Blue Water High (23 page)

But Fly wouldn't be put off. She didn't know why she was going up there. Maybe she just wanted to give him a chance to explain. Maybe she'd got the wrong end of the stick. Heath might've remembered that he dropped the book in the pool the minute he'd gotten through the school doorway. The brown-haired girl might've been his cousin for all Fly knew.

If that was true, there was no reason for her to be clutching Heath's copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, its pages all fat and wavy with dried pool water. There was only one reason she had it, and that was because she wanted to test the lie.

Fly arrived in the doorway to find Heath lurching back and forth across the room, trapped inside his own doona cover. He flopped down onto the floor and hunted around for the opening.

‘Come on, you mongrel,' he cursed. ‘Where are you?'

Fly watched him a moment, a little part of her happy to let him suffer.

‘Do you need a hand?' she offered finally.

‘The opening would be good. It's Velcro and it seems to have re-attached itself.'

Fly moved across to the doona monster on the floor.

Heath was sweating by the time she birthed him from the cover, but he didn't let that slow him. He turned right around and whipped that Velcro shut tightly again.

‘Ha! See what you can do to me now!' He looked at Fly. ‘Thanks,' he said, and put the doona into place.

‘I got what you wanted,' she said.

Heath looked totally bamboozled. ‘Sorry?'

Fly held up the novel.

‘I wanted that?' Heath said.

Fly could feel her insides starting to knot. ‘Isn't that what you went back to school for?'

Heath went very still for a moment. Fly imagined his brain going onto lie alert. It would be sending scrambled messages left, right and centre, sending him signals about which way to go without landing himself completely in the poop.

‘Oh that! Yeah. Right.
Pride and Prejudice
. Cool.'

That was the best he could come up with?

He reached for the book but Fly held it just out of his reach. ‘I put it in the laundry to dry out. Did you forget?'

‘Um, yeah. Must have blanked it out.'

Blanked it out. Keep right on digging, Heath, you're sure to strike oil sooner or later.

The two of them stared at each other a long moment, and Fly suddenly had access to a part of her brain she didn't know existed – the part that played the angles.

‘I love this book,' she said. ‘All the stuff about pride. About how it means you're so stubborn you stop listening to others. You stop seeing things clearly.'

Heath's eyebrows furrowed. He had no idea what she was going on about.

‘Yep, she was a ripper old …' He peered at the cover to check the author's name. ‘Old Jane.'

Fly saw him suddenly turn into a marshmallow, just saying the name, the same name as the brown-haired girl. She dumped the book on the cupboard, flashed him a spectacularly fake smile, and left the room.

They were halfway through the Scrabble game when Simmo sidled into the room and perched on the arm of one of the lounges. Heath had just laid down a word and there was a storm of protest. Matt, natural-born taker of the prize, was protesting loudest.

‘Shaboogle is
not
a word!'

‘Get off the grass, Matt. Of course it is. The whole kit and shaboogle.'

‘Caboodle is the word I think you're looking for,' offered Simmo.

Heath stared at Simmo and slowly picked up each of his pieces and put them back into the centre.

‘What are you doing?' Perri asked.

‘I just can't play with people who have no creative spirit.'

Fly knew this was another lie. Heath couldn't play because he couldn't keep his brain off Jane. When she'd gone to the fridge to get more drinks she'd passed by his shoulder and seen him playing with the little beige tiles. He'd made her name. J.A.N.E. And then, because he also had another A, a T, an R, and a Z, he had rearranged the letters to spell T.A.R.Z.A.N. She wished she had a nice strong piece of jungle vine right now. She knew exactly what she'd do with it.

Fly's letters led her down an altogether different path. At any one point in the game she could spell the word G.R.E.E.N. Usually she liked the word. Heaps of her favourite things were green. Trees, frogs, grass, pythons, tubes … But tonight she couldn't stand the sight of it, and no matter what she did, she just kept picking up letter after letter which allowed her to make the word no matter how quickly she tried to get rid of them. At one point she
thought she should just put the
green
word out there, but she was getting paranoid. She thought Heath might see right through it and look up, pointing the finger at her – the green-eyed monster! Fly just couldn't work out whether the whole of her was meant to turn green or just her eyes.

She was grateful you didn't get more letters in Scrabble, then Heath might've spelt Hinemoa or Tutanekai. And that would've hurt too much, that realisation that she wasn't Hinemoa after all. She hadn't set eyes on Heath and fallen madly in love with him. She wasn't sitting there on the rock, night after night listening to sad flute music floating across the water. She wasn't stealing calabashes from the kitchen to make primitive water wings so she could follow the song across to her true love. What were calabashes anyway? It didn't really matter, since she didn't have them.

Simmo took advantage of the break in proceedings to deliver his message. He handed out copies of a judging manual as he spoke. ‘I know it's the weekend, but we've got a full program on Monday, and it goes something like this. On Sunday we'll be having a standard best-of-four event with the usual time limits. Girls' and boys' heats.'

‘What about us men?'

Simmo ignored Edge. ‘But this time we'll have a special set of judges.'

‘Who?' asked Anna.

‘You.'

They stared at each other.

‘You're kidding, right?' said Bec.

‘The girls will be judging the boys and vice versa.'

‘Is there a reason for this?' asked Matt.

‘There's a very good reason. When you're competing you need to know what the judges are looking for. The best way to learn that is to do some judging yourselves.'

‘Cool,' said Edge. ‘Just as long as we don't have to take it seriously.'

Simmo got up off the lounge. ‘You have to take it very seriously. This comp will be the real thing. It counts towards your wildcard tallies. Read the judging manuals. They'll tell you which moves score what points, degrees of difficulty, the works. Learn them inside out.'

Bec summed up the feelings of all of them. ‘There goes the weekend.'

Simmo hesitated when he got to the door. ‘And just so you can plan your time, Deb has organised for us to all go bowling tomorrow night. A bonding exercise.'

Fly stared down at the papers in her hand. Brilliant. Judging manuals and bowling. Did it get any better than this?

In her dreams that night, Fly saw the dreaded brown-haired Jane floating down the face of a perfectly formed wave. The Solar Blue crew sat on the sand watching her, their judging manuals open in front of them. As Jane glided back and forth across the emerald-coloured wave they gave her scores. For form, they all gave her nine out of ten. Fly wasn't sure if they were talking about wave form or Jane's body – she scribbled down a seven just to be safe. For deportment and grooming, she scored an 8.5 from the team. Fly looked down at the manual. Deportment and grooming? What was that all about? She flicked through the pages looking for … and yep, there it was, instructions for how to score the contestant on the basis of appearance, tidiness and style. For scintillating conversation skills they gave her another nine. As Jane flicked off the wave and started paddling for shore Fly could see that something about her was changing. Her school uniform – why she was surfing in her uniform in the first place Fly had no idea – slowly changed into a primitive bikini top and woven skirt. A ring of frangipanis appeared around Jane's
neck and when she lifted her arms to wipe a strand of hair from her eyes Fly saw a pair of water wings unfurl and stretch out, glistening in the sun. Jane was Heath's Hinemoa. She was his love at first sight. Fly sat there in her dream taking this new piece of information in, letting it sink through the pores of her skin. And then she sneezed hard and a torrent of goop blasted down all over the pages of her judging manual.

Fly fought with that dream so much during the night that by morning her blankets lay in a crumpled knot on the floor. Fly sneezed herself awake to find that winter had crept under the doors and whistled in through the edges of the windows and camped inside the house like a frosty squatter. The room was
freezing
! She dragged the blankets up onto the bed, but they were almost solid with the chill and did nothing to stop the sneezing.

Fly sneezed her way through her shower, the hot stream of water slowly defrosting her limbs, and she sneezed her way into the lounge room, a bowl of cereal in one hand; she didn't want to share the germs. If she was being honest, she also needed a bit of time alone to make sense of the Heath and Hinemoa thing. She searched her hard drive for some kind of ‘let's be reasonable' program and tried to download some saner thoughts than she'd been having. Okay, so it appeared that Heath had lied to her, but who knew with Heath? And even if he had, maybe it was because he sensed that she might feel weird about him going completely gaga over someone else. Maybe it was him being sensitive, in a funny kind of way?

She could hear Matt moving through the house calling a house meeting. There was urgency in his tone. Deb and Simmo had gone out for half an hour and Jilly was at the supermarket. This house meeting was clearly one he was hoping to keep between themselves. Everyone slowly made their way to the lounge room. So much for a bit of time alone. Matt wanted to talk about Simmo's latest judging assignment. While Fly had been dreaming herself into a frenzy, Matt had been cooking up a plan. He waited for them all to settle.

‘We're all competing against each other, right?' he said. ‘And at the end of the year, the competition could be very close. Well I don't want to be responsible for being the difference between someone winning or losing at the end of the year.'

‘What are you suggesting?' asked Perri.

‘I think we should all agree to give each other the same marks.'

‘Won't Deb and Simmo spot it straight off?'

‘Not if we organise it so our individual marks are different but the total points for each competitor is the same.'

There was a lot of awkward shuffling, eyes turning away, a clear sense of discomfort. No-one was quite sure what to do here.

‘The thing is,' said Matt, ‘if we do it, we all have to do it. If one person opts out, it won't work.'

There was more silence as they considered his proposal.

‘I can't understand the stupid manual anyway.' Heath stood up. ‘At least this way I can go for a wave instead of spending my whole weekend with my head in a book.'

But Heath was about to become more bookish than he had been in all his life.

A pale and sickly sun managed to sling a few rays through the growing blanket of cloud. The temperature might've touched twenty degrees, if it was lucky. It was wetsuit weather; if not the whole steamer, then definitely a spring suit. Fly wriggled into her short-sleeved wettie. Wetsuits were always a struggle, that was kind of their job, but this time it seemed impossible. Fly tugged and pulled and pleaded with the legs, she stretched and kneaded and pleaded with the arms. The edges of the bottom pinched at her thighs and the armholes chewed into her underarms. By the time she reached backwards and found the long string to tug the zipper all the way up her spine she was sweating like a sumo wrestler and she felt like her head was about to pop off. Was it possible she'd grown this much since last winter? Or put on weight? Fly never worried about her body, and she definitely wasn't up for having some kind of fat attack today. She had enough on her mind already.