CHAPTER NINE
I quickly made my way down the stairs and through the courtyard to the oval where my group of friends usually sat. We had a pretty good position at the far end of the oval under a gum tree. This provided us with a canopy of much needed shade during summer. In winter we migrated into the middle of the oval to absorb sunlight. Our inconspicuous lunch position had the added advantage that no other groups wanted it, so we didn't have the pressure of rushing to reserve our place each lunch time.
As I reached the edge of the oval, a gust of wind sent my hair whipping across my face. I grabbed it into a bunch at the base of my neck. It was just typical that the wind chose to mess up my hair at the very moment I was passing Carly's group, and on the day I had crossed her.
I avoided eye contact with her group as I passed, keeping my gaze fixed determinedly ahead. At the end of last year, Carly's group of girls had started sitting with the year-eleven boys who hung out at the seats on the senior lawn. This merging of groups had caused an outcry amongst some of the year-eleven girls. They were not impressed by the presumption of Carly's friends, who were helping themselves to senior privileges (like the senior seats and boys) when they were clearly not seniors.
A flirtatious laugh rang out from their direction. It was followed by the unmistakable voice of Hannah, one of Carly's best friends.
'Tom, you are so bad! It's not Fiona's fault her hair is so gross right now!'
At the mention of my name, my eyes flicked in annoyance towards the group. Hannah was sitting sideways on the seat with her shoes off and her stumpy legs resting in Tom's lap. Tom was soaking up the attention. He was a large boy with dark hair and a goofy smile that didn't seem to match his almost overgrown stature. He jumped up off the seat, forcing Hannah to move her legs out of his lap.
'Hey, I just want you to know I didn't say that!' he yelled over to me, waving his arms to catch my attention. Embarrassingly, he now had the attention of several of the other groups of seniors sitting on the lawn, who were staring from him to me. I started, surprised that Tom was defending me. My surprise lasted for only a second; I quickly realised it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Tom getting a chance to banter with Hannah.
'Hannah's a dirty liar,' he continued, punctuating the word 'liar' by giving Hannah a playful shove, which she responded to with a delighted squeal. Hannah's stocky body barely moved from Tom's jostling, but she expertly made sure that her long hair, which had been bleached to the same bottle-blonde tone as Carly's, flicked invitingly in his face.
Ignoring them, I walked over to my group. My friends Jason and Matt had finished eating and were lying on their backs with their heads resting on their backpacks. Jason, who was taller than most guys in our year, almost looked short lying next to Matt's long, gangly frame. Jason had filled out over summer and was looking significantly less boyish than before, although I doubted that he'd also outgrown his juvenile personality over the break. He had clearly not had a haircut since last term, since his curly black hair was in its usual messy, long style. In contrast, Matt was as skinny as ever, and if he didn't stop growing he would have to duck to get inside the classrooms. Matt's short, straight black hair was trimmed neatly as always. I suspected his would be as untamed as Jason's if his mum didn't keep such a close eye on it.
The other three members of my group, Brooke, Megan, and Lara, were sitting with their heads close together, obviously deep in conversation. They made a cute set: Brooke with her slim, childlike body, brown eyes and naturally platinum blonde hair, Megan with her more motherly, well developed frame, soft light-brown bob, and well meaning gold-flecked hazel eyes, and Lara whose curly ringlets were bouncing down her athletic back, betraying the energy of her personality.
'Man, you're wrong. Mrs Murphy could take down Mr Yates any day,' Jason drawled lazily to Matt, one hand shielding his dark brown eyes from the shafts of sunlight that pierced through the tree canopy. 'Have you seen her nails? Plus, if he tried to hit her, his hand would slide right off from the sweat before she felt any impact,' he continued.
Matt laughed. 'Okay, man. I'll pay that. But Mr Yates is built. It doesn't matter what sick, fem-powers Mrs Murphy's got, Mr Yates would dominate.'
I threw my bag down on the ground and sat down next to Matt.
'I was kind of hoping you guys would have lost your obsession with teacher battles over the summer, but I was obviously wrong,' I sighed as I reached into my bag for my lunch box.
Jason sat up.
'Oh, hey, Fiona. Well, you know, we would be over it if Matt would just admit that Mrs Murphy would be the supreme fighting machine.' Jason shook his way-too-long hair away from his face as he spoke. No matter how many times Megan and I told him he needed a haircut, he wouldn't listen. He claimed that if we cut his hair, we cut his soul. It seemed like a fair sacrifice to me.
Matt sat up and turned to me.
'Tell him, Fiona. Tell him that Mr Yates would dominate,' he implored me. 'He always listens to you.' He threw up his long, skinny arms in exaggerated exasperation and rolled his eyes.
I rolled my eyes back. 'Ha! Jason never listens to me!' Strangely, Jason looked momentarily hurt by my comment. I ignored him and continued, 'Now can we not have this conversation for the rest of the year?'
Sometimes having boys in our group can be really annoying—especially when they rehash the same immature conversations day after day. We hadn't always been a mixed group. It had started out in year seven with just Megan, Lara, Brooke and me. Megan had been friends with Jason for years, as their families were close friends. And Matt was Jason's best friend. So Megan was always hanging out with Jason, Jason was always hanging out with Matt, and we were always hanging out with Megan—which meant that at some point in year eight, probably around the time when Jason and Matt stopped playing their self-invented (and ill-fated) blind-folded fence-jumping game, Jason and Matt joined our group. They were like brothers to us.
'Let's talk about the pretty boy who came to visit you in maths today,' Matt suggested, causing me to fluster in embarrassment.
'You know about that?' I asked sheepishly.
Lara's curly brown head jerked up from her whispered conversation with Megan and Brooke.
'Fiona, everyone knows about that.'
I looked around the group. Everyone was staring back at me, eyes wide with curiosity. Even Jason wasn't smiling for once. In fact, he looked disappointed, as if I'd let him down. I felt a strange stab of guilt, even though I had nothing to feel bad about.
I sighed.
'Fine. Look, his name is Shane, and he's one of Brett's friends. He came around for dinner last night—'
Matt cut in.
'Dinner? Is that what they're calling it these days?' He looked at Jason, pleased with himself for his joke.
'Nice one, man.' Jason paid the joke with a half-hearted nod and bro-fist, but without his usual uncontrolled laugh. He must have got up on the wrong side of the bed today.
'Hey, Matt,' Megan said. 'Shut up. You're embarrassing her.' She turned towards me and continued in a gentle voice.
'So, Fiona, what, did you eat last night, Shane's tonsils?' Megan burst out laughing, her bobbed hair shaking in glee at her own cleverness. I shook my head in annoyance.
'Listen, okay?' I pleaded, frustrated. 'He's just an arrogant idiot. I don't want to have anything to do with him. I don't even know why Brett is friends with him. He's a moron.'
'What I don't understand,' Lara said, 'is what he was doing outside our maths class. I mean, he doesn't even go to our school.'
'Well I can tell you what he wasn't here for,' Megan replied gleefully. 'He obviously wasn't here to visit Carly!'
Lara laughed. 'The look on her face was priceless!'
I felt a jolt of dread in my stomach. I had a strange feeling of foreboding that Carly was going to get me back for that. Not that it was my fault. It's not like I can control what Shane does.
'Anyway, since when did you steal Carly's boys?' Brooke asked with a mixture of
admiration and accusation.
'I don't!' I pleaded, embarrassed. 'I'm telling you, I don't know what that was about. What can I do to make you guys believe that I'm just as confused as you are?'
Brooke and Megan exchanged loaded glances. Brooke nodded to Megan encouragingly, then Megan said, 'Well now that you mention it, there is something you could do for us.'
Brooke giggled nervously. I looked at them suspiciously. I didn't like it when Megan and Brooke plotted together. It could only lead to trouble.
'What?' I replied slowly, looking from one to the other. Brooke gave me a hopeful smile, before Megan continued.
'Well, you know that Carly is having a pool party this weekend…'
'Yeah. So?' I replied in the same suspicious voice, although inside I was fuming with indignation. Yeah, I knew about the party, but only because my ghost twin sister had told me. How come everyone else seemed to know about this party before I did?
'Well, we really want to go, and we'd…' Megan paused in apparent fear and looked at Brooke for reassurance. Brooke's blonde head nodded encouragingly.
'We'd like you to get us an invite,' Megan finished determinedly. Megan and Brooke both looked at me, flinching in anticipation.
Wow, I must be really scary sometimes. Maybe I need to work on being less angry and more approachable. Luckily, I didn't feel the need to control my anger in response to their request. It was too hilarious.
I laughed, 'How on earth would I get us an invite to Carly's party? She hates me!' I shook my head as I continued to be amused by the idea. Megan and Brooke must have gone crazy over summer. Okay, Brooke is kind of ditzy and sometimes isn't really tuned into reality, but Megan—well she's normally the most grounded one of us all.
Suddenly I stopped laughing. No one else seemed to be finding it funny. In fact, Lara, Jason and Matt were looking at me with weird expressions on their faces.
'What?' They were starting to make me nervous now.
'You're so blind sometimes, Fiona!' Lara said in exasperation.
Surprised, I burst out, 'But she does hate me! I'd be the last person who could get us an invite!'
Jason snorted. Matt rolled his eyes (making him look even more uncoordinated than usual).
'We know she hates you, but you can still get us an invite,' Jason said.
Now I was really confused. What did they want me to do? Break into her house and steal them an invite? Dress them up in disguise so they could sneak into the party? Both things I could do quite well, thanks to my extensive experience helping ghosts fulfil their last earthly wishes. But my friends had no idea of my covert skills.
'Hello? You do remember that you're related to someone called Brett, don't you?' Lara asked, incredulously.
Enlightenment suddenly hit me.
'Let me get this straight, you want me to use my brother as a bargaining chip to get us in to Carly's party?' I asked.
'There you go. You're not as slow as you look,' Jason joked whilst patronisingly ruffling my hair. Annoyed, I batted his hand away. This was not a good hair day for me, I thought, as I glared through the mane that was now messily falling over my eyes.
'Why do you guys want to go anyway? We're not friends with any of Carly's friends. They're just going to ignore us.' I scraped my hair up into a loose pony tail with the spare hair tie I kept on my wrist. There was no point trying to fix it properly now. It was beyond repair. 'Especially you, Megan,' I continued. 'You hate Carly and her cronies!'
'Correction. She doesn't hate all of Carly's cronies, just the female ones,' Jason cut in.
Megan blushed. It totally didn't fit in with her usual outspokenness. She quickly recovered from her embarrassment though to retaliate at Jason.
'Oh, yeah? Well, why do you want to go, huh?'
'Shut up, Megan!' Jason protested in a panicked voice. For once, Megan didn't push it. I wondered why Jason was so desperate to go to the party.
I looked at Matt. He was being unusually quiet. He would normally never miss an opportunity to attack when he saw weakness, but he was staring wistfully over at Carly's group, obviously thinking about his reasons for wanting to go to the party. Hannah had finished fake-wrestling with Tom and was now lying on the seat with her head in his lap. The girl was such a flirt. For some reason, that didn't seem to stop Matt from having an embarrassing crush on her. It was quite pitiful really. Hannah was openly rude to his face, yet he couldn't stop drooling whenever she walked past.
I turned back to the others. 'I still haven't heard a good reason I should call on one of my precious sibling favours.'
'I have a good reason. It's a really cool party and everyone else is going. We'll be total losers if we're the only ones in the year who don't go! Can't we do normal things for once?' Brooke's voice became high-pitched in frustration as she finished her speech. Her brown eyes implored me intensely. I avoided looking at her while I thought about it.
It was hardly a good reason. Watching Carly's bimbo friends getting drunk was not my idea of a fun Saturday night; and I doubted we were the only ones not going, since Carly's group existed for the sole purpose of excluding people. I was willing to bet that the only people Carly had invited were those she saw as equal or above her in social status—which ruled out everyone in our year outside of Carly's group, and included any guys who were both hot and older than us. It sounded snobby and exclusive.
However, clearly Brooke thought that she wasn't normal if she didn't attend such a discriminative, albeit, cool party. I knew that Brooke beat herself up about being a high school disappointment, having never had a boyfriend, been kissed, or been to a drunken house party. She didn't seem to realise that high school sucked for all of us, not just her. It wasn't exactly my dream to be a boyfriend-less, maths-failing, ghost-talking, Carly target either; but going to Carly's party and giving her yet another opportunity to put us down wasn't going to change that. Unfortunately it seemed almost unanimous: everyone in our group wanted to go. I did not want to be blamed for ruining my friends' chances to move up the high school social hierarchy.
I sighed in submission. 'Okay, okay,' I said grudgingly, 'but just so you know, Carly's friends do not define normal. It will be a freak show.'
'Yeah,' Matt agreed sarcastically, 'if looking gorgeous all the time makes you a freak!'
Three handfuls of grass flew simultaneously at Matt's head.