by Cath Crowley
Ever feel like you’re the only one who doesn’t know what the conversation is really about? There are other ways of speaking, like kicking someone under the table, or wiggling your eyebrows up and down. Martin and Flemming are having a whole different conversation from the one I’m listening to.
‘Something’s up, Martin,’ I say on the way home.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean there’s something you’re not telling me about the tryout match. Spit it out.’
‘Faltrain, what happened last time I lied to you?’
‘I let the air out of your bike tyres.’
‘And?’
‘And I gave you that tiny scar on your leg.’
‘That tiny scar took four stitches.’
‘I was aiming for the ball, not your ankle.’
‘We weren’t playing soccer.’
‘I wasn’t talking about that ball.’
‘Look, Faltrain, forget about Flemming. He should be worrying about himself, anyway. He’s still failing every subject there is to fail except for sport. You’re not the only one who has problems,’ he says, looking past me to his front steps. Mr Knight is sitting where he usually is these days, staring out at the street.
‘How was practice?’ he asks as Martin walks past him to go inside. Mr Knight always makes me feel like I’ve just lost a game, even though I tried really hard to win. Martin shrugs. ‘Okay. You want a coffee?’
‘Thanks, mate.’
I smile at him and then follow Martin inside. About a month after we won the Championships, Martin invited me round to his place for dinner. ‘Your dad looks so sad,’ I said to him as he walked me home afterwards.
‘He’s a hundred times better than he was before, Faltrain. He’s moved from the couch to the front steps.’
If he’s a hundred times better, Martin, then what’s bothering you so much? If things are really going to improve you have to take a chance and find your mum. Martin doesn’t take chances, though. He’s like Alyce. What the two of them don’t realise is that if you never take a risk you wind up sitting on your verandah, dreaming about a life that only exists in your head.
I listen to Mr Knight’s mumbled thank you as Martin takes his coffee out to him. I hate the way everyone talks in this house. It’s a made-up language that means nothing. The real stuff is being yelled underneath everyone’s skin, way down in their blood. You keep all your yelling in your blood for long enough and it’ll poison you.
Martin walks back into the kitchen and starts pulling meat from the freezer. He puts it in the microwave to defrost. He starts slicing into vegetables.
‘Was it like this, before she left?’ I ask.
‘Like what?’ He takes the meat and presses it onto the frying pan. I hide my answer under the spitting fat. ‘Empty?’
He squashes the steak until it’s flat and dry. ‘I know you don’t get it, but Dad’s different since I came back from the Championships. You didn’t know him before. He never even hugged Karen. He didn’t have the energy. He asks about our days, now. Mum hasn’t been here to do that since I was a kid.’ He looks at me. ‘So what does it matter what it was like before she left.’
I don’t answer. Because it wasn’t a question.
‘Mum,’ I say later in the evening while we’re watching TV, ‘what if you knew a way to make things better for someone, but they were too scared to let you. Would you still do it?’
‘That depends on what you’re really talking about, I guess.’
‘I think maybe I know a way to find Martin’s mum. Alyce gave me the idea when she wrote in to the paper. I thought I could put an ad in or something.’
‘No, Gracie Faltrain.’ Her voice is a slap. ‘You mind your own business.’
‘But I want to help him.’
‘Sometimes help can be the thing that breaks a person.’
‘How?’
‘Because it’s the thing that gives them hope.’
‘But hope’s a good thing.’
‘Only when there’s a chance; other than that it’s just bad news in disguise. Imagine that your father hadn’t come back to us last year, and we’d had to find a way to make it through without him.’
‘But he didn’t do that. He loves us.’
‘But imagine he did leave, and you spent every day wishing that he would come back – because you would, Gracie. Every soccer game you’d search for him. After a while, though, you’d have to stop hoping. If you didn’t, you’d be stuck looking up into the stands for the rest of your life.’
‘That’s why I have to do something. Martin still thinks about his mum.’
‘Of course he does. But he doesn’t hope for her to come back, Gracie. You’re the one who’s doing that.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I’ve watched your team play for almost five seasons now. Martin nearly broke my heart in those first few years. Your father used to say he looked as though he was out at sea, searching the crowd for something to stop him drowning. He doesn’t look into the stands for his mum anymore, Gracie. He looks at you. He trusts something again and it’s taken him a long time to get there. Don’t mess with that.’
Mum’s wrong. Martin is still lost at sea; he’s just so good at treading water these days it looks like he’s swimming. And if I’m the only one who can see that then I have to do something. Because that storm is coming, and if all I do is wave at Martin from the shore, he’ll drown. Friends don’t sit on the sand and let that happen. Not real friends, anyway.
13
Love sucks. Just ask Romeo and Juliet. Or me.
Jane Iranian
Jane’s acting less and less like a real friend at the moment. It’s been five days since I emailed and she still hasn’t replied. She didn’t call me after the game. I want to ring her and yell, ‘Don’t you care about me anymore?’ And I would. But Gracie Faltrain knows a thing or two about dignity.
We’re in stand-off mode. It’s happened with other friends. You’re close for ages, so close you could spin off the secrets from their diary like a Frisbee. Then gradually, one of you disappears into the distance like a bad throw. They only call twice a week. And then once. And then not at all.
I never thought that would happen with Jane. If you’d asked me a month ago I would have told you it was impossible. I’d have bet my life on it. I know everything about her. She wears pyjamas with little bears on them. When she was a kid she was scared of the dark and had to sleep with her bunny lamp on. I know she liked Matty Fletcher in Year 4 and punched him in the face when no one was looking because he didn’t like her. You just don’t give someone that sort of information on yourself and then walk away.
I stare at the phone. Ring. Ring. Ring.
‘What are you doing, Gracie?’ Mum asks.
Testing the strength of my telepathic powers over long distances to make my best friend need me again. ‘Nothing,’ I answer, and pack my bag ready for school.
The only way out of stand-off mode is for the person who’s walking away to realise what they’re missing. I have to give Jane some time to be Gracie Faltrainless. She’ll see what she’s missing. She’ll come running back.
In the meantime, I have Alyce. ‘Come inside for a minute,’
I say when she arrives. ‘I want to try to straighten your hair.’ ‘Gracie, I sort of like my hair the way it is.’ ‘But don’t you want to love it?’ ‘Well. . .’ ‘Exactly. Now sit tight for a minute.’ Or sixty. Or a hundred.
Alyce could solve the world’s energy problems with the static electricity coming from her head.
‘Does it look any better?’ she asks after about fifteen minutes. Better than what? Better than if you’d stuck your finger in a power point? ‘It definitely looks shinier.’
‘You know, technically it’s not shinier because it’s straighter. It’s just that the light reflects off it more easily now that there’s a flat surface.’
‘Alyce, one day your brain is going to explode,’ I say, and push her
out the door.
‘You look really pretty,’ I whisper at the start of class.
‘Flemming will love it.’ ‘Keep your voice down. I told you, I don’t like him.’ ‘Right. You don’t like him. You love him.’
‘Shhh, Gracie.’
I’m too busy teasing her to notice what’s going on around me. Big mistake. School is a dangerous place for people like Alyce. I should have known to keep an eye out for enemies, especially enemy number one: Annabelle Orion. It’s the end of period two by the time I realise she’s been listening to us. And by then it’s way too late to do anything about it.
Alyce and I are sitting next to Flemming in English. We’ve teamed up to work on poetry. Every group gets a different topic and together we have to write a poem and read it to the class. ‘Remember, it doesn’t have to rhyme,’ Mrs Wilson says. ‘The best poems are the ones that surprise the reader.’ That’s her story now. My poems are always surprising; she never says she likes them.
‘So,’ I whisper to Alyce when Flemming’s at the front getting our topic. ‘I heard he’s failing school.’
‘Who?’
‘Flemming. Martin says Yoosta wants to kick him out unless he starts getting better marks, so I thought you could offer to tutor him.’
‘What? No.’
‘It’d be the perfect chance for you to spend some time together.’
‘I said, no. Leave things alone. Please.’
Flemming walks back to our desks. ‘We got jibbed. Wilson gave us nature. Why couldn’t we get something like soccer or surfing? Who writes poetry about frigging nature?’
‘A lot of people, actually. Wordsworth and Keats,’ Alyce says.
Oh no. Don’t let him know you like poetry. What, are you running for nerd of the year?
‘There are some really beautiful lines in them,’ she says.
‘Can we copy them?’
‘That’s cheating,’ she answers.
I kick her under the table. He’s joking, Alyce. Laugh. But she doesn’t. She picks up her pen and looks as serious as if she were a doctor about to operate. ‘Okay, first line?’
Flemming and I start flicking through our books, looking everywhere but at her pen.
‘We could do one about the soccer field – that’s nature,’ Alyce says. ‘What’s the ground like before you run on it?’
‘I dunno. It’s sort of flat and new. And. . .green,’ he answers.
‘You idiot,’ I say.
But Alyce writes it down. ‘It’s good.’
‘I’m a poet and I know it,’ Flemming says with this look on his face like he’s just won the smartest guy in the school award and Alyce is the one who’s given it to him.
‘You’re a loser,’ I tell him.
But he keeps on going, giving Alyce lines about soccer and she keeps writing them down. She changes a few, but mainly it’s exactly as Flemming tells it to her. He loves it. He loves it so much he volunteers to read it out to the class.
He changes colour about five times when the teacher raves about how good it is. ‘I wrote it,’ he says. I could not have scripted the whole thing better. Who could have known it would be this easy? I’m so excited I forget the first rule of life: nothing is ever easy.
Annabelle Orion is the last to read her poem. She walks past and gives us that smile that I know all too well. I saw it on her face when she told our kindergarten teacher that I pushed her off the swings. I didn’t. Annabelle Orion fell all on her own, but she wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to land someone in trouble and steal a bit of attention. She framed me with the skill of an expert criminal at the age of four. That smile means one of two things: we’re dead. Or we’re about to wish we were.
She stands at the front of the class and waits a minute to make absolutely sure everyone is listening. ‘Our topic is love,’ she says, and I have a flashback to period one. I’m using my big, fat, stupid mouth to tease Alyce about Flemming. And Annabelle is sitting behind us.
I have to hand it to her. Annabelle covers herself beautifully. There is no mention of Alyce Fuller. There is no mention of Andrew Flemming. But when she finishes reading her poem there’s not one kid in the room who does not know who Annabelle is talking about. The school nerd is in love with the school soccer star. Either Alyce is hot for me or Flemming, and either way it’s not good for her.
I watch Flemming watch Alyce raise her hand. ‘May I please be excused?’ she whispers. ‘I don’t feel well.’ Her cheeks are two circles of tomato soup, hot enough to burn. Mrs Wilson lets her go. The whole class sniggers as she walks out the door.
Flemming doesn’t say anything. He just got the first A of his whole school career because of Alyce and he sits there and lets her take the heat. Idiot.
I throw my pen at Annabelle after she sits down. ‘I will get you,’ I mouth across at her and draw my finger along my throat.
As soon as the bell goes I run. There are only two places a girl will go when faced with humiliation of that level. First to the toilet, to cry her eyes out. And then when she feels a bit better, to the tuckshop, for some serious comfort food. Alyce is still in her crying stage.
I knock softly on every door.
‘Go away,’ a little voice echoes across the tiles.
‘Alyce, come out or I’m coming under.’ The door clicks and swings open. She looks like she’s been swimming in the ocean with her eyes stretched wide.
‘I’ve been worried about you.’
‘Why? Because every kid in the class knows I like Andrew Flemming? I’m never leaving here, Gracie.’
‘Your parents’ll eventually notice you’re missing.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Alyce, Annabelle will pay for this.’ I grip her shoulder, so she can feel how strong I am. ‘We’ll make her pay.’
‘Gracie, I’ve told you a million times. I don’t want to make Annabelle pay. I want to be left alone.’ She washes her face and leaves without another word.
No way, Alyce. I’m not letting you disappear again. Your days of losing are over. Whatever I have to do to shut Annabelle Orion up for good, I’ll do it. And that’s a promise.
14
Alyce Fuller smiles at me as she’s walking up to her seat. Man, that chick has killer eyes.
Brett Mason
To win anything at all, though, you have to risk something. Unless Alyce can do that, she’ll always lose. She’ll never leave where she is. It’s not enough to stand on the platform and wish for the opportunity train if you’re not ready to get on when it pulls into the station.
She’s in the crowd with Mum and Dad this Saturday, watching our last match before the Firsts competition starts. There’s a group of kids sitting about ten steps down, closer to where the action will be. Not Annabelle’s crowd. Kids like Brett Mason, the kind of guy who’d let you into the tuckshop line if you told him you were in a hurry. But in a million years Brett would never ask Alyce to sit with them. He wouldn’t think of it. Because people like Annabelle have told people like Brett that Alyce currency can’t buy anything at school.
I’ve watched her get carried around in people’s wallets for a while. In Year 6 Alyce hung out with Francesca Ring. In Year 8 she sat with Hailey Nelson. By Year 9 she was on her own most of the time. She was just too different. Until she met me.
I’m not passing her on. I’m increasing her market value. Pretty soon everyone in the school will wish they’d held on to those Alyce shares. They could have bought their mum and dad that snazzy house by the beach they’d always wanted.
If fate brought Alyce to me, then it’s because I can make things different for her. She’s like those mice I saw on the Discovery Channel last week. The scientists were exposing them to UV rays to test how quickly they developed skin cancer. Mum had to leave the room. Dad and I watched right to the end. I wanted to see what happened to those little guys, trapped in wire cages, sunning it up. Nothing happened, though, because mice’s bodies are smart. The more you expose them to something they don�
��t like, the more they change to shut it out. Those mice were growing little thirty-plus coats over their skin to block out the rays. They’d have to bake for hours before the scientists could see a difference.
Alyce has only been in the sun with me for six months. She just needs more exposure. I’m not saying I want her to get so popular she fries. I’d be happy if she had a tiny tan.
Alyce acts as if she doesn’t care. I can see her chatting away to Dad like she always does before the game, her hands shaping some character out of air for him to see. Don’t encourage her, Dad, I think. Alyce has to live in this world. The real one.
‘What are you thinking about, Faltrain?’ Martin asks, stretching next to me.
‘Alyce.’
His eyes trail along the stands till he finds her. ‘She loves talking to your old man.’
‘She needs to hang out with people her own age. Where does talking to Dad get her?’
‘It gets her happy, Faltrain.’
‘It won’t make her fit.’
‘Alyce fits fine. It’s everyone else who’s wrong.’
‘Majority rules, Martin. You ever hear of that?’
‘You sure you don’t want Alyce to change so your best friend isn’t the biggest nerd in Year 11? I know you miss Jane.’ ‘That’s not it, Martin. Anyway, Freddy Jabusi is the biggest nerd in Year 11. Alyce is at least second on the list.’
I change the subject. Talking about Jane makes me feel sick. If she doesn’t call tonight it will make two matches that she has missed.
‘So how much do you think we’ll win by today?’
He shrugs. ‘Just play your best, Faltrain, that’s all you can do.’
‘Don’t you care if we win?’
The old Martin cared, the one who pulled me aside during my first game and told me how I could make it. ‘You care enough for both of us,’ he says, and walks off to goal.
I don’t get it. If he feels like that, why not quit soccer altogether? What’s the point in being on the field if you’re not planning on winning?
I fight fierce today. I make sure we win. Look at me, Alyce and Martin, see what it feels like to take what you want. I stare up into the stands at half time and see Alyce, huddled under a blanket with Mum and Dad. Martin looks cold, too. I’m hot, heart pumping the heat up under my skin to at least forty degrees.
