Nerrida shoves my arm, and my stone drops between my knees and bounces onto the floor. Now I have nothing to train my attention to. I’ve seen Nerrida go for girls before, her older sister has a scar on her cheek where Nerrida dug her nails in one time.
‘Look at me when I’m talking to you,’ she says and she grabs my face in her claws and yanks it round so I’m looking at her. ‘Fucking dyke,’ she says, and someone shouts, ‘You girls, leave her the fuck alone,’ and they both turn around with looks on their faces like someone’s going to die, but then they see it’s Flora Carter that’s spoken, and Nerrida drops her hand from my face.
‘We were just playin’ with her,’ Hannah complains, but Flora points to the other side of the yard and they start to leave without saying anything apart from Nerrida who mumbles ‘Sorry’ as she passes Flora.
Flora Carter picks up the stone I was holding and passes it back to me. ‘You all right?’ she asks, and I’m bright red in the face. Over her shoulder I can see that Denver is looking.
After school, I’m supposed to be waiting for Iris, but she hasn’t shown. Bad things always happen when you’re waiting for Iris.
‘I fucked your dad last night,’ says Nerrida outside the gates. ‘How’d you like me as a stepmum?’ Hannah is having hysterics behind Nerrida, wiping tears from her eyes. I pull my shoulders into my body, try and become small and I look away from them both. ‘Don’t worry,’ she carries on, ‘I wouldn’t marry him — his dick’s like that.’ She holds up her little finger and wiggles it at me. I’m offended on Dad’s behalf.
‘Reckon you’ve got a bigger dick than your dad,’ Hannah pipes up, which sets them both off, but Nerrida recovers quickly, in time to get close enough for me to smell her breath of raspberry Icy Pole.
‘Have you got a big dick, Brick Shit House?’ I’ve waited for Iris long enough, and I turn to walk away, but Nerrida grabs my arm and yanks me back round. ‘When will you learn to be respectful to your elders?’ she shrills like a mum, not my mum but one of the ones that comes out of the church.
‘Hey. You want me to walk you home?’ Denver Cobby has appeared next to me. I can feel the heat of his blood through his arm, even though it’s not touching mine. Hannah smiles and blushes a little.
‘That’d be nice, sure,’ she says. There’s a pause.
Denver snorts. ‘Not you,’ and Nerrida looks up, a smile just about to form on her lips when Denver puts his hot arm around my waist. I try not to jump. As he walks me away I hear Nerrida say, ‘What the fuck?’ and it is the most triumphant moment of my life, even though I will pay for it tomorrow.
Denver walks me to the end of our drive — he’s talked the whole way about his favourite footy stars, and I don’t mind because I can’t think of anything to say back, just enjoy that he is talking to me. I wish Iris was here to see, I wish someone had passed us on the road home, to stop and think, That Whyte girl’s making friends in interesting places.
‘Anyway,’ he says, a whip of a smile on his lips, like he wants to ask me something but can’t bring himself to. ‘Ignore Nerrida, she’s a skank. I can walk you home tomorrow. If you want.’ And he’s off again, but he treads off the path, goes into the bush and disappears. It’s what Mum would call the Magic of the Abos. I’m still standing there looking at the spot he was in, when he reappears. He sees me watching and waves. ‘Just having a piss!’ he calls, and carries on down the road.
The next morning, I dress carefully. Iris has a new netball skirt I think about thieving, but I wouldn’t make it out the door with my eyeballs in my head. Instead I pinch a padded bra from her dirty clothes basket, and I roll my cut-offs up a notch. I have a checked shirt and I experiment with tying it at my navel like Nerrida does. In the end I decide it’s better hanging loose — it disguises the strange high shape of the bra. I brush my hair which is not normally something I get round to. With a bit of lipstick I look all right I reckon. There’s nothing to be done about my plimsolls, which stink if you get too close. I wonder for the first time about getting a job like Iris has at the Gladioli Tea Shop so I could buy the sandals and nail polish she gets hold of. I think for a second about taking her sandals in my bag, shudder at what she’d do to me when she found out. The bra is a big enough risk.
I am proud of my new string bikini from Target. ‘You’ll look like a hooker,’ Mum’d said, but she gave in because at least it was on special. I wonder about wearing it over the top of the padded bra — if it comes to swimming, that bridge will have to be crossed.
At school, no one comments on the new look, which I take as a sign I have it exactly right. Nerrida gets me in the toilets, just her on her own without Hannah. She gets me by the wrist and digs her nails in. She’s just put more scented lip gloss on, and so her lips are very wet and they smell of plastic oranges. It’s like being in a snake’s mouth, having her claws around my wrist — the more I try and pull away, the deeper into my wrist the nails go.
‘Listen, you little bastard,’ she says, and she’s got that church-mum tone to her voice again, and with the other hand she holds up a finger to shake at me. ‘You need to know that you are fucking dead.’ She pulls me closer so that our foreheads are almost touching. ‘Did you hear what I said, were you paying attention, you massive fucking ape? I’m going to kill you.’ She lets go of my wrist and you can hear the sound of her nails unplugging from my skin. She loves him too, I think. But it’s me he picks up after class.
It’s so hot I have to take my shirt off and tie it round my waist, which ruins the new length of my cut-offs and shows the odd lumps of my bra through my singlet, but it’s not all bad. The route we take through the bush has a narrow pathway and I lead the way, looking back over my shoulder now and again to check he’s still following. I get the feeling he’s more into legs anyway. I hold a whip of wait-a-while out of his way so that it doesn’t spring back and catch him. ‘You’re a good bloke, Jake,’ Denver says with a smile around his voice, in a way that I’m pretty sure says he doesn’t really think I am a bloke at all. And then we go to silence, just the crust of us walking, me tootling around with a stick, looking for things to draw his attention to, and enjoying the feel of his eyes on my legs. Probably he’ll want to take me out, maybe I’ll meet his parents — his younger brother I’ve seen running a stick down the beach at low tide, maybe I’ll become a sort of older-sister figure to him. I have experience of that, I can make Anzacs and the whole lot of them would want me round all the time. Or maybe his parents will disapprove, maybe they’ll think I’m too young, or they don’t want their son going out with a whitey. We’ll ride out of town on his dirt bike, me clutching around his waist, or him hanging on to me like I might slip from his grasp.
‘Feel like a swim?’ he says, wiping sweat from under his eyes.
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I can show you the boat I found,’ and suddenly it’s all panning out, is there a more perfect way of getting kissed than lying in the bottom of a tin boat in the middle of the sea. The stories we will tell our kids. Denver grins at me, and says, ‘I’d like that.’
A curlew and the black tops of the gums against the white sky. Leaves that are brown, grey and blue, crisp with heat, the dry, face-burning heat and eucalypt that empties my nose and there’s Denver two steps behind me and we’re walking home again. I can feel his eyes on the backs of my calves, which are biscuit-brown with tiny white hairs that catch the sand in them. I have never felt beautiful until this moment, when I know he is watching, when I know he doesn’t see me as Jake the Flake, Brick Shit House, the Whopper. I can feel him thinking about touching my legs which now I look at them are long, not thick trunks, but strong and capable. He isn’t talking any more — we have been passing back and forth about the football season just gone, I’ve sensed that I have impressed him because today I said James Flannery was past his passing peak and that while Kale Aidie was fast, he was a pussy in the tackle. He laughed when I said that, and it was a nice laugh, surprised.