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‘Sorry, man,’ said Lachie. Red Ant gave a shrug.
‘You need to talk to Mum,’ said Felicity. ‘Try not to be a drama queen and flounce off for two decades this time.’
He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. Felicity’s warning had come too late; his guts had gone full drama the second the sliding doors whooshed open and he’d walked into the cloud of antiseptic and dread that had played in his dreams on and off since he was seventeen. And clueless.
Weirdly, his memories of Natalie covered six months or more of his life, but they always began in the same place: after-school detention. Year Twelve. Friday of the first week of first term.
He could remember being filled with outrage that he’d copped test tube washing duty for two hours. Like he didn’t get to wash up enough crap at home back then …
‘Joe Miles?’ Mr Northam, the bio and chem teacher, had been new to Clarence High, and since Joey had zero interest in phytoplanktons or carbofluorons or whatever the hell else was taught in those classes, he hadn’t met the bloke before.
‘It’s Joey, sir.’
‘Joey, then,’ said the teacher. ‘I believe I am to have the pleasure of your company until five pm.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he sighed. He’d miss the bus home, which meant a six click walk, and then if his parents were out working the crops, the little ones would be starving, and who’d be there to keep their kitchen shenanigans in check if he wasn’t home? Wombat would probably burn the house down.
Being the big brother to five full-on siblings sucked almost as bad as detention.
‘And where’s your partner in crime?’
He shrugged. ‘I was the only one to get DT in my class,’ he said. Which was unfairness freaking squared.
The door creaked open behind him and Mr Northam looked at his note again. ‘Natalie, I presume,’ he said to the newcomer.
‘That’s me,’ said a girl’s voice.
Joey turned around to see who in heck Natalie was.
Oh. Her.
He’d seen the chick with the weird bandanna around her head on the first day of term.
At first he’d thought she was one of the hippy types who lived in the co-op communes in the hills up out of Clarence. He had a keen eye for hippies, seeing as how he was the son of two of them, and hippies were always wrapping crazy coloured stuff about their heads, and painting their arms with henna, and making their own sandals out of pandanus leaves and whatever.
But that wasn’t why this chick wore a cloth wrapped about her head … not according to oval gossip, anyway.
‘Hey,’ he said.
‘Hey.’
‘Sinks are that way,’ said Mr Northam. ‘The science gear that needs washing is everything in those boxes there.’ He pointed to a dozen—uhuh, that’s right, a freakingdozen—boxes lined up on thefloor. ‘It’s new. When it’s all washed and rinsed and dried, it can go in the display cupboard.’
‘Um, sir,’ Joey said, not hopeful but willing to give it a burl, ‘if it’s new … maybe we could unstack it straight into the cupboard. Like, really neatly.’
‘Nice try, son. Get washing.’
The chick turned out to be pretty cool, even if she was useless with a tea towel.
‘What are you in here for?’ Joey said while they unloaded the first box.
She winked at him, which seemed like a big deal, on account of the fact that with all her hair missing and stuff her eyes looked really big in her face. ‘I’m late for class a lot. Turns out loitering in the quadrangle just because the rain looked pretty in the old gum tree isn’t a good enough reason.’
‘Which teacher? That’s pretty mean, sending a cancer chick to detention because she’s late.’
The test tube she was holding slipped into the stone sink and broke into about five hundred splinters.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I mean, you do have cancer, right?’
