Right then, Unit Headquarters wasn’t sleeping. It was crawling with people and noise. I’d never seen it look like that before. Officers coming and going, patrol cars screaming up to the entrance and collecting official people in uniforms and then taking off again, helicopters and drones watching overhead.
Z and I put our heads down and walked as fast as we could.
CHAPTER 5
We stood outside the school.
‘Told you I knew a detour,’ Z said.
I tried to smile, tried to say something funny, but my stomach had twisted itself into knots. Even on a relatively normal day it was hard for me to walk through those doors and into that place. I had stood on that exact spot, the patch of grass between freedom and hell, and stared at the building so many times before. It was always the same – that feeling like you want to throw up and cry and run away all mixed into one huge ball of anxiety. I hated it – the feeling and the place.
‘You OK?’ Z said.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Liar,’ Z smiled. Number Five on the list of things-I-learned-about-Z was the fact that he actually noticed stuff.
It was quiet. Everyone was already in class. Our school did not tolerate tardiness (their words, not mine) and there would be Consequences. There always were. Like my weekly chats with Beth.
‘Santee!’ And there she was. Beth. She stood at the entrance gesturing at me to Get Inside Now.
‘Beth! Imagine seeing you here,’ I said, as if I was one of her friends at brunch. I imagined Beth did things like brunch.
She crossed her arms, unimpressed. Beth never laughed at my jokes. But Z did. It made me smile like an idiot and forget, just for a moment, the dread I’d been feeling.
We slowly headed towards the main doors. His hand brushed mine as we walked but I didn’t look at him to see if he did it on purpose. Beth sighed and shook her head like, What am I going to do with you. ‘My office. Now,’ she said. ‘And Zac – I’ll catch up with you later.’
She click-clacked in her heels through the doors and we followed.
‘You know Beth?’ I said.
‘Yeah. We chat,’ he said. ‘Every week.’
‘Why?’ I asked quietly.
‘Gotta get my meds somehow, don’t I?’ he grinned.
Beth had tried to make her office warm and welcoming but the chairs were hard and even on a hot day the room was kinda freezing. She’d hung pictures on the walls. Landscapes of faraway places. Forests and waterfalls and beautiful sunsets. I think it was supposed to make you feel calm but it just made me worry that I would never get to see a place like that in real life. Ever.
‘Want to tell me why you were so late this morning?’ She sat in front of me with her notepad and pen, ready to record my answer. She wrote everything down. All the things I said, and didn’t say, were recorded and filed away.
‘Blockade,’ I said.
Beth scribbled some notes, then stopped and stared at me. Full-on eye contact. Silence. That’s what Beth did. It was her tactic: creating awkward silences so I’d talk and fill the gaps with too much information. But I was used to it by now and said nothing.
‘And?’ Beth finally spoke. It felt like I’d won something. Point to me. ‘How did you get through it?’
‘Um. The bus wouldn’t go any further so we had to walk around it,’ I said.
She raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow and made a note. ‘And …’ she prompted. But I wasn’t playing. ‘Santee,’ she said sweetly, ‘remember what we agreed? Open communication.’
I hadn’t agreed to anything. The open communication thing was just another one of Beth’s theories about me. According to her, if I practised more open communication I would experience fewer outbursts. She had given me a pad of paper and a pencil and told me to write down everything I thought. Everything. Get it out, she kept saying, open communication. Instead, I drew stick figures dying elaborate deaths – jumping off a cliff to the pointy rocks below, or being eaten by a shark or flattened by a train. That kinda thing.
She didn’t make me use the pad anymore. But she stuck with her theory.
‘OK then,’ she continued, ‘tell me about Zac.’
‘Z,’ I corrected her.
‘Yes, sorry, my mistake,’ she said. ‘So, you two are friends now? Yes? Santee and Z?’
I smiled in spite of myself; a tiny smile, but enough for Beth to notice and scribble something in her notepad.
Crap, I thought. Point to Beth.
The class was quiet, all heads down and writing furiously. I showed Mr Lo the blue slip that meant I was allowed to be late and there was nothing he could say. He grunted and shoved a paper into my hand. A maths test. Of course. Mr Lo was such a fan of the surprise test it became more of a surprise if we didn’t have one.
I sat at the back of the class and stared at the page of numbers. Once, I would have been able to hide in the Art Room when I felt like this. Ms Francis, with her crazy big earrings, would always let me hang around. She got it. Or she used to. There were no art classes anymore. And no more Art Room, with all its colour and mess. It had been turned into just another dull classroom.
I watched the rest of the class working through the test, punching numbers into their calculators, looking as if they knew exactly what to do. I rummaged through my backpack for my things.
‘Shhh,’ Tash said loudly.
The irony wasn’t lost on me but still I said sorry and she rolled her eyes at me.
‘Sorry,’ I said again.
‘Santee!’ Mr Lo snapped.
I put my head down and pretended to be working on a solution. The numbers and symbols danced on the page and I couldn’t hold them in place long enough to figure out what to do with them, so I stopped trying and started drawing instead. My lines took shape and became Z’s eyes. What the hell? What was wrong with me? I scribbled over them.
Class dragged on and on. My head ached. The pain pulsated right behind my eyes. I squeezed them shut. Maybe Mr Lo would let me get a drink. I raised my hand, but he was reading. Or asleep. I couldn’t tell.
‘Sir?’ I said.
‘Shut up,’ Tash hissed.
I was about to tell her where to go when the siren started. Lockdown. Lockdown. Lockdown. The familiar voice of the school’s automated security system started up. The sirens whirred. I winced. This was not helping my headache.
Mr Lo sighed, slowly pushed back his chair and stood. ‘All right, folks,’ he said. ‘Let’s do this.’
The lockdown drills weren’t the most annoying thing about school but they were definitely in the top five. We could expect to go through the whole hide-under-your-desk bullshit at least twice a week. More if there had been a recent Threat situation.
Mr Lo locked the door, turned off the lights and shut the blinds while the rest of us struggled to get under our desks. I never fit properly – my legs stuck out at weird angles, my neck bent weirdly. It was stupid and uncomfortable. We were all way too big for this kind of thing. There was a thump. Someone said, Shit. Someone else giggled. It happened every time.
‘Quiet,’ Mr Lo shouted.
But nobody was quiet. It was like the siren flicked a switch that turned everyone into idiots.
‘Maybe it’s the real thing this time,’ someone joked.
‘Hope not,’ Mr Lo said from beneath his desk. ‘Cos you’d all be dead by now.’ That made the class shut up. For a second. At least.
I couldn’t find Z. I wasn’t expecting him to be my new best friend but stupid Beth with her stupid theories had made me believe, just for a second, that I might at least have someone to hang out with during lunch. But I didn’t. I gave up searching for him and headed towards the girls’ bathroom. I didn’t feel like drawing, not now, and thought I’d just spend lunch in a cubicle. It was pathetic but there were some days when it was easier to stay out of everyone’s way.
I pushed through the students in the hallway. They hung out in their groups, talking and laughing, bitching and gossiping. Whatever.
I was one of them once. It was such a long time ago that I could hardly remember that version of myself: the Santee who had friends, and never had to hide in the toilets at lunchtime.
‘Santee!’ Tash’s voice sang out across the hall.
She was standing with her army of friends right near the bathroom. I put my head down and pretended not to notice everyone watching as I turned and headed in the opposite direction.
‘Eating lunch in the toilet again, Santee?’ she called out.
I ignored her and kept walking. There were other bathrooms. I didn’t need Tash’s bullshit. Not that day. Not any day.
‘Your dad still in jail?’ Tash shouted.
I froze. The hallway suddenly went very quiet.
‘Leave me alone,’ I said. I tried to sound calm but my voice wobbled. I had to get out of there.
‘We all know your dad is a Threat,’ she said. ‘Or was a Threat. Have they killed him yet?’
The walls closed in on me. Everyone was watching, listening, waiting for me to lose my shit. I turned to face her. Tash crossed her arms and stood there smirking, daring me to do something I’d regret. I clenched my fists. My blood boiled and bubbled and my head pounded.
‘You can’t be too careful with Threats,’ Tash said. ‘Better safe than sorry.’
I punched the closest locker. Bang. Someone cheered. Wooohoo. I’d given them what they’d wanted. Tash’s friends fussed around her as if she was the victim.
‘Santee,’ she said like she was speaking to a two-year-old. ‘Calm down.’
My fingernails cut into the palms of my hands. I took a deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth, like Beth had taught me. I tried to imagine white clouds and a blue sky but it was hard to get my thoughts together under the flickering fluorescent lights. All I could think was how much I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to punch her and keep on punching and never stop.
‘She’s probably a Threat, too,’ Tash told the crowd. ‘Like father, like daughter, you know?’
I took a step towards her.
The hallway got smaller.
The crowd got louder.
They yelled and cheered. I couldn’t hear what they were saying; it was just noise, like a huge waterfall rushing through my brain. My jaw tightened. My whole body tensed up. Everything fizzed like static. I took another step.
And then he was there. Just like that, standing in front of me, holding out a sandwich. ‘Wanna go halves in this?’ Z said as if there was no-one else around.
What the hell was with this guy? I gestured at what was happening, at what he’d walked into.
‘Hey, Riley,’ he said, and waved to someone across the hall. The guy waved back awkwardly. ‘So,’ he said, returning to me, ‘sandwich?’
I looked around. Suddenly no-one was watching me or laughing or cheering on my craziness. They had all gone back to their own groups and conversations. Tash’s friends had crowded around her as if they were protecting her. They were all hugging and whispering and shooting me worried glances. But that was it. It was like Z had magically diffused the whole situation with his stupid sandwich. Just like that. The static lifted and I came back to earth.
My hand was bleeding. Just a little. I’d taken some skin off the knuckles with my locker punch. Idiot. I shoved my hands into my pockets and hoped Z hadn’t noticed.
‘Be careful, Z,’ Tash said in her singsong voice as she and her friends walked past us. ‘She is so weird.’
‘I like weird,’ Z said, and shrugged.
I didn’t know if that was a compliment but it made me smile. I smiled even more when I noticed a red blush start to creep up Tash’s neck.
‘Tash?’ I said in the same singsong voice she’d used on me.
She stopped. Her friends stared me down. But Tash wouldn’t look at me. She kept her eyes down, and I could see that her face had turned bright red, like her neck. I knew it made her self-conscious. Once, we would have laughed about it and all of us would have tried to turn her extra-red.
They’d been my friends once, too. Even when the Unit had arrived on our streets and Curfew had been put in place, everything else stayed pretty much the same. We still had birthday parties and hung out after school and had sleepovers. Until things started to change. My friends started saying, No, sorry, we’re not allowed, we can’t come to your place. It’s dangerous, Tash had said. And I didn’t understand. Cos my place was just where I lived. It was my home. Even if it was the place where they’d found the Threats. Even if it was the wrong side.
Tash had been the last of my friends to stop visiting.
All the mean, smart-arse comments I’d been preparing vanished. I took a deep breath.
‘My dad – my parents, Astrid, me – all of us. We really liked you,’ I said. ‘You were like part of the family.’
Something crossed Tash’s face. An expression I couldn’t quite place. Before I had a chance to work it out she had turned and stormed out of the hallway, followed closely by her friends.
I’d finally said something.
CHAPTER 6
We sat at the edge of the school oval. The younger kids were running around and attacking each other with sticks. Some of the bigger guys were trying to play a serious game of soccer and yelled at them to piss off. I picked the crust off the sandwich and rolled it into tiny crumbs.
‘You OK?’ Z said.
‘Yeah,’ I lied and took a bite of the sandwich as if to prove it. But my eyes filled up with tears. I blinked them away. It was always like that. I could hold all that stuff inside until someone was nice to me, and then it would all spill out. Anyway, that was something else I learned about Z: Number Six – he was generous.
And it was because he was kind and generous, and I was all emotional, that I told him about my dad. I never talked to anyone about Dad.
I told him there had been four of us: me, Astrid, Mum and Dad. I told him how Mum and Dad had been artists. That Mum would come home with paint under her nails and in her flyaway hair and how finding it there made her laugh. I told him how Dad would always stay up late, hunched over his glowing computer screen, and I’d always try to stay up as late as him but I never could. In the morning, Dad would drink black coffee and I’d always want some and he’d say, Just a sip, and I hated it but pretended to love it because he did. Then one night, real late, the door crashed open and the Unit stormed in and Mum screamed this scream that didn’t sound like her at all and Dad kept saying, It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right, over and over and there was yelling and pushing and they grabbed Dad and dragged him away and I wanted to run after him but Astrid held my hand really, really tightly and then they were gone and it was quiet.
Empty.
Dad never came back and Mum never talked about it.
That was it.
‘And Tash?’ Z said.
‘She used to be my friend, but after that, yeah …’ I shrugged like it was no big deal even though it was. She’d probably been my best friend (if you believe in that stuff) and then, just like that, she wasn’t.
Z pulled up bits of grass and tore them into tiny pieces. ‘That’s shit,’ he said.
‘Who needs friends?’ I tried to joke. ‘Gives me more time for my interesting drawings.’
He laughed loudly, like he didn’t care who heard him or what they thought. I liked that. ‘Hang on,’ he said and went through his bag as if he had suddenly remembered something. He pulled out a sketchpad and, without a word, handed it to me. I flipped through the pages. They were filled with drawings. Careful, delicate pencil work that seemed to zoom right in on people; a hand with bitten-down nails, the creases in an old man’s forehead, the wrinkled toes of a baby. He was good. Really good. I looked back at him but his head was down, concentrating on ripping up the grass.
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I’m working on it,’ he said, and showed me a page where he thought he’d messed something up and another where the proportions were, in his opinion, all wrong, even though it looked perf
ect to me. ‘There’s this spot I like to draw and I thought maybe you’d like, I dunno, go with me today? After school? Hang out?’ he said.
I could feel the heat rise up in me and hoped I wouldn’t turn red like Tash. ‘Sure,’ I said, like it wasn’t a big deal. Except it was. For me.
I hadn’t forgotten I was grounded but I tried to work around it; I told myself Mum would understand, that she’d be happy to know I had a friend. I mean, in our chat Beth had even said this was a good development and friendship enhances emotional wellbeing and surely Mum wouldn’t argue with that? But still, I planned to get home way before her shift ended. Then she would never have to know. That seemed to be the best solution. Because I really wanted to go. I liked him, and I’d never liked anyone before. Not that way. So I made myself believe it would be OK.
Z was standing out the front of the school. I watched him as I headed out the main doors. Everyone was stopping and talking to him as they left for the day. He was all, See ya tomorrow buddy, and, Have a good one, and laughing and joking around. Z, the new kid, had way more friends than I’d ever had and I’d been at that school since forever. He was just better at that stuff than me, I suppose. Plus, it probably helped that rumours of being a Threat weren’t constantly swirling around him.
‘Hey!’ he broke into a smile when he saw me, and his smile made me smile, and I couldn’t get that smile off my face.
We started walking. The blockade had cleared and things seemed to be back to normal.
‘So, where are we going?’ I said.
‘Just gonna pick up my car and then we’ll head to the spot,’ he said.
His car? That guilty feeling lurched in my stomach. I tried to ignore it and smiled at Z and said cool or something pathetic like that. But it wasn’t cool. I really wanted to go, but I was freaking out. If Mum ever found out I’d been in a car with a boy who may or may not actually have a licence … I tried to push her disappointed face out of my mind. Mum would never need to know about the car, I told myself. It would be fine.
Everywhere Everything Everyone Page 4
