Chocolate Box Girls: Sweet Honey (17 page)

Tara is back from the Gold Coast now and
Bennie’s home from Tasmania, and it’s my turn to host a sleepover. Emma
is thrilled to be a part of it; she helps me plan a pool party and barbie with fresh
fruit mocktails, and offers a selection of her favourite nineties teen flicks for us
to watch. Dad is less enthusiastic.

‘Why do they have to come
here?’ he grumbles. ‘I don’t get much time off. I certainly
don’t want to share it with a gaggle of silly girls!’

‘It’s Tara and
Bennie,’ I remind him. ‘My best friends! They really want to meet
you!’

‘It’s only one night,
Greg,’ Emma chips in. ‘Honey hasn’t had any friends over here
before. It’s not a lot to ask.’

‘Why don’t we go out?’
he suggests. ‘Leave them to it?’

‘No, Greg, I want to do this
properly,’ Emma argues. ‘We’re responsible for other
people’s kids here. We need to be on the premises. We don’t need to do
anything – just stay in the background, help with the barbie. They’ll be no
trouble.’

‘Please, Dad?’ I chime
in.

He rolls his eyes and ruffles my hair.
‘Sheesh. I suppose so,’ he sulks. ‘Just this once, though, Honey.
The next time you’re inviting half the school over, ask first. I’ll make
sure I’m out of town!’

It bothers me that Dad can’t make
an effort for my friends, just like it bothered me that he wouldn’t Skype my
sisters on Christmas Day. But on Saturday afternoon when Dad tells Emma she’s
forgotten the most important ingredients for a sleepover – ice cream and popcorn – I
hug him and tell him he’s the best dad in the world for thinking of that.

‘I’ll sort it,’ he
says, grinning as he drives away. ‘Won’t be long!’

I don’t worry, even when
he’s been gone for an hour. I don’t worry when Tara and Bennie arrive
and he’s still not back, or when Emma texts and frowns and says that his
mobile is off. I guess he’s gone for a coffee or called into the office, found
some time-wasting task to help him spin out the ice-cream expedition for a little
while.

Or a long while.

‘Is your dad around?’ Tara
asks.

‘He will be,’ I say.
‘He’s just nipped out to get ice cream and popcorn. He’ll be back
soon!’

‘He is the best dad ever,’
Bennie declares. ‘My dad would never go to all that trouble!’

‘Yeah,’ I grin.
‘He’s cool!’

It’s weeks since I’ve seen
Tara and Bennie, and they’ve grown up a little. Bennie has taught herself to
do cat’s-eye eyeliner, and she’s wearing a fifties-style swimsuit
that’s very Marilyn Monroe. She tells us about the boy she met in Tas who
showed her that not all kisses are like cold dishwater soup.

We float on lilos in the pool, trailing
our fingers in the water.

‘I wish we had our own pool at
home,’ Tara sighs. ‘You’re sooo lucky!’

I already know that Tara’s been
texting the bus-stop boy all holidays, and that she thinks he might finally ask her
out when the new term starts.

‘How about you?’ Bennie
asks, flicking a spray of water in my direction. ‘Any hot romance? Did Riley
ever surface again?’

‘Did he ever,’ I say.
I’ve kept my Christmas Day encounter quiet, but now that I’m getting
close to Ash it doesn’t seem so sad, so scary any more.

‘I saw him on Christmas Day, at
the beach,’ I confess. ‘He barely recognized me. He was nice enough, but
he wasn’t interested … looks like the age difference really was a
big issue for him.’

Tara frowns. ‘So how come he added
you on SpiderWeb then?’

‘He didn’t,’ I say.
‘Turns out that Surfie16 was just some random who added me. I assumed he was
Riley and he just went along with it. Creepy, huh?’

‘I
knew
something
wasn’t right about him!’ Bennie declares. ‘That’s scary. I
mean, you asked him round to your house, Honey! What if he’d turned up?
And … well … he could have been an axe murderer or
something!’

‘He wasn’t,’ I say.
‘And I’ve deleted him, anyway. Lesson learnt.’

I let myself slide off the lilo and into
the water, enjoying the cool.

‘Report him,’ Tara is
saying. ‘People can’t just go around pretending to be other people on
the Internet!’

‘It’s all over,’ I
say. ‘No harm done. Anyway, that’s not the big news. I didn’t want
to tell you by text or on SpiderWeb, but I got myself a holiday job at the cafe.
I’ve been seeing a lot of Ash …’

‘You do fancy him!’ Bennie
whoops. ‘What did I say?’

‘I know, I know,’ I laugh.
‘Don’t get too excited, though – it’s early days. We’re
still at the hand-holding stage.’

‘No kisses?’ Tara asks,
disappointed.

‘We’re taking it
slow …’

As I say this, I realize that normally I
jump headlong into relationships with all guns blazing; then again, I’ve never
met anyone quite like Ash. I’m used to being in control with boys, calling the
shots, but with Ash I am way out of my depth. I care about him so much it scares me.
When he walks me home at night we hold hands, but what if it’s normal for
friends in Australia to hold hands? What if he doesn’t actually fancy me at
all?

I close my eyes and think about Ash;
dark eyes fringed with long lashes, sharp cheekbones, the sleek fall of his
blue-black hair. I think about kissing him too; I think about that a lot.

I duck under the water and swim towards
my friends, shark-like. I surface suddenly, tipping up the lilos and dragging Tara
and Bennie into the water with much screeching, splashing and laughter.
Heart-to-hearts are forgotten as we shower, change and fire up the barbie.

‘I don’t know where Greg can
have got to,’ Emma frets, checking her mobile for the hundredth time. ‘I
can’t understand it!’

‘Should we wait?’ I ask.

‘No, no, just go ahead,
girls,’ Emma says. ‘Something must have come up. A call from the
office …’

‘On a Saturday?’ Tara asks,
frowning.

‘He works long hours,’ I
explain. ‘And there’s a rush job on at the moment, so …’

‘OK. Right,’ Bennie
says.

I turn away so they can’t see my
embarrassment.

We eat vegetable kebabs and baked
bananas with melted chocolate as the sun sets. There is no ice cream and no popcorn,
but nobody complains and eventually we retreat inside, where Emma has set out jugs
of fruit juice and syrup and lemonade and soda, so that we can invent our own fancy
mocktails. My friends like Emma – she’s chatty and fun, and although at one
point I panic that she might come through and watch
Clueless
with us, she
just smiles and settles herself on the sofa with a glass of wine and tells us to
have fun and not to stay up too late.

‘Your stepmum’s OK,’
Bennie says, twirling the paper parasol in her drink as we curl up to watch the
DVD.

‘She’s not my
stepmum,’ I correct. ‘Just Dad’s girlfriend. But yeah, she’s
OK. I’m sorry about Dad. I bet he popped into the office and got
side-tracked … he’s kind of a workaholic. He probably forgot
he’d promised ice cream.’

‘It’s no biggie,’
Bennie shrugs. ‘Mocktails are better!’

‘Dads,’ Tara agrees.
‘What are they like?’

My friends are sleeping by the time Dad
finally gets home in the early hours, but I am wide awake. I hear the low hiss of
voices, the sound of Emma crying again, and I know for sure that I have heard it all
before, over and over, right through my childhood. It’s all too familiar,
although I’ve never been able to admit it before.

I blotted out the rows, the arguments,
told myself they were nightmares, whitewashed my memories so that everything looked
perfect. I remember now, though, and my eyes sting with tears the way they did years
ago when I used to sit at the top of the stairs late at night, hugging my knees,
listening. It scared me then and it still scares me now, the sound of my dad when
he’s angry.

I open up my laptop and click on to
SpiderWeb. I find a recent photo of me and Ash, our faces squashed up close,
laughing into my iPhone camera with the ocean behind us, and post it on to my page.
Summer holidays so cool
, I type.
Wish they didn’t have to
end …

Then I click to open the journal page to
distract myself, writing through the night while my friends sleep on.

On Monday, I have to drag myself to
school. It is an effort to pull on the blue-checked tent dress, an effort to pack my
rucksack with books and study sheets and shiny new pencil case. The study timetable
on the wall above my bed is looking neglected. I stopped sticking to the plan around
the time I began working at the cafe; I haven’t opened a maths book in
weeks.

I meet Tara and Bennie in the foyer, and
together we sit through an hour-long assembly where Miss Bird attempts to shake us
out of our back-to-school gloom and instil a little enthusiasm for the year ahead. I
close my eyes and doze through most of this speech, so I cannot tell whether it is
successful or not.

My enthusiasm is at an all-time low. I
slouch through school, just waiting for trouble to find me. It will. Any initial
veneer of being different, cool, exotic, are long gone, and hostile glances follow
me along the corridors. The dodgy SpiderWeb picture from last term lost me a lot of
friends, and my upbeat picture of me and Ash doesn’t seem to have changed
that. The fact is, I don’t fit in – I must have been crazy to imagine I ever
could.

It was fun to pretend for a little
while. I tried, I really did, but the novelty has worn off and my acting skills
won’t keep me afloat for long once the teachers suss how little study
I’ve actually done these last few weeks. I don’t even have a visit to
the beach cafe to look forward to – Ash isn’t working today, and my part-time
job is over now that the holiday rush is dying down. I am surplus to
requirements.

Back home, I lean against the
honeysuckle arch with a few maths books at my side, trying to recover some of the
focus I had before Christmas. I am still frowning at the first problem when my
mobile rings, Bennie’s name flashing up.

‘Hey, Bennie,’ I say.
‘Couldn’t live without me for even half an hour, huh? I’m glad you
called, though, because I’m totally stuck on my maths. That first question is
a killer. Any clues?’

There’s a silence on the line, and
a pink and white honeysuckle flower drifts gently down on to my worksheet.

‘Bennie?’ I repeat.
‘What’s up?’

There’s a snuffling sound at the
end of the line, and then Bennie’s voice comes through. ‘You know
what’s up,’ she says. ‘You know exactly what’s up, and
that’s fine, you’re entitled to your opinion. I’m not going to
argue. If you don’t want our friendship, then fine –’

‘Huh?’ I cut in. ‘What
are you talking about? Of course I want your friendship!’

‘You have a funny way of showing
it,’ she replies. ‘You could have just said those things to our faces,
Honey. You didn’t have to humiliate us like that in front of everyone. Tara is
gutted; I am too. Boy, did we get you wrong. We liked you. We
trusted
you!’

‘Bennie!’ I argue.
‘Listen! Calm down, please. I have no idea what you are talking about! I think
there’s been some mistake –’

‘No mistake,’ Bennie says.
‘Check your SpiderWeb, seeing as your memory’s so poor today. And
goodbye … been nice knowing you.’

‘Bennie!’ I yell.
‘Wait! Listen to me – whatever you’ve seen –’

But the line is dead. I jump up and run
into my bedroom, open up my laptop and click through to my SpiderWeb page. I go cold
all over.

A screenshot from my private SpiderWeb
journal is posted up on the wall, part of the piece I wrote at the sleepover in the
early hours of Sunday morning.

Bennie is snoring slightly and Tara
is wearing a kitten-print nightie that she’s probably had since she was
seven. My friends are not cool. Tara has a million freckles and geeky specs and
zero dress sense. Bennie is one of those curvy girls that just miss out on that
whole hourglass figure thing and end up looking like your favourite teddy bear.
Still, at Willowbank they are practically fashionistas. That place is so stuck
in the Dark Ages they will be adding kirtles, hoods and goatskin capes to the
school uniform list any minute now. The place is so dull it makes my brain
ache.

They are my words, my views, but taken
out of context they look spiteful, bitchy. That’s not how they were intended.
That diary entry was about how much I love my friends, not how hopeless they
are.

That journal is supposed to be private –
so how come it’s plastered all over my home page? I look closer and see that
both Bennie and Tara are tagged in the status, and that SpiderWeb says I posted it.
But I didn’t. I haven’t touched my laptop since yesterday, and the
status was posted a few hours back when I was still in school.

I scroll down, reading through the
comments from girls at school. They call me two-faced, vicious, manipulative, mean.
I can’t even blame them – this looks bad. Who would do something like this –
and how?

I click the Delete button, pick up my
mobile and call Bennie and Tara over and over, but there’s no reply. All I can
do is post a status explaining that my page has been hacked, but when I go to check
on it the words have vanished as if they were never there at all.

A new private message flashes up, and I
go cold all over as I see the name: Surfie16.

Don’t hold back, Honey, will
you? I know you said your new friends were kind of boring, but no need to
broadcast it all over SpiderWeb. Harsh.

I take a deep breath.

Who are you? Leave me alone! I
deleted you weeks ago, so why are you on my SpiderWeb page at all?

A reply pops up at once.

You know exactly who I am – Riley.
We met at the beach, right? You’ll never delete me, Honey, you’ve
been flirting with me from the start. You just can’t stay away!

My hands are shaking as I type.

I definitely deleted you, creep.
You’re not Riley. I know you’re not. So who the hell are you?

Almost a minute ticks by, and then the
answer is there:

Wouldn’t you like to
know?

School the next day is pure torture. I
look for Bennie and Tara in the foyer before lessons, but they’re not there,
and when I ask if anyone’s seen them my classmates turn away, freezing me out
completely. In maths, Tara has moved seats. She won’t look at me, and when I
try to talk to her afterwards, Liane tells me to back off, that I’ve done
enough damage already. I stand alone at break, the dagger glares of the girls around
me piercing my skin. It’s almost the end of lunchtime before I manage to track
Bennie and Tara down, sitting at a picnic table by the school sports field.

They get up to leave as I approach, but
I grab on to Bennie’s arm, distraught.

‘You have to listen,’ I
plead. ‘I can explain! I didn’t post those things. My laptop’s
been hacked again or something. I’d never have posted that, you know I
wouldn’t!’

‘You’re saying you
didn’t write it?’ Bennie challenges.

‘I did – but not like that!’
I argue. ‘It was taken out of context! I said lots of nice things about you
too; it wasn’t meant to be mean –’

‘Wasn’t it?’ Tara
says. Her eyes are pink from crying and I feel so bad for making her feel that
way.

‘It was posted yesterday afternoon
while I was still in school,’ I say. ‘Think about it – I couldn’t
have posted it, could I? It wasn’t me, you have to believe me!’

Bennie shakes her head. ‘You may
not have had your laptop in school, but you had your iPhone,’ she says.
‘You could have posted it from that.’

‘I didn’t!’ I
protest. ‘Someone’s hacking my SpiderWeb page. Why won’t you
believe me? Maybe Surfie16 really is some kind of stalker – he messaged yesterday
and it was like he was laughing at me!’

‘I thought you deleted him?’
Tara challenges.

‘I did!’

‘Yeah, right. You obviously
didn’t.’

The bell for afternoon lessons rings out
and Bennie sighs. ‘It’s funny how these things keep happening to
you,’ she says. ‘That photo before Christmas; now this. It looks bad,
but somehow, you’re still the victim. Well, my heart bleeds for you, Honey.
Look … I don’t want this conversation right now. I don’t know
what to believe any more.’

Tears sting my eyes as they walk away.
Battling to keep my head high, I elbow my way through the crowded corridors, find
the nearest toilets and lock myself in a cubicle. I sink down on to the toilet seat,
dismayed. My fresh start, already a little rocky, has finally imploded, and worse,
someone is hacking my SpiderWeb and stirring up a whole world of trouble.

Aren’t they? After two nights of
little or no sleep, I can’t even think straight. I feel like I’m going
mad. I press my cheek against the Formica partition, wishing I was a million miles
from here. I sit that way for a long time, and then someone rattles the cubicle door
and I jump up, panicked. What am I even doing? I am not the kind of girl to hide, to
cry, to fall to bits in public. I square my shoulders, grab my bag and walk out of
there, stalking along the corridor as the last lesson-change bell sounds. I put up a
hand to wipe away my tears and it comes back streaked with black eyeliner.

‘Honey? Are you all
right?’

I push past Miss Bird and walk on out
through the double doors, across the courtyard, on to the street; I can hear the
head teacher calling after me, but I don’t look back.