by Alex Dyson
But, as expected, he’d chickened out. It was kinda his trademark, to be honest. And while usually it was a frustrating element of his personality, tonight he was ironically relieved to be a romantic coward. Four months on from the last time he’d listened to ‘Ella’, it was glaringly obvious that the song was not as cool as he once thought.
Westlake, you make my chest ache? What was he thinking?!
It’s funny how something can resonate so much in the moment, but future-you ends up cringing at past-you’s antics. Also, to Caleb’s ears, the high hats sounded super tinny. He’d have to reopen the Ableton session and try to –
‘ARRRRGH!’
Caleb screamed as someone grabbed his shoulder, almost breaking the creaky chair as he spun around, arms flailing. Loud music suddenly filled the room as the headphone cord got ripped from its socket.
WANT TO GROW OLD WITH YOU
Caleb hit the space bar as he turned and saw his little brother grinning at him.
‘Haha! You shit yourself,’ Nathaniel said, smirking.
‘Champ!’ Caleb exclaimed. ‘You’ve gotta knock!’
‘I did. You didn’t answer.’
‘Well then, don’t come in!’
Nat shrugged. ‘What are you doing? Making songs again?’
Caleb immediately minimised the SoundCloud page and walked past Nat to his bed. ‘No,’ he said as confidently as he could. He wasn’t sure Nat bought it.
‘Then why are you up so late? It’s one in the morning.’
‘Oh god, is it? I dunno. Why are you up so late?’ he asked his stubborn brother.
‘Just thinking about stuff,’ Nat replied.
Caleb sighed. The shock of Nat’s entrance was wearing off. ‘About Dad?’
‘Yeah,’ Nat said, slumping down onto Caleb’s computer chair.
Caleb felt bad. His brother was a doofus, but a sympathetic doofus.
‘Phwoar, this chair smells like balls!’
‘I know,’ said Caleb, tucking himself under his doona.
‘You know? How do you know? Have you smelled a lot of balls?’
Caleb glanced up from his pillow to see Nathaniel grinning stupidly at him. ‘Can’t you just go to your own room?’
‘Maybe …’ he said, spinning the chair to face Caleb’s computer. Caleb shut his eyes for a moment before hearing an ominous mouse click.
‘What’s “Ella”? Is that one of your songs?’
Caleb almost broke the sound barrier leaping out of bed. This was a dumb move in hindsight, because it alerted Nat to the fact that he’d stumbled across something incriminating. With an open SoundCloud page and a new-found spurt of glee, Nat fought back, and a stinky scuffle broke out on the computer chair.
‘Who’s Ella? Who’s Ella!’ Nat yelled.
‘Get out or I’ll rip your mullet off!’ Caleb whisper-screamed, aware he could wake up the rest of the house. But it was too late – footsteps were coming down the corridor.
‘Mum!’ Caleb hissed, abandoning his fruitless fight and jumping back into bed to avoid a parental scolding. Nat sat upright on the flimsy chair as nonchalantly as he possibly could.
The door swung open. ‘What’s going on in here?’
‘Nat’s disturbing me!’ Caleb said.
‘I’m not,’ Nat whined. ‘I just needed someone to talk to.’ Damn Nat. As stupid as he was, he was also incredibly smart when it came to getting out of trouble.
‘Caleb, come here please.’
‘But …’ The look on his mum’s face stopped his protest, and Caleb moaned and joined her in the corridor.
She leaned in. ‘Caleb, you’re the older brother. You’ve got to help him out, okay?’
Caleb was suddenly too tired to protest. He nodded. She patted him on the shoulder, then left. He turned and went back into his room to see Nat smirking next to his computer. ‘Well then, what did you want to talk about?’
‘Nah, I’m good. Night, Button!’
Nat walked right past Caleb, giggling as he shut the door, leaving Caleb alone in his bedroom with his other annoying sibling: silence. Unfortunately for Caleb, he and Silence Clifford seemed to be conjoined.
CHAPTER 3
If Ella Westlake were a sound, she would be apricot frozen yoghurt.
She was sweet, she had soft, orange hair, and her voice was the smoothest, creamiest noise in the entire world. Her voice was also the main reason Caleb never got any work done in Maths. It was their only class together these days, and so he always tried to get the seat in front of her just to hear her soft-serve-like sentences in stereo surround sound.
The only issue was, her words were no longer directed at him, and hadn’t been since their first day at Riverview. A fact that – if he thought about it too much – gave Caleb a pain akin to a brain freeze.
It’s amazing what a new group of popular friends could do to a person. It had taken all of half a day for her to find someone better to hang out with than her old primaryschool friend Caleb Clifford, and that left Caleb cast out into the social wilderness. Alone. Friendless. At the mercy of Riverview’s playground food chain. And from there, Caleb was easy pickings.
After that day he had sworn not to forgive her. Sure, she still had the same cute freckles. The same glossy hair. The same beautiful, undulating voice. But if she was going to ditch someone that easily – allow them to be taken advantage of – then she obviously wasn’t the person Caleb thought she was, and so their relationship fractured from a close childhood bond to a general non-acknowledgement that the other person existed. There was tension, sure. How could there not be? The air was thick with it whenever they came into close proximity. But for years, neither of them broke the silent standoff.
Until that day.
It would have been approximately 358 days ago now. Two days after the funeral, and his first day back at school. Caleb had felt a light brush on his arm and turned around to see Ella standing there. By this stage he’d almost given up on their relationship. Decided she was the coldest, most heartless person in the world and that their friendship was tangled beyond repair.
Until she said those six words.
‘I’m really sorry about your dad.’
Those words had meant so much. Her eyes were sombre, and making direct contact with his for the first time in years. He was dumfounded. With everything that had happened, he wasn’t prepared. He’d written her off. But here she was looking at him with such kindness and sincerity that it knocked the wind out of him. That’s probably why the only reply he was able to muster was –
‘Oh … Thanks.’
She nodded. He nodded. She hesitated, but finally took her hand off his arm and walked away.
And as Caleb watched her walk back across the courtyard, he realised he was still deeply in love with her.
And they hadn’t spoken since.
Instead, Caleb thought of 1,045 different, better words he could have said to her. But, being unable to break the fabric of time to go back and surgically inject them into the moment, he instead – like the pathetic fool he was – went home and wrote a cheesy song about it, despite the fact that his own father had just passed away. Caleb had felt guilty about that for a bit, but later realised that in a week of agony and darkness, this spark, this glimmer of hope, might have been what pulled him through.
‘Have you seen Mikayla recently?’
‘No, why?’
‘She got hair extensions. They’re, like, super obvious …’
‘That’s a shame.’
Ella and her friend Esther’s conversation went on behind him during Maths as Caleb lamented his cursed existence. The years apart meant that now Caleb and Ella occupied totally separate social spheres – a shy music nerd in love with a confident, beautiful, intelligent girl. Caleb was pretty sure most people at school would be shocked to know they were once friends.
He moaned internally. In this modern world, with so many couples getting together despite their politics, religions or sporting teams, why was cross
-popularity dating still so frowned upon?
The bell rang. Caleb picked up his books, trying to time his walk to the door so that he and Ella would bump into each other. Be forced into some sort of interaction. But she went to speak to the teacher instead. Damn. Caleb flirted with the idea of pretending to tie his shoelace to buy himself some time, but thought better of it. Chalk it down as another one of his thousands of near misses.
It was home time.
The Nissan Micra’s car horn cut into Caleb’s earbuds, and he rose to his feet to greet Rachel. He looked around for any sign of a mullet as he got into the front seat, but the coast was clear.
‘Hey, Button-boy. Where’s Champ? I mean – Nathaniel.’
‘I don’t know. Trent’s place?’
‘Ergh, I wish he’d tell me these things. Can you ring him?’
Caleb did. Nat’s phone didn’t even ring before going to voicemail.
‘YOU HAVE REACHED THE MESSAGE BANK OF – “Penis!” – PLEASE LEAVE A SHORT MESS–’
Caleb hung up. ‘His phone’s off,’ he told Rachel.
‘Fine. Maybe he went home … So, you want to drive today?’ She looked at him encouragingly, but Caleb shook his head. Rachel shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ And with the roar of a tiny engine, they rolled out through Riverview’s rusty gates.
‘How was your day?’ Rachel asked.
‘Fine.’
Rachel sighed. ‘Is that all you’ve got for me?’
Caleb thought for a moment. Nothing had really happened. He’d floated through the day, avoiding human contact wherever possible. He’d had a gold run of not being asked questions by teachers. Miralee had hung out with her girlfriend, Dana, at lunch, so he’d found a spot under a tree and listened to music.
‘Nothing? No goss for me? No scandals?’ Rachel persisted.
Caleb shrugged. ‘Apparently Mikayla got hair extensions and they’re super obvious.’
‘Woah, okay. Who’s Mikayla?’
‘No idea.’
Rachel frowned. Caleb tried to deflect attention by asking, ‘Well, how was your day?’
‘It was okay,’ she said. ‘We had a tutorial on facilitation and stakeholder engagement, then I caught up with my friend Grace for a coffee.’
‘Sounds nice.’
‘Yeah, it was.’
The car fell silent again, and the suburbs zipped by. Caleb propped his elbow on the edge of the window and rested his head on his hand so he could gaze at the world using as few neck muscles as possible. The hum of the road filled the quiet.
‘Do you still hang out with that Ella girl?’ Rachel said out of the blue.
Caleb’s neck muscles suddenly got a workout as he snapped his head around.
‘What? Why?!’ He hadn’t spoken to Rachel about his devastating and impossible crush. Nor anyone else, for that matter.
‘Just asking. She goes to Riverview too, yeah?’
‘Yeah …?’
‘So I was wondering what happened to her. She used to be part of your gang, didn’t she?’
Caleb went hot under the spotlight. He shrugged as naturally as possible in an attempt to play it cool. ‘Yeah, but, I dunno …’
Then he asked a question he would regret for the rest of eternity. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘What do you MEAN the song I posted to Facebook?!’
Caleb was definitely not playing it cool now. Rachel, on the other hand, gazed calmly through the dirty windscreen.
‘The song you posted to Facebook last night, dummy. The SoundCloud link. It made me think of her.’
This didn’t clear anything up. ‘But … but I don’t even use Facebook! I’m not old!’
‘I’ll try not to take offense to that,’ said Rachel dryly.
Caleb was still frantic. How could his SoundCloud link have gotten out there? ‘Are you SURE it was me? Like, you didn’t get confused with – I mean – and anyway, how could this have –’
The echoes of a sinister snigger interrupted his thoughts. The distinctive laugh of a young boy with oily, poorly cut hair. Hair that was all business at the front, and all party at the back –
Nathaniel.
‘Ohhh.’ Rachel was cottoning on. ‘Did Nat hack you …?’
‘Oh god. Oh god no … this is a disaster!’
Nat must have clicked the SHARE TO FACEBOOK button on his SoundCloud page. And now his song – his love song – was on the loose.
And he’d literally named Ella in the title.
What. An. IDIOT.
‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no –’ repeated Caleb as he searched his phone for the Facebook icon. It wasn’t there. ‘Dammit, I need to redownload the app! Jesus!’ he cried.
Rachel gave a snort of laughter. ‘Oh man, Caleb, you don’t even have the app? I mean, I know you’re not a social butterfly, but seriously, there’s a base level –’
‘Yeah, okay, I get it!’ Caleb was frustrated enough without his social ineptness coming into question as well. ‘You can delete these things, though, yeah? Like, posts you make?’
‘Yeah, but …’ Rachel’s grin was now tinged with guilt. ‘I, um … I shared it.’
‘You WHAT! On Facebook?’
‘No, on MySpace – of course on Facebook!’
‘Why on earth would you do that!?’ Caleb yelled.
‘Because I liked the song! Why are you so worked up about it?’
‘Because you can’t just go sharing anything, and I – wait – you liked the song?’
‘Yeah, it was good.’
Caleb felt a flicker of pride, which was immediately tempered by Rachel’s next sentence.
‘Where’d you find it? I’ve never heard of them. BEEVTON, was it?’
Caleb gulped. It was now abundantly clear that Rachel didn’t realise the song was actually written by the profusely sweating person next to her. That made sense – there was no mention of Caleb Clifford anywhere on the page, and while she knew he made music, she had no idea what he called himself. The strategically placed ‘V’ must have been enough to prevent her connecting the dots. Plus, Caleb didn’t think she knew Ella’s last name was Westlake. Add to this probably the most logical reason she wouldn’t guess it was him – she obviously didn’t think her sixteen-year-old brother was capable of producing a song she actually liked. That stung a little, but in this instance it worked in his favour. Embarrassment-wise, sharing a song named ‘Ella’ was much less embarrassing than making a song named ‘Ella’.
‘Well?’ Rachel followed up, filling the silence Caleb had left with his panicked thinking. He took a breath. If he played it cool, he might be able to wriggle out of this situation with minimal damage, and without actually lying. ‘Where’s he from?’ she prompted.
Down the hall, Caleb thought.
‘He’s Australian, actually,’ Caleb said. ‘He’s new.’
‘Cool. Well, I liked it. You’ve got good taste in music for a sixteen-year-old.’
Caleb chuckled nervously.
‘In fact, you should make me a playlist sometime.’
‘Okay … um … when do you want it?’
‘Quickly might be best.’
‘Why’s that?’
She pulled into their driveway and parked the car, then turned to him with a serious look on her face.
‘What do you MEAN you’re moving out!?’
The hits just kept coming today.
The pair entered the house and Rachel dropped her keys into the abalone shell the family used as a key holder just as casually as she’d dropped her bombshell. It had momentarily distracted Caleb from running to his bedroom and cleaning up Nat’s online prank before anyone from school saw.
‘It’s just something I have to do.’
‘But why?’ Caleb was panicked.
‘Caleb, were you even at dinner last night? I can’t do this anymore, and Grace asked if I wanted to move in with her and some mates, so I’m going to.’
Caleb was stressed. The thought of being stuck here alone with hi
s depressed mother and infuriating younger brother was overwhelming. ‘Can I come with you?’ he asked.
Rachel patted his shoulder. ‘No, mate. It’ll be a share house, and as much as I love you, I don’t think we can manage that. You’ll be okay. Just stay here with Mum.’
Caleb was lost. His head was spinning. He couldn’t do it. ‘But I don’t WANT to stay here with Mum!’ he cried.
Rachel’s face as he said those words was all he needed to see to realise what he’d done. He turned around slowly.
His mum was there.
Holding some flowers.
And the look on her face broke his heart.
‘Mum, I –’ Caleb started. But his words were enveloped in the unassailable silence that was now a permanent fixture of the Clifford household.
‘It’s fine. It’s fine,’ their mum finally said. She used her free hand to push some loose strands of hair behind her ear. ‘I was just going to head down to the cemetery and change the flowers, if either of you want to come?’
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ said Rachel without hesitation. ‘I’ve got to study.’ She gave their mum a quick kiss on the cheek and headed to her room.
‘Caleb?’
Caleb hated going to the cemetery. Every piece of grass manicured. Every hedge trimmed. As if the pain of every visitor could be lessened by good landscaping. Regardless, he was going to say yes just to make up for his faux pas until he remembered the most pressing issue: the Facebook post.
His dad was already deceased, and would stay that way whether he visited the cemetery or not. His song, on the other hand, was very much alive.
Until he could kill it.
‘Sorry Mum, I can’t today. I’ve got to … do … something.’
‘I see.’ She looked crestfallen.
‘Maybe next week?’ Caleb added, hoping to make up for being the worst son ever.
‘I start nightshift on Monday, Caleb. I’ll just tell your father you were busy.’
