White Ninja

by Tiffiny Hall

  My mother is ninja. She says she’s only a retired ninja now, but weird deliveries still come to our house, we always get bailed up by Customs on family holidays and, like I said, she still spends a lot of time travelling overseas for ‘business’. Mum’s brought me and Elecktra up on a warrior diet and trained us in basic self-defence, but she’s never taught us the secret ninja arts.

  ‘Why haven’t you trained me in ninja?’ I ask, again.

  Mum throws her sword into the chopping board and it pings upright.

  ‘You don’t want that life,’ she says. ‘Everything you love, you end up having to destroy. You can’t always —’

  I finish the sentence I’ve heard a million times before. ‘Protect.’

  ‘Hulk juice,’ Art says, finishing the last of his fruit salad, ‘is what has kept me going all these years.’

  ‘Great for speed, strength and reflexes,’ Mum says.

  ‘Pass,’ I say. I really don’t like Hulk juice.

  Art whips his head towards me. ‘What’s gotten into you? You used to love Hulk juice; now you sing your As. Paarse. Whaaaatevaaaar. Raaandom. She’s watching too much TV! All those reality TV shows are affecting her speech,’ he says, raking a hand through his hair.

  I scrunch up my face. ‘Whatever.’

  He turns to my mother. ‘Akita, I thought the “whatevers” were meant to start when she turned sixteen, like the older one.’

  Mum smiles knowingly and takes Art’s dirty bowl from him. He looks at her and she reaches across to touch the pink in his hair. They’re obviously in love, I wish they’d just get married.

  Art’s been Mum’s boyfriend since I was five. No other kid at school has a mum with an artist boyfriend. Art grew up in a cubbyhouse out in the bush, with parents who did yoga and worshipped the sun. They never married, so I doubt Art’ll ever ask Mum, despite Elecktra’s prompting.

  One day we were all at the Gourmet Garage Café and when Mum went to the bathroom, Elecktra wrote on the specials blackboard Akita! Will you marry me? When Mum returned to the table, she squealed and hugged Art. Everyone in the café clapped until Art pointed to Elecktra, then looked at Mum with sad eyes and shook his head. Mum, in true unemotional ninja style, pretended it never happened, but it was still pretty embarrassing for everyone.

  ‘Where is Elecktra?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Upstairs, grooming.’ Art raises his blond brows to the skylights. ‘Casual clothes day is the highlight of her year.’

  Mum laughs.

  I can only manage a corner of my toast spread with globs of tahini and smashed avocado. The mention of casual clothes day makes me feel sick. A little glass of Hulk juice appears next to my plate. Not helping.

  Mum’s hand is firm on my shoulder. ‘Roxy Ran. One glass. That’s all I ask.’

  I pinch my nose with my thumb and forefinger, take a breath and slam the liquid down my throat.

  ‘So,’ Mum says, ‘casual clothes day.’ She takes the empty glass. ‘Excited?’

  ‘You should change that red T-shirt to yellow and honour your solar plexus,’ Art offers. ‘Yellow is the colour associated with your gut, which is where you hold anxiety. You’ll have a much better day.’

  Mum touches her stomach and sighs. ‘That’s right,’ she says.

  Art reaches a hand towards a yellow capsicum in the white bowl. ‘We underestimate the power of colour.’

  ‘Don’t see it myself,’ I say.

  ‘Lecky, don’t you think this is a bit much?’ I say, flicking my eye patch up as my sister and I walk to school. I totally regret allowing Elecktra to ‘style’ my outfit. She selects a few kids each year from a Facebook lottery and for the past two years I’ve been unlucky. I flip the patch down again; at least with this I’ll only see half the school population laughing at me.

  Elecktra has her phone in one hand and is scrolling through comments on her Facebook wall. ‘Post-apocalyptic future pirate chic is so right now. Trust me,’ she says without looking up from her phone. ‘I know fashion. This is just what casual clothes day needs — a bit of risk.’

  The sky is bruised; it can’t make up its mind to be blue or yellow. I feel those bruised colours inside me today; the colour of nausea, nervousness, ridicule. Art was right: my solar plexus feels grazed with anxiety.

  ‘I admit the cape last year was a mistake,’ Elecktra says.

  I shudder. I’ve never been so mocked as I was wearing that stupid multicoloured sequined cape. ‘I ended up on the worst-dressed list,’ I say.

  Elecktra huffs. ‘Casual clothes day is serious business; it’s the difference between thirty and 600 friends on Facebook, you understand?’

  ‘Okay, okay, keep your tank top on,’ I tell her.

  Elecktra is wearing military-style, high-heeled boots, pink over-the-knee socks, an oversized T-shirt that says I hate boys in blue sequins and a cropped leather jacket. She carries a clutch purse instead of a school bag. On anyone else this outfit would look like a costume, but with her tall, lean frame she looks like a runway model. Her long blonde hair is messy, as if she’s just woken up, although it took a whole morning of a combination of straightening wand, dry shampoo, curlers and blow dryer to achieve the relaxed look, and she’s polished her cheeks with pink eye shadow to give them more of a glimmer than a blush. Casual clothes day is the highlight of Elecktra’s social calendar. She’s been posting potential outfits for weeks. The military boots and pink over-the-knee socks won with fifty Likes.

  ‘I think my outfit is me,’ she says grandly, as if addressing an audience.

  ‘Who else would it be?’ I ask with a flat look.

  She ignores me and continues to address the fans in her imagination. ‘In touch with who I am. Tough but feminine, military but boho, on trend but sophisticated.’

  We’ll be at school soon and I’m not ready to face it. I can’t shake this festering feeling in my gut. Maybe it’s the Hulk juice. I feel a heaviness descending down my forehead, an electric garage door closing.

  Elecktra turns to me suddenly. ‘Remember to tell the school gazette who you’re wearing,’ she says. ‘Let’s practise.’

  ‘Do we have to?’ I say, trying to swallow my nerves. ‘I hate fashion.’

  ‘Fashion is every day,’ she snaps. ‘Who are you wearing?’

  ‘It’s not the red carpet, Lecky.’

  ‘Might as well be.’ She stops walking and handbrakes my step with her arm.

  My stomach flips. I have never felt like this before. It’s no longer nausea, more a restlessness. I can hear my heart beating, feel the blood pumping around my body, my chest rising with every breath then collapsing as I exhale. I am hyper-aware of every pore rinsing oxygen and filtering dust. That Hulk juice must have been off. I try to walk away from Elecktra, but she holds me firmly until I relent.

  ‘Dark-wash jeans, ballet flats, your red T-shirt, the cocktail ring you gave me to add …’ I forget the word I’m meant to use.

  ‘Flair,’ she says.

  ‘And this eye patch.’ I point to it. ‘Oh, and hair and make-up by Elecktricity.’

  ‘Elecktrafied,’ she corrects me. ‘It’s my brand. Repeat.’

  ‘Elecktra! We’ll be late for school and I’m feeling wrong.’ I try to tug my arm away, but she’s strong. She drinks more Hulk juice than me.

  I sigh. ‘Elecktrafied.’ She releases her grip.

  ‘The patch adds mystery. If you want to be famous and popular, you have to create mystique,’ she says.

  ‘Where’s your patch then?’

  ‘I go MIA on Facebook once a month. I don’t need a patch any more,’ she says.

  Suddenly, a hand grasps my shoulder. I freeze.

  Elecktra’s heeled boot flies past my face, a hand blocks it and I see my sister’s clutch purse spin in the air as she steps into a deep tiger stance and blocks an incoming spear-hand strike.

  ‘Mum! Seriously!’ Elecktra yells, letting go her submission hold on our mother and bending to retrieve her fallen purse. ‘You could have bro
ken my phone!’ She strokes it like a pet.

  Mum stretches out her arm. She looks at me and shakes her head. ‘Disappointing, Roxy.’

  I roll my eyes. Having to walk to school with Elecktra every day is tough enough without Mum’s surprise attacks to make sure we can defend ourselves. I can’t believe I froze! All those Sunday afternoons of practice with Mum’s blue noodle — a stick of foam she uses to make us block — and no real improvement. I’d love to tell Mum about the bullying at school. But being a ninja — I don’t think she’d understand. She’s probably never felt intimidated in her whole life.

  Mum’s wearing black running tights that show the definition in her strong, greyhound-like quads and a black puffer jacket with a hood. Her hair is tied up in a bun. She’s not even sweating.

  ‘We’ll talk about this later,’ she says to me. ‘You’ll be late for school — off you go.’

  She sprints off, leaving us in a cloud of her perfume. ‘Great roundhouse kick!’ she yells over her shoulder to Elecktra.

  ‘You know it,’ Elecktra calls back. She bends down to gather the other contents of her clutch purse: a lip gloss, breath mints, worry dolls, a piece of quartz stone Art gave her and the doorknob to her bedroom. It’s her very own security system; she carries it around so no one can get into her room.

  ‘Want a bean?’ she asks me. She’s acting like nothing happened, just another episode in the reality TV series she’s starring in, in her mind.

  ‘Adzuki bean?’ I ask.

  Elecktra rolls her eyes. ‘Adzuki beans are for losers. Jelly bean — here have the black one, I hate them.’

  ‘Don’t let Mum catch you eating sugar for breakfast. You know the rule.’

  ‘Yeah, slows down my reflexes, blah, blah, blah. They were pretty good back there.’

  She snaps her head back to elongate her neck and pops a handful of jelly beans into her mouth. I watch them slide down her throat. My mouth waters.

  Elecktra shakes her head with a sugar buzz. ‘So do you think Jarrod will like my hair?’ she asks.

  ‘What do you care if Jarrod likes your hair? He wants to leave Year Twelve to go full time at the car wash.’

  I hate listening to her stories about boys. I know she only tells me as a rehearsal before telling her friends.

  Elecktra stops walking for a second, throws another handful of jelly beans in her mouth and chews while thinking.

  ‘It’s like, the other day he said to visit him at work. So I went casual — flat boots, not heels.’

  ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, nothing. But I told him what I wanted. I said, hey, I think we should act like grown-ups and if you want to be my boyfriend, just say so and I’ll tell everyone. Make it official.’

  ‘You did not say that.’

  ‘No. But can you help me break up with Jarrod?’ She grabs my arm and tugs on it. ‘I’m going to say it to him.’

  ‘Jarrod the car-washer?’

  ‘I have another version with “loser” in it,’ she offers.

  ‘Are you even dating? And how many boys have I helped you break up with?’

  ‘He walks in the gate with me every day. You know you don’t walk through Gate One with just anyone.’

  My heart folds in on itself as I think of the school gates. I dread going to school. It’s exhausting. Not because of classes or PE, but because I’m nervous all day. I never feel completely comfortable. Sometimes I walk through the common area like I’m going somewhere really important and then just wait in the toilet for twenty minutes. If I look like I’ve got something important to do, I feel like people won’t notice I don’t have anyone to talk to. Other times I’ll pretend to forget the combination to my locker. I’ll look at the kids around me like, Great — of all days!, then I’ll shrink my world to that tiny dial and lock out the laughter and the looks. If I’m dealing with my locker, I don’t have to deal with them. The library is an option, but I can’t go there every day. On really cold days the popular girls claim top spot in front of the heaters.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ Elecktra shakes me gently.

  I turn to her. ‘Elecktra, do you ever feel like hiding?’

  ‘Only if my mouthwash isn’t doing its job.’

  We reach the letterbox that flags we’re only three blocks away from school. My hands begin to sweat and slide off the straps of my school bag. My stomach squirms. My tongue swells and grows bark. I stop and lean on the letterbox. The garage door slides down my forehead again, shuttering out light, air and sound.

  ‘Not again!’ Elecktra squeezes her clutch under her armpit, grabs my hands and puts them on the letterbox under my chin. ‘Breathe,’ she instructs.

  I take a deep breath, but it strangles in my throat.

  ‘Panic attacks just getting to school and you’re only in Year Seven. How are you going to deal with senior school?’ She rubs my back.

  I squint my eyes and wish to be invisible. If I was invisible, I could walk through Gate One with Elecktra and it would be like I was popular and beautiful.

  ‘I don’t want to go. I look dumb.’

  ‘You look like you.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ I squeak.

  Elecktra pushes her water bottle under my nose and I take a sip.

  ‘Soft drink!’ I look at her, shocked. ‘How’d you get that?’

  ‘Chantell brings it to school for me. Her mum buys heaps of the stuff. Mum won’t know. She’s kidding herself with all that reflex food.’

  The sugar bites the front of my brain and I feel it needle up my veins and into my neck.

  ‘Good, huh?’ Elecktra twirls on the spot. ‘I’m going to get Chantell to bring me chocolate bars too! Imagine!’

  The thought of seeing Hero and his mates, and me having nowhere to hide, makes my head too heavy to lift up off the letterbox. My hands grow piping hot under my forehead. My skin feels sunburned.

  ‘C’mon, Rox, we’ll be late again and I want to make an entrance.’

  I turn my cheek onto the back of my hand. ‘Will you walk in with me?’ I ask, then close my eyes because I can’t handle seeing her response.

  ‘Stop asking me that. You know the answer. I’m going!’ She pulls up her socks and walks off.

  I slowly lift my head and look at my hands. They’re burning with the same fire as when I gripped the bench in the playground. I shake my hands in front of me and something happens. I must have blinked. I shake them again — they disappear, then reappear. I shake them a third time and they go invisible for three seconds, then come back.

  ‘Elecktra!’ I shriek. ‘Elecktra, my hands are invisible! I can’t go to school with invisible hands!’

  She is ten steps ahead. She turns slowly and sashays back to me. She flips up my eye patch, then takes my hands in hers and squeezes them tight.

  ‘You’re hurting me!’ I gasp.

  ‘Enough! Your hands are not invisible — they’re right here, see?’ She squeezes them again. ‘You can feel this, can’t you? It’s just your eye patch playing tricks on you.’

  I nod fervently. The eye patch — of course.

  ‘It’d help if you walked through the gate with me,’ I say, but Elecktra cuts me off.

  ‘You know the rule!’ She walks off, then yells back, ‘Today of all days!’

  As always, I walk the final three blocks to school alone.

  THREE

  Staring at Gate Two, I feel the quiver under my tongue. A torrent of thick saliva fills my mouth with the bitter taste of terror and a trickle of nervous sweat runs down my back. All the things I hate — Chinese burns, pimples, cheese, answering questions in class — are Christmas compared with having to walk through the gate to school.

  I concentrate on my breathing like Mum does when she meditates. A calm spirit is the only way to stop myself puking my Hulk juice all over the outfit Elecktra’s made me wear. Ever since I was little she’s dressed me up like a doll. I’ve never worn an outfit that felt like ‘me’; I always try to look like
her and fail. I wanted to wear my own clothes today, but she said if anyone found out we were related and I was dressed as myself, then her ‘social reputation’ would be over.

  Kids are pouring through Gate One, all dressed in casual clothes instead of our usual navy uniform. I watch Elecktra prepare to make her entrance. She hangs up her phone, bends over so her hair’s hanging down and runs her hands through it to ‘volumise’ it, then stands and smiles with neon-white teeth. Her routine is mesmerising, if a little too practised.

  Jarrod meets her at the gate. She ignores him and he follows her in. She strides in a straight line, as if walking a tightrope or a catwalk, the whole performance seeming in slow motion. It feels like the world stops for Elecktra. That’s what happens when you’re so pretty you look like you belong in a box. Unlike me. My messy hair isn’t bright yellow like Elecktra’s, but jet black, so black it’s almost navy blue. I’m short for my age and have to wear glasses to see the whiteboard. Mum says it’s a matter of time before I land the double whammy and get braces too.

  ‘Roxy!’ Cinnamon rests a hand on my shoulder to catch her breath. She has an energy drink in her other hand. Although her mum drops her off every morning, she gets breathless walking from the car to the gate. For casual clothes day, she is wearing baggy tracksuit pants and a loose pink kaftan. Her hair is as wild as ever, as though on fire.

  ‘Hey! Nice tent!’ Hero yells at her as he walks through Gate One.

  Cinnamon tugs the bottom of her kaftan and doesn’t look up. Suddenly, I see her pants wriggle.

  ‘What’s that?’ I point to her right pocket, but my hand has disappeared again. I shake it, but still it’s completely invisible. It’s my eye patch, I remind myself, and stuff my hand in my pocket before Cinnamon notices anything.