Indigo Girls

by Penni Russon

  She’ s with the Band Georgia Clark

  Cassie Barry Jonsberg

  The (not quite) Perfect Boyfriend Lili Wilkinson

  Always Mackenzie Kate Constable

  My Life and Other Catastrophes Rowena Mohr

  The Indigo Girls Penni Russon

  Step Up and Dance Thalia Kalkipsakis

  The Sweet Life Rebecca Lim

  Bookmark Days Scot Gardner

  Winter of Grace Kate Constable

  PENNI RUSSON

  This edition published in 2011

  First published in 2008

  Copyright © Text, Penni Russon 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 74237 768 1

  Design based on cover design by Tabitha King and Kirby Stalgis

  Text design by Kirby Stalgis

  Set in 12.5/16.5 pt Spectrum MT by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in China at Everbest Printing Co.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Chapter One: Zara

  Chapter Two: Tilly

  Chapter Three: Zara

  Chapter Four: Tilly

  Chapter Five: Zara

  Chapter Six: Tilly

  Chapter Seven: Zara

  Chapter Eight: Tilly

  Chapter Nine: Zara

  Chapter Ten: Tilly

  Chapter Eleven: Zara

  Chapter Twelve: Tilly

  Chapter Thirteen: Zara

  Chapter Fourteen: Tilly

  Chapter Fifteen: Zara

  Chapter Sixteen: Tilly

  Chapter Seventeen: Zara

  Chapter Eighteen: Tilly

  Chapter Nineteen: Zara

  Chapter Twenty: Tilly

  About the author

  Chapter One

  Zara

  I spent the whole long drive to Indigo plugged into my iPod and texting Sooz. Sooz wanted to know what my brother, Ivan, was doing. All my friends have a crush on him, he’s kind of good looking, I guess. And he’s got this whole doesn’t-talk-to-anyone thing going on, which girls seem to find irresistible. I try and tell them he’s a complete dork but they never listen. Like in the car, Ivan had his PDA out, flicking around the little pen thing that you use to write on the screen. ’Cause you need an organiser when you go camping. As if. Why can’t he just have a PSP like a normal person? It bugs me. I didn’t answer her texts about Ivan.

  Kayla texted me too: poor baby – she always calls all of us baby, secretly it annoys me – two weeks of family torture. At first I wasn’t going to answer her text either. But eventually I punched in a totally non message. It seemed too rude not to say anything. After all, as far as she knew, we were still friends. Then Sooz again: See you on the flip side. The flip side? What did that even mean?

  Dad was driving. Mum was just kind of staring vacantly out the window. Dad was talking but he wasn’t actually talking to Mum, or to anyone for that matter, it’s just this pointless airfill thing that he does, a running monologue about petrol prices and fishing and car accident hotspots and the dangers of roundabouts. Did I mention that my dad is a cop?

  About three years ago, my brother Ivan and I noticed that my parents don’t talk anymore. Not to each other. They talk to us, of course, and sort of through us. I don’t even know if they realise. But Mum will be in the kitchen and she’ll say, ‘Could you ask Dad to start the barbeque?’ and I’ll go into the lounge room and ask him even though Mum could lean across the kitchen bench and call through the open door to ask him herself. He’s, like, sitting right there! Or I ask Dad if I can go shopping with Kayla and the other girls and he says, ‘Well, I don’t know, Zara. Ask your mother. Has she got any plans this afternoon?’ And I’m like, but you live together. And you don’t know if she ‘has plans’? I don’t say this, though. What’s the point?

  One day, it was just me and Ivan in the kitchen. He was biting into a sandwich, he totally inhales two loaves of bread a day. I asked him, ‘What about when they . . . you know?’

  He almost spat out his food. ‘Zara! I’m eating here. They don’t. Do they?’

  ‘Well, they’ve done it at least once in your lifetime or I wouldn’t be here,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You’re so disgusting.’

  I snorted. ‘In complete silence, though. That’s sort of spooky. Like Stepford Wives.’

  Ivan leaned on the counter, his shoulders shaking with laughter. ‘Or they mutter away to themselves. “Oh my, is that the time . . . now I really must . . .” Or like when they’re in the car, “Now, did I mean to go left or right here?” only they’d be saying . . .’

  ‘Don’t!’ I yelled, alarmed that he would get more graphic. He tried to say more, but he couldn’t get it out he was laughing so hard. I covered his mouth with both my hands, whimpering between laughs, ‘No! Nooooo.’

  Mum walked in. ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked, smiling like she was ready to share the joke but with this almost desperate edge, like the girls at school who aren’t popular but want to be.

  Suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore, for either of us. The last laugh wheezed out and Ivan took his sandwich into the lounge room to eat it. I picked up my mobile, flicking through the address book like it was suddenly crucial or something, so I didn’t have to look at her face. Do they even love each other? I mean, are all old people joyless like them? Or is it just my parents? Tilly’s parents aren’t joyless. They really like each other, you can just tell. I bet they talk all the time, about books and movies and stuff. And about Tilly and Teddy of course. Do Mum and Dad talk about me and Ivan?

  So anyway, we arrived at Indigo and found our spot near the toilets and the kiosk and we all got out and Dad winched up the caravan, and Mum started setting out the stove and the cups to make tea because that’s what they always do. This is, like, their life. And Ivan stayed in the car with his PDA and I looked around for Mieke and Tilly but I couldn’t see them. So I leaned against the car, looking bored. It’s an art to look that bored. Botox-bored, Sooz calls it. People spend thousands on plastic surgery to look like I did right then.

  Mum made tea and these sort of spongy, flabby tomato-and-cheese sandwiches.

  Finally Tilly rocked up, waving like crazy out the window of her car and I dropped the bored expression and flipped up a wave.

  That was when I got the text message. I almost didn’t read it because I thought it was Kayla again, and Kayla was a million miles away, back in Melbourne. But it wasn’t Kayla, anyway. It was Mieke – to both Tilly and me.

  Just found out yesterday that I got a late place in Drew Svenson’s summer class. He’s an awesome painter. Happy face but sad face. Not coming to Indigo for another whole week! Oh no. Mieke xx

  I read the text through twice. I don’t know why, but I felt this heavy pit in my stomach. Part of Indigo, a huge part, was Mieke. Without her it would be . . . different. I wasn’t interested in different. I mean, I was happy for her and stuff, if this painter was so
great. But why did she have to go to school in the holidays? It had never been just me and Tilly before. I mean, Tilly’s nothing like me. What if it wrecked everything?

  I was about to turn my phone off when another message came through. I had my finger on the off button – I nearly ignored it. I should have, because it was another one of those messages, the kind I’ve been getting lately – from ‘number withheld’.

  This one said: You are a pricktease.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Mum asked.

  ‘The batteries are running low.’ I deleted the message and switched the phone off. When I looked up, Ivan was watching me. The freak. I gave him a look, then stared at my nails. Bored. Bored. Botox-bored.

  Chapter Two

  Tilly

  Summer always seems to start when we get to Indigo. Christmas and December, it’s like summer’s dress rehearsal. It isn’t really summer until we turn down the dirt road, until we see Point Indigo for the first time, until we see the blue sparkling ocean.

  Every summer since I was nine years old and my baby sister Teddy was four, we’ve camped at Indigo foreshore. Teddy and Tilly. Because what my parents really wanted was a pair of golden retrievers. Actually, we’re Matilda and Theodora but the only people who call us that are a few stray great-aunts. And Mum when she’s livid. And relief teachers who don’t know any better.

  Dad and I started putting up the tent pretty much as soon as we leapt out of the car. Mum and Teddy disappeared because Dad and I have firm ideas about tent erection and if they hang about, it all ends in tears. Mum’s usually, then Teddy’s. It’s all about birth order. Dad and I are both firstborns, right? So we organise and we’re the boss. Which sometimes means we clash because we both want to be the boss of each other, but usually it works out pretty well when we’re both the boss of something else, like the tent, or Teddy.

  Anyway, while I was helping Dad I was thinking about Mieke’s text message. I was trying not to think of it as a disaster but frankly, I found the whole thing a little unsettling.

  You see, it’s such a fine balance, the whole Indigo Girl thing. Zara’s an alpha, right? Which is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and also another way of saying she’s a dominant chick. She’s popular. In fact, according to this girl I know, Jess, who used to go to Zara’s school, Zara is the most popular girl at her school, hands down.

  Zara’s amazing to look at. Golden-haired, golden-skinned. Princess Zara. She doesn’t see it like that. She calls herself a meat-and-potatoes girl because she’s blonde and tall and easy on the eye, which most guys are into. She says she’s just a combination of unchallenging factors – the hair, the blue eyes, the C cup. According to Chris Timms in my Year 8 metalwork class, ‘More than a handful’s a waste.’ He meant me, I guess. Not that he would know, mind you, it’s not like he – or anyone else – has tried (is that a smidge of regret in my voice? Not about Chris Timms . . . but if it was someone else, a particular someone, I might not completely disapprove of the experiment). Anyway, back to Zara’s factors: eyes, hair, boobs, tall, thin . . . ‘Yada yada yada,’ Zara would say, and she’d look bored while she was saying it. This, mind you, is when Mieke and I would throw clumps of damp, smelly seaweed at her, because she’s actually really and truly beautiful.

  Now me, I’m not an alpha obviously. I’m not, like, omega or anything which is the last letter in the Greek alphabet and saved for people like Finlay Ridge who’s got this really unfortunate forehead and spits when he talks and reads books about assembling machine guns. I’m more like one of the obscure ones in the middle that no one’s ever heard of – omicron or something. Gingery, freckly, a bit pointy in the face – nose, chin, even my cheekbones look sort of excruciating. Sometimes I feel sharp. All over, even on the inside, as if there’s something unapproachable about me, something spiky and ouchy, though most of the time I’m harmless.

  And Mieke, well, she’s sophisticated . . . maybe a delta. Fourth from the top, kind of aloof. If aloof was a shape it would probably be a triangle and the Greek letter delta is a triangle. Mieke’s cool in an arty, slightly gothic way. Her mum’s a fashion designer. Her dad’s a graphic illustrator and does these really dark, postmodern, brooding comics. The whole family is steeped in arty coolness. And Mieke is carrying the family torch, only it’s more like a family candelabrum, one of those really ornate ones.

  Mieke’s beautiful too, or I think she is, but in a different way from Zara. You know there are some flowers that look small and delicate, but then when you go to pick them the stems nearly rip your hand in half because they’re so resilient and wiry? That’s Mieke. Small, but not cute. She thinks she’s looked nine years old for the past seven years. She says when she hears her voice played back, like on a phone message, she sounds like a kindergarten boy with a lisp (she doesn’t have a lisp). And she says she looks like she’s always got two black eyes. She’s kind of pale.

  If Mieke and Zara and I all went to the same school there’s no way we’d be friends. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work that out. Alphas and deltas and omicrons, they just don’t belong together in the real world.

  Especially alphas and omicrons. This is where the fine balance comes in. Mieke, as a delta, is a buffer, a halfway point, a mediator. She knows what it’s like to be cool, so she and Zara share a common language even though Zara is cool in a totally different way. But Mieke also respects the pointy brain. So we’ve got our own thing going on. And somehow it makes me and Zara work too.

  I was thinking about this stuff when Zara came over. I stood up and brushed dirt off my hands, suddenly shy. I started off every summer feeling a bit shy, like a part of me worried that this was the summer Zara and Mieke would turn around and say, ‘Who do you think you are, Matilda Katherine Dove?’ And who do I think I am? No one much, not compared to this girl. She leaned down and air kissed each cheek, as if she were an elegant relative at a funeral and I was a slightly pudgy, stumpy child.

  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ Zara said. ‘Can you believe Mieke’s not coming?’

  ‘I know. It will be fully weird without her. Like the two musketeers.’ As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Was it presumptive of me to call us the two anything?

  But Zara sailed on smoothly. ‘Yeah, totally.’

  ‘Omigosh, like Zara! It’s like, so totally rad to see you.’ That was my dad. He’s always making fun of how my friends and I talk.

  ‘Dad! No one says rad. That’s so 80s.’

  ‘Hi, Mr Dove,’ Zara said. She’s really polite around parents.

  ‘Call me Julian. Mr Dove sounds so wet.’

  ‘And yet Julian is so manly,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dad. And he went back to the tent, obviously pleased that I was talking to Zara so he could be the boss of it all by himself.

  ‘Where’s Teddy?’ Zara asked. For some reason Zara adores Teddy. I mean Teddy is adorable (ninety-nine per cent of the time) but Zara doesn’t seem the type to like little kids.

  ‘She’s around somewhere.’ This was my chance. I tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Where’s Ivan?’ I felt momentarily sick, because what if he hadn’t come this year?

  Zara rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know. Sitting in the car or something. He’s such a social reject. Like he’s twenty, and he’s still coming on this lame family camping trip. What’s with that?’

  I wanted to defend him. But he’s a boy-Zara. An alpha. A golden boy. I would die if Zara knew how I felt about him and I would die a million times more if Ivan knew. Besides, I know it really annoys Zara when her friends have crushes on him. And he obviously doesn’t give her friends a second thought, because he’s three years older than us, which means he’s already done two whole years of university and we’re only going into Year 12 next year.

  Year 12. Sigh. I’m so ready for uni. High school is boring. I have this vision that university is going to be full of other people like me, pointy brain people, and we’ll sit around and talk about literature (you know, for fun) and
the homoerotic subtext in Star Trek (which is one of my favourite things to do ’cause as soon as you decide to make everyone on Star Trek secretly gay it gets heaps funnier) and everything will have this learned glow about it, like you can suck up knowledge just walking down the halls.

  Anyway, I wanted to defend Ivan and I also wanted to say that family camping trips aren’t lame and that I’ll probably still be coming when I’m twenty, but then I worried that she would think I was lame. So I just nodded, apologising to Ivan in my brain, which was probably the closest I would get to talking to him all summer.

  ‘Are you sleeping in the annexe this year?’ I asked Zara. She hated the stuffy annexe. But she hated being inside the caravan with her parents more.

  ‘Nuh-uh,’ she said, with a grin. ‘Guess what I scored for Christmas?’

  We walked up the dirt road to her campsite and she pulled a canvas bag out from the floor of her car. She rolled it out. It was one of those tiny one-person tents that’s almost really a sleeping bag, sausage shaped around the legs but opening out around the head.

  ‘My own swag,’ she said, proudly.

  ‘Ugh,’ I shuddered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s so small! It looks like a coffin.’

  ‘No way. I love it. Just me, no one to bug me. Out under the stars.’

  See, I don’t get that. Our family tent has three rooms – a sitting-type room, Mum and Dad’s bedroom, and Teddy and I share the other room. I like having Teddy there. I like that there’s only a thin canvas separating me and Mum and Dad so I can hear them breathe and snore and turn over in their sleep. Zara would think that was weird. Maybe I am weird. But won’t she be scared, all on her own in the middle of the night? Won’t she be lonely? Or is that just part of being Zara, sleeping out under the stars on her own?

  ‘I better go back and help Dad,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll put this up.’

  That was something I liked about Zara. She wasn’t precious. She wasn’t afraid to get dirty or break a nail. She did stuff for herself.