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Mum was over to see what was going on by then, and that had me twitching. I’d had my student ID and school reports on hand to mostly cover my ID requirements, but we only had one Medicare card between the three of us. I guess Ryan and I should have been split off onto our own cards by now, but we’d never gotten it done. Fortunately, Mum was much more careless with that than the birth certificates. I’d found it buried at the bottom of a pile of papers on the kitchen table and was just hoping she wouldn’t need it for anything else before I was back the next evening.
“Are you going out with Callie?” she asked. I nodded quickly, because Callie was about the only good alibi I had. “And Lucas?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe Ryan should go out with you,” Mum suggested, which already had Ryan straining and grimacing.
“I think I’m old enough to go out with a few friends by myself, right?”
That was when Mum looked like she wanted to shrug, but of course she knew she couldn’t stop me. I hated that she would even think about it for a moment, though. I knew she just wanted to protect me, but at times like this it just felt counterproductive.
In the present, Steven was suddenly in front of me. I hadn’t seen him coming, and that definitely scared me. I felt like I needed a bit of time to get my expression in order for facing him. I didn’t become all silly and giggly in front of hot guys like Aileen, but the thing was, among hot guys there were certain classes. And ‘hot guys who kiss like that’ were definitely in a class of their own.
I thought I should probably be a bit scared about getting in a car with him, but I just wasn’t. I was a little scared about the process of getting my birth certificate, of being able to see what was on it… not this.
Actually, I was a little disappointed when Steven just touched my arm and pointed me towards the rear of the school, where there was a small amount of parking that didn’t generally get a lot of use.
I seemed to remember a lot of the sporting guys would park back there so they could make a quick and discreet enough change into their training gear (the typical advice was not to look if you didn’t have to) so that made me wonder. “You didn’t have to go to your sport thing today, did you?”
Steven snickered. “Sport thing. Yeah, I have training, but I’m skipping it. Game’s not until tomorrow so I don’t need to be around today.”
“But won’t your, um, team want you to train extra hard for—”
Steven stopped walking. “It’s not fucking important, Tamara. It’s not like it’s going to be a career for me or anything. Are you going to ruin this whole thing by going on about sport?”
“Sorry.” I kept my eyes on his, even though the anger I saw in him was actually a bit scary. “I don’t know what’s important to you yet. I just assumed the sport might be something you actually wanted to do, something I was taking you away from.” I shivered. I would have told him I’d always thought from his antics at lunch that he was really good at footy, the sort of player a coach might expect more of, but I didn’t know how he’d take that either. “I don’t want to be a nuisance to you.”
“A hot girl has agreed to come out with me, and she thinks I might want to ditch her to kick a ball around.” Steven shook his head, then he broke out into a surprisingly sincere laugh. “You are hilarious. You get all fired up in a fight, and then the hint of a compliment and you go all fluttery and cute.”
If he’d seen fluttery in me before, well I was really feeling it now. Suddenly, I wished we really were going out with Callie and Lucas. I’d sort of hoped she would call me to demand answers about what was going on with me and Steven, but I guess we weren’t quite at that point yet. Either that or she was too occupied with Lucas to give me much more thought. Probably she was too occupied with Lucas. I didn’t think either of them would really want me and Steven tagging along with them too much. Probably that was the reason Steven was looking to spend time with me, flattering a girl he could have a little temporary thing with and not have to worry about the long-term when he’d be back in with his friend.
I had to keep my head in the right place over this all by myself, without help from Callie or anyone else. I couldn’t forget I was dealing with a guy who had hurt someone else in his life. Exactly the sort of guy who might be very charming to get to know at first—well, not that very charming described Steven at all on whole. I was yet to see any evidence he had redeemed himself after his past experiences.
His car was pretty clean for an eighteen-year-old’s, although he did sweep one burger wrapper off the front passenger seat before I got in.
“The paperwork first,” he said. “Then I’d like to take you up the mountain.”
Hobart was in the shade of a big mountain it was popular to climb, but I’d never been up there. I’d never really thought about going up there. “What… what is there to do up there?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t, because the look on his face was of the oh you cute innocent little creature variety. There didn’t need to be anything up there but the two of us and a car, right?
“Not much,” said Steven. “There’s some tracks up there, I like to run those sometimes.”
I looked down at my own legs, which were living proof that what counted as ‘hot’ for a guy was beyond the ability of mere females to understand. “Do you want me to come running with you?”
Steven was grinning again as he pulled out of his parking spot. “I don’t expect it. You can, if you want? But you’re not really dressed for it so maybe we’ll just walk this time.”
I thought a few kids still hanging around the school or starting their walk home were peering in the windows of Steven’s car as we passed them, maybe trying to work out who the girl sitting next to him was. But he’d done a pretty sly job of keeping anyone from seeing the two of us close together. The rumours would spread in time, of course, but our friends were dating already, and Callie and Lucas made a much more interesting couple. Much more plausible, too. At least the two of them had history.
Something seemed to change in Steven once he was able to speed up a little out of the neighbourhood of Burgundy College. It was a very subtle relaxation. “What happened with your job, anyway?”
That was not the question I had been expecting. “Nothing, really. I mean I didn’t get fired or anything. It just got a bit exhausting to have to do school and then work and then come home. Mum never liked it either, she whinged about my working all the time.”
“Huh.” Steven was already pulling into the carpark at the place where I needed to go apply for my birth certificate. “I would have thought you’d need to be working. You and I, we’re not exactly like bloody Lucas where we can afford to just bum around and then step straight into the perfect career.”
I felt a little rubbed up the wrong way that he seemed to be telling me I should be working. But there was nothing particularly judgemental in his voice. He seemed more interested in pointing out the connections between us.
“Yeah well, there’s a reason I have no money now. But I think my mum was right, it was getting too stressful for me.”
“Fair enough.” Steven’s car seemed to stop with a sharper jolt than I was used to. My heart was going wild, and it had nothing to do with being alone with Steven in his car—well, that was a part of it. But mostly, I just couldn’t believe what I was about to do. I couldn’t even imagine how Mum would react if she found out I’d been getting this information behind her back. After everything she’d been through, all she’d done to protect me from terrible for
