When I get home I spoon some fruit salad into a bowl, carefully avoiding the slimy bits of banana and wishing that just for once we could have muesli bars or biscuits after school like a normal family. Boris, Dad’s ancient cat, winds himself around my legs, trying to charm me into giving him a snack.
“Hey, loser.” Ziggy pushes past me and Boris, wrenches open the fridge door and takes a long swig from the milk carton. I resist the urge to dump my fruit salad over his head and maintain what I hope comes across as a dignified silence. “By the way, sucked in for getting the lighting gig with Skeletor.” He grins.
“What? How do you know about the play?” He shrugs and starts eating fruit salad straight from the container.
“Tell me,” I say as menacingly as I can, grabbing him by the collar for added effect.
“Make me.”
“Tell me, you little creep, or I’ll show Mum your piss collection.” I know this will do the trick. If Mum ever finds out that Ziggy’s been bottling his own urine samples since Year Five, she’ll go mental. She’s insane when it comes to germs, especially toilet-related ones. (In case you’re wondering why a twelve-year-old boy would bottle his own pee, I haven’t got a clue. Ziggy seems to think there’s something deeply scientific about it, but I reckon he just likes doing it ’cos it’s so completely gross. Grossness scores highly in Ziggy’s world view.)
“Okay, okay. Sheesh. The play’s at my school, yeah?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So they put a list on the noticeboard, idiot.”
“And who or what is Skeletor?”
“He’s the freak in charge of lighting. He’s weird and Ben Harrigan’s brother says he’s a druggie. You’d better make sure Mum and Dad don’t hear about him.”
“I have no intention of doing the stupid play, so it doesn’t make any difference, does it?” I grab my bag and head upstairs.
Lately, my bedroom is the only place where I feel like I can really be myself. With the door closed and the blinds down, I know that no one can see me. Sometimes I lie on my bed and cry. Sometimes I dance like a loon. Today I just take off my hideous brown-and-green-checked uniform and pull on my most comfy trackies. I get all the books out of my bag and stack them neatly on my desk before sitting in the Deluxe Student Study Chair that Mum and Dad gave me for Christmas. Anyone watching me would think I was the most conscientious kid in Parkville. Until they noticed that I wasn’t actually doing anything.
I look at the titles on the spines of the pile of books: Maths in Action!, History Lives!, Allez Français!. I spend a few minutes trying to decide which is the lesser of these evils. Then I remember that Kate asked me to call her. I drag the hall phone into my bedroom and curse my parents for refusing to get me a cordless handset for my birthday.
“Well?” Kate demands as soon as she answers. “What’d your mum say about the play?”
“She’s not home yet. I can’t see them letting me do it though.”
“Oh, Freia, you have to!” I wish she’d stop saying that. It makes her sound like Bethanee, which brings out my worst, most bitchy urge to snap back, No, I don’t have to! “Tell them you just have to! It’s going to be so cool. Belinda caught the bus home with Jamie Boyd and he says all the coolest Parkville guys are in it.”
“Who’s Jamie Boyd?”
Kate sighs as if she’s explaining something to a three year old for the eleventieth time. “He’s the guy who lives across the road from the park where the Bs play hockey on Saturdays. The cute one with green eyes and lush blondy-brown hair. You know!”
Frankly, he sounds like every other guy that hangs around the Bs, but I make a noncommittal noise so that Kate won’t feel she has to try to jog my memory any further.
“Please, Freia, this play’s the biggest thing to ever happen to me and I don’t want you to miss out. If you want, I can get my mum to phone yours and talk her round.”
“It’ll never work. You know what Mum’s like about anything that might affect my schoolwork.”
“But you’ll at least ask her, won’t you? For me? Pleasepleasepleaseplea–”
“I’ll try,” I say.
The one good thing about Mum and Dad being so ancient is that no one ever suspects I’m lying when I say they won’t let me do something. Not that I have to worry about lying this time: there’s absolutely no way Mum will agree to me doing anything that not only interferes with my study but also keeps me out after school and on weekends and – and this is the clincher – puts me in close proximity to – gasp! – boys. Especially since this year’s production isn’t with the usual wets and geeks from our brother school, Westside Boys, but with the no-good ruffians of Parkville Boys High.
When I hear Mum get home I flip open the top textbook in the stack in front of me. A minute later she sticks her head around my bedroom door. (Without knocking, despite the fact that she and Dad insist that Ziggy and I always knock before going into their bedroom or either of their studies.) We have this daily routine where she spends five minutes pretending to be interested in my day before getting down to the real business of finding out how much homework I’ve got.
Now, there is a school of thought that argues that homework is bad for kids and that we should be doing enough work at school to learn everything we need to know to function as decent members of society. And there is another school of thought that thinks that the only way to learn anything is to study pretty much every waking hour of the day. Sadly, our principal, Ms Mooney (aka Pruney, on account of her having spent too many years sunbaking), and my parents belong to the latter. And sadder still, it doesn’t seem to be paying off. The more I study, the worse my marks get. It’s like my brain’s subconsciously rebelling or something.
Mum pushes a few piles of stuff out of the way and sits down on the bed. I hope this isn’t going to be an extended visit.
“How was school?”
Surely this is the most redundant question in the universe. School is school is school. Seriously, what’s going to happen today that didn’t happen yesterday? Except the play. But I’m not ready to mention that, so I tell her school was fine.
“How’s Kate?”
“Fine.”
“Good … good. Got much homework?”
“Maths, English reading, irregular French verbs to memorise.”
“Well then, I guess you’d better get on with it, eh?” I pretend not to hear her sigh as she closes the door behind her.
What I wouldn’t give to be allowed to put a lock on my door. I asked for one last Christmas, but Dad said over his dead body. Then Mum consulted one of the two million how-to-raise-teenagers books in her library and spent the rest of the day trying to force me to tell her what terrible things I was up to in my room that required me to lock myself away from the rest of the family.
I guess it must be hard for Mum having such a disappointment for a daughter. I started out promisingly, so the story goes. When I was two, Mum let the School of Early Childhood Studies use me as a guinea pig for research. Dad says she only did it to get free childcare one afternoon a week; Mum insists it was for purely altruistic reasons; and some PhD student got it into her head that just because I could sit quietly looking at a book for a while, I must be some kind of genius. And of course, it only takes one mention of the G-word to get a couple of university lecturers’ hopes up that the power of their combined genes has created Super Baby.
From that day on it was all flashcards and audio books, so by the time I actually went to school I probably did seem pretty advanced compared to the kids who’d spent a couple of years at kindy sticking Play-Doh up their noses. My success continued in primary school. The work was pretty easy and we never had any actual tests, but I aced every class. By the end of Year Six, I was beginning to believe my own publicity.
Until I got to Westside, that is. Westside has a “proud academic history”, as they say in the school prospectus. It’s selective, which means we all had to sit an IQ test to get in. But being good at IQ tests doesn’t necessarily make you good at schoolwork. Year Seven was okay. I’d already read half the books we were studying in English and, thanks to my parents’ obsession with Trivial Pursuit and TV documentaries, I had a pretty good grasp of history and geography. I managed to stay in the top ten for most subjects, but I was working my bum off trying to keep up. By the end of Year Eight I was ready to go to the principal and turn myself in as a fraud. At least I might have done, if my parents hadn’t got to her first and had a long chat about my disappointing marks and what could be done to improve them.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the dumbest girl in the year. (That honour goes to Natalie Baker, but she’s a junior tennis champion so no one cares.) In fact, I’m still sitting somewhere in the top twenty for everything except Maths, but when everyone’s used to you coming first, that may as well be last.
After the half-yearly exams last year Mum decided drastic action was needed and hired one of her English Literature students to tutor me so she wouldn’t have to face the humiliation of having a semi-literate daughter any more. Turns out, having Nicky as my tutor is pretty much the best thing that’s happened to me since starting at Westside, so at least some good’s come out of being such a disappointment.
By dinnertime I’ve managed to do five of the fifteen trigonometry questions due tomorrow. It’s taken me almost forty-five minutes. Admittedly, about twenty-five of those have been spent rehearsing what I’m going to say to Kate when I tell her Mum and Dad have vetoed My Fair Lady.