Fran stopped at the monument to replace her runners with the open-toe heels. She had a hand mirror in her bum bag, and looked herself over before dumping her shoes at the top of the tower and heading down the track. Blisters were well on their way by the time she stopped at the ten-foot-high, full-body statue of Bert Gallagher, erected to much furore, as he had killed himself due to losing all his money at the races. The debate regarding the statue’s erection had allegedly become more heated than the one involving the renaming of Massacre Gully.
At the oval, she sat at Bert Gallagher’s feet and downed the blackberry nip she’d poured into her bottle. She gagged twice, just managing to keep it down, then stood up as a confident Sofia Loren, who she would remain until she reached the double doors of the convent hall. She had friends waiting inside – of course she had friends – so there was no fear in pushing open the doors. Tricia, one of these friends, would be waiting for her in the foyer, as agreed. At the time, she didn’t realise how sad this was, that she hated her friend more than anyone in the world, and that her friend hated her even more, enough to say when she opened the door:
‘Told ya you’d need a ten! The zip’s bursting!’ Tricia was finding this so funny. ‘I can see your undies!’
Sofia would probably have had something excellent to say back, but Fran was Fran again, her zipper wide open, she realised, her strawberry-themed briefs on show. 48
Tricia and her two new friends – Tricia was really popular all of a sudden – continued to giggle as Fran gathered herself and made her way across the empty dance floor, wobbling in her heels at first, every bit forty-nine-dollars and ninety-nine cents. The dance floor was large and empty, yet another song of the unhappily privileged adding to the depressed vibe. ‘Down in Kokomo’, this one. She’d love the DJ to play Cher or Kylie, or something indicative of the empowerment of the times. Nowadays girls could be sexy if they wanted to be, like Fran was now in her acid-wash jeans, and they could be glamorous and angry too, if they wanted to be. The girls’ convent school, attached to this hall, had just closed forever. Thank God for that. The brothers’ college was cleaning up its act and taking in fifth and sixth-year girls after the summer. Fran was going to be one of twenty girls to go there, and the music was making her excited about it. Blue and red and white dots pinged all round, and by the time she reached the middle the DJ put on ‘Handle Me with Care’, a song she didn’t know well or particularly like, but it caused her to stop suddenly and fling off her heels, right there below the disco ball, the floor all hers to shapeshift the dots of light.
It’s me, I’m Cathy!
It was a good while later when she opened her eyes to find Brian Ryan Junior doing the white man’s overbite. ‘Sorry about the sheep.’ He leaned in to say this; must have just had a mint; would have totally ruined her mood if she hadn’t noticed the cute boarder in the corner. He was liking what he was seeing and she was liking being it.
It was The Boarder, as it turned out, but Fran didn’t know that then.