Escape from Year Eight Page 8

  But the linen closet is right next to Leon’s room, and I don’t want to go near there. I shiver when I remember his sad cartoon Indians, and how last night they snuck down the corridor and came alive in my dream. I can still hear that mother crying, which is exactly what I don’t want to do.

  I bite a big piece out of my apple and crunch hard.

  If I chew loud enough, maybe it’ll drown out the noise in my head.

  What was that? Sounded like a car pulling into the driveway. Maybe Mum’s home early for once. I go into the mud room and look through the window beside the door. It’s not Mum’s Chevy out there; it’s a huge orange Dodge ute. Nadine.

  When she ‘ran up’ to check on me while I was sick, I asked her why she didn’t get a smaller car and she said, ‘I been drivin’ a pick-up since I was ten years old. Gas is mighty high but it ain’t like I go traipsin’ over to Chicago every other weekend. Longest trip I do is down to Newton to haul feed and fertiliser.’

  Now she steps down from the pick-up cabin, then reaches back to get something off the seat. It’s a flat white box, which she brings with her as she heads towards the house. I go down the front steps to meet her.

  ‘Hiya, kiddo!’ She smiles like she’s really glad to see me. Her white hair is curled tight and smells like a salon.

  ‘Your hair looks good,’ I say.

  ‘Glad you noticed. I payed seventy-five dollars for it so it better be an improvement.’ As we go into the house she explains, ‘On my way out of town I stopped at the used-bread store. Thought you’d like these.’ She plonks her box on the kitchen table. It’s full of glazed donuts and Danishes. Blueberry and apple, I’d say. My mouth waters. ‘Used-bread store?’ I ask.

  ‘It ain’t actually used,’ she scoffs. ‘It’s a day old, that’s all. Still good and they sell it real cheap.’

  ‘You want one?’ I offer.

  ‘Guess you could twist my arm.’ She sits down at the table.

  ‘Would you like a cuppa with it?’

  ‘A couple a what?’

  ‘No,’ I laugh. ‘A cuppa. A cuppa tea, or a cuppa coffee.’

  ‘Oh! Well now, I guess I better have a cup of tea, from a girl with a nice English accent.’

  English?! I don’t want to hurt her feelings by telling her I’m not a Pom. As we sip our tea and eat our used treats, I want to ask Nadine to tell me everything she knows about Leon. Maybe he’s got some weird syndrome I could look up on the net. If I had more information I could start to help him. But I shouldn’t be thinking about him. I don’t want it to be true what Jazz said, that I’m obsessed with him. I say to Nadine, ‘This Danish is delicious. It’s got cheesecakey stuff inside.’

  ‘Glad you like it. You need some flesh on those skinny bones of yours.’

  ‘No I don’t!’ I shove the rest of the Danish aside, even though I’m still hungry.

  Nadine looks peeved, but she doesn’t comment on my leftovers. Instead she finishes hers and then tells me, ‘I stopped off at Joyce’s on my way to town. Had a cup of coffee with her and Carrie.’

  Leon’s mum and aunt. ‘Yeah?’ I try to sound polite but not very interested.

  ‘Yep,’ Nadine confirms. ‘Carrie was havin’ one of her good days. She was workin’ on an album, puttin’ in photos of Leon and his dad amongst a whole bunch of stickers and fiddly little bits. Scrapbooking, they call it. They do that in Australia?’

  ‘Yeah, some people do.’

  ‘Lot of nonsense if you ask me. But if it keeps Carrie happy, I’m all for it.’

  ‘What about Leon?’ I ask before I can stop myself. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Nope. He was out wanderin’ around somewhere. Joyce reckons this is the first day in a long time he’s refused to go to school.’

  ‘Really? I wonder why he didn’t come to school.’ I want Nadine to keep talking about him.

  ‘Well, that’s a mystery, seein’ he won’t speak to nobody.’

  Nobody except me. I hug the secret inside me like a teddy bear that’s covered with prickles.

  Nadine drains her mug, sets it down with a thump and says, ‘It’s funny. Joyce reckons over the past few weeks he’s been happy to go. She said that up till today, it was like there was something at school he actually wanted to be there for.’

  5.30 p.m.

  ‘Bye!’ The light is starting to fade as Nadine backs her pick-up down the driveway. She stops when she gets to the road, rolls down her window and calls to me, ‘Don’t be a stranger now. You get on down to my place before the weekend and bring that skinny mom of yours with you. I’m plannin’ on bakin’ an apple crisp.’

  ‘Okay!’ I answer.

  I’m heading back to the house when I hear something. It’s kind of a dull banging sound, like something heavy is being chucked around. Is it coming from the house? No, it’s behind me. I turn around and try to listen carefully, but it’s hard because my heart is pounding and I’m wondering if I should run inside and call Nadine and ask her to come back. Up the hill and across the cornfield, I can see her orange Dodge pulling into her place. No, I won’t call her. I don’t want to be a wimpy baby who can’t handle anything on her own.

  Crash! The sound is louder. It’s coming from the long white building Janice called the machine shed. It’s on the other side of the driveway. What could be in there? A grizzly bear, like the ones I saw on Animal Planet? That makes me laugh, because I know that bears don’t inhabit this part of the country. Probably just a loose board banging in the wind.

  Before I can lose my nerve I go over and open the door. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the gloom inside, but then I begin to see huge farm vehicles looming amongst the dust motes. The only one I can identify is a tractor.

  I hear the clunking sound again. Over in the far corner, I make out the figure of a tall man with his back to me. No, it’s not a man, it’s a boy.

  ‘What are you doing here?!’ I yell at him.

  He doesn’t answer, but I can see what he’s doing. He’s going through a pile of lumber. He finds a chunk he likes and tosses it onto the cement floor beside him.

  I walk across to Leon’s corner, stepping over and past various implements, including a six-metre-long blade that sticks out from a rusty contraption on wheels. I’m standing next to him, but he pretends he’s not aware of me. He bends over his pile of off-cuts, tossing boards aside, searching for just the right scrap.

  ‘You building something?’ I ask.

  He doesn’t answer. Surprise, surprise.

  ‘Are you still mad at me because I couldn’t hear your precious people?’

  I know he heard that, because his face scrunches up and he throws a block of wood at the wall, hard. My heart’s pounding again. This guy is so strange. What if he’s in here choosing just the right length of lumber to whack me with?

  ‘My mum’s rent covers this building,’ I tell him, ‘so you’re trespassing.’ I have no idea if this is true, but it should be. ‘So you better go home and help your mom do her scrapbooking!’

  Finally he turns to me. His hands are clenched into fists and he looks furious. What did I do to deserve that look? I wanted to help him!

  ‘I don’t care,’ I say to him. ‘You keep up your silent act as long as you want. But for your information, later on I did hear them.’

  I turn and walk as fast I can through the darkening mess of machinery.

  ‘Wait!’ He says it just before I reach the door. I can feel in my own throat how much effort he put into choking out that word. I step out onto the driveway. The sun is setting, flooding the farm with soft violet light. I wait till he makes his way to me, wiping the board dust off his hands onto his jeans. He clears his throat and asks, ‘You really heard them?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I went back to the timber.’ I don’t have to tell him that it was in a dream. Let him believe I’m brave enough to go there on my own in the dark. ‘This woman told me about… about the murders. She showed me her baby.’ I hear the catch in my voice.

&
nbsp; ‘You saw them?’

  I nod. He’s looking at me like I’m the smartest and bravest person in the northern hemisphere. ‘So now will you come back to school?’ I ask.

  His expression turns sour. ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because you need to learn stuff.’

  ‘Huh,’ he snorts as if I’ve got the intellect of a chipmunk.

  ‘So you know everything already?’ I ask.

  He answers with a question. ‘What did you learn there today?’

  ‘Well, um…’ I search around in my head. History class, English… I must have learned one little tidbit at least. Maths class… ‘I know!’ I say, pulling a piece of paper out of my pocket. ‘I learned Amy’s having a party.’

  He takes the paper, unfolds it and studies it. I guess at some point school taught him how to read.

  ‘You wouldn’t go to that,’ he tells me, as if he knows this with complete confidence.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Because,’ he says, ‘you’re not like them.’

  Friday 28 September

  7.30 p.m.

  ‘Can you believe how much make-up she’s got on?’ I ask. ‘And she’s used like six different kinds of hair product, just to impress him.’

  ‘I think it’s cute,’ Amy says.

  ‘It’s gross!’ I bet Amy wouldn’t think it was cute if it was her mum we were talking about. ‘He’s like ten years younger than her.’

  We’re at a Chinese restaurant in Newton. Mum invited this guy along, Alex, that she met at college. He’s the one she’s ‘had a few drinks with’ after class on several occasions. She planned this meal last weekend because she wanted me to meet him, and she said I could bring a friend. I was scared to ask Amy in case she said no. I know she’s asked me to her party, but there’ll be lots of kids there. It didn’t necessarily mean she’d want to spend a best-friend kind of evening with me. But I really didn’t want to get stuck with just Mum and her hot date. I thought about how I was brave enough to go into the machine shed and investigate that strange noise, so I should be able to handle a little phone call, even if it ended in humiliating rejection. So I called Amy and she sounded really happy to come.

  Anyway, me and Amy are sitting at our own table across the restaurant from Alex and Mum. Mum is smiling like anything at him. ‘Oh, god,’ I groan. ‘Don’t look now. He just reached across the table and he’s stroking her hand.’

  ‘Maybe they’re in love,’ Amy suggests.

  ‘They better not be!’ I take a huge slurp of Coke. ‘She’s got this really nice boyfriend back home. He’s the champion loser in the region.’

  ‘Champion loser?’ Amy’s big blue-grey eyes get bigger.

  ‘I mean Weight Watchers loser.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  When we sat down our places were already set with knives and forks, but I just asked the waitress to bring me some chopsticks. Now I’m afraid Amy will think I’m showing off. ‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ I explain, ‘eating Asian food with cutlery.’

  The waitress appears with our chicken chow mein and puts a set of chopsticks next to my bowl.

  ‘You know how to use those things?’ Amy asks me.

  ‘Sure.’ I hover my chopsticks over the chow mein, pluck out a single pea and pop it in my mouth. ‘Me and Mum have been going to this Vietnamese place back home ever since I can remember. They don’t allow knives and forks there. The place is full of Asians, unlike here.’

  When the waitress comes back with our sweet-and-sour prawns, Amy says, ‘I’ll try chopsticks as well, please.’

  It’s funny to watch Amy concentrate as she carefully closes her chopsticks around a prawn. She’s nearly got it to her mouth, but she must be gripping too tight because suddenly it shoots out into space and lands under a chair at the next table. Luckily, the large man who’s eating alone there is engrossed in a very thick paperback and doesn’t seem to notice. The escaped prawn makes me splutter with giggles, though.

  ‘Stop laughing,’ Amy says. ‘You and your useless sticks!’ But she doesn’t give up. She frowns as she lifts a bit of egg from the chow mein. This time it goes neatly into her mouth. She grins at me triumphantly.

  ‘Good work,’ I congratulate her.

  She pokes her choppers into the chow mein noodles, but instead of picking some up she just kind of stirs them around. A bit unsanitary in my opinion, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings by pointing that out. I get the impression she’s not really thinking about the food. Suddenly she looks up at me and says, ‘I have to tell you something.’

  ‘What?’ She sounds so serious, I feel a stab of apprehension.

  ‘I don’t know how to say it…’ Her face goes pink again. ‘But I promised him I would.’

  A picture pops into my head. It’s Leon, holding Amy’s party invitation, staring at me. ‘Promised who?’ I ask.

  ‘Jazz!’ she blurts out. ‘He likes you.’

  ‘Huh?’ It takes a second for the meaning of the words to percolate through my brain, for the image of Leon to be replaced by Jazz. ‘You mean he likes me as in likes me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she confirms. ‘Exactly.’

  I can’t say anything. My mind is full of static.

  Monday 1 October

  7.35 a.m.

  ‘Well?’ Amy doesn’t bother to say hello as I sit down beside her on the bus. ‘Have you decided yet?’ Her blue-grey eyes are dancing with wanting to know.

  ‘Decided what?’ I ask. As if I hadn’t been thinking about it every single minute since Amy told me Jazz likes me and I said I’d have to think about whether I want to like him back. Talk about thinking! So many thoughts have been colliding against each other that my brain feels bruised.

  All through Saturday night when Alex came back to the farm and played Scrabble with Mum and me till two in the morning, all through yesterday when I was trying to catch up on sleep and homework plus cuddle the kittens, my mind was arguing with itself:

  Wow, a cute boy likes me. How awesome is that?

  Watch out! What if this is a trick, and they’re just trying to set you up so you’ll look stupid?

  But they’ve been so nice to me.

  So were the cool girls, remember?

  The cool girls weren’t that nice. Not like Amy and Jazz have been.

  They’ve probably just got better tricks to suck you in with.

  But maybe Jazz isn’t pretending. It could be I’ve learned enough and got pretty enough that I’m actually worth liking.

  Are you kidding?

  Evan likes me!

  Yeah, on a chat line. This is real life.

  Well, I’ve got to start real life some time.

  ‘Kaitlin?’ Amy looks worried.

  ‘Sorry, I’m just feeling a bit… preoccupied.’ ‘That’s okay.’ She readjusts her backpack between her feet. ‘You don’t have to like him if you don’t want to.’ She sits up straight and looks at me. Now that she’s right beside me, I can see that her eyes are too full of life and curiosity to contain a lie.

  ‘I do want to,’ I tell her.

  ‘You do?’ her voice sings with joy.

  I think of Jazz’s sweet face and how he makes me laugh. ‘Sure.’

  ‘You go, girl!’ We exchange a high five just as the bus pulls up in front of Leon’s place. He hasn’t been back to school since the day he showed me his so-called tree-house. But the bus driver stops here every morning anyway. He always pops the stop sign out from the side of the bus and waits for a minute or so. Then when Leon doesn’t appear, he withdraws the sign, starts up and we lumber on. But this morning it’s different.

  ‘Hey,’ I say to Amy, ‘look.’ There’s a woman standing next to the mailbox with a sullen-looking Leon.

  ‘Is that his mother?’ I ask Amy.

  ‘No, that’s his aunt, Joyce. That’s his mom.’ She points towards the house. On the steps is a thin woman in a long bathrobe, her hand over her mouth as if something awful is happening.

  The bus is stationary n
ow, with its ‘STOP’ sticking out. Joyce kind of pushes Leon up the steps. She comes right into the bus and says to the driver, ‘Don’t let him out till you get to that school!’

  ‘Now, Joyce,’ the driver drawls, ‘they don’t pay me to be no policeman.’

  Joyce turns to Leon. ‘You get yourself to school, you hear me?’

  The bus is more silent than I’ve ever heard it. Joyce says to the driver, ‘That boy’s spoiled rotten. Carrie treats him like he’s made out of glass. Claims he’s got an artistic temperament.’

  The driver sounds uncomfortable. ‘I got me a schedule to keep, Joyce.’

  ‘Sure you do.’ She steps off. As the door folds shut she shouts at Leon, ‘When the teacher talks to you, you answer!’

  Leon stands, not even holding onto anything. The bus lurches and he stumbles. The kids come to life with laughter. The driver, just like on my first day, says, ‘Sit down before you fall down, son.’

  Leon sits abruptly, beside Amy’s little grade-one cousin. ‘Ew,’ Amy says, ‘poor Jamie.’

  I don’t know if I’m glad or not that he’s coming back to school. It’s funny. With all my agonising over Jazz, I spent a whole day without thinking about Leon.

  9.00 a.m.

  ‘What’s a horn bag?’ Jazz asks me.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ I whisper.

  ‘Class!’ Mrs Johnson (aka Old Wart Nose) yells, ‘I expect silence, NOW!’

  For once I’m glad we’re with her, because she only lets us have five seconds at the beginning of the lesson to get settled, and then we have to give her our undivided attention. Which is fine with me today, because even looking at Jazz makes me totally embarrassed. How am I supposed to act around a boy who likes me? What should I say? I was just starting to get good at having friends and now I need to figure this out!