by Carly Nugent
Grandpa smiled. ‘You’re a better storyteller than that, Cassie Jane,’ he said. ‘I bet there’s another reason.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know what it is.’
‘You’ll figure it out,’ Grandpa said. ‘Don’t worry.’ He passed me the biscuits. ‘Here, have a Tim Tam.’
I picked up a biscuit and bit into it. When I was halfway through chewing I thought of the answer.
‘Difficult,’ I said.
‘What’s difficult?’ Grandpa said, with his eyebrows scrunched together.
‘Seven down,’ I said. ‘It’s an anagram’—(an anagram is when you mix up the letters of one word or phrase to make another word or phrase)—‘If lift cud. Difficult.’
Grandpa smiled and picked up the crossword and his pen. ‘Nice work, Cassie Jane,’ he said, and wrote the answer in. ‘See? I knew you’d figure it out.’
After we left Grandpa’s house Simon and I kept walking. We walked for so long that we got to the bridge, which is where the track meets the road and crosses the river. Mum says I’m not allowed to go over the bridge by myself, because over the bridge is The Other Side of Town.
I asked Jonas one day how big our town is, because he is much better at numbers than I am, and he said it is about two-thousand-people-sized, which means it is a small town. Two thousand sounds like a lot to me. Two thousand pencils on a desk would be a lot of pencils, and two thousand birds in a tree would be a lot of birds. But I guess the two thousand people in our town are never all in the same place at once. If you walk down the main street you will probably only see about thirty people, and about half of those people will say hello to you because they have seen you in the school play or they know your mum from night classes or your grandpa from church. And that’s what, I think, really makes it a small town.
The name of my town is Bloomsbury. I have lived in Bloomsbury for as long as I can remember. I went to kindergarten here, and not many people can remember before kindergarten. (Jonas is the only person I know who can remember being a baby. He remembers being in a cot and crying for ages and nobody coming to pick him up.) Diana can remember before we came to Bloomsbury because she was in Grade Two then. She says we used to live in The City but we moved because Mum and Dad were sick of the traffic and the noise and the prices.
My town isn’t big enough to have a lot of traffic but it is big enough to have two sides. Some of the things on My Side of Town are:
1) My house
2) Jonas’s house
3) Grandpa’s house
4) School
5) Church
6) The post office
7) The fish-and-chip shop
And some of the things on The Other Side of Town are:
1) The bank
2) The Very Nice Restaurant
3) The hospital
4) The bus station
5) Lee Street (a dead-end street that Diana and I aren’t allowed to go down because, Mum says, ‘It’s just not the kind of place you need to be hanging around.’ Whenever adults talk about Lee Street they get this look on their faces like someone has just died and they are very, very sorry.)
I was about to turn around and head home when Simon stopped and sniffed the air. I looked up and saw what Simon was sniffing at. There, standing right in the middle of the bridge, was Virginia.
Virginia isn’t as beautiful as William Shakespeare—her feathers are short and mostly brown and they don’t have eyes on them—but she is faster. Virginia is so fast that while we were chasing her I couldn’t think about anything except moving my legs. We chased her right across to The Other Side of Town—past The Very Nice Restaurant and the bank and the bus station—and the whole time I didn’t think about Diana or Buddhism or not going on Family Holiday even once. The whole time my brain only had one thought and that thought was run.
We chased Virginia all the way to the hospital. Next door to the hospital there is a small house with a fence all the way around it. Virginia flapped over the fence and behind the house and then we couldn’t chase her anymore, so we stopped. Simon was panting and I had a stitch, and for a minute my only thought was ouch. But then—when my stitch started to undo itself—I realised that the house wasn’t really a house at all. It was The Clinic.
Adults never say The Clinic in normal voices—they always whisper it or say it really fast like they want to get the words out before anybody notices. The Clinic is like a hospital, but for your brain instead of your body. I don’t know what doctors do in there—like if they use stethoscopes or tongue-sticks like regular doctors. But I do know that sometimes after people start going to The Clinic the doctors send them somewhere else. And after people go somewhere else they don’t always come back. I know this because Rhea Grimm (who is the tallest, meanest girl in Year Eight) used to have a dad. He used to do normal dad things, like buy the paper and drive a car and have coffee. I didn’t really know him, but Bloomsbury is a small town, so I used to see him around. Then one day he stopped doing dad things and started going to The Clinic. And a few weeks after that he stopped going to The Clinic and was just gone. I never see him around anymore.
Simon sniffed and pulled on his lead to get me to walk around the side of the fence. When I did we saw Virginia sitting in the top of a tall tree where the leaves were starting to turn brown. Simon barked and Virginia cried in her peacock way and something inside me sagged a little, like an old basketball. I was sagging partly because I knew we wouldn’t be able to make Virginia come down, but also partly because of a feeling I got from looking at The Clinic that I don’t know how to put into words.
Today was Monday, which meant school, which meant I couldn’t look for the peacocks. I walked to school with Diana, except I didn’t really walk with her because she was walking with Tom Golding and together they were slower than snails. I like Tom Golding (because he always smiles and says ‘Hi, Cassie’ and ‘See ya, Cassie’), but I don’t know much about him (because he doesn’t say anything else to me and because even though Diana is always talking to him she never talks about him).
Diana is in secondary school and I’m still in primary but we both go to the same place. This is because my town is small and only has enough kids for one school. The downhill part of the school is primary, and the uphill part is secondary. There isn’t a fence or anything between the two halves, but everybody knows that secondary starts at the downball courts. Only secondary kids play on the downball courts, and if you’re in primary the only times you can go past them are when you’re doing lunch orders or walking to the oval for PE.
At little recess on Monday I went to sit near Jonas on The Snake Stairs. I used to sit with some of the Grade Six girls but they didn’t like it when I told them how I had seen a UFO, or that my Aunt Sally can read minds. One day when I went to sit with them they all ran into the fort and didn’t come out. It took me a while to figure out that they were superheroes and had turned invisible so they could go save the world. Once I came up with that story I didn’t feel so sad about not sitting with them anymore.
The stairs are The Snake Stairs because one day last summer Miss Shilling came out of the back of the art room to wash the paint trays and saw a tiger snake go under the steps. Mr Bennett (our school principal) called the council to find it, but they couldn’t, so instead they put up signs near the steps that say:
DANGER! SNAKE!
And now Jonas is the only kid brave enough to sit there. Jonas isn’t scared of snakes. He saw one once near the river behind his house. When I asked him what he did, he said, ‘Nothing.’ He just stood there, and then the snake slid away. This story was interesting to me because before that I had never thought that doing nothing might be the best way to deal with something.
Because I’m so afraid of snakes, I can’t sit on the stairs with Jonas, so I sit on the footpath across the grass from him and we yell at each other. On Monday at little recess I yelled at Jonas, ‘What’s Buddhism?’
I thought Jonas might know something about
Buddhism because he has his own computer in his room and the Internet, which is one of the reasons he knows so many facts and is always saying, ‘Did you know?’ Another reason Jonas knows facts is because his parents take him on holidays to places like Cambodia and The Mediterranean, where they go to museums and art galleries and jungles. Next week Jonas’s parents are taking him on a big overseas holiday to Europe, so he can collect even more facts about France and viaducts and pizza.
A lot of kids think Jonas’s facts are annoying, but I think they’re interesting. Jonas knows interesting facts about everything, but his favourites are shark facts. He knows more about sharks than anything else. He has shark stickers on his books and on his school bag. He has a shark hat, a shark pencil case and shark shoelaces. He knows so much about sharks that sometimes I wonder if he secretly is one.
‘It’s a religion,’ Jonas yelled back. ‘From India.’
‘But what does it do?’ I peeled my banana and put some extra oomph on the word ‘do’ to emphasise it.
‘It doesn’t do anything,’ Jonas yelled. His glasses started falling down his nose and he pushed them back up. Jonas wears glasses even though he doesn’t really need to, because he thinks they make him look like Stephen Hawking, who is his favourite scientist.
‘But church is a religion and it does things,’ I yelled back. ‘It prays, and it sings, and it passes the collection plate.’
‘Buddhism’s not like that. Buddhism’s about thinking, and thinking isn’t doing.’
‘Yes it is! Thinking is a verb!’ I knew I was right because we went over verbs last week. Verbs are doing words (like running and jumping and spitting), which meant thinking was doing. Jonas knew it, too, because he is smart and always gets A-pluses in everything. One detail you should know about Jonas, though, is that he doesn’t like to be wrong.
‘Yeah. But,’ Jonas yelled (quietly).
‘Yeah, but what?’ I yelled (loudly).
Jonas was chewing his Vegemite sandwich extra slow. I knew he was waiting for the bell to ring, like when Carlton was ahead in the Grand Final last year and they just did kick-to-kick until the siren went. Jonas is clever like that.
Jonas and I are opposites. I know a lot about reading and writing and stories, and he knows a lot about science and maths and facts. Some kinds of opposites don’t go together very well (like ovens and ice cream, or dogs and cats), but some kinds of opposites do (like knobbly jigsaw pieces and holey jigsaw pieces, or sweet and sour). Jonas and I are the good kind of opposite, and that’s the first reason we are friends. The second reason we are friends is because Jonas is eleven-turning-twelve (like me) and he can read at a Year Seven level (like me). The third reason is because both of our dads are secondary-school teachers (my dad teaches English and Jonas’s dad teaches science) and so sometimes they visit each other on weekends and after school. Jonas doesn’t call his dad ‘Dad’, though—he calls him Peter, and he calls his mum Irene. This feels right in one way, because those are their names. But it also feels not-right in another way, because usually kids call their mums and dads Mum and Dad.
And the final reason Jonas and I are friends is because last year Jonas came to my birthday party. It was a dress-up party and Jonas’s costume was Neptune, who is the God of the Sea. He had a wand shaped like a bolt of lightning and some green crepe paper that looked like seaweed around his head. We ate cake and chips and danced outside until it got dark. It was the best birthday I’ve ever had, which is a big thing to say, since I had already had ten birthdays in my life. But that was the only one so far where I’ve danced outside at night with the God of the Sea.
Because Jonas is my friend I decided to change the subject to save him from not-knowing more about Buddhism. So I took William Shakespeare’s feather out of my bag and showed it to him.
‘Cool,’ Jonas yelled.
‘Do you want to help me look for some peacocks?’ I yelled.
‘Okay,’ Jonas yelled back.
And then the bell rang, and little recess was over, and Jonas was a Peacock Detective, and this story could keep going.
After little recess was maths, which is my least-favourite subject, which is why I was happy when Mrs Atkinson chose me and Jonas to pick up the lunch orders from the canteen.
There is a good side and a bad side to doing lunch orders. The good side is skipping fifteen minutes of maths. The bad side is that, because the canteen is in the secondary school, getting lunch orders is risky. Usually at lunch-order-collection time all the secondary kids are in class, but every now and then some of them are wandering around. If a secondary kid is wandering around during class time it is probably because they got sent out by their teacher for chewing gum or swearing or playing with the fire extinguisher. This is the kind of secondary kid you want to avoid the most. So picking up the lunch orders can be a bit like walking through a jungle: you probably won’t see any animals, but if you do chances are they will be dangerous ones.
We were almost at the downball courts when Jonas got a blood nose. Jonas is always getting blood noses. He has at least one blood nose every two weeks, and even more in summer. Other kids tease him and say it’s because he picks his nose, but I know that’s not true, because Jonas told me once about how many germs are on your fingers and how easy it is for those germs to jump from your fingers into your nose, and then from your nose into your brain. Jonas gets blood noses when he has to do things that are uncomfortable, like going across the downball courts into the secondary school where there are kids who call him Frog Eyes and Nerd Boy. Today Jonas had an especially bad blood nose—so bad he couldn’t talk because he had to hold both hands over his face. And when he ran off in the direction of the sick bay I knew I was on my own.
I crossed the downball courts, and the jungle on the other side was quiet. All the secondary kids were tucked safely in their classrooms. I made it past the secondary lockers and the secondary art room. The mums working in the canteen smiled at me when I knocked at the back door.
‘All on your own today?’ said a mum with brown hair in a ponytail. I nodded. ‘Are you all right to carry this?’
She gave me the plastic lunch-order tub filled with pies and sausage rolls in brown paper bags. It was heavy and left me without any free hands, but I could carry it. I gave her a confident smile, and she gave me a Caramello Koala to say thank you.
I was feeling much braver on my way back with the Caramello Koala in my pocket and the hot pastry smell wafting up into my face. I thought that this might be how Simon feels when he is sniffing and walking and not-thinking. I even slowed down so I could miss a bit more maths. I walked past the secondary art room and some of the secondary lockers. I was almost at the downball courts.
And that was when I saw her.
She was going in the direction of Mr Bennett’s office, but she was dawdling. She scuffed her feet and stopped every four or five steps to look at something on the ground or pick at her fingernails.
She was Rhea Grimm.
Here are all the things I know about Rhea Grimm:
1) She is in Year Eight.
2) She does horrible things to teachers, like prank-calling them and putting nail polish remover in their coffee.
3) She gets sent to the office a lot.
4) Her dad is gone.
5) She is really mean to kids who are younger than her (i.e. me).
As soon as I saw Rhea Grimm I lowered my head and walked faster. I didn’t care about missing maths anymore—I would have solved a hundred multiplication questions just to be out of the secondary school. But I was still two rows of lockers away from the downball courts and I knew she had seen me. I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck start to stand up, the way Simon’s hair does when he meets an animal or a person he doesn’t like. I could hear Rhea Grimm’s shoes getting closer to me (she was wearing big heavy black boots). She wasn’t dawdling anymore. She was a secondary kid on a mission, and that mission was me.
‘Hey.’
Rhea Grimm’s voice
snagged me from behind like it was a hook and I was a fish. I stopped and looked up. She was standing right in front of me, so close that if my hands weren’t full of lunch-order tub I could have touched her. She looked kind of pretty. She had big brown eyes, a nice nose, and her hair was long and flat and shiny. But she was wearing too much makeup—her face looked like it was covered in cake mix and texta. I wondered if that was why she was going to Mr Bennett’s office. Makeup is not part of school uniform. Neither is jewellery and she had a lot of that, too. Thin silver bangles that clinked against each other when she moved her wrists, and three earrings in each ear.
‘I know you,’ she said.
When she opened her mouth to speak I could see she was chewing gum. I started to tell her—in a wanting-more-than-anything-to-be-doing-multiplication voice—that I was just picking up the lunch orders and didn’t want any trouble and would be on my way and thank you very much for your time. But she spoke first.
‘You’re Mr Andersen’s kid.’
I nodded.
Rhea Grimm smiled, but not in a nice way.
‘That’s too bad,’ she said. ‘I mean, it must really suck. To have a dad like that.’
‘Like what?’ I said, and even though I was trying to be brave my voice still came out like a squeak.
‘You know,’ she said, and she leaned down so her cake-mix face was right up close to mine. ‘Like—crazy.’
Usually I’m good with words. I talk a lot and I know how to make conversation. But after Rhea Grimm said crazy it was like all the words I had ever known disappeared from my brain. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. And I gripped the lunch orders tightly and ran.
I ran so fast that when I got back to the classroom there was still twenty minutes of maths left. I couldn’t stop thinking about Rhea Grimm and I got every question wrong, and when I showed my work, it all looked like overcooked spaghetti because my hand was shaking. I didn’t remember the Caramello Koala until after lunch, and when I pulled it out of my pocket its face had melted into a lopsided chocolate blob. I still ate it, but without a nose and a smiling mouth it just tasted like Caramello.
