Blue Water High (26 page)

The girls gave half-smiles and did their best to
act natural.

‘Righto, guys – we'll go, Edge, Matt, Heath, in that order. Ladies, up to the judging table.'

The wind continued to back off as the boys took up their positions. At least Edge and Matt were actually making rides which deserved six, seven, or eight. Matt's clever thinking looked like it might actually pay off.

And then it was Heath's turn. Heath was not looking too sharp. Maybe that would teach him not to stay up half the night pretending to be Mr Darcy. He hauled himself to his feet and sloped off towards the water. Even though she was angry with him, Fly couldn't help hoping he'd do well. She was such a sucker.

Heath sat out the back for a long time. A couple of solid, rideable waves passed him by and he made no move. The rest of them tried not to look at each other, tried not to show on their faces what was in their brains: what was he doing?

Finally Heath took off on a medium-sized wave. It was the kind of wave he'd ridden a bazillion times before. There was no reason on the planet that he shouldn't have made the drop … but he didn't. There he was, free-falling through the air like it was his first time out there.

At the judging table, the four girls looked at each other, frozen. How could they possibly stick to the plan? But the train was in motion. Perri was the first to take the plunge. She drew her eight large enough for the rest of them to see that she was sticking to her guns. Bec sighed and drew a large seven on her form. Anna was next, scratching out a six. Fly stared down at her empty page. She bit her lip, hard enough that she tasted the salty spurt of blood shooting forth beneath her teeth. As she scratched out her number in that thick black texta, Fly could feel trouble brewing.

Deb and Simmo decided they would do the scoring up on the lawn, reckoning that everyone had had enough of a wind blast by the time they were done. They all sat on the grass, waiting for Simmo to wheel out the whiteboard. They were sure it was his favourite part of his job. They were also sure he enjoyed it so much because it was the only time he ever had to pick up a pen.

‘Okay, everyone – showtime. Deb and I have gone through and checked all the score sheets.'

‘Interestingly, it seems you've all ended up with the same score.' Deb seemed very bright.

Fly caught a few furtive looks pass between the group.

‘So I guess,' said Simmo, ‘you'd better take a look at your results.'

He pulled back the white page which sat over the top of the scores and they scanned their way along the weekly scores to the latest results. Against every name except Fly's was a zero. Fly could feel the wave of revolt rising. Deb stepped in before it took voice.

‘That's right – you all scored zero. All except one, that is.'

Simmo took up his texta again and scribbled a number next to Fly's name. The number was 0.5. ‘Well done, Fly,' he said. ‘Half a point. Not exactly world-beating but at least you've actually scored something.'

‘I don't get it.' Matt was the only one brave enough to speak. ‘What's with the zeros?'

Deb stared at him hard. ‘You almost got away with it, guys. In fact, until the end, Simmo and I have to admit that
we actually bought it. And then along came the last surf of the day.'

Heath squirmed uncomfortably.

‘I hate to say it, mate,' Simmo weighed in, ‘but that was about the worst bit of surfing I've ever seen in a competition. It was so bad, it was outstanding.'

Fly didn't think she'd ever felt such stillness in all her life.

‘But there's only so much you can fake, isn't there, Fly?' said Deb. ‘That's why you gave him a two.'

That stillness suddenly evaporated as every head in the group corkscrewed around at her in astonishment.

‘You gave me a two?!' Heath demanded.

Fly wasn't sure if she knew this was what it would be like when she'd scribbled down that two. She knew there'd be no hiding it, but maybe she hadn't quite thought through the full impact. She looked around the faces, but the questions, the disappointments were too much. She hung her head.

‘Sorry, guys.'

‘Before you all hammer her, it wasn't Fly who gave the game away.' Deb looked at Anna, Perri and Bec. ‘If you three had given him a low score too, Simmo and I would've gone with everything else. But you were all locked into your little plan and couldn't get out, could you?'

No-one spoke up in their own defence; there was no defence to be made.

‘Right then, we're going to rerun this competition next weekend. Can I suggest that this time we do it properly?'

No-one argued.

It was a very subdued dinner table that night. Fly couldn't be sure whether no-one was talking to her in particular, or
whether no-one was talking to anyone. And honestly, she was too tired to care either way. What she wanted was to go to bed, have a long, dreamless sleep, and forget that she'd ever even heard of a judging manual. The other thing she wanted to forget was the niggling little question in her brain about why she had done what she'd done. The way Deb told it, Fly was too honest to go through with their plan, but was that really true? Fly didn't know. She didn't know whether there wasn't some little leftover of the Heath/Jane thing, some little splinter of pain which meant that she was ready to give Heath a low score. There was no question; if he'd surfed well she would've given him a six – not an eight, but a six. Was there some little river of satisfaction in the fact that it was just not possible?

Fly had clearly been praying to the right gods because she climbed into bed that night and slept like she'd been run over by a road train. She closed her eyes and the next thing she knew Anna was shaking her awake, grumbling, as she did every day lately, that no-one in their right mind got up at five am in the middle of winter. It was nothing short of sheer lunacy.

Fly had seen a lot of religious movies when she was growing up. It wasn't planned that way, but the Watson farm was so far from the nearest satellite dish that the only station they could get clearly was an American cable channel devoted to the devoted. There were religious movies, religious sermons, religious shopping programs – now that she thought about it, that Deportment and Grooming woman had had a distinctly religious air about her. Anyway, she'd seen enough religious movies to know about doing penance, about paying the price, about cleansing the spirit through sometimes painful pursuits.

That morning, Fly had to agree. The rain came at them like knives. It was sheeting in at right angles to the beach and for at least half their run, they were heading straight into it. Somehow it made Fly feel good, enduring this physical test. It was washing her clean. And even if it wasn't doing that, it was making talk impossible, and after yesterday's debacle, she was all up for that. The rest of them seemed up for it too.

The school day passed in a daze. At lunch everyone seemed to be more interested in their food than usual. Fly felt for Matt the most. It had been his grand plan and she was sure he was feeling most of the grand displeasure. Heath might as well have been the mastermind for all his joylessness. It almost made her cross. Where did he get off sulking? Really, he had no right, no right at all.

The timetabled habit of Monday afternoons was double maths. They really knew how to end things with a bang, those old timetablers. You were just back from the weekend, inching through the hardest day of the week, and they give you a good solid dose of Pythagoras to finish up with. Mr Savin was doing his best to keep them awake. Every now and then he would clap three times loudly from the front and then, when the class looked up, he would smile and say, ‘Everyone having fun yet?'

As annoying as that might sound, he was actually the best teacher they had. He did own a spectacularly large collection of brown cardigans but aside from that he was pretty cool. It was like somewhere deep in the memory bank, he did actually remember what it was like to be younger than forty. Fly liked him most for the way he handled Heath. There were lots of teachers not to like for the way they handled Heath, but Mr Savin wasn't one
of them. Maybe he had been a Heath in his younger days, before the brown cardigan disease got him by the throat, but whatever Heath threw at him, Mr Savin seemed ready for.

Heath was his own worst enemy at school. He stared at the blackboard vaguely and he'd suddenly be laughing like a maniac at something no-one else could see. Or he'd lean so far back in his chair, craning to get a peek at the surf, that he'd overbalance. He often arrived late bearing a backpack full of impossible excuses – he'd seen some very suspicious lights out at sea and he'd popped in to report them to the CSIRO and it just took forever! All this said with a straight face and a huge piece of seaweed sticking out of his hair.

As the year ground down Mr Savin was starting to get slightly more hardcore with Heath; he knew Heath needed to pass if he was even going to qualify for a crack at the final Solar Blue comp, and today was going to be one of those days where he came down like a hammer.

When the bell finally rang and Fly started packing up her work she sensed a shadow fall across their desk. She and Heath had always sat together in maths and, despite the Jane incident, it just seemed too weird to change. Mr Savin perched on the seat in front and looked at Heath.

‘Hello, Heath,' he said.

‘Hello, Mr Savin,' Heath answered back with a cheery smile.

‘Wondered if you're up for a little chat.'

Heath thought on it a moment. ‘That's not really a question, is it?'

Mr Savin shook his head – no it was not.

Heath looked up at Fly. ‘Can you hang back and wait for me? There's something I wanted to talk to you about.'

If Heath was dreading what he knew was coming in his little chat with Mr Savin, then Fly had a similar dread of what she knew Heath wanted to talk to her about. As she headed towards the door she started going through the options – he was sick of her being a psycho, he thought it might be better if they just stopped talking to each other for a while, Jane had complained that Fly was having dreams about her all the time and it was starting to get up her nose … Oh, well. She would just nod and listen, and agree to whatever he thought was best.

Mr Savin started his little chat before Fly actually got out of the classroom.

‘So, Heath, just wondering how things are going?'

‘Yeah, they're definitely going along. Zooming along, really.'

‘Yeah?' Mr Savin wasn't buying it for a second. ‘I thought there might've been something up because it's getting close to the wire, mate. And you're not getting it together. At this rate you're headed for failure.'

These were the last words Fly heard as she closed the door behind her. Heath could fail? He really might not make the finals? It just didn't seem fair. Every tiny little niggly-gnarly thought Fly had ever had about him suddenly disappeared. She paced back and forth near the door making a plan – if they really got into it, if they got Matt to map out a full-on study plan and they all helped him, maybe they could turn this around.

And then Fly realised she could still hear what was going on inside. The maths labs had long, wide windows along the top of the corridor. And they were wide open, sending through the voices from inside as clearly as if they were speaking into a microphone. Fly froze – this was
ear-wigging of the highest order, no question, but if she was going to really help Heath, maybe she needed to know just how bad things were.

‘In my experience there are two reasons people fail,' said Mr Savin. ‘There are kids who fail because they're too busy messing about – playing class clown, wagging, generally goofing off …'

Fly's dad loved that phrase. He reckoned two-thirds of the world's population were full-time employees of the Goofing Off Corporation.

‘And then there are kids,' Mr Savin went on, ‘who goof off
because
they're failing. Because it kind of gives them an excuse for why they're doing so badly.'