‘Hmm.’ I’m being obstinate, but I’ve had a gutful of this magic nonsense.
‘Look,’ she persists annoyingly. ‘This place is really special to me. And I bet you haven’t seen much of the mountain yet.’
She has me there as we only arrived a couple of days ago, and I’ve spent most of that time fixing the old place up to make it comfortable for Dad, easy for him to get around with his crutches. ‘So what?’
She takes my arm by the elbow. Her fingers are firm and warm. I look down into her face. She’s a fair bit shorter than me, at least a head length. Her blue-grey eyes reflect the sunlight as her face expands into that smile again. She tugs my arm, and without giving it any more thought, I follow her into the forest. ‘You’re dangerous.’
She laughs but doesn’t answer. And for the next twenty minutes neither of us says anything as we fight our way through a maze of thick hanging vines and half-rotted fallen trees that are now probably residences for goodness knows what forest animals. My mind flips through a mental list of the many different creatures that are probably right now hanging on to my shoes, inching their way up towards the first sign of exposed flesh – ticks, leeches, snakes!
Finally we get there, and I have to admit the serenity of the place is really breathtaking. There’s a shallow stream tumbling down a collection of haphazard boulders, the water so clear I can see every smoothly-shaped pebble beneath the surface. On the other side of the stream stretches a field of deep green bracken ferns, thousands of them, about knee-high to thigh, dancing to the musical notes of a very light breeze.
‘Well, what do you think?’ She’s standing beside me, gazing proudly across the crystalline stream as if this picturesque scene was all her own doing.
I pick up a small pebble and attempt to skip it. It sinks on the first hit. ‘Nice.’
She frowns, disappointed, but I’m fed up with being agreeable. She says, ‘Is that all you can say, just “nice”?’
I sit on a spilled log, start checking my shoes for leeches. ‘OK, very nice.’
She sits beside me and groans, apparently conceding this is the most she’ll get. ‘Sorry about Jillian going off like that. You probably won’t believe this, but she’s known around here for her extreme tolerance and calm under duress. Sometimes she might appear a little abstracted, but that’s just her way. She’s intelligent, loves nature, is a wonderful magi–’
Wisely, she doesn’t finish. ‘She raised me from a baby when my mother did a runner.’
She shrugs her shoulders as if her mother’s rejection doesn’t concern her any more. I don’t need to be psychic to see that it does. Jillian’s hysteria gradually begins easing into a distant part of my memory. ‘Hey, look, forget it. It was no big deal.’
We’re quiet for a minute, taking in the pleasant surroundings – water spilling over rocks, a gentle breeze playing tag with the ferns and vines and millions of eucalyptus leaves, an earthy smell of damp soil and moss. Kate is sitting beside me, her head angled, eyes gently closed, totally involved, relaxed with herself. Suddenly I envy her. This mountain is her home, has been probably all her life. This forest is her roots; and it’s obvious she loves it. It’s something I’ve never had the pleasure of enjoying – a place to call home, a group of friends to call mates. ‘Is it just you and your grandmother then?’ I wonder fleetingly if she will think I’m intruding.
She just shrugs. ‘Yeah, I don’t know who my father is. There was never a name.’
‘Hey, that’s rough. He could be anybody. Do you have anything to go on?’
She gets defensive. ‘Who says I wanna know?’
She glances away, but I can see her eyes are troubled. When she finally speaks again her voice is soft. ‘I know he was a camper, here in the forest. That’s how he met my mother. She used to come here, sit by the river and dream about living in a big city one day. She never liked the mountain.’
‘What happened?’
‘He had just finished his Year 12 exams and had come up the mountain for a bit of relaxation. He ran into trouble with some poisonous nettle and my mother looked after it. Apparently she looked after a lot more.’
‘D’you think they loved each other?’
Her eyes change, like she’s slipped into the past, visualising her parents as they would have been so long ago, young lovers, meeting in the forest. ‘How would I know? Can two people fall in love so quickly? They only had a couple of days.’
Like an exploding bomb, it hits me. The reason Kate feels this place is special. ‘It was here, wasn’t it?’
Her shoulders lift just a little.
‘This is where your father camped, where your parents …’
She takes the defensive quickly again. ‘Yeah, so what?’
‘Nothing. Look, I didn’t mean …’ She’s glaring at me with daggers for eyes. My words dry up.
‘So why did your family move up here?’ she asks, switching subjects. ‘Even though I love it, it’s not the most pleasant place at times. Especially in winter. It snows you know, and some days the wind has ice in it, rips through everything you’re wearing. The mornings are already chilly. Winter’s coming fast this year.’
I decide she has a right to her privacy – the past obviously hurts. Well, so does mine. We have at least that much in common. ‘Dad had an accident that injured his leg pretty badly. He got so depressed Mum thought he needed the serenity a place like this could offer.’
She nods, accepting that it would. ‘How did it happen? The accident?’
‘He washed his hands in the garage where he’d been working on an old tractor, dropping the soap. A few minutes later he slipped on it, falling against some steel shelving, which came down on top of him.’
‘Ouch.’
‘Smashed his leg, causing permanent tendon and muscle damage.’
Her almond-shaped eyes grow roundish, her mouth opens just a little. ‘Freaky.’
‘That’s what they called it – a freak accident.’
She’s probably remembering now how I fell off my stool this morning in the lab. ‘You don’t have to say it. I know, clumsiness is inherited.’
‘I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ I say softly.
‘It must happen often then.’
‘What?’
‘Accidents in your family.’
Bad luck follows us like a plague, but I don’t say this. Instead I shrug. ‘We’ve had a few broken bones.’
She looks surprised. ‘Yeah? How many?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Seven, eight, ten.’
‘What?’
‘There was the car accident. Mum broke two ribs, an arm and chipped her collarbone. Casey, my little brother, he broke his elbow falling off a swing set a couple of years ago. When I was four I fell out of my bunk bed and broke a leg in two places. When I was seven I broke my hip jumping over a bench at the local park. There’s Dad’s leg – though that’s not technically broken.’
She’s staring at me with disbelief. ‘I’ve never broken anything.’
‘You’re just lucky.’
‘Any other incidents worth relating?’
My fingers run through my hair. It’s a habit. I do it a lot when I’m pushed. I’m reluctant to tell Kate about the family business going broke, or the fire at our last school that demolished the entire Art department. I had nothing to do with it – I just happened to be the only student working late on my major art work when a gas leak exploded, taking with it three classrooms. I was lucky, I’d just stepped outside to go to the loo only seconds earlier.
She’s perceptive though. I think she can see straight through me. ‘C’mon, let it out.’ She pushes my shoulder with her palm.
‘All right, all right.’ I grab her wrist to stop her doing it again, but don’t let go of her hand. I like the feel of it. ‘There was a flood that wiped away the house we were renting.’
‘Really? You’re kidding, was anyone hurt?’
‘No, but it was close. The St
ate Emergency Service helped us evacuate. But Mum stubbornly insisted on rescuing a box of photos and nearly got swept away.’
‘A lot of people say they’d do that – rescue photos. Not me. I’d go straight for …’ Her eyes flick briefly to mine, then back to the creek again. ‘Never mind. Were you near a river or something?’
‘Sure, but it was only a stream. It had never flooded before. Took the whole town by surprise.’
She’s shaking her head sympathetically. I’m amazed at the ease with which I’ve been spilling my guts. I’ve never been so open with anyone about my family’s continual run of bad luck. But with Kate it’s just slipping out. No, more like pouring out.
‘So you lost everything?’ she asks. ‘Except for the photos?’
‘And Dad’s precious family heritage book,’ I explain. ‘He guards it with his life. It was the first thing he saved. He’s been working on it for more than twenty years. Traced the Thornton line right back to the Middle Ages, 1200s I think. To the borderlands which fell between England and Scotland then – the Disputed Land. The Thorntons had one of the very first stone-built castles. It’s still there apparently, though Thorntons don’t own it any more. They lost it somewhere along the way. But it doesn’t look the same now, it’s been rebuilt with bricks and proper rooms and everything.’
She looks really impressed, her eyes growing huge again. ‘You’re kidding? Have you seen it?’
‘Nah, but I’ve seen pictures.’
‘God, Jarrod, that’s unreal. I’d love to see your father’s book. My family is so small. All I know is that Mum took off to Brisbane, and Jillian was a single mother. End of story.’
This blows me out. I feel her tug her hand out from mine. Reluctantly I let it go. Here I am thinking how lucky she is, having an established home, living in one town all her life, when she’s not much different to me really. I may not have her connections with this mountain, but she doesn’t know her ancestry. She doesn’t even know her parents. I have a sudden urge to share my family history with her. ‘If you like I could bring the book round one day.’
‘I’d love it.’
I can’t believe how different – normal – she is when she’s not talking about magic and stuff like that. Somehow I know it’s too good to last. I stand, deciding I can make it back to school for afternoon classes, when she does it again. ‘I think your family might be jinxed, cursed, you know?’
My eyes roll at the absurd thought. ‘I don’t think so.’
Her enthusiasm incites her imagination. She climbs on to the spilled log as if her sudden height will make her whacky theory somehow more credible. Her hands weave an invisible pattern in the air as she tries to make her point. ‘Think about it. All those accidents. And … and your powers … the curse must have something to do with them.’ She clicks her fingers as a sudden thought hits her. ‘The curse could have triggered them free from your subconscious.’
I decide to give up, and start walking in the direction we’d come. ‘Don’t start again, Kate. You’ll spoil the morning.’
She jumps down and catches up with me, totally immersed in her crazy theories. ‘I think your powers are growing for some reason. Maybe this curse is getting stronger.’
‘I don’t recall establishing there is a curse.’
‘Look,’ she goes on, ‘your father’s condition is serious, not just a repairable broken bone.’ She grabs my good arm and yanks me back, hard. Her strength surprises me. ‘Can’t you see?’
Strong or not, I’ve had a gutful of this rubbish. I shake off her hand. ‘Will you quit it? Bad luck is just that, bad luck. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t have any so-called “powers”. That’s absurd. Just leave me alone. I want to be normal like everyone else in this world.’
She stands very still. ‘Do you think I don’t want to be normal like everyone else? Do you think I like living with this?’
I peer at her. What is she saying? ‘You?’
‘I have powers too,’ she replies, her voice so low I can barely hear it. ‘Not strong ones, really. Not as strong as I’d like. But I can do a few spells and stuff. You know, turn on the radio from another room, make the digits on the clock change faster, tricks like that. But most of my talent is getting inside people’s heads.’
This last part is too much. ‘Are you saying you can read minds?’
‘No, nothing that grand. Although I have tried, with Jillian and Hannah. But I can sense emotions. I can tell if a person is angry, or sad, or frightened, even if they’re not revealing a thing on the outside.’
‘Very interesting,’ I reply sarcastically, a desperate urge to run pelting down on me. I realise I have to get away, from the forest, from Kate, and everything she’s saying. I start running and leaping, shoving foliage out of my way, hoping I’m heading in the general direction of the road.
‘I was in your head this morning, Jarrod Thornton!’
I don’t slow down until I finally break through to the road. It’s not the same place we went into the forest, but, hey, who cares, as long as I’m outta here. Unfortunately, Kate is right behind me. I spin around, determined to get her off my back. ‘You’re one crazy chick, Kate … whatever your last name is.’
‘It’s Warren. And damn you, you felt me!’
Still breathing heavily I try to catch my breath. She can’t know what she’s talking about. She’s fast freaking me out. And I know my words are going to hurt, but I have to do it. ‘Listen, Kate Warren, you’re delusional. You’re insane. They gotta lock you up before you hurt someone.’
I start running again, along the winding road to the first hairpin bend, the going much easier now, downhill all the way. Yet I can’t make my legs run fast enough, away from Kate, away from her psychotic accusations.
I hear the softly spoken words in my head as if she were standing right beside me, whispering in my ear. ‘With your powers unleashed, you’re the one who could hurt someone.’
I shake my head and look around. No one. Yet I swear it’s Kate’s voice. Goose bumps crack the surface of my skin. I must be losing it. It can’t have been her. It has to be my subconscious. That’s all.
‘Anything could happen!’
Her madness is rubbing off on me. I promise myself that I will do anything, everything! to stay away from her. I’ll find out who she hangs around with at school and make sure I get in with a different group. Even if that group is Pecs’s. It will be way safer than hanging around with Kate.
Kate
Friday morning we’re all grouped in the quadrangle outside the canteen before school. Hannah and I usually don’t hang around this area. It doesn’t have a sign anywhere that says, ‘Trendies Only’, it’s left unsaid; but everyone knows these tables are the popular group’s hang-out. But today it’s raining, a chilling wind is blowing right through our uniforms. I wish I’d worn my blazer as well as my maroon wool jumper. The quadrangle area is the only part of school that offers moderate shelter from bitter weather. It’s supposed to be large enough to house the entire school population under cover, but really, only if we were sheep.
I’ve had almost a week to think about Jarrod. Not necessarily by choice, my brain just refuses to think about anything else. I’ve had nothing to do with him since that first day, or I should say, he’s had nothing to do with me. He’s keeping his distance, and well, I just have to accept that’s how he wants it. And I know exactly what he’s on about, hanging around with that other lot. Not only does he think I’m crazy, he’s also running scared. Scared of my ‘bad luck’ theories.
‘Looks like he’s settled in nicely,’ Hannah says between sips of hot chocolate. ‘And why not,’ she goes on. ‘Looks count for a lot with that group. He’s pretty hot. Whatd’ya reckon?’
In my direct span of vision, I see Jarrod’s arm casually slung around Jessica Palmer’s back. I try to drag my eyes away from his fingers sliding rhythmically up and down her left arm. Unfortunately I can’t stop the sounds of her twittering voice chirping on and on about
how cold she is even though she’s wearing a jumper, blazer and long pants. I try to concentrate on what Hannah is saying. Jarrod hot? I guess I agree with that, but wording my thoughts out loud? I don’t think so. If Hannah catches on to my feelings for Jarrod, she’ll stir the hell outta me for the next ten centuries.
He glances my way and our eyes meet and hold for an undefinable fragment of time. I swallow hard, the buzzer sounds, and we start moving to class.
I haven’t answered Hannah, but it seems she’s taken my silence as general agreement anyway. ‘I mean,’ she rambles on, ‘he’s clumsy and all, can’t seem to stop dropping things – like those raw eggs in Food Tech yesterday, what a mess, and the chickens got out when he was supposed to have locked the cages in Agriculture; but somehow with him, it just makes him cuter, if that’s possible. Even the glasses look great on him.’
Her analysis grates on my nerves. ‘Oh shut up, Han.’
She tosses her empty cup into a bin. ‘What’s with you?’
I throw her a look that should have her breaking out in big blistery facial acne if I add the accompanying chant. It’s a mistake. Straight away it clicks.
‘Oh no,’ she groans with a half-laugh. ‘You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I lie. I do have it bad, bordering on obsession. And I don’t like feeling this way – vulnerable. Geez, I’m conscious of everything about him: where he is any minute of the day, what he’s doing, who he’s talking to, what he’s possibly thinking. It’s driving me crazy.
There’s a bunch of us now, making our way inside the corridors. At least it will be warmer in class today. The only attraction.
Hannah laughs loudly, amused by the thought of me hung up on Jarrod. If I’m being honest I can see her point. The guy is way out of my league now. Apparently accepted by the elite group, what would he want with me? He would be shunned if he got caught fraternising with the weirdos. Unless they have to, nobody talks to Hannah and me. We’re different, we don’t conform to strict society rules. Hannah is simply too poor, the holes in her shoes and dilapidated backpack, her second-hand uniform and charity shop clothes, adequate testimony to that. She could never keep up with the latest trends; and of course, she hangs around with me – Scary Face, as Pecs likes to call me. Hannah’s been my friend since kindergarten, when I was the only one who didn’t laugh at her borrowed and old-fashioned clothes, or make nasty snide remarks about her family’s poverty status. Everyone knows the Brelsfords live on handouts. Five children, a father who walked away when the youngest was just three weeks old, it has to be hard.