by Carly Nugent
‘Really. Cross my heart,’ I said. Then Irene cried. Peter put his arm around her. Dad just stood there looking sad and uncomfortable. I imagined Jonas at the school gate, with his bag, knowing he was leaving but not saying anything. Just waving like he always did and turning away. I had thought Jonas was my friend who trusted me and told me everything. But now I was starting to think that The Truth was something different.
For dinner Diana said we could get takeaway, so I put on my coat to walk to the fish-and-chip shop with her. Diana picked up Dad’s wallet off the bench and looked inside it. Then she went into the kitchen and started getting stuff out of the fridge for toasted cheese sandwiches.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘What does it look like,’ Diana said, without a question mark because she didn’t really want an answer.
‘We had toasted cheese last night.’
‘Just set the table.’
I knew from Diana’s tone (which was tired and grumpy with a little bit of sad mixed in) that the conversation was over, so I got out the tablecloth and the water glasses and the tomato sauce. It took me a while to find the tomato sauce because now the pantry was half-full of boxes, too.
I was sitting on the couch with Dad watching the news (they were talking about a bomb that had exploded in London) when the house phone rang. Diana was toasting cheese and Dad isn’t good with phones when he’s having Those Days, so I answered it.
‘Hello, this is Cassie speaking.’
‘Cassie.’ It was Mum. Hearing her voice made something inside me go soft, like melting ice cream. But then I remembered that I was still mad at her about Roger and the omelette. I forced my insides to freeze up again.
‘Hello,’ I said, in the most formal, frozen voice I have.
‘How are you?’ Mum said.
‘Fine.’
The TV said: ‘Evil act of terror.’
‘What are you having for dinner?’
‘Toasted cheese.’
‘Again? Put your sister on.’
I held out the phone to Diana.
The TV said: ‘Person of interest.’
Diana turned off the stove and took the phone.
‘Yeah?’ she said, which is definitely not the way Mum taught us to answer the phone. There was a pause so Mum could yell at Diana for answering the phone like that. Then Diana said, ‘I’m making dinner. I have to go.’ Then she hung up. The colour of Diana’s face told me that Mum hadn’t finished her side of the conversation.
The TV said: ‘Incomprehensible.’
I wasn’t hungry. With all the worry about Jonas in my stomach there wasn’t room for food. I picked off some of the crusts and nibbled a little bit of cheese that was leaking out the edges. Dad took his sandwich into his study and shut the door. Before he went he mumbled, ‘Thanks, sweetheart,’ to Diana. She just glared at him and gave him his wallet.
Diana let me leave the table early, even though I hadn’t really eaten anything. If Mum had been there she would have made me sit at the table until everything was gone, even the crusts. This made me happy and sad at the same time. Happy that I didn’t have to stare at cold cheese all night and sad that Mum wasn’t home.
After dinner I went to my room and tried to pretend I was a platypus. I imagined how I had been swimming all day in a brown river, eating lots of bugs and fish and small things that crawled along the riverbed. I imagined how I had stayed underneath the surface of the water all day, except for a few quick moments when I popped my snout up to take a breath and have a look at things. I imagined how proud I would be that no one had seen me, not even people who sat by the river for ages looking really hard. And I imagined that I was in my burrow, and it was small and brown and warm, and I had nothing to worry about and nothing to think about except rivers. I imagined how easy it would be to go to sleep, if you were a platypus.
But I didn’t imagine well enough because I couldn’t sleep. As soon as I tried my brain started thinking about non-platypus things. Like:
1) Where was Jonas? and
2) Why didn’t Jonas tell me he was leaving?
I thought for so long that it got late, and Dad knocked on my door.
‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘Bedtime.’
‘Dad,’ I said, because I was getting desperate. ‘Why wouldn’t Jonas tell me he was going to leave?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dad said, in a voice that sounded like he was talking from the bottom of a well, and not the space between my room and the hallway. Then he turned off my light and left.
And that was when I started to cry.
I cried so hard that I stopped thinking about why I was crying. I cried for ages to get all the feeling out of me, the way you turn the tap on really hard to get little bits of food out of a clogged-up sink. I cried until my eyes hurt and my nose was blocked and I had to go to the bathroom to get more tissues. And when I was completely empty—of tears and snot and thoughts—I finally fell asleep.
Today Mrs Atkinson gave me homework for Jonas, so after school I turned left instead of right and knocked on the door of his house. Peter answered.
‘It’s spelling worksheets and symmetry,’ I said, ‘for when Jonas comes back.’ I said ‘when Jonas comes back’ instead of ‘if Jonas comes back’ because Peter looked really sad and I wanted him to feel more hopeful. It worked—sort of—because he stretched his lips into an almost-smile and said, ‘Come in, Cassie. Do you want some cordial?’
I did, and while Peter went to make it I went into Jonas’s room to put the worksheets on his desk. I had never been in Jonas’s room before. The first thing I noticed was how big it is for just one kid. It’s much bigger than my room, and it has more things in it than mine does, like a dartboard and a globe and a laptop. Everything in Jonas’s room was tidy—his bed was made (with a shark doona cover and pillowcases) and his clothes were all put away. On Jonas’s bookshelf there was a big set of encyclopaedias, some other books about science, and a lot of books about sharks. On the wall above Jonas’s bed there was a big colour poster of the universe, with all the planets and the sun and lots of glittering stars in the background.
None of these things told me anything about Jonas that I didn’t already know. I walked over to his desk. His laptop was sitting there with a blank screen, and next to it was a mug of pens and pencils. I sat down and turned on the laptop. After a second the start screen popped up and a little box sat there waiting for a password. Which I didn’t have.
I was just about to put the worksheets down and go and find Peter and my cordial when I noticed something. On the shelf above Jonas’s laptop was a book. And sitting on top of the book was a rock. To anyone else it would have looked like just another river rock. But to me, it was different. To me, it was Jonas’s Special Stone.
I took my own Special Stone out of my backpack and compared it to the one on the shelf. They were the same—same flecks, same lumpiness, same smoothness. I felt a little skip of excitement in my stomach. I knew Jonas had left his Special Stone for me (and only me) to find.
I put both of the stones back in my bag. Then I picked up the book that Jonas’s Special Stone had been sitting on. It was a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Which is a novel. Which is a story. Which is not about facts or science and therefore is not something Jonas is usually interested in. I opened it. There was a bookmark in the middle of chapter eight, which is the chapter where Huck finds Jim on Jackson’s Island. The bookmark wasn’t a proper bookmark—it was just a piece of paper folded in half. I knew Jonas had a lot of proper bookmarks (most of them shark ones) so the piece of paper in Huck Finn was kind of weird. I unfolded it, and written on the inside, in Jonas’s handwriting, was one unfinished sentence:
Did you know, the most dangerous part of a tiger snake is its…
I stared at those three dots for a long time. Then I looked up at the laptop and the little flashing password box. And I started to wonder if maybe Jonas had told me why he was leaving. Or at least, he had given me a clue.
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I put my hands on the home keys of Jonas’s keyboard, and typed:
Venom
The laptop beeped at me, and a red cross flashed up on the screen. I tried again:
Fangs
Another beep. I frowned. I know a lot about tiger snakes, and I know that they are one of the most poisonous snakes in the world. I wondered if Jonas had got his fact wrong. It seemed unlikely. I looked around the room, like I was hoping to see the answer in Jonas’s shark doona, or his universe poster. My eyes stopped on Huck Finn, which I had put on the desk next to the keyboard. And then I thought: What if the answer wasn’t a fact at all? What if it was a story? What if it was a story that only Jonas and I knew, because I had told it to him just a few days ago?
I put my pointer fingers back on the F and J keys. And then I typed:
Eyes
The laptop made a happy, chirping sound. I grinned so hard my cheeks hurt—partly because I had typed the right password, but mostly because I knew that Jonas had liked my story after all.
Jonas’s desktop background filled the screen. It was a photo of a great white shark with its jaws open, coming out of the water. There were little folders and files sitting inside the shark’s mouth. I hovered the mouse over them one by one. Recycle Bin. School Stuff. Science Stuff. Animal Stuff. I stopped.
There was a file called The Peacock Detectives.
I opened it. Inside was an address. I took a pencil out of Jonas’s mug and copied it down in my Notebook for Noticing. Then I switched off the laptop and turned around just as Peter walked through the door.
‘Sorry that took so long,’ he said. His face was red around the eyes. ‘I was…’ Peter was having trouble finishing his sentences. He handed me a big glass of red cordial.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. Because it was. ‘Thank you.’
I had a long sip. It was the most delicious glass of red cordial I had ever tasted. It was the red cordial that went with knowing Jonas was my friend, and that he wanted me to find him.
I knew there was a bus at six a.m. because sometimes, after they have finished visiting us, Aunt Sally and my cousins go home on it. We always drive them to the bus stop to say goodbye, and it’s so early it’s still dark, and Diana and I are drowsy and squashed between our cousins in the back seat. When you’re half-awake that early to meet a bus it’s like being in a dream. The world feels soft and thin, like stretched-out playdough. Like it could change shape in your hands, or you could push through it and end up in another world.
I knew you could buy tickets on the bus, too, because Aunt Sally isn’t organised and always forgets to go to the ticket office the day before. I took all the pocket money I had saved out of my money jar and put it together with the fifty dollars Grandpa had given me for Christmas. Altogether it added up to one hundred and fourteen dollars and seventy cents, which I was pretty sure would be enough for one ticket there and two tickets back. I packed the money in my backpack with some water and some cheese sandwiches, my Notebook for Noticing, my photo of Akela, Jonas’s birthday present, the two Special Stones and Huck Finn (which I thought would be a good symbol of my mission to find Jonas).
I got up at five a.m., which was easy because I didn’t sleep all night. I got dressed and had some Coco-Pops and brushed my teeth and put on my jacket and scarf and beanie and gloves and left the house at five-fifteen. It was dark and cold outside, and I could see frost glittering on the ground in the last bit of moonlight before the sun came up.
To get to the bus stop I had to walk across the bridge and past the hospital and Lee Street and Mum’s Flat. In the dark and the cold and the quiet, all those places seemed more alive than usual. Their doors were like mouths and their windows were like eyes following me. They seemed to be breathing. There were no other people out at five-fifteen, and I had a thought that if the hospital or Lee Street or Mum’s Flat decided they wanted to swallow me up nobody would ever know.
The bus was waiting on the main street, outside the pub. It had its engine on, and it was making a soft rumbling sound. The bus was the only thing in the street with lights on (except for the streetlights) and it looked like one warm glowing star in the middle of a lot of dark space. It reminded me of one of the stars on Jonas’s poster, which made me feel a bit braver.
The bus driver was reading a newspaper and eating an apple in the front seat.
‘Morning,’ she said, except it sounded more like ‘ornin’ because her mouth was full of Red Delicious. ‘Ot a icket?’
I shook my head and took a twenty dollar note and four dollars forty in change out of my bag. The bus driver swallowed.
‘On your own, love?’
I nodded. ‘I’m going to visit my aunt,’ I said, which was almost the truth because I had written Aunt Sally’s phone number in my Notebook for Noticing in case I got into trouble. The bus driver had one eyebrow raised like she didn’t quite believe me, so I added, ‘She’s meeting me at the station.’ This was in no way The Truth, but I decided it was a Necessary Lie because Jonas was counting on me.
The bus driver took my money and gave me a ticket.
‘Have a seat,’ she said.
I was the first person on the bus. It was warm, and the light was soft. I sat at the back and huddled up next to the window in my jacket to watch everyone else get on. I felt like I was staking them out, since I was kind of invisible in the almost-dark. It was nice to feel like a detective again.
The first person to get on the bus after me was an old woman. She had a big fluffy coat and a nice handbag and she was wearing lipstick. Next, a man got on by himself and chatted for a while to the bus driver about his kids and the football, so I deduced he must ride the bus a lot. Then a man and a woman got on, and they looked like tourists because they had shopping bags from the Bloomsbury Information Centre and backpacks. They sat down together and fell asleep on each other’s heads and shoulders before the bus even left. Seeing them like that made me wish I had someone’s head and shoulder to fall asleep on, too.
We were just about to leave (I could tell because the bus driver turned the engine up and the lights down) when a girl ran onto the bus. She was puffing and she didn’t have a ticket, which the bus driver was a bit cross about because it meant she had to take money and give out change when it was already six o’clock. The girl was wearing jeans and a jumper—she didn’t have a beanie or gloves or a coat—and her backpack was stuffed so full that the zipper couldn’t zip up properly.
Finally, the bus driver closed the door and sat in the driver’s seat. The girl turned around. The bus clock clicked over to 6:03 and the light hit the girl’s face just enough for me to see who she was. And seeing who she was made me huddle deeper into my jacket.
Because she was Rhea Grimm.
Ever since Rhea Grimm had finished being suspended I had tried my best not to cross paths with her. I faked a headache so I didn’t have to go to the oval for PE, and I told Mrs Atkinson I couldn’t do the lunch orders because I wanted to improve my maths skills. But the-bus-at-six-a.m. was not a place I had expected to cross paths with Rhea Grimm.
She wanted to sit at the back of the bus—I could tell by the way she was scanning the seats. But she also wanted to sit alone, so she took the seat across the aisle from me, next to the window. I realised with some despair that I would have to stay bundled up against my own window for the rest of the trip if I didn’t want Rhea Grimm to see me. Which I really didn’t. Especially since this time I had no Jonas with balloons full of peanut butter and tomato sauce to rescue me.
We started to leave just as the clock ticked over to 6:05. The bus was so big that moving on it was like being on a ship pulling away from the shore. It took a long time to turn, and while it did I silently said goodbye to all the things I knew. The newsagent, the supermarket, the petrol station. And then we were driving fast and straight, right out of town. It was still dark enough to see stars, and from my low-down huddled position looking up and out of the big bus window it felt like we were driving throu
gh space.
I stared out the window until 7:24 and then I risked emerging a little bit from my hiding place. I couldn’t see Rhea Grimm’s face—she was either looking out her window or sleeping. Everyone else on the bus seemed to be asleep, too—except for the old lady, who was doing a crossword (a normal one, not a cryptic one). If I looked down the aisle I could see out the front window, which was as big as a movie screen. It was slowly becoming daytime but the light was still making everything fuzzy at the edges. It was like the world had fallen apart during the night and was now slowly putting itself back together. We went past a lot of fuzzy trees, and here and there a fuzzy house, a fuzzy dog, a fuzzy paddock of sleeping-upright cows.
I realised that if I had been at home now I would have been waking up to eat breakfast. And in forty-five minutes I would be walking to school with Diana. Somewhere between now and then Dad and Diana would realise I was missing. I tried not to think about what their faces would look like when they found me not there. I had left a note on my pillow that said:
Gone to find Jonas. DON’T WORRY!!
I really hoped writing DON’T WORRY!! like that (in capitals with two exclamation marks) would make the words more powerful, so that Dad and Diana really wouldn’t worry. But I had a feeling words wouldn’t be enough—especially words written by someone who is only eleven-turning-twelve on a piece of paper torn out of the back of a notebook.
I stopped imagining Dad and Diana reading my note and imagined finding Jonas instead. In my imagination he was really happy to see me, and when I said, ‘You should come home now,’ he said, ‘Okay.’ And then we ate city ice cream (which is completely different from country ice cream and more delicious) and then we came home.
Even though I knew finding Jonas wouldn’t be so easy, imagining it like that made me feel better, and I fell asleep against the big bus window.
When I woke up it was definitely daytime. All the blurry edges had smoothed themselves out like freshly ironed clothes and everything was clear and bright. We were driving fast past big green paddocks and small hills. The clock said 9:02, which meant it was almost time for me to change from the bus to the train.