“Evolution, Rose,” she answered. “Their bodies change over time. They don’t need to fly to get food, or to move to warmer climates, so they don’t.”
Miss Cantrell went back to the city at the end of Year 7. I guess she couldn’t stand this place, either. “It’s not that, Rose,” she said, packing up her things. “I’ve loved it here. It’s time to move on, that’s all. Who knows—maybe I’ll come back someday.” I picked up the book on the cormorants and traced the black lines of their wings. “You keep that,” she said, and clipped her bag shut.
I started watching sunrises on my own after she left. I rode to the freeway and looked for her old yellow Holden every Sunday. I hoped every time I saw a yellow car coming toward me and I stopped hoping every time it flew past. I kept going long after I knew she wasn’t coming back, like I’ve watched the colors explode in the sky long after I knew they weren’t real. Just reflections of light.
I’d stopped hoping that things would change for me—until this year. Mrs. Wesson said I should try out for a scholarship in the city. “It’s at a great school for science, Rose. You’d love it,” she told me in June. If I won the scholarship, I could start in Year 11, next year.
“I don’t think Mum and Dad would let me,” I said. I knew they wouldn’t. I’d asked them last year if I could apply for an exchange to Italy. “You’re a bit young, Rosie,” Mum said. She didn’t even stop what she was doing to look at the flyer. She kept right on slicing carrots into sticks that looked the same.
“Why don’t you check?” Mrs. Wesson asked. “The exam is in a month. You’d have to sit for it at the school. I could drive you if they sign a permission form.” She pulled one out of her drawer and passed it to me along with the application to sit the exam. “You’re ready, Rose. You’re one of my brightest students.”
Mrs. Wesson called me into her office a week after she’d given me the form. The walls were lined with fake wood. The windows were nailed shut to stop kids from stealing stuff. Her car keys sat in a glass dish on the desk. How could she understand what it was like? She could get up and drive out of here tomorrow if she wanted. I handed her my application with forged signatures. “You don’t need to drive me.”
On the day of the exam, Dave and Luke thought I was home sick. Mum and Dad thought I was at school. I took a bus and then a train, and as soon as I saw that place, saw the girls in their uniforms and the huge library and the computer rooms, I knew I belonged there. The desks weren’t graffitied with “Fuck you.” The only drawings of anatomy were hanging on the wall. I sat at the station that afternoon feeding small birds, dreaming that I lived in the city. I let three trains leave before I took one home.
I found out for sure that I was accepted last month. Mrs. Wesson waved the results and her laughter ribboned out. “Your parents will be so proud.” It must have been my face that made her voice fade to a thread. “Rose, how did you get there?” she asked. Her hand was already on the phone. “Don’t look away. Did you forge their signatures?”
“You don’t know them,” I said, staring out the window at the tired trees. She stared with me. “I grew up in this town, too,” she said. “Let me talk to them. The interview’s in the fifth week of the holidays. I’ll be gone for the start of summer, but I can help you tell them before I leave.”
“If you do that, then it’s over. I have to explain.”
I went to the caravan park after school. “What would you think of me moving to the city next year if I could get a scholarship?”
“I’d think you’re too young,” Mum said. “Where would you live?”
“Maybe I could do some sort of exchange thing or share a flat with someone. I’ll be Year Eleven.”
“You’ve been in more trouble this year than ever, Rosie.”
“Because of Luke.”
“Plenty of Lukes in the city. Plenty worse than him.”
I stared at the stack of cleaning products piled in the corner of her office while her voice ran on forever around me. “You’ll be gone soon enough. Two years. Have a little patience.”
I swung my bag and hit that stack and I didn’t stop to pick it up. Fuck you, I thought as she called after me. I raced across paddocks to the freeway. I yelled and threw rocks and dreamed of ways I could take that scholarship without her help. I didn’t stop throwing till I heard my name. “Rose.”
“Constable Ryan.”
He took me back to the caravan park and gave Mum a warning.
“I should let you go to the city, that’s exactly what I should do,” she said after he’d gone, slamming her stack of cleaning products back into place. “It won’t be a warning next time. I’ll be visiting you in prison. Looking for f—” Her hands strangled the air. “For lawyers.”
“Fucking lawyers, Mum. That’s what you mean. And as if you’d help me escape.”
“With that mouth they wouldn’t let you into a private school.”
I almost told her then. I almost yelled, They did let me in, because they like my mouth. But that would have ruined everything. So I shut my smart mouth and we didn’t talk till we got home. “You’re always pushing,” Mum said, and walked inside.
I thought if I knew someone in the city, and if I stayed out of trouble, maybe, maybe Mum might change her mind. It was a long shot, but before school finished I asked at the office if they had a number where I could reach Miss Cantrell.
They hadn’t heard from her since she left, either. She hadn’t paid a visit since she taught me science in Year 7. If she hasn’t come back to town by now, she never will. It doesn’t take a scholarship winner to work that one out. No one’s coming to save me from this place. That’s why I have to save myself, whatever it takes.
“I wonder how Davie Robbie’s doing,” Mum says, and it’s her way of telling me things aren’t all bad. She makes a good point. I might be headed to a place where my gran won’t be standing at the door. I might be facing a summer full of nothing to do and no friends to do it with. But at least the scenery in that country town is not entirely bad. If Dave Robbie’s a song, he’s written in major chords.
He’s got this way of smiling that makes me want to throw him down and kiss him. And yeah, I know that any guy I have to throw down to kiss probably isn’t Mr. Right. Still. I can dream.
Mum’s always hinting I should ask him out, but when a girl finds talking as hard as I do and singing in public even harder, that leaves mime and interpretative dance. Don’t get me wrong. I’d be great at both those things, but I don’t think Dave’s all that into the arts.
He does talk to me more than the other kids in town, though. His best friends, Rose and Luke, act like I’m invisible half the time and the other half they act like I’m that mysterious thing that messes with their TV reception. Rose Butler could be Louise Spatula’s slightly less evil twin. Every time we arrive in town she’s sitting on the hill like a bad omen. “Maybe she’s lonely,” Mum says. Maybe. She isn’t lonely for me.
She’d avoid me completely, only Grandpa lives at the back of the shop and she lives next to it. Plus, our milk bar is one of only two places to eat at lunchtime. We sell all the usual stuff, like groceries and papers, but Grandpa also makes the best takeaway food in town. There’s a section out the front where he has plastic chairs and tables. He never bothers to take the furniture inside, so sometimes Rose and Luke and Dave haunt the front of the shop till they’re shadows.
Last summer Dave came in and ordered chips for the three of them while Luke and Rose waited outside. He smiled and that was more than enough reason to double their serves and not charge extra. I even gave them some little packets of tomato sauce for free.
I put the food on the table and Rose ignored me completely and I thought, Shit, country kids are even more hard-core than the ones in the city. Who doesn’t crack a smile when you give them free chips?
“You want something?” Rose asked.
Sure, I thought. A little gratitude. World peace. A new acoustic guitar. A bass guitar and hands that play
like Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Natalie Merchant and Gabriel Gordon’s unreleased single, “Break Your Heart,” which is proving pretty hard to find. We don’t always get what we want.
I couldn’t say that, though. Not with Luke and Rose and Dave and some other kids from the town all staring at me. If I said that and they said something else and I didn’t have a comeback, it could get out of control. I gave them a look with a little attitude, though. Sort of like Shirley Manson, the singer from Garbage, that time she lost it onstage.
“It freaks me out how she stares and doesn’t say anything,” Rose said as I walked away.
“I bet it freaks her out how you’re a bitch sometimes, too,” Dave said.
I went inside and found a song on my iPod with a hard bass line and a whole lot of drums and I let the music rip a hole in the world, one that I could walk through and be somewhere else for a while.
I looked up from that other place and saw Dave staring through the glass. I thought: That guy is a little gratitude, world peace, a new acoustic guitar, a bass guitar and hands that play like Flea, and the single “Break Your Heart” all at once. He smiled and waved. I’m sick of staring at what I want, I thought. I’d do anything to hold it in my hands.
I’m not alone at the freeway for long this morning. “Rose,” Luke yells from the edge of the field. “Today, Rose.” He and Dave get so excited in the first week of summer holidays. It rolls out in front of them like a long sleep. It feels like a coma to me.
Luke gives me a whole lot of shit over how much I like school. He gives me a whole lot of shit over most things these days, but I don’t care. I like knowing why dark clouds crack at the end of a day hot as fever. I like knowing why rain falls. I like Mrs. Wesson.
“How come we have to read all this crap?” Luke always asks ten minutes into every science lesson.
“Because she says,” I tell him. “So shut up, I’m trying to concentrate.” He waits for a bit, then steals my pen and flicks my hair till usually I do something like walk over to the window, wind it open, and throw his books into the yard.
“I expect more from you, Rose,” Mrs. Wesson says when I do that, and I feel bad because I want to give her more. So I go back to my seat and kick Luke in the ankle and he yells so loud that more often than not I get a detention.
“You’re lucky I didn’t kick you higher,” I whisper. I don’t talk to him for the rest of the class and he feels so bad he goes up to Mrs. Wesson at the end and says, “It was me as well as Rose.” Then Dave tells her it was him, too, because if we’re stuck at school he might as well be. She sighs. “It looks like I’ve got the three of you again.”
Almost every time we’re kept in Luke tries to escape early. “Come on. She’s not looking, let’s go,” he writes on a note and slips it across the table.
“Luke Holly. That had better be a note about science,” Mrs. Wesson says, still staring at her work. There are only three of us in the room, genius. You don’t think she’d notice us gone?
Even in primary school Luke had a reputation for being the kind of kid teachers hate. He got into fights all the time. Once he gave Daniel Mooper a black eye because Daniel had asked me to be his partner in tennis. Mr. Booth was yelling that he was suspending Luke and Luke was yelling back, “What? He started it. As if he doesn’t know I’m her partner and Dave’s backup.”
Once kids get reputations like Luke’s, teachers blame them for everything. He’s had more detentions than Dave and me put together and we’ve had a fair few. The thing is in Year 9 teachers started looking for reasons to get Luke kicked out of school. A lot of students in our town leave at the end of Year 10. Some find apprenticeships or start working with their parents.
Mrs. Wesson’s been trying to convince Luke to leave for his own good. “I’m not fucking dumb,” he told her when she said he might try a trade instead of doing Year 12. She looked at him and said, “My husband’s a plumber. He’s not fucking dumb.” It’s the only time I’ve seen Luke with nothing to say. Mrs. Wesson’s on his side. She’s about the only teacher who is.
Luke’s running out of chances. He keeps doing stupid stuff, like nicking off at the aquarium excursion earlier this year. If someone other than Mrs. Wesson had noticed, he would have been sent to the principal for sure.
“Come on, Rosie,” he said as soon as we got inside, “there are at least fifty kids here. We could sneak off easy and look round the city for a bit.”
“Are you crazy? The teachers would kill us.”
“As if. They’d maybe hurt us a little. C’mon.”
“No.” I’d been looking forward to that day for ages. I wanted to see all of the things we’d been reading about in class. That was fun to me but Luke didn’t get it.
“Do whatever you like, Luke.”
“I will,” he said.
“Dickhead,” I shot back. Things are bad with your boyfriend when every conversation ends with “Do whatever you like. I will. Dickhead.”
I watched him drift to the back of our group and edge away from Mrs. Wesson. I kept hoping he wouldn’t really do it, because I knew that if he walked out that door, Dave and I would go with him.
“If Luke jumped off a cliff, you’d jump after him,” Mum always says when he gets me into trouble. She’s right, but every time I see Luke doing something stupid, the only thing I want to do is save him. He smiles and I do anything he asks.
I felt sick as I watched him that day. He was an expert at cutting. First he got real quiet, then he slouched his shoulders a bit and stuck his hands into his pockets. He dropped his head till he looked like one of the class nerds. No one even noticed him moving slowly away from our group to stand behind the kids at the baby shark and stingray pool.
“Does anyone know how the North Pacific sea star reproduces?” our guide asked.
“They rip themselves in half,” I said. “Divide into two.”
He smiled at me. “And why would they do that?”
“Maybe they couldn’t find another star to mate with,” I said. In the background Luke wiggled his fingers in the water at the tiny sharks. Or maybe the stars they had to choose from were idiots.
“Right. It’s Rose, isn’t it?” he asked, and I nodded. “It’s pretty stressful, though, tearing yourself in two. It’s better to find another star to reproduce with if they can.”
“You know, this would be a perfect place for you to do work experience,” Mrs. Wesson whispered, and I whispered back that I’d been thinking exactly the same thing.
“So why else is it better to mate with another star rather than just divide?” The guide kept firing questions as Luke moved farther away. We’d read in class last week that if they divide they end up with kids who are exact copies of them. I remembered thinking maybe that would make some of the parent stars happy. Sometimes it feels like Mum wants me to be exactly like her, stay at home and get married like she did.
“Dave,” I said, and elbowed him in the ribs. “Look.” He followed the direction of my eyes and saw Luke edging out the door.
“Is he crazy?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think he is.”
“What are we going to do?” Dave asked.
“Get expelled?”
“What’s another problem with tearing yourself in two?” the guide asked as Dave and I moved slowly toward the entrance. I couldn’t believe no one knew the answer. Tearing anything in half hurts, you idiots, doesn’t it?
Luke was waiting for us outside. He knew all along I’d follow him. I grabbed his shirt. “They’ll know you’re gone. You think they’re stupid?”
“Relax, Rose.”
“We need to go back.”
“I’m not ready yet. There’s a McDonald’s near the station.” Luke was dangerous when he got like this. I looked at my watch; they’d do a head count soon.
“Luke, c’mon.”
“Why don’t you all come on,” Mrs. Wesson said. That woman had a knack for busting the three of us. “Luke, you come with me. Rose, you and
Dave don’t leave Mr. Felder’s side for the rest of the day.”
Everyone else got free time to explore the aquarium in the afternoon. I had to shadow a teacher. “Tell me about the sharks, Rosie,” Dave said, trying to cheer me up.
“Well, you can’t tell how dangerous they are from their size. That’s all wrong. The big ones don’t always feed on meat.”
“How do you tell a dangerous one?” he asked.
“Their teeth.”
“So what, you ask them to smile?”
“If you’re stupid enough to come in close and see them smile,” I said, thinking of Luke, “then you deserve everything you get.”
Mum heard about what happened at the aquarium, because everyone hears everything in this town. “If Luke jumped off a cliff, I swear you’d jump with him,” she said again. I watched her slam cupboards shut. And I knew there wasn’t any point in asking her about work experience in the city.
“Will you miss Gran?” I ask Dad at the edge of town.
He doesn’t shift his gaze from the road ahead. “My mum was old, and it was time.” If he wasn’t driving, he’d reach for his wallet. Usually when he doesn’t know what to say, he gives me money to buy CDs. I’ve got a music collection that takes up an entire wall of my room. Bach to Veruca Salt and everything good in between.
I work after school at Old Gus’s Secondhand Record and CD Store, so I get first pick when the good stuff comes in. Gus teaches me the guitar. When he’s busy, sometimes his wife, Beth, gives me singing lessons. She’s the one who told me what software and keyboard I needed to record my own music. It took a whole lot of saving and saying things to Dad like “Let’s talk about the birds and the bees,” but I got the money.