Chapter Twelve

“I’m glad you came to me with this problem Luka,” his dad’s deep scratchy voice came through the computer speakers.

“Yeah, so what should I get her?”

“Whenever you buy a present for a female you have to think very carefully. A gift speaks volumes. What do you want your gift to say?” His dad leaned forward and peered at him through the screen.

“I dunno… happy birthday?”

He rolled his eyes. “Why do you want her to have a good birthday?”

“Because… I guess because she’s my friend?”

He gave a curt nod. “Okay, good. You want a gift that says, ‘I’m glad you’re my friend.’”

“Yeah.”

“Just friends?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure her dad would kill me if I tried for anything more than that. ”

“Okay. You need to be careful that it can’t be interpreted as a girlfriend gift, so you want to stay away from flowers and chocolates, and jewelry is borderline.”

“What do you mean, borderline?”

“Well obviously you’re not going to get her a ring. The only time you ever give a girl a ring is if you’re asking her to marry you. Necklaces…” He bit his lip and shook his head. “…probably not. You might be able to get away with a bracelet, so long as it’s not elegant. Actually, come to think of it, just avoid jewelry all together.”

“Okay… so what should I get her?” He returned to his original question.

“I can’t tell you, I don’t know the girl. You’ve got to listen to her very carefully. Take notice of the things she likes and the things she complains about and then get her something that will make her life a little bit better.”

“There isn’t some master gift that all girls like?”

“Well… yes and no. In my experience all girls like scented candles. If you are really stuck you could get her a scented candle, but only use that as a last resort. Your gifts say a lot about you. You want your gift to say, ‘I am listening to you,’ not, ‘I bought you a candle because I couldn’t think of anything else.’”

“Oh. Okay.”

As the days ticked down towards Carlie’s birthday, Lucas listened to her and watched her very carefully. The problem was, all Carlie and her friends talked about for the rest of the week was the pros and cons of different brands of makeup. His dad had said not to buy her jewelry so obviously he couldn’t get her earrings, and he knew nothing about makeup, so it kind of left him at a dead end.

On Friday afternoon, at a loss to know what else to do, he googled ‘Gift Shop’ and rode his bike up to a line of trendy looking stores along LaTrobe Terrace in Paddington. He wandered in and out of them looking for a candle. There was a lot of stuff that he had no idea what you would do with. Little glass jars with ornamental stoppers as lids, furniture that looked like someone had gotten sick of refurbishing halfway through the job, a shop that sold nothing but brightly colored beaded jewelry… it was all quite bewildering.

Finally he stepped into a store called ‘Buba and La,’ which in his estimation had a high probability of carrying scented candles. It was one of those stores that was decorated so that you felt like you sere stepping into a picture from a fashionable magazine. It was light and airy and there were pretty things all around the place. There were glass bowls full of delicate shells and shelves artfully arranged with vases and wooden boxes.

There were two guys in their early twenties chatting. A taller blonde guy was leaning on the counter to a coffee bar and a darker guy was restocking a shelf. Lucas thought they must be Buba and La. They were both dressed in fitted jeans and brightly colored polo shirts and the friendly, open way that they were talking to each other belied a relationship that went beyond working together in a gift shop. They were probably the owners.

Lucas felt relieved. Even if they didn’t have scented candles, gay guys knew all about women and gifts and stuff like that. Surely they’d steer him in the right direction.

“You right mate?” The blonde one, who Lucas decided was Buba, asked. “Do you need a coffee?”

Australians and their coffee. After puking up a cappuccino all over the Governor Lucas was taking a break from coffee. “No, I’m looking for a present for a girl.”

“What sort of present?” La asked.

“A birthday present?” Lucas said, unsure of himself.

“Did you have anything in mind?”

“Um… a scented candle?”

“Oh, we usually carry them but we’re all out.”

“Do you have anything like a scented candle?”

“Ah…” La tilted his head to the side.

“There are those scented soaps,” Buba interjected. “Show him the soaps.”

La took him over to a corner of the store where there were wicker baskets full of neatly wrapped bars of soap.

“Do girls like soaps like this?” Lucas asked.

La furrowed his brow and said, “Ah… well…”

But Buba cut him off. “Chicks totally love soaps. They think if they use fancy soap it’ll turn them into a supermodel or something. You should see my sister’s bathroom… totally overflowing with soaps and perfumes and other girly stuff.”

This comment gave Lucas the confidence he was looking for. He picked a bar of soap and was about to buy it when he decided, what the hell, why not two? If one scented soap was a good present, two must surely be great.

After buying the soaps and having them gift wrapped, it was like a weight was lifted off his shoulders. He felt so relieved. He slept like a baby that night, and the next day, at the Queensland swimming championships, he swam like a fish.

Mr. Weaver took the morning off from the bromeliads to take him to the swimming facility, which was on the south side of town. Lucas was surprised when he parked the car and came inside rather than just dropping him off near the gates. Mr. Weaver stayed all day. He sat beside Ben’s parents and when Lucas touched the wall at the end of a race he’d look up and see Mr. Weaver standing and cheering.

Near the end of the day Mrs. Weaver, Carlie, Penelope and Tamika showed up to watch the last couple of races. He won the under fifteen division of the 100 meters breaststroke and they all acted surprised and happy.

“I didn’t know you were such a good swimmer Lucas,” Penelope said. “From the way you act in Phys. Ed. class I just assumed you weren’t any good at sports.”

Lucas laughed. “I’m afraid artistic gymnastics really isn’t one of my strengths.”

“Maybe you’ll do better at rhythmic gymnastics,” Carlie joked.

It was a funny thing to say, but the reality was that Lucas needed to step things up in gym class. The grade for that Phys. Ed. was merged with the grade for health class and he hadn’t even looked at any of the material that the girls had been going over in that class.

Each Wednesday he hurried to the classroom to get the package of photocopies that Ms. Stephens put together for him before the girls got there, then he went to the library, hacked the wireless router and played computer games for an hour with the sound turned off. Needless to say, he was going to fail the test they had coming up in 2 weeks time.

His only hope of a passing grade was to ace the rhythmic gymnastics performance on the last Friday of classes for the term. It was a long shot, but he thought he just might pull it off. His mom had been a ballerina when she was young so he was planning on asking her to help him put a routine together.

There was only one more event that he was swimming in that day and so he told them all that they should go home ahead of him and he’d get a ride with Ben’s family, but Mr. and Mrs. Weaver protested and insisted that they would stay to the end.

Carlie and her friends seemed content. They were talking about how to get Tamika into ninth grade classes. She had only been kept down because she had some health problems when she was younger and she was really smart so there was actually a chance that she might be able to get accelerated.

After a while the topic of conversation changed and Carlie started talking about how fit all of the girls who were swimming looked.

“They’re all so toned and muscular,” she said. “Look at that girl in the maroon and yellow, she looks like she belongs in a TV commercial or something. I wish I looked like that.”

It was a stupid thing to say. Carlie wasn’t as muscular as the swimmers but in Lucas’ opinion she was way prettier than any of them.

Mrs. Weaver laughed at her. “Those girls probably swim for hours every day. You don’t just magically have a body like that, you have to work for it.”

“Maybe I should work for it,” Carlie said. “Maybe I should start exercising more. I should get up in the morning and run with you guys, and I should do sit ups and pushups every day.”

Suddenly something clicked in Lucas’ brain. Carlie was saying that she wanted to do more exercise. That was something that could be turned into a gift.

Before long it was time for his final race of the day, the 200 meters freestyle. Micah’s event. He always had such anxiety attached to this race. His dad always said that all he had to do was to try his hardest and it would make everyone happy, but that wasn’t true.

When he tried his hardest he would beat Micah and he’d have to look in his eyes and see the pain and disappointment and know that he was the one who’d put it there. When he didn’t try his hardest he felt ashamed of himself, as if he was lying or something. It was a loose-loose situation.

Micah wasn’t here today and so he swam his event. He felt great and he was winning until the final lap when realized that he was probably going to swim a personal record. Something about that bothered him. He didn’t want to be faster than Micah in his event, even if he wasn’t even in the same country.

It felt wrong.

He slowed down and the guy in the lane beside him powered past him to take first place. Lucas came in fourth and he had that same awful feeling that he got when he told lies.

He rode home with Mr. Weaver and the girls went in Mrs. Weaver’s car. Mr. Weaver asked if he was feeling okay.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied.

“Do you like swimming?” Mr. Weaver asked.

It was a weird question. To Lucas it was sort of like asking, ‘do you like breathing?’

“Yeah, of course.”

“What about racing?”

“Yeah… to a degree.”

“Why’s that?”

Lucas sighed and Mr. Weaver took his eyes off the road for a moment to glance at him.

“Anything you tell me is strictly confidential. I wont tell anyone,” he added.

Lucas regarded him for a moment. Mr. Weaver had wild, thick, dark brown hair that always looked messy and when he wasn’t at work, or defending himself against bromeliads, he wore short sleeved button-down shirts in muted earth tones with jeans and brown leather shoes that looked like they belonged on the deck of a yacht. He had a tall, narrow frame that made him look a bit like a reflection from one of those warped mirrors at county fairs.

His pale blue eyes flicked from the road over to Lucas and back to the road again.

Lucas sighed again, and then told him everything. He told him about how his and Micah’s dads were best friends and had swam together at university and how he and Micah had been friends ever since they were born, two months apart, fourteen and a half years ago. How they had always swam together with Micah’s brothers and how even though he trained twice as hard as anyone else, Micah could never keep up.

“The 200 free is his event and I always feel guilty if I beat him at it, but then I also feel guilty if I let him beat me. Today I realized that I was probably going to swim faster than Micah’s personal record, so I slowed down.”

“Hmm…” Mr. Weaver didn’t say anything for a while.

“Sometimes I feel like I want to quit, just so I don’t have to deal with it anymore, but I think my dad would freak out.”

The seconds ticked away and Lucas thought that must have been the end of the conversation, because when Mr. Weaver finally spoke he said, “Do you know the words to the Australian National Anthem?”

“No. I know the tune, but not the words.”

“The first line is, ‘Australians all let us rejoice.’ When I was younger I was an assistant producer of a TV program that aired on Saturday nights. It was my first big job and the head producer assigned the comedic part of the program to me. I’m not really all that great at comedy so I struggled for a while until I discovered four to six year old children.”

“That sounds a bit weird.”

Mr. Weaver smiled. “Okay, that did sound weird, but it saved my job. On the week before Australia Day Mrs. Weaver happened to be sick so I had to drop Carlie off and pick her up from day care. One day there was a little kid out on the play equipment singing the national anthem, but some of the words were wrong. I asked her what the words were and she said in a very serious voice, ‘Australians all are ostriches.’

“I got permission to interview her from her parents and it was a real hit. I started making a regular segment where I’d have an interviewer ask little kids questions and film their whackey responses. It was hilarious. People loved it. But what I really learned was that every person sees the world through their own eyes and interprets thing very differently.

“We expect that little kids would misinterpret the world, but I think there is a certain amount of that going on with teenagers and even adults too. You think that your dad would flip out if you told him you weren’t going to swim any more, but you might be interpreting him incorrectly. He might be happy for you to try something different.”

“Mm… maybe.”

“And Micah might find the same thing. He might find that he is good at something else and that his parents would be just as proud of him for that as they would be for him to swim.”

“Yeah but how could I tell him that?”

Mr. Weaver shook his head. “You probably can’t. But you could be the first one to try ditching swimming. If your dad got over it and wasn’t mad at you then maybe it would give Micah the confidence to try too.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. He loved swimming but it caused him so much stress. He often felt his life would be much happier without it.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Mr. Weaver said. “You have an amazing talent in the water, but it is your talent and your life and you have every right to try other things if that’s what you want to do.”

Lucas thought about what Mr. Weaver had said a lot for the rest of that day. He asked to be let off at the swimming pool that he worked at because he wanted to talk to his boss, Sarah, about Carlie’s birthday present and he decided to ask her about quitting swimming too.

He showed Sarah the medals he’d won at the swimming meet and she ohhed and ahhed over them and then he said, “I’ve been thinking about quitting swimming.”

Her penciled eyebrows rose in surprise. “Quitting? Why would you want to do that doll?”

“Well, I feel like I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’d like to try something else for a change.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yes, there are so many fun and exciting ways to stay in shape. Just this morning my boyfriend and I paddled in kayaks from town to the Indooroopilly bridge and back. There’s no reason that exercising needs to be a chore.”

“Right. Well, that’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. I have a friend who’d like to exercise more and build muscle. What would you recommend?”

Sarah smiled and winked at him. “Would this ‘friend’ have just recently quit swimming?”

“Huh? No.” Carlie rarely swam. In fact he’d never seen her swim, even in her parents’ pool.

Sarah motioned with her head and he followed her lycra-clad form into the little retail shop that was attached to the kiosk at the entrance of the pool. She picked up a DVD and handed it to him.

“Burn Fat Fast,” he read the title.

“Uh-huh,” Sarah said as she smiled and nodded. “That is the best half hour workout I’ve ever found. I do it every night before I go to bed. It’s not all about burning fat. It is about building and toning muscle too. Is that something your ‘friend’ is interested in?”

“Yeah. I think so. Thanks.”

He bought the DVD and wrapped it when he got home to the Weaver’s house. Now he had two presents and he was feeling pretty confident about Carlie’s birthday. He’d done a step better than what his dad had told him to. He’d listened to her and gotten something that she indicated she would like, and he’d gotten her something that was so close to a scented candle that she probably wouldn’t notice the difference.

He was so happy that he didn’t even get annoyed the next day when both Penelope and Tamika gave her earrings. It was pretty unfair that girls were allowed to give each other jewelry but boys weren’t allowed to give girls jewelry unless the girl was your girlfriend.

Her mom gave her makeup and her dad gave her tickets to the symphony.

She got to his gifts last and he knew he had a big grin on his face when she was opening the first one. His dad had said that gifts say a lot about the giver. His gifts were going to say that he was a thoughtful person who listened to her and wanted her to smell and feel pretty.

She opened the soaps first and her reaction wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting. La at the gift shop had done an excellent job with the wrapping and she ohhed and ahhed over the nice paper and ribbons and the glamorous glossy business card that was attached to the bottom of the package, but when she saw that it was soaps a perplexed look came over her face. Her brow creased and her head tilted to the side. She lifted the soaps to her nose one at a time. The whole room was silent.

“Thanks,” she said in a restrained way.

“There’s another one,” Lucas prompted.

Carlie took a deep breath and let it out, then smiled in a determined way at the next gift as she unwrapped it.

The smile fell from her face.

She turned the DVD in her hands. “Burn... Fat... Fast...”

There was a collective intake of breath from everyone else in the room and Lucas suddenly got the feeling that perhaps the DVD was a bad idea.

Maybe he should have gotten her some private gym lessons.

Suddenly Carlie leapt from her seat and screeched at him. “You think I’m fat!”

“What? No!”

“You think I’m fat and that I stink!” She hurtled the DVD in his general direction and took off running towards her room.

“Oh no,” Penelope said.

He couldn’t see Tamika’s reaction because she was wearing a little hat with a brim that was just long enough to cover her eyes when she looked down into her lap, like she was doing right then.

“Come on,” Penelope tugged on her arm and they went after Carlie.

Now it was just Lucas and Mr. and Mrs. Weaver out in the living room with a small pile of wrapping paper on the couch and a line of gifts on the coffee table, except of course the DVD which had bounced off the wall and was lying on the floor.

He thought back to the conversation that he’d had with Mr. Weaver yesterday. ‘Every person sees the world through their own eyes and interprets things differently.’ Well, Carlie had certainly interpreted his gift in a different way than he had expected.

“I didn’t mean that she was fat or stinky,” Lucas told her parents. “Yesterday she said she wanted to work out more and my boss at the pool said that DVD was the best workout she’d ever done, and I meant to get her a scented candle but the closest they had was scented soap and Buba said that girls love soap.”

“Who’s Buba?” Mrs. Weaver asked.

“The gay guy who owns the gift shop up in Paddington.”

“Did you keep the receipts?”

“Yeah, they’re in my room somewhere.”

“Okay, let me go talk to her and see if she’ll exchange them for something she’d like better.” Mrs. Weaver got up and left Lucas alone with Mr. Weaver.

“Jeez…” Lucas sighed. “Do you ever think I’ll get it right with her?”

Mr. Weaver shook his head. “Probably not. She’s a teenage girl. Who knows what goes on in that head of hers?” He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I used to think that it would be best to just hold my breath and wait for these teenage years to be over, but after you said your brother left home when he was eighteen I started thinking. I might not have much time left with her. She might decide to leave home when she’s eighteen too. So now I think it’s best to just try your hardest and apologize when things go wrong.

“How do you feel about the beach?” He asked.

Lucas was starting to become accustomed to these quick changes in the direction of Mr. Weaver’s conversations. “I like the beach.”

“Good. I think we should all go to the beach for a long weekend before you leave to go back to America.”

That idea brightened Lucas’ day. Things actually got better. When Carlie finally emerged from her room he apologized and explained that he hadn’t meant the gifts the way she had taken them. It helped that when they went to exchange the DVD at the pool’s retail store Sarah was there and she was aghast when he explained what had happened.

“I am so sorry,” she gushed to Carlie. “I told Lucas to buy that DVD because I thought he was buying it for himself. If he had told me it was for a birthday present for a girl I would have told him he was out of his mind.”

The retail store had a bunch of swimming, running and cycling gear and Carlie exchanged the DVD for a pair of running shorts. She tried them on in the little changing room and when she stepped out and said, “What do you think?” Lucas’ mouth and throat dried up and he couldn’t reply.

He’d never seen Carlie in anything as revealing as these shorts. He felt sure the school uniform was designed specifically to make the girls look frumpy, and that included the sports uniform. On the weekends she usually wore jeans or skirts that came down around her knees. This was the first time her glorious legs had been revealed to him in all of their splendor. It took a gargantuan effort to stop himself from staring.

Sarah was explaining to her all of the features of the running shorts; the sweat wicking fabric and the athletic cut that would allow her to stride out. She started talking about the hidden key pocket that was sewn into the waist band and lifted Carlie’s shirt a little to show her where it was. Lucas got a little peak of the smooth skin of her belly and when Sarah folded the waistband down to show her the key pocket he saw the top of her lacy white panties.

He turned away quickly and strode out of the store. He was sure Mr. Weaver would flog him if he knew the thoughts running through his head right now.

“Where are you going?” Mrs. Weaver called out.

“I’m just going to say hi to the other lifeguards,” he replied without looking back.

He walked around the pool to the far end and tried to think of unsexy things. He thought about that big hairy old guy who swam every Tuesday afternoon and whom Lucas had accidentally seen naked in the locker rooms one day. That event, which Lucas had thought of as particularly unfortunate at the time, was turning out to be a real blessing in disguise, because thinking about the hairy man was claming him down.

He said hi to the two lifeguards on duty and by the time he got back to the store Carlie was back in her regular clothes and they were ready to leave to go to Buba and La’s shop to exchange the soaps.

When he walked in the door Buba recognized him and waved hello. “How did the soaps go?” He asked.

“Um… not so great. She wants to exchange them,” he motioned to Carlie.

“Oh.” Buba looked disappointed.

“I told you, Jake,” La said. “You don’t give girls soaps because they’ll think you’re trying to tell them they stink. How you ever got a girlfriend is beyond me.”

“You have a girlfriend?” Lucas asked, stunned.

“Yeah. Why? Is that surprising?” Buba, or Jake, asked.

“Um… no… it’s just that I thought you two were… well, you know… gay.”

“Ha! Dennis only wishes I swung that way.”

“Get out of here you big ape,” Dennis said as he threw a CD case across the space between the register and the coffee bar. Jake ducked and it bounced off the espresso machine and clattered to the floor.

Dennis came out from behind the register and showed the girls all of the pretty things in the store and eventually Carlie decided to exchange the soaps for a little wooden box that she said she was going to use to store all of her earrings in.

Seeing that it had been a distressing morning for all of them in some way or another, and that it was Carlie’s birthday, they all ordered cappuccinos and little slices of an amazingly rich chocolate cake. They pulled together two of the little tables in the coffee shop part of the store and Jake arranged the pieces of cake around a fancy pink candle.

“I thought you said you didn’t have any candles?” Lucas asked.

“You asked for scented candles, this one is scent-less, it’s not the same thing.”

“Yeah, but it’s still a candle.”

Jake shrugged his shoulders. “You said scented. I thought that was important.”

Lucas shook his head and decided to drop it. Carlie looked happy now and that was what mattered.

They sang happy birthday and she blew out the candle and the entire time it was as if he were watching one of those old home movies where the camera focuses on one person and you’re not even aware that there were other people in the room. After she blew out the candle she looked up at him and smiled and he felt the strangest warmth bloom in his chest and he knew he was smiling back at her without even telling himself to.

When they got back home he got on iChat and told his dad about how terrible the advice he’d given had been. His dad looked stunned and then laughed loudly when he told him the whole story. After he was done with his dad he talked to his mom about the gymnastics routine for a while and then called Micah and told him that he thought he was going to quit swimming.

Micah looked conflicted. His brow furrowed and he bit his lip. “Why would you want to do that?” He asked.

Lucas shrugged. “I dunno. I just want to try some other stuff for a while. I feel like all we’ve ever done is swimming. How come we never joined baseball teams or tried soccer?”

“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think? All of the other players will have been doing it for years.”

“Who cares if I suck at it? Why does it always have to be about being good at something? Why can’t we be content with just enjoying the things that we do?”

Micah nodded cautiously. “Okay. I mean, I’m not going to give you a hard time about it. I’ll miss you at practice, but if you want to try other things you should try other things. What do you think your dad will say?”

“He’ll probably flip out, but you know what? He’ll get used to it.”

“Good luck with that. Let me know how it goes.”

“Mm. So the Weavers are taking us to the beach in two weekends time.”

“Two weekends? Like the weekend before you come home?”

“Yeah, as a farewell party. We’re going for three days and we’re going to stay in a vacation apartment. Carlie has invited her friends. It should be fun.”

Micah grabbed his date book and was flipping through it. “You mean the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re going with a bunch of girls?”

“Yeah, three girls and Mr. and Mrs. Weaver.”

“Are you mad?” Micah asked dramatically, his eyes bulging.

“No… what do you mean?”

“The 14^th Luka… what happens on the 14^th?”

“Huh?” He didn’t know what the hell Micah was talking about.

“That’s when they lay their egg. You told me that they lay their egg on the 14^th day of the month!”

“Oh shit.”

“You’re going to be stuck in an apartment with three girls and woman all laying eggs.”

Lucas felt the blood drain from his face. What had he gotten himself in to? “What am I going to do?” He whispered.

Micah shook his head. “I don’t know. You’ll have to try and give them their space. I figured out that’s what that saying means you know. They need extra space on the day they lay their egg.”

“But we’re going to be at the beach. We’re supposed to be hanging out together all weekend.” He felt the dread spreading over his body. How on earth was he going to deal with this?

Micah took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s just calm down and think about this rationally. They probably do it in the morning right? Like when you wake up and you need to pee, it’s probably like that. Mom and Gracie always pee in the morning, just like us guys do. I feel confident that laying the egg is probably the same.”

Micah’s logic was calming Lucas down. Sometimes he felt so lucky to have him as a friend.

Micah continued. “So all you have to do is get out of the apartment early on the Sunday morning and don’t come back until you’ve given them all enough time to do their thing.”

“How long do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes each?”

Lucas nodded. “I’ll give them fifteen each just to be sure.”

“Yeah, good idea. I can’t imagine that it takes longer than fifteen minutes to lay an egg.”

“Okay.” He was starting to feel better about this now that they had a plan. He’d just go down to the beach for an early morning swim and not come back for an hour… or maybe two hours just to be sure. “Hey Micah? What do you think they do with them?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they flush them.”

“No, I don’t think so. Sometimes toilets get clogged just with poop, can you imagine how badly they’d get clogged if there were a bunch of eggs going through the pipes?”

“Hmm… good point.” Micah chewed on his thumbnail for a few seconds as he thought. “This is going to sound crazy but maybe… do you think they sell them to the grocery store? I mean egg cartons have pictures of chickens on them, but it wouldn’t be the first time the food industry had tried to trick us. Remember when we found out that crab meat wasn’t really made out of crabs?”

“Yeah, but it turned out that it was actually called imitation crab.”

“What about cheese singles? They’re not really cheese are they?”

“No. You might be right,” Lucas conceded.

Micah nodded seriously. “I have a feeling about this one. I think we should suspend all egg consumption until we have it figured out. You’ll have a great opportunity when you go to the beach, I mean, they have to get rid of them somehow, right? Try to observe them and see what they do with them.”

When he got off the computer Lucas lay on his bed and thought through all of the events of the weekend and tried to arrange them in his head. Funnily enough, even after the conversation about girls laying eggs he still got a warm happy feeling when he thought about Carlie.

When he’d first found out about the menstrual cycle and had told Micah’s dad that girls were disgusting he’d replied, ‘You wont always feel that way.’ Lucas thought that maybe he was starting to understand that. The menstrual cycle was weird and creepy and gross, but it wasn’t Carlie’s fault that she had it. If she needed to lay an egg each month then it was okay with him. Anything Carlie needed was okay with him.

Chapter Eleven

Carlie hardy slept that night. Her mind kept on swirling around the events of the day and contemplating all of the things that could go wrong when they took their case to Mrs. Hoskins.

It felt weird to get up and put regular clothes on instead of her school uniform on a week day. It also felt weird to have both her mum and her dad hanging around the house rather than rushing off to work. After they’d finished with the documentary last night they’d sat down to watch it in the studio one last time, and her dad had been so happy that he’d said he wanted to come to the school with them to see Mrs. Hoskins’ face when she saw it.

“Carlie is my daughter too,” he’d said to her mum. “I’d like to be there to witness her debut as a news woman.”

She was eating her weet-bix at the dining room table when her mum came to sit beside her with her coffee.

“Carlie… I was thinking about it…” She turned the mug around in her hands nervously.

“Mm?”

“You said that you fell off the treadmill in the first week of school?”

“Yeah.”

“Back then you and Lucas weren’t friends, right? In fact, you were pretty upset about him being here at all.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well… it’s just that… I think you made the right choice by not lying and saying that he touched you. I can see how that could have been tempting and I’m proud of you for having the strength to tell the truth.”

There was an awkward silence as Carlie felt her face turn red from embarrassment.

“And, you know, in the end I think you’ll find that the people who are worth being friends with are not necessarily cool or popular.”

“Yeah, I know mum,” she mumbled.

“Penelope seems like a nice girl, do you want to invite her to do something for your birthday this weekend?”

“What about Lucas’ race? I thought we were going to go and watch his swimming carnival?”

“I think it would be nice of us to go and support him for a while, but we don’t have to do that all weekend. It’s your birthday. We should do something that you want to do.”

“Can we go out for lunch?”

“Yes, wherever you want. We could go and pick up Penelope from her house…”

She cut her off. “No, I mean, could you and I go out for lunch?”

Her mum’s eyebrows rose. “Just the two of us?”

“Yeah. Why’s that so strange?”

“No, no, it’s fine. I just didn’t realize that was something you might like.”

“We could go afterwards and get my ears pierced and buy makeup, and then get Penelope and go to the swimming carnival.”

Her mum gave her a wry smile. “I was hoping you might have forgotten about the ear piercing and makeup.”

“Mum, you promised I could when I was fourteen,” she complained. “I’m not a little kid anymore.”

She held her hands up in defense. “Okay. A deal’s a deal. You can get your ears pierced on Saturday and I’ll buy you some makeup for your birthday.”

Before long Lucas was out of the shower and they all went up to her school together. Today Mrs. Hoskins was wearing a severe looking dark grey tweed suit with enormous shoulder pads, a ruffled blouse underneath and a striped blue and white scarf around her neck that made her look comically sea-faring.

Her mum insisted that Carlie and Lucas should be allowed to come into the office to discuss their suspensions and Mrs. Hoskins reluctantly agreed. There weren’t enough seats and Lucas offered to stand but her mum disagreed.

“I’ll be fine standing today.”

Mrs. Hoskins look up at Carlie’s mum with an expression of distaste. “Rachel,” she began. “I expect you will want to know what happened yesterday.”

“No Gwen,” her mum replied. “I know what happened yesterday. What I want to know about is what preceded yesterday. How you came to possess a bag of marijuana, and how you broke into Lucas’ locker to set him up for a very serious crime. How you have been systematically defaming his character, and finally, how on earth you thought you’d get away with it.”

Mrs. Hoskins’ eyes were wide with anger. “Well, I never!”

“No Gwen, I never. In all my years as a public defendant or as a criminal defense lawyer, I have never seen such filth. I have never seen a grown woman so thoroughly abuse the power entrusted to her to guide and educate the next generation. Children Gwen. Children. You have manipulated and abused children. You have used your power to set up and defame a perfectly innocent, sweet, trusting boy.”

Mrs. Hoskins’ face was red and scrunched into a glare so potent Carlie had no idea how her mother was enduring it. “That boy is anything but sweet and innocent! He is an American hooligan! He gallivants around this school, touching the girls inappropriately, offering them drugs. For all I know he could be seducing them into sexual relations!”

Her mum shook her head. “We both know that’s not true. Lucas has done nothing of the sort. You are the perpetrator here, and we have the proof.” She laid the DVD of Carlie’s documentary on the shiny polished desk.

“What is that?”

“It is a news report that uncovers this whole sordid affair.”

Mrs. Hoskins took a deep breath and held her head high. “Rachel Stewart,” she spat out Carlie’s mum’s maiden name. “You have always been a trouble maker. From the first day I laid eyes on you when you were twelve years old, I knew you would amount to no good.”

Her mum’s eyebrows rose. “A trouble maker? As I recall I was the dux of my year.”

“Not with my blessing you weren’t. I never did like you. You were always pushing the edge of the rules. Wearing powder blue ribbons in your hair instead of royal blue ones, wearing socks in winter instead of stockings. You always had an unhealthy appetite for debate with your superiors.”

She smiled. “And look where that has led us. I am holding the key to your demise in my hand. I am quite happy for my husband to air this tonight… unless of course you would like to see it first.”

“I don’t have a television in here. I’m afraid I cannot watch it.”

Lucas snorted. “I’m pretty sure there’s a TV in the health class room.”

Carlie and Lucas lead them over to the health classroom, which was unoccupied, and her dad messed around with the TV on the stand in the corner until he got the DVD player to work.

Carlie watched Mrs. Hoskins as the documentary played. She knew it pretty much by heart by now so she knew that when her dad’s voice was talking about how Lucas had come over on an exchange from America there was footage of him trying (and failing) to play cricket with the sound and lighting crew on the lawn outside of the TV station.

She knew that when her dad’s voice said, “All Lucas wanted was the chance to get to know the Australian culture and make new friends,” there was a close up of his face with a big broad smile. He had been smiling at her as she tried to demonstrate how to use the cricket bat when that was shot. For some reason he wanted to stand upright and swing it like a baseball bat.

Mrs. Hoskins’ face was twisted into an evil scowl as she watched the footage that made Lucas look like the big, clumsy, loveable boy that he was.

“But that wasn’t to be, because of one woman.” Ominous music signaled a change in tone of the report as the scene cut to a slow motion snippet of Mrs. Hoskins walking out of the administration building, looking extremely pompous and full of herself.

Carlie watched Mrs. Hoskins face fall as Zoe’s interview and then her statement were played. Then there was the part with Lucas and Mr. Crossey trying to open the lock with Lucas’ key. By the time the footage of her trying to avoid the camera as she got into her expensive car was played her face was drawn and she had a far-away look to her.

“What do you want?” She asked weakly.

“We are willing to refrain from airing this report if we can come to a satisfactory agreement with you.”

Her mum laid out what they wanted. “As an old girl of the school, the last thing I want is for a scandal like this to sully its good name. You will see out the rest of the semester as the principal and then retire on the basis of poor health.”

Mrs. Hoskins hesitated for a moment before she nodded.

“You will keep your distance from Carlie and Lucas and anyone else who they associate with. If there are any problems with my children they will see the deputy principal, not you. If I so much as hear a whisper that you are trying to sabotage them in any way this report will be aired that same day, no questions asked.”

Mrs. Hoskins agreed to all of the conditions that Carlie’s mum laid out.

Finally, as they were getting ready to leave, her mum turned to Mrs. Hoskins and said, “Oh Gwen, about the Marijuana, if I were you I would get rid of it as quickly as you can. I’ve heard burying it in your back yard is the best method. Rumor has it that it floats if you try to flush it down the toilet.”

Carlie looked over at Lucas and their eyes locked. He was biting down on his lip, trying to contain his amusement. As soon as they were out of the classroom they were both laughing hysterically.

Her dad took them all out for a celebratory breakfast of French Toast and cappuccinos and then her mum had to go back to work.

“You were fabulous Rachie,” she heard her dad say as he squeezed her mom to him and kissed her on the lips before she left.

“Urgh, gross,” Carlie said, embarrassed by the abnormally high level of affection they’d been showing each other lately.

Carlie and Lucas didn’t have to go back to school until the next day so they got to tag along with her dad all day. It was really fun. He was covering an interview with Queensland’s Governor General in the Southbank Parklands. The Governor was having some problems with his public image, so he was presenting the awards for ‘Young Queenslanders of the Year,’ and then doing a live interview afterwards where he would talk to the young people and try to convince the public that he was ‘hip’ and ‘with it’.

Carlie stood beside her dad and every now and then he’d lean over to her and whisper about the best way to shoot a frame, or how to know when to cut away to a different angle. She watched Tracy Grimshaw expertly guide the Govenor through a ‘casual talk’ with the teenagers and young adults who had won the prizes.

Lucas sat off to the side under the shade of an awning. He wasn’t feeling well because he’d eaten too much for breakfast and then had to sit in the back of a news van with no windows as it swerved and weaved in and out of traffic on the way out to Southbank.

After a while all of the young people went out on the lawn to play a game of pick-up cricket with a set that the Governor’s advisors had brought along while Tracy asked the Governor a few more questions.

When her dad queued the girl who was batting, she called out for the Governor to join in the game and he acted as if it was a big surprise. He rolled the cuffs of his business shirt up as he jogged out on to the patch of lawn and took the bat from the girl. The camera switched from the boy who was bowling to the Governor taking an embarrassing far-off swing at the ball.

“God, he’s terrible,” her dad muttered under his breath. “We’ve got to do something. Go in and relieve him of that bat,” he told her.

“No way! I’m not going in there.”

The Governor took another ridiculous swing at a slow easy ball.

“Well shit, we’ve got to do something… Lucas! Lucas, get in there and have a go at batting. Tell the Governor to try bowling for a change. Joke around and smile with him a bit.”

Lucas looked a little green as he got to his feet, but he did as he was told. He was a much more obedient child than she was. He swerved a little as he jogged to where the Governor was swinging the bat around.

“Get a close up of this,” her dad ordered the cameraman.

Carlie and her dad watched as Lucas approached the Governor. He was smiling but it didn’t look quite right. He looked a bit groggy. His eyebrows were squished down a bit, as if he were slightly demented.

The Governor smiled back and held the bat up for Lucas to take. Lucas lifted his hand towards the bat, but his other hand went to his stomach and the smile fell from his face. He bent a little at the middle. His shoulders hunched.

Oh shit.

A wave passed from his abdomen, through his shoulders and neck, and then French Toast and cappuccino was hurtled from his mouth all down the front of the Governor on live TV.

The Governor stood, aghast, his arms outstretched as vomit dripped from his silk tie.

“Should we cut?” The cameraman asked.

Carlie looked up at her dad. He was biting on his lip and had his eyes narrowed. “No. Keep rolling. Keep the camera on the Governor.”

It took a second for the Governor to compose himself, but then he put his hand on Lucas’ back and bent his head towards him to say something. Lucas nodded.

“Somebody get this boy some water,” the Governor called out as he walked Lucas back to a bench in the shade of a big tree.

“Keep rolling,” her dad said.

One of the Governor’s aids jogged over to the bench with a bottle of water, which she handed to him then stood off to the side.

“Close in on him talking to the boy,” her dad said.

The Governor handed Lucas the bottle of water and was saying something to him as Lucas sat with his head bowed and his elbows resting on his knees. He must have made a joke because Lucas looked up at him and laughed and then the Governor smiled and laughed too.

“Okay, you can cut now,” her dad said. “If that doesn’t get him reelected nothing will.”

He was right. Lucas throwing up on the Governor was all over the news that night. Whenever the Governor was on TV he was talking about how he’d reacted to being thrown up on. His obvious concern for Lucas showed his human side a lot better than trying to play cricket did.

“I don’t know how dad knew to keep on filming,” Carlie told her mum at the dinner table. “If it had been up to me I probably would have cut to a commercial as soon as I saw he was going to barf.”

Her mum reached over the table and squeezed her dad’s hand and he gave her a little grin.

The next day Carlie and Lucas went back to school. The official story they were supposed to tell everyone was that someone from Lucas’ swimming club had tried to set him up, but of course they told Penelope the truth, and Tamika too.

Carlie had been surprised when she’d walked up to their usual lunch spot and Tamika had been sitting there in her school hat, looking like a dork.

“Um… Penelope said it was okay for me to sit here,” Tamika said.

“Yeah, that’s fine. I’m Carlie, by the way.”

Carlie didn’t know why Tamika refused to take her hat off but after a while she just got used to it and stopped thinking about it. Tamika was actually the same age as the rest of them, even though she was only in eighth grade.

Carlie told her and Penelope all about how she was going to get her ears pierced and get makeup for her birthday that weekend and invited Penelope over to stay the night on Saturday. She noticed Tamika looked away when she said that and even though she didn’t really know her, she invited Tamika to come too.

“Really? You’d really want me at your party?” She asked skeptically.

“Well it’s not really a party. We’ll just go and watch Lucas swim in his races on Saturday afternoon and stay up late and watch movies or something that night. My real birthday is on Sunday but mum wont let me have people over late on a school night.”

“Well… I’d like to come, but I’m not sure what my mum will say. Can I have your phone number so my mum can talk to your mum?”

That night Carlie stayed up to watch Lucas’ favorite show with him, “Ladette to Lady.” They both spent the vast majority of the time in stitches over the ridiculous girls at Eggleston Hall and the even more ridiculous teachers.

When she went into her room to get ready for bed her mum came in to talk to her.

“Carlie, you know your friend Tamika?”

“Yeah?”

“I just got off the phone with her mum.”

“Oh, about this weekend? I invited her to stay over on Saturday.”

“Mm… honey, Tamika has a skin condition which causes her hair to fall out.”

“Huh? Really?”

“Yes. It’s called Alopecia. Her mum says she’s very self conscious about it.”

“Is it contagious?”

“No. You can’t catch it.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Mm… so, if you still want her to come over you’ll need to be sensitive about her hair. You wont be able to do your beauty treatments like you do with Penelope.”

Carlie snorted. “They don’t work anyway. I think they just write those things in magazines to torture girls like us.”

“So do you still want her to come over? I told her mum I’d call her back.”

“Yeah. I think it’ll be alright, don’t you?”

Her mum smiled and touched her on the shoulder. “I think you’ll handle it just fine.”

After she said goodnight to her mum Carlie couldn’t figure out why she felt so happy. Even though there had been the huge drama of Lucas’ and her suspensions, everything seemed to be going so well lately. Her mum had told her that she was proud of her. Her dad had said that she was a real news woman. And she had friends. Friends who wanted to come over to hang out with her, not just to use the pool and her parents surround sound entertainment system. It was strange how the people you would never think to look twice at could make you happy.

Lucy, Chapter Eight

Carlie had dimples in her cheeks when she smiled. Lucas had known her and lived with her for five weeks but he’d never noticed because he’d never seen her smile until now. Of course she made a facial expression that imitated a smile regularly, but this was her first real smile.

She had just laid her letters down on the scrabble board and was smiling at her own joke. She’d written ‘poopoo’ across the triple word score square and a double letter score square.

“I don’t think that’s in the dictionary,” he complained even though he knew he was going to let her get away with it.

“We let you have eek,” she retorted, still smiling.

“Fine.” He held his hands up in surrender.

Carlie giggled with glee as she added her points. “Thirty-nine!” She wrote her score down. “That puts me at one hundred and twelve, Penelope at ninety-eight and Lucas at forty.”

Penelope and Carlie grinned at each other triumphantly.

He really needed to get a different game to play at lunchtime.

He’d started bringing board games to school because Penelope was so painfully shy that conversations with her were like talking to a wall. A pretty wall, but a wall nonetheless. Since Carlie had joined them they’d started using scrabble as a way to gang up on him. They didn’t do it meanly, it was just like they were asserting their supremacy as girls, kind of like the way his mom and Micah’s mom high-fived each other any time one of them made a joke about how dumb men were.

It didn’t really bother him. He was pretty sure of two things; first, he’d just had a string of bad luck for the past two weeks with the scrabble letters he’d picked up, and second, Carlie and Penelope were in cahoots against him.

Despite a dismal losing streak at Scrabble, things had gotten better for him since Carlie had left her old group of friends. She was polite to him now. She had stopped rolling her eyes and she actually made an effort to talk to him every now and then.

Last weekend she had gone with him and her dad to the nursery to look for more bromeliads. He was glad because, to be honest, he was kind of sick of bromeliads. He had no idea how Mr. Weaver kept his enthusiasm for them up. They were just spiky little plants with weird-looking flowers.

He’d clowned around with Carlie at the nursery, making jokes about the Latin names for the plants and making the garden gnomes have stupid conversations with each other in high-pitched voices. After a little prodding from him she’d joined in and had invented a gnome character that hated bromeliads with a passion. It had made him laugh so hard that he’d bought it and they stuck it by the path in the front garden (Mr. Weaver had banished it from the pristine bromeliad museum of the back yard).

Carlie’s bromeliad-hating gnome spoke with biting sarcasm in a high pitched Scottish lilt and was called Dr. McLooty. Before long Dr. McLooty was invading all corners of their lives. When they were at the dinner table he’d make a comment about how he couldn’t wait for math class the next day (Carlie despised math), when they were in drama class Carlie would lean in and Mr. McLooty would comment on what a “pompous old tart” the Queen was and how he had no idea why Colin, the boy in the play they were studying, would want to see her.

Mr. McLooty cracked him up. Just the voice that Carlie used was enough to send him into fits. More than once he’d gotten in trouble for laughing during an otherwise completely serious class at school.

Penelope was tolerant of Dr. McLooty, if not a little bewildered by him.

“You should come over this weekend to meet him Nell,” Carlie said one day when Penelope reminded them that she had no idea what they were laughing about.

“Really?”

“Yeah, of course. Come over to my house and stay the night. You can meet Dr. McLooty and we can swim in the pool and watch movies and eat popcorn.”

Penelope’s face glowed with happiness. “Okay, I’ll ask my mum.”

When she came over that Saturday afternoon Lucas hung out with them for a while. He even went up to Blockbuster to pick out some movies with them and Mrs. Weaver, but they outvoted him on every movie pick.

He wanted to watch horror films. He was still trying to replace the nightmare scenes in his head from Sally’s Baby with something else… anything else. Aliens, predators, axe murderers, they were all preferable to Sally.

Although he would never in a lifetime ask them about it, the girls seemed to be unscarred by Sally’s Baby. They didn’t feel the need to scare themselves silly, they wanted to watch vampire romances. He endured through about fifteen minutes of the first one before it became too much for him and he retreated to his bedroom to play computer games and go to bed.

He was woken multiple times throughout the night by squeals and giggles coming from Carlie’s room and the next morning when Carlie finally rolled into the kitchen for breakfast he had to put his hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t laugh.

She smelled awful, like rotting fruits and vegetables or something. She had goopy dried greenish-grey stuff all over her face and her hair was tangled with plastic wrap and a lumpy white mixture that looked a bit like cottage cheese. She lifted her hand to cover a yawn and he noticed that she was wearing black nail polish. The whole effect was not flattering.

“What on earth have you done to yourself?” Mrs. Weaver asked.

“Huh?”

“What is all of this on your face and in your hair?”

“Oh!” She patted over her face and head and her eyes went wide. “We were doing a beauty treatment… we read about it in Dolly…”

Her mom walked over to her and picked at Carlie’s crusty hair. “A beauty treatment? What is this?” She sniffed at her head and her nose wrinkled in disgust.

Carlie’s forehead creased and the greenish-grey face mask she had on crinkled. She turned quickly and ran out of the room.

Mrs. Weaver turned to him and Mr. Weaver. “What…? I mean, what was she thinking?”

Lucas just shook his head and went back to his breakfast. He had no idea what went through girls’ heads, if anything at all.

A yelp of distress echoed through the house a few moments later and then Carlie and Penelope boarded themselves up inside the bathroom for the rest of the morning.

After all of that fussing, when they finally emerged from the bathroom they both looked exactly they same as they had before their ‘beauty treatments.’

That was the way it went the Carlie, Penelope and Lucas. All three of them were friends, but sometimes they were better off without his input, and he knew it. When they got caught up in their ‘girl stuff,’ he’d just go and find something else to do.

Sometimes he’d bike over to Ben’s house and hang out for a while. Ben was a nice guy and his family was into sports the same way Lucas and Micah’s families were. Ben and his sister Natalie always had some swim meet or cross country race or kayaking regatta to go to and sometimes Lucas went with them. Any time he could enter the events he would, just as something to do.

When they went to swim meets he only entered the events he wasn’t good at. Lucas had always been good at swimming and it had always been a source of great distress for him. He’d raced Micah since they were so young he didn’t even remember and he always beat him. Sometimes he wanted to swim slowly just to let Micah win, but he knew that was unfair.

He was contemplating quitting swimming for the thousandth time when he got to school that Monday morning and headed for his locker. There was a sea of dark blue skirts and white blouses crowded around the stand of lockers that his was a part of and he pushed to the front to see what was going on.

Mrs. Hoskins was wearing a super-sized pink woolen skirt suit and fanning her fat, sweaty face with a lace frilled handkerchief as she watched the large, burly groundskeeper cut through the lock on one of the lockers with a large set of bolt-cutters.

The locker looked eerily familiar and it only took a quick count from the end of the row for Lucas to realize it was his that they were trying to break into.

“Ah… I could just open that for you if you like?” He said.

The man with the bolt cutters turned and said, “Oh, great…” before Mrs. Hoskins cut him off.

“That wont be necessary,” she trilled. “Stand back Mr. Gray. George, you get back to work on that lock.”

Mr. Gray? Since when did anyone call him Mr. Gray?

Poor George’s shoulders slumped as he turned back and struggled with the bolt cutters and lock. After a great deal of exertion he managed to cut through Lucas’ lock. He took it from the locker and offered it to Mrs. Hoskins, who waved him away as if he were an irritating insect. George sighed and put the lock in his pocket as he walked away.

Mrs. Hoskins stepped up to his locker and started rooting through it, pulling out folders and notebooks and his spare swimsuit until she held a plastic bag full of what looked like dried herbs triumphantly in the air.

“Ah-ha! My sources were correct!” She shouted exuberantly. “Marijuana!” She pronounced it marry-you-wana.

“Wh.. What?” He stuttered. “That’s not mine.”

“I beg to differ Mr. Gray. It seems you’ve been caught red-handed!”

He didn’t know what to think or to do. He’d been set up. He didn’t own any marijuana, well at least not since that unfortunate incident last summer.

“I think you had best come with me young man.” Mrs. Hoskins grabbed him by the ear and marched him through the crowd of girls. It hurt like hell but he was too afraid to make her stop.

This was really serious. He didn’t know what it was like in Australia, but in America you could get arrested for owning marijuana and go to prison. He didn’t like the idea of prison. Images of shackles and forced labor ran through his head. They probably had some medieval form of physical punishment here, like that episode of The Simpsons when Bart was indicted for fraud and got the boot.

All of these fears ran through his head as Mrs. Hoskins paraded him past groups of whispering girls on the way to her office. He had a sinking feeling that this was the first of many miserable days ahead.

Lucy, Chapter Seven

Carlie was surprised by how much she missed Lucas. He was still physically there a lot of the time, but he’d lost all of his warmth towards her. He used to joke around and try to make her laugh all the time, but now he was just polite and quiet around her.

He’d left their group at school to sit with Penelope instead.

“I was about to chuck him out anyway,” Bess said when she realized he wasn’t coming back.

“Yeah, he was such a stick in the mud, I don’t know how much more of him I could have taken,” Gina agreed.

Carlie knew they were just saying that. Bess had tried to flirt with Lucas all the time and once she had overheard Gina telling Zoe how cute she thought Lucas was and how she thought he liked her better than Bess.

Now that he was gone, she could see the attraction of him. Although he was only fourteen, Lucas was already tall with broad shoulders and long, muscular limbs. He had a body that was approaching manly but his face was still open, friendly and boyish. He smiled and laughed a lot, but the only person he ever laughed at was himself. Sometimes he said things that she could argue were mean, like when he cried, “God no!” when her dad asked him if he was trying to seduce her, but she knew there was no malice in his heart. He was just a big, clueless boy.

His detached civility only made his departure more difficult for her. On Monday night she heard him practicing his tuba and so she got her flute out to play with him, but after she joined in he stopped and knocked on her door. For a moment her heart leapt. She thought that he wanted to sit in her room and play face-to-face, but when she opened the door he didn’t have his tuba with him.

“I’m practicing what I’m going to play at assembly on Thursday. I can go into the garage if you want to practice your flute.”

She hesitated for a moment while it settled in that he was rejecting her. “No, that’s okay, I can practice later.”

He walked away without replying.

She had no idea what he thought he was going to play at school assembly, but the noises coming from his room sounded nothing like a tuba. She sat at her desk, pretending to do homework while she listened to him play. He was obviously experimenting, pushing the limits. He made noises like a weird percussion instrument, he warbled between octaves, he made the sort of sound you might associate with a UFO landing, he somehow made it sound like Harley Davidson motorcycle.

In between all of these sounds she could occasionally pick out a melody, but it was lost quickly.

She hoped he didn’t make a fool of himself in front of the entire school.

Even though he was clearly avoiding her, Lucas was quickly becoming best pals with her parents. He worked with her dad in the garden on the weekends and he and her mum had become ‘jogging buddies’. Her parents adored him, but it didn’t annoy her the way it used to. Now it just depressed her.

On Tuesday night he asked her mum if they had any board games that would travel well. Her mum dug an old game of chess out and found the box of scrabble for him.

“Do you mind if I borrow these?”

“No, not at all.”

“Thanks Mrs. W., you’re the best!”

He went to his room and Carlie noticed that her mum had a funny little smile of satisfaction on her face as she put Snakes and Ladders and Kerplunk back in the cupboard.

On Wednesday Bess asked after him. “So how’s Lucas?”

“Oh, he’s fine, I guess. I don’t really know. We don’t talk that much.” She consciously kept her voice even and light, even though she found the subject of Lucas to be deeply depressing.

“What’s he up to these days?”

“Ah… well between his lifeguard job and swimming practice he’s at the pool a lot.”

“Yeah? And?”

“Um… he’s been playing his tuba a lot. He’s giving a performance at assembly tomorrow instead of making a speech.”

“The tuba huh?” Bess smirked at Zoe, who raised her eyebrows and one corner of her mouth.

Carlie wasn’t sure what was going on. They’d never shown any interest in Lucas’ tuba playing before. “Yeah, why?”

“Oh, no reason.” Bess shook her head and changed the topic of conversation.

That night she listened to him practicing again and couldn’t help but laugh. His piece started off with the American national anthem in a slow, boring kind of way but quickly morphed into some sort of hip-hop style rendition of a marching band song, complete with that weird percussion thing he did. From there he transitioned into ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ but it was so fast and groovy that it was nothing like a waltz. He somehow juxtaposed that onto a different song, and it wasn’t until he was half way through that you realized he was playing the Australian national anthem, which he finished in a triumphant blast.

She no longer worried that he would make a fool of himself. What he had played was nothing like the boring plod of a tuba, it was fast and exciting and full of life and fun.

The next morning the entire school piled into the assembly hall. It didn’t surprise her that Lucas didn’t sit with her and her friends. She looked around for him and spotted him sitting with Penelope with his tuba in his lap a few rows away.

Mrs. Hoskins droned on for a while about school business and then she called the exchange students and all of the students who needed to make announcements to the stage. She watched Lucas stand and walk up to the front of the hall and get in line behind the French exchange student.

There was movement beside her, and she was surprised to see Bess and Gina getting up and walking to the front of the hall.

“Where are they going?” Carlie whispered to Zoe.

“They’re giving an announcement.”

“About what?”

“About a fundraiser they’re doing.”

“For what?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

Carlie watched nervously as Bess and Gina lined up behind Lucas.

Mrs. Hoskins called the French girl up onto the stage, who started to give her speech in a thick accent. She was mostly just talking about how hot it was in Brisbane and how she wished the classrooms were air-conditioned.

She had a sympathetic audience.

Carlie listened politely but she couldn’t help but glance over at Bess and Gina. It felt like they were up to no good. They too, were glancing around and then she thought she saw Bess do something to Lucas’ tuba but she couldn’t tell what. Lucas was holding the tuba at his side and listening to the French girl intently; he didn’t notice that they were messing around with his instrument.

When the French girl was done everyone clapped briefly and Lucas took the stage. He walked up to the microphone, but instead of introducing himself he just took a deep breath and brought his tuba to his lips.

Carlie was expecting the deep, rich sound of the first notes of the American national anthem, but just a little squeak came out.

There was a low murmur from the crowd of girls.

Lucas’ brow furrowed and he took another breath and tried again. His tuba squeaked again, and then something seemed to give away and a low, bubbly rumble issued forth that sounded alarmingly like a big, sloppy fart.

There was a split second of silence before the entire school erupted in laughter. Even the teachers, who were all sitting behind him on the stage, were laughing. The only people who weren’t laughing were Lucas, Carlie, Penelope and Mrs. Hoskins. The principal looked aghast, her eyes were bulging out of their sockets and her thin mouth was turned down in a tight frown.

Lucas looked around for a moment and then he did something that only made the situation worse, he tried again. Another deep, rumbling fart echoed around the auditorium.

Stunned, he lowered the tuba from his lips and the laughter only got worse. He had bright red lipstick smeared all over and around his lips.

His face had turned red and he looked around for just a moment before he ran off the stage and out the door of the hall.

The laughter continued as Mrs. Hoskins stepped up to the microphone and tried to take control of the situation.

Now was the time that Carlie should leave, while everyone was distracted and laughing. She wanted to leave, to go to him and tell him something to make him feel better, but she couldn’t make her legs work.

She looked around and spotted Penelope, hunched in her chair, biting down on her lip while she frowned. She didn’t look like she was about to go after him either.

Mrs. Hoskins was starting to get the girls under control. She was threatening to give out lunchtime detentions. The laughing diminished until it was just a chuckle here or there and then there was silence again. She sent the girls who were going to make announcements back to their seats.

Carlie had missed her opportunity. There was no way she could get up and leave now, if she did every eye in the school would notice her. They’d all know that she’d gone after Lucas and his farting tuba.

Bess and Gina had smug smiles on their faces as they approached her and Zoe. Zoe held her hand up and they did a muted high-five as they passed.

Carlie couldn’t believe it. They’d done that to Lucas on purpose. They’d humiliated him in front of the entire school. They’d made almost a thousand girls and all of the teachers laugh at him. It wasn’t just mean. It was mercilessly cruel.

Mrs. Hoskins was droning on about how the teachers were going to crack down on girls who weren’t wearing the school badge and the whole school was sitting, quiet and bored again.

Suddenly she decided that she was going to do it. She was going to leave. She was going to get up and go and make sure Lucas was okay. She was going to commit social suicide.

She stood.

She couldn’t believe it, but she stood.

“What are you doing?” Zoe whispered.

Mrs. Hoskins stopped talking and stared at her. The eyes of one thousand girls turned to her.

Oh shit.

She commanded her legs to walk. She moved as quickly as she could under such intense scrutiny. Finally she made it past the row of girls sitting between her and the aisle and stumbled into the open space. She was walking, then she was jogging, then she was running out the door, her face burning with embarrassment as the entire school looked on in stunned silence.

Once she was outside she continued to run away from the auditorium. Lucas was nowhere in sight. It had probably been a minute or more since he ran off the stage and Carlie didn’t know where to go to look for him.

She tried to think of where a boy would go when he was humiliated like that, but Lucas was the only boy she knew so she didn’t have much to work on. She decided to check the toilets because that’s probably where she’d go. Because Lucas was the only boy in an all girls school there were only two toilets that he was allowed to use; one was in the library and the other was in the gymnasium. Seeing that it was closer, she tried the library one first.

As soon as she approached the door she knew he was in there. She could see the light was on from the crack under the door and she could hear him sniffing.

“Lucy? Are you okay?” She called him Lucy all the time out of habit now.

“Yeah,” an unsteady voice replied.

“Can I come in?”

There was silence for a few seconds, then she heard the lock turn and he opened the door. His face was pink and wet from where he’d obviously scrubbed the lipstick away and his eyes were rimmed with red.

She had no idea what to say. She hadn’t actually expected him to open the door. “Um… is the tuba broken?”

He shook his head. “They put a potato down my bell pipe.”

“Oh… the old potato down the bell pipe trick?”

He tilted his head to the side and stared at her for a second before he started laughing. At first he just chuckled a bit, but then he started to really laugh and she joined in.

“Did you hear the sound it made?” He asked between gasps for air.

“I’m pretty sure everyone heard it.” Now that he was laughing about it she could look at her memory of the event with fresh eyes. It was actually pretty hilarious. “You should have seen Mrs. Hoskins’ face, I thought the old bag was about to have a heart attack.”

Lucas was laughing so hard his eyes were watering over. He picked up the tuba and the potato and they walked out of the library, still laughing. “I wonder what other noises you could make by sticking stuff down the bell pipe.”

“I don’t know, but I have a feeling I’m going to find out.”

When they stepped outside he stopped and looked at her. “Where is everybody?”

“They’re all still in assembly.”

Lucas’ eyes went wide. “We should go and stand outside the auditorium and play the tuba with the potato in it.”

She laughed. “No way.”

“C’mon, it’ll be hilarious. Everyone will be in stitches.”

“Mrs. Hoskins will expel you for sure.”

“How would she know it was me?”

Carlie tilted her head to the side. “Who else do you know around here who has a tuba and a potato and is missing from assembly?”

He pouted like a little kid. “Please?”

“No.”

He sighed dramatically. “Fine. I guess I’ll just go and eat then.” He started to walk off towards the staff building.

“Ah… Lucy?” Her heart began to pound from nervousness.

“What?”

“Do you mind if… well, can I sit with you?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Sure.”

Lucy, Chapter Four

Carlie seemed to be even angrier with him than usual. He guessed it was probably still because of the incident with the treadmill. When she had come out of the school principal’s office she had glared at him with the most searing hatred. On the bus on the way home he had tried to apologize again and again, but she was a stone wall. She didn’t even acknowledge his existence.

All weekend it had been the same thing. On Saturday he’d helped Mr. Weaver in the garden and when they’d gone out to the nursery to buy more of the weird spiky plants that he seemed to be totally obsessed with Lucas had tried to coax Carlie into going with them. He’d knocked on her bedroom door and tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t respond. She hadn’t said a word to him since the treadmill.

It upset him. He didn’t understand why she hated him so much. At first, when he had thought that it was a temporary moodiness, he’d been able to shrug it off, but now it was wearing on him.

“What do you think I should do?” He asked Micah on Sunday when he spoke to him on iChat.

“I don’t know, can’t you just forget about her and make other friends?”

“I live with her Micah. Have you ever tried living with someone who hates your guts before? It doesn’t do much for how good you feel about yourself, that’s for sure.”

“Sometimes women need their space.”

“What does that mean?”

“I dunno, I overheard my dad say it to Matthew once.”

“Space… like her room isn’t big enough?”

Micah shrugged. “Maybe.”

“So maybe I should offer for her to keep some of her stuff in my room?”

He shrugged again. “Grace never seemed to have trouble fitting in to her room, but she’s pretty tiny. Is Carlie bigger than Grace?”

“Yeah, she’s way bigger.”

“Maybe it’s proportional. Maybe bigger girls need more space than smaller girls. It makes sense.”

“Okay, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll offer for her to keep her stuff in my room.” Lucas started to feel a weight lifting. Perhaps that had been the problem all along. Perhaps if Carlie could use both of the rooms she would have her required space and be happier.

“Hey, did you join a swim team yet?” Micah asked.

“Nah.”

“Might not be a bad idea. At least then you could meet some guys to hang out with.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. He told Mrs. Weaver where he was going and then he spent the day riding on his bike to all of the local swimming pools to check out if any of them had a team he could join.

Brisbane had to be one of the best places in the world for swimming. There were so many pools, and most of them were big bustling colorful outdoor facilities full of swimmers and kids and lifeguards.

It was a beautiful, sunny, warm day outside. It was hard to believe it was February. It was snowing back in Denver right now.

When he walked into the Centenary Pool facility and started to inquire about their programs the woman behind the counter misunderstood him. She thought he was asking for a job interview. She passed him a clipboard and pen and told him to fill it out and bring it back to her. Before he could protest she turned around and started to help someone else.

He looked down at the piece of paper on the clipboard. ‘Which position(s) are you interested in?’ It asked. ‘(a) Lifeguard, (b) personal trainer, (c) guest services, or (d) food & beverage attendant.’ He circled (a) Lifeguard.

What was the harm in applying for a job?

The woman who interviewed him, was an excessively cheerful, excessively fit-looking blonde in a skin-tight lycra outfit. She was so excited that he wanted to be a lifeguard that Lucas himself became excited with the idea. She was impressed that he was willing to show up for work at 5 am and that he was willing to come straight to work after school in the afternoons.

“Where do you go to school?” She asked.

“Um… Grammar.”

“Oh, Boys’ Grammar, I went to Girls’ Grammar, what a coincidence! It’s so close too, it will only take you a minute or two on your bike!”

“No, I go to Girls’ Grammar.”

“Girls Grammar?... Well, that’s… unusual! It was all girls when I went there!”

She offered him a job on the spot. All he had to do was to get a letter or consent from his parent or legal guardian and go to the lifeguard-training course. He asked Mrs. Weaver who called his mom to make sure it was okay.

“How old are you?” Mrs Weaver asked.

“Fourteen.”

“They really want to hire a fourteen year old?

“Yeah, they said so long as I’m thirteen and nine months and I don’t work during school hours it would be okay.”

Of course his mom was okay with him getting a job. His older brother Nicholas had worked at a martial arts gym all through high school. His mom thought that having a job was ‘character building.’

“Not that Lucas needs much more character,” she added dryly.

That made Lucas laugh.

That night at the dinner table Lucas decided to ask Carlie if she wanted to use his room.

“Hey Carlie, do you want to put some of your stuff in my room?”

All three Weavers stopped eating to look at him.

“No," she answered.

“It’s okay if you do. I don’t mind.”

“Why would I want to put my stuff in your room?”

Three sets of eyes peered at him uneasily.

“Well, I just thought seeing that you’re a bigger girl you might need the extra space.”

Carlie’s eyebrows shot up at the same time that her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. “I am not fat!” She yelled.

“Huh?” He was confused. “I never said you were.”

Her eyes smoldered with hatred as she glared at him for a moment before she jumped up from the table and ran out of the room. Seconds later he heard the now familiar sound of her bedroom door slamming shut.

He turned back to her parents who were still staring at him.

“Lucas, why would you think Carlie needs extra space?” Mrs. Weaver asked.

“Well, Micah overheard his dad say that sometimes women need their space. I thought maybe since Carlie is tall she might needed more space than the average girl, that’s all.”

Mrs. Weaver turned to look at Mr. Weaver and suddenly they were both laughing hysterically.

“What’s so funny?” He asked.

Mr. Weaver leaned over and put his hand on Lucas’ shoulder. “One day you will understand.”

Now that Lucas had a job at the swimming pool that he had to go to on Monday and Wednesday mornings and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons he started to ride his bike everywhere instead of catching the bus with Carlie. He saw less of her, but that didn’t seem to make the time they spent together any better.

She was so touchy. Even the most innocent comment could set her off. He seemed to be constantly offending her. Sometimes she was outright angry at him, other times, especially when her ‘friends’ were around, she just sat and simmered.

Lucas didn’t think much of the girls Carlie hung out with. They weren’t very nice. Bess, their leader, was the worst of them. She was always making mean comments about the other girls in the school, even to the point of calling them names. She called the Asian students ‘nips’ and the Indian students ‘curry munchers’, and it made him uncomfortable. His brother was half Indian so he felt defensive, but besides that it was just plain mean. He was thinking about leaving their ‘group’ to look for nicer people to sit with at ‘morning tea’ and lunchtime.

The classes were pretty awful. The girls just sat quietly and listened to what the teacher was saying. Their idea of clowning around was passing a note once or twice during an hour-long lecture. It made it pretty much impossible not to learn. There were hours upon hours of learning every single day. His head hurt from all of the learning. They even learned during PhysEd.

They had PhysEd three times a week. On Mondays and Fridays it was regular sports and games but on Wednesdays it was a lecture. The first Wednesday wasn’t too bad, they’d done a review of the last unit they’d done last year, which was about diets and how to match the amount of exercise you do with the number of kilojoules you eat in a day. He was expecting something equally innocuous today.

That expectation was blown out of the water with the first sentence out of Ms. Stephens’ mouth.

“This term we will be studying the female reproductive system.”

Oh no.

“Today I will give an overview of anatomy and the menstrual cycle and we will watch a short film.”

Lucas didn’t know what the menstrual cycle was, but he was sure it couldn’t be good.

He sat petrified, rooted to his chair, unable to breathe, unable to move. His face burned with embarrassment.

“Please turn to page fourteen of your text books.”

All around him was the sound of rustling paper as the girls opened their books and laid them on the tables in front of them. He was supposed to share Carlie’s text books, which was why he was currently sitting right beside her, even though he would give anything to be anywhere else in the world.

He watched in his peripheral vision as Carlie flipped through the pages until she’d found the right one and then nudged the book across the bench-style desk so it was between them. He didn’t want to look at the page but he couldn’t help himself. He glanced down and was horrified by what he saw. Page fourteen was a cartoon cross-section of a girl’s anatomy and page fifteen was a labeled cartoon of a girl’s private parts.

He thought he might just keel over and die from embarrassment.

Of course they had sex ed classes in his school at home in America, but he had always been very careful to never learn anything in it. He always sat up the back and goofed around with the other guys who were also determined not to have to deal with this sort of stuff.

But here at an all girls school it was different. There was no way to goof off or tune out. All of the girls sat still and listened. Some of them even took notes.

Ms. Stephens was rattling on about the different parts of the reproductive system. She had an over-head projection of the cross section that she was pointing at with a stick as she spoke. She was wearing some sort of tye-dyed hippy smock with flared sleeves that obscured the projected image when she pointed.

“These are the ovaries, where the eggs are kept.”

Girls had eggs inside them? Like the sorts of eggs you got at the grocery store?

“Here are the fallopian tubes, the uterus, cervix and the vagina. Now, I’m sure you all have a million questions but remember that today is just an overview, we will get to all of the details in the coming weeks.”

They might get to the details but Lucas wouldn’t. There was no way he was ever showing up for this class ever again. He’d leave right now if he had the guts.

“Turn to page sixteen.”

Paper rustled again, but Carlie didn’t touch her book. She was sitting to his left and to turn the page she’d have to lean towards him. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to touch the book but he also didn’t want to draw attention to himself by being on the wrong page. He reached out and very gingerly took the corner of the page and flipped it towards Carlie but it didn’t have enough gumption, and the cartoon of the private parts flopped back in front of him.

Oh god, could this get any more painful?

He tried again but the same thing happened. By now everyone else had turned their page and was waiting, but Ms. Stephens was watching him. He tried again but this time Carlie reached out for the page at the same time and their hands touched and he just about jumped out of his seat. The last thing he wanted to do right now was to touch a girl… someone who owned all of this weird plumbing with eggs inside.

Ms. Stephens sighed. “Carlie and Lucas, if you don’t stop fooling around I’ll have to send you both up to Mrs. Hoskins’ office again.”

He wished he were small, so small that nobody could see him. He shrunk down into his chair and Carlie reached out and briskly turned the page.

The teacher changed the overhead on the projection screen and continued. Thankfully it wasn’t another cross section. It was a cartoon of a clock that was divided into four unequal sections, but instead of having 60 seconds it had 28 days.

“This is a schematic of the menstrual cycle. It makes the most sense for me to start on day six, when the lining of the uterus begins to thicken. The release of an egg from the ovary usually occurs on day fourteen. The lining of the uterus continues to thicken until day twenty-eight at which point it starts to break down. On days one through five the broken down uterine lining passes through the cervix and out the vagina as thick blood.”

It does WHAT?

There must be some mistake. That couldn’t possibly be the case. It was the most gross, creepy, disgusting thing he’d ever heard of.

“Now girls, I know this is a very important topic for you. Some of you may have even started menstruating. It is a normal, beautiful, wonderful part of becoming a woman.”

What? Was this lady high or something? What she had just described was ghastly, it was about as far as beautiful and wonderful as you could get.

“Rest assured that we are going to explore the menstrual cycle in great detail this term. Over the next eight weeks we’re going to talk about hormones and fertility and emotions and pre-menstrual tension and… everything. Were going to answer all of your questions in the sort of detail that they deserve.” She clasped her hands together and smiled as if this was the most fantastic thing in the world.

Lucas couldn’t think of anything worse.

“But today we have to move on. I have a short film for you to watch that explores one of the other great wonders of being a woman. It is called Sally’s Baby.”

She pressed the play button on an old VCR player and an image came to life on the screen. Ms. Stephens did a quick circuit of the room, flicking off the lights and pulling the blinds down over the windows.

Finally it was dark and nobody was talking about girls’ plumbing or private parts anymore. There was just some stupid video to watch and then it would all be over.

There was some lame music and the title ‘Sally’s Baby’ came up on the screen, and then there was an interview with a pregnant woman named Sally. She talked about how nervous she was about giving birth. It wasn’t so bad.

Until…

Sally actually had her baby. There was footage, real footage, of the baby coming out of her, all bloody and hairy and disgusting.

Lucas had seen his fair share of horror movies in his time, but nothing, nothing, could have prepared him for Sally’s Baby. It was the most gruesome thing he had ever seen. It was so grisly. He was shocked and frightened and appalled that something that gross not only happened, but that someone actually agreed to let a film crew see it.

He was surprised the cameraman wasn’t throwing up or passing out.

When it was finally over Ms. Stephens flicked on the lights and the girls packed up their books and started to file out of the room.

He couldn’t believe what he had just seen. He must be in shock or something. He had to tell each part of his body to move. He had to tell his legs to stand and his hands to pick up his bag.

Instead of going to eat lunch with Carlie and her friends he went to the library and locked himself in the boys bathroom (he was the only boy, so that wasn’t really a big deal). He got his laptop out of his bag and hacked the library wireless router to get online. They weren’t supposed to use the internet at school but he figured this was an emergency. He’d just been robbed of his innocence and he needed to tell someone about it.

It was eight o’clock in the evening in Denver and Micah was online. He sent him a video chat request and moments later he popped up on his screen.

“Shouldn’t you be at school?” He asked.

“I am.”

“It doesn’t look like a school. Hey you don’t look so good. Are you alright?”

“I’m in the bathrooms. I’ve just had an extremely traumatic experience.”

Micah’s brow furrowed with concern. “What happened?”

“Do you know what the menstrual cycle is?”

“No… is it like the Calvin Cycle?”

Lucas shook his head weakly.

“Wait, I’ll ask dad.”

“No, don’t do that…"

But it was already too late, Micah was already calling out loudly, “Hey dad, what’s the menstrual cycle?”

It was so like Micah. He just assumed that there was nothing he couldn’t talk to his parents about.

“The menstrual cycle?” He heard in Micah’s dad’s deep voice.

“Yeah, Lucas wants to know.”

“No, I just learned what it is, that was part of my traumatic experience,” he explained.

Sam, Micah’s dad, came to stand beside Micah, who looked up at him. “What is it?”

“Ah… well, when a girl becomes a woman certain changes happen to her private parts that give her the ability to become pregnant. Her body goes into a pattern called the menstrual cycle.”

Micah turned back to Lucas and shrugged. “What’s so traumatic about that?”

Lucas shook his head. “He’s not telling you the full story. They bleed… out of their…who-ha… for five days every month!”

“They WHAT?” Micah’s eyes went wide with shock and he looked up to his dad for confirmation.

Sam bit down on his lip and nodded solemnly.

“That’s not all,” Lucas continued. “They lay an egg, on day fourteen.”

“An egg! I thought eggs came from chickens?”

“I’m never eating an egg again.”

Micah shook his head. “Me neither.”

“It’s not like that boys,” Sam interjected. “The human egg is microscopic, they’re nothing like chickens’ eggs.”

Micah turned to his dad. “Do all women do it?”

Sam nodded.

“Even mom?... and Gracie?”

He hesitated for a moment before he nodded again.

Micah looked forlorn, his mouth gaped open and his eyes had a lost look about them. “That’s why they need extra space…”

“Huh?”

“That’s not all,” Lucas continued. “I saw one.”

“You saw one what?” Sam asked.

“A girl’s bits. I saw them, they were awful… awful beyond description.”

“Awful? Whose… bits did you see?” He asked suspiciously.

“Sally’s”

“Who’s Sally?”

“The girl in the video. It was awful.”

“They showed you a video of a girl’s bits at school?”

“Yes. She was having a baby… It was the worst thing I have ever seen in my life. It was a hundred times worse than the worst horror movie. It was so gruesome but I couldn’t look away. I think I am permanently scarred.”

“Oh.” Sam nodded in recognition. “They showed you a video of a live birth and you saw the woman’s… bits.”

“I don’t know how men do it. They are so disgusting. How could such a disgusting, repulsive thing evolve? You’d think they would have been weeded out by natural selection.”

Sam laughed. “You won’t always feel that way.”

“I’m not going back. There’s no way I’m going back out there, let alone to that awful class.”

“Micah, why don’t you go and bring Lucas’ dad back here to talk to him?” Sam asked.

Micah, who still looked shell shocked from finding out about the menstrual cycle, nodded and slunk out of his room.

Sam made Lucas tell him about the Weavers and the school and his job at the pool until Micah came back a few minutes later with his dad.

“Hi Luka,” he said merrily. “What’s going on?”

“You tell him,” he said to Sam. “I’m too traumatized.”

Sam turned to Lucas’ dad. “Lucas learned about the menstrual cycle today.”

“Oh.” The smile fell from his face. “That’s unfortunate.”

“Yes. He doesn’t want to go back to class.”

“Surely they don’t talk about the menstrual cycle in all of the classes. That has to have been the worst one. They’ll get better from here on.”

Lucas shook his head. “The teacher has an eight-week plan. She’s going to talk about hormones and fertility and… emotions.”

“Oh god no. You don’t want that.”

“I know! Who wants to sit in a class of twenty two girls and talk about emotions?”

His dad nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you out of it. I’ll call the principal, what’s his name?”

“Mrs. Hoskins.”

“It’s a woman?” All of his dad’s confidence seemed to deflate.

Lucas nodded.

“I can’t talk to a woman about the menstrual cycle. You’ll have to do it,” he said to Sam.

“What? Why would she care what I have to say about it?”

“You’ll have to pretend to be me.”

“How come I have to do it? He’s your kid.”

“Because you’re way better at this stuff than I am. You know I’ll just say something stupid and end up getting him in trouble.”

Sam’s brow furrowed.

“Do you honestly want Luka to have to sit through eight weeks of classes about the emotions girls feel about their menstrual cycle?”

“No, of course I don’t but…”

“Good, so you’ll do it then.” Lucas’ dad was already leaning over Micah’s computer typing. “Here it is…”

He stood upright and typed a number into his cell phone, pressed send and handed it to Sam. He must have put it on speaker phone because Lucas could hear the birr of the ring tone.

“Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School, this is Margie how may I help you today?”

Everyone was silent for a moment.

Lucas’ dad punched Sam in the arm.

“Ah… yes, hello, this is Tyler Gray, my son Lucas is an exchange student at your school. I was wondering if I might have a word with the school principal please?”

“Of course, please hold the line.”

A generic-sounding rendition of Vivaldi’s Spring came over the line.

“What am I supposed to say to her?” Sam asked.

“Just say you don’t want him to take the class about the menstrual cycle,” Lucas’ dad said.

“Yeah, but why?”

“Because it’s… inappropriate.”

“I can’t say that to a woman.”

Before Lucas’ dad could reply the uncomfortably snobbish sound of Mrs. Hoskins voice came over the line.

“Hello Mr. Gray, this is Principal Hoskins speaking.”

“Hello. I just received a call from my son who is in quite a lot of distress. It seems that the curriculum for one of his classes is… ah, well, somewhat inappropriate for a boy of his age and I was wondering if he could be excused form that class in the future.”

“Inappropriate? In what regard?”

“Well, he tells me that his teacher has an eight week plan for discussing the menstrual cycle. I appreciate that this is important information for girls, but it seems to me to be a little excessive for a boy.”

“Excessive? One can only gain respect for the female body through knowledge. Are you suggesting that you would prefer your son to go through life without respect for the female body?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then I expect that he will attend the full gamut of classes that are required of our students.”

“There’s something else. He tells me that he was shown a video of childbirth in which the woman’s genitals were visible. I’m not comfortable with him being exposed to that sort of material.”

“Ah yes, Sally’s Baby. We show that video to the girls yearly from grade nine onwards. We find it to be most useful in deterring sexual relations.”

“Even so…”

“Mr. Gray,” she said sternly. “I hope you are not questioning our methods for ensuring our young ladies do not stray down the wrong path.”

“No, not at all, I just think…”

“Excellent.” She cut him off. “We are in agreement then. Lucas will attend the full compliment of classes. I must stress the importance of his attendance. If he were to miss classes I’m afraid I would have to suspend him and I’m sure neither of us want that.”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, if that is all Mr. Gray I will bid you good day.”

“Ah…”

She hung up. The monotone of a dead phone line emanated from the phone.

Sam looked at the phone, shocked. “She bamboozled me.” He looked up at Lucas apologetically. “Sorry Luka.”

Lucas felt his heart drop. There was no way for him to even skip class. Now that Mrs. Hoskins had specifically said he had to go he was trapped.

Eight weeks of talking about girls’ stuff. If there was such a thing as hell on earth surely it was being trapped in Ms. Stephens’ health class talking about the details of the menstrual cycle.

It was all he could think about.

The stress was just about killing him. He couldn’t think or talk, he could hardly eat. On the weekend he was so distracted that he cut himself on one of the spiky plants when he was helping Mr. Weaver in the garden. As Wednesday got closer and closer he got more and more anxious. Micah and his dad were no help. They just nodded sympathetically.

Finally, on Monday night, Mrs. Weaver knocked on his bedroom door and he let her in. She sat at the desk chair and pressed her hands between her knees. He sat on the bed.

“Lucas, you’ve been acting very strangely over the past few days. Is there something bothering you?”

He did not want to talk to Mrs. Weaver about this. “Um… no.”

She turned her head to the side. “You can tell me if something has happened. I’m here to help you. Is it your job? Is it too much responsibility?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Is it school?”

He nodded slowly.

“Are the girls teasing you?”

“No.”

“Well…?”

He sighed. “It’s health class.”

“Health? What’s wrong with heath class?”

“The material is… girl specific.”

Something seemed to click in her head. “Oh…”

“I told my dad and he and Micah’s dad called Mrs. Hoskins to ask if I could quit the class, but she said no.”

A look of pity came over her face. “Oh dear. I’m afraid Mrs. Hoskins is not the sort of woman you ask things of.”

“No. She said I have to go to all of my classes or else she’ll suspend me.”

“Really?” She said without surprise. “When is the class?”

“Fourth period on Wednesday.”

“Do you have a copy of the syllabus?”

He went to his bag, fished out the piece of paper and handed it to her. She read over it quickly and nodded.

“I can’t make any promises but I’ll see what I can do.”

He wasn’t going to hold his breath. Mrs. Hoskins had been so strict and Mrs. Weaver was so nice.

She was on the phone for the rest of the night. Every time Lucas left his room to do something she was on the phone. Most of the time she appeared to just be agreeing with whatever the person she was talking to was saying.

The next day she drove him and Carlie in to school and went to talk to the principal. He felt sorry for poor Mrs. Weaver. He thought she had no chance against Mrs. Hoskins, but that night she came back into his room.

“I have some good news,” she said. “Mrs. Hoskins agrees that you don’t have to sit through health class on Wednesdays anymore.”

Lucas had never felt such relief. “That’s awesome!”

“Yes, well I’m afraid that you will still have to do the course work for the class, which means you will have to get the hand-outs and assignments from Ms. Stephens at the beginning of the class, then go to the library and do the work on your own.”

“Okay, that’s fine. Thank you so much. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

Mrs. Weaver smiled. “It was my pleasure Lucas. If you have any more problems at school, especially with Mrs. Hoskins, just tell me okay?”

“Okay.”

Lucas had never felt so happy in his life. He was free.

After Mrs. Weaver left his room he lay on the bed and smiled as he listened through the wall as Carlie practiced her flute. She was really good at it. He wondered why she wasn’t in an orchestra or a band.

He didn’t know the piece she was playing but he had heard her practicing it enough to know it by heart. He got the tuba that Mr. Hawthorn had loaned him out of its case and started to play along with her, just as an accompaniment.

As soon as the first resonant notes escaped the tuba she stopped. He waited to see if she wanted to play his game. After a few seconds she started again and this time she went along with it when he played in time with her.

It was fun. He made it up as they went along, just trying to follow her without seeing her. Carlie played two more songs, both ones that she had been practicing since he arrived, and then she called it quits. He put the tuba away and lay back on the bed smiling. Even though she shunned him when he tried to talk to her she had played her flute with him. Maybe she was starting to hate him less. Maybe they were turning a corner.