The faintest whisper of a presence behind me made me turn. Nick was standing in the doorway to the living room, an expression of total horror on his face.
‘Hi, Nick!’ I jumped up off the couch with a squeak of plastic. ‘I can’t believe you forgot to tell your mum I was coming over!’
Nick said nothing. He looked like that screaming Edvard Munch painting. Or a sex-doll.
‘I like your house,’ I said. ‘It’s very … clean. And you’re right, it wasn’t hard to find it at all – it’s so close to the train station. Are you going to show me your room?’
I advanced towards him, and he backed away as if I were going to stab him with one of the glass birds.
Mrs Rammage glided back in with a tray bearing two glasses of lemonade.
‘You kids sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know when dinner’s ready. It won’t be long.’
She put the tray on the coffee table and ushered me back to the couch. Nick sat in an armchair as far from me as he could possibly get. He wouldn’t look at me.
Mrs Rammage disappeared from the room again, her heels clacking softly on the plastic runner. I wondered if she was going out after dinner. Who wore high heels in their own home?
‘So … ’ I said. ‘This would be a good opportunity for practising small talk in awkward situations.’
Nick said nothing. I could hear his breath coming in shallow pants, the way it did when he was especially anxious.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I came here without your permission. But you need to be exposed to new challenges, otherwise you’ll never get better. And I wanted to meet your family.’
Nick leaned forward and took one of the glasses of lemonade. He drained it in one breath, like the desperate cowboy does in the saloon before he goes outside to meet the troublemaker at ten paces. He broke his stoic silence by belching loudly, and blushed.
‘Nice.’ I helped myself to the other glass of lemonade.
We sat there in strained silence for what felt like hours, until Mrs Rammage came to say that dinner was served.
The dining room on the other side of the hall was just as sterile and weird as the living room. The heavy dark wooden table was set with good white china, silver knives and forks, and embroidered cloth napkins. But the whole effect was spoiled by the plastic tablecloth with its tacky daisy print.
Mr Rammage was already sitting at the table. He was a big man, wearing a suit and tie. (Dad wouldn’t have approved. Too big-shouldered and power-suity. Very 1990s.) He nodded at Nick, and then stared at me.
‘This is Penny,’ said Mrs Rammage. ‘A friend of Nick’s from school.’
Mr Rammage raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything. Clearly they weren’t a very chatty household.
‘It’s nice to meet you, Mr Rammage,’ I said, holding out my hand.
He hesitated, then stood and leaned over the table to shake it. ‘Hello,’ he said.
Well, it was more than I’d got out of Nick.
There was an entree of salad with cold ham. There was so much dressing on the salad that each piece of lettuce dripped as I picked it up. My mouth grew fuzzy from the salty dressing and sugary lemonade. Nick ate mechanically, not raising his eyes from his plate. Nobody spoke.
I thought of Rin’s family, who were also quiet and polite, but in an entirely normal and human way. This was like having dinner in Stepford. Any minute now Mrs Rammage’s robot head would explode and she’d try to kill us all.
‘May I please have some more salad?’ asked Nick, his voice barely a whisper, his head down.
This was crazy. The salad was right in front of him. Did he really have to ask permission to eat more vegetables? My mum used to pay me to eat vegetables.
‘Of course you may,’ said Mrs Rammage, and to my astonishment she stood up, walked to the other end of the table, and served Nick some salad.
‘Thank you,’ said Nick, still not looking up.
‘You’re welcome.’ Mrs Rammage returned to her seat.
I couldn’t believe this. Was this what every dinner was like? Or was it a special performance for my benefit? I half expected Mrs Rammage to burst out laughing, and for Nick to tell me I’d been punk’d.
‘Um,’ I said loudly, trying to fill the air with the sound of something other than chewing. ‘Did anyone see that report on the ABC last week about climate change? I think it raised some really interesting points.’
Nick and Mr Rammage stared at me as though I’d just announced I was about to give birth to a trout. Mrs Rammage stared at her plate as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
‘Especially about alternative energy sources?’ I faltered.
Nick returned his eyes to his plate. A bead of sweat dripped from his nose into his salad.
‘Must have missed that one,’ said Mr Rammage shortly.
And that was my sole attempt at conversation. Clearly talking during dinner was just Not On in the Rammage household.
The dinner dragged on in silence. After Nick’s mum had served us some very overcooked slices of beef with watery gravy, Mr Rammage stood up to turn on the radio. Some loud-mouthed talkback host was asking people about their experiences with overcrowding on public transport. The noise only made things seem more quiet and still in the dining room. I had been chewing on the same piece of beef for over a minute, and was pretty sure it was never going to break down. Could I spit it into my napkin? Would this meal never end?
I glanced at Nick’s mum, and saw with horror that she was crying silently. Fat tears slid down her cheeks, taking eyeliner and foundation with them, so her face seemed to be melting. Neither Nick nor his father seemed to notice – or if they did notice, they didn’t care to comment.
I was in over my head. Nick’s case was too far gone, his psychological damage must be too severe. With a family like this, how could he ever get better? He didn’t know what it was like to be normal.
I’d never in my life wanted so much to be at home with Dad and Josh, eating Moroccan food and doing a jigsaw of a poodle dressed as a dragon. What was I doing here?
I managed to force the beef down and straightened my knife and fork to see that Nick and Mr Rammage had finished too. Had they been watching me masticate my way through this culinary disaster? I felt the lump of almost-solid meat making its way slowly down my throat. This was why people turned vegetarian.
‘Thanks for dinner, Mrs Rammage.’ I swallowed again, just to be on the safe side. ‘It was delicious.’
Nick’s mum ignored me, still crying into her uneaten roast beef.
Nick seemed frozen. It was clear I was going to have to get myself out of this whole ugly situation. But even though I badly wanted to crawl home and give Dad a giant hug for being so pleasantly functional, I wasn’t finished. This was what being a journalist was all about. Sometimes I’d have to put myself in difficult or unpleasant situations. Nellie Bly spent ten days in a mental asylum. I could manage one evening.
‘So, Nick,’ I said, raising my voice to be heard above the radio. ‘You said you could lend me that book? The one you mentioned the other day?’
Nick stared at me. ‘W-what book?’ It was the first time he’d spoken to me all evening.
‘Oh, you remember. You said you had it. In your bedroom.’ ‘I don’t remember anything about a book.’
I sighed. ‘Let’s just go look, shall we?’ I stood up and started towards the dining room doorway. I had no idea where Nick’s room was, but I was pretty sure he’d follow me.
And, with a clatter of cutlery and a scrape of chair, he did.
‘Where are you going?’ he hissed, as we walked down the hallway.
‘Well, which one of these doors is your room?’
Nick hesitated in front of a door, and I grinned triumphantly and opened it.
‘No,’ said Nick. ‘Don’t go in there.’
‘Why not?’ I walked in, flicking on the light.
In some ways it was just an ordinary bedroom. A bed (single), a bookshelf. A desk with
a laptop on it. But I immediately noticed other things: neat stacks of CDs on the bookshelf; a collection of what looked like light globes; and a row of Pez dispensers lined up on the windowsill.
PEZZimist. Of course.
‘Th-the red cockatoo one is worth over three hundred dollars,’ said Nick. I could barely make out his voice. He was still hovering in the doorway, beads of sweat on his brow, struggling. He didn’t like me being in his space.
I went over to the collection of light globes and my breath caught in my throat.
They were eight tiny little gardens, each inside its own globe. One was a desert, with miniscule cacti rising out of golden sand. Another was thick dark moss, with a cluster of white toadstools in the centre. Yet another held smooth stones with tiny purple flowers peeking up between them.
‘Did you make these?’ I asked.
‘They’re terrariums,’ Nick replied. ‘The plants are all real.’
‘They’re amazing,’ I said. ‘How do you make them?’
Nick shrugged. ‘Patience. I like to grow things, but my mother won’t let me plant anything in the front garden in case I spoil the lawn, and the backyard is just plastic. I like being able to make little worlds, apart from everything else.’
Like you, I thought. A little world apart from everything else.
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I’m a weirdo,’ said Nick. ‘Have you had enough yet?’
I grinned at him. ‘Not even close. Are you going to come into your bedroom, or are you going to hang out in that doorway for the rest of the evening?’
Nick slunk into the room like a miserable dog and sat gingerly on the edge of his bed, his posture all tense as if he was ready to spring up and flee. He cleared his throat. ‘H-how did you find out where I live?’
‘I hid my phone in your bag,’ I told him, examining his meticulously alphabetised CD collection. ‘I tracked its location online.’
Nick didn’t say anything, and I was kind of disappointed. Wasn’t he impressed by my investigative skills?
‘Bach, Debussy, Handel, Vivaldi,’ I read aloud. ‘So you like classical music.’ I moved along the shelf. ‘And … Gilbert and Sullivan.’
‘I like romantic music,’ Nick muttered.
‘But no Andrew Lloyd Webber?’
He shook his head. ‘Too loud. Hurts my ears.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You prefer the proper traditional musical to the modern rock opera.’
Nick said nothing.
‘I don’t know much Gilbert and Sullivan,’ I said. ‘But my parents took me to see The Pirates of Penzance when I was little. There was a song about being a very modern mister … ?’
Nick didn’t look up, but his face brightened and he began to speak very quickly.
‘I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.’
I stared at him. It was the most I’d ever heard him say all at once, delivered rapid-fire, without a slip or a stammer. I felt like bursting into applause.
‘A Very Model of a Modern Major-General,’ said Nick. ‘Major-General Stanley sings it near the end of Act One. It’s really difficult to sing because it’s so fast and tongue-twisty.’
‘That was amazing,’ I said, and meant it.
Nick shifted uncomfortably. ‘I still don’t remember telling you about a book.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘For someone who spends his whole life pretending to be something he’s not, you’re not very good at picking up lies. I just wanted to get away from the dining room.’
‘Oh.’
‘Although I would like my phone back.’
Nick fumbled in his backpack until he found my iPhone. He handed it to me, making sure our hands didn’t touch.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘About dinner. I told you not to come.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ I said. ‘It helped me understand you a bit more. Your family is … not exactly normal.’
‘No.’
I gazed at the terrariums and thought about how Nick’s ultra-cool persona was like a glass wall that sheltered him from the world.
‘Nick,’ I said. ‘What happened at your old school? Why did you leave?’
Nick scratched at his elbow. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Everything. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I need to know.’
He sighed and took off his watch, laid it carefully beside him, then picked it up and put it back on again before he finally started talking.
‘There was a girl,’ he said. ‘She was beautiful, the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. She was quiet and thoughtful and sometimes when she’d catch me staring at her she’d smile and look away, like she was shy too. I knew that if only I could work up the courage to talk to her, everything would fall into place, and we’d be together forever. I just had to find the right moment. I watched her, trying to figure out her routine. I used to wait for her after school every day, hoping that I’d be able to finally speak to her. And every day she’d walk on by. A couple of times I even followed her home, hoping and hoping that a miracle would happen and that I’d be able to say something. This went on for a month or two.’
Nick took his watch off again and held it in a tight fist, his eyes closed.
‘And then what? Did you speak to her?’
He shook his head. ‘She told her parents that I was stalking her. I can’t believe she did that. I mean, she smiled at me. I thought she liked me.’
I didn’t say anything. Of course she thought Nick was a stalker. What do you call a creepy guy who stares at schoolgirls and follows them home? A stalker. Or worse.
‘So her parents called the school and the school called my parents.’ Nick’s voice broke on the last word, and he started to cry.
‘Oh.’ I didn’t know whether I should try to comfort him, or whether it would make him more anxious. I waited. He pulled his sleeve across his nose and swallowed.
‘My parents were so mad. My mother screamed and screamed at me, asking what she’d ever done to deserve a son like me. So they pulled me out of the school, which was good because I think I might actually have died if I’d ever seen the girl again. And then my mother grounded me. She said it was time for me to start acting like a real boy, and that I wasn’t allowed out again until I could. And I wanted to say well then help me find a girlfriend, and I will grow up, but she didn’t. Ever. She never helped me meet girls, never got any of her friends to bring their daughters around, never introduced me to anyone.’
I wanted to ask him why he wanted his mother’s help in the first place – didn’t most teenagers hate it when their parents tried to interfere with their personal lives? But Nick wasn’t most teenagers.
‘I hated her,’ he was saying. ‘I hated her so much, and I couldn’t leave the house and she was there all the time, yelling at me and crying and telling me what a disappointment I was. So I started … doing stuff.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
Nick paused again, his body convulsing with silent sobs. He shook his head, and took a few gulping breaths.
‘I put a dead mouse in the kettle. I cut all my clothes into shreds with scissors. And one night when my parents were asleep, I went into the kitchen and took all the plates and glasses, and built them into towers on the floor, until they reached the ceiling. Then I went back to bed and left it all there for them to find the next morning. My mother thought I was going mad, and told me to stop. I told her I’d stop when she let me out and helped me find a girl. She didn’t, so I kept going. One day when she went out to the supermar
ket, I took all her jewellery from her bedroom and took it to Cash Converters and got nearly three hundred dollars for it.’
I frowned, remembering what he’d said about running away and seeing the world. ‘You stole your mum’s jewellery?’
Nick nodded. ‘Dad called the cops. I spent a night in the cell at the police station.’
‘Your father had you arrested?’ This story was so crazy I could barely believe it. If I hadn’t met Nick’s parents I definitely would have thought he was lying.
‘He came and got me the next morning. Then my mother said that she’d help me, but that I had to promise that I’d try to be the son she wanted, instead of a crazy mess. I agreed. She even wrote out a contract and I signed it. Then she went out for a whole day and came back with bags of clothes and magazines and DVDs. She cut out pictures of cool boys, and put them all in a scrapbook. She bought me all these clothes.’ He plucked the fabric of his T-shirt. ‘She put me on a diet and made me work out for three hours a day. She showed me DVDs of hot guys and made me practise walking like them, over and over again, for hours. Finally, she said I was ready to be a normal boy, and it was time for me to go back to school.’
‘And that’s when you came to East Glendale?’
Nick nodded, then buried his head in his arms and made horrible hacking sounds as he trembled. When he’d cried like that outside the pool, it had been okay. He’d been an interview subject, a test case. He’d simply been displaying symptoms of anxiety. But now … now he was a person. A person who’d been a kid, like me. Except while I’d been growing up with my loving parents, he’d been growing up in a plastic-covered bubble with parents who I couldn’t quite believe were human. It made my parents’ divorce seem like nothing. At least they loved me.
I wanted to tell him that everything was going to be all right. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted him to believe that I knew all the answers.
But I didn’t. This was huge. It wasn’t just a matter of a boy who was too shy to talk to girls. Nick had been abused by his family. He was broken in ways I couldn’t even imagine. I thought of Dad and Josh, and wanted to be safe at home with them more than anything else in the world. And I knew that Nick had never felt like that. For Nick, there was no home. There was no safe.
Love-shy Page 12
