Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
P eace and Sissy came to visit her most days, and Mother soon came to know them also. It was amazing the different voices they put on when they spoke to adults. You would have thought they were the most angelic teenagers around.
‘Let me carry that for you, Mrs Romano,’ Peace offered, when Mother was unloading the groceries from her car.
‘I can watch that stew cooking if you like, Mrs Romano. You do so much. You should try and rest.’
‘Your new friends are lovely girls,’ Mother told Evie. ‘Well brought up and full of good manners. Tim and Arlo are the same. Those parents do a good job of bringing their kids up in that commune. I thought they might be a bit wild, but I can see they are the opposite.’
Mother’s impression of the commune kids meant that Evie had even more freedom, and wherever they went, so did she. Peace took her into the clinic in Cairns, and she even snuck into one of the pubs on the northern beaches with them one day. They sat laughing and talking, and she sipped a Harvey Wall Banger cocktail as if she was every bit of eighteen.
She hadn’t gone with Sissy and another friend of hers when they went to watch Bob’s band play in Townsville. It was too far away, and she didn’t want to see him until she had been on the pill for the right amount of time before having sex. Her period had been a couple of weeks late and she, Peace and Sissy had lived in a constant state of fear, the girls checking in with her every day to see if she had got it or not.
Today, when she went to visit them, she skipped all the way up the track, racing in through the commune gates to find the girls. Tim had been digging the vegetable patch over and he called out to her as she went by. ‘Oye. Who’s chasing you?’
She laughed and backtracked to talk to him. ‘No one. I came to see Peace and Sissy. What are you doing?’
‘Turning the soil. I’m going to plant potatoes and some other vegetables. I’ll get some manure from the farm up the track and work the soil over until it’s healthy. I think I want to be a farmer when I leave school. Maybe I’ll buy a couple of acres and grow vegetables.’
‘That sounds good. Don’t you want to go to university?’
He chuckled and she thought how cute he was, his long hair, blond and tangled, his bright eyes always looking like they were smiling at her. If she hadn’t met Bob, maybe she could have been Tim’s girlfriend. Too late now though, she had told Bob she’d be his girl.
‘No one at our school goes to uni,’ Tim said. ‘Most leave before they finish year twelve. They get jobs and make money.’
‘I’m going to go to university. I want to be a doctor.’
School would start in a couple of weeks. She was looking forward to getting her books in order and seeing what the new school was like. If the kids were as cool as the commune crew, life would be pretty interesting.
‘You need to do a lot of study to go to uni.’
‘Do you think I’ll like the school here?’ she asked.
Tim had come closer to her and he gave her one of his beautiful smiles, his teeth white and straight. ‘No. No one likes school. There’re too many other good things to do, like surfing and fishing.’
‘And partying,’ she added.
His facial expression changed, and he stared at her with a serious look on his face. ‘Sissy used to do good at school. She was the smartest kid there. After she got with Stoner though, she didn’t do any schoolwork. She dropped out.’
‘But she has a job at the supermarket.’
‘Yeah, but she always wanted to be a teacher. Stoner said that was a shit job, so she changed her mind.’
She wasn’t sure how to answer. Sissy was her friend and she didn’t want to say anything bad about her.
Tim rested his foot on the top of the shovel. ‘You want to watch that doesn’t happen to you. You said you got good marks at your last school.’
‘I won’t drop out. Why would you think that?’
He didn’t say anything for a while, and she waited for what he was going to say. Tim was not like any of the boys she had known before. Maybe because he had two sisters, he knew how to talk about his feelings. Most boys didn’t talk about how they felt. They kept things like that to themselves. She wondered if Bob would talk about feelings.
Tim’s voice was deep and she looked at his full lips. He was cute and she wondered what it would be like to be kissed by him. He spoke softly. ‘You want to watch out for Bob. I know you think he’s cool, but he’s a lot older than you, and I know he isn’t a nice person.’
Unsure what to say, she shook her head, looking away from him and towards where the girls would be. ‘He seems okay.’
‘Don’t go with him, Evie.’
She turned to face him. ‘Why not?’
‘He’s just bad, that’s all.’
Tim’s eyes were sad, and she twisted her mouth as she looked away. She liked him so much and didn’t want to argue with him. But Bob was cool, and now she was his girl.
When she told the girls what Tim had said, Peace laughed. ‘He’s jealous. That’s all. He likes you too.’
She could feel her face redden. ‘Tim? Really?’
‘Yeah, Sissy said, ‘He told me the first day he met you, he thought you were really cute. He was going to try and tell you at the party, but he didn’t get a chance to talk to you because you disappeared with Bob.’
A hollow feeling formed in Evie’s stomach and she tried to ignore it. She liked Tim and didn’t want to hurt him but … Suddenly she remembered what she had come to tell the girls. ‘I got my period,’ she blurted out. Peace jumped up and down and Sissy hugged her, the three of th em stumbling around before falling together in a giggling bundle on the ground. When they calmed down and lay looking up at the sky, talking about what they were going to do for the rest of the day, she forgot about Tim and his sad eyes. Now she could relax and look forward to the next time she saw Bob.