Shauna's Great Expectations Read online

  ‘How are you going really?’ Reverend Ferguson asks softly.

  ‘She’s angry.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Shauna. It’s confidential. Obviously the school psychologist knows, but even she can’t get a word out of Olivia.’

  ‘Give her some time,’ I say. ‘She’ll probably come good.’

  I’m not sure I believe this, though. I think Olivia’s going to scarper sooner rather than later. I hate to say it, but I’m rather hoping it’s sooner. I’m literally sick at the sight of Olivia Pike. Literally. Ever since she arrived at Oakholme I’ve been feeling sick and exhausted. It must be an allergic reaction. Or maybe it’s from the coal dust from that damn fireplace in the withdrawing room.

  9

  I WAKE IN the dead of night to a blood-curdling scream.

  There’s a trill to it, a certain high-pitched vibrato that could only be produced by the specific anatomy of a coloratura soprano’s throat.

  I sit up and stare terrified into the blackness.

  ‘Lou-Anne!’

  She screams again and the windows vibrate.

  I see a ghost-like flash of white hair at the dorm room door before it slams shut.

  Indu turns on her lamp and Bindi and I get out of bed and rush to Lou-Anne’s bedside. She’s crying and has her hand clamped over her nose.

  ‘Something just bit my lip!’ she sobs. ‘A spider!’

  ‘Omigawd! A spider!’ Bindi echoes hysterically.

  Indu pulls Lou-Anne’s hand away from her lip as I turn on Lou-Anne’s lamp.

  ‘Your whole upper lip’s covered in tiny red dots,’ proclaims Indu. ‘It’s some kind of rash!’

  ‘Yeah, from a spider bite,’ says Lou-Anne. ‘A bloody funnel web!’

  I look down at the floor to see whether there’s a rogue spider crawling around and that’s when I realise that there’s a rectangular piece of plastic stuck to the sole of my foot. I rip it off and hold it to the lamplight.

  ‘That was no spider!’ I announce. ‘This is a wax strip with Lou-Anne’s hair stuck to it!’

  Everyone leans in for a closer look at Lou-Anne’s bow of short, black hairs that were, a minute ago, attached to her upper lip.

  ‘Omigawd!’ shrieks Bindi. ‘They took your moustache!’

  ‘I don’t have a moustache,’ sobs Lou-Anne.

  ‘Not anymore,’ I mutter.

  ‘But who?’ cries Indu. ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  ‘I know who,’ I say, scowling as I recall the whitish blonde hair that whipped around the corner in the second after Lou-Anne’s scream rent the air.

  I storm into the hallway, ready to rip someone into pieces. That someone is standing across the landing right in front of Keli’s room. She looks back at me over her shoulder and then disappears into the dimly lit room. The lights go off. Raucous giggles ensue.

  ‘Did you do it? Did you do it?’

  Now I understand. Olivia just tore off Lou-Anne’s moustache to impress Keli Street-Hughes and her cabal of scrubchooks.

  ‘Where’s the moustache? What did you do with it? We could stuff a doona!’

  More giggles. How dare they! As my hand, trembling with rage, reaches for the doorknob, a larger, more solid hand descends on my shoulder.

  ‘Shauna, don’t do it.’

  It’s Lou-Anne, with tears in her eyes. I can see her ravaged upper lip glowing red in the dim light of the hallway.

  ‘I can’t let them get away with that!’

  ‘You’ll be the one who gets into trouble. So just leave it.’

  ‘It was that little shit, Olivia Pike,’ I tell her, loudly enough to be heard on the other side of Keli Street-Hughes’s door.

  ‘Leave it, Shauna.’

  I want so badly to stomp into that room, throw on the lights and bawl those girls out until I’m hoarse, but Lou-Anne takes me by the elbow. I have to respect her wishes, I know.

  We all get back into bed, and after a few minutes of whispered outrage and the application of some vitamin E oil, the room falls silent. But my mind is far from silent. I stew so badly that Lou-Anne tells me to stop stewing.

  ‘I can’t fall asleep to the sound of angry sighing, Shauna.’

  ‘How’s your lip?’

  ‘Bald.’ A few seconds later she adds, ‘Sore.’ Then I hear some sniffles that could be crying, but I know when and when not to make a fuss of Lou-Anne. She’s embarrassed, so I leave her alone.

  Eventually everyone else falls asleep, but I remain very much awake. I am so angry that I could burn down the scrubchooks’ henhouse. How could Olivia do that to Lou-Anne? Lou-Anne, who’s never hurt a fly. Lou-Anne, who never says anything nasty about anyone. Lou-Anne, who defends Olivia when I say mean things about her.

  I toss and turn, ruminating. Then, at around three in the morning I get out of bed, open my pencil case and withdraw my scissors. They are in fact my mother’s former sewing scissors and they can make it through just about anything. Diamonds, probably.

  Silently, I slide like a serpent from beneath my doona, out of the dorm room and into the hallway. I cross the foyer and sneak into the darkness. I go all the way down the end to the bad real estate, where the younger girls sleep, and with ever-so-quiet tippy-toed steps, slip into her room. It’s obvious Mr Tizic keeps the hinges very well oiled, because not the slightest scritch disturbs the air as I push the door open. All the Year 8 boarders are asleep. Two of them are snoring loudly. I go to Olivia’s bed. She’s lying on her back with her blonde hair fanned out on her pillow. Ever so gently, I lift a thick lock of hair – about a third of it – from the crown of her head and swiftly lop it off, close to the scalp. She puts her hand to her forehead, mutters something and rolls over, without waking up.

  It’s revenge enough that Olivia will look in the mirror in the morning and see Friar Tuck, but I decide that some finishing touches are necessary. So I also sneak into Keli’s room and sprinkle Olivia’s fine hair all over her bed. It’s like the horse’s head in the bed in the Godfather movie. Keli’s going to wake up screaming. They both will.

  ‘Some pretty strange things happened in the boarding house overnight,’ snaps Miss Maroney the next morning. She’s called a special meeting in the dining room after breakfast. ‘If the girls responsible for this nonsense don’t come forward before the first bell rings, I’m giving every single one of you a Red Mark.’

  There’s a flurry of furtive glances. I look at Olivia. Olivia looks at Keli. Keli looks at Lou-Anne. Lou-Anne looks at me. Whether four pairs of darting eyes attract Miss Maroney’s attention or not is unclear. The bell rings.

  ‘One Red Mark to each of you!’ she roars.

  One of the Year 7 girls bursts into tears.

  Welcome to justice, Oakholme-style.

  10

  NATHAN HAS ONLY called me twice since our ‘date’ at the beach, but somehow everyone knows we’re ‘dating’. Having a boyfriend at Oakholme is kind of a big deal, especially for those who live in the boarding house. Not that many boarders have boyfriends. I mean, Lou-Anne’s got a hunk up in Eumundi named Isaac, but he’d probably prefer to chew off his own face than call her at the boarding house.

  One boarder who definitely doesn’t have a boyfriend and wants one is our beloved scrubchook Keli. She talks about her neighbour, Matt Adler, so often that an outsider would think he was her boyfriend. However, during my time at Oakholme Master Adler has called Keli a total of zero times. To my knowledge, anyway. Which is not to say that she doesn’t speak to him on Miss Maroney’s phone. In these times of fourth-wave feminism, Keli feels completely free to stall the phone queue by calling Matt and talking about herself in this saccharine little voice that she never otherwise uses.

  Jenny Bean gave me some interesting insights into Matt Adler’s feelings for Keli after going to the second fortnightly Introduction to Legal Systems and Methods support class at St Augustine’s last week without me. I’d been sick and dizzy that
afternoon and Miss Pemberton wouldn’t let me go. I really should have gone. I’m already way behind on the online reading and haven’t even started the first assignment, but I’ve been feeling so rotten that I just can’t do it on top of everything else.

  Anyway, I assumed that Jenny would be lost sans moi in that St Augustine’s testosterone pit, but apparently she struck up a conversation with one of Stephen Agliozzo’s less attractive friends, Tom Something-or-Other. Stephen had told Tom, who told Jenny, who told me that Matt Adler wishes Keli would stop ‘stalking’ him. Apparently the last time she called the St Augustine’s boarding house, Matt pretended to have a broken leg and said he couldn’t get to the phone, because he’d already used the ‘out at rowing practice’ excuse too often.

  Of course I relay this juicy piece of intelligence to my other friends during prep. late one afternoon. It’s almost dinnertime. Keli’s coven is in the back corner discussing something dreary in tones of great hilarity.

  ‘How is that even possible?’ shrieks Annabel Saxon.

  The usual suspects and I are all huddled around our table discussing the undesirability of Keli Street-Hughes in hushed tones.

  ‘Imagine waking up next to that every morning,’ says Indu.

  ‘You’d wake up orange,’ chimes in Bindi.

  We all break apart laughing, and Keli’s group looks over at us. We don’t care. We keep cutting up in barely whispering voices.

  Then in walk some Year 7 and 8 boarders, including Olivia Pike. I hoped that she’d even out her hairstyle with some sheep clippers, but she’s opted instead to pull the hair either side of her baldpate into a topknot. It’s ‘passable’, to fire her own words back against her, but to me she looks like some denounced detractor from the Chinese Cultural Revolution with half their head shaved. What a traitor! I was right about her from the beginning. Anyway, I feel like she’s been justly served and that our frosty relationship can resume as normal during our next meeting.

  ‘So how’s it going with Nathan?’ Bindi asks at regular volume. She knows full well how it’s going with Nathan, but this is prep. and it’s a public conversation.

  ‘I might go and pay him a visit at the Easter Show,’ I answer casually.

  ‘I’m in,’ says Indu.

  ‘Me too,’ says Bindi. ‘Is he entering the wood chopping competition?’

  We, and all the girls around us who’ve been eavesdropping, burst into uproarious laughter, even though no one quite gets the joke.

  ‘Nathan’s handsome,’ says Indu. ‘I don’t know about those boat shoes, though.’

  ‘You should have seen him at the music festival in his cowboy boots and Akubra.’

  ‘That’s weird, Shauna,’ says Bindi.

  ‘Not when everyone’s dressed the same way.’

  ‘Or undressed the same way,’ murmurs Lou-Anne.

  I’ve been thinking about Nathan quite a lot since the day at the beach. It’s hard to avoid it with my friends analysing every moment of our date. We’ve entertained every possible theory as to why he didn’t want to go into the water, from shrinkage to an inability to swim. I know that we’re over-analysing, but I do enjoy talking about him. There are certain details, however, that only Lou-Anne will ever hear.

  I like Nathan and that scares me a bit. I have to watch what I say to him. I know I put my foot in it at the beach by accusing him of racism, but sometimes it’s like I see it everywhere. And a lot of the time it really is there. When I was in Year 9, I had a boyfriend who I met at a science camp. His name was David and it was about as serious as it gets for a Year 9 camp romance, featuring exchanges of ‘I love you’, passionate sessions that involved tongue kissing and underclothes groping, and promises of staying together forever.

  One weekend, David invited me to his house for lunch. I met his family and everything seemed to be going well. Then his mother asked me flat-out, ‘And what’s your ethnic background, Shauna?’

  I didn’t know what she meant.

  ‘My ethnic background?’

  ‘Where do your parents come from?’

  ‘Barraba,’ I answered.

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘Have you heard of Tamworth?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘but what I mean is, what country is your family from?’

  I told her Australia. Then I told her that my dad’s Kamilaroi and I’ve got Irukandji blood on my mum’s side.

  ‘You’re Aboriginal,’ gulped David’s dad.

  I swear, you could have heard an ant fart. David’s parents looked at each other in shock. They didn’t even try to hide their horror.

  ‘And do you consider yourself Australian or Aboriginal?’ his dad asked awkwardly.

  How was I supposed to answer that? I muttered something about being both, knowing that it was the beginning of the end.

  David never called me again. In fact, I never spoke to him again because whenever I called his house he wasn’t there. Eventually I stopped calling. And I decided to avoid city boys forever. I call them ‘city’ boys and it makes them sound worldly, but they’re really just flat-lawn suburban boys, whose parents’ jar is just as small as my parents’ jar, and with the lid screwed on just as tightly.

  I’m glad that Nathan’s from the country. It’s one of many things I like about him.

  The clock strikes six-thirty and, like a herd of hungry cows, everyone rises and thunders down the hall into the dining room. We’ve got this dumb system for working out who gets fed first. We each take a glass from the service bar and on the bottom of each of the IKEA glasses is a number. The lower the number, the further up in the queue you go. It’s a clunky system, and I have no idea who started it or when, but it does work. It stops younger and less popular girls from being pushed around, and scoring the number three glass (numbers one and two were smashed before my time) is like finding the golden ticket in a Wonka chocolate bar. It’s very democratic.

  Tonight I pull a lousy number and I have to wait around for ages for some kind of stringy chicken dish. We always complain that the boarding house food is disgusting, and at the same time that the portions are too small! For some reason the dining room is a great place to whinge. Prep. hall is a forum for gossip and the dining room is the complaints centre.

  At the back of the dinner queue, with my nose full of the smell of bad chicken, I’m jolted by a wave of nausea that makes me weak at the knees. Stuff comes up and I have to make a huge effort to send it back down.

  ‘Shauna! Where are you going?’

  ‘Bathroom,’ I mutter to Lou-Anne on the way out of the room. ‘I’m sick. I can’t stand the smell.’

  I hightail it up to our bathroom and this time I really throw up. I feel awful. I sway to my bed and flop down. When I look at the ceiling it spins, so I close my eyes.

  I sleep for hours. Literally hours. It’s after eight-thirty when I wake up. The first person I see when I open my eyes is Lou-Anne, who’s pushed her bed closer to mine. She does that sometimes, if one or both of us are feeling fragile.

  She’s flat out on her belly copying word-for-word an Othello essay I wrote last year.

  ‘How was your nap?’ she asks flatly.

  ‘Fine. I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Nathan rang while you were asleep.’

  ‘I’ll call him back.’

  ‘Don’t forget to tell him you’re pregnant.’

  I nearly choke on my own nonchalant chuckle.

  11

  A MINUTE LATER, Lou-Anne and I are locked in the bathroom, arguing loudly.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are, keeping track of my periods?’ I demand. Lou-Anne doesn’t take a backwards step.

  ‘I wasn’t keeping track. We’re usually in synch, Shauna. I didn’t even notice it the first month, but last month I noticed you hadn’t used any pads.’

  ‘So you went rifling through the sanitary bin counting pads, did you?’

  ‘I know when you’re having your period, okay? You’re always short of pads and y
ou usually take a few of mine. And you have breakouts on your chin. There’s been none of that since we got back to school. Think about it. It’s nearly April.’

  I don’t want to think about it. But I pause. I lower my voice, knowing that Indu and Bindi could be gasping and palpitating with their ears pressed against the door.

  ‘I’m not pregnant. I can’t be. I took the morning-after pill.’

  ‘Doesn’t always work.’

  ‘But I was sick for twenty-four hours.’

  ‘So what? That doesn’t mean it’s worked.’ She sounds uncertain. ‘Does it?’

  I actually don’t know. I bought the pill at a pharmacy in Tamworth. That was three months ago. Easter holidays are coming up. The last time I had my period was over Christmas. I remember going Christmas shopping with Mum in Armidale and sloping off to the chemist to buy pads.

  Lou-Anne is right. I’ve missed two periods. Which doesn’t necessarily mean I’m pregnant.

  ‘I’ve just been sick. My body’s all out of whack since Olivia Pike got here.’

  Lou-Anne shook her head. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Olivia Pike. It’s called morning sickness.’

  ‘But I’m sick all bloody day!’

  ‘It’s called morning sickness,’ points out Lou-Anne, ‘but it should be called all-day sickness. My sister was sick all day every day for the whole nine months.’

  I burst into tears. How am I going to do the HSC feeling the way I do now? What if I have the baby in the middle of the exams?

  I quickly do the maths. Suppose I am pregnant. My last period was around Christmas. That means the baby would be born at the end of September, maybe the beginning of October, which is right around the time of my exams.

  Lou-Anne hugs me hard from behind.

  ‘I can’t have a baby,’ I sob.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ she says calmly. ‘You don’t have to do anything. They cook themselves, and when they’re ready to come out, they come out themselves.’

  ‘But I can’t do it at school. Not at this school. Can you imagine? The teachers . . . Keli Street-Hughes . . .’

  I’m really crying hard now, tears rolling down my cheeks.