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shirt.
    â€˜I’ll give you two bucks if you point her out to me.’
    â€˜All right. Just let me go,’ he said, and pulled against my grip so his shirt ripped. I let go and he dusted himself down. We walked around with him for the whole of recess. He couldn’t find her.
    â€˜What’s your name?’
    â€˜Fitsy.’
    â€˜You’d better not be bullshitting me, Fitsy, or you’re history.’
    â€˜I’m not,’ he pleaded, and the bell rang. ‘She might not even be here today.’
    â€˜Meet us here at the start of lunch. If we have to come and find you mate, you’re rooted.’
    Took him two minutes to find her at lunch.
    â€˜There. The sheila with the white hair.’
    â€˜Sitting down or standing up?’
    â€˜Standing up. Where’s my money?’
    I fished in my pocket and found a dollar.
    â€˜You said two bucks,’ he protested.
    â€˜Yeah. That’s all I’ve got. Piss off.’
    He grumbled and walked away. He could have knocked me down with a drinking straw. It was Carolyn, my Auntie Pat’s daughter. I like her and that but I would never have guessed she was hot for me. I should have left it alone. Itwas better when I didn’t know. She’s just not like that and the thought of kissing her didn’t fill me with blood, if you know what I mean. It made me feel a bit sad. Bit sorry for her. Some of the stuff she wrote was desperate.
    Den said they had found a house to rent in Fishwood. Big mud-brick place in the bush. Den had picked out his bedroom. He reckoned he had seven rooms to choose from. Who would build a house with seven bedrooms? Not just a little bit of bush but hundreds of acres of state forest around them. One neighbour—he lives nearly a kilometre away. An old bloke with heaps of sheep. They gave the agent some money already. They shift on the eleventh of April. Four weeks. Right at the start of the school holidays. You go, girls.
    Until Den told me that stuff it didn’t seem real. It was always softened by a ‘maybe’ filter. Maybe they couldn’t get a house. Maybe the job would fall through. Maybe Kerry would get a grip on reality. Maybe not. I saw her one lunchtime and my guts ached. She tried to turn away without being obvious. I realised she’d made a hole in me. If the wind blew from the right direction, I reckon I’d whistle like a beer bottle. Not just a little hole, something big and nasty. Too big for Bandaids.
    Hendo lost it in English. Mrs Heath asked him to sit on his chair about fifty times.
    â€˜What difference does it make?’ he complained.
    â€˜It makes the world of difference to me, David. Put your chair down.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Because it’s dangerous and you could break the chair,’ she said, her voice getting louder.
    â€˜That sucks,’ Hendo said, and flopped flat on his chair. Propped his feet up on the table.
    â€˜Put your feet down.’
    â€˜Ahhhh. Come on.’
    â€˜Get out!’ she barked with so much anger that Hendo shat himself. Picked up his bag and stomped out the door. Hendo always pushes it to the limit, like it doesn’t feel right unless someone is cracking the shits at him. Mrs Heath stands her ground. I like that in her.
    It was cold that night. Clear and shivery like autumn was finally breathing down summer’s neck. It’s crazy how I do that. Every time I’m really aching I talk about the weather. It was the ‘whether’ that was really giving me the shits. Whether I could be fucked going on with this stupid dance. This stupid puppet-show dance. I don’t look backwards much, it’s not the way I face most of the time, but that night, cramped up in my bed, I could see in a straight line to the time before my accident. Everything had been so breezy. It was like the perfect bourbon and Coke; has a jig in your mouth then slides all the way down leaving a nifty little glow in its