A Year in Girl Hell

by Meredith Costain

  ‘Who’s your little friend?’ she asks, nodding her head at Mia.

  ‘This is Mia,’ I jump in. ‘We – ah – we were all at Gold Street together.’

  Paige half-closes her eyes, like she’s thinking, or trying to remember something.

  ‘I used to know this girl that went to Gold Street,’ she tells us. ‘Chelsea something. She used to come to our gymnastics club. You remember her, Jayde.’

  Jayde yawns. ‘Who?’

  ‘Chelsea Piper?’ I say helpfully. ‘Her family moved to Perth halfway through last year.’ Chelsea was nice. She and her friend Tegan used to come over to Pink HQ for sleepovers sometimes.

  ‘That’s the one,’ says Paige. ‘You know, Jayde. The one with the big nose.’

  Jayde laughs. ‘Oh, yeah. That one. Now I remember. What did we use to call her? Elephantnose?’ Jack laughs, turning his hundred-watt green-eyed gaze on Jayde. Why doesn’t he look at me that way? ‘Pinocchio,’ I say loudly. All around the circle, conversations stop and people stare at me. Including Jack.

  ‘Whuh?’ says Jayde.

  ‘Pinocchio,’ I repeat, giggling nervously. ‘That’s what we used to call her anyway. You know? Like that wooden puppet in the fairytale who wanted to be a real boy. Whose nose grew, every time he told a lie?’ I hold out my arms. ‘Until it was like … this big.’

  Jack’s looking at me now, all right. I have his full attention, along with everyone else’s. Including Mia, who I can feel bristling besides me. She hates it when people put other people down. But it’s too late to take it back now.

  ‘Pinocchio!’ he snorts. ‘Good one, Lexi.’

  Some of the other girls whisper something to each other and smirk. Alysha throws me a jealous glare. Probably annoyed she wasn’t the one to think of it and get all the glory. But I don’t care. Jack Moxham remembered my name! I can’t stop myself now. I’m on a roll.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m amazed she doesn’t fall flat on her face with a nose like that. I mean, imagine trying to walk around all day carrying something that big in the middle of your face.’ I pause for breath. ‘In fact, we were thinking of getting Chelsea to change her name. To Pinocchiette.’

  Nick Giannis sniggers, then punches me on the arm. ‘That’s classic,’ he tells me. ‘Isn’t it, Jayde.’

  ‘Classic,’ agrees Jayde. She and a couple of the other girls give me approving smiles.

  I lift my shoulders and toss my hair to the side, the way I’ve seen Alysha do it. Look at me! Lexi the Loser, mixing it up with the shiny people. Head held high, I look around the circle, smiling my winner’s smile.

  But all I see is the shocked look in Mia’s eyes.

  Chapter 10

  A few hours later, I’m standing nervously outside Pink HQ, wondering whether I should knock. I can hear Mia moving around quietly inside. Then I realise I’m being silly. I’ve never knocked on the door before, just breezed straight in. I take a deep breath and creep inside.

  Mia’s crouched down at the far end, fiddling around with scissors and paste. She looks around as I come in.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says, turning back to her pasting.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask, my voice a tight ball, like I’m scared of Mia’s answer. This is really weird. I’ve never felt uncomfortable around Mia before. We can always talk about everything. But I keep thinking back to the look in her eyes when I sledged our old friend in front of all those people. I want to explain about all that, but I’m not sure how.

  ‘What does it look like?’ says Mia, snapping the lid off a thick texta. ‘I’m updating the Wall.’

  The Wall is the back wall of Pink HQ. It’s like a record of our friendship. A never-ending story, a memory of all our experiences, good times and bad. We stick up photos of clothes and stuff we like and invitations and clippings from magazines. We draw moustaches and devil horns on the photos of celebs we don’t like, or stencil pink love hearts around the guys we have crushes on. And we scribble funny comments and sayings and verses of our best songs in the spaces in between.

  Mia’s pasting up a photo of Chelsea. It was taken one night here at Pink HQ, just before she left for Perth. She’s doing a back bend, and Alysha’s balanced a glass of pink lemonade on her tummy. She ended up laughing so much the glass went flying, spilling pink bubbly liquid all over the cushions.

  I bite my lip. ‘Yeah, look Mia, about what I said today …’ Mia’s eyes are cold. ‘I can’t believe you said all that crap about Chelsea’s nose, and what for? Just so you could impress those snotty little cows. Do you think they even care about you?’

  I feel like she’s just slapped my face. ‘Come on, Mia,’ I say, shocked that she could talk to me like that. ‘I was just trying to be funny, you know? Have a laugh. Maybe you’re just too serious all the time, all right?’

  ‘Yeah, well I’d rather be serious than disloyal to my friends. How would you feel if she talked about you behind your back like that?’

  I’m just opening my mouth to fling something back at her when there’s a tap on the door. ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’ comes a voice.

  We turn around. It’s Mia’s dad. He often drops in to see how we’re going, or if he can help out in some way with our music. Sometimes he even sits in with us, on lead guitar. He’s great. You can talk to him about anything. I wish my dad was like him.

  ‘All set for the big sleepover recording session this week, Lexi?’ he asks me. ‘I might even come out and help you with some backing tracks. And I’ve got the snacks menu all planned. We’re going to start with bruschetta, then a little pizza – with my very special sauce of course, followed by …’

  I stop him before he gets too carried away. ‘Um, actually, Mr Zugaro, I – er – won’t be able to make it to the sleepover this week.’

  Mia stares at me, her anger over my bad behaviour temporarily forgotten. ‘But you have to come. It’s a ritual. Our ritual. And especially this week, with Michi coming for the first time and everything.’ She smiles at me. ‘Come on, Lex. I’m going to make it really special. With candles and stuff. Show Michi what’s she’s been missing out on all these years. She reckons she’s never actually been to a proper girly sleepover. Besides, we need you to put in the keyboard track.’

  I can feel a tell-tale flush starting to work its way up my neck. ‘How about we change it to Saturday night,’ I say. ‘We can still do all that stuff then, can’t we?’

  ‘No, we can’t,’ Mia tells me. ‘We’re going to visit my nonna and nonno on Saturday night. It’s their wedding anniversary. Big family thing, you know. Food. Dancing. More food. And besides, Michi wouldn’t be able to come then either. She’s got this orchestra thing on. Why can’t you make it?’

  I’m feeling really bad now. But this movie night is just too good a chance to pass up. Who knows what might happen? Especially after the points I scored with Jack and the others today. I shake my head slowly.

  ‘Oh well,’ says Mia, deflating like a birthday balloon at the end of a party. ‘Looks like it’s just going to be me, Michi and Alysha then. I guess we’ll work out how to do the keyboard track somehow.’

  I’m not sure how to break the next bit to her. So I jump in, feet first. ‘Um, Alysha won’t be able to make it either. Didn’t she tell you? We’re going to the movies.’ Well, that’s if Alysha’s parents let her after they find out she got put on detention in science today.

  Mia gawps at me.

  ‘With some of Alysha’s new friends,’ I add quickly. ‘It was her idea.’

  ‘Sure it was,’ spits Mia.

  Her dad backs away quietly to give us some space. Mia picks up a texta and, turning her back to shut me out, starts slowly adding some more words to the Wall.

  I don’t know what to do. Walk away, or try to patch things up somehow? ‘Mia?’ I begin.

  No reply. Only the steady swoosh of the texta as it glides more and more words onto the Wall.

  I guess this is it then. Our first official fight. Sure, we had sill
y little arguments and stuff back in primary school, where we didn’t talk to each other for a whole day. By the next day we’d forgotten all about it and were besties again. But I get the feeling this is going to be different. A lot different.

  I look around the room helplessly. There must be something I can say or do to fix things.

  Mia puts down the texta. ‘You still here?’ she asks, without turning around.

  Ouch.

  ‘Look, Mia,’ I begin. ‘I know I shouldn’t have said all that mean stuff about Chelsea’s nose. It’s just … you don’t know how hard it is trying to fit in with the girls in my class. Especially since Alysha …’ But I never get to finish my explanation. The curtain swishes aside and Michi appears.

  ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Okay to drop by for a minute? You said to come over any time.’

  Mia greets her like she’s her new best friend. Who knows? Maybe after today, she is.

  ‘Hi, Mich,’ she says, enveloping her in a giant bear hug. ‘Come on in. We were just talking about you.’

  Michi laughs. ‘Hope it wasn’t anything nasty.’

  She moves further inside, stopping by the box of photos. ‘You adding stuff to your wall?’ she asks Mia. ‘It’s such a great idea.’ She runs her fingers over a series of stencilled love hearts. ‘I’d love to do something like this in my own room. Maybe not quite so much pink, but, you know, some graphics and stuff.’

  She moves over to Mia’s guitar, picks it up and strums a few chords. ‘So I’m really looking forward to Friday night’s sleepover,’ she tells us. ‘You know, find out how real people live.’

  ‘What about your friends from your other school?’ Mia asks. ‘Didn’t they ever have sleepovers?’

  Michi giggles. ‘Yeah. But trust me on this. They were not girly. Not like yours is going to be. No celeb gossip mags or make-overs. Unless you count painting our nails black. We’d sit around and discuss really serious stuff. You know, like fractals, and how they can be used in art.’

  ‘Fractals?’ giggles Mia. ‘Sounds like something rude.’

  ‘It’s a maths thing,’ sighs Michi. ‘Like I told you, my school was kind of experimental.’

  She turns to me. ‘So, Lexi. What’s the name of your band?’

  ‘Oh, we don’t really have a band or anything,’ Mia rushes to explain before I can answer. ‘We just play together sometimes. You know. I mean, we’d like to think of ourselves as a band, but we’re not really. So we don’t have a name.’ She leans a bit closer to Michi. ‘Well, we did try out a few ideas, you know, just for fun,’ she confides, ‘but nothing seemed exactly right.’

  ‘No worries,’ Michi says. ‘You’ll know it when you hear it. It’s like when I go out shopping. The sales lady comes around and asks me what I’m looking for. And I always say I don’t know exactly, but I’ll know it when I see it.’

  ‘Same!’ cries Mia, jumping up and down on the spot like she’s five years old. ‘I’m exactly like that too!’

  What is it with these two? It’s like they’ve become joined at the hip or something. Even their names are similar. I’m just starting to feel really left out again when there’s a sudden waft of hair product as Alysha enters the room. ‘Hi guys,’ she says, flinging her backpack into a corner and slumping down on a giant cushion. ‘I am so over school.’

  ‘What’s up?’ Mia asks her.

  ‘Didn’t Lexi tell you? Bishop caught me passing notes in science and put me on detention.’

  ‘For passing a note?’ Michi is wide-eyed.

  ‘Well, mainly for the picture I’d drawn of him on the paper,’ Alysha giggles. ‘He really went off, didn’t he, Lex?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, remembering. ‘He went all manic. His eyes bulged like a goldfish and this vein on his forehead kept popping in and out. We all thought he was going to have a heart attack or something. Leesh was lucky she only got detention.’

  ‘I know,’ says Alysha, clutching her neck dramatically. ‘I thought he was going to throttle me. And then Nick came to my rescue, and he got put on detention too.’

  Alysha had loved every minute of it. I wonder if Jack would stick up for me like that? Maybe …

  Alysha looks over at Michi, who’s been picking out a few notes in the guitar while Alysha’s been talking. ‘So you play guitar too? Not just all that classical stuff they do in orchestra?’

  Michi shrugs. ‘Whatever. I just like playing.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t mind playing in just a small group?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Michi. ‘Why?’

  Mia and I stare at Alysha. Where is she heading with this exactly?

  ‘We-ell …’ Alysha grins at us. ‘I’ve just had a really excellent idea.’

  Chapter 11

  Alysha waits till we’re all sitting around her in Cushion Land, like ladies-in-waiting around their queen.

  ‘Come on, Alysha, the suspense is killing us,’ says Mia. It’s like she’s completely forgotten that Alysha will be standing her up on sleepover night too. ‘Spill it.’

  ‘Well, on the way back from detention, I saw our music teacher putting up posters for a talent quest.’ ‘Seriously?’ Mia says. ‘At school? Sweet.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s going to be called Starsearch, like the show on TV. Only it’s not going to just be for solo singers. I talked to Mr C about it. Bands can go in it as well. They’re going to have auditions first, to pick the best acts for the big finale.’

  ‘And you think we should enter?’ I ask her.

  ‘Why not? Remember when we played at graduation last year? Everyone loved us.’

  ‘Yeah, but that was different,’ Mia says. ‘We’re at high school now. At the bottom of the school. All the older kids will be way better than us.’

  Alysha tosses her hair. ‘Yeah, but it’s going to be in sections based on year levels. And besides, we’ve got our secret weapon now,’ she says, pointing to Michi. ‘That’s providing you want to play with us, of course.’

  ‘Sure,’ grins Michi. ‘As long as you don’t make me wear pink.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Mia. ‘We won’t. Hey, you and I can be the stylists!’ she adds, all excited now. ‘We can go round all the op-shops and markets.’ She grabs a notebook from the table and starts sketching ideas for outfits. ‘See?’ she tells Michi. ‘I reckon if we get some –’

  Alysha rolls her eyes. ‘This is a talent contest, not a fashion show. You don’t think we should work out what we’re going to play first?’

  Mia puts down her pencil, blushing. ‘Oh yeah. You’re right. Sorry, guys. You know me. Any excuse to get some fashion stuff happening.’

  ‘How we look is important too,’ Michi tells us. ‘But not as important as song choice. That’s what they always say on those TV singing competitions anyway.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘They’re always saying that. So should we choose something that everyone knows? Something in the top ten?’

  ‘It depends who’s choosing the finalists,’ Michi says. ‘Is it the judges, or an audience vote?’

  ‘The judges, I think,’ says Alysha.

  ‘So we’d be better off sticking with an original song,’ explains Michi. ‘We’d get more points for that. Everyone else will probably just choose soppy covers of someone else’s song.’

  ‘Hey,’ says Mia. ‘Why don’t we play the song we wrote over the holidays?’

  ‘“Living in Pink”, you mean?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, it will be perfect,’ says Mia, flashing me a warm smile. Does this mean she’s forgiven me? ‘Just like old times,’ she adds.

  ‘And it says a lot about who we are,’ adds Alysha. We trade high-fives, pleased with ourselves.

  ‘This is going to be awesome!’ says Michi.

  ‘If we’re going to play on stage in a competition, in front of people and everything, we’re going to need a name,’ I say.

  Mia grabs her notebook again and sits crosslegged on her cushion, waiting for us to hit her with ideas.

  Alysha [tossing her hair]: A
lysha and the All Stars.

  Mia [making vomit sounds]: Yeah, right.

  Me: The Pop Tarts?

  Mia: How about Frendz? Or BFF?

  Michi [shaking her head]: We need something that tells people about who we are. But something different. Something strong.

  We look around Pink HQ, searching for inspiration.

  Mia: The Wall?

  Alysha: Nah. It only means something to us. No-one else will get it.

  Her eyes travel over the pink love-heart stencils, the pink cushions, the fluoro pink lampshade hanging from the ceiling.

  Alysha: Something with ‘pink’ in it, I reckon.

  Then suddenly, suggestions start flying in from everywhere.

  Mia: Think Pink?

  Michi: Blah.

  Alysha: Pretty in Pink?

  Mia: That’s a movie.

  Me: Pink Zink?

  Michi: Crapola … but you might be onto something there. How about … Pink Inc.? With a C. And a full stop at the end.

  Everyone else: Awesome.

  And it is. It’s perfect.

  ‘So,’ says Mia slyly, ‘now that we’ve got the music and the name sorted, can we go back to what we’re going to wear?’ She flips to the page in her notebook where she’d started sketching designs for outfits. ‘I mean, that’s one of the first things those TV show judges point out, what people are wearing. And we can’t have something dumb like three of us in pink, and Michi all in black. We’d look like a bunch of giant marshmallows and a liquorice stick.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agree, thinking of style queens like Paige and Jayde sitting out in the audience, judging us. ‘We’d get laughed off stage. So primary school.’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to wear all black, either,’ says Alysha. ‘Jayde says that is sooo last season.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Mia appeals to Michi.

  Michi wrinkles her forehead for a moment. ‘Well,’ she says finally, ‘how about we have some parts the same, and some different. Like, we could all have black singlets or tees …’

  ‘Pink,’ insists Mia. ‘Pink singlets or tees. The name of the band is Pink Inc., remember?’