Lucy, Chapter Five

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Chapter Five

Not a day went by that Carlie didn’t regret telling Mrs. Hoskins the truth about the treadmill incident. She had wanted to lie so badly, but something had stopped her. She didn’t know what. It wasn’t that she was afraid of her mum finding out, or that she’d feel bad when Lucas was sent away, something inside of her just couldn’t tell a lie that big.

She didn’t know if Lucas had touched her breasts of her bottom when he had caught her, but she knew in her heart that if he did he hadn’t meant to. Lucas was a lot of things but he wasn’t sleazy. He’d never shown any interest in her or any of the other girls at school as anything more than just friends, even when Bess was obviously trying to flirt with him.

In fact Lucas showed remarkably little interest in Bess at all, or in any of her other friends. Sometimes when they made jokes and he was supposed to laugh he’d just turn his head to the side and squint his eyes at them as if he didn’t understand.

There was a girl in eighth grade called Tamika that wore her hat all the time. It was social suicide. The school hat was a horrible starched dark blue helmet that looked like it belonged in the forties. They probably hadn’t updated the uniform since then. All of the other girls defiled their hats. They’d bend them and fold them and leave them in the bottom of their bags so that they’d end up floppy, but Tamika hadn’t caught on. Her hat was pristine and she wore it all the time.

One day the poor girl walked past Carlie’s group at lunch time and Bess yelled out, “Hey Tamika, are you having a bad hair day? Or is every day a bad hair day for you?”

The rest of the girls laughed but Lucas just furrowed his brow and stared at Bess.

“Don’t you get it Lucas? It’s like, if you had a bad hair day you’d have to cover it up with your hat but she’s always wearing her hat.”

Lucas nodded. “I get it, I just don’t understand why you think it’s funny.”

Bess just shrugged and moved on to the next point of the conversation, her ego unscathed.

“So what are you guys going to wear to free dress day next Friday?”

This was question on the entire school’s lips. Once or twice a year the school did a fundraiser for some charity or another by allowing the students to pay to wear something other than their uniform on a specific day.

It was both exciting and scary. On the one hand it was so much fun to wear something other than the white blouse, regulation blue skirt and tie and black leather shoes that was usually required of them. On the other hand it was frighteningly easy to make a colossal error in judgment and have the entire school laughing at you all day long.

Carlie was pretty sure she had a safe plan. She was going to wear her favorite jeans with the strappy sandals that her mum gave her for Christmas and a pale blue boat neck singlet top. It would be trendy enough to look cool but average enough not to stand out.

Lucas seemed to be totally uninterested in the free dress day. When Bess pushed him to tell her what he was going to wear he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I dunno, jeans and a t-shirt?”

“You don’t know which ones?”

“Yeah I know, whichever ones are clean enough not to get sent home.”

He seemed to operate on an entirely different wavelength to everyone else. Even her parents seemed at a loss with him every now and then.

One night at the dinner table he was blathering on about his new friend Ben. Lucas had joined a swimming team that practiced after school a couple of times a week and Ben was one of the boys he swam with.

“He just lives over the other side of Waterworks Road, so it’ll be easy for me to ride my bike to his house.”

“That’s great Lucas, I’m glad you’ll have a boy to play with,” her mum said.

“Yeah, and I asked him if it’d be okay for me to stay over some time and he said that’d be fine, so just let me know when you’re having your date night and I’ll arrange to go over there.”

As usual, he brought the entire family to a halt. He was the only one who went on eating as if he’d said nothing unusual at all.

“Wait, you’re going on a date with Ben?” Her dad asked, confused.

Lucas rolled his eyes. “Ha-ha very funny. I mean for your date night…”

When he was met with blank stares he elaborated. “… with Mrs. W.? You know… date night?”

There was a bemused silence.

“Maybe you call it something different here… it’s the night when all the kids go to stay at their friends’ houses so the parents can go on a date.”

“A date?”

Lucas narrowed his eyes and leaned back defensively. “Yeah… a date. Don’t tell me you don’t know what a date is? It’s when the dad takes the mom out to dinner and stuff.”

Her mum and dad shared a puzzled glance before her dad confirmed. “Yes, I know what a date is.”

Lucas smiled and shook his head. “I thought you were trying to trick me. So yeah… like I said, I can go over to Ben’s house whenever you want, so just let me know.”

Her dad turned to her mum. “What do you think honey? When should we have a date night?”

“Ah…” She smiled and shrugged at the same time. “I’m free on Friday?”

Carlie felt mildly panicked. Her parents practically never went out, and not with such short notice. Friday was only three days away, and there’s no way her grandma would be able to come to look after her because Lucas was sleeping in the spare room.

“What about me?”

“Can’t you go over to a friend’s house?” Her mum asked.

“I’m not going to invite myself over to someone’s house.”

“Why not? Lucas did.”

“Yeah, well obviously I’m not Lucas.”

“It’s okay Carlie, not everyone can be me,” Lucas joked.

Her mum smiled and her dad chuckled but Carlie didn’t find anything to be amused about. That night, when Lucas started playing his tuba as an accompaniment to her flute she almost stopped practicing in defiance, but she didn’t. She had come to enjoy this game they played.

Lucas was so much fun to play with. When he’d first started barging in on her practices he just plodded along with a simple baseline accompaniment, but more recently he’d started making jokes and playing little tricks on her. They’d always start on whatever piece she was practicing but in the times when she was supposed to rest he would take over and morph the piece into something else.

At first he’d just change the key and she’d have to try and figure out how to play the piece in a different key, which was hard enough, but now he’d started hijacking the music in the pauses she left. He’d completely change to whatever he felt like playing, sometimes a Bavarian-sounding jig, sometimes a pop song, sometimes a different classical piece. She had to figure out how to accompany him when she didn’t have the music in front of her or know where he was going with it. She caught on pretty quickly that she was supposed to wrestle control back off him in the pauses that he left for her.

He made her laugh, although she did so quietly so that he wouldn’t know.

Living with him was starting to get more tolerable. Not enjoyable, tolerable. She didn’t mind sharing her textbooks with him so much anymore and she didn’t get so annoyed at morning tea and lunch when he sat with her and her friends. He had mysteriously stopped attending health class, which was fine by her, but he always asked her to be his partner in P.E.

Every now and then she would talk to him, mostly when he’d ask her a question or when they were doing some in-class activity together. When he was annoying, which was most of the time, she’d call him Lucy as a kind of insult. He’d call her Carl, but she wasn’t sure if he was trying to be mean or not.

When Friday rolled around she threw her uniform in that laundry basket and pulled on her jeans and singlet top. Lucas was catching the bus to school because he had an extra bag of swimming gear and clothes for going over to Ben’s house that night and it would have been dangerous for him to ride his bike. He stood beside the rear door of the bus and made conversation with a smartly dressed woman who was sitting close by. Carlie couldn’t tell what they were talking about. She could just see the woman’s big smile and hear her laughing occasionally.

Carlie was happy and relieved to find that what she had chosen to wear was acceptable, and spent a great deal of time examining the clothes of all the girls around her. There was no point in examining Lucas though. He had clearly just thrown on whatever was the first thing he’d picked up. She went out of her way to avoid his room as much as possible but a couple of times she’d been able to see inside and it looked as if a bomb had hit it. There were clothes (who knew if they were clean or not?) and sheets of paper and books and towels all over the place in there.

At morning tea she crowded around with her friends and they gossiped about what the other girls were wearing. They compared their mental notes on who looked good and who looked like a dag. Lucas rolled his eyes and ate his yoghurt, sandwich and banana without comment. He had twice as much packed for his lunch. He ate a ridiculous quantity of food. Clearly he hadn’t been listening when they’d learned how to balance their calories in health class.

Penelope Roth had been sitting at a bench under the paper-bark tree about twenty meters away from Carlie’s group at morning tea and lunch for about a week now. She always sat by herself and read books or did homework because she didn’t have any friends.

She was a painfully shy, awkward kind of girl. She was short and a little dumpy with straight, silky, dark brown hair, dark brown eyes that were slanted just a little bit, round cheeks and deep olive skin. She was half Asian, which was not at all unusual, what was unusual was that rumor had it that her mum was a mail order bride from the Philippines. This unsubstantiated gossip, coupled with her inability to make conversation was enough to shuffle her to the fringe of what was considered acceptable at school.

At lunchtime Lucas decided he didn’t have enough food and went to the tuckshop to buy more, so Carlie went to sit with her friends on her own. When she got there Bess was over at the bench that Penelope had started sitting at. She plopped something down on the seat and ran back to the group. Zoe and Gina were laughing and Bess had an evil glint in her eye.

“What’s going on?” Carlie asked.

“This is going to be so funny,” Bess said.

“What?”

“I left one side of a peanut paste sandwich on the seat.”

Carlie felt a shadow of dread creeping over her. Pranks like these were exactly the reason she needed to stay friends with Bess and the others, if they turned on her she would be like Penelope, friendless and susceptible to attack. It made it particularly difficult to watch as the poor girl approached.

Penelope already had the book she was reading out and she was flicking through the pages, trying to find where she’d left off last time. She wasn’t watching what she was doing or where she was going.

“She’s wearing white pants too!” Zoe cackled with glee.

Carlie wanted to look away but she couldn’t. It was like a horror movie, or watching Sally’s Baby, you knew it was the stuff of nightmares but you just couldn’t look away.

Penelope was close now. She dumped her bag on to one end of the bench and turned to sit without looking.

“What are you guys laughing about?” Lucas asked.

He had his school bag slung over one shoulder and was holding the extra sandwich and large carton of chocolate milk he’d decided he needed on top of what he’d brought from home.

Bess, Zoe and Gina were giggling and trying to watch Penelope without being obvious that they were looking at her. They were obvious enough that Lucas caught on to who they were watching and he turned to watch as well.

Penelope sat down on the sandwich and Carlie could immediately see in her face that she knew something was wrong. She quickly stood again and twisted her head to look at her behind as she felt the back of her pants with her free hand. Her panic was clear when she peeled the bread off her butt. She dropped her book and her hand came to her mouth. Her shoulders slumped. The hurt in her eyes was so clear that Carlie could feel the humiliation from where she sat in the safe confines of her group of friends.

The other girls were giggling uncontrollably while they took turns glancing over at Penelope. Gina was laughing so hard that she snorted and it sent them all into renewed hysterics. Carlie smiled weakly and tried to look away.

Lucas strode over to Penelope and she looked up at him with such wide, distressed eyes that it made Carlie’s heart ache. He took the slice of peanut paste smeared bread out of her hand and threw it into a nearby bush, then placed his lunch items in her hands while he rooted through his bag. He pulled out a long-sleeved t-shirt and wrapped it around her waist, tying the arms in a knot. Then he took his food off her and threw it in his bag, picked her book up off the ground, slung her bag over his free shoulder and guided her away with his hand between her shoulder blades.

“Oh, he’s such a spoil sport,” Zoe said between yelps of laughter.

“Did you see her face?” Bess asked. “That was soooo funny!”

Gina was laughing so hard that tears were streaking down her face.

“What’s the matter Carlie? Didn’t you think it was funny?” Bess asked.

“Ah, yeah, it was really funny,” she said. Even though she didn’t really think it was she knew that disagreeing with all of them would put her in a bad situation.

“Why aren’t you laughing then?”

“I’m just trying not to be so obvious about it. If she figures out it was us she could tell a teacher and get us in trouble.

They all settled down then. “Yeah, you’re right… It was pretty funny though.”

Lucas didn’t come back that lunchtime, she didn’t see him until P. E. the next period. Ms. Stephens was late, as usual, so the whole class milled around on the gym mats waiting for her.

When Lucas saw her he grabbed her arm and walked her to the edge of the gym.

“Did you put that peanut butter sandwich on Penelope’s seat?” His eyes burned with anger as he whispered.

“No. Bess did.”

“Did you know about it?”

“Not until she’d already done it.”

“But you could have stopped it. Why didn’t you stop it?”

“Come on Lucy, it was just a dumb prank.”

“Yeah? How would you like it if someone set you up so it looked like you shit in your pants?”

“What do you want me to do? Tattle on my friends? Ruin their joke?”

“Those are your friends? Even after this, you still want to be their friend?”

Carlie shrugged, annoyed at him for taking the moral high ground. “Yeah, they’re my friends.”

Lucas stared at her for an uncomfortably long interval. “So be it.”

He walked away from her right as Ms. Stephens finally showed up for class. They were done with the unit on the gym equipment and today they were moving on to gymnastics. First they were doing artistic gymnastics so they had to do the vault and the beam and the bars and practice cartwheels and stuff on the floor. They were supposed to get in partners, as usual, but when she looked around for Lucas he was already standing beside Penelope.

Carlie was the only one without a partner, so she had to go with Ms. Stephens. She was embarrassed beyond belief. She was less popular than Penelope Roth.

She couldn’t help but glance over at Lucas and Penelope every now and then throughout the class. Lucas was totally uncoordinated. He romped around like a big puppy and when he fell he made a huge loud thump that you could actually feel reverberate through the floor.

He fell a lot and he laughed a lot. Penelope laughed a lot too. At first she just giggled shyly when he’d try something that was so far beyond his skill level that he failed spectacularly, but by the end of the class she was laughing in earnest. She helped him up when he fell and they laughed together.

Carlie felt the sting of something sharp and unpleasant in her heart.

That afternoon he went straight to his swimming club after school and then to his friend Ben’s house for the night so her parents could go out on their ‘date night.’ In the end they’d decided that she was old enough to stay home on her own for a few hours while they went out and she ate pizza and watched TV on her own before practicing her flute for a while then going to bed.

Even Winston had abandoned her. The only person her dog was interested in was Lucas. If Lucas wasn’t around he just lay around waiting for him to get back.

She lay in her bed and tried to sleep but the only thing that came to her was the look on Penelope’s face when she’d realized that someone was playing a trick on her. She had looked so hurt, so humiliated.

Carlie felt a burning regret in her chest.

It was lonely in the house all alone.