by Tiffiny Hall
‘We’re sisters, nothing’s private.’ She grabs at me, then dumps her end of the rug and lunges for my shoulders. She has too much reach with her long limbs and catches me as I’m spinning to run away. She rips the backpack off my arm and unzips it. Her jaw drops when she pulls out the white box containing my brand-new tablet.
The trap that’s been sitting in my gut snares shut. ‘It’s not what you think,’ I squeak; now someone’s turned my volume down.
‘Maxi, did you steal money? Like that girl in your class was screaming?’ Fleur says it in such a lovely tone; I almost want to confess so I can receive the hug her voice promises. But I know it’s a trick.
‘No!’ I blurt. ‘I used my own money.’
‘Well, the price of this is six-druple what I earn at the juice bar in a whole week! What are you doing to earn money like this?’
I shrug again, not knowing how to explain myself. The tree flashes in my mind, the thick sparkly branches and the bark that breathes like skin. How can I account for all these dollars?
Fleur’s face cramps.
‘If you help me carry this rug home and don’t tell Mum about the iPad, I’ll show you tonight where I found the money. Deal?’ I say.
Fleur unravels her face. ‘What, like treasure?’ she asks.
I smile. ‘Exactly like treasure.’
Chapter 8
The setting sun casts yellow spots on my new green rug sprawled across the floor from the lizard house to my bed. I peel back a corner and smile. The money tree could change everything: Mum wouldn’t have to work two jobs, Dad could write his novel full time, Fleur wouldn’t have to visit op-shops. We could have all the cool stuff; we could be the cool kids for once.
Mum is getting ready to return to the chemist for her evening shift and Dad has stayed back at school for a senior students’ electives meeting. It’ll be just Fleur and me tonight. I hold the rug gently in my hand. One week ago we were down to our last few dollars; now this. I pluck a fifty-dollar note out from between the floorboards. What will Fleur say? She’s as trustworthy as she is reticent. I’ve trusted her with everything in my life and she’s always had my back. She’ll know what to do with this.
A soft knock at my door. I drop the corner of the rug as the door swings open. Mum waves at me, her jewellery chiming a symphony. She points a thumb over her shoulder.
‘Off to work?’ I ask.
She nods with her cheeks puffed out. She zooms in on my rug.
‘Found it for twelve bucks at a local garage sale. Upside of living in a fancy area — they’re always giving away almost new stuff,’ I lie.
Mum chugs her cheeks.
‘Hey, how do you know that oil swirling thing works?’ I ask.
Mum mimes a phone to her ear, then puffs out her cheeks, tilts back her head and gargles for a moment.
‘Cos Nanna says so,’ I say. ‘And how do you know everything Nanna tells you is true?’
Mum looks to the ceiling and loops a circle around her head.
‘The universe,’ I say.
Mum twinkles her lips as she swishes the coconut oil from one cheek to the other. It’s called oil-pulling. Mum swishes coconut oil around her mouth for twenty minutes each day. She desperately wants to have her teeth whitened after some medicine she took as a kid stained her teeth grey, but we can’t afford it. Nanna says coconut oil is better than bleach from a dentist for getting stains off your teeth.
Mum grins like a bullfrog, then disappears. I hear her spit out the coconut oil. She returns and gives me a TV smile. ‘You’re doing a great job keeping up your end of the bargain,’ she says, looking around the room.
‘Thanks.’ I hug her, then walk over and stare into Sibyl’s enclosure. She looks mysterious — she knows the secret. Once the babies hatch, I’m going to be spending every cent I have on live food … wait. Mum stands beside me. Yes, the secret! I tense under her gentle hand on my shoulder as I think of my money-hiding rug. I can afford to breed more lizards now. This could be a business. I could be some real competition for Gary at the pet shop. The first lizard millionaire! I’m not used to thinking rich. My tablet lies hidden under my sheets, the new rug conceals my stash, the cappuccinos warm my belly … how could I forget!
‘This glass is so clean you could eat off it,’ Mum says, peering in at Sibyl. ‘You really are doing a great job looking after them, honey. We are so proud of you. It’s good to know we can really rely on you.’ She squeezes my shoulder. ‘You’re always honest and hard-working — what more could we ask for?’ Mum kisses me on the hair, then leaves me alone. I hear the front door thump closed soon afterwards.
I stare at my reflection in the glass. My brownish hair that looks perpetually static, like it’s been rubbed against a balloon, and those freckles that sometimes sparkle near my eyes … The girl staring back at me is not honest. All her lies are swept under a sprawling green rug. The reality check chokes me.
I take Sibyl out of her enclosure and hold her up to Socrates to say ‘hi’. His beard turns black immediately. I laugh. He always does that when he sees her; they’re in love.
There’s a creak on the floorboards outside. ‘What’s the password?’ I call.
I know Fleur says something smart, but I can’t hear her voice through the wooden door. I open it to find her standing with her hair turbaned in a towel again and red lines under her eyebrows where she has attempted to pluck the hairs into a fine line.
‘Honest, you should leave your brows alone. They won’t grow back and there’s nothing worse than little squiggles on your head that look like the mealworms Sibyl eats,’ I say. Fleur pokes out her tongue at me and I hold up Sibyl. ‘You two have a lot in common.’ My sister suppresses a smile.
I stop teasing Socrates and put Sibyl back in her enclosure. Fleur takes a seat on the end of my bed, kicking off her sandals and folding her long legs beneath her summer dress. Why couldn’t I win the gene lottery? Because I won the room lottery, my brain reminds me.
‘Spill,’ Fleur says.
My palms liquefy. I swallow hard and look down at the floor. Maybe all this happened to me for a reason, to keep the secret as my own. My gut churns and I have to admit, it’s not the secret I’m worried about sharing. It’s the money.
Fleur’s voice softens even more and drifts towards me like smoke. ‘You know you can trust me, right?’
She’s totally playing me. I go to tell her, but a new feeling — greed — creeps in, snatching the words away from the tip of my tongue.
‘The money you found. You didn’t find it. Did you?’ she says, removing the towel from her head. The last of the sun spritzes her hair and for a moment she looks all angelic, making me feel even more demonic for taking what probably wasn’t mine and spending it.
‘Holy moly, Maxi! The rug, the coffees, God knows what else you’ve bought — you didn’t find the money, you took it. Took it from Dad’s savings.’
‘What? Where are you getting that from?’ I ask.
‘The secret book safe,’ she says. ‘In the study? The safe that looks like a book? Where Dad hides some of his money. You found it and took it, hey?’
‘I didn’t know about Dad’s secret book safe. Honest! I found some other money,’ I say.
Fleur looks at me dubiously. ‘Where then?’
I walk over to my door and lock it just in case, then take a corner of the rug and lift it up like a magician’s cloth.
Fleur screams. It’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard her make. She’s scared to move, as if a bird-sized spider sits under that rug.
‘Fleur?’ I say gently.
‘Where’d you get …? I mean, there’s so much …? All this, where’d it come from? The loot! Did you steal it? Dad’s book safe doesn’t have this much money in it, surely,’ she murmurs.
‘I didn’t steal it, I promise. I found it. Or, well, I guess it found me. It doesn’t seem to belong to anyone,’ I say.
Fleur considers this for a moment, then dives off the bed and sprawls in the forest of money p
oking through the floorboards like tall coloured grass.
‘There’s more of it now, much more. When it first started growing, there was only one old note, but now there are heaps of notes, like fresh leaves, all brand new. I had to buy the rug to hide it,’ I explain.
Fleur stops feeling the notes and looks up at me. ‘Growing?’
I crouch down to the floor to meet her. ‘Yeah,’ I whisper. ‘It’s growing. Whenever I take some money, the next minute there’s more. The more I take, the more it grows.’
Fleur’s eyes widen and I can see myself in them. My own eyes look frozen but excited.
‘I need your help to keep this a secret,’ I say. ‘I need your help to use this in the right way. We could really change things for Mum and Dad. If we’re smart.’
Fleur nods, but I can tell she is making a mental list of things she would like to buy, from shoes to cosmetics to designer clothes.
‘Hey, snap out of it!’ I yell. Then I lower my voice. ‘I know it gets you at first, but we have to think clearly about this. We can’t get carried away.’
Fleur is peering between the floorboards, straining to see what lies beneath. Her dress flies up over a pair of pink bike shorts. ‘What’s down there? Where’s it all coming from?’ she asks.
‘If I show you, you have to promise not to tell a single living breathing organism. It’s a secret between us — you, me and the lizards.’
‘I pinkie-swear,’ she says.
I take her pinkie and we wrap our fingers around each other, then kiss the back of one another’s hands. Her sticky lip-gloss stays on my skin.
Fleur helps me to rearrange the green rug to cover the money farm beneath. We triple check there isn’t a single leaf poking out from the sides, then head out.
Standing at the door to the basement, a rush of hot spit rises into the raw soreness of my dry throat. I didn’t realise how nervous I’ve been all day. The blue hatch looks undisturbed, but an awful thought strikes me, the kind that cannot be retrieved once it escapes into your mind: what if I were never meant to open the hatch in the first place? What if this is some terrible test where I should have ignored the money and never gone down into the hole and never spent a single cent? An overwhelming sense of doom covers me in a blanket of prickles. I failed the test.
Fleur is bouncing on her heels in anticipation. I take a long deep breath. After a few moments, I give up; my anxiety cannot be addressed with breathing exercises. Fleur is impatient and leans forward and heaves the hatch open. Thud, the hole is exposed (she is much more athletic than I am). A magpie swoops us and we duck. It murmurs a few syllables as I look around. No one. Fleur is now looking at me, holding her hands out expectantly. I’m gulping air like a gasping marathon runner.
‘Are we going down there?’ Fleur asks.
‘You’re no Aristotle when it comes to logic,’ I sass, as Dad would have said, and suddenly I’m trapped in a memory from my old school.
A bunch of kids was forced to take ballroom dance lessons from an old lady who struggled to walk, let alone waltz. The boys stood on one side and the girls on the other, and when the old woman blew a whistle, the boys would walk over to the girls and say, ‘Would you do me the honour of this dance?’ I stood there, my cheeks on fire, my heart pounding, waiting. As all the other kids paired off to dance, I wished I wouldn’t be standing on my own at the end of it. But I was. I stood there, fat as ever, staring at the old woman whilst she blew her whistle at Oscar and Chloe, demanding that they make a threesome with me against their will.
Those feelings, the ones of humiliation, of not being good enough, the feelings that make you want to crawl into a black hole and die, are emotions I never want to know again in my lifetime. Down there in that basement is my ticket away from it all. The girls with the right bags, the expensive shoes, the straight hair, the cool clothes always get asked to dance by the boys. My brain stops me — is this money thing all about being liked? I check myself for a moment. Not having a lot of money is a hassle, but being chubby too is just tragic.
Fleur is halfway down the hole.
‘Wait!’ I call after her, chasing her down.
The basement is dark and laced with cobwebs. I yank on the light, then shush Fleur with my finger, although her voice is never a threat to any decibel. The light from the hatch above falls on her face and she looks impossibly trusting of me right now. She stands solid in the darkness; both of us have never had a big hang-up over darkness. We’re pretty proud of that. Sure, spiders, snakes and clowns — the usual scare suspects — freak us out, but never the dark … that is, only as long as we have each other.
I take Fleur’s hand and lead her around the random objects to the wardrobe. I open the door and motion Fleur to follow me down the trapdoor inside the cupboard. She is hesitant at first, but with one squeeze of her hand, she gives me a confident nod and climbs down. The soft glow fills the room below and lights the maze of wine bottles.
‘Wow,’ Fleur murmurs. She runs a hand along the coloured glass, leaving delicate fingerprints as we meander our way along the corridors of bottles. ‘Dad would love this.’
‘There’s more,’ I say, leading her further into the labyrinth. The scent of Fleur’s skin coats the stench of mouldy dust; today she smells like coconut. The bottles reflect the glow in a soft romantic light, the kind that nearly turns your skin transparent.
‘This is exciting,’ Fleur whispers. And I realise how long I’ve yearned for something exciting to happen to me. Yeah, I love Sibyl and Socrates, but being a responsible lizard lover doesn’t leave much opportunity for having adventures. The money tree asked me to dance and I am finally dancing.
‘We’ve carped this diem, or whatever Dad says,’ I tell her.
As we round the final corner, I watch the light hit Fleur’s face and her eyes widen so much they are almost square. She draws all the air in the room into her lungs in one diabolical gasp. My secret shivers out of me. The tree looks like it has grown bushier since I last visited. Fleur arches her neck and takes in the throbbing coloured branches cascading down, the dome of notes covering the wide trunk, the rainbow swirl of different denominations. Then, as if something snaps inside her, she lunges for the tree, feeling the buds of money and wrapping herself around the trunk. She twirls branches around her like a gymnast with a ribbon.
‘It’s a money tree!’ She laughs. ‘A real-life money tree! I can’t believe it!’
I let her run around the trunk several times to get it out of her system. But when she reaches to pluck her first note, I smack her hand away.
‘What did you do that for?’ she asks.
‘We need rules,’ I say.
‘What rules?’
‘Rules to protect the tree, and to protect the secret. If there are no rules, someone will find out.’
Fleur, being the eldest and supposedly the more sensible, plonks herself down to listen. She stretches out, looking up the skirt of the tree into its technicolour foliage. I lie down next to her and allow the tree to swallow me up and make me feel invisible.
‘Wow,’ she says. ‘This could really change our lives.’
‘I know.’ I get down to business. ‘Okay, so first rule is: we tell no one. Act like the tree doesn’t exist.’
‘Duh,’ Fleur says.
‘Next rule: we record all our pickings, so we know how much money we’ve taken.’
‘Who cares how much we’ve taken if it all just grows back anyway?’
‘No, we have to be accountable to each other. If I don’t tell you how much I’ve picked, then I could just go on some crazy spending spree that would give us away. The more frivolous we are, the more suspicious people will become.’
‘True,’ Fleur agrees.
‘Third rule: we consult each other on our purchases. Fair?’
‘But you won’t think anything I want to buy is of any value,’ she protests.
‘I will buy lizard accessories you won’t like, so you can have those hideous designer sunglasses y
ou’ve been eyeing for the past century. No judgment on purchases, but we do tell each other and record what we buy. Deal?’
Fleur exhales deeply. ‘Deal,’ she says. I have never seen her this happy before. Gone are the days of making over her own clothes.
We bathe in the light of the money tree until our ‘WANT’ lists are completed in our heads, then we share them.
MAXI
Substrate
UVA lights
New enclosure for Socrates
Larger egg incubator
Climbing branches
Live food: grasshoppers, mealworms, silkworms and crickets
Heat lamps
PlayStation
PlayStation games
Braces
TOTAL: Lots. As I have no idea how much braces will cost but have heard parents refer to them as costing an arm and a leg. That’s heaps.
FLEUR
Tablet for school
Custom tablet case
Parisian scarf
Calvary Couture blazer
Textured V-neck cardigan with star elbow patches
European jeans
A Best Society handbag
Strappy sandals
Designer umbrella
Posh sunglasses
TOTAL: Work in progress. Fleur has no idea what a designer umbrella goes for these days and is sure she has forgotten some of her favourite things to add to the list.
Chapter 9
Wednesday passes and Fleur is so aloof about the money tree that I am convinced she is up to something or taking rule number one very seriously. Stacey is away from school on Thursday so I chill out a bit. Tyler and I roam the yard for insects at lunch and talk about his PlayStation and how he’s hanging out for an upgrade. I’ve wanted a PlayStation forever. I can’t concentrate in class with the money forest growing on my brain. I’m distracted with doodling lists of stuff to buy; the ‘WANT’ list has grown. When I produce my brand-new iPad, no one says a word; it’s expected that my parents fork out for this. Tyler helps me to download all the applications I need for school and I feel a bit more like everyone else.