Wilder grinned back at her and punched his own chest a couple of times, like, Nothing to see here.
‘I’m not crying,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something in my eye, that’s all.’
‘I’m thinking about an assignment I’ve just remembered is due on Monday,’ Yumi said.
And then Anouk said, ‘I’m crying because Gregory Peck looks exactly like Jed.’
I felt annoyance spark in my chest. Jed and Gregory Peck looked nothing alike.
She’d only said that to make sure everyone remembered Jed was off limits. That them there were the rules. That it was hands off her guy.
That the only person allowed to kiss Jed tonight was her.
#
Yumi’s bedroom has multiple sports medals hooked over the arms of multiple championship cups, which jostle for room on her bookshelves and desk with multiple excellence awards and coach’s awards. Netball, footy, running, tennis – Yumi is most excellent at all of them.
Her walls are plastered with vintage posters from bands her mum went and saw when she was our age or a bit older: an orange Elvis Costello poster with ‘Get Happy’ written across it in sky-blue writing; a Smiths poster featuring a photo of Elvis Presley (who clearly didn’t play with the Smiths, but whatever); another Smiths poster with ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ written across the top. Bronski Beat. Siouxsie and the Banshees. Duran Duran.
A couple of years back, Yumi found a dusty turntable and a box of records at a garage sale, so afternoons spent at her place usually consist of the crackling, needle-in-the-groove sound of John Lennon’s Imagine, Stevie Wonder’s ‘Wonderland’, This is Hip by John Lee Hooker, that type of thing. An audio pairing to the posters on her walls.
The night of Jed’s party, Liv, Hattie, Anouk and I were putting on our make-up, Yumi was in the shower, and the Mamas & the Papas were on the turntable – 16 of Their Greatest Hits, if you don’t mind.
Ancient school.
The cover of the album had the four members of the band standing in a park looking straight at the camera, a willow tree behind them; two guys, two girls. The two guys and one of the girls looked appropriately hippy, but then standing in the middle of the group was one bad-arse mofo with her hands on her hips, looking like she’d smack your face if you said even slightly the wrong thing.
‘She choked on a sandwich, you know,’ Liv said, taking the album cover out of my hands and pointing at the bad-arse mofo. ‘Mama Cass did.’
Anouk raised one eyebrow. ‘No, she didn’t,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ Liv said. ‘She did.’
Anouk picked up her phone and tapped at the screen. ‘Cass Elliot,’ she started reading, scrolling through various links. ‘Mamas & the Papas. Blah blah. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Yada yada. Death. Collapsed on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No, hang on, that’s not it. Here you go: “An oft-repeated urban legend”’ – and here she raised both eyebrows at Liv – ‘“claims that Elliot choked to death on a ham sandwich … a partially eaten sandwich found in her room might have been to blame … post-mortem showed she died of a heart attack and no food was found in her windpipe”. I think you’ll find that’s what’s called an urban legend.’ Her mouth stretched over the words as she ostentatiously pronounced ‘urban’ and then ‘legend’.
‘Consider yourself schooled by Google,’ Hattie said, leaning in to the mirror and putting mascara on.
Yumi came back from her shower, stepping over those of us who were sitting on the floor so she could get to her wardrobe and get out some clothes. ‘No, don’t anyone move, I’m fine with stepping over all of you. Seriously, don’t even move your legs a little bit, I’m fine,’ she said.
Because, yeah, she needed us to move our legs.
I shifted out of Yumi’s way and took the album cover back from Liv. ‘I love the fact that her top has creases across the lap from where she was sitting,’ I said, pointing at Mama Cass, ‘like it hadn’t occurred to her for even one second to maybe grab an iron before the shot was taken for the cover of their album.’
‘I hardly think you can talk,’ Liv said, pulling at my unironed Bambi T-shirt. ‘Don’t think you did a whole lot of ironing of this little baby.’
I laughed. ‘Well, that’s only because I didn’t realise you were going to be breaking into my house this morning, stealing my T-shirt, and wearing it to the party tonight. If I’d known, I definitely would have ironed it for you first.’
‘Is that yours?’ Anouk said, flicking her eyes over at the Bambi top, then looking back at me. ‘It’s cute as.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘You should be wearing that tonight,’ she said. Emphasis on ‘that’. ‘It’d look so good’ – emphasis on ‘so’ – ‘with that skirt you’re wearing.’
It sounded nice, all sugar and spice (‘that would look so good on you’) – but what she was really saying (‘what you’ve got on now doesn’t look as cracking as that other top’) was all slugs and snails.
Anouk is gorgeous and smart, and she’s excellent fun to be around. She writes Shakespearean sonnets that are funny and cool, riffing on why soy milk shouldn’t be allowed in the same room as coffee, or the fact that meerkats require a name change because they’re not actually cats. But she’s tricky, too, because she always does this kind of thing with me – the slugs and snails thing – though I’m never completely sure if she does it deliberately or if I’m just being over-sensitive.
I looked at myself in the mirror; at the old Radiohead T-shirt I was wearing with my short denim skirt. The Bambi T-shirt definitely would have looked better.
‘What the fook, Anouk,’ Liv said. ‘She can’t wear this because, hello, I’m wearing it. And I’m not giving it book.’ Twisting the word ‘back’ so that it rhymed with fook. And Anouk.
Anouk laughed.
That whole ‘fook Anouk’ thing? It was a running joke that had been going on between us for a good couple of years now, ever since Anouk was first called Anouk by an emergency teacher back in Year 9.
Her real name is Annick.
The emergency teacher – who was quite handsome, incidentally – was doing the rollcall, and when he came to Annick, he said, ‘Anouk?’
Anouk said, ‘it’s Annick actually, not Anouk,’ as if it mattered (which it didn’t, because he was only going to be taking us for a week).
That was when Liv leant over and said, quietly – not so the emergency teacher would hear, but so the rest of us could – ‘Annick, Anouk, who gives a fook,’ and we all collapsed into giggles.
The poor guy never ended up getting us under control. He probably gave up teaching as a vocation once he’d had us for the week, because for the rest of his time with us, every class, he had to contend with an endless round of hands going up to answer questions using words that rhymed with Anouk.
Book was used a lot. Duh.
Hook.
Look.
Crook, nook, rook, sook, shook, took. They were all fair game. One time Anouk even managed to throw in Innsbruck, which was quite an achievement.
And ever since then, Annick has been called Anouk.
#
Anouk sat opposite me on the tram to Jed’s party, going through her phone, the rolling amble of public transport making her and Hattie sway like they were underwater mermaids. Or in Anouk’s case, an underwater mermaid with a wolf chowing down on her.
I took a photo of the two of them leaning in towards each other like they were magnetised, Anouk holding her fingers up at me in a peace sign, the rest of her hand still clutched around her phone, Hattie with a matching peace sign and her tongue poking out.
Then I snapped a selfie of me and Liv and Yumi.
All in the name of Snapchat.
We were talking French. All of us. Not that any of us particularly spoke French (though Liv and Yumi did remember a few words from back in Year 7 and 8), but we’d decided before we’d got on the tram that we’d speak French for the entire trip.
‘Mon dieu elevasion,’ Anouk said.
‘Haw haw haw, mélange, a toi,’ Yumi threw back.
None of it actually meant anything. Well, some of the words did, but most of them were French-ish sounds, delivered with the thickness in the throat and the roll of the tongue that we thought made us sound particularly authentic.
We threw in ‘oui’ (yes), ‘bonjour’ (hello), ‘Marie-Claude et Philippe beep’, ‘croissant d’orange’ (orange croissant), ‘quelle heure et il?’ (what hour is it?) and ‘la petite fleur comment allez vous’ (little flower how are you), giggling as we ran out of words we knew and started throwing in whatever we thought sounded French, getting louder and louder, talking over each other, competing to see who could sound the most Gallic.
And Anouk looked over at me, laughing, and said … well, I couldn’t be sure, everyone was talking, throwing in stupid-sounding French, but it sounded like she said, ‘Le garçon.’ Then she winked at me, and pursed her mouth into a kiss.
Le garçon. The boy.
Jed.
Consider yourself officially warned, she might as well have said to me.
Officially warned in French.
Chapter 3
It was late in the night.
Jed and I were sitting by the pool, on banana lounges.
Jed and me.
Oh yeah.
Actually, it was Jed and me and the Gun. His dog – the one who’d invited us – was sitting up, his back straight, his ears pitched forward, watching all the people partying at his house.
‘He doesn’t seem all that happy to have us here,’ I said to Jed, raising my eyebrows in the Gun’s direction. ‘I mean, hello, you invite a whole lot of people over,’ I said to the Gun, ‘you’ve got to expect them to come. Maybe some drinks will spill. Maybe some cigarettes will be smoked. It’s just the way of the party, and you can’t worry your doggy head about it.’
Jed laughed.
The wind from earlier in the day had slunk off, ashamed of its bad behaviour, leaving the night warm and slightly static. A storm still waited in the clouds, but it didn’t have the va-voom necessary to let rip yet. The inky blackness of the night threw the glow of the pool lights up into our laps, making the two of us appear aqua-tinged and lolly-flavoured.
Yep, he looked lolly-flavoured alright.
‘How did you do that, anyway?’ I asked Jed.
‘What?’
‘You know. The talking-dog thing; the invite. I want it, and I don’t even have a dog.’
‘You haven’t got this?’ He got out his phone and pressed it, swiped the screen, but it didn’t light up. ‘I so need a new phone,’ he said, throwing it down on the lounge. ‘Friggin’ thing. It’s an app,’ he went on. ‘My mum had it; probably the first time she’s shown me something on her phone that I thought was actually funny. Not the way she did it, of course – she just had him saying, “Hello, Jed. It’s me, the Gun.” But I could see the potential.’
‘Show me,’ I said, unlocking my phone and putting it in his hands.
He went to the App Store, found the app and passed the phone back to me.
‘So if I download this,’ I checked, ‘the Gun will be able to talk to me?’
‘Exactly.’
I grinned at him, bought it, then watched as the little circle started chasing itself.
Like a dog chasing its tail.
‘So, now you take a photo.’ Jed snapped a shot of the Gun looking at my phone, eyes tilted upwards. ‘Then you line up the eyes and the mouth’ – he moved the red dots and the dotted lines on the screen to match the Gun’s face – ‘and now he can say whatever you want.’ Jed pressed the square red record button and leant forward into my phone and said, ‘I like your nails, MC,’ picking up one of my hands and holding it. ‘They’re very emo.’
The black polish still looked all glossy and perfect from the manicure I’d had earlier that day with Tosca.
Jed pressed replay and we watched as the Gun’s mouth moved in sync with the words, saying to me, ‘I like your nails, MC. They’re very emo.’ Press, repeat. ‘I like your nails, MC. They’re very emo.’
I felt, in that moment, as if I had captured Jed inside the mechanics of my phone. His voice, his dog, his stupidness, all there for eternity, for whenever I wanted to listen to him.
Like.
‘I prefer the term “fully gothic”,’ I said, leaning over to the Gun and ruffling his fur.
Jed laughed. ‘Vampire chic,’ he said.
His knees were close to mine. His hand was folding the tips of my fingers into my palm, creating a soft fist, then letting go of the fist he’d created and running his hand over my wrist and back to my hand, like I was his.
I felt my breathing catch, my stomach filling up with butterflies. There was every chance that if I tried to speak, a brightly coloured, winged little something would flutter out from between my lips and go and settle on the nearest tree, instead of words.
‘Vampire chic,’ I said, testing my theory, then grinning at the fact that the butterflies had decided to stay inside my guts after all, pattering against my innards as they bumped into organs and settled on my ribcage.
The Gun was forgotten in that moment. Anouk was forgotten in that moment.
‘I can roll with that,’ I said.
‘Vampira,’ Jed said, then ran the edge of his fingernail down my throat to the little dip where the bones of my neck clicked into the front of my ribs.
The thinnest edge of his nail running the length of my throat.
I felt my chin lifting slightly, so his nail had full control of my throat. That’s why vampires are so sexy – you lay your neck wide open and they drain you, possess you, taking your very breath away, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because in the moment it feels so good that you don’t care what the consequences are.
But I knew what the consequences would be. Anouk would be majorly pissed off if Jed and I kept going the way we were.
Not to mention the Gun, who was watching the two of us. This was going to freak the Gun right out.
‘You know vampires aren’t a real thing, don’t you?’ I said, clamping my chin back down, shutting my throat away and looking at Jed with a raised eyebrow.
The sensible side of me recognised that this here was the very last moment I could get up and go to the kitchen, grab a drink, start talking to someone else. Keep my friendship with Anouk safe.
I’d been warned – in French, no less. By a tram-riding, mermaid-swaying, wolf-eaten, peace-sign-flipping friend. I knew she wouldn’t be happy if I stayed out here by the pool, with Jed’s nail tracing the length of my neck.
But I didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want another drink. I wanted to stay out here. I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to feel what would happen, more importantly. Feel his mouth on mine, his hands on my body.
It was ages ago, the summer holidays, Merimbula, I felt like saying out loud, to the world, to Anouk. Your dibs on Jed are past their use-by date.
‘The thing is,’ I said, taking Jed’s hand from my throat, ‘I’m the one with the emo nails, not you, so even if vampires were real, you couldn’t be one, because your fingernails’ – and I held them up in front of his face – ‘as you can see, aren’t nearly vampire-y enough.’
He pushed his lips out, making a fish face. ‘Not fair.’
No. It wasn’t fair. Anouk had shotgunned him, but the fact was, he wasn’t going anywhere near her. And his nail running down my neck? Well. It had been my neck he’d chosen, not Anouk’s. How did a girl say no to that?
And look at him, with his handsome face and his gorgeous mouth.
‘Luckily for you,’ I said, remembering that the black nail polish Tosca-slash-Dad had bought me to match my manicure was still in my bag, ‘I happen to have this little baby on me.’ I held up the bottle. ‘Vampire chic can be yours. For a price.’
He gave me a look that had all the butterflies rising in sync, as if he were the puppetmaster and his grin tugged all their strings; then when his smile relax
ed, they all settled back down to my organs.
‘Knock yourself out,’ he said, and splayed his hands on my knees, his fingers spread like a starfish, ready for the polish.
Butterflies. Butter-friggin’-going-crazy-flies.
I twisted the brush out of the bottle and used the rim to bleed off the excess, then started running the brush the length of his nails, surprised at how hard it was to paint evenly. You’d think it would have been dead easy, but it wasn’t.
He flicked one of his fingers under the hem of my skirt, then slid his eyes up at me, that naughty grin of his on his face.
‘Stop that,’ I said. ‘I can’t paint them properly if they’re under my skirt.’
‘That’s a shit job you’re doing,’ he said, holding his hands up and looking at them. Some of the black was leaching onto the skin around the nails as well as being on the nails themselves.
‘I think you’ll find,’ I said, bringing his hands back down to my thighs so I could keep painting (also, because it felt good having them there), ‘that it’s not actually me doing a shit job. It’s the fact that you’ve got shit nails that makes it so hard.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘That’s my pleasure,’ I said, trying to keep my hand steady as I applied slippery gloss to his middle finger.
He had long fingers, perfect nails. Even looking at his hands made some of the butterflies shiver – a tiny tremor down their microscopic spines. His skin, the bone structure underneath, it was all perfect.
‘You know what annoys me about vampires?’ I said, in a bid to distract myself from him – which was hard, seeing as it was only the two of us sitting there, by the pool, his hands on my thighs.
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s actually impossible for teeth to just get long and pointy and then go back to being normal shape. There isn’t an animal in the entire world that has teeth that change shape. If you’re going to make up a terrifying monster, at least have it partly grounded in reality.’
‘But you said if you painted my nails I’d become a vampire,’ he said.
‘Yeah, no. Not gonna happen.’
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