Pink Read online

  ‘Hi.’

  I turned. A tiny blonde girl with enormous blue eyes and the kind of nose celebrities pay millions for was smiling at me with perfect white teeth.

  ‘I’m Alexis,’ she said, and held out her hand.

  In the movie, this would be the bit where I said something wrong and the Queen Bee would cut me down with a cold glance.

  ‘Ava,’ I said. ‘I’m Ava.’

  I shook her hand shyly, feeling very grown-up. What kind of teenager shakes hands? At my old school introductions were accomplished with a grunt and a jerk of the head.

  ‘Like Ava Gardner!’ said the girl. ‘How wonderful.’

  I blinked. Chloe was the only person who’d ever said that before. Except for old people.

  ‘You’ll like it here,’ Alexis said, with an adorable impish squint. ‘I can tell.’

  Could she? Could she also tell that I was only dressing up in this pink cashmere jumper? And could she tell that I was really a quasi-goth emo lesbian? I hoped not. Alexis was my very first Billy Hughes conversation, and I really, really wanted there to be more.

  The teacher came in, and we all sat down. I didn’t remember hearing a bell. Maybe there wasn’t one.

  ‘Good morning, Matthew,’ said Alexis.

  The teacher nodded at her. ‘Hi, Alexis,’ he said.

  Calling teachers by their first names. Coffee. No school bell. Shaking hands. Everyone mature, serious, disciplined. For a moment, I forgot about the pink jumper and the possibility of Liking Boys. I was just happy to belong to a school where being smart wasn’t considered to be a sign of mental instability.

  First period I had a meeting with the school’s integration architect. I wasn’t entirely sure what an integration architect did, but she had a nice office on the third floor of the school overlooking the courtyard.

  Her name was Josie, and she had almost-white blonde hair kept neatly in place with a shiny red headband. Her lips and fingernails were painted the same shade of red, and she was wearing far too much make-up.

  ‘Ava, hi,’ she said with a blinding smile. ‘Have a seat.’

  It felt a bit like being in a posh doctor’s office – lots of pot plants and nice paintings and bookshelves. The guidance counsellor’s office at my old school had been a chaotic mess of manila folders, cheesy DARE TO DREAM posters and outdated fliers about anorexia.

  ‘So, the purpose of this meeting is to induct you into Billy Hughes, and to make a start on your performance plan. It will be a bit truncated, because we’re already halfway through first semester, but I think you’ll find it useful anyway.’

  Performance plan? Was I in trouble?

  Seeing my frown, Josie smiled again. She had an awful lot of teeth. ‘Billy Hughes isn’t like an ordinary school, Ava,’ she explained. ‘We’re committed to de-siloing the learning experience. Learning should be a conversation between student and teacher. That’s why we encourage the students to use our first names, and why we share a common room.’

  Whoa. The student common room and the staffroom were the same thing?

  ‘It’s also why the students are responsible for writing their own reports at the end of each semester.’

  ‘We write our own reports?’

  Josie nodded. ‘In consultation with your teachers, of course. But at the beginning of each semester you birthday a performance plan, with a list of key outcomes you want to achieve, and a series of deliverables over the course of the semester that track your progress.’

  I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Then at the end of each semester, your teachers will provide you with some written comments which you can incorporate into your own report.’

  ‘Do I decide my own grades?’ I asked.

  ‘In consultation with your teachers and with me,’ said Josie. ‘And by evaluating your achievements against the deliverables and outcomes specified in your performance plan.’

  ‘So what’s to stop me from giving myself straight As?’

  Josie leaned back in her chair. ‘Only yourself,’ she said. ‘At Billy Hughes, we encourage students to take responsibility for their own learnings. It is your education, after all, and you should have the opportunity to shape it to best suit your needs and goals. We also recognise that secondary school is a very important time for personal development, and we recommend that you incorporate those learnings into your performance plan.’

  I frowned. Was it also policy at Billy Hughes to use the word learning as a noun, and birthday as a verb? Because I wasn’t sure I could get behind that.

  By recess, I was ready to go back to my old school. Billy Hughes was hard! The reading lists for English and Literature were about seven hundred pages long and I hadn’t read any of the books, which was ridiculous because I am very well-read. My French teacher (Juliette) didn’t speak any English, and my Physics teacher (Andrew) might as well have been speaking French, because I had no idea how to use diffraction patterns to compare and contrast atom spacing in crystalline structures. The only thing I had the slightest handle on was Maths.

  I wasn’t smart. I stumbled outside onto a perfectly manicured lawn fringed with lavender and forget-me-nots.

  I wasn’t smart at all. I thought I was bright. I’d won academic excellence awards for nearly every subject since Year Seven!

  I was screwed. Completely and totally screwed.

  I wanted to turn around and walk out of the ornate iron gates and get on a train and go home. I wanted to go back to my old school where I was the best at everything.

  I missed Chloe. I wanted to curl up next to her and breathe in her cigarette-and-vanilla smell and listen to her say that school didn’t matter, that it was all just brainwashing anyway. Maybe she was right.

  My eye was suddenly caught by a bunch of five kids sitting under an artfully twisted Japanese maple, all wearing black. They stood out like cockroaches at a butterfly convention. All of the other kids at Billy Hughes wore fitted jeans or just-above-the-knee skirts. There was plenty of white and pink and blue and even some green and the occasional splash of red. But nobody wore black.

  These kids were different. They were all slouched and dishevelled. One of them had big rips in his black jeans. Another was fat and quite hairy for a teenager, with the kind of round metal-rimmed glasses that only looked good on John Lennon or Harry Potter. There was a girl with braces, a lumpy ponytail and an oversized black T-shirt with what looked like a Star Trek logo on the front. An Asian boy had his nose buried in a book. The others were laughing at something one of the boys had said. He was the least mangy-looking of them all; his black jeans fitted him quite well and he wore a button-down black shirt. He was making a funny face, with his eyes all squinty and his lips pursed. I felt myself smiling.

  ‘Ava.’ It was the tiny, perky girl from form assembly. Alexis. She was carrying a bottle of water and an apple, and had a folder tucked under one arm.

  ‘Come and sit with us,’ she said, and threw a disdainful look over her shoulder at the untidy black-wearing kids.

  ‘Stage crew freaks,’ she muttered as she led me away. ‘It’s not like personal hygiene is hard.’

  If you could go to the supermarket and buy six-packs of people, Alexis and her friends would be located in the gourmet section. They all matched, in a Country Road catalogue kind of way. There were three petite, perfect girls: Alexis with her pixie blondeness; Vivian, a sleek and sophisticated Malaysian girl with the most beautifully manicured fingernails I’d ever seen; and Ella-Grace, the girl with brown plaits who spoke French and Japanese. I felt like a great clomping dirty giant next to them. A great clomping dirty giant with absolutely nothing interesting to say.

  The three boys were tall and solid-looking – like they rowed or played some other kind of gentleman’s sport such as water polo or lacrosse. They wore fitted, slightly slouchy distressed jeans and designer T-shirts, and had artfully messy hair. They seemed to be paired up with the girls, and their names were Caleb, Cameron and Connor, but
I wasn’t sure which was which. They sat at a picnic table nearby, talking about which uni had the best MBA course and New Zealand’s recent performance in the cricket.

  The girls were quite appallingly nice. They asked me how my first day was going, offered to lend me notes or help me out with the Physics stuff, and were generally so bright, bubbly and full of energy that I found it hard to believe they weren’t airheads. I felt guilty just talking to them, terrified that any minute Chloe might bust in and flick cigarette ash on these visions of healthy pink perfection and extinguish them.

  ‘So, Ava,’ said Alexis. ‘What was your old school like?’

  I felt myself blush. ‘Er,’ I said, ‘it was okay. The work was much easier.’

  Ella-Grace laughed like a sparkling waterfall. ‘Of course it was,’ she said. ‘But I bet you were bored, right? That’s why you came here.’

  I nodded. That, and because I wanted to wear my pink jumper and skirts and lip gloss, and talk to normal people about normal stuff like boys and television and all the other things Chloe hated.

  ‘Still,’ said Vivian with a sympathetic smile. ‘You must miss your old friends.’

  I nodded again, waiting for the cigarette ash to rain down a hail of retribution.

  Alexis let out a little cry, the kind of noise that Bambi might have made whenever he discovered a particularly forlorn woodland creature in need of his love and friendship. She put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. I stiffened involuntarily. Why was she touching me? Was she going to realise I was a lesbian?

  Could she sense it?

  She smelled like summer and apples and honeysuckle. I wanted to be her.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’re your new friends. We’ll look after you.’

  For a moment I thought I was going to cry. How could these people be so nice? How did they know I was worth being friends with? What if I wasn’t smart enough, or cool enough, or … healthy enough? What if they found out about Chloe?

  ‘So is there someone special?’ asked Ella-Grace.

  I jumped. Could she read my mind?

  I opened my mouth to reply, but had no idea what to say, so I shut it again. Great. My new friends thought I was a fish. What would I say? This was a pivotal moment in my new life. It was a big decision to make. Could I really just deny Chloe? Was this what I really wanted?

  ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘No one special.’

  Vivian clapped her hands together. ‘Our first task as your new best friends!’

  The girls pursed their lips and considered me, with heads cocked to one side.

  ‘Aaron,’ said Ella-Grace.

  ‘Too emo,’ replied Alexis.

  ‘Dario.’

  ‘Too short.’

  ‘Luke.’

  ‘Gay.’

  ‘Really? Explains his excellent taste in shoes. What about Vincent?’

  ‘He’s dating Marissa-Jane.’

  ‘Shame. He’s very good at inorganic chemistry.’

  ‘Ah!’ Alexis sprang to her feet. ‘Ethan.’

  Vivian nodded and smiled. ‘Ethan.’

  Ella-Grace winked at me. ‘Ethan.’

  This was all going very fast. ‘Who’s Ethan?’ I asked.

  ‘Tall,’ said Alexis. ‘Handsome. Athletic. Academically solid. Very eligible. Don’t you think, Cam?’ She tripped over to the picnic table where the boys sat.

  ‘Hmm?’ Cameron wrapped a lazy arm around her waist.

  ‘Ava and Ethan. Parfait, n’est pas?

  ’ ‘Mais oui, mon cherie.’ Cameron cracked a Country Road catalogue smile and she bent down and kissed him.

  ‘This is so exciting,’ said Vivian. ‘We’ll have to get you in the same place. I wonder if you have any classes together. Or you could join that mentoring program he’s in. With the kids from that primary school. He doesn’t debate, because he’s got rowing on Wednesdays.’

  He volunteered with kids?

  ‘The musical,’ stated Alexis as she rejoined us. ‘Ava has to be in the musical.’

  There was a chorus of assent. I started to feel a little nauseous.

  ‘A musical?’ I asked. ‘Like Phantom of the Opera?’

  Alexis nodded. ‘Except that this year it’s Bang! Bang!. We’ll all be in it, and I saw Ethan’s name on the audition schedule for next week.’

  ‘You have to put your name on the list,’ said Ella-Grace. ‘Then you can meet him when you audition!’

  I swallowed. ‘I have to audition? With singing?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Alexis. ‘You’ll totally get in. I have a feeling.’

  I had a feeling too. A sinking feeling. I tried to imagine what Chloe would say if I told her I was going to be in a school musical. Singing. Dancing. I honestly didn’t think she’d have words.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ said Alexis. ‘You’ll both be in the musical, working together, hanging out on weekends. And I’ll be there to make sure everything goes according to plan. It’ll be just like Emma.’

  ‘Because everything worked out so well in Emma,’ I said, almost under my breath.

  A frown wrinkled Alexis’s perfect forehead. ‘Well, it all worked out in the end.’

  Chloe hated Jane Austen. More than she hated Disney and McDonalds and Harry Potter. She said that Austen’s characters were all shallow and sheltered and didn’t care about social injustice or breaking down the class system. And that the women were anti-feminist because all they wanted to do was get married and obey men. When she found a copy of Pride and Prejudice on my bookshelf, Chloe let fly with some Mark Twain quote about how a library with no books at all would be better than a library containing Jane Austen’s novels.

  I remembered the way Chloe’s lip curled when she saw the book, the way she pinched it between finger and thumb like it was some rotting thing. She tossed it into the bin with a disdainful flick of her wrist. I wanted to rescue it, but I knew I couldn’t put it back on my bookshelf. So I let it go. I still missed it.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll audition for the musical.’

  ‘So how was it?’

  Chloe was lounging on my bed, lying on her back. She wore a grey wool dress with black fishnets and knee-high black boots. She blew smoke rings up to the ceiling. I wished she wouldn’t smoke inside. It made my clothes smell. Still, it was good to see her. I’d missed her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said.

  I’d survived my first week at Billy Hughes, but only just. I was exhausted. I’d been up past midnight every night, trying to catch up on Dickens and World War II and logarithmic equations. I was making headway, but I knew by Monday there’d be a whole lot more work to get done.

  ‘What are the people like?’ Chloe asked. ‘Are they all sweaty-palmed pocket-protected geeks?’

  I thought of Alexis’s perfect nose, Ella-Grace’s tiny figure, and Vivian’s effortless style. Chloe would hate them all.

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  Chloe sighed. ‘Poor baby,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone you can hang around with? Anyone who’s even close to being Like Us?’

  Hah. I wondered who Chloe would hate more, the preppy perfection of Alexis and her friends, or the carelessness of the black-wearing kids who stood out so badly.

  I shrugged. ‘There’re some people I eat lunch with,’ I said. ‘But I’m really too busy with schoolwork to make friends.’

  ‘And you already have me,’ she said with a coquettish flutter of her eyelashes.

  ‘And I already have you,’ I replied, winking at her.

  ‘You know,’ Chloe said, ‘I quite like your hair like that.’

  I’d told her that we weren’t allowed to have dyed hair at Billy Hughes. I’d told her other things. I’d told her that all the kids were boring and that I didn’t fit in.

  I hadn’t told her about Alexis. Or the musical. Or Ethan.

  I’d had Ethan pointed out to me by Vivian and Ella-Grace, but hadn’t officially met him yet. He was tall and had neat sandy hair and freckle
s. He was hot. I had also learned that his surname was Bradley, that he was a vegetarian, and that he volunteered for Médecins Sans Frontières. He was perfect, and I was terrified that he would laugh when we finally met and the Emma plan was exposed.

  Chloe wanted to go and hang out at the Batcave, but I pled homework.

  The Lesbian Batcave was where we usually hung out. It wasn’t really called the Batcave. Its name was something pretentious and French like L’Arrondisement, but I’d just always called it the Lesbian Batcave because it was dark and cavelike, and full of serious-looking lesbians wearing black. Chloe always rolled her eyes when I called it that, and told me I was being childish.

  When we’d first got together, it was just the two of us – me and Chloe against the world. But then in Year Ten she joined a radical art collective, and we started hanging out at the Batcave with all the other artsy lesbians. It was good, at first. They were all so very cool and intellectual. But I didn’t really get their art, and I didn’t like the thick black coffee that they drank constantly. I didn’t like the way the cigarette smoke stayed in my hair for days afterwards when I followed them out to the courtyard. And I didn’t like sharing Chloe. She became someone different when she was around those other girls – someone mean and aloof, her cool hardened into cold.

  I was jealous, really. Jealous of the way Chloe slotted so effortlessly into this new group. I wanted to be with people that fitted me.

  And then I heard about the Billy Hughes School for Academic Excellence. A school where all the smart kids went. A school where I could hand in my homework on time without being made to feel like I was giving in to ‘the man’, or betraying some kind of moral code of freedom and rebellion. A school where boys and girls went to the end-of-year formal together in tuxedos and floor-length gowns, and slow-danced under coloured lights like in those old movies with Molly Ringwald. A school where I could start again, and be the person I really was. Or at least the person I thought I might be.

  ‘Is this how it’s going to be, then?’ asked Chloe, as though she could hear my thoughts. She dropped her cigarette butt into her half-finished cup of coffee. It made a fzzz.