by Beale, Fleur
‘Quit while you’re ahead, young lady,’ he said.
‘Don’t call me young lady.’ I scratched my heel down the chair. ‘It’s such a cliché.’
‘So is telling lies to run off and sleep with your boyfriend.’ He shook his head and glared at me. ‘I can’t believe you’d be dumb enough to even think of doing it.’
I got up, walked to my room, shut the door behind me and cried my heart out. This was it. Seb would dump me. My life was over.
They grounded me all weekend. No phone calls. No stepping outside the house — and it was no consolation whatsoever that the weather matched the state of my heart. Noah had the sense to keep out of my way, although he did give me a message from Jax. ‘Jax says to tell you she rang S and told him you got sprung.’ Typical boy — he didn’t ask who S was or anything, which would have been a good thing except I so wanted somebody to talk to. He slouched out the door, then stopped. ‘Quite a hot chick, that one.’
‘She likes you, too. It’s her one fault.’ But lucky for me that Jax did or she wouldn’t have got Noah’s phone number from me and then I wouldn’t know she’d rung Seb.
Noah didn’t linger for conversation, just took himself off to his bedroom where he’d be sticking his head out the window and smoking up a storm.
Monday came. The girls were waiting for me on our corner. We walked to school more slowly than usual until Jax dug her elbow into my side. ‘Look!’
And there he was — Seb King, tall, built and handsome with the rain misting his dark hair. My heart squeezed, then accelerated into the thump thump I’m-going-to-die routine. I hardly noticed the girls leaving me.
‘Hi, doll,’ he said. ‘Run into a prob Friday night, did you?’ He put an arm around me and kissed me right there in the road.
It was all right. Everything was going to be all right.
two
My friends were awesome.
‘You’ve got to make up with your mother,’ said Lizzie. ‘Be all quiet and thoughtful. Look as though you’re really thinking about things.’
Jax sighed. ‘Fat lot of good that’ll do.’
Addy patted her hand. ‘I think it’s a good idea. Mothers aren’t all the same, you know.’
Poor Jax. If I had to choose between her mother and mine then I’d have to take mine, although right now it would be a pretty close call.
I took Lizzie’s advice, and was careful not to overdo it. Monday I was silent, but not sulky silent. Tuesday I drifted around Mum’s studio, picked things up, stood in silent contemplation in front of a painting, started a sentence, left it hanging and then wandered out again.
Wednesday I did the dishes when she asked — didn’t point out that it was Noah’s turn although it so was. When I’d finished, I just muttered, ‘Sorry, Mum.’
And it worked! She hugged me, sat me down and gave me the talk about trust, followed by the one about self-respect and being too young to have sex. I sat there with my head down and let her get it over with.
Finally, and at last, she gave me back my phone.
‘Thanks, Mum.’ I hugged her, then beat it to my room.
I talked to Seb for one hour and fifty-two minutes. There would be another chance, he told me. Another chance very soon for us to be together. My fears that he’d been thinking of dumping me faded. ‘It’s holidays next week — we’ll manage something when your mum’s at work.’
My gut tightened. He still loved me. I had to concentrate on that. ‘But Seb — my mum works at home. Remember?’ I’d told him she was an artist. He couldn’t have forgotten. I remembered every little detail of every single thing he’d told me.
‘Oh, yeah. Forgot. We’ll work something out, babe.’
I wished he’d call me by my name. I dreamed of hearing my name on his lips. Maybe afterwards, after we’d done it, then I’d ask him to call me Minna.
When we’d finished talking, I phoned Lizzie and we talked for another hour; at least, I talked and it was all about Seb. I sent texts to Jax and Addy.
Thursday. I spent lunchtime with Seb because Thursday was the one day he didn’t have a sports practice. ‘Hiya, doll. Awesome news. I’m going to Aus for the holidays. Leave Monday night. Dad’s got me into this water polo tournament. I’ll bring you back a koala.’
I stared at him. ‘You’ll be away all holidays? For two whole weeks?’
He threw an arm around my shoulders. ‘I’ll send you a postcard. Promise.’ He grinned at me. ‘Say — any chance of you escaping the bloodhounds tonight?’
I shook my head. ‘Bloodhounds are both on high alert and suspicious with it.’
‘The weekend? We’ve got all of Saturday and Sunday except I’ve got a tournament Saturday, and I’m guessing they won’t let you go to the party afterwards?’ His eyes travelled across Sherry Faulkner’s breasts all the time he was speaking. I leaned my head on his shoulder and glared at her. Seb didn’t notice. ‘Pity. Have to wait till next term then. Don’t go off with anybody else while I’m away.’
I gasped. ‘As if I would! Seb! How could you even think that?’
He laughed and tugged my hair. ‘Well, you’re a pretty hot chick.’ That was what Noah had said about Jax. Still, originality wasn’t what I loved about Seb and I completely forgave him for checking out Sherry F’s boobs.
I walked home from school to our corner with my friends. Lizzie kept banging on about how I needed to cement my love for Seb. She said if I really loved him, then I’d find a way to be with him.
‘Stow away to Australia, you mean?’ Addy asked rather snappily. I do think she had a right to be snappy because it wasn’t kind or empathetic of Lizzie to keep on about Seb and me when she knew that Addy had the hots for him too.
I said, ‘Well, I can’t and that’s all there is to it. Unless you think I ought to put sleeping pills in Mum’s coffee?’
‘Speaking of coffee,’ said Jax with a skilful change of subject, ‘I vote we go to BeauTox again on Sunday. And no cheating — this time we’re really going to drink lattes and we’re going to drain our cups.’
Addy sighed, but when she spoke she was more cheerful. ‘Okay, but I still don’t get why people are addicted to coffee. I’d rather drink mud.’
We laughed and parted at the corner.
No sign of Mum when I got home, but she’d left us a note: Dad says he’ll be home for dinner at seven. Has something to tell us. Minna: there’s mince in the fridge. Make some meatballs and we’ll do the spag when I get home. Noah: the school rang and you have five assignments overdue. Get on to them — now.
I do not touch raw meat.
I went in search of Noah but, of course, he wasn’t home. He should have been — I knew for certain that his shift started at nine tonight because I’d checked it for Jax. I guess it had some benefits that my friend was hopelessly in love with my brother. I can’t say I admired her taste but she always said, ‘You just don’t get it.’
Once I’d said to her, ‘So tell me! Why Noah?’
Apparently the way he smiled did it for her. And his loping stride. And the way he made his friends laugh. And his hair was really cute.
I still didn’t get it, and her hopes had skyrocketed since I told her Noah thought she was hot. Might not have been such a good idea to tell her, what with him being stoned half the time.
I lay on my bed, listened to music and dreamed of Seb.
Mum blasted in. ‘Minna! Turn that down, and have you done the meatballs?’
I sat up. ‘Mum — (a) please knock before you roar in here, you’ll give me a heart attack, (b) I don’t know how to make meatballs, and (c) I don’t touch …’
But she’d gone and was shouting at me from the kitchen, ‘Get out here and give me a hand. Please. And where’s Noah?’
I thought about staying where I was, but she was in such a mood these days. I figured it might be strategic to go and look helpful so I got up and took myself out to the kitchen. ‘Dunno. Haven’t seen him.’
She frowned and tapped a finger
on the bench top. ‘Phone him, will you, Min. Dad said he needed us all to be here.’ She shook her head and muttered, ‘He wouldn’t say what it was about, but he sounded excited.’ She grinned at me. It gave me a shock — she hadn’t done that in so long. ‘Like to hazard a guess what he’s up to this time?’
I shrugged. ‘Can’t be some dumb tramping trip — not if he wants us all to hear about it.’
Mum laughed.
Yeah, it was quite funny to think of Dad getting excited about taking all of us on a forced march through dripping bush. I wouldn’t mind, except that he loves hills — he runs up them and when I gasp my way to the top where he’s so kindly waited for me, and all I want to do is collapse and never move again, he takes off up an even higher one. Never again, that’s what I vowed a couple of years ago, and I’ve stuck to it.
‘What do you reckon?’ I asked her, all in the interests of building rapport and trust between us.
Mum’s face went dreamy for a second, and then it sort of closed up and she got all brisk and busy. ‘Goodness knows. I can’t begin to think.’ She snapped open the fridge and hauled out the wodge of bloody mince. ‘Get hold of Noah, Min — then you can make a salad.’
Only if the lettuce was the pre-cut, pre-washed variety.
I sent Noah a text: Get yr arse hme. Dins wth Dad @ 7. Sum big anounsmnt.
The lettuce was washed and bagged, lucky for it. I tipped it into a bowl, dropped some itsy-bitsy tomatoes on the top and declared it finished.
Noah floated in at 6.52. Dad charged in at 6.58, thereby making me lose my private bet that he’d be thirty-eight minutes late. This must be some huge announcement coming up.
Mum served dinner, but she didn’t give herself any. ‘I ate earlier, with the girls.’ Well! I bet they didn’t have scummy meatballs and packet salad.
We all sat down at the table though and Mum picked up my knife and drew patterns with it — she could never just sit, my mother. I should buy her a book on Zen or something for Christmas.
I stuffed a meatball in my mouth. ‘So? Come on, Dad — spill!’
He grinned at me. ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full. Eat first, talk later.’
Noah stared at nothing and shovelled food like he was loading a conveyor belt.
Two seconds later, Dad put down his fork and leaned his elbows on the table. Huh! I knew it! He was busting to tell us.
‘You’ve won millions in Lotto and you’re going to take us all to Paris,’ I said, grinning at him. And I would grab a million of it and buy Seb everything his heart had ever desired.
Dad laughed, ‘Nope, it’s much more exciting than that.’
That’s when I started to get a little edgy. If it wasn’t money, and it wasn’t travel, then for sure I wasn’t going to like it quite as much as the father person thought I should.
Mum said, very quietly and with that weird, closed look back on her face, ‘Put us out of our misery, Wes.’
He gave a belly-chuckle. ‘Well, my family,’ and here he leaned forward, eyes sparkling, anticipation and excitement leaping out all over his face, ‘we have the opportunity to live for one whole year on Motutoka Island out there.’ He waved in the direction of Cook Strait. ‘We’ll be doing conservation work — bringing the place back to its original state. We’ll be its keepers, its guardians for one whole year.’ He scanned our stunned faces — well, Mum and I had stunned faces. Noah was too stoned for the enormity of Dad’s preposterous idea to penetrate.
I kept eating. ‘You’re the conservation guru, you can go by yourself. I’ll send you messages by carrier pigeon whenever I need money.’ I shook my head. It was faintly amusing — Dad thinking we’d find his little scheme exciting.
He held up a hand. ‘Wait — I haven’t finished.’ He took a deep breath and looked around at the three of us, although I noticed his gaze kind of slipped across Mum rather quickly. ‘There’s going to be money in it — quite a bit, actually. We’ll be able to rent this house out for a start, and secondly the television company will be paying us. Handsomely.’
Mum’s head jerked up. ‘What television company?’
I put my fork down so that I could give him the full benefit of the wry expression I’d perfected with the girls only last week. Dad babbled on with the details of his Grand Plan.
The Hargreaves family (i.e. us) were to stay on this island and see nobody much for a year.
The Hargreaves family were to film themselves doing hard, back-breaking work for a year.
The Hargreaves family film would then be made into a television series so the world could laugh at all the stuff-ups we made.
‘No,’ I said again. ‘Forget it, Dad.’ I leaned over my half-eaten meal so that I was right in his face. ‘No way in the world will I agree to that.’
He patted my hand and grinned at me. ‘That’s a reaction, Min — not a well thought-out response.’ He turned to my brother. ‘Noah?’
Noah beamed a happy-happy smile in Dad’s general direction. ‘Cool, man. Whatever turns you on. Sweet with me.’
I kicked him. ‘Use your brain for once in your life. It will not be sweet and it will not be cool.’
Dad ignored me. ‘One down, two to go.’ He put his arms on the table, leaned on them and looked across at Mum. ‘Liv? You could still paint. Will you do it?’
I dropped my fork on to the plate so that it scattered tomato sauce across the table. ‘Don’t even think about it, Mum.’
She ignored me too, just kept on drawing patterns on the table with her knife. ‘And when is this going to happen?’
I thumped back in my chair. ‘It’s not going to happen with me. Absolutely not me.’
Dad reached out to pat my hand again. He didn’t seem to notice it was jammed into the pocket of my jeans and had been for the last five minutes.
‘Pretty soon, actually — in about a month. The beginning of August,’ he said, his eyes shining bright enough to light up a street.
‘Forget it,’ I said, grabbing all the calm and dignified control I possessed so that he couldn’t accuse me of being hysterical, juvenile or whatever the epithet of the moment happened to be. ‘I Am Not Going!’ I’d die if I couldn’t see Seb for a whole, entire year, and that was just one of things that would kill me.
Dad didn’t even glance at me. ‘We’ll be planting trees, taking inventories of the wildlife, eradicating pests.’
‘Start with Noah,’ I muttered. Talk to yourself, Min. Nobody else is listening.
Mum held up a hand. ‘That bit I can go along with — but parading ourselves all over the telly in the process? No, thank you.’
Dad grinned at her. ‘Come on, Liv — it’ll be fun. And don’t forget the money.’
‘Yes,’ said Mum, ‘the money.’ She went back to the knife-drawing, her eyes following the movement. Then she hauled in a deep breath and fired off a volley of questions. ‘How long have you known about this? Why us? Why the TV?’
Dad, using the hearty voice he brings out when he wants us to do something gut-busting, foul and boring, said, ‘I’ve been working on setting it up for nine months. Didn’t want to worry you.’
‘Kind of you,’ I muttered, but he just swept on.
‘We approached the TV company because we need the money to bring the island to the next stage. The animal pests have pretty much been eradicated, but …’
I sat up, slamming both hands flat on the table. ‘Listen up, and listen good — no money in the world is going to make me spend a whole year on some dumb island with you lot.’ I glared at them — Noah with a stupid grin on his stupid face, Mum still scratching away with the knife and not looking at anyone and Dad pretending he was giving me the biggest treat of my life so far. I had no appetite for the rest of my dinner. The spaghetti had turned to eels in my stomach. I stood up. ‘Forget it. It’s not going to happen. Not now. Not ever.’ I left them sitting there and ran to my room. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t.
three
I rang my friends.
‘
Min!’ Lizzie gasped. ‘What about Seb? A whole year? You know the stats on long-distance relationships and yours has hardly started.’
‘Thanks for your support,’ I snapped.
‘Oh, sweetie! I’m sorry, I really am.’ I heard her take a huge breath. ‘Listen — you can come and live with me. I’ll ask Mum. It’ll be fun.’
Colour filtered back into my world. I wanted to hug her. ‘Thanks, Lizzie — but are you sure? I mean, it’s a whole year.’
‘Course I’m sure.’ I could almost see her shaking her hair back (red right now, with blonde highlights). ‘Mum won’t mind.’
God, I wished my parents were like hers. They trusted her. They weren’t always on her back. They would never even think about an idea as dumb as this one.
I rang Addy. ‘You can’t!’ she shrieked.
‘Don’t stress,’ I said. ‘Lizzie says I can stay with her.’
Addy was still gasping. ‘I can’t believe your Dad would even think about it. It’s awful — and Min — what about Seb?’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It just rips my heart out even thinking about it.’ I swallowed. ‘Look, I’d better phone Jax.’
We said nothing for a second. Jax was going to take it hard. It seemed every day she was falling harder and harder for my idiot brother.
I phoned her, told her I had some horrible news. ‘A year,’ I finished up. ‘A whole year stuck on some idiot island. All four of us.’
But the first thing she said was, ‘Oh, Min — you poor thing! A whole year away from Seb. That’s cruel.’
I choked up. That was so Jax — always thinking of others and not herself. ‘Jax, I think I’ll be okay.’ I told her about staying with Lizzie. ‘But what about you? Noah’s going to be gone for so long.’
She was quiet and then she sighed. ‘It’s not like we were going out or anything.’
It wasn’t fair — life sure dealt a bad hand to Jax, what with her crazy mother, and now Noah was being taken away from her before anything could really get going.
An island. In the middle of Cook Strait. No thank you, Father dear.
