by Ben Karwan
About the Book
Sometimes you have to put yourself first.
Jen’s just finished year twelve and she’s dreading what’s coming next. She needs to escape her mum’s too-high expectations for a while – and decide whether her boyfriend, Dylan, is someone she needs in her life.
There’s only one solution. Road trip! Jen, her best friend Elliot, the ladies’ man (in his dreams) Theodore C. Block and the lovely Sophie pile into Elliot’s beat-up old car, Vincent, and head up the coast to reunite Elliot with his girlfriend. If Jen can’t be happy, at least Elliot should have a chance. But things don’t quite go to plan.
Snarky and irreverent, Coasting will make you laugh and bring tears to your eyes as Jen tries to work out who she really is – and what’s important to her.
WINNER of the Australian Sony Young Movellist of the Year Award!
‘Witty, clever and heartfelt … I really enjoyed this book and its distinctive voice. It speaks directly to the experiences of young Australians.’ Skye Melki-Wegner, author of the Chasing The Valley trilogy and Australian Sony Young Movellist of the Year Judge
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Notice
Just be happy, and if you can’t be happy, do things that make you happy. Or do nothing with the people that make you happy.
– Esther Earl
Chapter One
Imagine the relief your feet finally feel when they nail that complex tap sequence. Or the relief you feel when ‘we need to talk’ doesn’t spell the end of your relationship. Or maybe your blood test has just come back and it turns out your life isn’t in any immediate danger. Add it all up and you might come close to how I feel leaving my last high-school exam.
But, as always, there’s a downside: the feeling won’t last long. A quick lap of my cardiovascular system and then bam – the illusion of success is shattered.
You see, Mother Dearest has always thought me to be a disappointing daughter, on account of how I’m kind of lacking in the Department of Scientific Aptitude. As such, I struggle with what she terms ‘the simple scientific basis for the conditioning of the universe’ – what your average person calls ‘science’. The phrase ‘simple scientific’ seems oxymoronic to me. As for ‘the conditioning of the universe’ – that’s just moronic.
She claims she just wants me to have a promising and successful future, so maybe it’s a tad unfair of me to ignore the splashes of colour that make her human. She has a very narrow definition of ‘successful’, though, and, funnily enough, the criteria are basically everything she’s ever done. It’s difficult to separate her selfless aspirations for me from her selfish desire for a clone.
Her voice swirls out of her bedroom as soon as I step onto the upstairs landing after arriving home from my last exam.
‘Hi, sweetie,’ she says in a tone of vague condescension. ‘How was your exam?’
‘Not great,’ I say, dropping my schoolbag inside my bedroom door and kicking off my T-bars. I use the side of my foot to kick them further under the bed, into oblivion. Chemistry and I don’t mix well.
I figure Mum will be waiting for me to return so she can follow me into my bedroom and interrogate me about the exam, which she does.
‘What do you mean, “Not great”?’ she asks, her feet planted on my shadow’s head. She leans on the doorframe and folds her arms across her chest. ‘What did they test?’
Without fail, she’s asked that question after every exam I’ve ever taken. I sit on my bed and rattle off a few of the questions I’ve memorised for this exact reason.
‘Oh but that’s easy,’ says my mother after one of them. ‘That’s just asking about the molecular structure of different carboxylic acids. It was the first point on the syllabus.’
‘I know the question,’ I say. ‘It was the answer I didn’t know.’
‘Watch your attitude, please, Jennifer. If you had actually applied yourself, you might not have had this problem.’
And what ensues is her usual lecture on how my scathing remarks need to be toned down, how I should treat people with more respect, how frustrating it is that I don’t use the brains God has given me, blah, blah, blah. To be honest, I’m just assuming that’s what she’s talking about: once she mentions ‘applying myself’, I tune out. Excuse me for not working my arse off to study things I don’t care about. I mean, I could, but I’d rather focus my time and energy on stuff that either a) is interesting or b) I could feasibly use outside of an exam.
Instead of listening, I focus my energy on trying to decide which book I’ll read first. I have three weeks to relax before they release our results and I find out how poorly I’ve done.
And three months to work out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.
An eternity later, Mother Dearest finishes ranting and suggests I go help Dad set up the new TV cabinet. As unappealing as the idea of physical labour is, it’s infinitely more interesting than hearing about the downsides to my existence.
I trot down the stairs and head into the front lounge, where my dad is sliding a TV unit against the wall.
‘Hey Dad.’
He turns to smile at me. ‘Hey Jen. How was the exam?’
‘Don’t even talk to me,’ I say.
‘That bad, huh?’
I raise my eyebrows and he laughs.
‘Help me with the TV, will you?’
I don’t see why he bought this new cinema system in the first place. Apparently there’s nothing better to spend thousands of dollars on. And because the new TV won’t fit on the old corner unit, he spent a further three hundred on a new wall unit, just to top it off.
Dad crouches at one end and grasps the edge of the screen. I mirror him at the other end. The television is almost taller than me but I manage to lift it with relative ease.
‘I don’t know where you get your strength from, my girl,’ Dad says.
I’m actually not that strong, it’s just that I’m strong relative to my height. I’m a good ten centimetres shorter than Dad – and he isn’t exactly André the Giant. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t from you.’
‘How dare you!’
My dad is one of those weird parental specimens capable of being your friend without being condescending. He knows how to draw the line between authoritative and authoritarian, and he earns respect and trust without demanding it. He’s a dork but a superstar.
We put the TV on the unit and shift it until we’re satisfied that it’s centred. Dad sighs and wipes his brow as though he’s just run a marathon.
The front door opens and my brother Aaron bounds into the room. He’s fourteen years old and looks a lot like me. We both have Dad’s pale, rounded face and Mum’s blue eyes. But Aaron’s ash-blond hair tapers around his ears and neck whereas mine is chestnut brown and swirls in these little curls down to my
collarbone. Aaron was less than an inch shorter than me for a long time but he’s just started his latest growth spurt and is starting to get away from me.
‘Nice of you to join us,’ I say.
‘It’s an absolute pleasure to be here,’ he says. Sarcasm is contagious. ‘That’s not centred,’ he adds, nodding towards the TV.
‘You fix it, then,’ I say. And – I’m not even kidding – he pulls a tape measure from his schoolbag and declares that the TV is off by about a couple of centimetres. Seriously, who cares? His attention to detail does, however, aid his exceptional artistic ability. He spends most of his time painting or drawing in his room. Some of his portraits are hanging in the dining room. They’re regularly mistaken for photographs.
Aaron uses his tape measure and some complicated-looking mathematical formulas (though it’s equally possible that they’re very simple equations) to find the perfect location for the rest of the furniture – ‘We need to maximise attractiveness, symmetry and floor usability’ – and finally finds a layout he’s content with. While all this is going on, I curl up on one of the couches to read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, my arms aching. I assume that once Aaron is done, we’ve finished, but Dad busies himself with the tangle of cables and plugs that make the sound system work.
Aaron grabs a palette from his bedroom and starts mixing paints.
‘Aaron,’ says Dad slowly, ‘what are you doing?’
‘Well,’ says Aaron, ‘the new cabinet is a different colour to the old one, which throws off the artistic balance of the room.’
I roll my eyes. I don’t even know what makes a room ‘artistically balanced’.
Dad stares at Aaron blankly for a while.
‘I’m trying to make the walls match the new furniture,’ Aaron adds pointedly.
‘Don’t get smart with me, boy,’ Dad says, but he gives Aaron a wink. ‘I’ll talk about it with Mum – but don’t get your hopes up.’
It takes several hours but finally the speakers, TV and Blu-ray player are all functional and our budding interior designer has decided on the exact shade he wants to paint the walls: a silvery blue. Blue Fox, he calls it. I think he’s getting a bit ahead of himself.
Dad grabs a beer from the fridge and sinks into the empty space next to me, proud of his work. I love my dad but after any form of physical activity, nobody wants to be near him because a pungent sweat stream invariably soaks his skin. He turns the TV on to the evening news and stares at the screen, his smell making it difficult for me to concentrate on my book.
The front door opens again and my mother enters. I hadn’t even realised she’d left. She comes into the lounge room, kisses my dad and ruffles Aaron’s hair on her way past. Aaron grimaces. His hair is off limits – he puts a lot of effort into his ‘just got out of bed’ look.
‘The room looks great,’ she says to nobody in particular, and then to Dad, ‘but you need a shower.’ As his sweat dried, the smell slowly faded, but the room still doesn’t exactly smell like flowers and candles. Dad salutes and heads upstairs.
‘Where did you go?’ Aaron asks Mum as she sits in the now-vacant space beside me. ‘I had to go and fill out some paperwork,’ she says. ‘One of my patients was taken off life support today.’
‘Are you okay?’ Aaron says. ‘Are the family?’
She shrugs. ‘These things happen.’
‘But they shouldn’t,’ Aaron mumbles.
I’m glad I’m not directly involved in this conversation because I’m not really sure what I’d say. It’s really sad. Mum’s probably used to it, though. As used to it as you can be, at least. She’s a trauma surgeon at this huge hospital in the city, so often her patients wake up in the morning with no idea that by the end of the day they’ll end up in hospital, halfway between life and death. And if they don’t pull through, it’s devastating. I guess that’s one of the reasons Mum gets so frustrated with me: if she can’t make everything okay, what chance do I have?
Before I started VCE my marks were pretty good. Not so great that I was winning any academic awards, but I was comfortably passing all of my subjects. Mother Dearest was so proud of her little family: Dad’s a litigation lawyer, so he’s also a brainiac; Aaron’s incredibly artistic and also has a brilliant mathematical mind; and I showed ‘so much potential’. But once it came time to pick VCE subjects, my mother apparently forgot that a) I’m not her and b) I do not share her interests, so she made me study English (it’s compulsory, anyway) and the four nightmare subjects: Mathematical Methods, Chemistry, Biology and Physics. My problem with this is not so much that it’s too hard but that the subjects themselves are about as interesting to me as counting the blades of grass in a field. Well, admittedly, I quite like English but, according to Mum, a decent mark in that does not balance out mediocre results in my other subjects.
It’s not as if I pride myself on not meeting her standards of intelligence. I don’t think I’m dumb. But maths and science, the things my mother values, just don’t interest me. I don’t see the purpose of learning how electrons interact with each other and, outside the classroom, there’s no point in me knowing how to derive logarithmic functions. Sure, they might be useful in some jobs, but they’re not likely to be jobs that I’ll ever have because I can’t imagine working a job that makes me want to tear my eyes out from boredom, so it isn’t exactly easy to find the motivation to ‘apply myself’. So instead I just aimed to pass my other subjects and focused the majority of my energy on English. There’s no rigid structure in English; there’s room for interpretation and creativity and critical thinking. It gives my brain a much better workout than memorising formulas and rules.
I tried explaining that to Mum a few times during the year, but apparently I was taking the ‘easy way out’ and being lazy and not letting myself reach my full potential. ‘You used to be so good at school,’ she’d say, and there was no hiding the unspoken question: ‘What happened?’
Dad orders pizzas for dinner and Aaron gets them from the delivery guy. Dad grabs another beer and I pour myself a glass of orange juice. I fully intend to spike it with a shot or two of vodka to celebrate the end of my exams but I’m interrupted before my fingers have even closed around the vodka bottle.
‘Excuse me, young lady,’ comes the voice of Mother Dearest. ‘You don’t need to be drinking alcohol.’
‘I’m eighteen,’ I say pointedly. I just finished my exams. Surely I can have one drink. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s not a good example to be setting for your brother,’ she says coldly. ‘Do you know how many teenagers come into the ER with alcohol poisoning?’
‘It’s one glass …’
‘Your brain is still developing. Didn’t you study the effects of alcohol on brain cells in class?’
‘Yes,’ I mumble.
‘Then you know the damage it can cause. I know you think I’m being harsh but it’s really in your own best interest. I see it far too often in people far too young. Your future is too bright to throw it away for a quick buzz.’
Aaron is picking at his nails, trying not to laugh, having far too much fun at my expense. We’ve both heard the lecture a million times before. He’s fully aware that if he cracks and laughs out loud, the attention will be on him. Mum gives him a sideways glance, a warning, and continues with a case study of a teenager she once treated for alcohol poisoning. I remain silent as I hear all about stomach pumps, catheters and IV drips.
‘Is that something you’d really like to experience?’ she demands. I genuinely don’t know if she expects an answer or not.
Eventually Mum ends her lecture and thanks the Lord for our meal, so I grab two slices of pizza, put them on my plate and announce that I’ll be in my room with my vodka-less juice.
As I trudge up the stairs, I hear Dad say, ‘You don’t think you’re being a little harsh on her, Lauren?’
‘No, I don’t. She needs to …’ But exactly what I need to do, I’m now too far away to hear. I’m sure it’s som
ething along the lines of me changing my personality or accepting that she’s always right. ‘Jen needs to apply herself’ is inevitably the tagline.
I just want to stay in my room for a week, now. I had planned to spend the evening with my family, maybe playing a board game or watching a film or something. It’s odd to say, since we live together, but a catch-up seems long overdue. In the lead-up to my exams I was a bit of a hermit. I read over my English notes every day, read a bunch of books about India’s political system to give myself the best shot at a brilliant analysis of The White Tiger and wrote a million practice essays. I want to make more of an effort with my family over the summer, now that school is done. Maybe help Mum get to know me a little better. I think she still has the idea of Jen: Her Daughter. She forgets that I’m much more than just her DNA.
I want to be strong, show her that I’m going to be okay. That I’m still a good daughter. That I still add something to the family. I lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Maybe gravity will keep the tears in my eyes. It’s only crying if the tears actually fall, right?
But the effort to keep myself from crying only makes it worse. What should’ve been silent streaks of emotion slipping down my cheeks quickly turn into sobs that convulse my entire body. I shift to the edge of my bed and push my brow into the heels of my palms, staring between my knees. Desperate to keep quiet, I watch a few tears drop onto the carpet, but my vision quickly blurs and the blockage in my nose distracts me.
Eventually I’ll have to put in an effort – I can’t hide in my room forever – but tonight I’m way too tired, way too teary and have heard way too many slights for one day. To be fair, I don’t think Mum means to upset me. I don’t even think she realises how I feel. Nothing she said was particularly harsh. And she didn’t say it with contempt; she spoke very matter-of-factly.
