Graffiti Moon

by Cath Crowley

  I slide into the booth.

  ‘You’re late,’ I say.

  Jazz points her lollipop at me and gives me the serious look.

  I steal a chip. ‘Okay, I’m late, but if the plan’s to stay out all night, what’s the hurry?’

  ‘She’s got a feeling,’ Daisy says. ‘The next guys to walk through the door are the ones we’re meant to hook up with.’

  ‘Have you seen the guys that live around here?’ I ask.

  ‘Lucy’s right,’ Daisy says. ‘Some of them aren’t pretty.’

  Daisy knows the crowd. She’s a sheddy so she comes here a lot. Jazz and I only started hanging out with her about a month back when we were put in an English group together. I always liked her; we just move in different crowds and go to different places.

  Inviting her tonight was a spur of the moment thing. She and Jazz and I were squashed behind a bush this afternoon, hiding from her boyfriend, Dylan, and his mates. They were slamming everyone with eggs to celebrate the end of Year 12.

  ‘Romance is in serious need of some resuscitation,’ Daisy said while yolk slid down her face. She looked at Jazz and me, caked over with egg. ‘I’m really sorry my boyfriend is such an idiot. I’m definitely breaking up with him,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow. If I do it before then I’ll have no one to hang out with on the last night of Year 12.’

  ‘Hang out with us,’ Jazz said.

  Another egg hit Daisy in the face. She didn’t need much more convincing.

  ‘Are you really breaking up with Dylan?’ I ask while she’s looking towards the door. ‘You’ve been together since the end of Year 10.’

  ‘I really am. I don’t know why I’ve stayed with him till now. It’s too long to be explained by temporary insanity.’

  ‘Lucy’s waiting for romance.’ Jazz says it like I’m the girl suffering from temporary insanity. ‘I’ll settle for action. I’ve got one last night before my parents come back from holidays. After that it’s all study all the time till exams. Every entry in my Year 12 diary can’t be: Watched TV, watched TV, flossed, kissed my parents goodnight, secretly watched more TV. Tomorrow I’m writing: Stayed out all night. Kissed someone.’

  Jazz heard last week that she got an audition for the College of the Arts. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t need the drama course. ‘Kissed someone,’ I say. ‘Not anyone.’

  ‘Okay. Kissed someone cute. Like that,’ she says, pointing at the door.

  ‘No way,’ Daisy and I say together.

  ‘This is perfect.’ Jazz checks her reflection. ‘Leo Green’s in my English class. I like the way he writes. I don’t know the guy with him.’

  Daisy grins, and looks at me. ‘It’s Ed Skye. Lucy, you remember him?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘He’s hot,’ Jazz says. ‘Perfect for you.’

  Daisy stops grinning. ‘That leaves Dylan for me. I don’t want Dylan.’

  ‘We’ll find someone for you along the way,’ Jazz tells her. ‘Ready?’

  ‘No,’ Daisy and I say at the same time.

  ‘Good. We’ll head over and let things unfold.’

  ‘I’d really like tonight to stay folded,’ I tell her.

  ‘Not an option,’ Jazz says, handing Daisy and me a piece of gum each. I didn’t seriously think it was.

  Some things take forever. Waiting for a bus when it’s raining. Getting waxed after winter. Lining up to get tickets for a band. Waiting for a coffee in the morning. The walk across to these guys isn’t one of those things.

  I blink and I’m there, staring past them through the window at the bridge. The lights on it are sending little warning messages: walk past the table, run, head to Al’s and wait on the steps for Shadow to come back.

  ‘Hi,’ Jazz says, standing at the table.

  Leo looks at her and grins. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ Dylan says.

  ‘Shut up,’ Daisy tells him, and makes the introductions. ‘Ed, this is Jazz Parker. Just a warning, she’s psychic. So don’t go thinking bad thoughts. You know Lucy. Leo, you know Jazz and Lucy. Jazz and Lucy, you know Dylan. He’s the idiot who threw eggs at us today.’

  Ed looks at me like he wishes I’d disappear and if I had the choice I’d grant that wish; I’d turn into smoke and blow away. I want to sit on the other side of the table from him so he doesn’t think I’m interested but there’s no room on the other side so I sit as far away from him as I can and try to have an out-of-body experience.

  Trying, trying. Nope. No luck. I can’t get no astral projection. This couldn’t get more awkward if we all tried.

  ‘You want to get some air?’ Leo asks Jazz, and they walk outside. Daisy follows them and Dylan follows her. Okay, it could get more awkward if we all tried.

  Don’t think about Ed. Think about Shadow. Think about meeting him. Think about what you’ll say, standing in front of him. Think about taking him into Al’s studio and showing him shiny pink glazes that blaze in the light. Think about night slowly turning into day and Shadow not disappearing and you there, not disappearing with him.

  I look over at Ed. He’s staring out the window giving Leo the thumbs down. I wait till he’s looking at me then I give him two fingers up. He gives me two fingers back. I give him the middle finger. He gives it back to me. I don’t know any more signs so I make up one. Three fingers. Take that, mister. He sticks up four. I call your four and raise you five. He skips straight to ten and does something with his thumb that disturbs me. I remember a sign I saw on TV once and bounce my hands on my lap. Ed bounces his lap right back.

  ‘Good.’ Jazz slides back into the booth. ‘You’re talking.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re still this mad at me,’ Ed says.

  ‘You grabbed my arse.’

  ‘You broke my nose.’

  ‘You broke his nose?’ Jazz asks. ‘You grabbed her arse?’

  ‘I was fifteen and I slipped and she broke my nose.’

  ‘Wait a minute. How do you slip onto someone’s arse?’ Jazz asks.

  ‘I meant slipped up. I slipped up and she broke my nose.’

  ‘You’re lucky that’s all I broke,’ I say.

  ‘You’re lucky I didn’t call the police.’

  Leo, Dylan and Daisy slide into the booth. ‘Did you know Lucy broke Ed’s nose?’ Jazz asks.

  Ed closes his eyes and silently bangs his head on the wall.

  ‘I took him to hospital,’ Leo says, grinning. ‘He had to sit for five hours in one of those gowns with his arse hanging out.’

  Okay, if someone says ‘arse’ one more time I’m going to have to levitate to get away from the humiliation.

  ‘I can’t believe he grabbed your arse,’ Jazz says.

  I concentrate really hard. Nope. No good. I can’t get no levitation. ‘I need a bathroom stop.’ I grab Jazz by the shoulder. ‘I have a feeling you need one, too.’

  ‘Do I need one?’ Daisy asks, smiling.

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Toilet stop for everyone.’ Leo grins and stands up. ‘Not you.’

  ‘Careful,’ Ed tells him. ‘Not a good idea to make her mad.’ I hear him laughing till the toilet door shuts. Before it does, I make sure I swing my arse a little. Take that, mister; you wish you could get some levitation.

  Ed

  ‘She’s swinging her arse on purpose,’ Leo says, laughing. ‘I like her.’

  I laugh with him till the toilet door shuts and then I stop. ‘I don’t like her. I’m going home.’

  ‘No way,’ Leo says. ‘I want to hang out with the Jazz Lady and she wants someone for Lucy.’

  ‘I’m not someone for Lucy.’

  ‘Jazz thinks you are.’

  ‘Jazz thinks she’s psychic. Jazz is delusional.’

  ‘Daisy won’t hang around without the other two,’ Dylan says. ‘She’s mad because I threw eggs at her head this afternoon.’

  The three of us think about that for a second.

  ‘That was stupid to throw eggs at her head,’ Dylan says.

  ‘Flowe
rs work better.’ Leo leans across to me. ‘Look. We’ve got six hours to kill before the job and three cool girls out for adventure. What’s the problem?’

  ‘The last adventure I had with her ended in hospital, that’s the problem.’

  ‘So don’t touch her arse this time.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

  First piece I ever did was for her. A girl with roads and rivers and deserts running across her skin. Highways on her neck that went all the way cross-country. Off to the side of her was a guy with the hood of his car up and smoke pouring out of the engine.

  I painted it in the middle of the night with a piece of white tape over my nose and two bruises over my eyes. I didn’t even check behind me for the cops. ‘Arrest me,’ I was planning to say if they turned up. ‘Come on, do it. Arrest me.’

  No cops showed and I stayed there till the sun blurred the dark. It wasn’t even a good sunrise. Factory smoke swallowed the colour before it had a chance and the whole sky was cloudy white.

  It took me weeks to ask her out. I’d been stalking her locker, stalking her before school and at lunch and after school. I even Googled her. Found a picture on the school website from this time we’d gone to the National Gallery in Year 9. She was staring at a Rothko painting and I was this sad little dot in the background, staring at her. I’d been checking out the Vermeers and I came round the corner and there she was. All pearls, all eyes, all skin, all mouth.

  I watched her at school, too. While she was drawing these pictures of people tangled together. I kept dreaming me and her were tangled like that. Kept dreaming of this spot she had on her neck, this tiny country. I wanted to visit, to paint a picture of what I found there, a wall with a road map of her skin.

  Mrs J paired us up for a research assignment on Jeffrey Smart and I was watching that spot and she looked up from her book and caught me making travel plans. ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Only. I was thinking. We should see a film.’

  She sat there tapping on the table with her pen and my blood was tapping and I was all desperation and no cool, sitting there making plans to move to some country far off the map. But then she said yes and my chest got sucked somewhere and I walked around with this hole in me all week. I kept thinking I wouldn’t make it to Friday night. That something would happen before then to mess with my luck, something like a nuclear bomb going off so there was nowhere for us to meet.

  ‘Pretty harsh,’ Leo said when I called him to come get me because she’d left me in the gutter with a broken nose. She never even called to check she hadn’t killed me. A date like that makes a guy wish they would drop the bomb. Right over his house.

  ‘What do you think they’re talking about in there?’ Dylan asks, looking towards the toilet.

  ‘I’ll take a wild guess and say us.’ Leo leans back. ‘Girls and money. I’ve got a good feeling.’ He checks behind him for about the fiftieth time tonight.

  Him and Dylan keep talking and laughing and acting like they don’t care that we might get caught later at the school. I look out the window and think about the sky in Bert’s book. About how the clouds look like they’re moving but they aren’t. It’s the same ones flicking over, again and again and again.

  Lucy

  It’s serious business time so Jazz and I walk into the same cubicle. Daisy crams in, too. ‘Is this like the cone of silence?’ she asks after Jazz locks the door.

  ‘It’s more like the cubicle of truth,’ Jazz tells her.

  Jazz and I met like this when she arrived a few months into Year 10. I was about to lock the cubicle door when she pushed it open, slammed it shut, covered my mouth and hissed, ‘Shhh.’

  We listened while Holly Dover and Heather Davidson came into the toilet and squealed Jazz’s name. ‘She’s not in here,’ Holly said when no one answered. ‘Let’s look in the library.’

  ‘They’re hard to shake,’ Jazz said after they left. ‘They’ve been following me since the canteen.’

  ‘We call them the HDs,’ I told her. ‘You know, because of the high-pitched surround sound of their voices.’

  ‘I had a feeling I didn’t want to be their friend even before they spoke. I’m psychic,’ she said, and looked at me looking nervously at the door. ‘Psychic. Not psycho. I’m Jazz Parker.’

  ‘Lucy Dervish,’ I said.

  We were friends from that second on. I hung with loads of different people before her. I like having friends from different groups. Some days I’d sit with the kids in my book group. Some days with the arty types. Some days I played chess. Some days I painted my nails black.

  In the end I fell into having a best friend easily, though. Jazz is the sort of person who invites herself places and she doesn’t follow the rules of high school geography. She likes chess and the supernatural and drama and Shakespeare and sport. ‘I’m eclectic,’ she said to the HDs once, and I could see them trying to work out where she plugged in.

  She looks at me tonight while we’re in the truth cubicle. ‘Why’d you lie?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘We’re out there talking about Ed and you say nothing about him being the broken-nose guy. That’s a lie, right?’ She looks at Daisy.

  ‘It’s withholding the truth,’ Daisy referees.

  ‘Fine. Why’d you withhold the truth?’

  ‘You’re psychic. I assumed you knew,’ I tell her.

  She gives me the serious finger. ‘You can’t joke your way out of this.’

  ‘I felt stupid and I knew you’d mention it as soon as we walked over and I knew if you thought I’d liked Ed once you’d push me to like him again and I don’t like him.’

  ‘But he’s so cute and he’s friends with Leo.’ She drops her voice. ‘Luce, when we were in the street talking, Leo’s arm brushed my arm. I got static electricity down there.’

  I can’t help laughing. ‘So go out with him. Tell me about it tomorrow.’

  ‘I want to tell you about it while it’s happening.’

  ‘He’ll probably think that’s weird,’ I say.

  ‘I want you to get static electricity.’

  ‘I’ll go rub my feet up and down on the carpet for a while when I get home. I promise.’

  ‘I remember static,’ Daisy says. ‘Dylan and I used to have it. Now he won’t even come with me to Queensland for an end of Year 12 trip. He worked all year to get the money and then he spent it on a Wii. Don’t you want static?’ she asks me.

  ‘I do. Just not with them.’ I nod in the direction of the café. ‘I want someone like Shadow.’ Not someone like him. ‘I want Shadow.’

  ‘Someone you have almost no hope of meeting,’ Jazz says.

  ‘Dylan knows him,’ Daisy says. ‘Him and Poet.’

  I’ve been tracking Shadow for years. Kids make stuff up about him all the time. He’s dead, he’s overseas, he’s studying art. As far as I can tell, none of it’s true. ‘You mean Dylan knows someone who knows someone who might know them.’

  ‘No. He actually knows them. He says so all the time. “I went here with them and they went here with me.” Sounds like they see him more than I do. He acts like it makes him cool.’ She thinks about it. ‘I guess it does make him a little bit cool.’

  I grab Jazz by the shoulders with my insides ticking fast. ‘I’ll come tonight if we look for them. We can go to places Dylan thinks they might be. You get a night of action with Leo. I get Shadow and romance.’

  ‘Sounds like a book my Aunty Glenda would read,’ Jazz says.

  ‘Please, please, please.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind getting Poet,’ Daisy tells her. ‘His writing is very cool.’

  ‘Please,’ I say again.

  Jazz grins. ‘Okay. I’m up for a Shadow hunt.’ She tries to open the door but the lock’s stuck. ‘That’s weird.’

  ‘Is this like an omen?’ Daisy asks.

  Jazz unzips her boot and takes it off so she can slam it at the lock. ‘It’s not an omen.’ Slam. ‘Tonight.’
Slam. ‘Is going to be great.’ Slam. ‘I’ve got a feeling.’ Slam. She puts her boot back on and looks at us. ‘Okay, we’ll have to climb out of here.’

  She stands on the toilet seat and heaves herself over the wall. We hear her hit the ground. Daisy winces. ‘This doesn’t mean anything,’ Jazz calls. ‘Trust me. I’m psychic.’

  I come out of the bathroom and the first thing I see is Ed. Okay, it was a long shot but I was half-hoping he’d cease to exist while we were gone. I feel a little tingle when he turns around but I put it down to the fall I had during my toilet escape. That and the thought of meeting Shadow.

  I don’t look at him as I slide into his side of the booth. I’m not here for Ed. I’m here for my young and scruffy artist. ‘Lucy and Daisy want to find Shadow and Poet,’ Jazz says.

  ‘Who?’ Ed asks.

  ‘Graffiti artists,’ she tells him.

  ‘They do stuff all over town.’

  ‘They call them writers,’ Dylan says.

  ‘Whatever,’ Daisy answers. ‘We want to meet them.’

  ‘I mainly want to find Shadow,’ I say.

  ‘We can do that.’ Leo grins. ‘That’s a great idea.’

  ‘No, that’s a stupid idea,’ Ed says. ‘That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. How would we even know where to look?’

  ‘Daisy said Dylan knows them,’ Jazz tells him.

  ‘Really.’ Ed stares across the table at Dylan, who looks like he’s about to do a runner.

  ‘You were lying?’ Daisy asks. ‘Typical.’

  ‘I wasn’t lying. I see them all the time.’

  ‘So prove it,’ she says. ‘Take us to the places they hang out and if we find them, introduce us.’

  ‘He can do that,’ Leo says. ‘Right, Dylan?’

  I’m holding my breath. I’m crossing everything on the inside. Lungs, kidneys, ventricles, the whole deal. Please don’t let Dylan be lying. An idiot could see there’s something going on between these guys but I figure it’s that Ed would rather cease to exist than hang out with me.