Blue Water High (24 page)

She picked up her board and waddled off down towards the beach. And that's when she saw them – Tutanekai and Hinemoa sitting together on the sand. Heath's board sat unused beside them and, get this, Heath was reading aloud from Jane's copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, while she slathered sunscreen over her arms and legs. Heath reading aloud? Jane in a bikini? In this weather? Where was she from – Antarctica? – to think of this as a balmy, bikini-wearing kind of day?

And it only got worse. Jane twisted around trying to cover her back with cream. Heath held out a corner of towel for her to wipe her hands on then he passed her the book so she could take over reading while he did the sunscreen honours on her back. Fly could feel her temperature
on the rise, but with that wetsuit superglued to her body there was nowhere for the steam to escape. She suddenly felt like she might explode.

Then she sneezed and a bucket of slime landed on the sand between her feet. Maybe she was getting sick, maybe she had a temperature and that's why she was feeling like she'd been invaded by someone who thought about smashing things all the time. She took one last look at Heath and Jane, like sticking a hand back in the fire to be sure it's hot, and headed back up to the house.

She crawled into bed with her judging manual for company. She was smart enough to know that lying there without some distraction was complete madness. As she nestled in she thought she was right about getting sick. That was it; she'd let herself get too cold last night and what she needed to do now was take it easy. Think about something else. She went to open the book, half expecting the bucket of snot she'd unloaded onto it last night in her dream to have glued the pages together. But it was fresh and clean, and crammed with the technical details of surf comps. Lots to take her mind off ‘things'.

Two hours later Matt walked past her doorway. ‘You coming, Fly?'

Who would've thought that the judging manual would be so fascinating that Fly had almost forgotten their meeting? For all that Heath had jumped to the decision that cheating was the way to go, the others hadn't got there so quickly. They'd talked through the pros and cons until Deb and Simmo had pulled back into the driveway and they were still no closer to an answer. It clearly needed more discussion and so they'd agreed to meet at a cafe called the Purple Iguana on the promenade that afternoon.

Saturdays at Blue Water Beach were always jam-packed. Even in winter. People came to walk their dogs along the promenade. They roller-bladed and pushed prams and licked four-flavoured ice-creams from the gelato bar across the road. When the police didn't move them along, people busked and juggled and twirled the odd firestick. It was impossible not to feel good down there and that was why Fly ended up getting out of bed and leaving the house; it wasn't because she wanted to meet the others, and it definitely wasn't because she was convinced that cheating was the way to go. Besides, the Purple Iguana made the best hot chocolate on the planet. It was as thick and smooth as treacle and just sweet enough that it didn't push it over the edge when they plonked three fat white marshmallows on top.

While the others talked over the cheating proposal, Fly soaked up the friendliness of the hot chocolate. She must've needed it because she was onto her third before Matt was even halfway through the details of the plan.

‘It'd go like this,' Matt explained. ‘The four girls are judging Edge, for example, right? So Fly and Anna give him a seven, Bec gives him six and Perri an eight. An average of seven.'

‘And how will you guys judge us?' Perri wanted to know.

‘Simple. I give you seven, Heath six and Edge eight. We just rotate the numbers around between us.'

‘And we all end up with a score of seven,' said Bec. ‘But what if someone does something spectacular? We'd have to give it a higher mark.'

At this stage Edge piped up; he was becoming Matt's second-in-command on the plan.

‘That's the other part of the equation,' he said. ‘Just good, solid riding. Nothing cute.'

‘And if it starts getting too good, we just wipe out,' added Matt. ‘That's the deal.'

Bec looked across to Perri. ‘What do you think?'

Perri shrugged. ‘I haven't got any better ideas.'

Matt and Edge stared at Anna.

‘Guess so.'

And then it was all eyes on Fly. She was too busy making a whirlpool in her hot chocolate to notice.

‘Fly?'

She looked up suddenly. If they'd asked her to give a summary of the plan she'd have been totally stumped, but the bits of it she did hear, she didn't like.

‘I think the whole thing sucks.'

Everyone stared.

‘I'm just – it's shifty and it makes us all into liars, and I'm just sick of it.'

What she was sick of was feeling like Heath was a liar and that people couldn't be trusted. She looked around the group. No-one quite knew how to counter the argument.

At this point a waiter glided up to the table. ‘Anybody want anything else?' he asked.

‘Yeah,' said Fly. ‘I'll have a double helping of honesty with some telling the truth on the side.'

The waiter's eyebrows twitched.

Perri gave him a smile, pushing her hand onto Fly's
forehead. ‘Don't mind her, she's a bit off colour today.'

Fly let her head rest on the table. At least that was the truth – she
was
off colour today; green wasn't her natural hue. They needed Fly in or it wasn't going to work, but they could see she needed a bit of time. They decided she had until ten o'clock that night to make a call.

Fly went back to bed as soon as she got home. Jilly came and sat with her and asked her to describe her symptoms, but Fly couldn't put her finger on the weird twitchiness which seemed to have invaded her body. She felt kind of sick, kind of numb, kind of heavy in the heart. Jilly took her temperature, had a long, hard look at her and declared her fit as a fiddle. Physically. Jilly was smart enough to know the pain was on the inside. Fly's heart had been, if not broken, sprained. As the others tumbled down the stairs for dinner, Jilly lingered. She was cool enough not to make a big speech about it, but kind enough to let Fly know it would pass.

Deb's grand bonding session began with takeaway pizza at home before bowling. The minute the doorbell rang they all floated out of their rooms, lured down the stairs by wafting ham and pineapple, by pepperoni and mozzarella. This wasn't the kind of food they were usually allowed. Even though they were in charge of the cooking, Jilly was in charge of the shopping, and it was hard to make a pizza out of brown rice and broccoli no matter how Jamie Oliver you were feeling.

Fly couldn't eat. Now she thought about it, beside those three Purple Iguana hot chocolates she'd hardly eaten at all since yesterday morning – since she'd been so full of other feelings. Ones that had lifted her high in the air and tickled the inside of her ribcage and made her twitch all over. And
now, thirty-six hours later, she was suffering from the ones which tugged down the edges of her mouth, the ones which pulled the plug on her sense of humour and snarled as it went down the drain. She could feel herself on the verge of being dramatic and she knew what her mum would say about that, but she couldn't help it, she felt dramatic.

They were halfway through the third pizza when Bec realized that Heath was missing. As if in answer, Heath bounded happily down the stairs. Fly didn't think she'd ever seen him looking so spruced. He had on a pair of cargo shorts and a crisp white shirt. It made him look browner and healthier than such a sneaky rotten liar had any right to look. He carried a battered notebook and a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
.

‘Bit over the top just to go bowling, isn't it?' said Matt.

‘Bowling?' Heath seemed to be forgetting a lot these days.

‘Deb's big bonding treat. We talked about it yesterday.'

Heath shook his head; it was like he genuinely hadn't heard.

‘There was a conversation,' Fly said, ‘about how it'd be good for us all to go out together tonight. You appeared to be in the lounge room when it happened.'

‘Missed it completely.'

‘Must've been thinking about something else,' she said. Fly could feel the side of herself rising up again, the player, the finder of angles, the fiddler on the truth.

‘Well, have a good time,' Heath said.

Fly watched him take a couple of steps towards the door. She couldn't help herself. ‘Where are you going, just in case Deb and Simmo ask?'

As if that was the reason she was asking!

Heath flashed the book and pad. ‘I'm really behind on this novel assignment. Thought I'd go somewhere quiet, get my head around it. See ya.'

He vanished out the door.

‘Heath spending Saturday night on schoolwork?' said Bec. ‘Can you believe it?'

‘Not really,' said Fly.

Bowling was a riot. Deb had booked them into the local bowling alley without taking into account that Saturday night was worship night in the church of ten-pin bowling. There were serious competitions running in every single lane except theirs and men with enormous bellies trapped under their shirts lovingly polished their bowling balls and talked tips with each other. There was something surreal about the whole thing, as if everybody was in uniform. The women wore tight, bright T-shirts and polka dot skirts and the men combed their hair back a bit like Elvis. Even the littlies strutted about in their two-tone shoes, singing out the words to the fifties' rock-and-roll blaring from the jukebox. The music was doing their heads in.

‘I feel like I'm trapped in my parents' car,' moaned Perri. ‘They love this stuff.'

Fly kind of liked them all for it. It was no different to the little Nippers, or to themselves really. They all wore a uniform whether they admitted it or not, they all basically thought the same things were good or bad, they all listened to the same music (except Anna, who could not be
weaned off German hip-hop) and they all kind of knew who they were because they knew who they were not. They weren't metalheads, they weren't goths, they weren't emos, they definitely weren't the bowling brigade … So who was Jane?

The sudden Jane invasion put Fly completely off her game. She slipped just before the line and ended up down on the floor with the ball still attached to her fingers.

‘Whoa there, Fly. I think you're supposed to let go of the ball,' Simmo called. He was in an annoyingly chipper mood, having trounced them all on each of the six games they'd played so far. Deb, on the other hand, was sour as hell. She had never actually been bowling before tonight. It just hadn't occurred to her that she wouldn't be any good – she was a sporty enough kind of girl, she'd been sure she'd be picking up strikes in no time. But that's not how it turned out. Deb was appalling – and Simmo was loving it. Every time she stepped up to collect her ball Simmo would pretend to be encouraging.

‘Do your worst, Deb,' he'd say.