if you want to talk, Sophie. Keep it in mind.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I read the card with a fake bashful smile. ‘I will.’

  I shut the door. I stood behind it, waiting to hear her steps retreat down the footpath to the road. I waited one minute. I waited two.

  Jenny Kent, I heard, walked around the side of our house to the driveway. I walked softly over to the glass sliding doors and heard her unlatch the gate to our back garden.

  Only when Izek let out an almighty caw from the ash tree did I hear the gate relatch and Jenny Kent finally walk out to the road.

  52

  I had to get out of Yarrindi. I couldn’t waste any more time. I slammed the glass doors shut and ran into my bedroom. I tore a suitcase from my wardrobe and threw all my new clothes into it, my Converse, my entire underwear drawer. I decided I could leave my books behind. Yarrindi could keep my magazines. Computers were easy enough to find in internet cafés, and the only things I knew I would need to keep close were all in the magic box I’d surreptitiously inherited from Evil Marlina.

  I darted over to it and sorted quickly. I dumped the bag of stones on the ground with the white-handled knife and reached into the collection of candles to gather the small thin ones. I took out the lighter and added it to the pile. I considered whether I’d be using cord magic in the near future, but the cord spools were bulky and I decided that anything that needed cord I could probably manage with Will alone until I was safe enough to gather new equipment. I ran out into the lounge room and grabbed my schoolbag, bringing it back into my bedroom and tipping its contents on the ground. The plan was to pack my schoolbag with magic kit and essentials, because the suitcase would be too bulky to carry.

  The fountain of paper, pens, books, spare mobile phone charger and bits of lunch box that poured onto my floor dispelled any notion I had of being able to pack efficiently – pen lids rolled under my bed, papers fluttered everywhere, and I found myself squatting on the floor, staring at the black negligee dress Fran had given me.

  Only yesterday, I had been planning to wear it to a party on Friday, a party I’d promised Brody Meine I’d be going to. Thirty-six hours later, Fran was under a love spell to Joel Morland; Brody was suspended from school, pursued by journalists; and I was lined up for my own private witch-burning, packing to leave town.

  I held up the dress. With a sense of nostalgia for something that hadn’t even happened yet, I stood up, removed my school uniform and put the dress on. Before I wandered into the bathroom to look at myself in the big mirror, I kicked off my school shoes and stepped into the pair of high heels I’d acq
uired from Lucy.

  The dress was tiny, and almost see-through. It was so short it barely skimmed the tops of my thighs. Although it clung to the curves of my body, the cut flattered my roundness where it mattered and draped the parts I preferred to keep invisible. There was no chance that my dad would let me wear it out of the house, even with the dress-up excuse of Halloween – until I realised that with a thick pair of black opaque stockings and my little purple cardigan, I’d actually look better than if I wore the dress on its own. I went back into my room, hauled these things out of my suitcase, redressed and walked back into the bathroom to prove myself right.

  It didn’t seem fair. I didn’t care what the girls in my group thought of me, or the other girls in our year, or any of the boys. But before I disappeared, got killed or exploded in a ball of witchy fury, I wanted Brody Meine to remember me looking as good as I knew I did now.

  I walked back into my bedroom. I changed out of the party clothes and put them in a separate pile on my computer chair before wriggling into last night’s pyjamas.

  I stared at the open suitcase. I stared at the contents of my schoolbag on the floor. I stared at the scattered pieces of magic kit, dispersed all over the room. And then I sat on the bed and burst into tears.

  When Dad came home hours later, my tears had dried up but I was still there.

  53

  Dad didn’t ask what was wrong; he just made us dinner and suggested I come out and eat with him in front of the TV. After a couple of hours, an obligatory phone call to my mother, and a sneaky second helping of ice-cream, I actually starting laughing at the television and – after placing another plate of leftovers under the ash tree for Izek – went to sleep, if not happy, then at least not crying my eyes out.

  Having made the decision that Friday would be my last day in Yarrindi, I walked through Thursday as if in a dream. Michelle yapped to me a rehash of yesterday’s conversations while we were on the bus, Nikki ate a burger in long sleeves at the gate, Kylie grimaced at the Joel/Fran public displays of affection in Maths, Belinda gave me serpent eyes whenever I crossed her path, and I avoided looking too closely at the pulped faces of Rob and Matt when they joined us at recess. Garth, I was told, was nursing his broken ribs at home.

  Without Brody in it, Modern History passed like a long list of deaths read out. Whatever danger Jeules represented outside of school was undermined by the banality of his teaching style. For a serial killer, his lack of personality was flabbergasting. I filled in handouts in short sentences, as a kind of literary protest against how boring his classes were.

  Would I miss this? When the bell rang for the beginning of lunch I headed home, my last two periods being frees. I wandered up to the taxi rank – partially because I wasn’t interested enough in Yarrindi any more to be bothered to walk through town and up the hill to the house.

  The expense of the cab was worth it. The moment I was back in home’s chicken-blood embrace, I felt less jaded.

  I fetched food from the fridge for Izek and walked out to the deck. I called to him and was pleasantly surprised when a pair of black wings swooped from the higher branches of the ash tree and the great crow landed on the deck looking clean and sharp and shiny.

  I spent the afternoon repacking, sorting my things and cleaning my room. I considered stashing the clothes I should have been wearing to Gretchen’s party in my suitcase, but something maybe a little pathetic stirred me and I stuck them onto a coathanger instead, hanging the unworn costume in front of my wardrobe.

  From the corner of my room, I also retrieved the plastic crown I’d worn the night that Brody kissed me for the first time. I hooked it over the neck of the hanger.

  Many times that night I found myself wandering into my room to look at it all – as a reminder of other futures I might have had.

  54

  My jaded mood bled through night into morning. More gloom was added when I found myself next to Michelle on the bus. She blabbered about Gretchen’s party not only for the whole bus ride in but also for the entirety of first period English.

  ‘You know, I’m never going to forgive Fran for bailing on the Ashley Ventwood plan,’ Michelle said. ‘It would have been legendary, and now we’re all just going as our own thing.’

  ‘What are you going as?’

  ‘A vampire. I’ve got a long dress with a slit that goes up to the stomach – I look hot in it, I guess. I thought I’d put a few drops of fake blood in the corner of my mouth – to look subtle, you know? I wish I had gold contact lenses to make my eyes really sparkle.’

  I almost told her that I’d heard one of the nerds in Gretchen’s group say the exact same thing, but I kept my mouth shut.

  In Maths, Joel continued his vile puppetry of Fran and showed no signs of keeping his hands far from her binding bracelet. Part of me wondered if the spell would be broken if I used the scissors to stab him to death, or if the magic deal he’d struck was so strong poor Fran would be left to plant kisses on the lips of his corpse. When a note from Kylie landed in front of me, I was grateful for the distraction from murderous thoughts.

  What you going as tonight? You know the Ashley Ventwood plan is off?

  Probably a witch, I wrote, dreaming of my purple and black outfit, my plastic crown. You?

  Maybe a cheerleader vampire. Want to come over to mine this afternoon and make pompoms?

  Can’t, I wrote back, have to do stuff with Dad – that’s the tradeoff for the party.

  She was a nice girl, Kylie – and I felt bad for lying to her. As I trudged towards Modern I saw my phone flash another missed call from Lauren. After I’d texted, Too miserable to talk. Will call later X, I told myself that when all this was over, I’d write to everyone I liked and explain what had happened.

  It would be, I realised as I sat down, a fairly short list. In a moment of self-awareness, it occurred to me that, in Yarrindi, most of the people I liked I didn’t know, and most of the people I knew I didn’t like. The one great exception to this, of course, was Brody Meine. I restrained my fingers from brushing against the back of his vacant seat. Even thinking about him made my heart hurt.

  When a black-shirted Jeules came into the room for the start of class, I was staring dreamily at the whiteboard, trying to look at anything rather than Matt’s face. One of his eyes was purple and swollen completely closed.

  ‘Year 11,’ said Jeules as he placed a stack of folders and handouts on the desk. ‘I am the bearer of good news and sad. The good news is that as of Monday you will have a new, semipermanent Modern History teacher, not a ring-in. Ms Dwight, sadly, is taking extended leave and the school will be taking a specialist teacher on a transfer to take her place.’

  ‘What’s the bad news?’ asked Matt, through a swollen lip.

  ‘That means you’re losing me,’ said Jeules, his hair bouncing as he folded his arms.

  ‘You’re … leaving this class?’ asked Joanie.

  ‘I’m leaving the school,’ Jeules said. ‘Going back up to Sydney. I’ve done my week in this lovely coastal town, it’s been real, it’s been right on, but I’m getting back in my car this afternoon and I’m going – and I can’t wait!’

  There was a stunned silence in the room and Jeules responded by drumming his fingers on his desk. Silence continued.

  ‘What’s the bad news?’ asked Matt again, laughing at his own joke.

  ‘That you’ve got forty more minutes of me,’ Jeules said, handing out some worksheets to fill in. ‘Stay awake, Year 11 – it’s almost over.’

  As the worksheet dropped into my hand, my face beamed – it actually beamed – with radiant joy.

  55

  As soon as Modern was over, I grabbed my things and caught Gretchen Eighfield before she’d even reached the classroom door. ‘Hey, Sophie,’ she said, clutching my arm. She kept her eyes on Jeules until he passed us into the corridor and disappeared into the staffroom nearby.

  Gretchen released me the second he was out of view and leaned in to whisper, ‘Amazing
news about Jeules, isn’t it? I’d be less bored in this subject if I was taught by a can of hair.’

  I nodded. ‘Gretchen, you know how Brody’s suspended? Does that mean he isn’t coming tonight?’

  ‘The only person who can suspend him from my party is me,’ she said. ‘There’s no way he’s not coming – he has to. He’s in the band.’

  ‘He’s what?’

  ‘Shh!’ she said, smiling. ‘You really cannot tell anyone. For a start, it’s a surprise, but also … that business yesterday … I don’t want there to be a mass boycott called by Belinda just because he put her boyfriend in hospital. Garth’s a dick, anyway. You’re still coming, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘Great.’ She turned to go, but changed her mind. ‘I wanted to thank you, by the way.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I really love my White Witch costume, and it would have been stupid to let myself get talked out of wearing it tonight. I’m making it a bit of a litmus test with Scott, actually. Either he thinks I look amazing as the White Witch, or he can find another study partner for Biology – you know what I’m saying?’

  I did.

  ‘Have you settled on what you’re coming as?’ Gretchen asked me.

  ‘The happiest girl in the school,’ I said, unable to stop smiling.

  56

  I was still smiling when I scurried to join the group behind the Technology labs – and not even Matt’s face or the splint on Rob’s nose could dampen my enthusiasm. Nikki was discussing her party outfit when I sat down.

  As I did, Belinda wiped an invisible spray of dirt from her legs.

  ‘Soph, you missed me saying,’ Nikki said, ‘we’re redoing our costumes for tonight to suit the new vampire theme and we’re making sure we don’t double up. Michelle is femme fatale vampire, Kylie is head cheerleader vampire, Belinda is a fairy vampire, and I am catwoman vampire. What are you going to be?’