The day’s barely started and I’m already hot. Peering into the bathroom mirror, I push my streaky hair back off my face with a thin silver band. It includes a tiny, fragile white butterfly which flutters at the side of my head. Definitely makes me feel less sweaty.
‘Does this look dorky?’ I wonder.
My mirror self gazes back at me with questioning eyes. Doesn’t have a clue!
I want to wear the band because Mum gave it to me last night. She spotted it in a shop in Williamstown after a business lunch with an important client. She didn’t come right out and say, ‘I’ve decided it’s great that Sarah got your hair lightened. I’ve completely changed my mind and I can see now she’s a good influence on you. No wonder your dad left me for her!’
What she did say when she handed me the band in its fancy purple bag was, ‘I thought this would bring out the highlights in your hair,’ which I reckon amounts to basically the same idea.
On the other hand, I explain to my uselessly blank image, I’m afraid to wear the band because I’ve gotten through two days of high school without any bitchy comments from anybody, especially the cool girls.
It’s not fair! I jerk the band off, savagely brush my hair back into a pony tail and secure it with an ordinary scrunchy. I know I can stand up to them if I have to, but I don’t want to have to. I want to be one of those girls who just fits in naturally.
How come some people have a built-in dorkometer and I totally lack one? Where did girls like Tiffany and Olivia get theirs? Were they born with it?
If dorkometers are handed out at birth, I tell the girl in the mirror, God must have run out of them before he got to you. I leave her, looking insulted, stomp off to my room and shove the headband in my underwear drawer.
We’re in home group. Mrs McBain lets us chat for a few minutes before she takes the roll and reads the announcements from the daily bulletin. Matthew’s all excited because he watched a show last night on marine mammals.
‘Did you see it, Stevo?’
‘Sure did,’ Stephen nods.
‘Duh,’ I comment. ‘Is chocolate fattening?’
‘Huh? Oh, I get it!’ Matthew whacks me on the back in appreciation of my joke, then turns back to Stephen. ‘Did you get a load of that whale’s balls? They weighed a tonne each.’
‘Matthew!’ I look around nervously to see if anyone heard. Thank goodness Billy isn’t here yet. No one else seems to be paying any attention to us.
‘Katie!’ Matthew mimics my tone. ‘David Attenborough said it, so I guess I can mention it in school.’
Stephen chuckles. ‘I think they weighed a tonne together, not each.’
‘Could we drop this subject?’ I ask.
‘If you insist, Miss Prissy Pants.’
Blessed silence descends on our corner of the room. It’s then that I notice the cool girls are giggling. Of course they would have heard everything Matthew said. He’s got the loudest voice in the Southern Hemisphere. I strain my ears to catch what they’re talking about.
‘She thinks she’s so privileged,’ Tiffany says. My heart plummets to the soles of my school shoes. Why did I have to give such stupid answers when Olivia talked to me in PE? Obviously she thought I was bragging about having boys for friends.
It’s Tiffany’s turn to pipe up. ‘As if at our age you go to the Show with your dad.’
‘Or if you do,’ Charlotte laughs, ‘you don’t admit it in public. Could you believe how she went on about that dog show?’
My heart leaps out of my shoes and does somersaults around the room. They’re talking about Justine!
It’s recess. The boys and I are wandering around the sweltering schoolyard, watching everyone wilt.
‘Let’s go to the library,’ Stephen suggests.
I make a cross with my forefingers and hold it in front of his face as if I’m warding off evil. I never want to see a library at lunchtime again in my life.
‘You’re missin’ Mrs Duke, eh, Stevo?’ Matthew teases.
Stephen frowns.
‘She loved you when you fixed her computers.’
‘This is boring,’ Stephen answers, ‘just walking around sweating.’
‘Yeah,’ I agree. ‘It is.’
Every recess and lunchtime last year, Erin and Bethany and some of the other preps would run up and beg me to play with them. Often Matthew would join in and sometimes even Stephen, if we could pry him away from Mrs Duke. We pretended we only went on the flying fox and the monkey bars to please the preps, but really we had heaps of fun.
Well, I tell myself firmly as the boys and I keep trudging through the heat, that was last year. You’re a grown-up high school kid now.
Suddenly, I spot the cool girls, standing in the shade beside the oval, licking icy-poles. I bet they never sweat. Suddenly, they spot me. They’re definitely looking at me. Charlotte whispers something to Tiffany. I bet she’s saying, ‘There’s that loser who hangs around with daggy boys from her primary school.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I say as I turn and head in the other direction.
‘Feel like going to the library now?’ Stephen asks hopefully.
‘No! I’d rather have lunch with an axe-murderer than go to the library!’
‘How about the chess club then? We could check that out.’
‘What chess club?’
‘The one Mrs McBain read us about in the announcements this morning. She said it meets in room 202.’
‘Sure,’ I say, ‘we could try the chess club. If we want to be total, irreversible nerds.’
Stephen looks affronted. Well, I can’t help it. My brain feels like a glob of hot porridge simmering inside my skull. Could the cool girls really see that I was a loser in primary school?
We’re halfway through cookery class. This is one thing about high school that I’ve actually been looking forward to, but I haven’t mentioned it. What if it’s dorky to be interested in fiddling around with food? Which we aren’t actually doing yet. We’re in the theory room, copying out a bunch of boring rules.
‘When are we gonna cook?’ Billy yells. This is the third time he’s asked that question. We all want to see what the teacher will do. It’s funny to see how different ones handle Billy. This one, Mrs Parfett, looks at him like he’s an exasperating puppy and reminds him, ‘We’ll make something when the bell goes.’
Billy looks at her like she’s got an IQ of 55. ‘When the bell goes,’ he explains loudly, ‘that means the class is over.’
‘No, this is a double lesson.’ Her voice tells us her patience is wearing thin.
Billy stops arguing and murmurs to himself, ‘They call this cookery class and we can’t even cook.’
The bell’s going. Good.
‘Okay, class!’ Mrs Parfett’s sounding cheerful again. ‘Finish the sentence you’re working on and we’ll move into the prac. room. Get yourselves into groups of three or four and find a cooking station.’
We go into a room full of stoves, sinks and benches. The cool girls move fast and get the bench in the far corner. The boys and I take the one next to them. Matthew and Stephen are annoying sometimes, but right now I’m glad to have them. The sound of a teacher saying ‘get yourselves into groups’ used to freeze my heart into ice-cubes. I look around to see if anyone is in my former position, without a group, left to stand alone for everyone to gawk at.
Yes, there is someone. It’s Justine. She’s slumped over, looking scared, like when she arrived at our classroom door. How did this happen? I thought she was friends with Chloe! I scan the room and see Chloe happily giggling with Elise, who used to be Fatima’s friend. They’ve teamed up with Tristan and Jason to make a group. I can’t keep up with who likes who. I’m so stupid! Last year Mr Callahan told me I knew twice as many words as anyone else in the grade. But what good does that do me?
‘Hey, you!’ Matthew is saying. Who’s he talking to?
I realise with horror that he’s calling out to Justine.
‘Come on over h
ere,’ he says to her.
‘Shut up!’ I hiss at him. Even I know enough not to ask the class weirdo to join our group! Matthew looks shocked, but he shuts up.
Oh, no. Justine’s heard him and she’s starting to walk towards us.
‘We can’t let her be with us.’
‘Why not?’ Matthew looks puzzled. ‘She needs a group and we only got three so far. Didn’t you hear that teacher? She said we could have four.’
‘It’s not that!’ I don’t want to tell him it’s that I heard the cool girls talking about her in home group.
‘Go with them,’ I say to Justine when she gets over to us. I point to the Asian girls, who are across the room. ‘They’ve only got two in their group. They need another person.’
Justine gives me a confused look, but she goes over to Vi and La. They appear a little surprised, but they don’t tell her to go away. Thank goodness. The god of dorkiness must have decided I deserved a break.
At last I’m cool! Temperature-wise, I mean. That’s because only my head is sticking out of the sparkly water off Williamstown Beach. I’m not too good at swimming, nevertheless it feels delicious to glide around in liquid coldness after sweating all week.
‘I’m getting out now,’ Mum calls to me.
‘Okay.’
‘Don’t be too long, all right?’
‘I won’t.’
As if anything could happen to me in this flat bit of sea. She treats me like a toddler sometimes. I breaststroke a few metres in the opposite direction from her to prove a point. Still, I should be grateful she pried herself out of her bungalow office to spend some time with me.
I float around on my back for a while, my closed eyes filled with a rosy glow. Then I make my way up through the shallows, past naked babies and grannies with saggy skin and sandcastles draped with seaweed. I plonk myself down on my beach towel next to Mum’s. She’s slathering her arms with sunscreen.
‘You already put that on,’ I remind her.
‘That was before I went in the water. You’re supposed to reapply after swimming.’
‘I didn’t swim fast enough to wash mine off,’ I say, stretching out on my stomach. Already I can feel the sun heating up my back. Mum picks up one of the straw hats she brought and settles it on my head. Under the fringed brim, I can still watch her as she smooths sunscreen onto her thighs. Which are bulging out of her bather legs. Her stomach has got so big that the blue Lycra stretched across it looks in danger of popping open.
I turn onto my back and put the hat over my eyes. Inside my tiny straw room, I let my mind wander. It carries me away, to a place where I never had to worry if I was being a dork or not. It takes me through the sky, across the Murray River and the Snowy Mountains, to Canberra. It lowers me gently into a cloudy morning when Alice was eleven days old and we took her out of the flat for the first time. We went to the Botanical Gardens. Jake just wanted to run so Dad chased after him, leaving me and Sarah sitting on a blanket under some trees, with Alice between us. Her navy-blue eyes were wide open and she was wearing a doll-sized yellow dress with a white frill around the hem. People strolling by kept stopping to look at her. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ women crooned. One little boy about Jake’s age was so fascinated with Alice that Sarah let him sit down on our blanket and hold her. His mother knelt in front of him, ready to catch the baby if he let go, but he was very careful. ‘I hold on tight,’ he told us in a serious voice, not taking his eyes off Alice’s miniature face. My chest felt filled with light because she was my sister.
‘So how’s school going?’ Mum says. Her voice whizzes me back to hot, ordinary today.
‘Okay.’
Why’d she have to ask about school? I guess she reckons that’s what good mothers do when they’re spending time with their daughter. But I don’t want to think about it here. I take off my hat, turn on my side, prop myself on an elbow and take a deep breath full of salty, non-school air.
‘Got any homework yet?’ Mum persists.
‘I have to write something for English. It’s due on Monday.’
‘What about?’
I wish she’d desist with all this interest in me. Maybe next Saturday I’ll leave her in the bungalow. I don’t want to tell her I’m writing about the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me because she’ll ask what it is. And I know she won’t like the subject I chose. ‘We have to tell what we did on our summer holidays,’ I say.
‘Still handing out that hoary old subject, are they?’ Mum chuckles.
‘Afraid so,’ I sigh.
‘Miss!’ Billy is waving his hand like he’s trying to flag down an aeroplane.
‘Yes, Billy?’ Mrs McBain says calmly. She never gets flustered with him like some of the other teachers do.
He announces loudly, ‘I wanna be a policeman when I leave school.’
‘That’s nice. Why exactly are you letting us know that now?’
‘Because I shouldn’t have to write poetry,’ Billy states emphatically. ‘Poetry’s got nothing to do with being a policeman.’
‘I don’t know, Billy.’ Mrs McBain gives him a little smile. ‘Even policemen need to express their sensitive side sometimes.’
‘I haven’t got no sensitive side,’ Billy growls.
‘I’m sure you do. You just need some help uncovering it. I’m not expecting a masterpiece. Just have a go.’
It’s obvious Billy would like to say more, but Mrs McBain ends the conversation by getting up from her desk and moving around the room to have a look at people’s work, which is making up acrostics. We’re supposed to take a word that’s important to us and write it down the left side of a page, then think of a word or phrase to go with each letter.
As usual, Stephen’s already engrossed in the task. He’s written Cetacean down the side of his page.
‘What’s that?’ Matthew asks, not even attempting to pronounce it.
‘Animal with a blowhole,’ Stephen tells him, impatient to get back to his work. ‘Limbs modified into flippers.’
‘Right,’ Matthew nods.
‘Stupid poetry!’ Billy is muttering to his blank page. ‘I can’t think of no important word.’
‘Do Policeman,’ I suggest.
‘Huh?’ He turns around and looks at me. At the same time, I realise that all three cool girls have turned their heads towards me as well. They heard me trying to help the class whacko! When will I learn to keep my mouth shut?
‘What’d you say?’ Billy persists.
‘She said you could do Policeman as your important word,’ Matthew explains.
‘Oh, yeah.’ You can see a light bulb switching on inside Billy’s head. He turns and writes the word in big, awkward letters.
‘For M,’ Stephen says without looking up from his own paper, ‘you could put May accept bribes.’
Billy doesn’t appear to hear that. But the cool girls are giggling. I just hope it’s Stephen’s joke they’re laughing at.
‘Look, Katie,’ Matthew nudges me. ‘Think this is good?’
He’s already finished. He can concentrate a lot better than he used to. His acrostic says:
Perfume of horse smell
Heart extra large
Acts like a gentleman
Runs really fast
Leaps tall buildings
Asks no hard questions
People love him
‘Leaps tall buildings?’ I ask. ‘Since when can a horse do that?’
‘She never said it had to be true,’ Matthew points out. ‘You can say anything you want in a poem. It makes it more poetic.’
‘I guess so.’
‘Anyway,’ he says, fluttering his eyelashes at me, ‘I’m expressing my sensitive side.’
I take a quick look at the cool girls to see what they think of that, but they aren’t paying any attention to us. Olivia and Tiffany have squashed their chairs close together and they’re reading a creased piece of paper they’ve got between them. They’ve got their hands over their mouths to suppress
giggles. When they’ve finished reading, Tiffany folds the paper into a little square. She checks to make sure Mrs McBain’s back is turned, then hands the paper across to Billy. So he’s not totally untouchable after all.
Billy unfolds the paper importantly. It takes him a while to read it, but finally he figures out whatever it says. ‘Ha!’ he snorts at top volume. ‘That’s a good one.’
Mrs McBain turns away from Chloe, who she’s been helping, and looks sharply at Billy. I bet Tiffany won’t pass him any more notes now. But he saves himself by covering the paper with his hand and saying, ‘I thought of a good line for my poem, Miss!’
‘I’ll look forward to reading that, Billy. Now keep your voice down to a working level, all right?’
‘Aye, aye, Captain.’ Billy gives Mrs McBain a salute. She turns back to Chloe, and Billy refolds the note. He tosses it over his shoulder to land on my desk. I open it as silently as I can, and find an acrostic:
Just so
Ugly!
Sits there like she’s an actual person
Thinks she is one too
I don’t think so!
Never brushes her teeth or hair
Even a loser wouldn’t be her friend
Who wrote this? One of the cool girls? Or were they just passing it on from someone else? Even a loser … does that mean me?
Matthew pulls the note over in front of him, reads it, then crumples it up into a ball of rubbish.
‘What’d you do that for?’ I ask. He can be so infuriating sometimes.
He just gives me a look, the same one he gave me when I said Justine couldn’t be in our cookery group.
The bell clangs, signalling the end of English and the beginning of lunch. As the class starts to crowd out the door, Mrs McBain calls, ‘Kaitlin, have you got a minute?’
Why does she want to see me? Does she think I wrote that poem about Justine? But she didn’t even see the note, did she?
Term in Year Seven Page 3