A GROUP OF Year 12 girls have been invited to a meeting in the withdrawing room. We’re the gluttons for punishment who completed an HSC subject last year. Most of us did 2-unit maths, and will continue maths at a higher level this year. Oakholme has begun to encourage its top students to complete an HSC subject in Year 11, based on the theory that spreading the stress over time maximises ATARs.
This meeting is about the HSC University Pathways program, which gives Year 12 students the chance to complete a first-year university subject. It’s only been offered to the students who, in Mrs Green’s view, can cope with it. This is the first year the program has been open at Oakholme College. We had to apply last year, and most of the girls, including Jenny and me, chose to study Introduction to Legal Systems and Methods online at the University of New England. It’ll be useful for me because I want to study journalism at uni and to do that I would have to take some law subjects anyway.
Mrs Green had to push for the HSC University Pathways program to be introduced. It was a few years before the powers that be – the ancient Oakholme school board – gave in. She obviously has grand ambitions for improving the school’s academic reputation, which I’m not sure its student body has the ability to back up. Not all rich kids are smart. They’re pretty much the same as the rest of society. Some of them are intelligent, some of them are dunces, and most of them are just good old average.
Reverend Ferguson was against loading a university subject on top of the HSC because she thinks we’re already under too much pressure. I know her opinion on the matter because, although we don’t have regular counselling sessions anymore, she always accosts me to chat about this or that. I think she misses me.
Of course I told SRF that I was all for HSC University Pathways, because it opens up options for me once I’ve finished school. In the end, there was a compromise – only the girls who were already excelling academically would be recommended for a place.
Mrs Green stares at the excited occupants of the withdrawing room. She has bright, piercing eyes that seem to be able to see everyone at once. When the room falls silent, she clasps her hands and leans back onto the mantelpiece.
‘If you’re in this room, it’s because you’re already good at sitting exams . . .’ she begins. She gives a spiel about how the university units on offer are respected by other universities across Australia.
‘This is new territory for Oakholme College, and we weren’t sure exactly how we’d support your extra studies. But we’ve come up with a solution. There will be extra classes on offer to support the online work, but they won’t be held here at Oakholme. They’ll be held at St Augustine’s.’
An involuntary whoop goes up around the withdrawing room. St Augustine’s is a boys’ school, about ten minutes drive away! Embarrassed giggles quickly descend. As anyone who’s been to an all-girls school knows, there’s nothing apt to render girls boy-crazier than sequestration from the male gender. I went to a regular povo government school, Barraba High, until halfway through Year 7, so I’m not quite as under the boy spell as some of my friends. Jenny, for example.
Jenny is one of those girls who’s ordinary looking until you really look at her and realise just how delicate and pretty she is. The glasses and puppy fat are deceiving. If you talk to her for five minutes you can’t help but notice her gorgeousness – dark eyelashes, clever, hazel eyes and the cute smatter of faint, pinprick freckles that run over her little ski-jump nose. But there are some people, boys especially, who don’t make it through the five minutes because Jenny can be a bit intense.
There’s this one heartthrob at St Augustine’s who Jenny’s been mooning over for about six months. His name’s Stephen Agliozzo. He’s been unfairly blessed with curly, black hair and blue eyes, and he turns every girl and her mother inside out. I’m not joking. I’ve been to combined Oakholme/St Augustine’s social events and actually seen middle-aged women blush around him. Of course, he doesn’t deserve any of it because he’s an arrogant little prince. There’s not a girl alive who would last a month with him. A girlfriend is like a haircut to Stephen Agliozzo, but probably less important. Jenny, thank God, doesn’t stand a chance. I suppose there’s no harm in dreaming, though.
‘Can I see a show of hands if revision classes are something you’d be interested in?’
Every single person raises a hand. Jenny puts up both of hers.
‘Right,’ says Mrs Green triumphantly. ‘I’ll send permission slips out to all your parents.’
After the meeting, Jenny and I go to the Year 12 common room for hot chocolates. About the only useful thing the Student Association’s ever done is install a coffee and hot chocolate machine there. It must spit out a thousand hot drinks a day.
Jenny’s excited, really excited, about doing the University Pathways support courses at St Augustine’s. The only thing that can get her as high as those clean-cut boys do is Paris. She has the same shine in her eyes when she’s discussing the city of light, as if it’s a new lover. And if Paris is her lover, it’s mine, too. It’s as if we’ve fallen for the same guy, but we’re both so rapt in him that neither of us minds that he’s seducing the other.
Jenny’s managed to convince her parents to put up for some cheap digs, so all I have to do is come up with money for the flights, sightseeing and getting around. It’s got to be doable somehow, though I’ve yet to raise it with my parents. They wouldn’t share my exhilaration, and it’s possible that they won’t share their money. I remember the pained look on my dad’s face when he had to contribute to the Toulouse trip in Year 10. He just could not fathom why I had to travel to the other side of the world. So I may end up putting the hard word on my cousin, Andrew. I think he’d loan me at least some of the cash. There’s also the night shift at the Barraba servo. A couple of weeks of that mind-numbing job would be worth it for Paris.
‘Imagine being in Paris! We could go to the theatre every night. Imagine, Shauna!’
The wonderful thing is, I can imagine. The terrible thing is that I just can’t quite imagine how I’m going to pay for everything. Theatre every night?
The two of us in a little studio apartment in the Latin Quarter. Buying pastries in the morning. Eating ham baguettes on a bench by the River Seine at lunch. Meeting some gorgeous French guy and zooming around Paris on the back of his motorbike . . .
‘Shauna? Shauna?’
‘What?’
‘You look about a million miles away.’
‘I was. I was in Paris.’
Jenny grabs my hand and squeezes it. There’s light dancing in her eyes. We both laugh.
‘What about Stephen Agliozzo?’ I ask her with huge eyes full of mock-sadness. ‘Do you think you could bring yourself to leave him behind for a whole month?’
Jenny can’t help but blush as she rolls her eyes. She’s never been one for carefree breeziness.
‘We’ll have to book our flights pretty soon,’ says Jenny, between sips of her hot chocolate, which is fogging up her glasses.
‘Thinking about Stephen?’ I ask her cheekily.
‘It’s the steam from the hot chocolate, Shauna! I’ve already forgotten about him.’
‘Oh, sure.’
Jenny was a late developer, and while she’s very smart, there’s no hint of the knowing, catty sophistication that would give her a pass into one of the ‘popular’ groups at school. It’s one of the things I like about her. Sass, hormones and boy craziness have only just pulled into her station. I just wish she’d fixate on someone nicer and more attainable than an in-demand pretty boy like Stephen Agliozzo.
I’m not one of those really boy-crazy girls, but I do have a lot more experience than Jenny. I had a few boyfriends back in Barraba, but not much action since I first donned the bottle green Oakholme tunic. At Barraba High, it was all taken much less seriously. Kids hooked up and broke up on a week-to-week basis and most of them didn’t cry into their social media accounts when it was all over. Some of the older students had longer, more serious relationships and it was well known that a few of them had sex.
I had sex this summer with Nathan O’Brien at the country music festival I went to with Andrew. Nathan’s not even a schoolboy. He finished school last year and now he works on his parents’ farm at Kootingal near Tamworth.
I don’t quite know how it happened that night. We just stayed up talking about music and school and how annoying Sydney is. Then we ended up slow dancing to a bad cover of Keith Urban’s cover of ‘Making Memories of Us’, both of us wishing the song would never finish. One thing led to another – believe me, I wanted it to – and I woke up the next morning in Nathan’s swag with my sweaty, naked legs tangled in his.
Jenny almost needed oxygen when I broke the news to her. You’d think it was she who’d just lost her virginity the way she carried on. Lou-Anne, on the other hand, didn’t flinch. In spite of her sister’s glaring example of where sex can lead – the maternity ward followed by years of drudgery – Lou-Anne is quite seasoned between the sheets. Of course, all the smut unfolds up in Eumundi, where the kind of men who interest her live. At Oakholme people have no clue about Lou-Anne’s sex life, or indeed anything that might explode the narrow boundaries of their rigid minds.
Nathan did hunt me down on social media in the days following our steamy night wrapped up in his swag, but I’m not sure what our ‘status’ is. If you’d told me that morning that I was going to lose my virginity that night, I never would have believed it. It came as a shock to wake up in a paddock entwined in someone I’d only met the day before. At dawn my eyes slammed open onto dry blades of grass and a broken – yes, broken – condom a few centimetres away from the swag. The first thing I did after locating my cousin, whose side I was meant to be plastered to (according to my mother’s pre-festival instructions) was to find a pharmacy. After a dose of the morning-after pill, I was nauseous for days. So it was a mixed experience. The earth didn’t move. The condom did. But Lou-Anne had always warned me not to expect too much.
It felt good to get Nathan’s message, though, and to know that it wasn’t just a one-night stand for him. When I read his words, my stomach dropped, and then fluttered around my body like it was not attached to anything. He said that he was coming to the Easter Show to exhibit his family’s cattle, and that maybe I should swing by. Too bad. I’ll probably be back in Barraba at Easter. That was my nonchalant reply, which I kind of regret now.
When Jenny and I are done salivating over Parisian fantasies in the common room, I go back to the dorms. After a ten-minute wait in the eternal queue for the phone in Miss Maroney’s office, I ring home. My dad answers in his usual chipper tone. Still excited, I tell him about the plans for Paris, but he doesn’t really get it.
‘What about university, Shauna?’
‘I’m still going to university, Dad. I’d go to Paris during the holidays.’
‘You don’t even have a passport.’
‘I can apply for one at the Barraba Post Office.’
‘Don’t you think you should be concentrating on your HSC?’
‘Paris would be after the HSC.’
Dad’s silent for a few seconds. Then he says, ‘What do you want to go to Paris for anyway? You’ve already been to Toulouse.’
Aaaaargh! I could scream at him, but I don’t. God, it drives me crazy that he has so little understanding of my life. He has no idea about how things work, even when they’re basic, and even when I spend time explaining them. He may be in Barraba and I may be in Sydney, but we are a universe apart. He and Mum live in a jar with the lid screwed on tightly, and if I still lived with them, I’d never go further than the lid.
‘Come on, Dad . . . who wouldn’t want to go to Paris?’
‘Well . . . I suppose if you had the money . . .’ He tries to rally some enthusiasm. ‘Yeah, I s’pose it’d be an interesting place to visit. I’d like to have gone, if I’d had the opportunity.’ He clears his throat.
My dad’s a nice bloke, a softie, a pushover even. He may be a big, burly, bearded truck driver, but there’s nothing tough about him.
‘How’s Mum?’
‘Oh, she has her spells. She still sleeps a lot.’
‘Has she been doing much painting?’
‘She finished a beautiful tropical fish painting last week. It’s huge. I’m taking it into the bank tomorrow to see if they’ll buy it. They’d be crazy not to.’
Lately Mum’s been selling some of her work to local businesses. She makes the most amazing paintings, using tropical colours, a lot of blues and greens and purples. She never painted much before Jamie died, but she’s obsessed with it now. I guess she has more free time because I’m at boarding school.
‘Do you want to speak to her?’ Dad asks.
I don’t know exactly why, but I find it hard to speak to Mum on the phone when I’m at Oakholme. I always get emotional, on the edge of tears, and there’s always this queue of impatient, aggressively sighing boarders waiting just outside the door. Sometimes they knock and yell exhortations to hurry up. (Sometimes I do, too!)
‘Nah, don’t worry. I don’t want to bother her. Tell her about Europe, though?’
There’s a short pause. Then: ‘I thought you wanted to go to Paris?’
Oh my God. . .
I tell him I love him and hang up. I fling open the door of Miss Maroney’s office and see that Olivia Pike’s next in the queue. She looks shocked to see me, then afraid, and finally airily contemptuous. I stalk past her and trot up the stairs past the painting of the old perv Reverend Doctor Sterling McBride.
It’s been a few weeks since my first meeting with Olivia and we’ve managed to avoid eye contact since then, in spite of living, studying and eating in the same building. Sure, I’ve seen her around, watched her try to but not quite fit in with the other young boarders she bunks with, but I still haven’t made any attempt to talk to her. Bugger her. The other day I noticed her heading into the sick bay with the nurse, Mrs Davis. She looked over her shoulder in terror at me, but said nothing. It probably won’t be long until Olivia scuttles back to wherever she came from.
When I get to my dorm room, I sweep up an armful of French books and head back downstairs to the prep. hall. The whole top floor of the building is dedicated to dorms, and downstairs are ‘service’ rooms, like the dining room, the rec. room, the offices and good old prep. hall. Prep. hall is a theoretically quiet, peaceful place where boarders can go to do their homework. It has all the outer dressings of study – desks, chairs, computers and printers – but precious little actual homework ever gets done there. It’s more of a place to congregate with friends and rake over the daily muck before dinner.
Almost everything at Oakholme – the rooms, the decor, the furniture – is old. There’s some nasty synthetic-looking blue carpet in the library that must be from the eighties, but everything else is antique and ornate. In the prep. hall, there’s a magnificent crystal chandelier hanging overhead, but no one ever looks at it. The good taste that the Oakholme parents pay for is largely wasted on its students.
This is the conversation I walk in on when I enter prep. hall to join my posse – Lou-Anne, Indu and Bindi: ‘One day I just decided where my eyebrows would go and I had the rest of my face lasered.’ Bindi raises the highly arched, impeccably sculpted eyebrows in question.
‘I detest the very idea of it,’ says Indu, who has a basic philosophical objection to depilation. ‘What if one day in the future you decide you want to regrow your eyebrows?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
Indu looks pensive for a moment. ‘What about when you’re a granny?’
‘You think I’ll want a monobrow when I’m a granny?’
‘I think that perhaps you’ll want to look a little less quizzical than you do right now.’
Everyone, including Bindi, cracks up. I plonk my French books on the table.
‘Bindi, you are over-groomed,’ declares Indu, leading to more uproarious laughter.
‘She means naturally beautiful,’ adds Lou-Anne.
They’re both right. Bindi is naturally beautiful, with huge eyes, high cheekbones and an elegant, aquiline nose. But she also has eyeliner tattooed on and she straightens and lengthens her naturally curly hair – all of which she gets away with in spite of the school rules against make-up, perms and hair extensions. I suppose the school can’t force you to wipe off things that are semi-permanent or irreversible.
Still chuckling, I open my French novel, L’Étranger by Albert Camus.
‘I don’t know how you can read that,’ says Lou-Anne.
‘I can’t read it while you’re talking to me.’
‘Why would anyone want to read a book written in French?’ Lou-Anne continues.
‘Well, it doesn’t get into my head through osmosis,’ I tell her. ‘I have to read it.’ I glare pointedly at her Christian Studies textbook. ‘I think you’ll find the same applies to the study of religion.’
‘What’s osmosis?’ asks Lou-Anne seriously.
Indu and I share a subtle eye roll.
Indu’s in Year 11 like Lou-Anne, and she’s pretty bright. Sometimes I wonder what will happen to Indu and Lou-Anne when Bindi and I leave at the end of the year. Will they become best friends? Will they take to their new dorm buddies? I try to imagine what it will be like for Lou-Anne to suddenly lose me. Next year I’ll be at university during the semester and, hopefully, overseas with Jenny during the holidays.
Jenny and Lou-Anne have a frosty relationship – more of a non-relationship actually. They don’t have a thing in common except me. Lou-Anne is my all-time best friend, but during school hours Jenny often trumps her. I downplay the friendship with Jenny to avoid Lou-Anne getting huffy. Jenny, on the other hand, seems to understand that I’m closer to Lou-Anne and doesn’t hold it against me.
I go back to L’Étranger and try to read, but Paris creeps into my brain.
Jenny and I had the time of our lives in Toulouse at the end of Year 10. Even though it was the middle of winter and freezing like we’d never known, we loved it. Jenny said that she felt glamorous, like the star of an old movie. I fell in love with the city for different reasons. In France, I had this feeling of being unknown, and I liked it. No one knew me or anything about my past. No one made any assumptions about my character. Shopkeepers didn’t follow me around the shops. Commuters didn’t stand in the aisle rather than sit down next to me. I felt free. I liked the indifference, the sense of being just another foreigner. Being a foreigner in a foreign country, as opposed to being a foreigner in my own country.
I read the same paragraph of L’Étranger six times before surrendering again to my daydreams.