A Little Wanting Song (2 page)

The day after the rumors started he grabbed me in the hall. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I need you to tell people the truth about sports day.” He was talking like I could save him.

I stared at his face and I knew what he felt and I said, “I wasn’t with you every minute of the day, Andrew.” He only looked confused for a second.

Later in Year 9 he became the kid who farted in class. In Year 10 he was the guy who spat when he talked. I couldn’t have stopped it, even if I’d told, and telling meant pissing off Louise and losing Dahlia.

I lost her anyway.

I walked home the long way after Jeremy’s pool party. I hoped that if I took my time, there’d be a message waiting for me when I got in the door. A year ago Dahlia would have called and said something like “In the name of science, I have to know. What’s it like to be naked in front of a guy?”

I would have said something back like “I don’t know, but in the name of romance I’m hoping it feels better than being naked in front of fifty guys.”

There was no message. For years I’ve been Dahlia’s second half. I guess things change, though, so slowly you don’t notice the chord’s different. You’re playing B7 with added D and then D drifts away and all you’re left with is B minor. That’s a pretty sad key.

So I pulled out my guitar case, cold and dimpled like the skin of an orange. I practice for hours most days, more when I’m sad. I click the clasps and peel back the lid and underneath it’s sweet. I play till the sound fills me, rich and gold and warm like the wood. It’s my voice: smooth and unscratched. I sing when no one else is there. I sing, beautiful and in tune. Pity I didn’t have my guitar with me at the pool; I could have used it for cover.

I sat there after the party, singing some tunes and thinking about how I’d treated Andrew Moshdon last year. I looked up his number in the phone book and stared at it for ages, wondering about the best thing to say to a guy after you left him for dead and didn’t bother to look back till over a year later. Nothing sounded right so I rang and played it by ear.

“Hey, Andrew. It’s Charlie,” I said, and all I got back was breathing. “Charlie Duskin.”

“I know who you are.”

“So. So you weren’t at the pool party today.”

“That’s funny, Charlie. I can hardly talk I’m laughing so hard.”

“I didn’t mean … I know you didn’t do that last year.” But there’s no good way to tell someone you believe they didn’t piss in the pool.

“I have to go.”

“You want funny,” I said before he could hang up, “try losing your bikini top in front of almost every guy in Year Ten.”

There was one beat of quiet and then he said, “I don’t wear bikinis.”

“Yeah, well, lucky you.”

And then I told him everything, about Alex and the skin disco, about the footy game and the tissues and Louise. I even sang him my song called “Fuck.” Andrew’s got a very cool laugh. I’d forgotten that.

We made up a new song together. One about Louise. Turns out more words than you think rhyme with Spatula. “Sometimes singing makes you feel pretty good,” I said before I hung up.

“You should sing it to her.”

“Yeah,” I told him, in a way that could mean a few things.

Jeremy’s party was a week ago and Dahlia hasn’t called once since then. I check my phone as we hit the freeway. Still nothing. Dad merges at the wrong speed and for a second I think it’s all over but then the cars around give us a lane to ourselves and Dad can drive any way he wants without horns blaring. The sign says we’ve got a while to go till we get there. Three hundred kilometers. The paper says it’s burning hot all over Australia today. The heat and Dad’s driving and the lack of messages on my phone make me feel like we’ve got a thousand kilometers ahead of us. At least.

This place is as quiet as a ghost town on Sunday mornings. Ever since Year 7 I’ve come to the edge of the freeway on my own to watch the cars passing. The only noises are the birds and the wind and the people coming and going. Everyone drives through on the way from one place to another. No one ever stays.

I don’t blame them. Of all the places in the world I could have been born, I got the drink and toilet stop capital of the world. Like my boyfriend, Luke, says, you got to be pissed about that. I am pissed about it. Some days I’m so pissed I throw rocks at the cars driving out because they get to leave and I don’t.

“You’ll go if you want to, Rose,” Mrs. Wesson, my Year 10
science teacher, said this year. It takes a lot of wanting to get out of a place like this, though. It takes wanting so bad it’s all you care about, all you dream about, all you breathe. Some days I think it takes more wanting than I’ve got.

The stupid thing is I should have been born somewhere else. Mum and Dad did it in the backseat of his car the night before she left on this big overseas trip she’d been planning for ages. I was on a plane to London before I was a heartbeat. I was out of here. Then she brought me back.

She waited till the beginning of this year to tell me that important piece of information. We were coming home from the driving-test place after I’d got my learner’s permit and I was going on and on about how jealous Luke and Dave would be when she blurted out, “I got pregnant in the back of a car, you know.” I nearly steered us into the path of an oncoming truck.

“Shut up, Mum.” Who wants to think about their parents having sex?

“I just don’t want you to do anything stupid, Rosie,” she said, and I turned on the windscreen wipers even though it hadn’t rained for weeks.

“I’m not planning on it.” I gripped the wheel tight. The only driving I planned on doing was the sort that got me to the city. The car filled up with quiet and I took the shortcut home.

I went to my room as soon as we got back. I didn’t want to talk about what Mum had told me, but she crept in later. She laid her head on the pillow beside me and her breath stole
the cool of the night. I kept my eyes closed and pretended to sleep.

“You weren’t a mistake,” she told me before she shut my door. But I was. Things might have been different for her if she’d kept going, if she hadn’t come back to a place still as air, a place where nothing happens. Things might have been different for me.

When I was young, Mum and Dad made things exciting. They took chances. They watched sunrises. We’d walk through the dark, Mum’s fingers wrapped tight around mine, Dad’s coat brushing my knees. We were the only three people awake in a world half asleep and the air felt heavy with maybe. I knew any minute the sun would explode and color would spread across the sky. When I was about six, we stopped going. “We’re tired, love. How ’bout we have a lie-in?”

I once heard Mum talking to her friends, saying, “Rose is exactly the same as me when I was young.” You’re wrong, I wanted to scream at her. I won’t turn out like you. I won’t think I’ve hit the big time because I’ve worked my way up from caravan park cleaner to caravan park manager. I won’t stop reading books and start reading supermarket catalogs.

In Year 7 I started talking about the things I’d read to Miss Cantrell, my science teacher. She was the one who gave me the book on the cormorants in Brazil, long black lines swooping along the rivers, birds born to fly. Far out on the edges of the Pacific, the book said, there was another type of cormorant. These birds were almost exactly like the ones that lived in Brazil, except that they’d forgotten how to use their wings. “Why did they forget?” I asked her in class.

“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.