How to Make Friends

by Charlotte Barkla

  Dad grabbed my hand and tried to pull me away from the stall. ‘Sorry about that,’ he mumbled to Fiona. ‘We’ll get out of your hair now.’

  But I wasn’t quite ready. I planted my feet. ‘Why’s it called miraculous?’ I asked Fiona.

  It sounded pretty amazing. The lady on the bottle looked convinced that it was miraculous too.

  Fiona sighed. She handed me a pamphlet. ‘Read it for yourself,’ she said through clenched teeth. Then she turned to the next customer, her shiny smile restored.

  The Miraculous Wrinkle Cream pamphlet gave me some excellent supermarket reading material. I pushed the trolley and read about the cream while Dad darted around fetching tomato sauce, tinned apricots and all the other items on the list.

  ‘It says here that it reduces wrinkles by up to eighty per cent,’ I commented, as he dropped a packet of rice into the trolley.

  ‘Hmm?’ He glanced up. ‘Oh, well – that’s advertising, you know. They can throw around all kinds of statistics. Doesn’t mean they’re true.’

  ‘I guess.’

  But it wasn’t just the statistics that impressed me. There were also the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of a lady who’d used it, which looked pretty convincing. The ‘before’ photo was a boring black-and-white picture (it must’ve been from the olden days), where her hair was all messy and she was frowning a lot. The ‘after’ photo was a sunny, colourful picture where the lady was at the beach. She was smiling with bright, white teeth and flicking her super shiny hair all over the place. To be honest, I couldn’t notice any difference in her wrinkles – her skin looked exactly the same in both pictures. But in the pamphlet she kept going on and on about how happy and relaxed she was feeling since using the cream.

  That got me thinking . . . Mum had been pretty stressed since starting her new job. Not only with the piles of paper that she kept bringing home, but I’d noticed the level of coffee in her coffee jar was decreasing at a faster rate than usual.

  ‘Maybe I should buy some for Mum,’ I said to myself, tapping my chin.

  I had no idea if Mum had wrinkles or not (I’d never noticed), but I figured it didn’t matter. I’d buy a bottle for Mum, as a special gift to help with her stress. It would be the perfect present.

  But then I saw the price – way at the bottom of the pamphlet, underneath a million quotes about how amazing the cream was.

  ‘Ninety-nine dollars!’ I exclaimed.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was such a small bottle too! Fiona’s bottle had run out in no time.

  A baby with spiky hair in the trolley next to ours looked at me, startled by my outburst, and exploded into tears.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said to the baby’s dad as he grabbed a squeaky toy for him. I tossed the pamphlet into the trolley, then hurriedly caught up with Dad in the next aisle.

  So much for testing the moisturiser. Ninety-nine dollars was way too expensive. Even if I stopped buying Junior Scientist Magazine and saved up all my pocket money, it would still take more than a year before I had enough money to buy the cream.

  Unless . . .

  As soon as we got home, I logged onto the computer to look up the fancy Miraculous Wrinkle Cream website, to find the ingredients list. But the ingredients were really complicated, with long names I’ve never heard of like ‘skin rejuvenator serum’ and ‘moisture enhancer’ and ‘oxygen-boosting enzymes’. I checked in the pantry, but I couldn’t find anything remotely similar.

  I did find some sorbolene cream in the bathroom, however, which looked pretty much the same as the fancy wrinkle cream had. I grabbed some toothpaste (to give it the nice minty smell), and some empty jars from the craft box, then lugged everything up to my laboratory (aka my bedroom).

  It wasn’t long before I’d bottled up the wrinkle cream into a bunch of jars, complete with their own handmade labels.

  ‘Dee-Dee!’ Max padded down the hallway and stuck his head into my room. ‘Oh, yum!’ He charged inside and grabbed one of the jars, then tried to unscrew the lid.

  ‘No, Max.’ I unwrapped his fingers from around the jar. ‘It’s not for eating – it’s moisturiser.’ I grinned. ‘And now it’s time to test it out.’

  I was so excited to show Mum my creation – I couldn’t wait to see her smoothing it onto her skin and smiling joyously like the lady from the pamphlet.

  Max and I searched all over the house, but we couldn’t see any sign of her.

  ‘Have you seen Mum?’ I asked Dad, who was reading the paper in the lounge room, with the same bleary-eyed expression Mr Zhu had the other day.

  Dad glanced up. ‘She had to duck into work. Why’s that?’

  ‘Tada!’

  Dad nodded slowly, taking in the row of jars on my bedroom floor. ‘Very impressive,’ he said, although he looked confused. ‘What is it exactly?’

  ‘Wrinkle cream!’ I said, proudly showing him the labels. ‘For Mum!’

  Dad’s jaw dropped. ‘For Mum?’ he squeaked.

  ‘Yes, as a present, seeing as she just started a new job.’ And so I can test it out, I thought to myself. I needed to find out if it could really transform ladies from being frowning and stressed to smiley and carefree.

  ‘Err . . .’ Dad opened his mouth, but no words came out. It wasn’t often that he had nothing to say. He scratched his head. ‘I’m not sure if it’s the best present for your mum, actually.’

  I frowned. ‘Is it because I haven’t conducted clinical trials yet?’

  ‘No, that’s not it,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s certainly a thoughtful gift, Edie. But I’m wondering if perhaps she’d like a bunch of flowers from the garden instead?’

  A bunch of flowers? It didn’t sound too exciting to me, but Dad had known Mum for a long time, so I figured he probably knew best.

  So I reluctantly packed the jars of wrinkle cream under my bed, and collected some flowers from the backyard.

  Even though it wasn’t a very scientific gift, Mum seemed pretty happy with the flowers when we presented them to her that evening.

  ‘They’re beautiful, Edie!’ she said as she enveloped me in a giant, lung-squishing Mum-hug.

  ‘You’re w-welcome,’ I managed to reply.

  With my head squashed against her shoulder and the breath being squeezed out of my body (in a good way, of course), I had a thought . . .

  Mum was clearly pretty impressed with the bouquet. Maybe an explanation and a nice bunch of flowers for the front of the classroom would be all I’d need to smooth things over with my classmates?

  I planned my next experiment right away.

  On Monday, straight after breakfast, I skipped out the back to select a beautiful bouquet of flowers for my classmates.

  ‘Oh no.’ I stopped short.

  Unfortunately, my flower picking on Saturday for Mum’s bunch had left our yard a little depleted. All we had left were a couple of straggly geraniums, which didn’t look like the greatest choice for a bouquet.

  As I attempted to salvage the best of the geraniums by the side fence, I spotted some beautiful purple roses in my next door neighbour Joe’s yard. I peered through the timber slats to get a better look.

  ‘Jackpot!’ I dropped my geraniums in a flash.

  Lining the fence were six beautiful rose bushes, filled with purple, pink and yellow roses. They were nice. Really nice, actually. Much better than the random bunch of flowers I’d picked for Mum yesterday – they looked like a handful of weeds in comparison.

  I didn’t have time to check with Joe, but I figured he wouldn’t mind if I took a couple – he had plenty there. And he was always in the garden. I was sure he’d grow a bunch more in no time. He probably wouldn’t even notice they were gone.

  So I grabbed some scissors and snipped a handful of flowers from Joe’s purple rose bush. I chose the bush that had the smallest roses, because I figured he’d be less likely to notice they were missing.

  As I was stuffing the roses into my lunch box for safekeeping, I pictured my classmates smiling
graciously as I explained the honest mistake with the cookie recipe. Then we’d all laugh about it over a casual game of handball at morning tea. It was a fail-safe experiment. Nothing surprising, nothing that relied on recipes – just a simple, beautiful bunch of flowers. What could go wrong? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

  Straight after rollcall, I raised my hand.

  ‘Can I make an announcement please, Mr Zhu?’

  ‘Sure, come on up, Edie,’ he said, beckoning me forward. ‘That’ll give me a chance to work out what page we’re up to,’ he added with a wink, as he flicked through his maths textbook. Even though Mr Zhu was a great teacher, it hadn’t taken me long to figure out his organisation skills left a lot to be desired.

  I skipped up the front with my Antarctic Animals lunch box and smiled at the class.

  Most of my classmates didn’t look too angry, I was pleased to see. Annie B was smiling, Ling was looking only slightly suspicious, and Emily James was twirling a piece of hair around her finger while staring out the window. The rest of the class were either yawning or fiddling with their pencil cases. It wasn’t a great start, but it could’ve been worse. Nobody looked enraged about the cookies, which was a positive sign.

  If I managed this without any accidents or malfunctions, then surely I’d be on my way to making friends.

  ‘I just wanted to set things straight about Friday,’ I said, opening the clasp on my lunch box. ‘About the cookies, you see . . . I made a tiny mistake with the recipe.’ I reached in and pulled out the flowers. ‘So I brought along a present for the class, to say how –’

  I stopped.

  Every single kid was staring at me, their eyes wide. It was like liquid nitrogen had been spilled across the room. The whole class was frozen solid. Even Mr Zhu looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  What could it be this time? I hadn’t even managed to spit out my apology – surely I hadn’t offended everyone already?

  I glanced down at the bouquet. ‘Yikes!’

  Only a handful of headless stalks remained of my beautiful bunch of roses.

  No wonder the whole class looked horrified. They looked like they belonged in a horror movie.

  ‘There were definitely heads on them this morning . . .’ I said, scratching my chin.

  ‘Heads?’ Ling gasped, his eyes wide.

  ‘Oh – rose heads, I mean – not real heads,’ I quickly clarified. ‘Where could they have gotten to?’

  I peered into my lunch box, then groaned. The five purple rose heads were in the bottom.

  That pesky lunch box! It did take quite a lot of squishing to get the roses in there – the heads must’ve been caught in the lid!

  ‘The heads are in here,’ I explained, holding up my lunch box to show the class. They toppled onto Samirah’s desk. She jumped, knocking her pencil case onto the floor.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it!’ I dropped the headless stalks onto her desk so I could bend down to pick up her pencils, but she screwed up her nose.

  ‘Ew – there are ants all over them!’ She pointed to the mangled stalks. Sure enough, a trail of ants was marching onto her desk.

  ‘Yuck, I hate ants!’ Riley, the tall boy sitting next to her, scooted his chair away. He shuffled a bit too far and landed his chair leg on his desk buddy’s foot.

  ‘Ow! Get off me!’ She pushed his chair off, then crossed her arms. ‘Mr Zhu, Riley squished my foot!’

  ‘Did not,’ Riley said. ‘Your foot got in the way of my chair!’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Mr Zhu’s eyes were looking bloodshot. He swept up the stalks. ‘I’ll get rid of these.’ He marched to the bin and dumped the mangled stalks inside, while I rescued what was left of the rose heads, popping them back into my lunch box.

  Then Mr Zhu steered me back to my seat. ‘Why thank you, Edie, for that lovely gesture. Wasn’t it nice, everybody?’ He tried to smile, but it was looking more like a grimace. ‘Now, spelling books out, please.’ He hurried to the front and started writing up our vocab words.

  ‘It was a really nice bunch of roses,’ I whispered to Annie B, as I opened up my exercise book.

  She nodded. ‘I do like roses,’ she said kindly.

  My heart lifted a little.

  But only for a second.

  ‘Careful, Annie B.’ Emily James scowled. ‘She might try to poison you, like she did with the cookies.’ She said it quietly, but I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

  Annie B gasped.

  ‘Poison?’ I spluttered. ‘As if!’

  ‘Quiet, girls.’ Mr Zhu turned from the whiteboard and frowned at us. ‘Start your work, please, girls.’

  As he faced the board again, I whispered, ‘It was a mistake with baking soda!’

  Emily James shrugged, glaring at me through her blonde coils. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  Annie B blinked at me, before moving her exercise book further away.

  I sighed.

  So much for laughing about bitter biscuits over handball. At this rate, I’d be lucky if I was allowed back to the handball court by the time I graduated high school.

  By lunchtime, the Year Five gossip chain had transformed my Apology Cookie Experiment into an attempt to poison the whole school, finished off with a headless roses prank.

  At lunchtime, I couldn’t help noticing kids clutching their sandwiches to their chests and staring at me. And when I walked past a group of boys on my way to the water bubbler, I heard someone whisper, ‘Watch out, she might have poison!’

  By the end of the day, my spirit was as wilted as the rose heads at the bottom of my schoolbag.

  At home that afternoon, I plonked down, resting my forehead on the dining table.

  ‘Fruit-and-nut slice?’ Dad set down a plate of delicious-looking sweets.

  I straightened immediately. ‘Yes, please!’

  ‘Yay!’ cheered Max, ditching his blocks and bolting for his highchair.

  If there’s one thing that will make my day much, much better, it’s one of Dad’s slices. His baking had improved 200 per cent since he’d left his old job. His choice of afternoon tea snack used to be Vegemite crackers, but recently he’d really stepped things up. Even Max agreed, and that was saying something, coming from someone whose diet primarily consisted of cheese sandwiches and bananas.

  We were halfway through afternoon tea when a sharp rapping came from the front door. Dad hopped up.

  ‘Hello there, Joe!’ he said brightly. ‘Good to see you!’

  Joe? Oh no. My stomach knotted. Could he have noticed the missing roses?

  Nah, I thought to myself, taking an extra-large bite of slice. They were the littlest roses on the smallest bush – they weren’t very noticeable.

  But when I overheard Joe’s gruff voice, and noticed Dad’s getting louder, I tiptoed out to the hallway to check. Joe’s face was as red as a beetroot.

  ‘That girl,’ he huffed, pointing at me. ‘She – she stole my prize roses from my miniature rose bush.’

  My chest tightened. Prize roses? No way . . .

  ‘Edie? Stole your roses?’ Dad’s brow furrowed. ‘That can’t be right.’

  ‘Yes she did – I saw her with my own eyes!’ Joe glared at me, hands on hips. ‘And I was going to enter them in a flower show next week!’

  Dad turned to me. ‘Do you know anything about this, Edie?’

  Suddenly my stomach weighed a tonne. And not because of the fruit-and-nut slice I’d just eaten.

  ‘I can explain.’ I raced to my backpack and grabbed my Antarctic Animals lunch box. From what I could tell, Joe was a pretty great gardener – perhaps he’d be able to spruce them up for the competition somehow?

  ‘Here they are,’ I said, sheepishly handing over the rose heads. ‘Hopefully you can still enter them in the show . . .’

  But Joe was not impressed with my suggestion. ‘Is that some kind of joke?’ he spluttered. ‘Of course I can’t enter those in the show.’

  Even Dad was looking at the roses like they were diseased.


  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘I just, well, borrowed them, I guess. I thought you wouldn’t mind if I took a few. You had plenty there . . .’

  He shook his head. ‘I did have plenty,’ he said. ‘You took all my miniature lilacs. And it only flowers once every three years!’

  I gulped. All the roses – had I really? I’d been so focused on creating the best bouquet, I hadn’t thought about what I was doing.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again, blinking back tears. ‘I didn’t realise you were going to enter them in a flower show. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have taken them.’

  ‘She didn’t mean any harm,’ Dad said, gently putting his arm around my shoulders.

  Joe turned to Dad, fixing him with a steely gaze.

  ‘Yes, well – I can’t solely blame her. It’s you who’ve brought up your daughter to be a careless thief.’

  Dad’s face went just as red as Joe’s. The tears that had been prickling the backs of my eyes quickly dried as a thought struck me.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, my hands on my hips, ‘according to the site plan, your eastern garden bed encroaches on our land by fifty centimetres. So the rose bush is most likely located right on the boundary.’

  Joe gaped at me.

  ‘Therefore,’ I continued, ‘not only were half of those purple roses ours, but half of all the roses on all the bushes are technically ours too.’

  ‘What?’ Joe looked back and forth from Dad to me, his mouth ajar. ‘What rubbish! That can’t be true!’

  ‘You know,’ said Dad, slowly stroking his chin, ‘she’s right. Our real estate agent mentioned it when we bought the place.’

  ‘So, should we call it even then?’ I cocked my head to the side – the way Mum does when she’s about to win a disagreement with Dad.

  Joe huffed and puffed but eventually backed down the steps with a shake of his fist and a ‘Well, don’t do it again!’

  Dad exhaled as he closed the door behind him. He turned to me, his eyes wide. ‘How did you remember that? I’d totally forgotten!’