Ed

‘She’s swinging her arse on purpose,’ Leo says, laughing. ‘I like her.’

I laugh with him till the toilet door shuts and then I stop. ‘I don’t like her. I’m going home.’

‘No way,’ Leo says. ‘I want to hang out with the Jazz Lady and she wants someone for Lucy.’

‘I’m not someone for Lucy.’

‘Jazz thinks you are.’

‘Jazz thinks she’s psychic. Jazz is delusional.’

‘Daisy won’t hang around without the other two,’ Dylan says. ‘She’s mad because I threw eggs at her head this afternoon.’

The three of us think about that for a second.

‘That was stupid to throw eggs at her head,’ Dylan says.

‘Flowers work better.’ Leo leans across to me. ‘Look. We’ve got six hours to kill before the job and three cool girls out for adventure. What’s the problem?’

‘The last adventure I had with her ended in hospital, that’s the problem.’

‘So don’t touch her arse this time.’

‘I’ll try to remember that.’

First piece I ever did was for her. A girl with roads and rivers and deserts running across her skin. Highways on her neck that went all the way cross-country. Off to the side of her was a guy with the hood of his car up and smoke pouring out of the engine.

I painted it in the middle of the night with a piece of white tape over my nose and two bruises over my eyes. I didn’t even check behind me for the cops. ‘Arrest me,’ I was planning to say if they turned up. ‘Come on, do it. Arrest me.’

No cops showed and I stayed there till the sun blurred the dark. It wasn’t even a good sunrise. Factory smoke swallowed the colour before it had a chance and the whole sky was cloudy white.

It took me weeks to ask her out. I’d been stalking her locker, stalking her before school and at lunch and after school. I even Googled her. Found a picture on the school website from this time we’d gone to the National Gallery in Year 9. She was staring at a Rothko painting and I was this sad little dot in the background, staring at her. I’d been checking out the Vermeers and I came round the corner and there she was. All pearls, all eyes, all skin, all mouth.

I watched her at school, too. While she was drawing these pictures of people tangled together. I kept dreaming me and her were tangled like that. Kept dreaming of this spot she had on her neck, this tiny country. I wanted to visit, to paint a picture of what I found there, a wall with a road map of her skin.

Mrs J paired us up for a research assignment on Jeffrey Smart and I was watching that spot and she looked up from her book and caught me making travel plans. ‘What?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Only. I was thinking. We should see a film.’

She sat there tapping on the table with her pen and my blood was tapping and I was all desperation and no cool, sitting there making plans to move to some country far off the map. But then she said yes and my chest got sucked somewhere and I walked around with this hole in me all week. I kept thinking I wouldn’t make it to Friday night. That something would happen before then to mess with my luck, something like a nuclear bomb going off so there was nowhere for us to meet.

‘Pretty harsh,’ Leo said when I called him to come get me because she’d left me in the gutter with a broken nose. She never even called to check she hadn’t killed me. A date like that makes a guy wish they would drop the bomb. Right over his house.

‘What do you think they’re talking about in there?’ Dylan asks, looking towards the toilet.

‘I’ll take a wild guess and say us.’ Leo leans back. ‘Girls and money. I’ve got a good feeling.’ He checks behind him for about the fiftieth time tonight.

Him and Dylan keep talking and laughing and acting like they don’t care that we might get caught later at the school. I look out the window and think about the sky in Bert’s book. About how the clouds look like they’re moving but they aren’t. It’s the same ones flicking over, again and again and again.