The Boys of Summer (3 page)

Scott hurled the banana peel across the room
and opened his locker as if it wasn’t covered in mush. He threw in
his books and slammed his door shut, casting me a filthy look
before storming out. His entourage looked at each other and
appeared to be as surprised as I was. Like the mindless zombies
they were, they quickly scurried after Scott, throwing uncertain
glares my way.

I was just about to let my shoulders sag in
relief when I heard it, right next to my ear. The solitary sound of
a slow clap.

Adam.

“Way to go, Tess, way to go!”

It was as if I had just been carried out of a
factory by Richard Gere or something.

This was not how I expected the day to go.
Although things had taken an unexpected turn that had me smiling
into my opened locker, Scott’s voice echoed in my mind.

“
You may have won the battle, Tess, but
you haven’t won the war.”

***

Lunch and the rest of the day passed with
surprisingly little drama. Scott’s banana-rised locker stayed like
that for the rest of the day; I think he was trying to prove a
point or something. The typical boy mentality of not caring, though
the look he had thrown me had been chilling. If I knew Scott, it
would be eating him alive.

Ellie and I walked in mirror image, our
thumbs hooked into our backpack straps as we pushed our bodies
forward to balance the weight of our textbooks on our backs. I had
made sure I had packed up all my valuables from my locker in case
there was a mysterious attack overnight.

Adam circled us on his bike.

“Sooo, have you thought about my business
proposition?”

He wasn’t addressing Ellie, he was addressing
me. I knew he was, because I automatically cringed every time he
asked the question, which had been every damn day for the past
semester. I also knew it was directed at me because Ellie, from the
very get-go, had squealed and said, “Count me in!” Traitor!

Adam must have read the look on my face.

“Aw come on, McGee! It’s gonna be awesome!”
His circling was making me dizzy.

“I just don’t think I would be any good.”

He rolled his eyes at Ellie. “I thought you
promised to talk some sense in to her?”

“Hey! I’ve been on operation ‘get a rocket
under Tess’ for weeks. I even got her parents involved.”

“Yes, about that.” I stopped walking abruptly
to confront Ellie, nearly causing Adam to fall off his bike.

Ellie gave me her fluttery-eye blink of
innocence, the very one that probably fooled all the boys. Well, it
didn’t fool me.

“Mum has been giving me hell, saying, ‘It
will be good for your confidence, Tess’ and, ‘It will give you some
extra pocket money for the holidays’ and ‘You might meet some new
people’.” I repeated every Mum-saying with enough exaggerated
whining to sound almost authentic. Even to my ears.

Ellie folded her arms. “And all that is so
bad because?”

I paused. Because it was out of my comfort
zone. I was not good in foreign environments. I wanted to spend the
summer with Ellie and Adam riding down to the lake, watching the
fireworks at the show and eating ice cream at the Sunday markets. I
wanted to regain that same essence of past summers and how
wonderfully lazy it had all been. Not slaving away at the Onslow
Hotel.

“It’s not rocket science, Tess,” Adam said.
“Come on, it’ll be the three amigos. No parentals. We can play pool
all summer long and get paid for it.”

“It will be so fun,” Ellie said, “serving
drinks to hot guys.” Boys were never far from her thoughts.

“Yeah – and cleaning up sticky messes and
dirty dishes; sounds like a riot,” I said. “Can’t we just hang out
at the lake?”

“We ALWAYS do that.”

“Not last year.”

“Correction – YOU didn’t do it last year; you
were attached to Snotty’s face the whole holidays. WE went to the
lake and the market and stuff, and this year we want to do
something different, don’t we, Adam?”

“Yes, yes we do, and we want to do it with
YOU.”

The Onslow Hotel was almost like a tiara of
Onslow in that it was positioned at the very peak of a hill
overlooking the entire town. Ellie and I painfully walked up there
a few times, agreeing that ‘Coronary Hill’ was an appropriate name
dubbed by the locals. We had learned our lesson and chose for
future reference to trek the long way around the back roads on
bike, swinging around the imposing hotel structure to the quick
trail home. Our bikes had blazed a path downhill as we screamed,
our feet on our handlebars. So Adam was predicting awesome times
ahead at the Onslow Hotel? I seriously doubted anything with the
word ‘Onslow’ in it could ever be connected to awesome.

It was obvious that the fore-founders of our
grand community severely lacked in the imagination department.
Onslow was a small town, population of less than three thousand,
nestled in the valley of the Perry Ranges. It would be more in line
with being a retirement village if the rolling hills weren’t the
backdrop to Lake Onslow, a sprawling mass of man-made lakes that
swept as far as the eye could see. Local legend claimed that it was
bottomless, and Lord knows we had tested the theory. So far, it
checked out: we could never touch the bottom.

As students of Onslow High finished up from
school, we would cut through Onslow Park, walk past Lake Onslow
where the Onslow Hotel overlooked the town of … oh, what is it
called? Oh yeah,
Onslow
!

They looked at me with their pathetic,
pleading doe-like eyes.

Even after a full three weeks of having to
endure ‘that’ look, I still felt my heart race in anxiety at the
thought. I had never had a job before, even though my parents had
nagged and nagged me to get one.

I knew all the answers to the questions I was
about to ask, but I tentatively asked again, anyway.

“So how many hours?”

“Weekend lunch, twelve to two, and dinner,
six to nine.”

I didn’t need to calculate, I had done it a
thousand times. Adam was good, he didn’t smile or even show an
ounce of excitement. He was serious and business-like, knowing that
if he was any other way it would scare me off.

“Ten dollars an hour?”

He nodded. “Cash in hand.”

I definitely didn’t need to calculate that
either. I’d had all of my hypothetical money spent for the past
three weeks.

Ellie wasn’t as diplomatic as Adam, and
started to bounce on the balls of her feet.

Adam inched closer, maneuvering his bike
right up to me. “Come on, Tess. My uncle wants me to be dish pig
for the holidays, doing it without you guys would make it what it
is, a pretty shitty way to spend my weekends. But I don’t know, I
thought if you guys were with me it would be a blast. We always
make our own fun, and just think of it. We can go and blow all our
money together on Big Ms and dirty deep-fried chicken wings at the
Caltex afterwards.”

That had me frowning in disgust more than
anything. He’d been doing so well until now, but suddenly it seemed
like he’d totally forgotten who he was talking to. But I now saw
something new in Adam’s pleading eyes. He had made it sound like an
awesome adventure because his uncle and dad had given him little
choice for the weekends but to slug it out in dirty dishwater for a
good chunk of his holidays. He had sold it to us on the angle of
money, free soft drinks and an array of cute boys. Admittedly, it
did definitely have its perks.

But the bigger reason my icy facade had
started to thaw was because if I didn’t do it, I would barely get
to see my best friends on the weekends, and I wouldn’t be able to
join in on all the ‘in-jokes’ they would share from all that time
together over the summer without me. Plus, Ellie would no doubt
snag a cute, new, Onslow-Hotel-visiting boyfriend for the summer,
and Adam would be buying everyone chicken wings at the Caltex and
where would I be? At home, doing chores because my parents wanted
to drill some sort of work ethic into me, in some other torturous
way as a form of revenge for not getting a summer job with my
work-savvy friends. There would be no ten dollars an hour for the
displeasure either. I thought of one of my mental purchases, a cute
little summer dress I had spotted in the window of Carters’ clothes
shop, and smiled.

I re-adjusted the weight of my backpack as I
looked down at my foot, tracing a circle in the dirt. I squinted
back up at Adam who was waiting intently.

“Does the restaurant have air
conditioning?”

Adam broke into a broad smile, like a cat
that got the mouse.

“Like a freakin’ igloo.”

Smug bastard, he didn’t need to look so
satisfied with himself. I fought not to smile and looked from him
to Ellie, who was acting as if she had a brigade of ants in her
pants.

I sighed in defeat. It wasn’t the summer I
wanted, but it was the summer I was stuck with. “Alright.”

“Sorry?” Adam questioned.

“Alright, I’ll do it.”

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Can you repeat
that?”

“I’ll do it!” All air was knocked from me
when a squealing Ellie body slammed me into a bear hug.

Bloody hell.

“Okay. Well, hopefully Uncle Eric will think
it’s okay. He is pretty desperate, but I can’t promise anything. If
you’re lucky, I guess …” Ellie and I set in on him, giving him a
dual beating in the rib cage, but he preempted the attack and sped
off on his bike, our textbook-filled packs preventing us from
giving chase.

Adam called back, flashing a winning
smile.

“You won’t regret it! We are going to have
the
best
summer!”

The arrangement had been to meet at the
Onslow Hotel for orientation in our spare school period, so we
could get the feel of our surroundings.

Little did we know it was actually an ambush
and we were about to be thrown into the deep end. A billowing cloud
of steam blew up into Uncle Eric’s face, threatening to melt it off
entirely. This was just as disturbing as the loud hissing sound he
was creating in an attempt to froth up milk on the coffee machine.
I looked on in horror; how was I expected to be able to master this
beast of an apparatus? I had never made a cappuccino in my life!
Ash teetered on the edge of Uncle Eric’s cigarette as it wavered
every time he spoke.

He was a big, bearded, gruff, biker-looking
kind of fellow, who cared little for his health if the caffeine
consumption and chain-smoking was anything to go by. As far as I
knew, the reason Adam had roped us in to help out was largely due
to Uncle Eric’s wavering health. No doubt it was a bonus that we
were still in school so he could pay us minimum wage off the books.
Kind of like a sweatshop for child labour.

He gave us an assessing look.

“We could do with some fresh blood around
here. Tess and Ellie will be front-of-house in the restaurant.”

There was a not-too-subtle agenda: Uncle Eric
tended to work in a way of capitalising on people’s strong points
so as to attract the right clientele. Little did he know that I was
silently freaking out over a coffee machine, let alone what else
this job might entail.
Just breathe
, I told myself.

Just. Breathe.

As if sensing my unease, Adam elbowed me and
threw me a friendly, reassuring smile. Ellie, who was as giddy as a
schoolgirl, flashed me her pearly whites as if what Uncle Eric was
saying was truly magical. I felt nauseous with information
overload. I had only been inside the Onslow a few times for the odd
dinner gathering, but Mum and Dad were not regular pub goers. They
were more accustomed to wine and home-based dinners with close
friends than pub hopping.

Now the beast of a coffee machine lay silent,
the noise replaced by yet another scary sound: Uncle Eric wheezed
out an uncomfortable series of chest-rattling coughs. I folded my
arms and fought not to wince as the sound and smoke blew my
way.

“Thought you quit that nasty habit, Unc.”

An older version of Adam appeared through the
divider that sectioned the main bar from the restaurant – Chris. He
brushed past us in the small space, ensuring he slammed Adam hard
in the arm as he made his way towards a lower cupboard, crouching
to search for something. They never used to look alike. Adam went
through a phase where he thought he was adopted because Chris
looked so much like his parents, but nowadays there was no
mistaking the resemblance. Lean, with clear alabaster skin, big
deep, dark eyes, and dark unruly hair. The main differences were
that Chris kept his hair cropped shorter, he was taller, and he
held himself differently. Adam was a lot more outgoing whereas
Chris was the far more serious sibling; he tended to go about in
life as if the weight of the whole world rested on his
shoulders.

Chris found an exercise book and flicked
through it, a crinkle forming between his brows as he
concentrated.

“What habit? Coffee or smoking?” Eric
mused.

“Both,” Chris muttered. His brow furrowed
further as he thumbed each page.

When we arrived to begin our trial at the
hotel, Adam had looked forlorn. Not a good sign. Not much seemed to
worry Adam, but when I saw Chris behind the bar taking stock of
inventory, I automatically knew the reason behind Adam’s sullen
mood without even having to ask. Uncle Eric had chosen Chris to
manage the bar.

Smart move, Uncle Eric.

Knowing what Chris was like, we knew he’d run
a tight ship and not give us an inch, especially Adam. Suddenly
goofing off and free pool seemed like an impossible dream. This was
strike one against the ‘dream job’ I had envisioned. Strike two
quickly followed.

Uncle Eric moved aside.

“Tess, why don’t you make Chris a coffee?
Show us what you got.”

Oh God! Why didn’t I pay attention to how he
did it?