I wander into the kitchen, still trying to make sense of what happened last night. Did Jake Blake kiss me? Or did I dream that?
My mother waves the Weekend Britannia Bugle under my nose.
There, on page three, is a huge picture of Jake kissing me.
And the headline:
JAKE BLAKE IN HOOK-UP WITH OLDCASTLE’S ELLY.
The story says:
Jake Blake’s reputation as a young Romeo seems well deserved.
He’d only been in town three hours when his baby blue eyes were turned on young Elly Pickering.
‘I’m going to be seeing him every day he’s here and he’s already kissed me,’ said Elly, who, at fifteen years old, makes a very cute, blushing Juliet.
He’s from Los Angeles, she’s from Oldcastle High. It’s a budding romance, worthy of the Bard himself.
‘YOU’RE FIRED!’ Mum yells. ‘I’m supposed to be managing the publicity and the first story in the paper is negative. Even more appalling, it’s about my own daughter! I have already had an angry call from Festive Films and it took me half an hour to explain. There is NO CHANCE of you coming on the film set with me.’
‘It doesn’t look good,’ Dad agrees. ‘You’re way too young for a bloke like him.’
WHAAAA??
This is a total miscarriage of justice! It’s all lies. Mum knows full well that I was only doing what she asked me and I got pushed over. It’s hardly a ‘romance’. There were a hundred people there.
‘I know all that!’ snaps Mum, ‘but if you’d used your brains and taken your mobile with you, you could have rung me and none of this would have happened. And why did you speak to that journalist? It just says to me that you are not mature enough to be my assistant, and . . .
’I don’t hear the rest because I run off down the hall bawling my eyes out.
Honestly, this is SO unfair! I didn’t know that shadow I talked to was a reporter from the Bugle. Everything’s been twisted around. Now I look like an idiot.
I go on FacePlace and my mirror is scribbled with horrible stuff. There must be fifty messages here.
Can u believe Pickering is telling the world she’s Jake’s girlfriend? ROFL. What a loser.
Dream on, pickle-face.
She said she wouldn’t have time to be an extra. Now we know what she means by ‘personal assistant’. Helping him wipe her lipgloss off his shirt?
Why her? She’s boooooring!
Hey! Leave her alone. I think they make a great couple.
Never knew JB had such bad taste!!
Say it isn’t true, Jake ♥ ♥
Then I check out the Jake Blake fansites on the net and my picture is on every one of them. This stupid story has gone around the world in the hours I was asleep.
I’m now the Number One Enemy of about a trillion girls on planet Earth.
And it’s All. Total. Lies.
I’m sitting in front of the computer with my head in my hands and snuffling into a soggy tissue, when Carmelita comes into the room. She’s still wet from the shower.
‘I’ve seen the paper,’ she says. ‘You poor thing. And I heard your mum saying what she said. I tried to talk to her, but she’s pretty mad. It’s sooo awful.’
She puts her hands on my shoulders, but I can’t turn around and look at her. I’m too miserable.
‘Els, I won’t be in the movie. No way!’ she declares. ‘I can’t go there while you’re just sitting at home. You’re my most darling friend in the world. Who cares about some dumb old movie? We’ll still have a great summer together. Go down the beach every day and just hang out.’
Don’t you just love Carmelita? She would even give up a chance of being in a Hollywood movie to be with me. At least there’s one little bandaid on my heart.
But I can’t let her do that. As much as I’d like to. If she’s just going to drag around with me every day? How boring would that be? That’s not why she came to visit.
What about Henry? She could be lying under the shade of a tropical fig tree and smooching with him, all hot and sultry, on the banks of a big, brown, rushing river.
‘He’ll be fine,’ says Carmelita.
But I can hear in her voice she already misses him. As much as she loves me, she loves her boy too.
And isn’t that what friendship is about? To have some patience when True Love comes along?
I mean, Carmelita and I know we will be friends until we die, but we also know we need to have other friends, family and romance. And we can’t get in the way when a big break comes along. We don’t want to be sitting together in some old folks’ home in front of the Xbox, plucking each other’s nose hairs, and with no one coming to visit because we were too selfish to let each other have a life.
So that’s why I get my head up from the desk and tell Carmelita that she HAS to be in the movie.
I tell her this could be her big break! I know she desperately wants to be an actress. She was always the star in drama club at Oldcastle. Everyone loved her. She’s a great singer and knows every song in every Monster Class movie by heart.
‘Maybe I could be like one of the famous Latino actresses, such as Jessica Alba, Eva Longoria or Penelope Cruz,’ she says dreamily.
I never thought of it before, but why couldn’t an Oscar-winning actress come from a macadamia nut farm in Far North Queensland?
Stranger things have happened.
(Although I actually can’t remember when.)
I tell her that I couldn’t stand in her way. A true friend would never do that.
‘Thank you, Els!’ she cries.
And then she sings that hit tune from Monster Class 1:
‘Where, where?
It’s a wolf. Over there!
Where, where, oh where, is the wolf?
Here!
(Scream!!!)
He’s a werewolf. An everywhere wolf.
In your face, in your mind.
In front, just behind.
Beware, the everywhere . . . WEREWOLF!’
(Scream!!!)
I’m outside Will’s house on Hammerhead. I’ve come to visit and explain that dumb story in the Bugle. I am hoping he hasn’t spotted it, but Carmelita said I should come and see him, just in case. She’s right. She’s good at this sort of stuff.
Will lives here with his family – his dad, Took; his mum, Jasmine; and his little sister, Pookie, in a rundown shack at the far end of the beach. It’s one of the last old houses left around here.
Most of the places are now huge glass boxes with massive decks and gargantuan swimming pools. And in the middle, where you would expect another mansion to be, is Will’s place.
Will’s dad, Took, has this great saying: ‘You get the view, but the view gets you.’
I get it. When we’re looking back at the cliff all we can see is intense light bouncing off shiny glass and it’s like we’re surfing at the mall. Meanwhile, all the rich people inside those houses imagine they’re at one with nature, communing with whales.
Like I said, why does it sometimes feel like I’m the only person with a fully functioning brain?
You almost can’t see Will’s house because it’s shaded by a clump of ti-tree. You come straight from the sand onto the wooden steps on the cliff, then halfway up you step to the left, take a sandy path along for a bit and there it is – the cutest little house made from bamboo, shells and driftwood.
It’d almost seem like the wreck of a wooden ship if it weren’t for Will’s mum’s art everywhere, making you look twice. There are bright flags, painted pots, portraits of mermaids and offerings to various gods and goddesses of the ocean scattered everywhere in their front yard.
Jasmine’s made pottery shrines to King Neptune (Roman); the ancient goddess Naunet (Egyptian); Aegir the Sea Giant (Old Norse); the goddess Amathaunta (Sumerian); the god Varuna (Hindu); the great Poseidon (Greek) and the ruler of the ocean, Kanaloa (Hawaiian). And every day, whenever you visit, she’s laid a fresh flower in front of each one.
Today I step on the old front veranda and there she is, painting one of the pretty pots she sells down the market. She looks like a mermaid herself in a long faded blue dress and bare feet, with pink hibiscus flowers in her long, blonde, braided hair. She smells of patchouli oil and you feel good just being near her.
‘Hello, lovely one,’ she says to me. ‘Will’s just on his way back from the shops. He went to get some milk. Sit down and take a brush.’
Soon enough I’m sitting cross-legged on the bare boards and dipping my brush into little wells of pure colour. A pair of rainbow lorikeets perch on the railing and squawk at us. I take my inspiration from their intensely bright plumage and dab brilliant green and scarlet on my pot. Just beyond, the sea shimmers with aqua intensity and the sound of the waves washes over me.
Could there ever be a spot more peaceful than this?
I tell Jasmine that Jake Blake is in town.
‘Who?’ she replies.
I tell her no one really, just a boy, and we sit and paint in silence, listening to the surf.
‘Oh, here’s Will now,’ she says with a wide smile.
Along the path he comes, striding purposefully as he always does. His face is a picture of concentration, as if he’s thinking deep stuff, which he usually is. As soon as he sees me, he scowls and then I see in one hand he has a carton of milk and in the other, uh oh, the newspaper.
‘Thanks, sweetie,’ his mum calls to him as he barges up the steps past us, straight into the house and bangs the screen door behind him.
‘What’s up with him?’ asks Jasmine. ‘You’d better go see, Elly. You can always make him calm down when he’s cross.’
I don’t know whether I’ll be able to today. Reluctantly I lay down my brush and go indoors.
Inside, lazy smoke from a sandalwood incense stick swirls through the shady rooms. In the kitchen the Bugle is dumped on the wooden dining table. I stop for a moment to look at that picture again.
It’s perfectly innocent – Jake’s only kissing me on the cheek.
And then I peer more closely and see what Will sees. The look on my face. In that picture – there’s no other word for it – I am swooning. It looks like I am about to sprout wings and fly to heaven in sheer rapture.
Erk!
I tap, tap on Will’s door and when there’s no answer, peep my head around and see him stretched out on his bed – his huge feet hanging over the end. His arms are crossed behind his head and he’s staring at the collection of surfboards stacked on top of the wooden beams above.
I perch on the edge of the old cane couch by the window. I tell him I’m sorry, it was not like it looks. I start babbling like Took does when he talks about the Bugle. He calls it a ‘rag’, full of stupid lies. The ‘mouthpiece of the rich and corrupt’.
And then I go on about all that Romeo and Juliet stuff and how dumb it is. I’m hoping he’ll interrupt me, but he doesn’t and my words just end up dribbling out pathetically into the gloomy silence. All I can hear is the crash of the ocean.
‘What’s the big deal with him?’ says Jake. ‘It’s like you’d trash everything we’ve got just to get noticed by someone famous.’
I tell him that’s not true! Will must know that I love him. I tell him I adore him with all my heart. There’s not a boy in the world that could take his place.
‘So what’s the story about then? You kissed him? You’re going to see him every day?’ he accuses me.
I explain the whole thing with my mum, and how I fell over and stuff. He has to believe me!
‘For real?’ he says and turns to me. The doubt in his grey eyes makes me leap from the couch and onto the bed beside him.
For absolutely true and for real, I whisper into his salty, blond ringlets. He wraps his long, tanned arms around me.
‘I love you, Elly,’ he says into my neck and then he kisses me.
For the first time I’m not sure that I am kissing him back.