Larrie was excused from family dinner because she and Beth were apparently so engrossed in writing a practice essay on Twelfth Night that they couldn’t bear to stop when it was time for Larrie to come home. I couldn’t believe it: eating together every night was Mum’s personal obsession, and it was impossible to get out of unless you were at an activity on school grounds or had something contagious. Or you were Larrie.
“I hear Simon Lutz got his learner’s permit,” said Mum, motioning for me to pass her the salad.
“Does anything happen around here without you hearing about it?” asked Dad. “That medical centre should be renamed the Kingston Gossip Exchange.”
Mum’s eyes narrowed. “For your information, Fran Lutz told me about it herself. Simon’s going to have driving lessons with an instructor, but she’s not looking forward to all the hours of practising with him. Still, once he’s got his licence he’ll be able to help her out with the pharmacy deliveries.”
“And maybe he’ll give Al lifts instead of us having to drive her all over Kingston,” said Dad, who makes no secret of what an inconvenience it is to take me anywhere.
“I’m not entrusting my life to Simon Lutz’s driving! Have you seen how big his feet are these days? In his clown shoes, he won’t be able to tell the difference between the brake and the accelerator. I wouldn’t be seen dead in a car with him anyway; word’d spread round Kingston in a flash and Mum and Mrs Lutz would have us married off by the time I got home.”
Dad grinned. He’s always joking that Mum and Mrs Lutz are the eyes and ears of Kingston.
“Simon’s a very nice boy from a good family. You could learn a thing or two from him about manners, Allison,” snapped Mum.
Dad must’ve sensed that Mum and I were about to have one of our blowouts (I certainly didn’t intend to sit there and be told I wasn’t as good as Simon Lutz), because he tried to change the subject by inviting me to watch a DVD with them.
He held up the cover of a lame romantic comedy. “It may not be as funny as the Al and Larrie Show, but it’ll be like the old Family Fridays,” he said, as if that would entice me.
When we were little, Friday nights were practically sacred in our house. Dad would come home in a good mood because it was the weekend and Mum would make (dairy-free) dessert, and after dinner the two of them would snuggle up on the couch, and Larrie and I would put on a show for them. Sometimes, Larrie would make up a dance for us to perform, or we’d stick paper dolls on the end of rulers and put on a puppet show, but often we’d just go wild in the dress-up box.
One week, when I was about six, Larrie made a huge cardboard TV out of the box from our new washing machine. We put on a couple of Pop’s old suits and tucked our hair under big golf caps and pretended to be TV show hosts – Al E. Gator and Larrie Says-So. We did our favourite knock-knock jokes and interviewed each other about the week’s “news”. Dad thought it was hysterical and christened it the Al and Larrie Show, and it became a weekly event. To Mum’s distaste, the nicknames stuck too.
Two weeks into high school Larrie decided that the Al and Larrie Show was too babyish for her, and stuck our cardboard TV set out in the garage. The two of us still hung out together on Fridays, but now Larrie wanted to spend the night painting her nails or putting on deep-cleansing face masks for her non-existent blackheads. It wasn’t nearly as much fun, but back then I thought a little boredom was a small price to pay for Larrie’s company.
I guess I was too young to know better, but I’d assumed that once I was in high school a more sophisticated version of the Al and Larrie Show would take up where it had left off. In my childish imagination, Larrie was waiting for me to join her at Whitlam so that she could introduce me to her friends and take me to the cool (by junior high school standards) parties she’d started being invited to. What I hadn’t counted on was her ignoring me, or making jokes at my expense, or pretending not to know me.
The year I started at Whitlam, Larrie a) got her first boyfriend (Michael Schute, who was in Year Twelve – scandalous! – and a state diving champion – hot in Speedos!), and b) started treating me like dirt. First, she refused to be seen talking to me at school, and at home she’d try to make up for it by being extra nice or letting me have a spritz of the perfume Michael had given her for her birthday. Then she decided she didn’t want to hang out together on the weekends any more, because her friends didn’t want a little kid tagging along when they went to Parkville Metro to try on make-up and padded bras. By the end of my first year of high school we never did anything together unless Mum and Dad made us. Maybe it was puberty that changed her, or peer pressure. It didn’t really make a difference what had caused it, all I knew was that the Al and Larrie Show was history.
I turned down Dad’s DVD invitation, using homework as my excuse.
Dad feigned shock. “Are you feeling okay? Colette, you’d better get out your thermometer, I think Al must be delusional with a fever.”
I swiped Mum’s hand away when she reached for my forehead. “I thought you’d be happy. You’re always telling me off for leaving my homework until Sunday night.”
“And you’re always telling us that only losers do their homework any earlier,” said Dad.
I could see Mum was forcing herself not to smile, but she managed to keep a straight face. “Don’t tease her, Max. I think it’s an excellent idea – Larissa always tries to get at least half of her homework out of the way on a Friday.”
She looked baffled when I stormed out of the room without saying another word.
I wouldn’t admit it to Maz, but since Thursday I’d been thinking about what Simon said about making people see me differently. I realised that when I thought about how I wanted people to think of Al Miller, all I could come up with was “not Larrie”. It was going to take a while to work out, but I figured in the meantime I could at least pick up my marks a bit in the subjects where I’d stopped trying simply because Larrie excelled at them.
I turned up the volume on my speakers, to mark Larrie’s absence, before pulling out my Science textbook. After I’d read the introductory chapter on Mendelian genetics (named after some monk who was obsessed with peas), I filled in the table on Ms Morales’s worksheet. It turned out to be a list of things like eye and hair colour, and was pretty straightforward once I understood the difference between phenotypes and genotypes. Buoyed by having got Science out of the way, I started on my New Media Studies essay about privacy in the digital age.
It was a pretty pathetic way to spend a Friday night, but I didn’t have anything better to do since Maz was at a gig with Nicko. (Strictly for Vertigo Pony research purposes, she assured me, not because she’d started eyeing off Nicko like he was hot chips and she’d been on a low-carb diet for six months.)
I didn’t mind that they’d been spending so much time together, but it had made me more aware than ever that I’d never had a “real” boyfriend. By my age, Larrie was already going out with Mitch Doherty and they were rising through the ranks of Whitlam’s power couples. I used to watch them walking with their arms around each others’ waists or cuddling on the couch together and think, In a couple of years, that’ll be me and my gorgeous boyfriend. But so far it hadn’t happened, and the one guy who was interested in me was about as un-Mitch-like as they came.
Al Miller has a lot of catching up to do.