My Best Friend
by Clementine Darcy

That’s a difficult one, Ms Hiller! Does it have to be friend, singular? Because if so, I truly can’t do it. Chelsea-Grace and Cleo are my equal best friends. I can’t disentangle them. They’re woven together.

I hardly ever see them separately. They do, sometimes, spend time without me, but that’s usually because I can’t face going all the way to Hobart to see a gig by a pop singer I don’t even like, or shopping for clothes I don’t need. Sometimes I pull out of sleepovers, too, when I just don’t feel like it. But otherwise, it’s the three of us. 3CD. I can’t choose one over the other.

So, my best friends are Cleo Diaz and Chelsea-Grace Darvell.

Before I met them, in primary school, my best friend was Leah Parker. She dropped me, though, at the beginning of Grade 6, because she wanted to join ‘the Gang’.

Don’t worry, Ms Hiller. They weren’t a proper gang. There were no guns or graffiti or drugs involved. We were eleven years old!

The Gang was a clique of the coolest kids at Cooee Primary. Their leader was a girl called Angela, and the deputy was Diarne, and they both had boyfriends. They knew all the Beyoncé dance moves, and were allowed to go into the city by themselves at weekends wearing midriff tops and cut-off shorts, and they both had iPods. That was a big deal at the time.

Narelle was in the Gang, too. She and Leah were sort-of friends until, during the summer after Grade 5, their families went on holidays together to Bicheno. While they were there, Narelle invited Leah to join the Gang. Not me. Just Leah. And Leah joined.

She didn’t even talk to me about it. On the first day of school she sat with me in Mr Dineen’s class. The next day she moved tables and sat with the Gang girls. And when I asked her why she didn’t want to sit with me anymore, she shrugged and said, ‘Because you’re just not pretty enough to be in the Gang, and you don’t know music and stuff. You’ll get over it.’

That day after school, Fergus found me crying into my pillow. He had just started Grade 10, and he was one of the most popular boys at Burnie High. Half the girls at Cooee Primary swooned when he dropped me at school every morning. Everyone loved Fergus.

He perched on my bed. ‘What happened?’

I sat up, wiping away the tears. ‘Leah doesn’t like me anymore, and the Gang sang about me not having any friends, and I’m not pretty and don’t know music.’

Fergus rolled his eyes. ‘You know, Clem, we could totally get even. We could get angry, and I could help you make those stupid girls feel small and worthless. I’m popular. I have the power. But you know they’re wrong, right, about you not being pretty?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know if I’m pretty. I’m not pretty like they are. But I think the way I look is fine.’

‘The way you look is awesome,’ Fergus corrected. ‘So long as you know that, and that the way you are inside is awesome, too, and that we could get angry and get our revenge but we’re better than that . . . I think the best thing to do would just be to listen to the music you like and dance like an idiot and forget it ever happened and go back to school tomorrow with your head held high and ignore them, because you’re way too cool to take anything those girls say seriously. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ I said, smiling.

‘So what music should we put on?’ asked Fergus.

I grinned. ‘I think we should put on the most uncool music in the world. We should put on Jimmy Buffett!’

When Dad found us dancing like lunatics around the lounge room to ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise’, he looked confused for a moment before shrugging and joining in. After a while, he did ask why we were dancing to his favourite crazy pirate music. ‘Because it’s uncool!’ I cried out gleefully.

‘Off to the orphanage with you!’ Dad yelled, but he was laughing. We were all laughing. And Leah Parker was forgotten. And the next day I did go to school with my head held high. Because my big brother told me to, and he was the best person in the whole world.

I still see Leah around town sometimes. She went to Parklands High with the other Gang girls, while I went to Burnie High, like Sophie and Fergus. She pretends she doesn’t know me. Which doesn’t bother me at all. I’m channelling Jimmy Buffett when it comes to Leah. I’m breathing in and breathing out and moving on.

It feels like Chelsea-Grace and Cleo and I have been together forever, even though really it’s only been a couple of years. And even though they’ve changed a lot and I haven’t changed much at all, we’re still 3CD. They’re still my best friends.

Chelsea-Grace is a sweetie, really. Or at least she tries to be. She might open her mouth without thinking a lot, but she means well.

Chelsea-Grace doesn’t like school much, but she’s great at art. I’m always telling her she could make a career of it, if she would only try. I’m not sure Chelsea-Grace wants a career, though. All she thinks about are boys and babies. In her family, none of the women work. Her oldest sister, Caitlin, has three kids and her nineteen-year-old sister, Amy, just had a baby. As for her parents, they’re traditional. They expect Chels to get married and have kids, not be an artist.

Cleo’s a different kettle of fish entirely. She’s extremely clever; she gets brilliant marks without even trying. She used to be proud of it, but now she seems embarrassed. She doesn’t talk like a walking dictionary anymore and she only tells stories about Todd Campbell, not Alexander the Great or Einstein. At speech nights she rolls her eyes and yawns when she accepts her awards, and everyone laughs.

Cleo used to want to be a historian, but lately she’s been reconsidering. It would mean moving Hobart to study, and she’s not sure she wants to do that. She’s thinking of enrolling in a child-care course instead, because you can do that in Burnie.

I hope she changes her mind. I think Cleo would be a terrible child-care worker. She doesn’t have the patience. She’s too blunt and unsympathetic. Also, I hope she finds the courage to leave Burnie, at least for a little while.

I wonder what will happen to 3CD after high school. I definitely don’t want to stay in Wynyard. I want to study, maybe poetry. I know I could stay here, do some of my subjects at Burnie Uni and the rest online, like Soph does. But I want to see what it’s like to live somewhere else, for a while – maybe even the UK. I could eat mushy peas, drink cider, picnic on Hampstead Heath . . . do a poetry workshop at Keats House and visit the graves of Chaucer and Tennyson and Robert Browning at Westminster Abbey. I could wander the Yorkshire moors, moody and full of important ideas . . .

I want to escape, Ms Hiller, to somewhere other. A new life, a new place, and . . .

Maybe even new friends. Does that make me horrible?

Sometimes, 3CD just feels like hard work. It feels as though if I were to do one tiny thing wrong we might fall apart.

I wish I didn’t have to pretend with them. I wish 3CD could see right inside me – see the real Clementine – and like me as I am. I wish I could turn up to school dressed as a faerie or a pademelon and they’d still like me. But I think if I came to school dressed as a pademelon, they’d disown me forever.

So I’m finding myself hiding things. Like what’s really going on with Fergus.

Chelsea-Grace and Cleo are my best friends, Ms Hiller. And I love them. But sometimes I feel as if life might be more of an adventure without them.

Then I imagine my world without them in it. And I feel very small and very scared.