IT’S NOT THE last I hear about those pesky eight hundred bucks. And I know it’s serious business when I get a note in roll call:
Please see me and Mrs Green in Mrs G’s office. SRF
‘Has Olivia mentioned anything to you about eight hundred dollars missing from the Wish Upon A Star fundraising effort?’ Mrs Green asks me as soon as I sit down.
‘My meetings with Olivia are confidential,’ I say cautiously.
‘Actually, Shauna,’ says Self-Raising Flour, ‘they’re not. You’re not her psychologist. You’re just her mentor.’
‘Has she told you anything, Shauna?’ asks Mrs Green in a way that tells me I’d better stop mucking around.
‘She said that Keli Street-Hughes was trying to blackmail her into paying her eight hundred dollars.’ I must admit that after years of daily racist remarks, I relish sticking the dagger between Keli’s shoulderblades.
‘She said Keli’s trying to blackmail her?’ Mrs Green gives Reverend Ferguson a doubtful look.
‘That’s what she said. I told her to come and see you right away, Mrs Green. That was my advice.’
‘Well, it was Keli who came to me, and she sounds very upset and very sincere. Did Olivia sound upset to you?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Were you inclined to believe her or not?’ demands Mrs Green.
‘Well, yeah,’ I answer.
‘As disappointed as we are,’ says Reverend Ferguson, ‘we don’t know why Keli would make up a story like that.’
‘Unless she took the money?’ I suggest maliciously.
‘We’ve considered that,’ says Mrs Green, ‘and we’re as sure as we can be that that’s not what’s happened. Keli is the beneficiary of a trust fund set up by her grandparents. She also receives an ample amount of pocket money each week from her parents. She has no reason to steal.’
Wow, you wouldn’t know it from the way she dresses, I think. Typical country uniform of moleskin poocatchers and flannel shirt that you could buy at Vinnie’s.
‘Maybe she’s trying to frame Olivia to get her expelled?’
‘That’s quite an allegation, Shauna,’ says Reverend Ferguson, puffing up baking-soda-style.
Mrs Green looks interested. ‘Why do you think Keli would try to frame Olivia? They seemed like good friends.’
‘Because, as I’ve already pointed out, Keli is a racist pig from way back.’
The two women look at me agape, like I’ve dropped the biggest bombshell of the century. Oh, please. . . We’ve been over this, haven’t we? The racial slurs, the name-calling, the murmurs, the sign on my door.
Do you know what I do then? I let Keli have it. I take no prisoners. I tell them all about every nasty word that I can remember ever coming out of Keli’s freckly mouth, just to jog their faulty memories. Hell, I even exaggerate.
By the end of it, Mrs Green and Self-Raising Flour look like they’ve been caught in a tornado. Their hair’s blown back, their suits are akimbo and their mouths are opening and closing like they’re codfish.
I watch the women exchange grave looks. I think maybe they’re starting to see it my way. Or at least realise that they can’t keep letting it fly.
Mrs Green asks me to bring up the missing money with Olivia again and then report back to her. I leave her office thinking like hell I will.
It’s not Olivia I plan to confront, but Keli.
I wait until the late afternoon, because I know Keli’s usually out on the oval or in the netball courts until the hour before dinner. At about five-thirty, I take a stroll across the landing to the room that Keli shares with Annabel and two other scrubchooks. I knock on the door. Annabel opens it. She sneers when she sees it’s me.
‘What?’
God, she’s rude. ‘Is Keli here?’
‘In the shower.’
Annabel begins to shut the door in my face but I jam my foot in it.
‘Hey!’
She tries to push it from the other side, but I barge through, shoulder first.
‘You can’t just come in here!’ Annabel roars, spittle flying from the tracks of her braces.
I march into the steamy bathroom. The shower’s running in the last cubicle. With Annabel shrieking like a banshee behind me, I make a lunge for the shower curtain and haul it back, revealing Keli Street-Hughes in all her wobbly, dimply, ginger magnificence.
She lets out a blood-curdling scream. ‘Get out!’
I reach into the cubicle and grab Keli’s wet arm.
‘I’m getting Miss Maroney!’ cries Annabel, spinning on her heel.
I pull on Keli’s arm and she slides across the tiles, thrashing like a fur seal on the deck of a poaching boat.
‘Let me go! Let me go!’
Dragging her into the middle of the bathroom, I get up in her face and waggle my finger in front of her eyes, the way that cop did to me.
‘You are a lying, racist arsehole,’ I say, my voice dangerously low. ‘I’ve just come from Mrs Green’s office. I’ve told her everything about you. She suspects you’re trying to frame Olivia because she’s Aboriginal, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you got expelled this afternoon. You deserve to be.’ I’m exaggerating, of course, but I want to put the fear of God into her.
‘But I haven’t . . . I didn’t . . .’
Keli’s face is red and ravaged by a desperate frown.
‘Shut up!’ I yell in her face.
Keli whimpers and then starts crying.
‘Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to get dressed and go down to Mrs Green’s office right now. You’re going to tell her that it was all a big mistake, and that the eight hundred bucks was never missing.’
‘But what am I gonna do about the money?’ she wails. ‘You think that Wish Upon A Star’s not going to notice it’s gone missing?’
‘Why don’t you take it out of your trust fund?’
An expression I’ve never seen before passes over Keli’s face. She looks cheated and crushed at the same time. She looks so humiliated that I actually feel sorry for her.
‘Okay,’ she says, her voice trembling.
I leave her in the bathroom, and as I walk back through the dorm room and into the corridor, I pass Olivia, who must have heard every word. We lock eyes. I expect her to be grateful, but she looks petrified. I see Miss Maroney in the hallway, walking towards me with a squawking Annabel in tow.
‘Shauna! What happened in that bathroom?’ she demands.
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t you just walk past me! I want to talk to you.’
I stop and turn to face her. She asks me again what happened.
‘Nothing,’ comes a voice. It’s Keli. She’s dressed in a tracksuit and her wet hair is stuck to her face and neck. ‘It was a misunderstanding,’ she says flatly.
Miss Maroney looks from Keli to me and back again, unconvinced.
‘Go and get ready for dinner,’ she says coldly.
At dinner, Olivia sits at a table by herself. I keep trying to attract her attention to invite her to sit with us, but she refuses to meet my eye. She curves over her meal like a C, staring vacantly into her food as she turns it with her fork. There is something about her bearing that’s familiar to me, and I really don’t like it.
In the middle of the night I’m woken by a squeeze of my shoulder. I wake suddenly, gasping, panicking.
‘Shh!’
It’s Olivia. She crouches at my bedside. I sit up.
‘I’m going,’ she whispers.
‘Where?’
‘Home. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t try to stop me either. If you do, I’ll admit that I stole the money and I’ll be expelled anyway.’
‘Did you really take the money?’
‘Yes.’
Words can’t express how disappointed I am to hear this. ‘Why, Olivia?’
‘I don’t know.’
It’s such a shame it’s taken this long for us to speak frankly to each other. I understand how she doesn’t know, because I used to steal and I still don’t know why. I feel a flood of empathy for her.
‘Go back to bed,’ I whisper. ‘We’ll sort it out in the morning.’
‘I’m going back to Bourke. I’m catching the six o’clock train.’
‘We can keep the money a secret. I won’t tell anyone.’
‘But they know I’m a boong now. You told them, Shauna.’
‘I thought they already knew! I thought that was why Keli was accusing you!’
‘They didn’t.’
‘Well, they know I’m a boong, and I’m still here. Stay at school, Olivia. It’ll be okay.’
‘I don’t belong here. I can’t stand it, pretending to be something I’m not. I’d rather be a boong in Bourke.’
‘I know how you feel.’ I take her hand and squeeze it. ‘But please don’t leave. Things will change, I promise. You’ll change, and then your feelings will change, and then people’s attitudes will change. Some of them, anyway. You have to give school a chance. Give it until the end of the year. You deserve to be here, you know.’
She squeezes my hand back. ‘Thanks for trying to help me,’ she says.
I want to tell her all kinds of things. That I know what it’s like to feel terrified and strange. That I used to hate myself, too. That I did bad things and was dishonest and unlovable. That I’ve decided that I’m going to make it in spite of my past, and that she can too.
But I let her go.
In the morning I wake up early. My first thought is that I hope Olivia has changed her mind, but then I see the envelope on my bedside table. I open it and count the money. There’s seven hundred and eighty bucks in there. Twenty’s missing. She’s planning a trip to Bourke, a sandwich and a can of Coke. She’s gone.
On the front of the envelope there’s some childish writing. It says: Here’s to you, Mr Street-Hughes!
I tiptoe up to the other end of the dorm building and push the envelope under Keli Street-Hughes’s door.
Later in the morning there’s all strains of mayhem, what with Olivia and most of her stuff missing. The police arrive. Every boarder gets interrogated. I don’t give away anything. It’s all resolved by the afternoon, of course, because she turns up at her foster parents’ place in Bourke.
I get a note from SRF and I meet her in her office. She asks me what happened, and whether it had anything to do with Keli, and I tell her that I don’t know.
‘I just hope it didn’t have anything to do with me,’ I say.
‘You did your best Shauna,’ she says, ‘and that’s all anyone expects of you.’
The more I think about it, though, the more sure I am that Keli Street-Hughes didn’t know that Olivia was Aboriginal – not until I shouted it into her face in the bathroom. And that’s what sent Olivia packing. I know that her flight is at least partly my fault. I jumped to conclusions about what had happened, and I was very badly wrong.
After dinner, I catch Keli Street-Hughes alone in the stairwell. When I call her name, she stops dead, turns and her eyes widen in some shape of horror.
‘I owe you an apology,’ I tell her. ‘I made a mistake and I’m sorry.’
Keli looks stunned for a moment before sharpening up smartly.
‘Tell your cuz she owes me twenty bucks,’ she says gruffly. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t report you both to the police today.’
She shoots off ahead of me, taking two stairs at a time. At the top, she goes her way and I go mine. I know that in her mind, everything she’s ever believed about me and Aboriginal people in general has been confirmed today. She was right all along. Of course she was.
It hits me with a great jolt of guilt that Olivia has been let down on my watch. I should have drawn her out that afternoon she came into my room wanting to talk. I shouldn’t have brushed her off. The only way to redeem myself, and maybe the only way to redeem Olivia, is to find her and convince her to come back to Oakholme.