by Bell Davina
‘You’re nothing but a giant buffoon,’ says Belle, looking him straight in the eye. Her nostrils are flaring like Pony Soprano’s, she’s so mad. ‘People respect honesty. And fairness. And intelligence. And people helping each other out. They’d never give their money to a pumpkin-head like you.’
‘One week!’ says Mayor Magnus, pushing the tips of his fingers together. ‘In one week … KABOOM! The clubhouse will be gone.’
‘So you won’t touch it for a week?’ says Belle. ‘Till next Monday? You promise?’
Mayor Magnus nods enthusiastically. ‘I’m gonna ride there on a bulldozer myself, next Monday at 10 o’clock. Do I have a bulldozer?’ he asks Bart Strabonsky. ‘GET BULLDOZER!’ he yells into his phone.
‘Well, you’ll probably want a big crowd to come and watch you,’ says Belle smoothly. ‘We can arrange that.’
(Huh?!)
Mayor Magnus literally licks his lips. He adores a crowd. I wonder if he’ll wear the purple sparkly cape then too. ‘Thanks, doll face. Appreciate.’
We turn to go and he calls, ‘Hey, girlies, want to look at my tropical fish? Biggest collection in the southern hemisphere, right here. Stay and pull up a chair. We can play cards.’
‘Are you crazy?’ asks Belle. ‘I’d rather be eaten by an actual shark, limb by limb with my flesh being ripped apart –’ (um, whoa – intense) ‘– than spend one more second of my life with you.’ She marches out and the others follow her, but when I look back, I swear Mayor Magnus looks like he’s about to cry. For real. When he sees me watching him, he glares so fiercely that his eyebrows practically cross.
‘Whoa. Did anyone else see –’ I begin.
‘Are you crazy?!’ Maisie asks Belle as she punches the buttons on the lift. ‘Why did you offer to bring him a crowd?’
I’ve been wondering the same thing, actually. I couldn’t bear to stand there and watch the clubhouse be torn apart. Honestly, it would be like seeing Pony Soprano being shot, or someone blowing up Gracie’s bedroom. Even thinking about it makes my breathing go tight and shallow.
‘Do you need your asthma puffer?’ Maisie asks.
I shake my head. I want to explain that thinking about losing the clubhouse makes me feel as if I’m suffocating – like my heart is actually breaking – but I don’t have the words.
‘I think she’s just freaking out a little,’ says Lola. ‘Deep breaths, Soph. Like this.’ I copy her until I feel a bit calmer.
‘Do you think we’re going to sit back and let that moron crush the best thing about this place?’ asks Belle. ‘We’re going to organise a giant rally to stop him. With the whole of Sunnystream. Next Monday at 10 o’clock.’
‘A rally like in tennis?’ Maisie asks, confused.
‘That’s the other sort of rally. I mean like a big protest,’ says Belle. ‘With speeches and people holding signs and yelling things. This could be bigger than Say No To Straws!’
‘We could chain ourselves to the bulldozer!’ says Lola. ‘To stop Mayor Magnus tearing it down. And then we can film it. That would totally go viral.’
‘Nobody’s chaining themselves to anything,’ says Belle as the lift reaches the ground floor. ‘I’m talking about intelligent political action, not some stupid internet thing. Seriously, guys, we might be the only ones who can make a difference to that clubhouse. We can rekindle the Sunnystream spirit. So let’s do it. Are you in?’
The lift goes ‘ping!’ and the doors open and as we step out, I feel that prickle of electricity you get when someone has a good idea. Thinking Fire, Gracie used to call it. The others feel it too – I can tell by how we’re suddenly grinning at each other.
‘I’m in,’ says Lola quickly.
‘I’m in,’ I say quietly.
‘I’m in,’ says Maisie, ‘but I can’t talk about it right now coz I’ve got conditioning in forty-five minutes.’ Conditioning is like strength classes. That’s how Maisie can lift a giant tractor tyre above her head. I saw her do it on year six camp. ‘What about tomorrow? Planning meeting?’
‘Yes, but not before ten,’ says Lola firmly. ‘Holiday sleep-in.’
‘Eight,’ says Belle firmly. ‘I’m Skyping Matilda at one and Pete at three.’
‘Nine at the clubhouse,’ I say, because I like to keep the peace.
‘We won’t be able to sit inside because of all the junk,’ Belle points out, ‘and it’s supposed to storm tomorrow.’ Belle is a very diligent observer of weather patterns.
‘My basement?’ says Lola. ‘But apologies in advance for my annoying family.’
‘I love your family,’ I say, because it’s true. The Powells’ house is the opposite of mine now – it’s loud and busy and chaotic. When they stop squabbling, the whole family can sing in the most amazing harmonies. You should hear them do Christmas carols – it’s like The Sound of Music. Their basement is a giant games room with a ping-pong table and a disco ball.
‘Deal,’ says Maisie.
We race each other out the revolving doors and into the autumn sunshine. Lola’s first and Belle is last, and we do a group hug before we go our separate ways. Our arms, locked tight, feel super strong. Together, we are stronger. That was the quote we all chose to put under our photos in the Sunnystream Primary yearbook. When I’m with these guys, it feels like we can do anything.
If you’ve ever been woken by a miniature pony landing on your bed, you’d know what it feels like to have Maisie Zhang drop through your window before sunrise, straight onto your covers.
‘Pony Soprano?’ I croak into my pillow. ‘Is that you?’
Maisie crawls in next to me and lies there for about three seconds, which is how long she can sit still at any one time. Since the summer, she stops by sometimes on her way to training. She climbs up the tree house and then along the ridge of the roofline. There’s a little window in the roof that I always leave open for her. My mum says it’s called a dormer window and it increases the value of our house significantly. I can feel the chilly morning air on her clothes, the cold metal of the studs on her jeans against my legs, but I don’t move away because if I close my eyes a little, it feels like I’m sharing a bed with Gracie.
I dreamed about Gracie again last night. I dreamed she was at the clubhouse, running through the garden. I dreamed that she ducked and weaved around the sundial that Lola decorated in a thousand tiny mosaic tiles, and the little wooden lending library that Belle built after watching a YouTube tutorial. I dreamed that she shimmied up the red Japanese maple, and then she disappeared.
‘Can I plait your hair?’ Maisie asks.
‘Sure,’ I say dopily, and drag myself up to sitting as she flicks herself around onto my pillow. ‘But you’ll have to get the knots out first. What’s the time?’
‘Ten to five. Sorry.’
‘No matter,’ I say. I stayed up super late making cheesecake and then I couldn’t get to sleep – not for ages – because I was thinking about the clubhouse, half worried, half excited, half scared. (Is that three halves?) I got up at four to bring Togsley into my room. Sometimes the sound of his snoring makes me feel better. But Maisie wasn’t to know.
‘Soph?’ she says, just when I’m dozing off again. ‘Do you think I’m dumb?’
‘Don’t even say that,’ I say, suddenly wide awake. ‘It hurts my feelings.’ And it truly does. ‘No dumb person could do gym like you.’
‘Yeah, but that’s just sports.’
‘What about coding? And drums? And –’
‘OK, shut up now,’ says Maisie, but not in a mean way. She’s one of those people who hates it when people say nice things about her. You know the type?
We’re quiet for a while. With real friends, silence is never uncomfortable. That’s something I read on Lola’s Instagram once and I think it’s super true. Sometimes I miss Lola’s Instagram posts, but there’s no way Mum will buy me another phone now.
‘There’s a new move I’m trying at gym,’ Maisie says eventually as she finishes de-tangling and separates
my hair into sections. ‘It’s really hard. I think about it all the time. I see it on my eyelids – on the insides,’ she says. ‘Does that even make sense?’
‘Is it a vault?’ I ask. Maisie’s best apparatus is the vault because she’s so short and strong. In gymnastics, the four apparatuses are the vault, bars, beam and floor. Maisie finds floor routines the hardest because when she’s concentrating on her moves, she forgets she also has to wave her arms around a lot like she’s a Spanish bullfighter and/or someone from Romeo and Juliet, which is what’s supposed to make the audience fall in love with you and also get you a perfect ten.
‘No,’ Maisie yawns. ‘It’s on the beam. Back handspring, back handspring, backflip. But I need to practise it more. Maybe I should be doing double training these holidays. Maybe … maybe I don’t have time to be part of this whole saving-the-clubhouse thing.’
‘You do!’ I say, turning round to face her so quickly that the plait falls out. ‘Whoops – sorry. We need you, Maisie. Please? You can practise in the clubhouse when it’s finished. It’ll be like your own private gym.’ I’ve been looking forward to the holidays for so long that I can’t bear to think about us not spending them all together.
‘Maybe,’ says Maisie. She sighs. ‘I should go.’
‘Stay!’ I say, and wrestle her, trying to pin her hands down. Early-morning wrestling is one thing my dad is the actual best at. But Maisie is a natural because she’s pretty much all muscles. In three seconds she’s flipped me over and is sitting on my back. I’m laughing, but I can’t breathe that well so it comes out like a seal coughing.
‘Victory!’ Maisie yells, forgetting to be quiet and sneaky so my mum doesn’t know she’s here. Mum is sort of obsessed with kids getting enough sleep. She would not be OK with a five o’clock wake-up.
Downstairs I hear her feet land on the floor next to her bed.
‘Go!’ I hiss. ‘See you later, at the Powells’. And be safe,’ I whisper after her as I close the window. But I don’t need to say that. Maisie never, ever falls.
Just as I’m climbing back into bed, there’s a tap on the window and Maisie sticks her head in again. ‘Hey, remember when I climbed up the drainpipe at the clubhouse and water-bombed Belle’s Harry Potter book club?’ She grins. ‘I really do want to save it. I’ll make the time.’
That’s a weird fact about Maisie: she hates Harry Potter. The books, the movies, all of it. She thinks he was too mopey and not grateful enough for his incredible powers. Do you know who loved Harry Potter? Gracie Hargraves. She read all the books out loud to me with a zillion different voices for all the characters. Her idea of heaven was something she called a Reading Party, which we set up under my dad’s desk. Blankets, snacks, the whole works.
I feel tears start to slide down my face as Gracie slips into my mind. I’m sick of this wishing feeling, because I know that wishing can’t ever bring her back. I’m sick of being sad, and of people being so weird around me. I’m sick of feeling like a freak at school – of walking around and around at lunchtime, nowhere to go, no-one to sit with. These holidays were supposed to be a break from all that. But it’s not going to be the same as it used to be because nothing is the same anymore.
Gracie was always the one who organised the holidays when we were left home alone by ourselves, and the nights after school when our parents were working late. She pretended she was a cruise-ship director, wrote menus, wrote the scripts for our plays, volunteered us to help out at Sunnystream Animal Shelter. She made everything into something you’d want to remember, like it was an important event.
You’re probably thinking, ‘Oh, she must really miss Gracie.’ But that isn’t enough – it’s so much bigger than missing, this feeling in my chest. I didn’t know how to describe it, but then Lola emailed me a quote she found on the internet, and truly? It helped more than anything anyone said. It went like this: ‘To describe how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.’ And that’s exactly how it is. I don’t just miss Gracie. I am the missing. Like the ocean is blue. It’s as if I’ve turned into something entirely different – a whole other creature, like a mermaid. And part of the missing is missing the old me. I thought the old me would be at the clubhouse, waiting. But now there might not be a clubhouse, and I don’t know how many more things I can lose.
When I get up an hour later and pad down the stairs, Mum is just about to leave for work, even though she got in so late last night that I didn’t see her before I went to bed. I want to tell her about the clubhouse, but she’s whipping around the room in that crazy ‘I’m forty seconds behind schedule’ frenzy, shoving things into her briefcase and aggressively curling up her phone-charger cord into perfect coils, all exactly the same length. ‘Oh – money for dinner tonight,’ she says as she hears me coming, riffling through her handbag. ‘I meant to leave some on the table. Here you … Oh.’
She looks up and sees that I’ve been crying. I can feel that there’s snot crusted on my face, which has that salty puffiness. You know that feeling when you cry so much your skin kind of aches? I’ve got that now.
‘Sophia, what’s wrong?’ Mum asks. But she uses a voice that I know so well. It’s the one where she feels as if she should stay and talk about something emotional, but she’s actually got to get to work and doesn’t really know how to deal with it anyway. It was always Dad who did the ‘come here and tell me all about it and I’ll always love you anyway’ thing.
‘You can go,’ I say, my voice kind of squeaky from all the crying. ‘I know you probably have to be somewhere.’
‘I would stay, sweetheart, it’s just that I’m showing a couple that converted bungalow over on Tea Cake.’
Converted bungalows are a type of house that’s worth a lot of money, especially the ones on Tea Cake Crescent. I know because Mum used to point them out to me and Gracie all the time when she was driving us places, like my ballet classes over in Cloud Town and Gracie’s away games for baseball.
‘See that, girls? Lovely houses,’ she would say, ‘with wonderful proportions.’
‘Like the girls on America’s Next Top Model,’ Gracie would say.
‘You’re not really watching that trash, are you?’ Mum would ask disapprovingly. She thinks reality TV is the devil.
‘Not watching it. Just auditioning for it. Aren’t we, Soph?’ That would literally be my mum’s worst nightmare.
‘Grace Hargraves, your attitude is bordering on obnoxious.’
‘Oh, it’s way beyond that,’ Gracie would say. She had such a cheeky wink.
‘Seriously, go,’ I tell Mum, trying to sound more together. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Well, if you’re sure, here’s fifty dollars. Or you can get some Uber Eats. Do you still have the app on your phone? That charges straight to my card.’
‘I don’t have a phone anymore,’ I remind her for the millionth time, taking her guilt money.
She looks at me hesitantly. ‘Sophia, your father and I –’
‘LA LA LA LA LA,’ I say, covering my ears, closing my eyes.
When I open them again, she looks even more uncomfortable. ‘It’s Tuesday, so tonight after work I’m –’
‘At a networking evening,’ I finish. As far as I can work out, that’s when Mum’s real-estate friends sit around and talk about real estate. ‘See you tomorrow then. Maybe. Whenever. It’s not like I don’t have keys.’
I remember when Gracie and I had to stand on a box to reach the lock. We’ve always had keys. ‘Such independent children,’ Mum would say. ‘Or neglected,’ Dad would say. ‘Either way, we must be doing something right.’ He was proud of us – even when we weren’t winning things or getting on teams, which Gracie usually was.
‘A big heart is more impressive than a big trophy cabinet,’ he’d whisper when we were sitting together, watching her walk up on stage at the clubhouse to get yet another award. Dad is basically the opposite of Mayor Magnus. Everyone in Sunnystream knows him and loves him. He has thes
e springy curls that jump out from his head, like electricity, and kind blue eyes, the type that crinkle up at the corners.
But he’s not here. He hasn’t been since the Christmas holidays, when he moved to the city apartment. I haven’t spoken to him since then – that’s why I threw my phone out of the tree house. When he calls the landline, I run up to my bedroom and stuff a corner of my doona into my mouth.
Before Gracie got sick, he used to travel a lot for work. He’s a TV writer and he used to go back and forth to Los Angeles. You’d think I wouldn’t notice the difference between him being in LA or in the city. But as the front door closes and I put sourdough bread in the toaster, wiping my snotty face, for the zillionth time I can feel it – his not-here-ness. Hovering over the house like an actual thing – like a drone that follows me from room to room.
‘Pickle,’ he had said the night before he left. ‘Want me to put oil on the flying fox before I go?’
‘Don’t call me that,’ I snapped. ‘And I don’t want you to do anything.’ I looked up from the cookie dough I was kneading at the kitchen bench. ‘Except stay. Please? Dad, please. Don’t go.’
He sighed. He pulled up a stool and put his head in one hand and watched me. He watched as the dough came together in a ball and I rolled it out, carefully sprinkling flour on the rolling pin so it wouldn’t stick. He watched as I cut out the biscuits with the rim of a glass, like Grandma Jean had showed me, and laid them on the trays. I didn’t mess up a single one.
‘Soph,’ he said, picking up a dough scrap, ‘you can visit me in the city. Any time. It won’t be forever. It’s just that … Mum and I, we’ve been through a tough time. We need some space, apart, to –’
‘YOU’VE been through a tough time?’ I said, slamming the oven door shut, and my voice was kind of all over the place. ‘You think this has been tough for YOU?’
