by Bell Davina
For Sally, of course!
Best mentor and dear friend.
And to the memory of Ms Sadlier,
who lives on in the hearts of those she taught.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Seven Questions
Quote Board
About the author
Copyright Page
It’s one of those autumn days when it’s cold enough to think about marshmallows. Toasting them, I mean, or dropping them in a hot chocolate so they go all soft. (But only the pink ones, right? The best.) The leaves on my street are turning different shades of fire, and Sunnystream – the suburb where I live – looks really pretty. I’m walking through there right now if you want the full tour. I’m headed to Corner Park, where my three best friends in the entire world are waiting for me. We haven’t hung out together for two whole months – not since last holidays. In other words, forever.
Belle Brodie, Lola Powell, Maisie Zhang and I (Sophia Hargraves) were best friends all through primary school – like, the best. But now we’re in year seven, and we’re all at different schools. I’m the only one who goes to Sunnystream High, and you know what? It’s lonely – like, really lonely. Especially after what happened over the summer.
But I’m not going to think about all that today. Today is what my sister, Gracie, used to call a Full-Heart Day. You know that feeling you get on the first day of the holidays? Not the Saturday, but the first Monday, when it’s ten o’clock and you’d usually be at school, but instead you’re at home wearing your own clothes, maybe even your PJs, and your hair’s not brushed, and you’ve got weeks ahead of you to do whatever you want? That’s what I’ve got going on right now.
I’m leaving my house with two batches of cupcakes in my backpack. I baked them myself. Salted caramel, because Maisie loves everything caramel. And triple chocolate because, well, how good is chocolate?
At the end of my street, Peachtree Street, I hit the town square, which is actually more of a big grass circle. It’s called Handkerchief Place and Lola has made us do like a zillion photo shoots there on her phone. It has a little white wooden gazebo in the middle that has lights strung up around it and a fountain in front, and it’s super pretty. All the shops and businesses and cafes are around that square, like Sookie La La, where we get milkshakes, which is run by this nice old couple called the Greens, and Buck’s, which is a grocery store, and Maisie’s parents’ antique store, Old Gold, which she lives behind. It’s full of weird old stuff: a skeleton missing only its two front teeth, and a pirate’s beard brush. In summer, people sit out here at restaurant tables, or on the warm pavement eating ice-cream from Judy’s Eye-Scream. When my dad is home, we do that a lot. Or at least we used to before he left.
In fact, because I didn’t have time for breakfast (major sleep-in), I think I might stop there now and get a cone and say hi to Judy. Judy doesn’t treat me any differently to how she did before what happened in the summer. She just says, ‘Hey kid, what up?’ in that way that’s half-friendly and half-professional, like you’re actually just as important as an adult customer. She’s only just finished being a uni student but she started the ice-cream shop all on her own, which Belle finds particularly impressive. Belle likes businesswomen who can be strong entrepreneurial role models for us. That’s literally how Belle talks – I’m not even making that up.
Today, there aren’t many customers at Judy’s shop, and Judy looks glum. That could be because summer’s ended and people won’t be eating that much ice-cream for a while. Or she could be fighting with Mikie again. Mikie used to be a carpenter but now he runs the local coffee cart and he makes really good hot chocolate. But is hot chocolate babyish? Maybe I should start drinking real coffee, like Lola does.
Mikie and Judy are BF-GF about fifty per cent of the time and totally in love. The other fifty per cent they’re fighting – really HUGE fights. That’s when her ice-cream flavours have names like Death to All Boysenberry, Man-go Away and Mikie, I’m Cherry Angry, Full of Sage. Once Mikie got a tattoo of Judy’s face on his arm. She was so mad that she let the brake off his coffee cart and it rolled into Merry Creek. The power generator that runs the coffee machine got completely wrecked. I know because we helped pull it out of the creek, Belle and Lola and Maisie and I. We sort of like to be involved in what’s happening around town.
Mikie is a clumsy guy, and pretty forgetful. The next week, he forgot to put the brake on and the cart rolled into the creek again. Often you’ll find him sitting on the pavement next to his coffee cart, picking petals off a daisy and muttering ‘she loves me, she loves me not’. That’s when he’s thinking about Judy. Lola reckons the Mikie and Judy story is better than most things on TV, which is really saying something because Lola LOVES TV. You just never know what’s going to happen next with those two.
The boy in front of me in the ice-cream queue went to Sunnystream Primary, where Gracie and my friends and I used to go. My heart sinks a little. I know what’s going to happen next. When he pays Judy and turns to leave, he sees me. Looks at me. Looks uncomfortable. Looks away.
I feel my cheeks go hot. Which happens really easily when you have red hair and freckles. ‘Hi Judy,’ I say, trying to act like nothing just happened.
‘Hey kid, what up?’ says Judy like nothing just happened. (See? Told you.)
‘What’s your flavour of the week?’ I ask.
‘Vege-MIGHT-get-back-with-you-but-then-again-I-might-not,’ she says. ‘Vegemite and vanilla, basically. It’s pretty salty. Want to try a spoon?’
‘Sure,’ I say, even though it sounds terrible. But here’s the thing. Judy’s combos always work. The Vegemite mixed with the sweet creaminess is actually total genius. ‘Mmm. I’ll get one of those. In a waffle cone, please.’
‘Don’t tell Belle about the sample spoons, OK? She’d bust my balls,’ says Judy.
Belle is obsessed with getting people to stop using plastic and creating rubbish and wrecking the environment. She’s the coach of an environmental action group for primary-school kids called the Eco Warriors. Except the guy who printed their T-shirts got it wrong, so they say ‘The Eco Worriers’. This is actually pretty accurate because Belle is very worried about the future health of the planet. She’s the reason that no store in Sunnystream will give you a bag – not even a paper one. You’d think everyone would be used to it by now, but often people forget to bring their own and you see them with armfuls of stuff, dropping things on their toes and saying bad words. The Eco Worriers are supposed to help out by following shoppers around and picking things up.
Lots of people in Sunnystream are scared of Belle, including the shop owners. She’s often described as a ‘force’, which I think is a code word for ‘bossy but efficient’. But the weird thing is that the Eco Worriers kind of love her. In primary school, they used to follow her everywhere, like ducklings. They would ask her for advice, like what to do when their friends left them out in the playground. It was pretty cute.
‘You off to the clubhouse?’ Judy asks, and smiles.
Everyone in Sunnystream knows that even though te
chnically it belongs to the local council, Corner Park Clubhouse is sort of ours. We’ve played there our whole lives – after school, on weekends, during the holidays – and now that we’re older, it’s where we hang out. Or it used to be, before Lola and Belle moved away for school and Maisie’s gymnastics got even more intense. Since the start of summer, I haven’t been there either – too many memories, I guess. Without the others, it felt too sad to go there. Like eating your birthday cake alone.
But I know the clubhouse so well, it’s like it lives in my heart. I can close my eyes and I’m right there, sitting on the steps of that white, wooden building – the oldest one in Sunnystream – on the edge of Corner Park oval. It used to be a cricket clubhouse – that’s why it has that name. I can smell the particular smell you get when you step up onto the verandah and through the blue door, like old wood and beeswax from the polished floor and eucalyptus from the big old trees that are on one side of the building. On the other is the garden with the red Japanese maple that Gracie and I helped plant. Our dad won the tree in a raffle, but Mum wouldn’t let him put it in at our house because it wasn’t native to the area.
I can picture the inside of the building – the sweet little hall, about the size of two classrooms, where I’ve been going since Mum took me and Gracie to storytime when we were toddlers. Since then, we must have been there a million times. A zillion. It’s where we’ve had school plays and prize nights and a town pie-eating competition, which Lola won twice. It’s where we’ve come every year of my life to watch our local theatre group, the Sunnystream Players, put on their mid-summer murder mystery play.
In the path by the back door, there’s a row of handprints from when we were in year five. We made them one night in winter when the lights of the dog park were already on, and it was so cold our fingers hurt when we took off our gloves. They’d finished digging up a drain that afternoon, so the concrete was still soft enough to stick our palms into. I’m sort of embarrassed to tell you this part because it’s pretty cheesy, but when we’d finished, we all squealed and high-fived our sticky hands because it felt kind of daring, squishing a bit of ourselves into history. Like we had signed the wall in pen. By then it was dark and we’d all had to go, the concrete turning hard between our fingers, gloves in our pockets. ‘Guys!’ I had yelled just as everyone was heading in different directions to go back home. ‘Best friends forever?’
‘Literally,’ said Lola.
‘Obviously,’ said Belle.
Through the dark, I could feel Maisie smile.
‘Yeah,’ she’d said. ‘Forever.’
I can’t wait to see those handprints again – to compare how much longer our fingers are now. ‘Yup, special holiday meet-up,’ I say to Judy. ‘All of us.’
‘You know, when I was twelve, I broke my arm climbing on the roof of that clubhouse,’ Judy says proudly. ‘Dislocated my elbow and everything – bent it right backwards. Best summers of my life, hanging round that place. You know the bashed-in bit on the front-right roof?’
‘Sure,’ I say, nodding. ‘Looks like a little meteor hit it.’
‘Nope – that was my sister’s CD player. Know what a CD player is? I threw it up there when she told my whole class about my crush on the dad from Finding Nemo. Ah, good times. Say hi to the girls.’
‘Nemo’s dad is super nice – I totally get that. See ya, Judy,’ I say, waving bye. I cross the street and head down a little no-through-road, which is where Belle lives, but not during term-time because she’s at boarding school now. The park is at the end of it. As I pass by, I wonder if her mum’s at home painting in their tall, skinny house. Belle will be at the clubhouse already. She’s always forty-five minutes early to everything.
‘Corner Park Clubhouse is never locked,’ my mum always tells her clients as she drives them past. She’s a real-estate agent, which means she sells houses to people. Her face is on lots of posters around town doing a really fake smile. It’s kind of embarrassing. ‘Not even at night. No-one in this town would ever do anything to damage it. It’s the beating heart of Sunnystream. Has been for over a hundred years. That’s just the kind of place Sunnystream is – a real community where everyone cares about each other. We’re lucky like that. And if you choose to buy a house in the area, you will be, too.’ Fake smile.
OMG – I wish you could try this Vegemite ice-cream. Truly, it’s blowing my mind right now. Judy’s Eye-Scream is just one of a zillion reasons we’re lucky to live here – Mum’s actually right about that. Sunnystream is a suburb on the edge of a big city, but because there’s a creek on one side, and a highway on another, and Corner Park on the other, it feels like a separate little town. We even have our own town mascot, a miniature horse called Pony Soprano, who lives in a stable on Handkerchief Place and roams round the park on weekends. #blessed, as Lola would say.
Sunnystream’s so safe that in primary school we could walk to each other’s houses without an adult and spend the whole day by the creek. We were allowed to play by ourselves in Corner Park any time we liked. After school each day, Gracie would throw her baseball with Patrick on the oval while my friends and I would put on shows on the clubhouse stage or do handstands. Patrick was Gracie’s BFF, but I haven’t seen him since the summer. I try not to think about him much. Sometimes it feels like every day is just a mash of things I’m trying not to think about.
We’d stay out till it got three-quarters dark and you could hear the mosquitoes humming. When the light had faded so much that Gracie couldn’t see the ball anymore, she’d come over to collect me. We’d walk home together through the twilight, our steps exactly matching, singing old songs from choir. On weekends when our parents had to work, we’d go and poke around in the clubhouse garden or help brush Pony Soprano. In the week before Christmas, there used to be Disney movies projected onto the outside back walls. Gracie and I would go early to get a spot at the front on a beanbag. I’d always fall asleep before the end. I couldn’t help it – it was so warm and safe tucked up in a rug beside her.
But I didn’t come here last Christmas. There are so many things I don’t do anymore – ballet and Girl Guides and swim squad. Sometimes I wonder: if Gracie were still here, would she even recognise me now?
Soph, come on, cheer up – Full-Heart Day! I remind myself. And as I get to the end of the street and see my friends across the park, sitting on the clubhouse steps, my heart really does feel full. For the first time in so long, maybe home will feel like home again. I sprint across the oval, past the stegosaurus slide. However soon I get to them, it’s never soon enough. However long I spend with them, it’s never long enough.
‘We’re only going to be together for four hours,’ Belle says, licking salted caramel icing off her fingers so she can hand out the agendas she’s brought in her clipboard pocket. An agenda is a list of topics that she wants to make sure we talk about. We’re sitting on the concrete steps of the clubhouse, the cupcakes spread out on the emergency picnic blanket Belle brings everywhere. There are four concrete steps leading up to the door – one for each of us to sit on, in the same place every time. Mine’s second from the bottom. Belle’s is at the top. ‘And then I’ll need to leave so I can Skype my friend Matilda,’ she says. ‘So let’s maximise this opportunity. I’ll take the notes.’
In case you can’t tell, Belle has modelled herself on Hermione Granger from Harry Potter. She’s always talking about her five-year plan and her ten-year plan and ‘maximising opportunities’, which I guess means making the most of things. Her family originally came from Sweden. They’re descended from Vikings, which is maybe why she’s tall and her hair’s honey-blonde. It might also explain why Belle seems a bit fierce if you don’t know her. Sometimes even if you do know her, actually.
‘Item one,’ she says as she writes in her neat, perfect cursive that could actually be a computer font. ‘Breaking news: I have a boyfriend.’
‘WHAT?’ we say. People on the other side of the oval look over, so we must have said it loudly.
‘YOU have a boyfriend?’ I ask. You’re probably thinking we’re shocked because not many twelve-year-olds have boyfriends, but it isn’t that. It’s because we’re surprised Belle even has time for a boyfriend. She won a scholarship to a fancy boarding school called Hollyoakes at the foot of the mountains, which surprised zero people because she’s a scary genius. She only comes home in the holidays, and even though she tries to get us to group FaceTime, she does so many after-school activities that she’s only ever free for twelve minutes before she has to go again. Between the Row-Bots (her coding club who are programming tiny toy boats), and her campaign to get people to Say No To Straws (one of the world’s biggest silent polluters), and power-studying so that she keeps getting top marks in everything, when would Belle see a boyfriend?
‘Of course I do,’ Belle says coolly. ‘Being in a successful relationship is in my fifteen-year plan. How am I going to achieve that if I don’t get any practice? To excel at anything, you need to put in at least –’
‘Ten thousand hours,’ we all say together, because we’ve heard her say this so many times.
Lola looks confused, maybe because she finds it hard to plan beyond lunch. And she’s always been the boy-crazy one in our group, or maybe just the one who’s into romance. Her whole family is obsessed with old Hollywood musicals – the ones where there’s lots of swinging around lampposts and synchronised tap-dancing, and the guy is trying to get the girl, usually while sing-speaking and wearing a tuxedo. Belle refuses to watch those movies because the women don’t have the chance to maximise their opportunities while the men make all the decisions. I sort of like them.
One of the things I miss about being around Lola all the time is seeing what outfit she’s wearing. It’s always different, always kind of bright and cool and brave, if you can call clothes brave, because she never tries to look like anyone but herself. Today it’s a bright red shirt that says NERD in big white writing, a denim jacket and these puffy navy shorts that would look terrible on me, but look great on her. Her earrings are red pom-poms dangling from safety pins. I feel kind of embarrassed that I just chucked on my year six graduation hoodie that has ‘Keep Calm and Graduate’ across the front and three medium-sized holes in it from crawling through the back fence when my pug, Togsley, escaped last Halloween.
