I came home exhausted.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and had ended up training hard.
‘You showing off for Angelica?’ Hero had asked, pointing her out among the squaddies training in the next lane. I didn’t bother answering, just rugby-tackled him underwater, nearly drowning us both.
But the truth was I liked to train hard. It de-stressed me, working the tension out of my body and out of my mind.
I gave Hero some kickboard work while I timed my sprints over ten laps and was having a break at the shallow end when Angelica emerged from the girls’ change rooms, giggling with one of her posse.
‘Angelica!’ An athletic, grey-haired man slapped his newspaper down on a table near the shallow end. ‘This is swim training, not a social outing. For heaven’s sake, girl, focus!’
Her friend peeled off, leaving Angelica to face the tirade on her own.
He pushed himself up from the table and jabbed a finger at the pool. ‘That’s where champions are made; not in the change rooms, giggling like a giddy girl.’
Her face went white, then splotchy red, like he’d slapped her.
She jerked away from him and hurled herself into the pool just as Hero splashed up beside me on his kickboard.
‘That was harsh,’ he said, under his breath on the turn. ‘No wonder she dishes it out at school, if that’s what she has to put up with at home.’
No wonder.
She ploughed through the next few laps like she had an outboard motor strapped to her bum. But as soon as her father stalked off to take a phone call, she took a break, hanging off a lane rope at the shallow end, breathing heavily.
I could see she’d been crying. We both looked away and pretended to study the churning lanes beside us.
‘You OK?’ I asked after a minute. She nodded, looking more embarrassed than antagonistic. Then she surprised me.
‘Your friend, the vampire writer, came up to the school today with your dad.’ She looked over to where her dad was arguing with someone on the phone. ‘They were both really nice and said they’d come back and do a writing and illustrating workshop for the Year Six/Sevens.’
She seemed about to say something else, then zeroed in on Hero splashing back up towards us on his kickboard.
‘See you later,’ she said and pushed off from the wall.
Hero was all eyes. ‘Ooh, was that what I think it was? Is A-team lowering her standards, or what?’
I shrugged, the blood running hot in my face.
His eyebrows leapt into his hairline. He ditched the kickboard and spun round, wrapping his arms around his own neck and slurping out loud kissing noises.
I duck-dived under the water to get away from him and swam the next ten metres underwater.
He really was an idiot.
The smell wafting out from the kitchen nearly made me faint when I walked in the door. Mrs Marquez’s meal – some sort of yellow fried rice with chicken and seafood – was sizzling in the wok.
‘This recipe or your life,’ Manny said, brandishing his most impressive kitchen utensil: a razor-toothed saw used for cutting through bone. ‘Tell your little mate to write it down and bring it to school or risk my wrath.’
‘Uh, OK.’ I wasn’t ever going back to that school, but Manny didn’t need to know that. Not when he was armed with a blade that could flense carcasses down to the bone.
He scooped a generous serve onto a plate and passed it to me. I was halfway through wolfing it down when I noticed that the kitchen bench was set for just the two of us. ‘Isn’t anybody else eating?’ I asked.
Manny shook his head. ‘Anders has gone home to his loft. He’ll be back in the morning to give you a ride to the hospital. Vee and Caleb are at his parents’ house tonight–’
He stopped at the look on my face. ‘What?’
‘It’s just that Caleb said he was the cuckoo’s egg – the changeling that never fitted into his family...’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, it just sounded like he didn’t get on with them–’
‘Are you kidding? He loves his family, but man, you should see them. His dad is like sixty and still mountain-bikes and swims every morning. His mum runs half-marathons. They’re fit and tanned and blond and they adore him, but talk about the cuckoo’s egg ... He took up writing as a teenager to give him something to do on their annual ski trip to the snow.’
I thought about Caleb, the antithesis of athleticism. ‘But he fits in here, with you and Vee–’
‘–and Anders. Sure, he does. We’re all the odd pieces of the jigsaw that somehow match up. Join us together and we look just like a happy family.’
I pushed my plate away and thought about that for a minute.
‘I might go phone Mum,’ I said.
‘You do that,’ he said, gathering together our cutlery and dishes.
I pulled out my mobile and switched it on. As I walked through to my room, a message beeped onto the screen.
Love you. xx
I thumbed a quick reply.
Me too. Xx
And hit Send .
I lay down in the darkened room. Manny had made my bed again. I could get used to that. And his cooking. But that aside, it had been a rocky day. I missed my mum.
After a dozen or so rings a recorded message clicked in: The mobile phone you are calling is switched off or not in a mobile phone area...
Her battery must be flat. I’d take the recharger in with me when I went to visit her tomorrow.
And that was my last conscious thought for the day.