Love and Muddy Puddles (2 page)

“Are you okay?” I whispered when the teacher turned around.

Shannon looked up, surprised. She sniffed and then looked helplessly around her so I dug in my bag for a tissue. It was a bit crumpled but it was still unused and she didn’t seem to mind.

“Thanks,” she said and gave me a weak smile but her eyes were welling up again, so I pulled the whole packet out and put it on her desk.

From that point on, whenever I saw her, I gave her a secret smile. I wasn’t quite brave enough to do it openly and go against Saffron and Tiger Lily but it seemed a bit sad that someone should have no friends in the whole world so I did what I could.

Samantha had absolutely no sympathy for her at all.

“Well it’s her own fault,” she said. “If she wasn’t so piggish, she wouldn’t have got so fat and then she wouldn’t have got dropped. I mean, it’s simple. You keep your mouth shut if you don’t want to put on weight. She must’ve known what would happen.”

I nodded. When you put it like that, of course it was true, but the part of me that loves kittens and puppies still felt sorry for Shannon and I wasn’t about to tell Samantha. She was busy obsessing about who was going to replace Shannon.

Because Saffron and Tiger were holding auditions.

First, the word went around our year. Milly told Emily who told Breeanna who told Brittnee. Soon everyone knew. “Tiger said they’re definitely going to choose someone else to join them, but only one person.”

“Really? Only one?”

“Definitely only one.”

No one could stop talking about it. Hayley, a girl whose dad was a bookmaker at the races was even taking odds on who it might be. Sam drove me crazy. She was on the phone for three hours one night going through all the names.

“It might be Leigh, but she’s probably not cool enough. You know how she wears her bag, always about to drop off her shoulder. I think they’d think she’s a bit too messy. It could be you. But probably not. Because, you know, you’d have to get your teeth fixed.”

I slid my tongue around my mouth. My teeth were definitely a problem. It wasn’t that they stuck out or anything. It wasn’t even that I had braces. It’s just that for some unknown reason my enamel was stained.

Samantha first pointed it out when I was 11 and I made a decision to never smile in a photograph again until they were fixed. When Mum noticed my closed lips in every picture she wanted to know what was going on.

“It’s really not that bad, Coco,” she said, staring into my mouth. “I mean, the colour is a little bit uneven, I guess. Maybe over here a bit. But it’s no worse than anyone else.”

When I cried, she looked again and then compared with Charlie’s teeth.

“Well, I suppose there is a bit of difference,” she said after about five minutes.

“Yeah, but really?” said Charlie. “Is it that much of a problem?”

I stamped my foot.

“Seriously, you’d have to be blind not to notice how ugly they are. I really need to get them fixed. Please let me? Please!”

“Okay,” said Mum. She said it in that way that people do when they’re kind of giving up and giving in. “Oh-kaaaay. I’ll talk to the dentist and we’ll see what they can do. It’s not the kind of thing that you should get done before you’re a teenager though. You’ll have to wait until you’re at least 13.”

Thirteen was this year. And I had plans. But they would still have to wait just a little longer, because Samantha hadn’t actually stopped talking yet.

“It might be Georgia, except have you seen how she’s dip-dyed her hair? Probably not. Maybe Savannah. I mean, she’s pretty and she’s tall and she’s smart, but not 
too 
smart if you know what I mean... I’m not saying she’s dumb, right? She’s just not a brain box nerd.”

“Sam, I’ve got to go to bed,” I said eventually. “My mum’s going to come up here and take the phone out of my hand if you don’t get off. We can talk about it tomorrow. Just try to get some sleep, okay?”

We’d all been going nuts for a week before Saffron and Tiger picked about five people they thought possibly might be good enough and wrote each person a little note, inviting them to have a ‘conversation’ over lunch.

Samantha and I both got notes. We were both ecstatic.

“You see?” she said. “My strategy worked. We didn’t follow too closely, but we didn’t separate off from the group too much. They can see that we’re individuals, but not like, crazy individuals. How are we going to do our hair? It will have to be perfect. This is it. This really is it. This is make or break for us.”

I still had a question in my head about odd numbers and even numbers and two of us and four of them but I didn’t say it out loud. Perhaps Saffron would see what great friends Samantha and I were and pick both of us. Anyway, I had other things to think about, including my teeth and how I would have to be careful not to smile too much.

On the day of my ‘conversation’ I had to go over to their seat by myself and answer questions from all four of them about things like clothes and music and shoe designers. Samantha had spent the whole week reading recent copies of fashion and gossip magazines and she had tried about 20 different hairdos over the weekend before she finally settled on one that to me looked just like Saffron’s messy, straight do. I wasn’t going to tell her so though. She’d already panicked for about 72 hours straight.

She panicked for another 72 hours while the girls made their decision. By the end of those three days Charlie was giving me grief at home.

“Auditions? To become a member of a group?” She was incredulous. “Are they for real? What’s so special about them anyway?”

I got defensive. “Just because you don’t care about these things doesn’t mean they aren’t important,” I said. “These girls are like the pinnacle of Year Eight. Everyone wants to be like them. If I get to be in the group, that’s pretty much my social life sorted out for the rest of high school. I’ll be the best there is. I mean, it’s all just basically a competition, right? If I get in, I’ll have won.”

“Unless you get too fat, of course,” she said, raising one eyebrow at me. I tried to raise mine back at her, but my face failed and she burst out laughing. I screwed up my nose at her. At least I could do that. It’s so unfair. How come some people can raise an eyebrow and others can’t?

“But seriously,” I said, flopping myself over on the patchwork quilt on Charlie’s bed. “I don’t think they’ll pick me anyway. Not being vain or anything, but I’m too pretty to be their makeover kind of project, and being realistic, other people know more about fashion and stuff than me so they will probably choose them.” I thought for a minute. “It would be the coolest birthday present ever though…”

Yes, Charlie and I were going to turn 13 in a week’s time. But what I hadn’t told her was that if I was picked, I’d have to go to a day spa with Saffron and the whole group on the actual day of our birthday.

I wasn’t going to mention it before I had to. Charlie would be upset if she thought that I was hoping to do something else on our birthday. Every single year for 12 years we’d woken up together, opened our presents together and had a party together. I wasn’t looking forward to possibly telling her that I wanted to go away with my potential new friends.

But that’s exactly what I had to do.

Because, miraculously, somehow I made it in.

 I got the note in second period history, slipped to me by Isabella across the aisle. She smiled as she gave it to me and my tummy went to jelly. In the background Mrs Corrington was droning on about ancient Egypt but I couldn’t listen. I held the note in both hands, took a deep breath and then opened it all in one movement.

The paper was the creamiest, smoothest paper I’d ever touched, with black curly designs all around the edge. At the bottom someone had stuck on five tiny pale pink love hearts stickers, and in a hot pink pen, Saffron’s handwriting read:

Dear Coco,

You are officially invited to join our group. You’re one of us! Come sit with us at lunch.

Saffron, Tiger Lily, Isabella, Lise

My heart skipped a beat. I blinked and blinked again. Was this real? I felt like Charlie Bucket from that kids’ movie, holding his golden ticket, except that (obviously) mine was pink and black.

“It’s happened!” I breathed quietly to myself. “I’m popular. This is it.”

It felt amazing. I wanted to jump up and down like a little kid and yell, “I won, I won! I’m the king of the castle!” It took everything I had to keep control of myself and act cool and sophisticated. When I finally got to go off to the bathroom with Samantha, I let out a little bit of the squealing that had been piling up inside.

“Me! Me! They picked me! Can you believe it?” I yelped, grabbing her shoulder and bouncing on my toes, pushing the note in her face. She pushed me off.

“Ow! Stop it. You’re on my foot,” she said. And then she smiled. “It’s amazing! I mean really amazing. I never really thought that they would pick you. There are other people who are skinnier than you, or taller, and—no offence or anything—cooler than you. I mean, even my hair is longer than yours, and of course, your teeth… So yeah, it is amazing.”

I looked at her face and suddenly got a shock. She was completely jealous.

“Oh Sam,” I said, my smile crumbling. “I’m really sorry. You wanted this just as much as I did, I know. Do you want me to tell them no?”

She looked at me like she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. “Are you crazy? If you say no you’ll be sitting on the bench with Shannon and I’ll be back at the end of the queue as well. No way. You have to do this.”

“Really?” I said. “You’re so sweet. We’ll be in this together. You can help me! You can coach me. I’ll need your help. We’ll get together every day and debrief.”

“Definitely,” she said. “I mean, I’ve already been coaching you for ages.” She twisted her face. “Seriously, this only happened because of me. If you hadn’t followed the strategies, they probably wouldn’t even have looked at you. So you can’t forget me or leave me behind.”

“Of course I won’t,” I said, soothing her. “I’ll do this for you and me. If I get an opportunity to invite you to a party or something—anything, I will. I know you’d do the same for me.”

And that was the way my life as one of the most popular girls in the school began, with four new friends in front of me and an old friend behind me, backing me up.

The first thing I did with Saffron, Tiger, Isabella and Lise was take some photos. We put our heads together, pursed up our lips and went click click click on our phones (although in my case, it was an iPod. Mum still had to be talked into letting me have an actual phone. Something about me having to be able to afford to pay the bills. Whatever. It was annoying.)

“Beautiful!” gushed Lise, looking at one of the side of my face. “Ears!”

“She thinks you have beautiful ears,” said Isabella.

“Really?” I said, touching my earlobe. I had never ever noticed my ears before.

“No, no, it’s your eyes and your lips. That’s why you’re so pretty,” said Saffron sweetly. “You’re so gorgeous. You’re amazing.”

For the rest of the day I kept pulling my iPod out under my desk. I couldn’t stop looking at our photos. Saffron, of course, was in the middle of them all. She was still as pretty as the first day I saw her, with her blonde and perfectly straight hair, blue eyes and perfect skin, but she wasn’t so much pretty as just completely elegant. She had gotten taller since Year Seven, and her legs looked about twice as long as mine. It was all the little details, like today’s tiny peasant style braid in her hair and the vintage designer floral bag she carried, that really made the difference though. Nothing looked wrong. Not ever. Saffron was as perfect as you could get.

Samantha, who always knew, told me that Saffron’s family was so rich that they had a holiday house in Palm Beach and an apartment in Paris as well as one in New York. There was even a rumour around that they owned a tropical island. Apparently Saffron’s dad was in charge of a whole bank or something so there was plenty of cash. She probably could have afforded to go to one of the even more exclusive schools around our area but Samantha (and again, I had no idea how she found this stuff out) said that her dad was a ‘self-made man’ (whatever that means) and that he wanted her to come to St Agnes to ‘meet real people’.

Saffron was smiling in most of the photographs, but Tiger Lily wasn’t. Her face was more about the attitude than the smile. She had big green eyes and the blackest, longest eyelashes you’ve ever seen without mascara. She must have gotten them dyed—like her hair, which was currently a dark auburn red with black streaks, but it looked cool and not trashy because she had a great cut. Everything about her was edgy and urban and tough. I couldn’t imagine her next to a cow or in a field of flowers. She would have looked completely wrong.

When Tiger started school, it went around that her mum was the editor of 
Snap!
 Magazine, which everyone reads all the time. I even went out and bought a copy just to check if the surnames were the same—and it was true. In the first few days a lot of people asked Tiger to get her mum’s autograph or free copies of 
Snap! 
but Tiger is pretty much like her name and I don’t think too many people asked again.

Isabella and Lise were as different from each other as anyone can be. Isabella was Italian, with black hair and olive skin, whereas Lise was Scandinavian-white-blonde with big, blue puppy dog eyes. Lise’s parents were both artists and her dad won an award last year for some painting competition, which I only knew about because my mum was reading about it in the newspaper. She looked up and said, “Isn’t there a girl at your school with this surname? I think I met her mum at a lunch once.”

Isabella’s parents were solicitors and she had three younger brothers who she didn’t like at all. While we were taking selfies she got really mad when she discovered a bunch of pictures on her phone of her brothers with their mouths gaping wide open.

“They’ve been playing on my phone again,” she said. “It’s so annoying. I’m going to have to get a lock on my door. I can’t stand it when they do this. I mean, little brothers are the worst. You just have no idea what they’re going to wreck next. I just tell my mum that she should keep them under control but she rolls her eyes and yells at me instead. I mean, is that fair?”

Tiger raised an eyebrow. “Just put a pass code on the phone,” she said.

“I did that before but they managed to get me to tell them what it was. I have no idea how they did it. They think they can make me say anything.” Isabella said. She passed her phone to Lise, who scrolled through the pictures.

“Brothers!” she said.

That first day it took me a while to get used to being looked at all the time. I followed along as the other girls sashayed around the playground and I could hear my name being whispered through every class. A couple of times, when I heard something like, “why her?” my face would start to go red but I gave myself a talking-to.

“Social stuff and popularity is my thing. It’s what I’m good at and I deserve it. Anyway, if Charlie can win everything else, I can win this.” Then I tried to channel some of Charlie’s effortless confidence and immediately felt better.

After two days I got used to it. I loved that everyone was looking at me. I loved the feeling of being on top and I loved having Saffron smile at me and hearing even Tiger Lily say something complimentary.

The only thing I didn’t love was telling Charlie and Mum that we had to put off our birthday celebrations.

“You’re kidding, right?” said Charlie, taking a sip of her drink. We were sitting at the back of the house, looking onto our long, terrace garden. Her face was puzzled. “You want to go to some spa thing all day with people you hardly know on our birthday? Why can’t they just change the day? Why do you have to go anyway?”

“You know about this. I explained to you about these girls,” I said. “It’s part of being in the group, going to the things they organise. If I don’t go, it’s going to look like I don’t really want to be friends with them and they might drop me when they’ve only just picked me. It’s too much of a risk not to go. Please. At least try to understand!”

“It seems a little bit extreme,” said Mum. She had a cup of tea in front of her and was nibbling on carrot sticks and pesto. “They can’t be very nice friends if they’d drop someone because they can’t go out with them one day. Are you sure that they’re the sort of girls you really want to hang around with?”

“They’re fine, Mum,” I said, a little bit between my teeth. I picked up a piece of carrot and crunched. “F-i-i-ine. Seriously. You don’t get it. Please, it won’t really matter if we have a birthday dinner on Sunday instead. I mean, it’s just a day, right? The important thing is that we celebrate it. I mean, half the people in the world don’t even know the exact date they’re born on, and they still have birthdays.”

“That’s the stupidest argument I ever heard of,” said Charlie. She was tipping back on her chair and looked sulky. “Mum, this is ridiculous.”

I tried a different tack. “Well, do you remember three years ago when Charlie made it to State for freestyle and the competition day was on our birthday? And you had to go to Canberra and you weren’t back until late so we had our cake and party on the next day instead? This is kind of the same thing.”

Mum looked thoughtful. She slurped her tea. “But it’s not really sport,” she said. “I mean, this is a bit different.”

“Yes, but I don’t 
do
 sport,” I said. Under the table I clenched my fingers in frustration. “I’m never going to be in a sports competition like Charlie. Not a serious one anyway. You know that. It’s not really fair if Charlie gets to change the days because of sport but because I don’t play sport I don’t get to! This is social stuff and fashion stuff—this is what 
I’m
 good at. This is what matters to
me
. Isn’t that as important as a sports competition?”

Mum looked almost convinced. Maybe I should have been in the debating team after all. “Well, I guess if you put it like that… Maybe just this once we could change the day, if Charlie agrees?”

Charlie looked like she was coming around as well. “Alright,” she said. It was a long drawn out one. “But you still have to sing to me in the morning when we get up.”

“I’ll sing as loud as I possibly can,” I said, smiling. “Thank you, Mum, thank you, thank you.”

“Thank Charlie as well,” she said so I burst into a terrible rendition of ‘You are my sunshine’ which is what I always sing to her on our birthday, complete with cheesy actions. I’ve been doing it for four years now. It’s what Mum used to sing to us both when we shared a room when we were little. We have a love/hate relationship with Mum’s voice so it’s fun to take her off. She doesn’t realise that she sings off-key.

“Ha ha,” said Charlie. “Thank you—not! Have fun on your silly spa day. But you’d better come back extra beautiful or I won’t let you do it again.”

Chapter
 
4

 It sounds kind of crazy now that I think about it but sitting around in towels with four other girls in a day spa all covered in mud, with gunk on our faces and cucumber slices on our eyes, was the most sophisticated and cool I had ever felt in my life.

I had felt slightly grossed out at the beginning when the woman started to smooth out the mud all over my shoulders and neck. 
Icky, icky icky! 
I thought. But I tried to calm down and be cool. Mud might not be my thing, but I was doing this to be popular. Plus the most exclusive girls in the school were being really nice to me.

“So is it actually your birthday today?” said Saffron, smiling.

“Yup,” I said. “And my sister as well. Thirteen today!”

“Sister?” asked Lise, picking off her cucumber slices and looking at me with surprise. “How?”

“Um, they’re twins?” said Tiger Lily, giving her a look.

“Oh,” said Lise. “Twins!” Her big blue eyes looked like they were about to fall out of her face.

“Can you, like, read each other’s thoughts?” said Isabella. “Isn’t it like if you pinch one twin, the other one feels the pain? Because I’ve got cousins who are twins and when one of them broke her arm the other one had to go to hospital as well… “

“I think that’s more identical twins,” I said. “We don’t look exactly like each other. We’re more like sisters born at the same time.”