Jamie Reed lived in one of the more modern houses in Carrington. But to achieve a ‘modern’ status in such a place wasn’t hard. It only meant you hadn’t bought an old house and refurbished it, for the Reed family home was at least thirty years old. It was snug amongst the gum trees and on the edge of a pine plantation at the end of the long Main Road, which sounded great in real estate terms but all it really meant was that it was annoyingly far away from shopping centres, schools and friends, as well as being prone to playing host to unwanted guests such as messy cockatoos and huntsman spiders.

The inside of the house itself, was a sight hard to grasp, as it was evidently decorated by a bored housewife armed with a credit card. A bored housewife with absolutely no taste. The front room was decorated as if it was a country cottage, with pressed flowers in quaint wooden frames, squashy arm chairs each covered in horribly contrasting plaid material, a badly handmade rug and a coffee table that looked like a large tree stump had been cut down and plonked randomly in the middle. From there was the kitchen, fitted with state of the art stainless steel appliances and high beam white lines that showed up any speck of dirt (and there generally were quite a few) as well as the master bedroom, done like a nineteenth century cabaret, all red quilts and golden curtains.

The rest of the house continued in this horrible fashion. It was common place to see dishes from days ago stacked on the sink, cat fur clogging up the ducted heating and pillows from different rooms in the wrong places, and given the diversity of rooms this came off with a hideous effect. There was no mistaking it. Even after its Friday clean by the hired maid, the Reed house was a fine of example of how wealth, power and free time do not equal taste or anything like it.

In fact, the only two normal looking rooms in the whole house were situated down the back, on the first floor. One was painted electric blue and stuffed full with everyone a small boy could want. Expensive plush toys, remote controlled cars, motorbikes, tanks and boats, a bookshelf stacked with video games instead of the intended books, small Matchbox cars which were murder if you accidentally stepped on them and various costumes from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Harry Potter were strewn everywhere by a eight year old Tyler Reed, much to the despair of the weekly maid, who had never met a messier child. Cupcake wrappers were often stashed under the bed, as well as chocolate bars stolen from high up in the pantry, dirty laundry hidden in the bottom of a cupboard instead of being put in the provided basket and defaced library books forgotten under a pile of DVD disks and their cases spread near the large television. So I suppose you could say, even though it was less of an eyesore than the horribly yellow dining room, the bedroom of a spoilt, never taught right from wrong primary schooler probably wouldn’t the first port of call on a tour of the home.

One room, however, the overworked maid didn’t have to worry about, was the one directly across from Corey’s, which was Jamie’s.

The only parts of this room the maid saw was the door and the heavy lock that Jamie herself had taken to drilling into the wall. No other member of the family had a key so it wasn’t expected that the maid was to clean it, even though every day after cleaning Corey’s impossible bedroom, she’d always try the lock – just in case.

Not of course, that she was missing out on anything spectacular. Jamie’s room was just that, a room. Not as hideously decorated as the rest of the house, or as stuffed full as her younger brother’s, but just a regular teenage girl room.

Pale pink walls that no one had ever bothered to paint over, that were covered in parts by posters of various bands, photos tacked with drawing pins that left small holes and drawings done in Sharpie, most of which only made sense to the drawer, or to the people present at the particular time. A lot of meanings had been forgotten.

A bulletin board also hung on one of the walls, as long with a rather expensive television. The board, to pin more photos, and other random artefacts that proved a life, such as movie stubs, autographs, random paint samples, party invitations and a boys school tie, its owner long forgotten. A few spindly webs had taken over the television screen which hadn’t been used for months, even since someone had the bright idea to pause the movie that was being watched and drew moustaches and armpit hair on the onscreen characters, in a particularly intoxicated moment in Jamie’s past, where at the time, she actually thought it’d be a funny idea.

A large bed was the prominent feature in the room, black cast iron with purple sheets and a red and black covered doona sitting in the position it was thrown off in. A large mirror sat on the bureau, littered with make up in many different shades, random pieces of jewellery and thing that didn’t necessarily belong on a bureau such as school planner and two empty cigarette boxes.

A desk sat against the wall with the bulletin board, littered with magazines and clothing but nothing really a desk should be used for.

A plastic bag sat next to the door, with crumpled half eaten chip packets, ruined boxes of biscuits, several empty bottles that once contained cheap champagne and a million dead matches was the only evidence of last weekends activities, along with the diminishing but distinctive smell that had been attempted lazily to be covered by strawberry smelling body spray.

Heavy curtains were pulled closed, hiding a window, broken, from being jimmied too many times in late night escapes, making the only light coming from a rather ugly desk lamp propped up on a pile of shoe boxes.

Under the bed, ever the perfect hiding place, was shelter to old school reports she didn’t want her parents to see, and they never asked about, school books that were mysteriously ‘lost’ or ‘stolen’ when it came around to report writing time and random empty alcohol bottles.

So really, Jamie Ann Reed, had many good reasons for keeping her door locked, from not only her sticky fingered little brother and nosey mother but also the incredibly curious maid, who tore her gaze away from the locked door as she heard the front door open at four o clock, signalling Jamie had arrived home.

Jamie stepped into the oak panel lined foyer and kicked off her school shoes. Dirt and stones clogged into the grooves was finally shaken free and skidded in all directions over the freshly polished floor, and soon her school bag and immensely expensive blazer joined them, crumpled in a heap.

The maid just sighed, but didn’t say anything, let aknown get angry, even though she’d spent a good half an hour cleaning the front hall. The first rule for a good existence inside the Reed house was don’t make noise. The house was today, as it always was. Deathly silent. She had been given many different reasons for this, such as Mr. Reed needed complete silence for completing paperwork and making Very Important Phone-calls. Or that Mrs. Reed suffered terrible migraines or Jamie had a slight mental problem and random loud noises could send her into a state of destructive fury. But as Mr. Reed was rarely home, she’d never seen Mrs. Reed bedridden and not watching Oprah or reading trashy tabloids, and that Jamie seemed completely stable, even if she was a little odd, the maid just got the impression they were a family with very little to say to each other.

Tyler came traipsing in after Jamie, dropping his bag next to hers.

Neither children bothered to look up at the maid, and she was used to it. Tyler had never been taught manners and Jamie… well, who really knew about Jamie?

It was then Mrs. Reed descended from her second story boudoir looking bedroom, clutching a Mills & Boon book to her chest, wearing her regular bewildered expression as she looked down at her two children, as if Elvis or some stranger had walked into her house.

“Jamie,” her mother greeted, with the same tone of voice a tired police chief would use when he sees his son being dragged in for D&D for the third time that week.

“Mum,” Jamie greeted, in a similar fashion. She brushed passed her, with an air of bitterness, leaving the maid to clean up the dirt and dust and Corey to quietly make himself a sandwich.

Mrs. Reed sat at the bottom of the stairs, her red curls stuck up in many directions, a result of lying down all afternoon. The wrinkles in her face were evident, tired purples bags hung under her eyes and as her gaze followed her oldest born, she sighed a desperate, rattling sigh, which Jamie heard and rolled her eyes at.

“What will I do with your big sister, Tyler my boy?” she asked her small son, who shrugged and gave her a look which plainly stated his sister was the last thing on his mind, distracted by the new Xbox game awaiting him in his bedroom, and Mrs. Reed was too, also quickly distracted. A negative attitude off a daughter she barely spoke to or about wasn’t really enough to inspire serious thought.

Lisa Greenly, in Jamie’s opinion was the kind of friend any girl should have. Tall, vivacious and street hardened; she had connections and friends that most high school students would kill for, anything from the best party guests to the biggest drug dealers Carrington’s side of the city. Her life had a lot of didn’ts in it. As in, didn’t go to school, didn’t have parents, didn’t have a curfew and didn’t get along with a lot of people. And she liked it that way.

Jamie met Lisa by chance circumstances, about a year ago due to a party thrown by a then, year ten from the boy’s campus. Daniel had already insulted her four times in the first two hours, and like most parties of her year nine era, it consisted of boys drinking beer, trying to push each other in the pool and trying their luck with the girls, who were all tottering around with a Vodka Cruiser in one hand and a cheap fag in the other screeching I’m so smashed! at each other before collapsing into a giggling pile. She had barely drunk half a bottle of a sickly pink ‘Guava’ flavoured drink when Sean had walked up to her, with him an incredibly pale girl with choppy black hair and a weeks worth of eyeliner build up. She was wearing an immensely small amount of clothes, even for January and a disgusted look.

“Are these your friends?” she had asked, looking around at the assembled group with a mixture of pity and abhorrence.

“Not really,” Jamie had answered quickly. It wasn’t a lie, she told herself, as there was an incredibly small number of people there she actually liked.

The girl had sent a last scathing look around before ashing into someone’s open Coke can.

“I’m getting out of here. You coming, Jamie?” She didn’t have time to register, or even ask how this girl knew her name; she was shoved out the door by Sean, and followed dutifully down the front path.

“I’m Lisa,” the girl had introduced herself finally, as she climbed into the font seat of a beat up old car, shoving an old pizza box and an empty Jim Bean can onto the floor on the passenger to make room for Jamie. Lisa waved goodbye to Sean and when Jamie shyly asked how long she had had her licence for, in a test to actually find out her age, Lisa just laughed and said of course she wasn’t old enough to drive. Jamie wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

Lisa didn’t seem to mind that Jamie was just fifteen (“Fifteen is a lot better than fourteen, besides, you look older,” she had said) and also told her that she seemed ‘way too cool’ for the ‘incredibly lame’ party she had been at. She shoved a can of Woodstock into Jamie’s hand and didn’t bother to explain where they were going until they pulled up at a shabby little house. It was then Jamie realized she wasn’t really in Carrington territory anymore, more on the Leeole Park side. In Carrington if you had long grass and rusting kid’s bikes in the front yard, your neighbours could pretty much call the cops on you.

Lisa took Jamie’s hand and led her inside, and the whole house stank like beer and smoke. The walls had parts where they’d been kicked in, music was blasting from a crackly old stereo and a girl was flaked out on the floor. A couple were making out furiously on the couch and the smoke coming from the ashtray smelt heavier and tangier, which of course she would later recognize as weed.

People came out of the woodwork to greet Lisa, most stumbling, clutching a bottle of something, another person, or a wall. All sorts of gifts, mostly in the form of alcohol and cigarettes were showered in Lisa’s general direction, and Jamie’s after they’d found out she was with Lisa. Eventually they’d migrated into the party throwers bedroom because it was the least crowded place, and Lisa lazily lit a cigarette and tried to catch up on the drunkenness level of everyone else. Jamie had slunk into the corner, trying to shield the fact she wasn’t drinking and had never got drunk before, but somehow Lisa could tell and continued to pass her random cans until she could feel the effects of alcohol for the first time in her life.

She could feel it, heavy in the pit of her stomach, and when she stood her head felt light. Some friend of Lisa’s passed her a bottle of straight vodka and she had shot it back amongst cheers. She smiled at them even though all she really wanted to do was gag and spit it up on the stained carpet. It burnt the back of her throat and left a nasty after taste, but it did its job, and within an hour of arriving she was well on her way to being incredibly smashed.

She had woken up the next morning, curled up on a spare mattress right against Lisa, who had already woken and was holding two Panadol in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Jamie gladly gulped down the pills with a huge class of cold water, but then winced at the pounding her head was receiving for her sudden movements. She felt sick to her stomach and her clothes now stank like the house, but grinned broadly up at Lisa.

“Last night was ace,” she had said. Lisa just nodded and Jamie couldn’t help but thinking Lisa was some form of angel sent (though probably not from God.) to help her escape. From her life, from her shitty problems and her stupid claustrophobia causing small town with its nose stuck up in the air.

After that, Lisa was a permanent fixture in Jamie’s life. She’d appear at the end of a school day, parked in the zones marked with bright yellow letters spelling out “No Parking”, sitting on the hood, her fish netted legs crossed and re applying luridly red lipstick.

“Your friend, Lisa,” Alex had started one day as her and Jamie shoved their fifth and sixth period books back into their lockers. “She looks like a whore.”

“She is a whore,” Jamie had answered defiantly, but felt like a shit all the same for dissing her new found friend, even though Lisa often admitted to it.

“Yeh, I’m a bit of a slag sometimes,” she’d say as they’d floor it away from the school. “But wotcha gunna do, aye?”

And it was with Lisa she started experiencing things that seemed positively foreign in a sleepy town like Carrington, things that Jamie felt made her and her life matter and things that made her wake from the stupor she’d been if for the past couple of years.

They’d ditch school and drive to the theatre and instead of watching the film, throw popcorn at each other (and the other patrons) and yell rude things at the characters on screen. Most kids wouldn’t dare to do that sort of things, as someone in the cinema would know someone who knew someone who knew your mum. That’s how it was in Carrington, everyone knew everyone.

But Lisa didn’t care, she had no parents, she lived with her older brother who didn’t give a shit what she did, even on the nights when Lisa would flash older boys in order to secure cheap bladders of wine which they drank in quick succession before driving Lisa’s shitty bomb of a car up Main street as fast it would go, before hiding it behind an old shed on the property next to Jamie’s when they were sure the cops had been called. Then they’d sit on Jamie’s window sill, smoking cigarettes to keep warm, still giggling softly with the effects of the alcohol and having drunken conversations that seemed so deep at the time.

Because of Lisa, Jamie’s grades began to slip, as did her attendance record, and her friendships. It didn’t really matter though, did it? Lisa was the one introducing her to new friends, and taking her to parties where she would meet boys more dangerous, fun and her type than any boy from Carrington ever were. It was at those parties where she would loose her inhabitations and dance with a boy she’d just met or forge new friendships over the wood fire and whiskey shots. It was with Lisa that they’d sing loud and horrible renditions of the Spice Girls at three in the morning in some stranger’s living room. It was with Lisa she’d make out with just for the attention of all the horny beer filled boys and the possibility of free citrus flavoured vodka. It was with Lisa that she nursed a hangover every Saturday and Sunday morning. It was with Lisa that she started to live again, even if it did seem something like a half life. But Lisa was her best friend. Lisa knew more about her than Alex or Kate did, not that Jamie really bothered to tell them anything. They didn’t understand her anymore, they hadn’t for a while. A year later, she had gotten over her childish awe, and replaced it with a requited strong friendship. She couldn’t function without her, and it seemed perfectly normal that when she unlocked her door, Lisa was sprawled on her bed, drawing intricate patterns onto her knee.

In the other hand she held her mobile phone and she was hissing rather violently into it, a mixture between wanting to yell her guts out at the person on the other end of the line, and trying to keep quiet to avoid any awkward questions as why she was in Jamie’s room, which would be obvious if she broke the silence of the house.

“Yes, I’m sure. I was told five days, and those five days ran out five days ago you stupid foreign fuck! What was that? I can’t bloody well understand you, maybe you try a job that doesn’t involve talking to people in a language you were taught by tapes you ordered over a tele-merical!” She waved vaguely at Jamie who grinned and perched herself at the end of the bed. Lisa continued to wave her hands about, although not in a form of greeting but as in an expression of frustration, which was also displayed by the distorted facial expression and the “What?” she spluttered out every ten seconds or so. Her long hair was in a messy braid over her shoulder, and her fringe was starting to show the signs of needing a wash. She smelt of a million things, most of them being hidden by a thick layer of concealing deodorant, her make up looked like it had been applied over an old layer and she was wearing a huge jumper with a beer stain and a scorch mark on the sleave, that Jamie guessed had, up until a few days ago belonged to some random male. Her fingernails were dirty and covered in chipped polish; her shoes that she had kicked off were caked in mud, as was the tatty old shoulder bag she carried. Jamie gathered she had not been home in a couple of days.

“Yes! What? No, you dickhead! Can you get me your bloody manager? Manager? You know, boss? Man – a – ger?” Lisa sighed deeply. “Fucking fresh off the boat, all of them, I swear,” she muttered to Jamie without bothering to turn away from the phone. “Do you have any employees who didn’t come to this country on a floating door?” Lisa ended the call with a violent jab at the ‘hang up’ button and threw it across the room where it skidded across the carpet and bumped into the skirting board with a soft ‘bam’. She sat up and straightened her legs out so she could tap Jamie in the hip with her toes.

“Sorry for not picking you up from school, but I thought it’d be better to keep out of town with the Heap till I get my license,”

The Heap was the nickname for Lisa’s little old car, that Jamie guessed had been built in the time of the pyramids, had three different paint screens, a cracked window, stolen plates, no registration and more lives than a cat. Getting its name from all the times it had been referred to as a ‘junk heap’ ‘rust heap’ or ‘crap heap’ had been crashed, bashed and broken more times than Jamie could remember yet it still lived on, transporting Jamie and Lisa to parties in Leeole Park and further out, acting as a makeshift taxi, ambulance or bed, even though it stunk like smoke and was the biggest cop magnet ever. Lisa was turning eighteen in just over a month, and her number one priority was getting her license to end the problem of using up so much petrol by going the long way everywhere to avoid cops.

“That’s alright, the bus ride was actually pleasant in comparison to my day,” Jamie sighed dramatically and scooted until she was lying next to Lisa. “I was under the incorrect impression that because I got to choose all my own subjects this year, it was actually going to be better. But all I’ve got is a bunch of stupid blonde girls in philosophy, who evidently where not told you needed to be able to think to pass the class, Daniel Rowe, Cree Smythe and all their equally Neanderthal friends in English Language and an absolute idiot of a language teacher who makes us sit around going ‘how are you?’ ‘how are you?’ ‘how are you?’ and it’s all just really pointless, you know?”

“Of course I know, baby doll, why do you think I left? No more teachers telling me that I was interpreting something wrong, or that my shoelaces were the wrong colour or that I failed something-erother. If I want five plus five to be eight, well then it damn well will be!” Lisa laughed, and Jamie joined in, even though she wanted to pipe up and ask Lisa how this life style was going to last her for the rest of her life. “Anyway babes, in honour of you being such a good little student, I have a surprise for you.”

“Ah yeah?” Jamie asked, pulling off her socks and flinging them next to the door. Lisa’s surprises were usually ‘interesting’ bits of information about herself, such as ‘I tried a DIY wax kit and I burnt the fudge out of my fadge, ha ha get it?’ or ‘someone should tell that guy I fucked last night that nipples are not beer caps, they’re so bloody sore from all that twisting, does he really think that’s a turn on?’ so Jamie wasn’t really interested, but Lisa had mentioned the surprise was for her so it couldn’t really be a tale on the woe of having an exceptionally heavy period could it?

“Well I was sitting on MSN today at Mattie C’s place, you know, the one in Leeole that doesn’t have a back door? Anyway, I start chatting to a young man by the name of Dale, ring any bells Jaims?”

Jamie shot Lisa a wary look. “What did you do Lisa?”

“Haha, would you take a geez at the way she looks at me?” Lisa asked an imaginary audience. “I didn’t do anything, he just mentioned that he had a lot of fun with you in the holidays and he’d like to see you again.” She used her fingers to create talking marks in the air around the word ‘fun’ and smirked at Jamie, who merely pressed,

“And?”

“Well I said to him, Dale, myself and Jamie aren’t doing anything tonight, why don’t you come down and pay my girl a visit? And of course he took me up on the offer, and why wouldn’t he? How many boys do I offer my best friend up on a plate for?”

Jamie ignored the compliment, pulled a pillow over her face and groaned. “Lisaaaaaa, it’s a school night idiot. I can’t go gallivanting around with you and random boys anymore, holidays are over.”

Lisa just laughed and pulled the pillow off. “Don’t act like you don’t want to see him girl, you guys were all over each other all holidays. Besides, it’s the start of the year; everyone knows that school doesn’t count at this time of the year. Come on, get yo’ skinny ass changed, we got some illegal substances to acquire!”

Illegal substances seemed far and few between that night, perhaps because the holidays were over and most of the dealers had gone back to the city or to school, or perhaps it was because it was a Monday evening. They’d acquired a few bottles of cheap wine with Lisa’s fake I.D at the dodgy Asian restaurant on Main Street and a couple of grams of some iffy looking weed. But as Lisa stated, “it may not be a feast, but it is no meagre meal.”

Jamie uncorked one of the bottles into the back seat of The Heap, held her nose, and sculled as much of it as she could before needing to come up for air.

“I swear to God this stuff gets worse each time we drink it,” she muttered, screwing up her face and passing the bottle to Lisa, still driving, who took a swig and handed it back.

“Well its all we can afford on my youth payments and your allowance from your daddy,” Lisa smirked. “So unless you wanna get off your rich white ass and get a job, we’re not going to be moving up in the world anytime soon.”

“Maybe you should get a job Lis, in case you haven’t noticed you’re the one who spends your days smoking away your youth payments whilst I’m getting an education.”

“Education, shmeducation. I don’t figure I’d be very good at a job, unless I was a hooker and I don’t fancy sucking no wrinkly old cocks. Why would I wanna work nine to five when everyone pays for me?”

Jamie resisted the urge to roll her eyes and ask Lisa whether she thought everyone would pay for her when she wasn’t a skanky underage girl anymore, but instead she took Lisa’s mirror out of the glove box and began examining the rush job she had done of her make up, frowning and trying to smooth away her foundation line. “Erch, how attractive.”

Lisa raised an eyebrow. “Jaims, Dale has seen you after you got plastered and fell in the lake.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Jamie mused, the distant memory of staring at herself in a mirror, her eye make up panda-d around her eyes and her top fairly see through, seemed a lot longer ago then it probably was, and didn’t raise even the faintest of a blush. Lisa’s phone rang and as she chatted away, Jamie busied herself drinking the rest of the bottle. Seeing Dale sober defiantly was not on the cards.

Dale was twenty years old, approximately three and bit years older than Jamie herself. He lived in the city’s outer suburbs and had happened upon the Carrington/Leeole Park area late the year before when on a trip with his friend to visit a mate he used to work with. He owned a beat up car, had a tattoo across his stomach and been all over Australia. Dale and his friend decided to stick around for while and they’d ended up finding summer work at the school, cleaning and gardening and painting and the like and that’s where he first saw Jamie Reed. He’d been weeding the rose bushes at front entrance, in the blistering summer heat, when two girls had strolled up to the entrance. From a distance, they both looked very similar and Dale thoughts perhaps that they were sisters, both tall, slim, with long hair but it was difficult to tell as both had large pairs of sunglasses obscuring their faces. One of the girls, with the lighter hair, wearing denim shorts and a singlet who was carrying a book, and walked past him, into the school, without a word. He figured his job wasn’t security and if this girl wanted to walk into the school, she could. Instead he turned to face the second girl. She was dressed in a short white dress without a bra. He knew she wasn’t wearing a bra because he could see the colour of nipples through her shirt, and tried not to stare as she called “I’ll just wait out here Jamie.” She surveyed him for a moment before telling him, “Educations institutions give me the creeps.”

“Ah, yeah?” he asked, leaning against the brick fence.

“Yeah, especially this one. I mean look at it. School’s are supposed to be a bunch of portables with graffitid tables and a bricked office and science room, this is a friggin’ mansion that some loner turned into a school cuz he had no mates to leave it to when he died. Geez, the whole school is one big, posh, cliché.”

Dale couldn’t disagree there. Even though he was mostly kept outside, the few times he’d been allowed inside to fix a dodgy lock or paint a room, he’d half expected Harry Potter or a character from an old Enid Blyton book to come skipping down the corridor. Once he’d even seen the vice principal giving a tour of the school to a small British girl with braids and a mother dressed in plaid.

“Ha yeah, at my old school they didn’t even bother with a garden, and here they’re paying me to prune rosebushes,” he laughed, gesturing to the work he was supposed to be completing.

“Well that’s Carrington for you. One big pretty rose bush, with all the nasties trimmed away,” she winked, but he really wasn’t sure at what she was hinting at. “I’m Lisa.”

“I’m Dale.” After a few seconds silence he asked. “So, what are you doing here?”

She looked in the direction her friend had left in. “My friend, Jamie, she goes here. She found some book she forgot to return to the library before the year was over, so she decided she must do so, pronto.” Lisa rolled her eyes. “She’s such a dork.”

She certainly didn’t look like a dork to Dale, when she returned down the path from the schools main building, but she certainly didn’t look like a prim private school girl or the kind of girl who would hang out with trash like this Lisa seemed to be. She now had her sunglasses perched on top of her head, keeping her fringe out of her face as she tied the remainder of her hair in a sloppy pony tail with an elastic band she’d filched from the library.

“Dale,” she called, and he looked up, startled that she knew his name. “Mr. Jameson said to tell you you need to get back to work or you’ll have to work through your lunch break.”

“Well, we better take our leave then, Dale. What are you doing tonight?” asked Lisa.

“Um, well, the friend I’m staying with is having a few mates round and –”

“Sounds great, do you wanna go Jamie?”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind going.”

“Well then its all sorted, text me later and give me the deetz,” Lisa pulled a sharpie out of her pocket and scrawled her number onto his arm. “Catch ya.” She winked again, in a way he supposed she thought was seductive, but just made her look stupid and trashy, especially in comparison to her apathetic and straight faced friend.

As they walked away, he looked at the number marked in black ink on his arm, and had half a mind not to call it. She might have thought her pushiness was a turn on, but to him, it really wasn’t. If it wasn’t for the way Jamie turned her head slightly and gave him a half smirk half smile, he probably wouldn’t have called, just to spite Lisa. But there was something about that smile, that girl, he wanted to unravel.

Dale did call Lisa that day and gave the girl the address. Lisa and Jamie turned up, albeit late and half sloshed, Lisa kissed him on both cheeks but he looked past her, trying to find Jamie who was talking to some girl with dreadlocks that she knew. For an hour, he tried to subtly get involved in the same ground conversations she was in. When she spoke American politics with the guy who owned the natural medicine store at the Leeole Park strip mall, he pretended to know what he was talking about, when she smoked joints with the girl who sold crack pipes from her living room, he toked along with them and when she went to check on Lisa who was snorting lines in bathroom, he ‘desperately had to pee’. It wasn’t until after midnight that he found her sitting outside on an old child’s swing set, smoking silently.

“Are you following me?” she asked.

“Kinda.”

She nodded, unperturbed by his admission. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, when she just started speaking, talking of the stars and crack pipes and swinging so high you could disappear off the face of the planet. The plight of Ethiopians, the terrible Carrington bus service, the fact Lisa couldn’t hold as much coke as she seemed to think she could. He was drunk and half stoned and far below her intelligence so he just nodded and pretended to understand existentialism and stoicism and all these other theories she was spouting off. And when she asked him if he thought she was crazy and if he still wanted to follow her around, in misguided drunken romantics he murmured “I’d follow you anywhere.” She laughed and allowed him to kiss her, and later take her into the spare room he was staying in.

He liked her hair and her eyes and the freckles on her shoulders; he liked the way she rambled on about things he didn’t understand. He liked the irony of the fact he was a high school drop out living in a spare room of a run down little house who worked as a handyman at her snobby school where she dressed in a posh uniform and went home to fancy house and had a daddy that paid for everything. She liked his height and his quietness and his street smarts. She liked his tan and his smile and the way he wouldn’t try to make out with her in public. They saw each other for the rest of the holidays until he was no longer needed at his place of employment and his mate’s father had found them a new job back near home. She had kissed him goodbye and really hadn’t expected to see him again.

So it really hadn’t been that long since she’d seen him, but when Lisa pulled The Heap into Mattie C’s drive way and saw Dale leaning against his own car with his friend Maria, she knew something was different.

Maria, surprisingly was not an Italian female for any other kind of image the name ‘Maria’ would conjure up, but a skinny twenty year old boy with a mullet and an eyebrow ring. Jamie had never asked why he was called Maria. Jamie had friends with weirder names, such as Bug, Goobs, Shit Lips and Donkey. Jamie had learnt that is was better just not to ask. Maria was wearing a dirty singlet and talking to her a girl with really yellow hair and it didn’t take Jamie long to realize that she was looking anywhere but at Dale.

“Hey baby,” he smiled, kissing her on the cheek.

“Hey.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“Uh, I’ve missed you, too.” Lisa saw Jamie’s fingers crossed her back and rolled her eyes.

Jamie sat on Dale’s knee and got drunker and drunker, talking to anyone but him. Eventually she let herself be lead away, as he talked. Talked about how his new job was shit, his boss was a fuck, his step mum was a slut. About Maria’s dirty rat of a girlfriend, about how much he’d missed her and thought of her all the time. She said nothing. She was too drunk to deal with him, she didn’t want to be the vessel for all his emotions, she didn’t want to be responsible for him. She kissed away his words, thinking, hoping, maybe she would feel the way he wanted her to. He pushed her against the side of Mattie C’s house, kissing her and touching her and murmuring under his breath against her neck. She stared at the stars and they way they spun in her drunken mind, the back of his neck damp with sweat, his hair sticky with wax, the bristle of his leg hair against her bare skin, his rough fingers underneath her clothes felt foreign even though she’d felt it all before. She felt removed from the situation, like it was a flashback or she was watching herself, he was grunting and still talking as he slid her underwear down to her knees and she just wanted to stop his words, stop his stupidity, stop stop stop… eventually it was over, and he looked at her bewildered. He hadn’t realized how drunk she was, how completely out of it, he stroked her hair and told her sorry, sorry baby, Jamie, sorry. He told her how much he’d missed her, again, and his new plan. He was going to quit his job, he was going to move to Carrington. He had friends here, and he had her, surely there had to be some job? Surely there had to be somewhere he could rent? Surely surely surely…

“Dale,” she managed to get out. “We’re not together.”

“Yeah I know babe, but now we can be.”

Jamie managed to haul herself away from Dale’s grasp and lean against the fence. She felt like she was about to be sick, and realized she’d drank a lot more than she should of. “You shouldn’t have come back.”

“But Lisa said-”

“Lisa knows jack, Dale, just go home, why couldn’t you just have left it where it was?”

“But Jamie –”

“But Jamie nothing,” she bent over, feeling like she was about to chuck but didn’t. “Dale, I’m sixteen years old. I want to get drunk with my friends and hang out at the mall, I don’t want to be in a serious relationship. You knew that, I was sure you did.”

“But I love you.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I know you enough to know I want to be with you.”

“I’m going to sleep with the new boy. He has an accent and he smells nice, and that’s all I really need.” She didn’t know why she thought of Zac, but she didn’t see the harm in exaggerating her story and didn’t get a reply. Instead her lunch made a bid for freedom, along with the wine that didn’t taste any better the second time around and a few Doritos. When she finished, she looked up and he was gone.

Lisa came looking for her about ten minutes later, remarkably sobered up. In completely un-Lisa fashion, she didn’t speak all the way to taxi rank at the strip mall. Jamie sat on the curb, nursing her spinning head and foul tasting mouth as Lisa slotted coins into the payphone and called a taxi. ‘Say something,’ Jamie begged Lisa mentally. Anything. But no. Lisa kept her mouth shut.

“Do they all hate me?”

“No. They just feel a bit sorry for Dale. I think they’re angry at me for inviting him down when I knew you didn’t seriously want him.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know its not. I didn’t know he was gunna go all psychotic ‘lets move in together’ on you. Boys are fucked, even if they are older than us.”

“Tell me about it. What did he expect Lisa?”

“I dunno love. Maybe he’s lonely. Maybe he’s just a dickhead. He’s definitely gone from a type A boy, to a type B.”

Jamie snorted. “Definitely.”

The ‘Boy Type’ system was something Lisa and Jamie had invented with a couple of girls they’d long forgotten. They’d been sharing a drunken conversation about boys and how there was only two types of boys in their lives, the ones that loved you and left you, or the ones that loved you and expected you to love you back. Most of the boys they encountered where type A’s, which suited them fine and Jamie had never really had a bad experience with a type B before that night.

“Girl, you think you’ve got problems, you should have seen me and my type C.” Lisa yawned, hailing down the taxi that came swinging into the parking lot. She climbed into the front seat and left Jamie to flake out in the back, thinking about her own type C.

A type C was a boy that you got with who wasn’t like your normal boys and he wasn’t friends with any of your friends. He was a nice boy, asked you out before he tried anything, took you out to dinner, held your hand in front of his friends, ex cetra. So when he took your virginity, you waited a respectable amount of time before breaking up with him amongst a sea of tears (his) and you didn’t feel bad about loosing your virginity at all. A lot of type C’s got over it pretty quickly, and took the opportunity to call you a whore every time they saw you for a couple of months (Like Jamie’s did) or some of them turned into even physco-er versions of type B’s. (Like Lisa’s did)

“Boys suck,” she mumbled, turning over to be sick again in the plastic bag, Rod, the taxi driver had supplied her with.

“Rough night Jamie?” Rod asked her, who had transported Lisa and Jamie many times in this condition, being that there weren’t that many taxi drivers in Carrington and Leeole Park.

“You could say that.”

“There’s a guy in love with her who came all the way from the city to basically propose marriage,” Lisa filled him in. “So she decided getting really blotto and rejecting him was the best way to go about it.”

“Ah you girls, always breaking boys hearts,” Rod shook his head in mock sadness.

“We’ll never break your heart, Roddie, will we Jaims?”

Jamie responded by splattering more of the contents of her stomach on the floor of Rod’s cab.