Read The Anti-Cool Girl for Free Online

operation I think he thought it was.
    Feeling the toxic butterflies about to explode out of my mouth in the form of breakfast, I tried my best to give my dad an alibi, or at least some kind of reasonable motive. I looked around the store and said, as loud as I could, ‘So, you’re just holding on to that shirt so when we come back later to buy it, nobody will have taken it, right?’
    He looked at me, a little stunned, like his skills were so incredible he couldn’t believe that I had just seen him stuff a shirt down his pants.
    â€˜Um . . . yeah, Sannie. That’s it. I don’t want anyone to take it,’ he said. Then we quickly left the store, Rhiannon being careful not to walk alongside us until she could be sure she was no longer near the crime scene.
    Next stop was the pub, where Dad bought a much needed beer and Rhiannon and I shared a pink lemonade. We needed to wait for Grandpa to finish his important Wagga business (again, I don’t know . . . shopping for World War II books?), and it was justas we were sitting patiently in the beer garden that a man came over to our table and started aggressively taking our picture.
    â€˜Thief! Thief!’ he screamed, aiming the camera in our faces. Dad was too dazed to comprehend what the hell was going on, but I knew: his Wagga crime spree had not gone to plan.
    Everyone in the pub was looking at us, and this guy just wouldn’t stop. He was the owner of the store Dad had taken the shirt from, and he was furious. He kept yelling at us and taking our picture until the police arrived. I’ve always wondered what happened to that roll of film. What do you do with twenty-six photos of a confused-looking man and two little girls crying? I threw up, and Dad was put in the back of a paddy wagon. This was well before mobile phones existed outside of movies, so I have no idea how they found Grandpa, but they did. The last thing I remember is sitting in the front of the wagon, looking back through the peephole at Dad, nothing but a sad, black outline in the back of a police van.
    Mum did what she could for Dad when he randomly turned up at Smurf Village, drunk and with nowhere to go. One morning I woke to find him sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my room, with Mum sitting next to him, stroking his face and crying, begging him not to die. I threw up in my bed. After that, she would usually leave blankets out for him and let him stay in the garage, as long as he promised to be gone before we woke up, because, ‘Rosanna gets so stressed.’
    But I always knew when he was around. It was my sixth sense. Barely out of kindergarten, my Dad-radar was a finely tuned machine. I could determine how close he was by a mere rumble in my belly. The fluttering of a thousand poisonous wings would always tell me, and at that moment, they were telling me that he was dead. Which is why I was surprised when he moaned. As Rhiannon and I were standing there, frozen, looking down at our dead dad in the dirt, he moaned.
    Let me tell you something: nothing will ever terrify a bunch of kids more than telling them they’re standing in front of a dead body, only to have that dead body make a sound. For all their tough talk and gangster bravado, I’ve never seen twenty-five kids run away faster than they did when my dead dad started moaning in the dirt.
    He was alive, obviously. Very, very drunk, but alive.
    Rhiannon and I turned around and ran back up to the house. I was silent, she was hysterical. She told Mum, who called an ambulance. When it arrived, it felt like every human being in north-west Sydney came to watch the spectacle. As two paramedics walked him to the gurney, a kid came running out of the bush with a plastic bag. It was Dad’s stuff.
    The kids, a lot less terrified now that it was just some drunk guy and not a zombie, chased the ambulance as it drove up the hill and out of our compound, and once it had disappeared into the distance, everyone