Smart Girls Don't Wear Mascara

by Cecily Paterson

  Sam looked up towards the oval. ‘You shouldn’t go up there,’ he said. He sounded like he’d made a decision. ‘You’ll get hurt.’

  I stuck my chin out. ‘I’ll go if I want to,’ I said. ‘I can handle it.’

  ‘Really?’ said Sam, and for the first time in months he looked at me properly, with his blue eyes and his freckles and his black hair, all in focus. I forgot to breathe.

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘I feel all weird now.’ I flumped down on the ground near the fence. Sam sat—more carefully—on the concrete on the other side of it. I turned to face him and held on to the wire, my hand nearly touching his. ‘I just want my friends back,’ I said, tears starting to well again. ‘I’m lonely.’

  Sam’s eyes went even bigger than before. He took a breath in and a breath out, before standing up.

  ‘You shouldn’t be lonely,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

  Chapter 27

  Wiping his hands on his pants, Sam put on his determined face and then headed up towards the oval and the Big Tree, disappearing out of sight.

  I waited. And waited some more. Whatever Sam was doing up there was taking a long time. My tears subsided and I gave my face a go-over with the backs of my hands, and then drew pictures in the dirt with a stick while I waited some more.

  ‘What’s that?’ came a voice over my shoulder. It was Sam. I jumped to my feet and guiltily scrabbled the dirt over my doodling. ‘Is that a love heart?’

  ‘No,’ I said, maybe a little too loudly.

  ‘It so was,’ he said, peering down into the ground. ‘You were drawing love hearts.’

  ‘I so wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s irrelevant. What happened up there?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘I just told them they should be nicer to you. Like, talk to you and stuff.’

  My eyes welled up again. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘You told them that?’

  He scuffed his foot in the dirt. ‘Yeah, why not? It’s long enough. They should be over it now. Boys would be.’

  I made slit-eyes at him. ‘Hmm. Really?’

  He opened his mouth to reply but I didn’t hear what came out of it because behind me was another voice.

  ‘Abby?’

  I made a thank-you face at Sam and turned around to Jessie. She was red-faced and even more awkward than usual. Bizarrely, all I could think was, She’s grown. In just a few weeks, she’d become nearly as tall as me, and I hadn’t even noticed.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. And then we kind of just stood there for a bit. I gave her a small grin and she half-smiled back at me and a rush of happiness filled my chest. I missed her so much. And I was so worried for her, being at Stella’s beck and call. Was she alright? Who was looking after her like I used to?

  ‘So, do you want to do something?’ I asked. ‘We could play ...’ but I didn’t get to finish. For the first time in her life, Jessie interrupted me.

  ‘Um, I have something to say,’ she began, twisting her head around to look down the side of her leg. ‘I have a message.’

  ‘A message?’ My eyes went big and my chest went cold on the inside again. I let out a slow breath. ‘From ...?’ I jerked my head back towards the oval and the tree, asking the question.

  Jessie nodded. ‘Yeah, from Stella and Buzz ... I mean, Bianca.’ Her fingers caught the sides of her skirt and she twirled the fabric around. ‘Um. They say, I mean, we say, that ... well, um ...’ She stopped talking and handed me a note.

  ‘Here. This explains it.’

  It was a small, folded-up piece of lined notebook paper, written on in blue biro and pink highlighter felt tip. I unfolded it, twice, and read it to myself.

  Abby. We get that you want to be friends with us again. But you’ll have to try harder. Stop with the babyish stuff. Be more normal. Then we’ll let you hang out with us.

  Stella, Bianca, Jessie

  I swallowed. My feet felt heavy and my fingers were numb.

  ‘Um,’ said Jessie, ‘they also said I should tell you that you have to do something about ... how you look.’ She said the last word so softly I could hardly hear it but my eyes popped out of my head anyway.

  ‘What’s wrong with how I look?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean—’ Jessie let a huge breath out and scratched her arm. ‘It’s just maybe you could, um’—she breathed in and then out again—‘this is really hard.’

  I took pity on her. ‘Are they saying they want me to wear makeup?’

  She swung her head around to the side again. ‘Maybe, I mean, kind of.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Anything else? For Queen Stella, I mean.’

  I wasn’t expecting Jessie to reply. Surely ‘trying harder’—whatever that meant—was enough, not to mention wearing makeup. As if that’s ever gonna happen. But then she spoke again.

  ‘There is one other thing. Stella said.’ Jessie’s voice was really, really small now. Like a tiny little kid. ‘They don’t want you to sing at school, and especially no more Annie.’

  I swallowed again and realised my throat was completely dry.

  ‘Is this for real?’ I managed to squeak. ‘No singing? All of this?’ I pointed at the note and shook my head. ‘I can’t do that.’

  Jessie raised her shoulders up and down. She was looking very firmly at the ground, digging a hole in the dirt with the front of her shoe.

  ‘You have to,’ she said. ‘Stella says so. And Bianca agrees. Or you can’t be friends with them, I mean, us.’

  ‘But this is crazy,’ I said. I looked right into her face, searching for the Jessie I knew who never said anything mean to anyone. ‘Can’t you see they’re just using you, getting you to do things you don’t want to do? Don’t you remember the beginning of the year? “Smart Girls have got to stick together”? Our club? The pact we made?’ I moved closer and touched Jessie’s arm. ‘Can’t you see that Stella’s wrecked all that?’ I shook my head. ‘It’s like you’re kind of brainwashed. There’s nothing that’s really that special about her. We—you, Buzz and I—are best friends. We all love the same stuff.’

  Jessie pulled her arm away from me. Just gently, but it was definitely a pull.

  ‘I was never that smart,’ she said, twisting her head even further around, so that she could practically see her back. ‘I really wasn’t. And, you know what?’ She took a deep breath in like she was trying to be brave. ‘I actually don’t like singing, either.’

  My face must have shown my shock because she immediately tried to make me feel better. ‘I’m sorry, Abby. I really am. But it’s true. I don’t. And Buzz, I mean, Bianca, is totally into other things now. She has been for ages. You must have seen that. Annie was like, I don’t know, Year Five, or even Year Four.’ She shrugged and made a face.

  I swallowed again. This time I could taste the tears I was forcing down, out of my eyes into the back of my throat. I tried to speak but my voice sounded like gravel. ‘So you’re not going to ditch Stella? That’s it?’

  Jessie shook her head. With the tiny glance she threw towards my face, I could see she felt apologetic.

  ‘She’s okay, Ab. She really is. I mean, she’s bossy, sure, but she’s ...’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘She’s nice. And she’s had a really tough time with her mum and everything that went wrong in Sydney. You should hear some of the stories she’s told us. You’ve just got to give her a chance. You could have, but you didn’t. But you can start again, she says, if you follow her rules.’

  She went to go, but then turned back, like she’d had another thought. ‘If you want to, you can come to the lolly shop with us tomorrow. In the afternoon. We’re going to have ice creams and hang out.’

  ‘But I have to do everything Stella says and wear makeup?’ My voice was small.

  Jessie’s face was sad. ‘I’m sorry. But that’s how they say it has to be. Just try, okay?’r />
  I tried to move after her, but my feet wouldn’t lift themselves off the ground.

  ‘Jessie,’ I called out and she half-turned back. ‘I miss you.’

  ‘I miss you too, Abby. But you have to try.’ She smiled, almost like she used to in the old days. A hopeful smile, trying to make me feel better.

  I felt the note in my pocket for the rest of the day. It sat there, scrunched and accusing, the words yelling at me. Just like I tried to avoid Stella and Buzz’s eyes—which I knew were peering at me from the corner of the classroom in free reading time—I wanted to block my ears too, hoping that I wouldn’t be able to remember what the note said.

  Try harder, Abby.

  Stop being babyish, Abby.

  Be more normal, Abby.

  Normal? I’d never given a thought to being normal in my life.

  I could hear Mum in my ear. ‘Just be yourself, Abby.’ I’d never thought that being myself wasn’t normal.

  ‘You alright, Abby?’ said Mr Smee when I got four out of twenty-five spelling words wrong and sat down after two minutes in what was supposed to be a three-minute speech. ‘Do you know what you’re supposed to be doing?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I think so.’ But the note was screaming louder than his question and my head was a confused mess of jumbled words and stupid feelings and handwritten accusations and friends who weren’t friends—but who would be friends again if I tried harder.

  The truth was, I had no idea what to do.

  I needed to think.

  I ignored Miles all the way up the driveway and only stopped in the house long enough to grab a cupcake, an apple and some leftover breakfast pancakes from the fridge before heading out the door.

  ‘Going down the river, Mum,’ I yelled, deliberately not waiting for her reply. I ran down the path, jumping over tree roots, scrambling down the grassy cliff. I hopped carefully through rocky patches, avoiding stinging nettles, until I got to the big rock overlooking our waterhole.

  Our waterhole.

  I made a face. Funny how I still called it that. Today was the first time Sam had spoken to me in ages. If someone had said to me at the beginning of the year that ‘we’ and ‘our’ would be destroyed in less than six months, I would have pushed them off the rock and laughed when they’d hit the water with a splash.

  ‘No way!’ I would have said.

  Way.

  I slumped to the ground with my food beside me, my fingers going to my pocket. The note was still alive in there, still giving off heat. Still trying to poison me. I opened it carefully and read it again, hoping that the words might have changed. Hoping that instead of ‘try harder’, there might be ‘sorry’. Or, ‘let’s just forget it’.

  There wasn’t. It was still the same. It was an invitation, but with a list of demands. I let the words sear onto my eyes until I couldn’t look at them anymore. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of eucalyptus and water and, from somewhere far away on the dairy farm up the hill, the warm scent of cow dung.

  That’s normal, something said, right inside me. It was a quiet, small voice, right in the middle of me. That’s all you need.

  There was a catch in my throat. I wanted to believe it—I really did. But it wasn’t enough. Still with my eyes closed, I opened my mouth and yelled at the river.

  ‘I just want my friends as well!’

  ‘What?’

  There was someone there! I jammed my eyes open and swung around, fierce and ready to protect my patch, only to find Sam standing behind me, his hands shoved in his pockets and a funny look on his face.

  ‘Were you talking to yourself?’

  ‘Were you spying on me?’

  ‘Do you always shout at rivers on your own?’

  ‘Do you always follow people around and disturb them when they’re trying to get some peace?’

  He laughed and plonked himself down next to me.

  ‘Watch the pancakes!’ I said, still cross. ‘I suppose you want one.’

  ‘I’d prefer the cupcake.’

  ‘You can have half of it and that’s all.’ I split the cake into two, handed him a bit and then took a bite of my half almost at the same time he did. In the distance a cockatoo started fighting with its friend, squawking noisily and chasing the other birds away.

  ‘They have fights and then get on okay,’ I said to Sam, my mouth half-full of cake. ‘Why can’t people do that too?’

  He chewed thoughtfully and said nothing.

  ‘I mean, I know birds have smaller brains,’ I kept going. ‘So probably they can’t remember their fights.’ A sudden thought struck me. ‘Maybe smarter people have bigger fights. Because they can remember everything.’

  Sam looked into the distance. In the corner of my eye I saw his hand sneak towards one of my pancakes, but I didn’t stop him. Instead I picked one up and gave it to him. He gave me a half-smile and put the pancake in his mouth.

  The cockatoos stopped fighting and it went quiet, except for the frogs, the crickets, the swish of the water current and Sam’s chewing. I sat next to him, breathing steadily. In, out, in out.

  I turned my head towards him. ‘Jessie says—well, Buzz and Stella said it, but they made Jessie give me the message—that I should just be like Stella and do what she wants.’

  There was a silence, and then Sam answered.

  ‘Like, what kind of stuff?’

  I flicked a bug off my leg. ‘I dunno.’ I looked up. ‘Well, actually, I kind of do. They want me to try harder. Stop singing.’ My voice went really quiet. ‘Wear makeup.’

  I knew Sam’s eyebrows would be higher than his head, so I looked away, hoping not to see his face when he started laughing at me. But there was no sound. No hefty chortles. No gasping giggles. Silence. I turned back to him to see his serious face.

  ‘Do you want to?’ he said. ‘You know, do what Stella says?’

  I stood up, reached for a small rock that had been in my eyeline the whole time, and chucked it in the water. It entered with a small plop and sank immediately without a trace.

  ‘I just want my friends back,’ I said.

  He stood up too, shrugged and threw his own stone in. It landed just to the left of where mine had been. ‘I guess we all want our friends back.’

  I stepped closer to him. ‘We’re friends again, right?’

  He kept his face turned towards the water. ‘Do you think you’ll do what Stella says?’

  ‘Does it make a difference to you?’

  He shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

  I tried again. ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘Abby, I don’t know what to tell you.’ Sam’s voice was quiet. ‘Whatever I say, you’ll probably do the opposite of, just because you’re you.’ He reached for another rock and threw it in. ‘Anyway, does what I say really make that much difference to what you’re going to do?’ His voice was bitter. ‘Nothing I do seems to affect you at all.’

  ‘You ate my pancakes,’ I said, trying to get a laugh. ‘So now I’m hungry. It affected me.’

  ‘See ya, Abby,’ said Sam. ‘I’m going home.’ And he walked away, back up his path to his house, without even turning back.

  Chapter 28

  Our garage was always full of boxes, some full of stuff and others empty, kept by Mum ‘just in case’ we needed them. I sifted through the pile of empties, chose a biggish one and taped it up nice and strong.

  And then I filled it.

  On the rock, after Sam had left, I made my decision. With cockatoos squawking in the sky, I realised I knew two things. First, I wanted my friends back. Second, I loved Jessie and Buzz more than I hated Stella. So I’d do what they asked. I’d try. I’d try to be normal. I’d try to stop singing. And, much as I hated to think about it, I’d even try to wear makeup.

  In the box went my old Annie VHS cassettes, my new Annie DVD
s, my Annie soundtrack CDs and my four different novel versions of the story. I nearly put the signed copy of the Annie stage show program in the box, but instead quietly slotted it into the middle of a shelf of comics. In the box went my school hat that Buzz had said still smelled of Ziggy, as well as my old red t-shirt and the denim shorts that Buzz hated even back in Year Five.

  In the box went the recordings of the three of us singing at the Show, and, finally, even though it nearly killed me to put it in, our Smart Girls’ scrapbook.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I whispered to it. ‘Please don’t cry. It’s all for the best.’

  I put the box by the front door and told Mum I was getting rid of some stuff.

  ‘I’ll take it to the tip later,’ she called to me from her office. ‘I can’t do it now. Landcare reports to write. Plus, did you recycle and split up all the different kinds of waste?’

  ‘Yes,’ I called back, although the answer was ‘no’. If Mum knew what was in the box, she’d never let me get rid of it, and I didn’t want to have to explain. It was hard enough telling her that I didn’t want to go to Baker anymore.

  ‘But why not?’ she said, when she’d finally finished her report and had emerged, ready to get started on a vegetable lasagne. ‘That’s crazy. After all that work and doing the tests and everything? I think you’ll need to think about this.’

  ‘But I thought you’d be pleased,’ I said.

  Her face was confused. ‘Well, I mean, it seems a bit of a big decision just to announce one day out of nowhere.’

  ‘It’s not out of nowhere,’ I said, huffily. ‘I’ve been thinking it for ages. I just want to go where my friends are going.’

  Mum’s shoulders went up and then down. ‘Can we think about it later? I’ve got to cook this lasagne now. Do you have homework?’

  I ignored her question. ‘Can I look in your top drawer?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘A hairbrush. I’ve lost mine.’

  Her face looked confused again. ‘Um, okay. I think there’s one there. If not, the bathroom cupboard.’