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  For…

  seventeen-year-old Liam,

  sixteen-year-old Dave,

  fifteen-year-old Steve.

  ‘We mustn’t forget that we here at MacGreggor State College are a community.’ Mrs Bryan’s triangular eyebrows are so serious below her slick, gelled-back hair. ‘And when one of our community members takes a fall we must band together to pick each other up.’ She pauses. ‘This tree is to act as a reminder of that.’

  Then she clears her throat but I don’t hear what she says next because I’m screaming. My body jumps out of its seat and my mouth erupts with a yell so violent that I kind of scare myself.

  ‘She didn’t fall, she died,’ I shout. ‘She’s dead.’

  A rolling wave of about seven hundred heads tumble to look right at me.

  ‘And a tree? Are you serious? She hated nature,’ I shout up at Mrs Bryan, who is muttering into the microphone for students to take their seats.

  I feel angry in a way that I’ve never felt before, every single one of my internal organs trying to lash out of my body like a rabid security dog, and it’s because of what they say about her. Or don’t say. It’s what they’re not saying that pisses me off the most. The past six months I’ve been able to mainly keep my cool but today when they started talking about the stupid plaque on the stupid piece of concrete next to the stupid fucking tree that’s taken them all that time to plant, pretending all like, I don’t know, pretending like it’s an achievement—pretending like they give a shit—I couldn’t take it anymore.

  ‘And if you’re going to talk about her at least say her name.’

  There is an avalanche of whispers and giggles all around me as Mrs Bryan, yelling now, attempts to calm the hyper masses. I’m stuck in the middle of a row, clambering over the people next to me and muttering like a crazy person. That kid with the spiky fringe pinches me on the arse and I spin and whack his chest, spitting, ‘Are you fucking serious?’ into his face and I’m pretty sure I see genuine terror fill his tiny blue eyes.

  When I finally get to the aisle, to the centre of the heaving groups of students, quieter now but still all staring at me, I freeze.

  Do something, Ava.

  I look at Mrs Bryan who is staring at me like she wants me dead and I just start to laugh. Say something, anything, Ava. Stop laughing. But I can’t help it. I become very aware that I must look like a straight-up lunatic, but I don’t care.

  I run my hands through my hair, shaking my head as I address the whole auditorium. ‘You know what the most insulting part of it all is, though? It’s the choir singing that stupid Miley Cyrus song about climbing a fucking mountain in her memory, cause that would’ve made her want to kill herself all over again.’

  The auditorium erupts in laughter and cheers as I give Mrs Bryan the finger with both hands, spin on my heel and march to the back of the room and straight out the two big double doors. I hear them slam behind me.

  Way to go, Ava.

  I promised myself just this morning that I’d try and be one of those quiet, unassuming girls who blend in. I even scrawled the words be beige on the back of my hand in black texta as a reminder. Ever since I’ve come back to school people have been staring at me, whispering and pointing about as subtly as a sledgehammer to the face. I considered making a shirt with the words My best friend just died, soz if I make you uncomfortable, but we ran out of printer ink. Anyway, it seems that leaping out of my chair and screaming at the top of my lungs achieved the same effect.

  I’ve only been back at school full-time for a month, a few weeks part-time before that, and only because I had to. If it was up to me I’d never have come back. I’d have just left with some grand parting gesture like painting a big dick on the oval with grass killer or something. But Mrs Bryan and the other teachers lost their shit about Year 11 and missing work, and my dad was running out of excuses to hold them off any longer. The last few weeks have just fused into a blur of me struggling to pay attention or wagging. Or zoning out when people monologue about how they know how I feel because when their nanna died or when their aunty died or when their fucking dog died they felt blah blah and blah. But none of them know. It wasn’t my nan or my aunt or my pet that died, it was Kelly. It was my best friend. There aren’t words for how it feels and I don’t want to talk about how it feels anyway because everything since it happened, everything right now, is really, really shit and there is no point at all in quadratic equations when my whole body aches with this terrible numb sadness.

  It’s like life is actually moving slower. I thought school went slow enough before she died. Now it feels like time died right along with her. What makes it worse is that they all act like they’re pissed off with me, and with her. They’re pissed off with her because it happened and they’re pissed off with me because I can’t get over the fact it happened. But it’s only been six months. That’s nothing. I reckon I’m going to feel like this for the rest of my life.

  When I get to Kelly’s house, I open the side gate and walk past the bins into the backyard. Lincoln is sitting on the floor of the patio in nothing but his jocks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

  Lincoln jumps. Sees it’s me and relaxes. ‘Mum’s on my back cause my clothes smell like smoke.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So now they don’t.’ He takes a deep drag of his ciggie.

  I kick him with my foot and sit down next to him. ‘So smart.’

  I watch the little movement of his chest as he breathes. His brown skin pulled tight over the muscles in his chest. There’s no denying he is hot as. Not like normal handsome, though; more like weird model handsome, like he could be in a surf shop catalogue wearing board shorts and no shirt for sure. He’s got a sharp jaw and big brown dramatic eyes which you notice because his hair is always shaved super short.

  Lincoln and Kelly’s mum, Tina, has been really aggro since Kel died. We used to get on really well. She was pretty much my mum. But maybe a month after the funeral I started to get this feeling she couldn’t stand to be around me. Dad reckons it’s because I remind her of Kel. Says it must be real hard for her, which I get but I just miss her, miss all of it, the way everything used to be. I can only come around now when she’s not home. If Tina found me here she’d freak out, and if she found out about Lincoln and me I think she’d completely lose it. I don’t want to upset her, but I can’t help it. I like being here; the smell of their house is so familiar to me, like coconut oil and lavender and dust all mixed together. I know where they keep everything in the kitchen, and where to step on the wooden floorboards so they don’t creak. I feel less crazy when I’m here, which in itself is crazy because everything at their house at the moment is absolutely nuts.

  ‘You weren’t at school,’ I say. I notice no
w when he’s not around, I never used to.

  ‘Nah.’ He pauses for a second before he says, ‘But I heard you were.’

  Of course he bloody did. I exhale loudly and turn away from him, rubbing my forehead with my hand.

  ‘You want to. Talk. About it?’

  ‘Lincoln, you don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Nah. But do you?’

  ‘No,’ I say quickly. I don’t want to talk about it now because I’m going to have to keep talking about it. I’m going to have to go through it with Dad, and the principal and the school counsellor and every dickhead kid at school that looks at me like an idiot for the next few weeks. I take the cigarette out of his fingers and inhale deeply. There’s a long silence before either of us speaks.

  We’ve always got along, but we were never friends. I mean, I was pretty much here every weekend since I was about four, and I went on most of their family holidays. But Lincoln was just always the cool older brother, fixing bikes or playing loud music or drinking in the garage with his mates.

  When we were younger we would spy on them from the backyard. We figured if we knew what boys talked about when girls weren’t around then we’d be better equipped to talk to them when we were around.

  When we were in Year 9 we started to go to the same parties and I think that freaked him out a bit. Kel would hook up with his friends and he’d flip out about it, real protective, and him and Kel would fight about it and he’d say, ‘That’s just the way it is, Kelly. I’m older therefore I know better.’

  But Kel wouldn’t have taken that from anyone and especially not Lincoln. She made up this rule that he wasn’t allowed to hook up with anyone in our grade and she wouldn’t hook up with anyone in his and both of them were keeping their end of the deal until the night we all went to Stuart Gillespie’s eighteenth. Lincoln really wanted to hook up with Amanda Higgins, who has massive boobs. Like porno massive.

  ‘Fuck the deal, Kel, Amanda’s so up for it, ay?’ Lincoln said, standing right in front of Kel, shifting his weight from one leg to the other like one of the netball girls so Kelly couldn’t get past.

  ‘You’re a pig,’ Kelly scowled.

  ‘Come on, just this once?’

  ‘If you hook up with Amanda I’m going to make out with…’ she looked around the party scanning the guys. ‘Tom Greig.’

  Lincoln scoffed loudly. ‘He’s a dick.’

  ‘You’re a dick,’ Kelly snapped back.

  Lincoln groaned, looked over at Tom Greig, who was cheering as some other guy sculled from a bottle of vodka. ‘Fine,’ he mumbled as he walked away. Then he turned back and looked right at me. ‘And who are you going to hook up with, Aves?’

  I just stood there stunned. ‘No one,’ I mumbled. ‘No one.’ This time trying to seem more confident.

  ‘Yeah.’ He paused. ‘Probably not that many guys here who’d hook up with you anyway.’ And then he walked off with Kelly yelling at him to get fucked.

  She quickly spun back to look at me. ‘He didn’t mean that, Aves, he’s just trying to piss me off. All the guys here’d be lucky to make out with you.’ Her face cracked with her enormous teeth-filled grin and I couldn’t help but laugh. She leaned her forehead on mine so her eyes kind of mushed into one because she was so close. ‘You’re the most beautiful of them all,’ she whispered and I just nodded. She always knew exactly what to say. Always.

  Right after it happened Lincoln and I started texting, mostly about the stupid shit that people would say or do, and then we started hanging out and then we—well, yeah. I figure he’s the only one who really actually gets how I feel. Kind of. I don’t even know if I like him like that, even now, after everything that’s happened between us.

  ‘Wanna get stoned?’ Lincoln asks. I shake my head. I don’t. ‘Wanna’—he pauses and looks at me with his big brown eyes and takes a deep breath—‘root?’

  ‘God, Lincoln.’ I shake my head, smiling. ‘Who says root?’ He doesn’t move his hand, he leaves it lightly on my neck and he smiles at me.

  ‘What do you want?’

  I exhale again and lean my head on his shoulder; he lifts his arm and puts it around me. I feel Lincoln kiss my forehead and I gulp down the large lump in my throat. Lincoln looks at me, right in the eye and neither of us moves for what I reckon is a whole minute. We just sit there looking at each other. I’ve never been able to hold eye contact with anyone but it’s like with Lincoln I’m not even nervous. Not like how I feel with other guys. I’ve had boyfriends and that, nothing serious, but it was always Kel who would make it happen. She was confident, especially with people she liked. She kissed whoever she wanted to kiss and she’d make whoever she liked like her back. She’d also make whoever I liked like me. It was a pretty sweet pay-off.

  There’s very little we didn’t do together. We even lost our virginity on the same night, in the same house, pretty much at the same time because that’s what we’d planned. Ahmed was a sweet Muslim boy who had just graduated from our school and I thought he was the loveliest. He played violin in the school string quartet and he was going to uni to be an engineer. We’d talk online most nights about homework, life, our future and stuff and when he saw me at school he’d always make an effort to say hello to me. He didn’t really go to parties so I didn’t see him much outside of school. His best mate Jack played rugby. He was a big dude, really funny and really sweet; he’d turned eighteen right at the beginning of Year 12 so he’d instantly become one of the most popular kids at school because he’d buy everyone’s booze on the weekends. Kel liked Jack and so we all shared a bottle of Galliano and Kelly asked Jack to show her his room, which left Ahmed and me alone in the lounge room frozen, neither of us able to work out what to say until finally he muttered, ‘Do you want to see the spare room?’

  I nodded and we walked up to the hallway in silence. The awkwardness was agony so as soon as we got to the spare room I kissed him so we’d have something to do and we wouldn’t have to endure the silence any longer. We didn’t really talk while it was happening, we just did it. I don’t know why, probably because we thought we should, because Jack and Kelly were in the other room doing it, and it was easier to just do it than explain why we hadn’t. It was fine. I mean it wasn’t bad, it just happened, nothing like in the movies where it’s crazy romantic or passionate or anything, just quick. A non-event, really.

  With Lincoln it’s different. It’s better. It’s fun. Most of the time.

  ‘Hosana sent me the video of you today.’ Lincoln laughs and I look up briefly before burying my head into his shoulder, mortified. My crazy-lady outburst online forever. Great. ‘I cracked up laughing when you gave Mrs Bryan the finger. He’d zoomed in on her face and it looks like she’s actually gonna spew.’

  I groan. ‘Do I look completely mental?’

  ‘Nah, you look cute as,’ he lies. I smile, whacking him on the leg and he grabs my hand and squeezes it.

  ‘They just make me so mad.’

  ‘Yeah, Aves. I know.’

  Flirting with Lincoln makes me feel better about what’s about to happen. Maybe he feels the same way. I don’t even know if he likes me. I mean he must a little, but not like that. I just know that when I hang out with Lincoln everything else doesn’t matter as much. What happened at school today doesn’t matter. What my dad will say later doesn’t matter. Being with Lincoln makes me forget how messed up everything else is. Or maybe forget is too strong, maybe he just makes me feel something other than shit for a bit. Like I used to feel when Kelly was still alive. Which is weird because this never would’ve happened if Kelly was alive.

  ‘Come on,’ Lincoln raises his eyebrows at me and stands up. He doesn’t say anything as he leads me through the sliding door, up the hallway, past Kel’s closed bedroom door, into his room and onto his bed.

  It’s dark by the time I get home.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Dad shouts from the kitchen the second I walk through the door.

  ‘Kel’s.’

&nbs
p; ‘Ava!’ Dad appears with a tea towel over his shoulder and a scowl on his face. His floppy grey hair bounces as he shakes his head. ‘I thought we agreed you wouldn’t go there.’

  ‘Yeah we did, but Lincoln wasn’t at school today so I wanted to see if he was okay,’ I lie, and watch Dad’s face as it crinkles into a smirk.

  ‘Bullshit, kiddo.’ He turns and walks back into the kitchen. I kick my shoes off and follow him.

  My mum left us the first time when I was about six months old—she dropped me in the reception area of Dad’s office and left. We didn’t hear anything from her for like, two years when she just showed up on our front stairs in a panel van. She hung around for a bit and then left a note on our coffee table that said I’ll call you, and pissed off overseas.

  That was her longest stint away because we didn’t actually see her again until I was nine. She’d write postcards from Paris, Berlin, Lithuania, Egypt and she’d never sign them Mum, always Barb xx. Never any regularity; just whenever she felt like it.

  Her and Dad fell in love quickly, got married and had me all in like twelve months. She must have just been in one of her manic phases, where she comes across all flighty and free-spirited like a real gypsy. But on her other days, her low days, she’s dark and moody, she lies and she is mean.

  My relationship with my mum is nonexistent, really. I think about her like you do a distant relative. I feel like I know her based on what my dad has told me or from these quick bursts of interest she shows in me. We don’t have anything in common apart from genes. I reckon if I met her and didn’t know her I still wouldn’t like her, and I’m okay about it.

  I’ve seen what she’s done to Dad and I used to really care, wanted her to be around, didn’t understand it. I still don’t but I guess I’ve just got used to it. I haven’t seen her for a year; she’s living in Darwin. She got married to some guy with long hair and sent me a photo. She never had another kid.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Don’t change the subject. You had a shit day?’ He’s got his back to me, stirring whatever is on the stovetop. He says the last part like it’s both a statement and a question. Like he knows I had a shit day, but like he also wants to know if it really was a shit day.