Saving Jazz (2 page)

I have to be smart at school, because if I'm not, there is always someone there ready to claim, ‘She might be pretty, but she's as thick as pig shit.' I have to work hard to be fit or it's, ‘She might have a beautiful face but it's a shame about her body.' And more than anything I have to have a nice, friendly personality or it's, ‘Yeah, she's lovely in name and lovely to look at but what a fucking bitch.' I worked hard, I tried really hard — and I hope this doesn't sound like I'm a phony, but that is genuinely who I am. Was. I tried not to have faults, because, as Jack once told me, this world is a bitch and people even bitchier. But of course all the trying in the world can't make you perfect. What is perfection? I had the same doubts and fears as my friends, the same appearance issues if there was a pimple lurking, the
same body issues — because despite my seeming perfection I am flat chested. Boobs not even big enough to fill a B cup.

That might seem like the most meaningless thing you've ever heard, but there it is, my Achilles heel. Mark Ward in my year had bigger tits than me. Make no mistake, he was punished mercilessly for that crime against humanity. But that was my focus — the size of my boobs — and for a long time I really thought that if they were bigger (I certainly wouldn't have ruled out plastic surgery) then I could cope with anything. Before you think it, let me say it: how fucking shallow was that? But we were shallow, all of us, fixating on minor flaws and using them to make ourselves miserable, or using them as a weapon against someone else.

But body issues aside, before the night of Greenheadgate I was a mostly happy and content person. I had friends, I was popular and I was doing well at school. I had no real dramas in my life. And even my mum and dad, who worked together in our boutique winery, were proud of me, in their aloof kind of way. It kills me now, to know how much that has changed.

I guess you want to know about my friends. Let me take you further back in time to when I was six. It was time to live the dream: after arriving from South Africa as a newlywed couple, my parents' idea was always to make money, then leave the city and buy a small landholding where they could grow things and live in a safe community. My dad retired from his lucrative dental practice and bought fifty acres in Greenhead to set up a winery. My mum, who was a bank manager, had been studying viticulture. I was starting Grade 1 and it was the biggest upheaval of my life. As we stood in front of the school in Greenhead I was terrified of being left alone, but along came this six-year-old boy, Jack West, and his mum, Maria.

‘Hey,' Jack said, scrunching up his eyes, as he still does today when he smiles, ‘what grade are you in?'

‘One,' I said, looking at his tousled red hair and freckly face.

‘Me too. I'm Jack.' He waved to his mum. ‘See ya. Come on,' he grabbed my hand, ‘let's make sure we get to sit together.'

Jack always took me by the hand, from that day on. He was my best friend in the whole world. I trusted him with everything. One day I was at his house while my mum was at the hairdresser. After exhausting all of the Disney DVDs, Jack had an idea — he would be my hairdresser. I sat patiently on the blue plastic stool as Jack tied a towel around my neck and arranged his tools.

‘Right,' he said, ‘and how would you like your hair today?'

I waved him on. ‘However,' I said. My hair was shoulder-length ringlets — my mother's pride and joy — held aloft, either side of my face, in two bunches.

‘Something fashionable,' Jack said in his best imitation of a hairdresser.

It was Maria's scream, when she entered the
playroom carrying two glasses of Milo and a plate of biscuits (that Milo stain never left the cream carpet), that alerted me to the fact that Jack's cut was definitely
not
fashionable.

‘Good lord, what have you done?' Maria shrieked, collecting my perfect bunch, still in its elastic band, off the floor. Jack had severed it from my head, just above my ear.

When my mother arrived, her newly coiffured hair unable to even bob under its helmet of hairspray, her look of disappointment (one she perfected later, during the time of Greenheadgate) confirmed she agreed with Maria.

She stared grimly through the windscreen as she drove me to the local salon. My mum always worried about what the neighbours would think. She couldn't see anything funny in this.

‘Cut it above her ear,' she ordered the startled hairdresser, holding my remaining bunch out as an offering.

‘Such beautiful ringlets,' the girl murmured. ‘Why?'

‘Here's why,' Mum said, turning my head so the girl could see my asymmetrical cut. ‘Even it up.'

When the girl offered my mother the lopped-off bunch as a keepsake, my mother, no fan of sentimentality, dismissed it with a wave of her hand. ‘Bin it,' she said. I know that even today, Maria still has the other one in a box of Jack's childhood memories.

So from the age of six I sported a very chic bob, which I actually loved. However, after my twelfth birthday, my dad (back in the days when he actually looked me in the eye) commented scathingly, ‘What do you think you are? Parisian? For crying out loud, Jasmine, grow it — no girl needs to look like a boy, or French for that matter.' From then on, I let my hair grow out.

As for me and Jack, we didn't care, it was just hair. We were six. We were best friends for life.

All through primary school it was Jack and me.

One hot summer day, when we were about ten, Jack and I were mucking around with a pot of bubble liquid and a bubble blower. You know those plastic rings on a stick that you dip into the detergent and blow through? We had been to Scottie's party and got them in a lolly bag. We were seeing who could blow the biggest one — Jack was dragging his plastic ring through the air, creating a distorted and bulging bubble that reflected streaks of blue and pink in the sunlight. Suddenly the bubble broke free from its plastic confines and wobbled through the air, over the hedge that separated Jack's place from the Maitlands'.

We pushed through the hedge and watched
the bubble shiver through the air and slowly settle on the surface of the Maitlands' pond. Despite the trickling water from the ornamental stone fish's mouth, which rippled the water, the bubble sat firmly on top of the pond. It was indestructible. That was until a large pair of lips, belonging to one of Mr Maitland's gigantic koi, puckered up and kissed its side. The bubble popped. The expression on the koi's face was one of sheer shock (I think startled looks are the default position in these creatures anyway), but no matter, it had us in fits of laughter. And then a thought bubble popped right over the top of Jack's head.

‘I've got a great idea,' he said.

We gathered up detergent from both our houses and squirted it — all of it — into the stone fish's mouth where it spewed water into the pond. It was immediate. The pond started foaming violently and then it went out of control. Our laughter stopped abruptly as a tsunami of foam cascaded over the confines of the pond and erupted down Greenhead's main road.

‘The fish,' Jack shouted as we watched one helpless victim caught up in the deluge skitter down
the street. I ran to my house to grab a bucket and something to scoop. In the time it took me to find a ladle — the one with the holes in it — and return to Jack, it was too late.

‘Geez, Jazz,' Jack said, really ashamed and miserable. ‘I didn't think that through. I think I killed all the fish.'

We hadn't. There was one left, who we rescued from the dishwater and popped in the bucket with clean water. Jack was so brave marching into Mr Maitland's bakery and confessing to the crime, while I stood behind him holding the bucket with the sole survivor. I'll never forget Mr Maitland's face — the dark beetroot colour it went, the spittle flying from his lips as he berated Jack and labelled him (for life) the town troublemaker.

Others in the town found it funny. Not the death of the fish, which Jack solemnly promised to replace — they just knew Jack was trying to have a laugh and was not intentionally malicious. ‘He's just a boy,' was the usual response.

Tommy Robinson arrived at Namba High at the start of Year 8. He was totally hot — all the girls had instant crushes on him. A perfect face, with perfect teeth. I wasn't alone in fantasising that one day Tommy would be my boyfriend. The guys liked him too. He was athletic — into footy, so a welcome addition to the local team. Tommy slid easily into the Namba community.

But I guess I had doubts about him pretty early on. He'd watch me and Jack together and make comments.

‘What's up between you two?' Tommy asked once as we were all sitting around at school.

‘Nothing,' Jack said dismissively.

‘You fancy her.' It was a statement, not a question.

I turned on him, ready to set him straight as to how Jack was my best friend and that was it. But Jack replied first.

‘Aww, gross,' he said, screwing up his face. ‘As if I fancy her. That's Jazz.'

I was humiliated and hurt. I got up and walked off. I didn't speak to Jack for the rest of the day. How dare he say that, like that? How dare he?

The next morning I was still studiously avoiding him. He found me outside Food Tech.

‘Hey,' he said, like nothing had happened, ‘when King tells us to get the ingredients, you get extra chocolate — I think the muffins will need more than the one piece they'll let us have.' He screwed his eyes up, laughing, but stopped when he saw I wasn't joining in. ‘What's up?'

‘Nothing,' I said, turning away. I didn't want to talk to him, I didn't want to be around him and I certainly didn't want to be doing his dirty work.

‘Sure,' he said frowning.

‘I'm not your little bitch,' I snapped.

‘Hey, steady, what's your problem?' Jack said.

‘Get stuffed, Jack.' I really wanted to tell him to
fuck off
, but then, when I was thirteen, I think it
was like the worst thing I could think of saying. To actually say it to Jack, my Jack, was impossible.

‘Hey,' he grabbed my arm, ‘what?'

‘How can you touch me,' I shook him off, ‘when I'm so gross?' And I couldn't help the tears, so I ran to the toilets.

Jack pushed open the door to the girls' toilets and saw me sobbing over the sink. ‘You'll be in serious trouble if Mr Man finds you in here,' I snivelled at him through the mirror. Mr Man was the actual name of our deputy, a man mountain whose appearance belied his generally soft interior. Still, he wasn't one who would take lightly a boy breaching the sanctity of the girls' toilets. I could already hear him: ‘Show respect — they are young women, who are entitled to privacy.'

‘I don't care,' Jack said, venturing forwards. ‘Jazzy, I'd cut my tongue from my head if I thought I'd offended you.'

‘Well, I wish I had a knife,' I said, glaring at him angrily, ‘because you have.'

‘I didn't mean it like that,' Jack said. ‘I didn't mean
you
were gross. I meant what he was
suggesting was gross. You're my best friend. You're like my sister. You're more than that, you're my everything in the whole world. The idea that it's something else is gross. Guys like Tommy don't understand.'

As usual, Jack had pulled the anger from me. Of course he hadn't meant it like that. Of course he was repulsed that someone would think he had an ulterior motive towards me. Jack loved me. Best friends for life.

‘But no matter what, I'm sorry, Jazzy.' And he put his arms around me and hugged me tightly.

Later that week, I got my first period. I sat on my bed sobbing, because — well, I didn't know why, but I just felt so sad and confused. And Jack sat with me. He held my hand. He went to the shop and bought me two different types of pads, because he wasn't sure if wings were good or not. He never blamed my changing body and my hormones for making me so prickly. He never treated me like I was a mere female who couldn't control her emotions. He just held my hand.

And as for Tommy, well, from that day I never
trusted him. I guess I always felt like he was looking for something nasty in everything that was innocent.

Of course I also had girlfriends, picked up over the years at Greenhead. Simone, Sim we called her, whose dad was a cop — so you can bet there were never any gatherings at her place — and also Lily, whose parents had a huge wildflower business. We were all the same age so it made sense that we would hang together. And, in the middle of Year 9, along came Annie (you'll get to know her later).

So that's the backdrop against which this tragic tale is set — a small community, and the fact that bad decisions can have life-changing effects.

It was twelve months ago, although it seems like more than a year. Summer had truly hit with nuclear force and the air was full of the drone of bees in the grevilleas. The sun was hot by 7 am and the holidays were already a lifetime ago. School had just started and we were already waiting for the first term break.

The second week of Year 10 — nothing to report, classes pretty much the same, most teachers unchanged. There was a sense of relief to know the Head of Maths had finally retired — it surprised us that she was able to face sunlight when she dragged herself from her fur-lined coffin each morning. Finally someone had pushed a stake through the old vampire's heart (not that I'm admitting to
that
crime). We partied in Maths that day, and Miss
Cormoron — more terrified of the Head of Maths than we were — celebrated the most. But aside from the usual beginnings, there was nothing unusual about the beginning.

‘Did you see this?' Jack pushed his phone across the canteen table to me. I was so hot I'd taken my school shoes off, but I was paranoid my feet stank. So I was focusing more on any potential odours than whatever had been occupying Jack and Tommy for most of the break.