by Bell Davina
They also have what Belle describes as ‘a unique living situation’. Their house is tall and narrow and sort of, well, falling apart. There’s a bedroom in the basement, and a living room on the ground level (that’s where we are now) and then an attic that’s Belle’s bedroom up some rickety stairs. There’s a hole in her ceiling, so you can see the stars, but it does get kind of cold in winter, and drippy, so it’s always full of saucepans and bowls to catch the rain. Her room is so tiny that when Belle’s in bed and the rest of us lie on the floor, we take up the entire room, squished together. It’s what my mum would call ‘a renovator’s delight’.
‘Is that me bonny ladies?’ Punk calls from the kitchen, which is really just a hot plate in a cupboard. It’s amazing what Belle can cook on there, though. (Francine never cooks anything.) Punk pops his head out. He’s wearing all black leather, except for an apron that says ‘Quiche the Chef ’. ‘Yo!’ he says through the beaver teeth.
‘Yo, Punk!’ says Maisie.
‘That smells good,’ says Lola.
‘Did you know that pigs are smarter than dogs?’ says Belle darkly.
‘Well, stone the crows,’ he says happily. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’
‘No thanks,’ we say, sort of reluctantly, because it smells amazing. But do you know what else is amazing? What’s in our overnight bags.
Seven minutes later, we’ve lugged all our stuff upstairs, including The Jar, which I dropped by home to get, along with my sleeping bag and sleepover stuff. Mum wasn’t there, but when is she ever really there? I left her a note. Now we’re all in our PJs, surrounded by all the food that you’re not supposed to eat for dinner, which we picked up from Buck’s with the fifty dollars Mum gave me for dinner a few days ago that I’d forgotten about.
‘Shouldn’t we be using this for paint?’ Maisie asked when we were at the check-out. But even Belle agreed that if ever we needed a cheeky cheer-up, it was tonight.
This is what you can get for not even fifty dollars: cheese corn chips, and Maltesers, and jelly snakes, and those Furry Friend chocolates in the little rectangles with the cute pictures on the front, and sour worms, and milk bottles, and a box of mini Magnum ice-creams, and Pringles (the green ones), and a bag of Milky Ways, and some white bread and butter and hundreds-and-thousands that I am currently making into fairy bread, and a box of Barbecue in a Biskit. We actually can’t finish it all. By the end, I feel so full that I have to lie down.
We’ve agreed not to talk about all the things we still have to do to save the clubhouse – not tonight. It’s too depressing. So the first person to mention the clubhouse has to do a dare that may or may not involve undies on their head. Belle schedules a fundraising brainstorm to be held over breakfast tomorrow when we’re fresh.
After today, there are only three days left and the walls are still half brown and half white because we can’t afford the undercoat – or the paint. The windows are still cracked and one has no glass in it, the door’s still broken, the curtains still look like they’ve been attacked by slash-happy pirates. We talked to heaps of people about the rally, so I guess that’s something. Lots of them said they love the clubhouse but they’re not sure they’re going to be able to come on Monday because of work. A few just sighed and said, ‘What’s the point? That Mayor Magnus just does what he wants anyway.’ And one of them asked if we could get Tally to sing at their daughter’s bat-mitzvah party, which put Lola in a really snippy mood.
It’s freezing at Belle’s house with the wind coming in through the roof, and at one point we can’t hear each other speak because Francine and Punk Sherman are singing REALLY loudly to songs by a band called Vampire Weekend, which of course I’ve never heard of. I think Belle’s also pretty embarrassed that we can hear them call each other ‘babe’ all the time, because at one point she gets super crabby and accuses Maisie of cheating at Connect Four. But apart from that, it’s just like old times.
We talk about our old teachers, and kids from our primary school that are at our new schools, though Belle has none at hers and Lola only has two. One of those is a girl called Ladybird who has an anxiety parrot, which is sort of like a guide dog for people who feel anxious. She has special permission to have it sit on her shoulder in class. The parrot’s name is John West Junior.
Maisie confesses that at lunch she sits with two girls from the Cloud Town Cougars – our rival netball team, who always elbow us when the umpires aren’t looking – so we all throw things at her, but only in a jokey way. I quickly change the subject so I don’t have to confess that I sit with literally no-one. ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Is it time for Seven Questions?’
Even though we’re too old for some things, like monkey bars and handstand competitions and four square and putting on plays, at least we haven’t grown out of Seven Questions. It’s a game we made up ourselves. It’s sort of a cross between ‘Truth or dare’ and ‘Would you rather’ and ‘Never have I ever’. We’ve been writing down lots of questions since we were in year four and putting them in this huge jar that used to hold five kilos of peanut butter, which is probably how much Lola’s family could eat in one day. There must be hundreds of bits of different coloured paper scrunched up in there. You take turns picking from The Jar and reading out the question. Everyone writes down their answers on a piece of paper but they don’t put their name on it. Once you’ve done seven questions, you all swap answers and read them out and try to guess who wrote what. If you like finding out stuff about your friends, I HIGHLY recommend it. You just have to practise disguising your handwriting, but we’re good at that bit now. Belle gets us pens and paper, and we launch right in. Soon we’re up to question five.
‘Would you rather kiss Bart Strabonsky with full tongue or wear underpants with grass seeds in them for a whole week?’
The way Lola is giggling, she totally wrote this one.
‘GROSS,’ says Belle. ‘That is a completely inappropriate question.’
Her face is so disgusted that Maisie and I laugh until we have literal tears. I choose the grass seed underpants and I reckon Maisie does too. I bet Lola chooses kissing. She always chooses kissing. The rule is that you can’t pass, so I bet Belle chooses the grass seeds.
Maisie picks out a green balled-up bit of paper. ‘Truth: which person in this room do you like the most and why?’
Lola whistles.
‘Whoa,’ says Maisie. ‘Great question.’
Belle frowns. ‘Friendship’s not a competition. But rules are rules. No passes.’
As I bend my head to answer, I try not to care that no-one will write my name down. They won’t write Belle’s either, but Belle couldn’t care less. Lola seems kind of low-level annoyed at Belle these days, so she’ll write Maisie. The others will write Lola because she’s Lola. Something about Lola makes you want to be around her and be like her, and for her to like you. Even though Belle rolls her eyes about the Lola Effect, I know she feels it as well. For a second, I think about writing Lola’s name too.
But then I remember the thud on my bed when Maisie climbs through my window before training. How she once punched a boy called Massimo who cut off my ponytail on a dare in year four. How she took Lemon Tart to live at her house over the summer because she knew I couldn’t look at her.
Maisie, I write. Because she is sweet thoughtful awesome the actual best.
It’s my turn next, and I stick my hand in The Jar. The little ball of paper is yellow.
‘What is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?’ I read when I’ve unscrunched it.
Then there’s that feeling like when your fridge stops humming, and you didn’t realise how noisy it was until it goes quiet. Everyone is so still. But my friends don’t look away like most people around town would.
I swallow.
I whisper, ‘Can I pass?’
In the pause that follows, I can hear a dog barking, so far away it could be calling from another planet. I think about how Gracie was obsessed with that dog that the Russians sent into s
pace. Her name was Little Curly.
‘You could just try writing it, Soph,’ Lola says, really gently. ‘It might make you feel a little better.’
Maisie nods and squeezes my arm, and Belle says, ‘She’s right. When my new friend Matilda’s grandma died …’
I get a scrunched-up feeling when she mentions Matilda, all jealous and tight.
Lola shoots her a death stare.
I look down at the lines on the page.
Slowly, my hand shaking, I write four words. Such little words, but together they’re big.
The others cheer so loudly, I worry that Punk Sherman is going to want to come and join the fun. I blush. Lola is right. I do feel a little better. Maybe more than a little. Maybe a whole lot. As I smile down at the paper and the others lean in to hug me, something blooms in my chest – something warm and good. It takes me a moment to recognise it because I haven’t had this feeling for so long. It’s hope.
Suddenly I feel proud, like I want to tell someone I’ve been brave. That someone has springy grey curls and kind blue eyes. I realise I want to tell Dad.
‘Let’s not read these now. Let’s go to the park,’ Belle says, going over to her wardrobe. ‘I’ve got marshmallows in here. We can light a fire and toast them.’
‘WHAT?!’ the rest of us say together.
‘MORE sugar! Public fire-lighting in a banned area! Sneaking out at night unsupervised?!’ says Lola. ‘Who are you and where is Isobelle?!’
Belle shrugs as we wriggle out of our sleeping bags and start pulling on shoes and jumpers and beanies. ‘Maisie doesn’t have to get up for training. No more dogs to walk. We can stay out as late as we like.’
My mum would hate the idea, which sort of makes me want to do it more. That’s bad, isn’t it? But don’t freak out too much, because Sunnystream is literally the safest place in the galaxy. There was an article about it recently in the local paper, the Sunnystream Gazette.
Outside, the moon is fully round, like a plate, and we take turns making our breath come out like dragon smoke. Maisie’s glow-in-the-dark skeleton onesie looks amazing as she does handsprings across the oval. The rest of us run after her, giggling as the breeze whips our hair. When we swing past the playground, I go headfirst down the stegosaurus slide on my tummy, fast, my arms stretched wide. For the first time in forever, I feel light and I feel free.
At the clubhouse, we chicken out of making the fire. We’re not really the biggest rule-breakers, I guess. So we sit on Mikie’s smart new concrete steps and burn the marshmallows with matches. We go through a whole box, the flames nipping our fingers till we all have little blisters on the tips. It hurts but we don’t care – it just feels so good being out here in the night-time. It feels like we’re grown-up but also like we’re heaps younger, both at the same time. The marshmallows are just the right amount of burnt and melty.
In the ghost-ring of torch glow, Belle puts aside all the pink ones for me. ‘Gracie’s favourite, right?’ she asks. I smile at her in the starlight. ‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Mine too.’
‘Belle,’ I say slowly after a while. ‘Do you think I should talk to my dad? Did I make a mistake, not wanting to see him because he moved away?’
‘Or did he make a mistake when he ran away from you?’ she asks. ‘He can try to come back into your life all he likes, but he still chose to leave.’ She says it all with such force that I realise she’s not even talking about my dad, Andy Hargraves, anymore. She’s talking about another dad who left his daughter so far back that none of us ever knew him at all.
‘What happened to your dad, Belle?’ I say quietly, which I’ve never been brave enough to do before. Guess I’m on a roll tonight. Not even Lola knows about Belle’s dad – I know because I’ve asked her. ‘Do you know who he is? Has he tried to come back? Like, ever?’
Belle flicks the torch on and off, on and off. ‘Oh, I know who he is,’ she says after a while. ‘And more than anything in this world, I wish I didn’t.’
‘Sophia?’ someone whispers to me through the dark. ‘Soph?’ That someone is Gracie. This is just how she whispers on Christmas morning when she wants to crack open our stockings.
‘Hi,’ I whisper back, smiling. It’s so nice to hear her voice. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Early o’clock,’ she says. ‘Go back to sleep. I’m just going out for a bit.’
‘Don’t go,’ I whisper, feeling my eyes trying to open. But we must have stayed out late last night because they’re stuck closed with the gunk I get when I’m super tired. ‘OK, bye,’ I whisper sleepily, already half stepping into a dream.
When I wake again, it’s early but light. Lola and Belle are still snoozing, but Maisie’s sleeping bag is empty. She’s probably in the bathroom, which is downstairs next to the kitchen. I hope she got to sleep in at least a bit, because she pretty much never has the chance.
Gracie isn’t there. Today will be another day without her, and I can’t do anything about that. Nothing will ever bring her back. She’ll never get older than twelve. But what I can do is live my life as a thank-you to Gracie for all the times we had together – I can be brave, and kind, and generous, like she was. As I stare out of the gap in the ceiling at the sunrise, I realise that saving Corner Park Clubhouse is the first step in doing that. Gracie loved that clubhouse. She really loved this town.
The pink clouds remind me of last night’s marshmallows. We mustn’t have eaten them that long ago, but already I feel hungry. Waffles pop into my head. I don’t want to boast, but my waffles are pretty great. I wriggle out of my bag, trying to be as stealthy as Maisie. I could make waffles for everyone and we could sit around on the floor and eat them together, which is actually my idea of heaven, and think up ideas about how to pay for the paint. Surely Francine would have eggs and sugar and milk and flour? Hmm, on second thoughts, that’s kind of a long list for someone who never shops.
I tiptoe down the stairs and through the living room to the tiny cupboard-kitchen. My fears are confirmed. I find pink Himalayan rock salt and a tiny case of saffron threads and a box of Confuse-ly, which looks like rabbit pellets but says it’s a kind of muesli that Ancient Egyptians enjoyed. In the fridge there’s a set of car keys (??) and a box of after-dinner mints.
Luckily for us, Buck’s opens at six in the morning on Friday and I still have some change from last night. I wait for a bit to see if Maisie wants to come, but she’s taking ages in the bathroom. So I slip out by myself, still in my cat-face pyjamas, hoping I don’t bump into my mum. She’s often out powerwalking about now, or at bootcamp. And she is so NOT OK with wearing PJs in public, or even outside. ‘Like a pair of homeless people,’ she’d say when Gracie and I wore our nighties on the trampoline. I flick the lock so it won’t click when I pull the door closed. Maybe I’m the one who could be an assassin.
As I walk up to Handkerchief Place, there’s nobody else around to see the dawn light turning from pink to apricot. The world seems gentle and it feels nice to be doing something for someone else. The waffles, I mean. But also fixing the clubhouse. I guess it’s easier to do things to cheer up other people than it is to cheer yourself up. For me, anyway. Helping people helps yourself, my dad always says. As I walk around Buck’s in my ugg boots, I wonder if he’s at the gym in the city apartment or away in Los Angeles again. I wonder if he hates me or loves me. I wonder if he’s ever coming home.
I get maple syrup and some half-price blueberries, too, and the guy on the cash register looks at me and looks sad and looks away. So I look away, too, at today’s newspaper, which is in a big pile next to the counter. And I absolutely cannot believe what I am seeing. I snatch one up. ‘This too,’ I say quickly. I cannot WAIT to see Belle’s face when she reads the headline.
When I’m three-quarters of the way back to her house, I realise someone is following me. I stop.
And whoever it is stops too. I start and they start. I stop and they stop. Holy smoke.
This isn’t good.
I have that hammering hear
t thing that Belle always tells us is a part of our brains from way back when we were monkeys – I think it’s called fight-or-flight mode. As I stand there, fear pumps through me and the waffles seem like a really dumb idea. Just when I’m thinking of ditching the groceries and making a sprint for it, someone says, ‘Sophia?’
I turn around.
It’s Patrick. Gracie’s BFF.
Patrick and Gracie did literally everything together – except for the year Patrick was really into ballet, which totally wasn’t Gracie’s thing. She went and watched his concert, though. She said he was the best Tulip Waving in the Breeze that she’d ever seen. Patrick goes to my school, but to be honest, I’ve tried really hard to avoid him. Up until now I haven’t felt brave enough to see him. But maybe now’s the time to keep my brave streak from last night going.
‘Remember when you were a tulip?’ I ask as Patrick catches up to me. It’s kind of a random thing to say after all this time, but he grins at me and I can’t help smiling back. ‘You scared me, by the way. You shouldn’t follow people like that!’
‘Sorry – didn’t mean to,’ says Patrick. ‘I just never know if … if you want to talk to me.’
‘It’s not you.’ I sigh. ‘It’s just that talking is hard. I always end up wanting to cry. Then I can’t get the words out.’
‘Nothing wrong with crying,’ he says. ‘Would be weird if you didn’t, wouldn’t it? Considering.’
I’d forgotten how easy it is to chat to Patrick. He used to spend so much time at our house that my dad built a third stool at the kitchen bench, just for him. My parents called him Pudge, which made no sense because he was as tall as Lola and really skinny, like he’d been stretched. He used to help us dress up Lemon Tart as famous people so we could film her – Sherlock Holmes, the Queen, Abraham Lincoln.
