Read Surface Tension for Free Online Page B

was true about Liam too.
    It wasn’t that we were friends or anything – at least not particularly. It was just that he had always been around. We used to run into him at the hospital when I was little and still going in for my check-ups. I remember sitting with him in the corner of the waiting room, building unsteady worlds out of blocks while our mothers sat straight-backed along the wall, leafing through old magazines to pass the time. Later, at school, we sat out of sport together, shredding leaf after leaf in the shade of the spreading eucalypt while other kids ran and jumped and hurled themselves at things.
    Every now and then a ball would come our way, or a bored boundary fielder would take a few extra steps backwards to strike up a conversation.
    Liam would always look up. He’d grab the ball, throw it back in a long, swooping arc. He’d say, “How’s it going?” and “What’s the score?” and “Heads up! Here comes a long one.”
    But I would keep my head down, the way I always did, keep my eyes on my leaf, concentrating on shearing a clean, smooth line right down the centre of the spine.
    Now, though, I looked up. I stopped my pliers mid-snip and stared over at the door to the classroom. Because someone was coming in. Someone familiar. Someone with an oddly crooked nose.
    “Good morning, children!” Finkle was holding a wooden box. A display case, with something inside it, nestled snugly between velvet pillows.
    He smiled, a broad, Cheshire cat grin as if all our wildest dreams had suddenly come true and he was the dazzling messenger of them. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “It is what you think it is. Can you believe it?”
    I couldn’t.
    It was the lever. The actual lever.
    From her desk, Mrs Barber nodded. “From the
archives.
” She said the last word in a whisper, as if it was a secret.
    Finkle nodded solemnly. Then he passed the lever around the room so we could all take turns holding it, so we could all
feel the solid weight of history in the very palm of our hand.
    As we did, he told us all about his artistic vision, which involved our mosaic, his lever, and a whole lot of weirdness.
    The lever wasn’t only here for inspiration. It was also so we could make sure it fit. So we could mould our hundreds of tiles around it.
    It was coming out of the archives and going into our mosaic. Mosaics plural, in fact. There were two of them.
    One for Old Lower Grange. One for New.
    They were going to lie side by side in the city square, with the lever in between, surrounded by a decorative border.
    “A sundial!” Finkle boomed, as if he was announcing the most important announcement in the entire history of announcements. Then he picked up a marker and drew a sketch on the board.
    New Lower Grange was going to be a sundial, with compass points directing tourists to places of vibrant and/or laid-back interest.
    Old Lower Grange was going to be a water feature, with a drinking tap on one end.
    The town would sit underwater and when the level dropped too low, you could flip the lever, releasing more into the well, drowning the old town over and over again.
    I told myself not to think about whether it was morbid or festive.
    After Finkle left, I studied my growing pile of blue. That should be enough for now. It was only the new Tuckers that was blue. For the old one, I needed some orange and yellow from the pile up the front.
    I pushed my chair back and stood up.
    “Ow!”
    Behind me, Liam had one foot tangled in my chair leg.
    “Sorry.” I looked down at his desk. He was snipping tiles for the fire tree – green and brown, green and brown. It was one of the easiest sections of the mosaic – firstly because it was pretty much just a tall, straight stick, and secondly because there was no “after”. They couldn’t exactly rebuild a tree and it would take hundreds of years to grow one even close to tall enough.
    Liam hardly had anything to do, really, but Mrs Barber said it didn’t matter. She