by Tiffiny Hall
‘Time’s come to ditch the five-storey lizard house for some friends who don’t live on crickets,’ Fleur mutters under her breath. A normal person wouldn’t hear this, but over the years I’ve developed Superman’s hearing. I don’t know why she is so shy and polite around everyone else but me — guess it’s kind of a compliment.
I stand up and walk over to my sister, then stare into her peppermint-green eyes. I lower my voice. ‘And where do you expect Sibyl and Socrates to sleep?’
Fleur holds my stare.
‘Do you expect them to sleep in the kitchen?’ I ask. ‘You know how Mum feels about my cockroach colony. No matter how many times I tell her I smear Vaseline around the edges of the buckets so they can’t jump out, she insists every small-time average roach she spots in the house is an escapee. It’s so insulting! I know I have the best cockroaches in town and if she saw one of my specimens, she’d know it too.’
Fleur sniffs and finally looks away. ‘But I’m older,’ she says in a whimper.
‘So what? Look, I need the bigger room because I have bigger things going on. More important things than boys and sitting around dreaming about bread all day.’ I return my attention to the eggs.
‘It takes discipline to go off carbs!’ she pouts, then stomps back upstairs on her turned-out ballerina feet.
I fan the remaining clutches of eggs and reset the temperature on the incubator. ‘It’s okay, guys, I’m here,’ I say. ‘You’re going to be okay. I’ll see you in a few days.’
Sibyl has moved back into her sand burrow and stares at me with her mouth open. Suddenly thuds make her scurry deeper into her hole.
Fleur reappears at the doorway, holding a suitcase that she has just dragged down the staircase step by step. She heaves it into the centre of my room, then drops it hard onto the floor.
‘Stop!’ I yell. ‘The vibrations will kill them! Do you want blood on your hands? Did you wake up this morning and think, “Hey, what about I commit a bit of murder today? That sounds like fun!”’
‘Max, don’t be so hysterical. I’m moving in. We can share the big room,’ Fleur says. Her eyes dart around the room and I can tell she’s rearranging my furniture to accommodate her bed.
I fold my arms. ‘We’re already moved in. This is my room. It’s not up for grabs any more. Or sharing.’
‘Don’t be such a little pest,’ she sighs.
‘I’m only two and a half years younger than you!’ I snap.
She huffs. ‘Biologically. Mentally you go back a decade!’
Fleur reaches into her case and throws a shoe at me. I catch it in midair. She aims the next heeled weapon at my lizard house.
‘Wait!’ I yell.
Fleur hesitates and slides her eyes towards me.
‘I’ll give you fifty bucks for the room.’
Her eyes narrow. ‘And where did you get fifty bucks?’ she asks.
‘I found it,’ I say. Forfeiting my money will mean sacrificing lizard food and the canteen. I’ve heard this school has the best canteen; being on the rich side of town, it even serves croissants. But Sibyl’s and Socrates’s survival is more important than a pastry.
‘Show me the money,’ Fleur says, lowering the shoe.
I walk over to my jacket hanging on the door and pull out the fifty-dollar note from my pocket. ‘You’d have to work a long shift at the juice bar for this,’ I coax. I know she hates her part-time job.
Fleur gasps, then snatches the money out of my hand. ‘Deal,’ she says.
Mum knocks on my door. Fleur slips the money into the shoe she’s holding.
‘Are we nearly ready?’ Mum looks at Fleur’s suitcase in the middle of the room. ‘Still fighting over the room, are we?’ She walks over to the bed and sits down. Her eyebrows are a warning and we know to come and sit beside her. We all hook ankles.
‘Look, honey,’ she pats Fleur on the knee, ‘the room fits the lizards. They’re all that’s left of Colin and we have to take care of them and make do.’ She sighs up into her fringe, then laughs. ‘Your father is the last person you would expect to now own a reptile licence!’
‘All we ever do is make do,’ Fleur sighs. Mum ignores her.
‘So, the big day,’ Mum says. ‘Are we looking forward to meeting friends with similar passions? It’s very important for girls your age to have hobbies. In such an image-saturated world, it could be easy to succumb to the sum of one’s selfies.’
‘As if. We’d need phones first. Please can I have my own phone?’ I plead.
Mum smiles and pulls her hair back into a ponytail before she answers. ‘So you can rate your self-esteem by how many followers you have and the “likes” gleaned from strangers on social media? I don’t think so.’
I pretend to sulk but I’m used to ‘no’. I’ve only asked three hundred and thirty-two times.
Fleur slumps her shoulders. Today at school she will have to find her voice, and she never likes that. If it were up to Fleur, she would only talk to me. She hates speaking to strangers. She prefers to sit back and observe the world; from the peaks of her tall shoulders, she’s a lighthouse.
‘Can we have money for the canteen?’ I ask. ‘I heard it’s a really great canteen, with French pastries.’
Fleur rolls her eyes and breathes, ‘Thinking about lunch before breakfast?’
‘We don’t do that,’ Mum says.
We don’t do a lot of things in my family. We don’t have money for the school canteen, we don’t go overboard with birthday gifts, we don’t buy new clothes but rely on hand-me-downs from cousins and op-shops. What’s worse than that? Moving into the shabbiest house on a really rich street. Walking around, I can’t believe some homes have letterboxes that are more luxurious than our house. I know Fleur is desperate for new clothes for school. She has sewn a leather panel from one of Mum’s old skirts onto the pocket of her plain cotton T-shirt to wear with jeans. She is far more creative than me. At my old school I used to look in lost property whenever I needed new clothes and ask the teacher if I might have them. Often the clothes were abandoned and it saved the teacher sorting them out into the rubbish.
I spied on Fleur conducting a first-day-at-school dress rehearsal yesterday. She met herself in the mirror about eight times; each time she was a different person in a different outfit. It was like watching some kind of speed-dating event. Our new school doesn’t have a uniform, so there’s more pressure to look cool. Kids will judge everything from the shoes you have to the schoolbag you don’t have. You need the ‘it thing’. Everyone needs to have it. It. IT! Whatever ‘it’ may be at the moment.
‘Well, once my lizards hatch, I’ll be able to sell the babies for thirty dollars each. That’s nearly two grand!’ I wriggle with excitement.
‘You’ll be able to afford a pastry then,’ Mum says.
‘As if there are sixty lizard lovers out there,’ Fleur says. Despite her voice being so quiet, it can drip with sarcasm and sting. She’s still really cheesed off my reptiles have claimed the bigger room.
‘I love how entrepreneurial you are,’ Mum says and squeezes my leg. The wind blows through the window and messes our hair into each other’s faces. We untangle and Mum asks, ‘How is Sibbie?’
I walk over to the lizard house, open the glass cabinet doors and reach in to lift up Sibyl by the belly. I sit back down between Mum and Fleur.
‘Don’t touch me with that thing,’ Fleur says and flinches.
I hold the lizard out on my palm, then raise her up by the tail to reveal her underbelly. ‘See?’ I say.
Mum and Fleur lean in. Sibyl doesn’t squirm. She’s used to this examination.
‘Another clutch of eggs is cooking. See those lumps in her belly? They’re eggs!’
Mum frowns. ‘Will you be able to keep up with your studies whilst tending to the babies?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘I’m out,’ Fleur says. She picks up her shoes and drags her suitcase towards the door. ‘Max, you can have this room. It stinks.’
Chapter 4
As we drive to school, Mum gives me her Dos and Don’ts for making a decent first impression.
Do smile and make eye contact.
Don’t bring up the cockroach colony.
Do ask other kids their favourite movie.
Don’t invite them over right away to meet Socrates.
Do repeat their name seven times in two minutes to avoid forgetting.
Don’t bring up your pregnant lizard.
Pretty much, be normal. And lizardless.
‘Well, I don’t like kids who don’t appreciate bearded dragons,’ I remind her as we round a corner. ‘So that should make it easy.’
Both Mum and Fleur sigh conspiratorially, exhaling for so long I think they might pass out. Then I feel Mum change gear with a crunch in preparation for a speed hump, and Fleur and I angle our morning cups of tea so they won’t spill.
We are late to school by Fleur’s standards. She likes to arrive early. The half-hour before the first bell was the highlight at our old school: standing outside with friends and just talking or, in Fleur’s case, whispering. No point being early today; we both need to find friends to talk to first. I’m glad Hatbridge College is both a primary and a secondary school. At least I’ll have Fleur.
Mum drops us off out the front. I watch kids arrive and join groups, the circles expanding effortlessly to absorb them, then closing again to exclude the outside world. This is Cool School, I can tell. Everyone looks great: boys wear expensive shoes and girls sport luscious locks, salon quality. I bet their mums don’t cut their hair.
Dad suddenly appears in his ugly tweed teaching jacket with patches on the elbows and that droopy burgundy tie. He takes our hands and we stand in our own little embarrassing circle. Kids walk past and stare, probably wondering why we are holding hands with a teacher. Fleur and I try to tug away when we realise he’s in the mood for a powwow.
‘Who’s got it better than we do?’ Dad asks.
Fleur and I look around, petrified.
‘Who’s got it better than we do?’ Dad repeats in a singsong voice, then squeezes our hands.
‘Nooobody,’ Fleur and I mutter in unison.
Dad cups his ear. ‘I can’t hear you!’ he says, way too loudly.
Fleur and I exchange a glance, agreeing it’s best to get it over with, then say louder, ‘Nooobody.’
Dad beams so hard his eyes practically disappear. ‘Today is the perfect day for a perfect day!’
I love the creases in the corners of his eyes that turn his face into a perpetual smile. The silver streaks that paint the sides of his thinning hair shine in the sun. I wish my hair was white blonde, not the non-colour it is. I yank my mousy braid. Mouse or rodent is the worst hair colour on the spectrum. As soon as I’m old enough to find me some hair dye, I’m changing to fire-engine red, blue black or sunflower yellow.
‘So how are we feeling, team?’ Dad asks. He looks at me. I don’t want to admit I’m nervous. My stomach is churning.
‘Fine,’ Fleur says.
‘Me too,’ I add.
‘“Fine” is always code for “not fine”,’ Dad says. ‘Look, girls, I know it’s hard starting afresh, but this is a really great school that will offer you a bright future. I only want the best for you. These kids would be lucky to have you choose them as friends.’
Something tells me they’ll be doing the choosing, not us.
‘It’ll be good,’ I say. ‘Good’ is also code for ‘not fine’. Fleur shrugs and nods. Then Dad performs the ultimate act of parent humiliation and kisses us each on the head in public, before finally leaving us to it.
Fleur slinks to a nearby tree and pretends to search in her bag for something — her confidence perhaps. I know she’s sussing out her next move. Glancing around, I see a boy standing at the base of the school steps, looking as lost as I feel. He’s wearing round framed glasses that pinch a big nose, and holding a tennis racket in a death grip that is turning his knuckles white.
Walking over to him, I ask, ‘You play tennis?’
He turns and looks at me suspiciously. ‘It’s not a tennis racket, it’s a mosquito destroyer,’ he says. ‘I hunt insects.’
He lifts the racket and I can see it has a button on the handle. He presses the button and the racket strings buzz with an electric current. I go to stick my finger in.
‘Are you crazy?’ he says, yanking the racket away.
‘Probably.’
The boy smiles for the first time. ‘Then I like you already. I’m Tyler Beverage. Year Six,’ he says.
‘Maxine Edwards. Same,’ I say. ‘Why hunt mosquitos?’
‘I like the sparking noise they make when I zap them.’ He shrugs. ‘Hunt flies too.’
Holding eye contact, I ask, ‘Tyler Beverage, what’s your favourite movie?’ I start to feel more comfortable as everyone else’s conversations begin to swirl around us.
‘Toy Story 3,’ he says. ‘You?’
‘Tyler Beverage, I don’t like movies as much as I like nature docos. If we had cable TV, I’d watch them all day. Tyler Beverage, I had a friend at my old school who had cable and would let me watch until her family moved back to America. I wanted her cable TV so bad, Tyler Beverage, but she gave the subscription to her older brother who’d moved out of home.’ Tyler observes me with slit eyes. I think I’m doing everything right: eye contact, using his full name and asking questions, but I’m not sure if saying his name seven times is to make me remember him, or him remember me.
‘I went to a magic show once and was pulled out of the crowd to be sawn in half,’ he says.
I tell Tyler, ‘I went to the zoo once and swam in a glass pool alongside a crocodile in the next tank. It was eight times as big as me.’
‘Cool,’ he says, his eyes wide. ‘Want to sit next to me?’
‘Sure, Tyler Beverage. Lead the way.’
But before we head off, a girl walks past and bumps his backpack. Her smooth olive legs are on show in a pair of pleated red shorts and she’s looking down her nose, so all you can see is her brown eyeshadow sparkling in the sun. Everything about this girl is in your face.
‘Sorry,’ she says, raising only one eyebrow. When her chin dips slightly, I see her eyes are the same colour as the turquoise stones in Mum’s hippy bracelets. I know the lazy one-eyebrow trick. Kids do that when they’re being totally fake.
‘You’re not sorry,’ I say. ‘You bumped him on purpose.’
Tyler looks over his shoulder as if he heard his name being called, but when there’s no one to answer to, he shuffles behind me.
‘I think you’ll find his backpack bumped my new designer Louis satchel that my dad just bought me for being totally awesome.’ No light reaches her eyes. This girl immediately gives me the creeps.
‘Louis is a dumb name for a bag,’ I say.
‘It’s not a name, idiot. It’s a brand. A French brand. Cost the earth,’ she sneers and mentions a sum I can’t believe. I look at Tyler. He doesn’t blink.
‘As if bags cost that much! That’s more than my mum’s car,’ I blurt.
The girl laughs, more of a squawk. ‘Your mum must drive a dump. We’ve just bought a new Jag. Wouldn’t be caught dead in anything less.’
Mum should have told me: do be yourself, but don’t let anyone know where you come from. I forgot this school has its own swimming pool.
My skin prickles. I see a flash of Fleur in the background, shaking her head. I call the girl a bad word and rip Louis from her shoulder. The girl falls to her knees, quickly rescuing the bag from the pavement, then patting it like a pet.
‘I’m telling!’ she yells up at me.
Tyler grabs my arm. ‘Let’s go,’ he says and pulls me up the school steps and into the building. We stride down a corridor of lockers, then turn sharply into a room filled with a mob of music stands and a long grand piano. When the
door closes behind us, I realise he is panting.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
Tyler removes a handkerchief from his pocket and blows his nose. How last century, I think.
‘That was full-on,’ he says. ‘No one ever talks to Stacey Shovelton like that.’
‘She was boasting and full of herself,’ I say. Suddenly I feel really self-conscious in my army-green T-shirt handed down to me by Fleur and my jeans that don’t even have a name like Louis. I’m angrier with myself than Stacey. Mum always says jealousy is a disease and I feel terrible I allowed myself to be infected.
‘Everyone who goes here is pretty rich,’ Tyler says casually.
I roll my eyes. ‘I bet they’re not just “spiritually wealthy” as my parents would say but real wealthy, like gold knobs on their cupboards and carpets that feel like clouds.’
‘Yep … carpets that feel like clouds.’ He nods, then warns, ‘You’ll be in trouble for what you said.’
‘Yeah. But she deserved it. You should have zapped her with your thingy.’
Tyler looks at me, mortified.
‘I’m just joking, Tyler Beverage,’ I say, laughing.
He laughs too. ‘Hey, stop using my name so much — it’s freaking me out.’
The bell rings.
‘As you wish,’ I say and follow him to class to meet my teacher.
When I walk into the classroom, I expect everyone to stare at me, but instead each face is absorbed in staring down at a screen in their lap. Everyone has a tablet.
I look at Tyler. ‘I haven’t got an iPad,’ I panic.
‘We don’t use many textbooks any more — almost everything is on the tablet and in apps. It’s more fun,’ he says.
There’s no way we could afford an iPad, let alone one just for me. Instead of graffitied folders or covered schoolbooks, all the kids have personalised tablet covers. This is crazy. Tyler yanks my hand and I realise I’ve been staring.
‘We get screen time before school to do whatever we want,’ he explains.
It is cemetery quiet, something I’m not used to in a classroom. A woman with curls erupting from her head, and red specs to match a pair of red boots, approaches me.