Leaving Jetty Road

by Rebecca Burton

  But the upbringing kind of misfired on me, I think. Now I just try and avoid confrontation altogether, especially with my family. Just the thought of all that self-analysis makes me shudder. I don’t want to talk about stuff, to think about it. I just want to do it. I want to try it, and see what happens. How else am I going to find out about life? How else am I going to decide?

  “What about you?” I ask Lise now. “What would you change about yourself?”

  She doesn’t answer. For ages, she doesn’t answer. She picks up an unopened sugar packet from the table, creases it into tiny, deliberate folds, then unfolds it again, smoothing the wrinkles out of the paper. She frowns. Then she says quietly, “I’d change everything.”

  “Everything?” I echo.

  She nods, looking down. “My clothes. My body. My self. I’d like to get outside of myself and be someone else completely.”

  This is something else Lise does a lot; she says this stuff—this negative stuff—about herself. I mean, what are you supposed to say when someone says something like that?

  So I do what I always do (what Mum would never do): I change the subject.

  “How about another cappuccino?” I suggest lightly. I grab my purse, stand up. “Or a bowl of gelato? We could share one.”

  Immediately her face brightens up.

  “Yes, please.” She hands me some money. “Life’s got to be all right if there’s a cappuccino on the way, right?”

  “Exactly,” I say, and head for the counter.

  She doesn’t bring the subject up again when I come back, and for the rest of the afternoon we talk about other things—you know, much more important things, like what movie we’ll go to see next weekend and what color Lucy Davison will have dyed her hair for the first day of term (it’s a different color every year, without fail) and who our biology teacher will be this year.

  “I can’t believe Mr. Schumacher got sacked last year,” Lise says. “He was a great biology teacher.”

  “Sofe says it was for ‘getting involved’ with one of the Year 12 students.”

  She wrinkles her forehead. “Like—what does that mean exactly, ‘getting involved’?”

  Our eyes dance wickedly as we look at each other across the table.

  “You think he felt her up?”

  “Or kissed her?”

  “Maybe they had sex in the lab assistant’s room.”

  “Yeah—on the desk. Next to that jar with the pickled brain in it.”

  I could have asked Lise what she really meant about wanting to change all those things about herself, I suppose. But to be honest, I didn’t want to know.

  I still don’t, either. Everyone wants to change something about themselves, you know? What’s the point of getting hung up about it? Sometimes you just have to move on from that stuff, think about something else. That’s my theory, anyway. I think Lise just needs to be reminded of that every now and then.

  That’s my other theory: maybe if I remind her often enough, she’ll remember it for herself one of these days. I mean, if I can get myself to do the reminding, surely she can start putting it into practice.

  Maybe.

  chapter two

  The Wild Carrot Café

  If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. On the first day of term, I break my news to Lise and Sofe.

  “He rang me up on Sunday to tell me I got the job.”

  Sofe gives me a quick, pleased grin. “You mean the guy at the café in Glenelg who interviewed you both?”

  I nod. “Yeah. The manager.” I turn cautiously to Lise, not sure what her reaction will be. “You remember—Michael?”

  But Lise just shrugs. “I didn’t want to work there anyway. There’s too much studying this year.”

  Probably she’s upset. Not because she really wanted to work at the café—I believe her when she says she didn’t—but because I got the job and she didn’t. As in, Nat’s better than me—that kind of thing.

  But I think the truth of it is, I just talked to Michael more than she did. Lise, being shy, hardly said anything at all.

  When I say Lise is shy, I mean, like—shy. Put her with people she doesn’t know very well and she goes sort of quiet and stiff, like she’s got nothing to say. It’s even worse when she’s with guys. Even Tim, whom she’s known for years: when he’s around, she’s this completely different person; you can’t get a word out of her. It’s like she shuts in on herself. Her face gets all boxed in. Only her lovely wild hair seems free.

  I don’t get it, to be honest. I mean, last year I had this crush on one of Tim’s mates from work, Mario. It was huge: I used to lie in bed at night for hours, just thinking about him. He stayed over at our house for dinner a couple of nights, and the whole time, all I wanted to do was reach out and touch him. Just feel close to him, you know? Of course I never said anything to him about it. How could I? He was my brother’s friend; you can’t get more embarrassing than that.

  So yes, in one way, because of all that, I felt pretty shy around him. But it never made me so shy I couldn’t speak. Besides, the thing is, you get over those feelings, and you move on. You know?

  But Lise hasn’t moved on—not at all. If anything, her shyness seems to have gotten worse as she’s gotten older. Sometimes I think she’ll never change.

  On my first day at the Wild Carrot Café, it’s 100 degrees.

  Michael, the manager, is apologetic. “I’ve got the ceiling fans on high. Doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, though.” He runs a stubby hand through his short gray hair. “One of these days we’ll get air-conditioning.”

  He shows me around the place again, more slowly than he did during the interview. There are wooden floorboards all the way through to the kitchen, scrubbed to a dull, worn gleam. A small black tub of wheatgrass decorates each of the tables, which are covered with unbleached tablecloths and burlap place mats. (“Very unfashionable to have tablecloths these days, I know,” says Michael, bustling around, tugging at a cloth to straighten it, pushing a sugar pot back into the center of the table. “Butcher paper’s all the rage. But I can’t stand the stuff. It’s so unrestful.”)

  Potted plants in terra-cotta-colored containers line the walls, and rough wooden crates filled with apples and oranges stand in each corner of the shop. More tubs of wheatgrass stand at each end of the counter. It’s got what you call the natural look. Almost—but not quite—twee.

  Michael introduces me to a girl with dark, curly hair and a wart on her upper lip who’s standing at the espresso machine behind the counter, wrapping knives and forks up in paper napkins.

  “Loretta’s a uni student. She works here on Saturdays and Sundays. She starts at ten, an hour before you.”

  Loretta glances up at me with a lazy, hungover smile.

  “That’s on the days when she makes it here, of course,” says Michael grimly, and hurries me on out the back to the kitchen.

  “And this is our chef, Joshua.”

  Joshua’s standing at the counter opposite the dishwasher, chopping veggies. He turns around and smiles at me in greeting.

  And that’s it. There’s no warning. One minute I’m feeling normal (if a bit nervous about whether I’m actually going to like it, working here); the next minute Joshua the chef is smiling at me—and my knees are crumbling.

  He’s like—gorgeous. Drop-dead.

  He has brown-brown eyes, an Asian-style brocaded cloth cap in place of the usual chef’s hat, and a swoop of blond hair that falls over his forehead. He’s tall, tall, tall, and his black-and-white checked chef’s pants seem to go on for miles.

  “Hope you like wheatgrass,” he says, grinning.

  “Me? I practically inhale the stuff,” I answer, like my legs aren’t trembling and my cheeks aren’t beet-red.

  His eyes dance at me. “You’ve come to the right place, then.”

  Next to me, Michael glances at his watch.

  “There’s just time to teach you how to make cappuccinos before the lunchtime rush, Natalie.
I’ll get Loretta to show you.”

  He pushes back through the wooden swinging doors to the front of the shop, a small, sturdy, middle-aged man, always hurrying, always on the run. He’s going to be a hard taskmaster; I can tell that already. I follow him out, but not before Josh gives me another one of those smiles and my knees turn to complete sawdust.

  Everything has changed. Just like that. All day, I can’t stop smiling; and when Michael compliments me on my great “people skills,” I feel almost guilty. It’s not exactly the work that’s making me so friendly to all the customers.

  But I’m sure I can muster up enough enthusiasm to keep Michael happy, as long as Joshua keeps working at the café.

  chapter three

  House in the hills

  “Only one more year of singing hymns and saying the Lord’s Prayer,” says Sofia to me on Monday morning as we line up outside the school hall for Assembly. She pushes her ponytail impatiently back behind her shoulder. “I should do what Lise does, hey. Join all the school clubs in sight. What’s she at this morning—chess club? Math club? Or was it choir?”

  “I don’t think she goes to all those clubs just to get out of Assembly,” I say mildly. “She does actually want to be in them.”

  “That has to be the saddest thing I’ve heard this morning,” Sofia says darkly.

  I’m just about to protest (I can’t stand the way Sofe makes comments like this about Lise) when she goes on, dreamily, “Anyway, just think—this time next year I won’t even remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer.”

  She grumbles at me all the time about going to an all-girls school, Sofia. Before she came here at the beginning of Year 11, she went to some kind of “alternative” school in the hills, near where she and her little half brother and her mum live. She’s always going on to Lise and me about how much more fun it was at her old school. Didn’t matter whether you wore track pants or Calvin Klein, she says; the guys’d still crack farts in the locker room, and the girls scored highest on all the chemistry tests.

  Sometimes, when she says this, Lise nods worriedly: “I’m sure it’s not normal spending all your time with girls.”

  It’s one of the few things Sofe and Lise ever actually agree on. Sometimes I wish—you have no idea how much I wish—there were more of those things.

  Me, I like our school. I like the teachers, the subjects; I even like the uniform. (Well, it’s not that I like the uniform, exactly; what I like is not having to decide what you’re going to wear to school every morning.) On hot days the classrooms are drenched with the smell of crushed, seed-spilling fruit rotting underneath the old Moreton Bay fig tree in the schoolyard. At recess, I stand peeling oranges with Lise and Sofia under this tree, and we trace our feet along the thick roots that crack through the asphalt in wide, solid rivulets. I feel comfortable here.

  After Assembly, Sofia and I walk across the schoolyard toward the Year 12 locker room.

  “Hey, guess what?” she says. “I got invited to a party.”

  I wait patiently while she kneels at her locker, sorting through her books. “Who by?”

  “A guy at the Aquatic Centre. He was sitting next to me in the spa.”

  “Sofe,” I groan.

  “Mate, he was nice.” She looks up at me with that big, wide smile of hers (a flash of white teeth in an olive-brown face; it’s a smile that all the guys fall for). “He goes to uni.”

  “What—studying how to chat up cute little schoolgirls in the swimming pool?”

  Things like this are always happening to Sofia. It’s funny, really: I mean, she’s tall, blond-haired, and blue-eyed, but there’s a big bump in the middle of her nose, and her hair is thin and always has split ends. Still, the guys practically swarm around her. She, of course, takes it all for granted. “They’re just guys, Nat,” she said to me once, dismissively. “It’s just sex.”

  Now she stands up, her arms full of books and loose-leaf folders.

  “His name’s Nick,” she offers. “Hey, and guess what? He’s vegetarian, too.”

  We trudge upstairs for English. Outside the classroom, we lean against the wooden rails of the balcony, books and folders piled up by our feet, waiting with the rest of the class for Mr. Adams to come and unlock the door. Sofia falls uncharacteristically silent, twisting her ponytail around and around one finger, eyes far away, nose wrinkled in thought. The sound of a gym teacher’s whistle drifts up to us from the Oval.

  “So are you going?” I ask at last.

  “Where?”

  “To the party. On Saturday.”

  She looks at me like I’m stupid. “Of course.”

  “Sofia Walker,” I say, giving up.

  She gathers her books back up in her arms as Mr. Adams approaches, keys jangling from his belt. “Give me a ring on Sunday and I’ll tell you what happened, okay?” Then she grins mischievously. “Let me know if you want the censored version or the uncensored.”

  With Sofia, the censored version is always the safest option. In any case, she’ll break up with him soon. I give her three weeks, max.

  A couple of weeks later, I go up to her house after work on Saturday, to stay the night.

  I love going to visit Sofia. Partly, I think, it’s just because I hardly ever get to do it: she lives in the hills, which means that from school, you have to catch a bus into town and then a train back out again to get there. Even the house itself is another ten-minute walk from the train station, with a steep and windy driveway at the end of it. I always arrive there red-cheeked and gasping for breath.

  Because of that, even if I’d known her as long as I’ve known Lise, I probably still wouldn’t see as much of her outside of school. Lise and I live just a few streets away from each other—she’s one tram stop closer to the city than me—and we’re always in and out of each other’s houses. When we were younger, it was like we lived in each other’s pockets.

  But the other reason I like staying at Sofe’s is that her life is so different from mine and Lise’s. Her father, for example, left years ago. One day, when Sofe was just a toddler, her mother went out to the supermarket to get some milk, and when she came back, he’d just gone. He didn’t even take his clothes with him.

  Sofia’s mother runs a jam-making business from home, and she told me all this the first time I visited. She was standing at the stove, stirring something in a big pot.

  “It was like he wanted to pretend he’d never lived there at all,” she said in this hurt, wondering kind of voice.

  Sofe rolled her eyes and said impatiently, “Mum.” Then she turned to me. “Mum’s been dying for a new female audience. I don’t think I’ve brought a girlfriend up here since primary school.”

  At the time, I wondered how that could possibly be true. I mean, you’d expect, with a mother who thinks men are positively evil, that Sofe might have grown up the same way, you know? (“You haven’t heard the story about my stepdad, Nat,” she said to me later that day. “You just wait till she tells you that one.”) But now I know it’s the truth. Sofe just hasn’t hung around girls much over the last few years: “I like guys. I like the way they think”—a flash of that wicked smile—“and I like the way they look.”

  That reminds me of something else about Sofe. Her mum is what you might call “permissive”—she’s got a dope plant growing in the backyard, and she’s quite happy for Sofe to bring her boyfriends home for the night. “At least that way I know where she is,” she once told me solemnly. “And plus—I get to meet the boyfriend the next morning.”

  This Saturday, by the time her mother picks me up at the station it’s almost dusk. Before dinner—which is pizza, because Sofe’s on strike (“I’m sick of cooking all the time”) and her mother’s too busy labeling jam jars for a greenmarket the following morning—we sit on the brightly colored rug in Sofia’s bedroom, gossiping. She shows me some clothes she bought at a thrift store, gets me to try on a pair of her earrings.

  “So how’s work going?” she asks me eventually.

/>   I grimace. “I hate washing dishes. And I’m crap at making cappuccinos. But I still think the chef’s pretty cute.”

  “What did you say his name was again?”

  I try to say his name without blushing, but I can’t. “Joshua.”

  She gives me a cheeky look. “You should ask him out.”

  “Sofe. No way! He’s at least nineteen.”

  She smiles deviously. “I’ve always thought you’d go for older men in uniform.”

  When the pizza arrives—vegetarian, of course!—we go and sit on the porch in the backyard, with Sofe’s mum and her little half brother, Mattie. (I have by now, of course, heard the famous story involving Mattie’s father. He left for India when Sofia was ten and Mattie was three, to get “enlightened.” They never heard from him again: “He got so enlightened, he just forgot about paying child support” is the way Sofia’s mother puts it.) After we’ve finished eating, we stay outside for a while, and Mattie pesters us (unsuccessfully) to play cricket with him. Sofe pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and she and her mother light up. I sip my orange juice.

  “Nick coming up at all this weekend?” Sofia’s mother asks.

  Sofe shrugs. “Maybe. Not for the night.”

  “Not going swimming with him, Sofe?” I needle her.

  She lets out a puff of smoke into the night. “What d’you mean?”

  “Well, he did pick you up at the Aquatic Centre.”

  She groans. “Get over it, Nat. There are worse places to meet a guy.”

  The truth is, I can’t really explain why I feel so happy when I’m at Sofe’s house. It could be all sorts of things—the view over the hills from the front garden, the smell of jam cooking on the stove, Mattie’s wide, happy smile. The arguments Sofe and her mum have: short, sharp, simple (totally unlike the arguments I have with my mother, which are few but somehow always fraught with resentment). Or it could just be the way school seems so far away.