by Bell Davina
‘What’s a nar-sissy?’ Maisie whispers to me.
I’m not sure it’s the time to go into it. Lola HATES it when people use her real name. I want to say something to stop this – anything – but the words are stuck in my throat.
‘SHUT YOUR BOSSY MOUTH,’ shouts Lola. ‘Shut the FUDGE up. This friendship is OVER.’ She stands up and throws her milkshake – throws it hard. It flies through the air, like it’s in slow motion, and hits Belle right in the face. It drips off her and spreads onto the floor, like radioactive slime.
And as Lola leaves through the front door, I know it’s not the only thing around here that’s broken.
‘Sophia,’ my mum barks as soon as she walks into the kitchen that evening. I’m surrounded by eight batches of cupcakes, all in various stages of cooked and not-cooked and can’t-be-cooked-because-I’ve-run-out-of-patty-pans-and-weirdly-you-can-only-buy-them-in-Cloud-Town. Mum doesn’t seem to notice the cupcakes. She only has ten minutes to change before Pilates Me-Hearties, which is an exercise class where the teacher dresses like a pirate. Her grief counsellor recommended it for relaxation, which my mum is no good at. ‘Liam has brought something to my attention.’
Liam is her very dapper assistant at the real-estate business who I can’t stand. Me and Gracie sometimes had to go and sit with him in Mum’s office when we were waiting for her after school. Liam is always looking at Facebook but pretending he’s working very hard. Either that or he’s doing a quiz about which Disney princess he’s most like. Me and Gracie looked up his internet search history once when he wasn’t there and he’d done that quiz thirty-two times. He just graduated from business school last year but he dresses like he thinks he’s a full-on businessman. He’s also a very big gossip. He told mum about seeing Lola and Maisie skateboarding off the roof of the public toilets into the sandpit at the park. Lola got grounded for a month. We had to sneak her jars of pickles through her bedroom window.
‘He’s seen something about you on the internet,’ she continues, looking for her drink bottle in the cupboard, still saying nothing about my baking fest. ‘Something about a fundraiser. Lola’s sister and a trapeze – no, a towel rail? I can’t remember. It sounded inappropriate. Is that anything to do with you? You know how I feel about cyber safety.’
My mum is weird about the internet. I think she’s paranoid that someone is putting nudie pics of me on there. It happened to a year-nine girl at my school. Her ex-boyfriend uploaded them after they broke up at Sunny Stream of Talent. She sang a rap song about another dude and he was really mad, so he did it as revenge. What a jerk. But Mum should know I would never let ANYONE take nudie pics of me. I don’t even like getting changed in front of Maisie. One of Gracie’s nicknames for me was Never Naked.
Anyway, I know it’s good to be safe online, but my mum goes crazy if she thinks my name is absolutely anywhere on the whole internet, and everyone’s name is somewhere. I don’t want to get into this whole internet thing with her now. I’m tired from the sleepover, and worried about Maisie, and most of all I’m in shock that suddenly, out of nowhere, I no longer have a group. So I’ve decided to do the bake sale alone, because I can’t think of what else to do with myself.
And truthfully? I’m really mad.
About so many things.
I’m mad about losing the clubhouse and losing my childhood and losing my sister. I’m mad about the talent show and not singing ‘Edelweiss’. I’m mad that it was always me and Gracie, left alone. I’m mad that Gracie never seemed to mind but I did. I really minded, but I never said. And most of all, I’m mad at my friends for just giving up on our friendship – just like that! After practically our whole lives. I look at the cupcakes and imagine them flying through the air, smashing against the Tasmanian oak folding doors that my mum thinks turn our lounge room into a versatile living space.
But I don’t actually throw them. If those guys aren’t going to help me, I’m just going to do it myself. So many things have been ripped from my life these last few months. At least this is one I can try to get back.
‘We’re saving Corner Park Clubhouse,’ I say bitterly. ‘At least, we were.’
‘From what?’ she asks.
‘You mean from who. Who else? Mayor Magnus. He’s demolishing the clubhouse and he wants to turn it into apartments. The Muscle Tower or something. And then take over the whole park. He’s already got the bulldozer waiting. Apparently there was a notice about it on Handkerchief Place, but nobody seems to care.’
Mum freezes, like this is literally the worst thing she’s ever heard. ‘But the park is a huge selling feature for the suburb. It’s why people want to move here. That, and the –’
‘Community atmosphere,’ I finish, because I’ve heard it a squillion times.
‘Precisely,’ says Mum. ‘I must admit I didn’t see the notice about it. When is this happening?’
‘Monday. If you’re interested, we’re putting on a rally to, like, protest against it. That’s what the whole trapeze thing is about.’ Will there still be a rally? I don’t know. My head hurts. I can’t think about that right now. I remember the green milkshake flying through the air like dragon vomit.
‘What do you mean, you’re having a rally?’ she asks. ‘Of course I’m interested. This has huge implications for the future of the suburb.’
‘Me and Belle and Lola and Maisie are having the rally. We’re going to try to stop Mayor Magnus tearing it down. But everyone’s invited. If enough people turn up, well, maybe we can do something to save it.’ I think she’s going to tell me it’s a stupid idea. When I say it out loud, it does sound kind of dumb. We’re just kids. But we’ve got to try. At least, I will. Who knows about the others? One annoying thing about not having a phone is that I don’t know if they’re all group-chatting now, or if they’re still not speaking to each other.
But Mum doesn’t say any of those things. She looks at me intensely. ‘You organised that yourselves?’
I nod. ‘Mostly. We can’t let the clubhouse be destroyed. There are too many memories there. And if those apartments go up, it’s like, Sunnystream won’t be Sunnystream anymore. I’m baking this stuff to raise money. For the repairs. It’s pretty run down.’
I think she’s going to tell me off for saying ‘like’ too much. But it’s like she didn’t even notice.
‘That’s incredible,’ Mum says, still looking at me – right into my face. ‘Well done, sweetheart. What time on Monday?’
‘Ten,’ I say. ‘In the morning. I know you’re probably working then. I guess heaps of people will be.’
She frowns and goes back to hunting for the water bottle, and I know she’s weighing up whether she can afford to miss whatever work thing she’s supposed to be doing. But as she pulls it out of the cupboard and starts filling it up, she says, ‘I’ll email my clients about Monday. And the members of my networking group. I’ll be there.’
This feels like a parallel universe. I kind of don’t believe it. I wonder if she really is a robot, like Gracie always suspected, and she’s malfunctioning.
I clear my throat. ‘Mum? Can you take me to Bake the World a Better Place? It closes at seven. I need patty pans.’
You probably don’t think this is a big deal, but Bake the World a Better Place is in Cloud Town, and it’s right near the hospital. Anywhere near the hospital is the last place Mum would ever want to be. I bet she still dreams about it, just like I do. I know that she often takes the long way to go to the city, on the freeway, so she doesn’t have to drive past.
But she nods and says, ‘I’ll cancel Pilates Me-Hearties. Pass me my keys.’
‘Do you want a cupcake for the road?’ I ask her as I pick one for myself and then offer her the tray.
She looks at the cupcakes, and then she looks at me, and her eyes fill with tears. ‘Red velvet,’ she whispers.
I nod. ‘With cream-cheese icing.’
Then she starts to cry – really cry, the way I do when I sit by myself in the tree house.
The next morning, I’m yawning as I set up my cupcakes in the gazebo at Handkerchief Place. Mum stayed up to help me ice them till past midnight, even though she has bootcamp at quarter past five on Saturday mornings. I chose the icing colours to match the high-up clubhouse windows that make the lovely pattern on the floorboards – raspberry and orange and lemon. Mum’s icing is really neat.
It took until we were decorating our very last cupcakes for me to work up the courage to say what I had been wanting to ask her all night. It’s what I’ve been worrying about this whole time. ‘What if … what if Mayor Magnus tears down the clubhouse anyway? And we have to watch?’
Actually, that’s not even what I wanted to say – not all of it. The rest was: ‘Won’t watching the bulldozer roll over the clubhouse feel like I’m losing Gracie all over again? What if my heart is already so broken it actually shatters, like glass? Will I still be alive? Why isn’t it equal, how much each person’s life hurts?’
Mum finished piping an orange rose and reached over the kitchen bench. She tilted up my chin so I had to look into her eyes. ‘It might not feel like it now,’ she said quietly, ‘but what you’ve gone through with Grace has made your heart grow.’
My eyes welled up when she said Gracie’s name, and hers did too. But she didn’t stop speaking. ‘If the clubhouse is lost, it will live on in that big, strong heart, and we can be grateful for the time we had with it. It hurts because we love,’ she said, and it was like she’d read my mind in that spooky way mums sometimes do. ‘It isn’t fair, but that’s the trade-off. And what would be the point of life if we all gave up loving?
‘Your father and I,’ she continued.
But I shook my head and closed my eyes.
‘We love you,’ she whispered. ‘That’s all I was going to say.’
I’m still thinking about that now as I finish setting up my music/cash box. When I’m done, I pick up my sign and walk over to Judy’s Eye-Scream. ‘Can you please take a picture of me with this? And put it on Instagram? I don’t have a phone anymore,’ I explain to Judy.
If Lola had been there to help me, the sign wouldn’t be so lame. But she wasn’t. So it is. I didn’t plot it out beforehand, so the last three letters are all squished and the words slant upwards because I can’t write straight without lines. I did it this morning, and the glitter paint isn’t really dry yet.
Judy grabs her phone. ‘Oh, Soph,’ she says when I hold up the sign. ‘That’s beautiful.’
It says: Bake Sale Saturday! Gracie’s Favourites. Help Save Corner Park Clubhouse.
She takes the photo and I try to smile, though when she lets me look at it, it’s sort of a scared smile.
‘Where’s the gang?’ she asks when we’ve posted.
I swallow. ‘We’re not a gang anymore. We had a huge fight. Belle thinks we’ve grown apart. So I guess it’s over.’
Here’s the thing I love about Judy. She doesn’t say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous – you’ll sort it out,’ like a mum would. Like my mum did when we were icing the cupcakes. Judy says, ‘That’s tough, kid. Want to tell me about it?’
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘We were trying to raise money, and then Maisie almost died, and Lola really lost her mind, though maybe that’s kind of to do with Tally, and Belle has this new friend who’s better than us.’
Judy snorts. ‘Not possible. No-one’s better than you g– wait! Did you say Killer almost died?’
‘Kind of. She fell off the fence at the clubhouse doing beam practice. She’s been skipping gym training to help us fix up the clubhouse in time for the rally,’ I add. ‘But we don’t even have enough money to finish painting it. If anyone shows up on Monday, they’re probably going to think it’s a dump that deserves to be knocked down.’
Judy frowns. ‘Doesn’t have to be perfect. You’ve cleared out the junk, right? And Mikie fixed up the steps?’
I nod. ‘And we cleaned, like, heaps. And we did the undercoat. Well, some of it. But there are still holes in the floor. And the ceiling. The door needs fixing. So do the windows. And we can’t afford any of that. What else are we supposed to do?’
‘Kid, sometimes you’ve just got to let people in,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you’ve just gotta ask for help.’
As I walk back over to the gazebo, I think about that. I wonder if she was only talking about the clubhouse, or if she’s been watching me since the summer.
Lola would be impressed with my Instagram marketing. Within five minutes, I’m swamped. One lady buys seven cupcakes for her granddaughter’s seventh birthday. Patrick swings by on his way to holiday baseball training and gets enough for his whole team. I baked 132 red-velvet cupcakes, but now I’m worried that might not be enough. Luckily Mr Green from Sookie La La drops off a peach pie for me to sell. ‘That really was Gracie’s favourite,’ he says with a wink. And he’s right.
Nobody else says anything about Gracie, even though her name is on the sign. And some of them still do the weird thing where they’re not quite sure where to look. But some of them smile deep, and I know it’s because of Gracie. Once when she was in hospital and no-one could visit – not even me – she Skyped assembly and waved to everyone on the big screen in the hall. The whole school cheered and stamped their feet and the principal couldn’t stop them. Not for ages. Sometimes I used to wonder … Would they have cheered that long for me?
I’m just about to get the wishing feeling again when Maisie arrives, walking kind of slowly. She’s brought a tray of rice bubble squares. She helps me handle the cash, which is coming thick and fast. I sell forty cupcakes – FORTY! – to the Friends of the Sunnystream Sidewalks, who weed the cracks between the pavement stones. The Eco Worriers come by on their way to help out customers at Buck’s with the whole no-bag situation. I give them some half price. I sort of love those guys.
‘Holy heckballs,’ Maisie says as she flicks through the pile of money. ‘We could paint the whole Shark Tank with all this.’
‘How are your ribs feeling?’ I ask between customers.
‘Huh,’ says Maisie, which is Maisie for ‘I don’t want to talk about it’. I keep watching her carefully, and I can tell she isn’t feeling good.
When I have only eight cupcakes left, Lola arrives. She’s carrying a plate of what I think might have been Anzacs, but they’re black and crumbling, like discs of soot. She looks embarrassed. ‘I sort of got distracted,’ she says as she plonks them on the table. She has earrings on again! They’re tiny red maple leaves. Oh my heart.
‘Distracted by what a massive jerk you were yesterday?’ says Maisie, grinning.
Eek! But you know what? Lola just grins back, and throws a burnt Anzac at her.
‘Hey – careful. She’s injured, remember?’ says Belle, climbing up the steps to the gazebo.
Lola turns, and her smile turns into a glare. ‘Hello, Isobelle,’ she sneers.
‘Hello, Magnolia,’ says Belle, plonking down a plate of honey-joys with a sign on them that says they’re sugar-free. How can honey be sugar-free?
‘Seriously?’ sighs Maisie, putting her hands on her ribs and frowning.
‘Well, I –’ says Lola.
‘She –’ says Belle.
They both start talking at once, and I feel as if something inside me is being crushed.
‘If you think –’ begins Lola.
‘Your problem –’ begins Belle.
Suddenly I just can’t handle this anymore.
‘SHUT. UP,’ I yell. ‘AND JUST LISTEN FOR ONCE.’
Everyone flinches. This really isn’t like me.
‘I don’t care that we’re all at different schools now. I don’t care that we can only FaceTime for twelve minutes every second Thursday. I don’t care if you have new friends or whatever.’ (That bit’s actually a lie. Oh well.) ‘We’ve always been best friends and there is NO WAY that’s changing. ZERO. So get used to it.’
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People all around Handkerchief Place have turned to stare, but you know what? I DON’T CARE.
‘The clubhouse needs us, and we need the clubhouse,’ I continue. ‘We’re doing this thing TOGETHER, so start thinking about someone other than yourselves for a second. Start thinking about the memories we’ll be saving and the people we could actually help if we got this thing going again.’ Then I say something that even I find a bit shocking. ‘If you’re still hating on each other, whatever. I don’t give a flying fudge. But stop for a second and think about me.’ I swallow. ‘Because you guys are all I have now.’
There’s a big pause. I don’t know what I’m expecting to happen, but it’s definitely not my friends giving me a huge round of applause. Which is what happens next.
Maisie says, ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ and Belle wolf-whistles so loudly that the rest of us wince.
‘Sorry, guys,’ Lola says when the clapping stops. ‘You’re right – I was being a total brat. Like, worse than the Cloud Town Cougars. I don’t know what got into me. I guess … I guess I’m finding high school harder than I thought.’
‘If anyone should apologise, it’s me,’ says Belle, ‘You’re right – I am bossy. And I’m sorry that I talk about Matilda all the time. I’ve actually had some time for self-reflection …’ She pulls out yet another notebook and flicks to a page where she’s written a list under the heading ‘Self-reflection’.
I expect Lola to roll her eyes, but she just raises an eyebrow and chews on a fingernail. I want to tell her to stop because she’ll ruin her nail polish – it’s clear with rainbow speckles and it reminds me of fairy bread – but I don’t say anything.
Belle clears her throat and tucks her honey-blonde hair behind her ears. ‘I’ve concluded that I think Matilda is so important to me because I never thought anyone would ever like me except for you guys, and that maybe … maybe we’d known each other so long that you didn’t even really like me, you just didn’t remember life without me. I know I’m a nerd, and stubborn, and a perfectionist. I never thought that anyone cool would ever want to be my friend. So, sorry about that.’
