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“Thanks,” he said. “My dad . . . you know, he —”

“It’s okay,” I said.

It felt wrong, talking about his dad like that when he was right there. He was a bit slow sometimes. He got confused. But he understood stuff. And he was Liam’s dad.

Liam turned to him. “Have you got anything else to deliver?”

His father shook his head. “Weeding the gardens now.” His speech was blurry, slow, as if he’d just been woken from a deep sleep.

“You want me to walk you back?” Liam pointed up the street to where the town hall sat at the top of the hill, overlooking the town. His father didn’t exactly work there. They just gave him odd jobs, the kind of things he could do when he was having a good day. The kind of jobs where it wouldn’t matter if he got distracted along the way and sat in the town square for half an hour watching the hands on the clock tower turn.

“Yes. Good.” His father nodded.

Liam turned to me. “Thanks for not telling. He needs the job.”

“That’s okay.” I tipped the broken pieces into the front pocket of my bag, listening to them clatter dully down on top of one another. “He really didn’t like that pot.”

“It’s not that,” Liam began. “It’s just —”

“I was kidding,” I said quickly. I pulled one pigtail around to the front and squeezed droplets of water out onto the sidewalk.

Liam stared down at the dark patches on the sidewalk, then up at me. “You told Ellen you did your six.”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“I just came from the pool. I didn’t see you.”

“Oh?” I fiddled absently with the zipper on my backpack. “You must have missed me. I’m always there.”

“I know. That’s why . . .” He trailed off. “Never mind.” He nodded toward his father, who had begun shuffling slowly up the street. “I’d better get going.”

“Yeah, me too. Hang my towel and stuff.”

“Okay, so . . . see you at school, then.” He paused. “Maybe I’ll catch you at the pool after?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

As Liam hurried to catch up with his father, I went over and retrieved my bike. Then I jumped on the pedals and headed away down the hill, glad to be going in the opposite direction so he couldn’t see my face.

“Hang your towel?”

“Yep.”

Mom and Hannah were at the kitchen table, staring at the screen of Hannah’s laptop.

Dad was in the studio with the door closed, which meant one of two things — either he was doing detail work on his plates and didn’t want to be interrupted or he was working on one of his wacky heads and didn’t want Mom to see.

“It’s coming together,” Hannah said. “See?”

I leaned between them and watched as she scrolled slowly through the pages she had laid out on the screen.

On the Move

A Town Reborn

New Beginnings

Out with the Old, In with the New

Lower Grange Says Yes! to Progress

“It looks good,” I said. And it did. It was slick and professional. There were clean, crisp borders around the scanned photos and newspaper clippings. The text Hannah had added wrapped over and between them in a way that looked right, as if the pages hadn’t been put together by someone but had always been there. There was something strange, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but as Hannah scrolled further and further, past smiling faces and tall, leafy trees, I realized.

All the headlines were happy and shiny, all about progress and improvement and sparkling new swimming pools.

“Where’s the rest?” I asked.

Hannah frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You know,” I said. “About the protests and everything.”

I had read about it, back when I was
Mom’s little historian
. About the arguments and the angry town meetings.

It hadn’t all been happy and shiny, the way it was on the screen.

Some people had been furious about it. They had fought to keep the town, at least at first.

There were groups formed to protect historical buildings and the old trees in the surrounding forest and the anteater and the not-very-common orchid that someone might possibly have seen once in the bush just west, or maybe east, of town.

Protesters parked themselves on the platform at the top of the old fire lookout tree. For a few weeks, Elijah made extra pocket money climbing up and down the spiral peg ladder, carrying food and water on the way up and foul-smelling buckets on the way down.

It didn’t last. Because in the end, the engineers and the politicians all agreed. Lower Grange had to go.

The settlers hadn’t thought it through, you see. Eighty-eight years earlier, they had thought it was the perfect spot for a town. They hadn’t realized it was actually the perfect spot for a dam that would irrigate the whole region, the whole bustling network of towns and farms that would come along years later and grow bigger and busier and more water-hungry than Lower Grange itself would ever be. It was progress, and you couldn’t stand in the way of it. If you did, you’d get swallowed by a giant wall of water.

Hannah shot me a look. “I know about all that stuff, Cass. I was
there,
remember? It’s a matter of choosing what’s most important.” She scrolled idly back and forth with the mouse. “I think we’re pretty much set now. We’ve narrowed it down to what we need.”

I nodded. Not because I agreed but because I knew what she was talking about. Someone getting to choose. Somebody narrowing things down. It was like Mom was always telling her classes. I had seen her scrawling it across their essays in her wild, looping handwriting:
Dig deeper. Remember — history is written by the winners!

Or maybe it was like me telling Ellen that I was sorry. That I was just looking, that Dad’s pottery had slipped.

Each of those things was true. But put together, they didn’t tell the real story. There were cracks in between where important stuff leaked out. It’s a funny thing, an unsettling thing — how you can tell the truth and have it still be a lie.

“Yeah,” I began, “but what about . . . ?” I stopped. There was a crunch of gravel as a car came around the bend into our driveway much too fast.

Tourists!
I thought. It was hard to see through the shower of dirt and tiny stones thrown up as the car braked outside, but I knew that’s who it would be. They come out here accidentally sometimes, taking a wrong turn on their way to the tearoom. They flatten the tiny wildflowers on the side of the road, spray dust all over Mom’s hanging laundry, then get cranky with us because we’re not a genuine copy of a rustic historical cottage serving Devonshire tea.

There was a loud banging on the front door. I leaned back on my chair and looked down the hall. That way, I wouldn’t even have to get up. I could just yell directions to Ye Olde Tearoom and tell them no, we absolutely definitely could not just whip them up a batch of country-style scones.

Instead, the door to the studio swung open, and Dad elbowed his way into the hall like a surgeon going into an operation, his hands slick with clay.

“Howard!” he said. “Come in, come in.”

I stared down the hall. Finkle? What was he doing here?

That man really was everywhere.

There was a photo of him right there on the screen, one that looked like it had been taken about twenty years ago, when he still had hair. He was resting his chin on one balled-up fist, evidently trying to appear thoughtful. There was a caption underneath: “Howard Finkle, Centenary Mayor.”

“Hello, girls!” he called down the hall. Then he clapped Dad on the back and followed him into the studio, the door slamming shut behind them.

That was when I realized.

Finkle’s oddly crooked nose — not unlike a random blob of mashed clay that could possibly be something someone had left there by accident.

I turned to Hannah. She was grinning.

“Commemorative sculpture,” she said. “Also my idea. Howard loves it. Dad loves it. Everybody wins.”

Mom sighed. “Not if Dad doesn’t get all his pots finished in time for the tourist season. I can’t believe you’ve got him making a free head right before the busy season, Hannah.”

Hannah clicked the mouse impatiently, making the screen blur. “I told you, Mom — it’s not really free. It’ll be great publicity. We’ve got big plans for the centenary. There’ll be people coming down from the city — newspapers, TV, the whole thing. And Elijah will be back soon. He can help with the pots.”

As she stopped talking, Hannah stopped clicking. The screen snapped back into focus, and I leaned down toward it. The book was in thumbnail view now, showing everything at once. My page was in the middle somewhere, surrounded by pictures of the pool and Country Crafts and the newly sealed Main Street. Somewhere near the top of the screen was a photo of Finkle with a lever in his hand.

And off to one side, something else.

I drew in a quick breath.

It was another newspaper clipping, dated a few months earlier than mine. There was another grainy photo — another tired couple, two more small bundles. Underneath were paragraphs of closely typed text. I leaned across Hannah and clicked on the magnifying-glass icon to blow them up: “newborn tragedy,” “local man in hospital,” “possible brain damage,” “cause unclear,” “fatigue may be a factor,” “driver error likely, say police.” Above them, the headline read: “Miracle Baby Survives Crash.”

Hannah followed my gaze. “He’s in your class, isn’t he?”

I nodded, peering forward. “Is this going in, too?”

Hannah shook her head. “No, that’s just something I found when I was going through some other stuff.” She tapped a finger repeatedly on the keyboard, enlarging Liam’s miracle-baby face until it filled the screen, huge and pixelated. “No point dredging all that up again. Not now that everyone’s moved on.”

I glared at her. Moved on? I couldn’t help but picture Liam’s curious gait, his too-long shorts; could almost feel, suddenly, the tightening grip of his father’s hand on my wrist.

I reached for the mouse. “It’s time for dinner.”

“Wait!” Panic flashed across Hannah’s face. “I haven’t saved it!”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m only putting it on sleep.”

She nodded. “What a surprise.”

Elijah always used to tell me off for never shutting down the computer completely. He said it wasn’t good for it, that things need the chance to switch right off and then start again clean. But I couldn’t help myself. There was something about sleep mode that I found irresistible. I loved the way it suspended everything just the way it was. How everything went dark and quiet and still, but when you opened it up, it snapped back into life, all of it right there, just waiting for the light.

I stared down at the computer. Then I clicked the button once, twice, and watched Liam’s face disappear as the screen faded to black.

Thunkity-thunk. Thunkity-thunk
.

I didn’t look up from the mosaic. This was a tricky bit, snipping the blue tiles just right so they would fit into the outline I’d traced for Tucker’s Supermarket. We each had a section to work on, and when they were done, we were going to piece them all together like a giant floor puzzle. It was important to get the edges right, to follow the template so it all worked, so everything would fit the way it was supposed to.

But even without looking, I knew what the familiar
thunkity-thunk
was. For me, this was the sound track to every school day — Liam’s feet kicking rhythmically at my chair from the desk behind.

It had annoyed me at first. I used to turn around and tell him to stop. He would for a while, but then it would start up once more, and when I turned around again, he would look surprised, like he hadn’t realized, like his legs had simply taken on a life of their own.

After a while, I stopped saying anything. A while later, I stopped minding.

After a longer while, I kind of started liking it.

It got so that if he was away, I missed it. It was like a background hum you don’t even realize is there until it’s gone and the air around you feels empty all of a sudden.

In some ways, that was true about Liam, too.

It wasn’t that we were friends or anything — at least not particularly. It was just that he had always been around. We used to run into him at the hospital when I was little and still going in for my checkups. I remember sitting with him in the corner of the waiting room, building unsteady worlds out of blocks while our mothers sat straight-backed along the wall, leafing through old magazines to pass the time. Later, at school, we sat out of PE together, shredding leaf after leaf in the shade of the spreading eucalyptus while other kids ran and jumped and hurled themselves at things.