4

Vân Ước headed home down the Punt Road hill, along the river toward Church Street, and across the bridge, stopping halfway to peer into the murky Yarra waters and up over the city skyline. Instead of listening to French dialogue exercises on her iPod, she spent the whole time trying to work out the Billy Gardiner puzzle.

Her first assumption was the only logical conclusion—he must have some well-planned torment in mind for her. No payoff today. He was holding back. Her skin crawled uncomfortably. She stopped, shifted the weight of her bag into a more comfortable position on her back, and pushed her bangs sideways. An elaborate high-stakes bet to try to convince her that he liked her—with a publicly humiliating punch line on the horizon? Like the prom-night-pickup, egg-throwing flashback scene in Never Been Kissed. That looked like it really hurt. The best thing she could do was avoid him. She was nothing if not practiced at keeping a low profile.

She examined one of the small proofs that Billy Gardiner had a (well-hidden) heart. Last term at Mount Fairweather, she’d accidentally overheard him speaking to his sister. She knew it was his sister because he’d said sister call to Ben Capaldi later in the day when Ben asked. Every phone call at Mount Fairweather was newsworthy, because they were so strictly limited.

Vân Ước had been cleaning and packing up her oboe, and he must have been leaning against the wall right outside the practice room, speaking on the school office phone, which you weren’t supposed to take out of the office. Rules and Billy! She was too shy to open the door and walk out past him, so she stayed put. His sister had obviously broken up with a boyfriend. And Billy was… perfect. He was supportive and affectionate. He listened. He acknowledged her feelings but was confident she’d feel better before too long. He reminded her of the importance of eating chocolate and watching some Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars. And he ended the call by saying, I always knew the guy was a douche, which, she could tell, made his sister laugh, because he started laughing, too, and said, That’s more like it. And he said, Call me again anytime. And he said, I love you, okay?

She trudged along Albert Street. It also had to be said that Billy Gardiner was smart. The kind of smart that bugged teachers. He appeared to be paying no attention but then could answer questions designed to catch him out. He seemed to divide his concentration with no apparent effort.

The heat of the asphalt footpath burned through the soles of her shoes. Occasional delicious wafts of coriander and garlic and lemongrass floated from restaurant doors. She weaved her well-known course, giving the junkies a wide berth, her private-school uniform being a got-some-spare-change-love magnet, and saw someone she knew at least every few blocks all the way home.

Walking onto the grounds of the apartments, she admired the familiar long shadow her building cast into the end of the hot afternoon.

Great. Nick Sparrow and his friends were on the playground. Most little kids were already inside for dinnertime. And the ones who weren’t buzzed off anyway when the big boys came into their space.

“Chick-ay—chickee, chickee. Chick-ay! Lady want some D?” Nick grabbed his crotch and gyrated his hips.

Really? She really had to listen to Nick Sparrow doing a B-grade street thug impersonation from some American crime show? In broad daylight—on her own turf? She looked to see exactly who was with him. Matthew Trn and three other boys she knew from West Abbotsford Primary School. Normally she would have treated them as invisible and walked on. Was it that she was finally in year eleven, the end of school and the beginning of life in sight? Or that she was discombobulated by the bizarre Billy Gardiner treatment? She did not lower her eyes and walk on. She would not let them make her feel uncomfortable. She willed herself to say something. Say anything—now. Right now would be a good time. Put these dummies in their place.

Nothing came out.

She turned as crisply as she could on the tanbark and walked off, hoping she at least looked as angry as she felt. Even if she hadn’t managed to open her mouth. What had stopped her from saying something? As she walked into the building’s lobby, she felt that she’d let the whole team down: herself, Jane Eyre, and Debi.

The overlocker was thumping away in her parents’ bedroom. Her mother did three or four days a week of piecework sewing these days, which was like semiretirement compared to when Vân Ước was little. It was baby onesies again, she could tell by the pale blue fabric fiber on the kitchen bench where her mum had unpacked and counted the precut garments. Vân Ước grabbed an apple and headed into her room for a couple of hours of homework before dinner.

She and her tutor, Debi, had read Jane Eyre at homework club, starting at the beginning of year eight. It felt way too hard at first. The vocab! She still had her lists. Cavillers, moreen, lamentable, letter-press, promontories, accumulation, realms, vignettes, eventide, torpid, hearth, crimped, stout, dingy, lineaments, visage, gorged, bilious, bleared, sweetmeats, morsel, menaces, inflictions, mused, tottered, equilibrium, rummage, tyrant, pungent, predominated, subjoined… and that was just the first chapter. The feeling of panic, of ignorance, of despair at ever mastering this truckload of indigestible words! They were not words she heard at home. She was the only one in the family who was ever going to read books like Jane Eyre.

Debi’s face lighting up as Vân Ước read the first line—There was no possibility of taking a walk that day—was still a vivid memory. Nothing was as contagious as Debi’s enthusiasm for reading.

“I am a complete nut for this book,” Debi had said. “My year-eight teacher made us write a chapter-by-chapter summary, and it was a good thing. It made me feel that I owned the book. I knew it inside out.”

Vân Ước decided that she, too, would get to know the book inside out. And something miraculous happened when they were about a quarter of the way through reading it. After weeks of plowing and hesitating, something clicked; she stopped stumbling over the unknown words and long sentences. Words magically started to reveal meaning, most of the time anyway, through context. And the sentences themselves stopped being obstacles and started telling a story. Her eyes were racing ahead; she was comprehending the shape and the rhythm of the language. She was cheering Jane on, and dying to know what would happen next. She suffered all Jane’s indignities and humiliations and, in the end, triumphed with her.

She and Debi talked about each passage after she read it aloud, and discussed the era in which it was written, the restrictions and expectations imposed on a character like Jane, and on all women, in different ways, according to their strata of society; they talked about the importance of religious faith in the era, the way in which people with mental illness were generally treated—and at the end of the book, Debi said, “Never listen to fools who dis Jane Eyre as being a story about a girl who gets her mean man. This is a character who gets what she wants and lives on her own terms by having moral fortitude, intelligence, courage, imagination, and a will of iron. And that is one hell of a checklist. Imagine Charlotte Brontë writing this book in 1847. What a powerful story for women living at that time!”

Vân Ước agreed. Poor Charlotte Brontë had had to use a dude name to get the book published at first: Currer Bell. That was how undervalued women were.

Vân Ước got into the habit of calling Jane to mind pretty much whenever courage was required or justice denied. She privately used the test: What would Jane do? As if Jane were hanging around the apartments. Or trying to fit in imperceptibly—a poor kid at a rich school. She often thought about exactly what Jane would say or do, what she herself should have said or done in various situations. She remembered Nick Sparrow, with a hot flare of annoyance. One day she’d find the guts to say what Jane would in a situation like that.

Out loud.

Note to self.

Promise to self.