Bugs Read online

  ‘If you think about a word enough it sounds weird.’

  Stone Cold looks straight at me. ‘You think about being together with Jez. A lot?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’ I flick through my chem notes so I don’t have to look at her. ‘It really shouldn’t take too long for you to catch up in chem …’

  Stone Cold groans and flops down on the bed beside me. ‘Chem, chem, chem. Seriously? That’s all you want to talk about?’ She pulls a ‘bored-as-fuck’ face at me, and for a second I know what it’s like to be a teacher. Then Stone Cold smiles; it’s weird how quickly her face can change. ‘Speaking of chem, give me those test tubes.’ I was hoping she’d forgotten them so I could sneak at least my two back tomorrow. Stone Cold pushes herself off the bed and goes to her bookcase. She pulls out a little bottle of vodka, hidden behind her books.

  ‘I thought we should christen them.’

  ‘I’d clean them out first. Who knows what’s stuck in them?’

  She fills them up anyway. ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and get some P or something. C’mon.’

  She stares down at me. Everything with this bitch is a challenge. So I nod, forget that I might die or might go blind, forget that I have no idea what she’s actually given me, forget that I actually have nothing to prove to her, and I take a test tube and we clink them together before skulling them.

  God it’s harsh. It’s weird how it feels like ice carving through you but then it suddenly flips and the chill turns to heat. I manage to not cough even though it burns my throat. I can feel it pool in my stomach, setting the acid on fire. I should eat something – I haven’t eaten anything since lunch but all we have in here is carrots. I frickin’ hate carrots.

  Stone Cold looks kind of queasy; it looks like something is working its way up from her stomach. Maybe this time she’ll be the one outside retching. Her cheeks puff out like she’s a cartoon, but she doesn’t go green and projectile vomit. Instead she just burps. And when I say ‘just’ I mean she lets it rip – it’s louder than anything I’ve ever heard Jez or even Uncle do.

  ‘Carrots and vodka don’t mix.’ Stone Cold stashes the bottle again. ‘Please don’t tell my mum.’

  Like I’m the kind of person that would narc. ‘Nah, it’s sweet.’

  She smiles at me. No wonder she has a big-arse mouth: it’s to house all those big-arse teeth.

  ‘I think we could be good friends, Bugs. Don’t you?’

  Friends? More like an accessory or an accomplice. That’s what some friendships are: an understanding that you could totally fuck each other’s shit up if the world knew what you have on each other. A kind of stalemate, me and Stone Cold, politicians in expensive suits making nicety-nice for the media, gripping each other’s hands a little too tightly and a little too long.

  A cold war.

  There’s a knock at the door. ‘Girls? I made you some sandwiches.’

  ‘Shit, hide the test tubes.’

  It’s a good thing we stole test tubes, not boiling tubes, because they’re so slim they slip easily down the spines of Stone Cold’s hard-cover reference books. She’s got one of those huge New Zealand Oxford dictionaries and a Roget. Man, if they weren’t at her house maybe I’d just spend some time with them, getting my geek on.

  Stone Cold opens the door and kinda slouches across the door frame so she takes up the whole width. She’s like that tape that they put up in cop shows – a diagonal slash of ‘Do not pass’.

  ‘I thought you two would be hungry with all your …’

  ‘Studying, Mother. We’re studying.’

  ‘Well, of course you are.’

  ‘You don’t have to check up on us.’

  ‘I’m not …’ Mrs Fox sounds like she’s counting to ten in her head – deep breath, Shelley. ‘They’re just sandwiches …’

  ‘Thank you Mrs …’ They both look at me. Stone Cold because I dared to speak, Mrs Fox because I’ve forgotten that she’s just one of the girls. ‘Thank you, Shelley.’

  Stone Cold takes the plate from her mother and closes the door. She looks at me as if I have just pushed the button and nuked Siberia.

  ‘What was that about?’

  ‘I don’t know, I thought it was nice.’

  ‘Nice? She calls me a pig and then she feeds me these?’ Stone Cold waves a sandwich in my face – it’s cream cheese and cucumber on brown bread. It looks nice. They all do – little sandwich triangles standing in rows on a white china plate. These aren’t half a bag of chips chucked in a plastic bowl – she’s taken care. She wanted it to be nice. I grab a sandwich and bite and it is nice – it is creamy and crunchy and just a little bit salty. But Stone Cold is immune to nice; she can’t see it for what it is.

  ‘She just wants me to get fat so she can have yet another thing to nag me about, y’know?’ She opens up the window and tips out the sandwiches before I have a chance to grab another. I hope Duke eats them all before Shelley sees what Stone Cold has done. I think of how sad she’d be if she saw her carefully cut triangles scattered across her neat garden.

  ‘She’s such a bitch,’ Stone Cold says as she snaps the window shut.

  ‘Say “cream cheese”, Bugs.’ Stone Cold takes a photo of me with her phone. She doesn’t show me, even though I might have my eyes half closed or some shit on my face. She just looks at it and smiles. ‘Douche, what’s your number?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can text you later. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t have a phone.’

  ‘Everyone has a phone.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  ‘That’s so weird. Why?’ She’s like Duke with a ball, she won’t let it go.

  ‘I can’t …’ God I hate her for making me say this. ‘I can’t afford it.’

  ‘Afford?’ She rolls the word around in her mouth as if it is the first time she’s ever tasted it. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My mum says if I want a phone I have to pay for it, and since I don’t have a job … no phone.’ I may as well be speaking, I don’t know, German or something – she has no way of understanding. Not the girl sitting in front of a couple of grand worth of stuff.

  ‘She wants you to pay for it yourself? Seriously? That’s child abuse.’

  I shrug. It’s easy to make fun of abuse when you haven’t seen it. I want to defend Mum because I kind of get what she’s trying to do – if I had to work for it I would appreciate it more. Just look at this silly bitch sitting pretty, and she doesn’t even see it. On the other hand, I just want a phone.

  ‘Please tell me you at least have internet?’

  ‘There’s a laptop I can use. But that’s different, that’s for school. A phone isn’t necessary.’

  ‘But your mum has one, right?’

  ‘Yeah she has one.’ But I think she wishes she didn’t. She says that work can follow her around all the time, after her shift and on her days off. I thought being indispensable would mean they’d never get rid of me, Bugs, but it turns out it means I can never be rid of them.

  Stone Cold opens her desk drawer and starts digging through her things – nail polish and notebooks and pens. ‘Here …’ She throws me a phone. ‘I knew I still had my old one.’ She opens another drawer. ‘The charger has got to be in here somewhere …’

  So this is life as lived by Stone Cold. What you wish for just lands in your lap. I hold the phone in my hand. It is cool, as in temperature, and smooth. It looks like obsidian – deep black and glassy. Me and Jez stole an obsidian boulder once – some fulla had a whole bunch standing sentry around his freshly sown front lawn. We skated past once, twice, again. The plan was that Jez was going to put it under his top and we’d skate away, but it was heavier than we thought. So we put it on his skateboard and he had to push it along with his foot like a soccer ball. Man, I wish I had a scooter. And then we both laughed because kids on scooters are dumb grommets.

  ‘Does it still have some juice?’ I just look at Stone Cold. She takes the phone from my hand. ‘You h
aven’t even turned it on, you noob.’

  Stone Cold plays with my phone. My phone. I’ve had it in my hands for like a minute and already I’m territorial.

  ‘I got this last year and it’s still cool and everything but a new one came out around my birthday.’ She holds her phone against mine. ‘See? Once this one came out I couldn’t have this old one any more. So it was around my birthday and my mum said it could be one of my presents …’

  One. One. Of. Her. Presents.

  ‘So you can have it, I guess.’ Stone Cold flicks through deleting all her old contacts. I wonder if one of them has her last hand-me-down phone? Click, they’re gone – she’s found herself a new model.

  It’s weird that she doesn’t even talk about her old friends. You know I’d be talking about Jez. Rabbiting on, as Nan would say. But Stone Cold hasn’t said anything. It’s like she’s shut them up in a drawer and forgotten about them. Maybe one day she’ll look for them, saying I thought I left them here somewhere. How long before that’s me? And Jez?

  Stone Cold takes some photos of herself with the phone. She holds the phone slightly up and tilts her chin slightly down, working her angles like a webcam pro. Maybe her mum chose the right name after all – it wouldn’t surprise me if some dude in Ohio has forked over his credit card number for some choice shots of little Miss Charmaine. She picks the photo she likes best and saves it with her number.

  ‘First contact.’

  I want to say Take me to your leader, but I don’t think she’ll get it. Yeah, she has all this stuff; but a sense of humour? Debatable.

  ‘So all you need now is a SIM and some credit. Please tell me you at least have enough money for that.’

  ‘I’ve got about 20 bucks at home …’

  ‘God, you’re useless. C’mon.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To your place,’ she says really slow, because she thinks I am, ‘and then into town.’

  I chuck my notes back into my bag and follow her. She’s left on her computer, the lights and the heater but she doesn’t even notice, just walks out like she’s never been told off about wasting power and how much the bill is this month.

  Duke is still eating the sandwiches on the lawn. I think the sticky cream cheese has slowed him down a little. Stone Cold steps towards him, pretending that she’ll take the sandwiches, and he growls at her.

  ‘You’re so frickin’ dumb, dog.’

  Inside, Stone Cold takes a twenty from Shelley’s purse – she doesn’t sneak it or anything, she just takes it like it’s hers.

  ‘Mum. We’re going into town.’

  ‘I thought you were studying.’

  ‘We are. Bugs needs something from her place, OK?’

  ‘Will you be back in time for dinner?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll grab Maccas or something in town.’

  ‘Char. You know we like to eat together.’ There’s something in Shelley’s tone. Is it a warning, a plea or a negotiation?

  ‘Fine. I’ll be back for dinner then.’

  ‘Do you need a lift into …’

  ‘BYE.’ Stone Cold shuts the door on her mother’s voice. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  It’s cold outside. The air has that icy feel, chilled by the mountains and the lake. Stone Cold wraps her hoodie thing around her tightly. It is lightweight, like merino or something, not enough to keep winter out.

  ‘You should grab a jacket or something.’

  ‘God, Bugs.’ Stone Cold pulls the hood up. ‘I thought I left my mum inside. Let’s just walk fast.’

  So we do, which is good because at this pace it’s not easy to talk so I don’t have to listen to her blah, blah, blah about how hard she has it. We walk down the walkway past the park and head to Ngamotu Road.

  ‘We should have taken the lift from your mum. You live ages from town.’

  ‘Where’s your place?’

  ‘Right next to school.’

  ‘God, Bugs. Why didn’t we just go there after school instead of walking all the way to my place and all the way back again?’

  I pick up my pace, striding ahead of her. Whose idea was this in the first place? Who had a stupid little fight with their mum that meant we had to walk instead of getting a lift into town?

  Stone Cold has stopped. She’s looking at the street sign across the road.

  ‘When I was little I thought that if I walked all the way down Gillies Ave I’d end up in Auckland. I thought that because there was a Gillies Ave there too, they were the same road.’

  ‘Did you live in Auckland?’

  ‘For a while. We’re never in one place very long.’ Maybe that’s why she doesn’t talk about her old friends; there are too many that have been lost in her moves. ‘But Dad reckons we’re here to stay now.’

  She’s sort of quiet, not just because we’re out of breath but sort of quiet in herself.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  Stone Cold steels herself as if I’m going to ask her something super personal here on Gillies Ave. ‘OK.’

  ‘You guys know that you live close to Tauhara, right? Why did you enrol in town?’

  ‘Dad wanted me to, he went there too.’

  I guess that’s as good a reason to pick a school as any.

  ‘Besides, I totally rock that kilt.’

  I laugh, just a little, because that was sort of funny.

  We keep walking, walking fast to keep the cold away. We cruise up Rifle Range – past the roundabout, left up Duncan, then Tonga and home to Rāwhiti.

  ‘This is your place?’

  I hate it when she says shit like that – it makes me, I don’t know, defensive. And that pisses me off because I shouldn’t have to defend my place, not to her, not to anyone, because there isn’t anything wrong with it. It is just a house. So our weatherboards are made to look like wood – not made with proper timber – and under our carpets there’s probably chipboard instead of floorboards. It’s a cottage, not much bigger than her sleep-out – two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom and lounge squeezed in, but I have my own bedroom. Our house is at the front – another house is built behind, like they are houses on a Monopoly board squished together to make as much rent as possible from those who land here. Mum reckons when she was my age there was this really cool old house here, like a villa or something – We used to call it the murder house – but that place is long gone. Why have one house when you can have two? We have a little patch of garden out the front, a few flowers, a bit of lawn. If Mum had the time Shelley has it would be primo, but in the middle of winter it just looks sad and uncared for.

  ‘Yeah, this is it.’ I lead her around to the back gate. It’s a big wooden gate, taller than me. I stick my hands through the hole and unlock the padlock on the other side. I let Stone Cold through and the rottie next door starts up.

  ‘Hey Sarge, it’s just me.’ Sarge looks pretty scary – he has a scar running down his face and one eye is missing – but he’s a big softy really. When Kēhua was a kitten she got herself stuck between the railings in the fence. All we heard inside was barking, so I ran outside and I could only see the cat’s fluffy little bum and Sarge’s head down. He was shaking his head side to side – Shit, he’s taken her head off, he’s eaten my kitten – and I got there and there’s Kēhua: claws out on one of her tiny front paws, swiping at poor Sarge’s nose. I twisted her out of the fence, – all the time she’s still spitting and swiping – and I pulled her out and she legged it and there’s Sarge and me covered in tiny little scratches. So he’s cool, Sarge.

  But he’s not cool with Stone Cold. It’s like he’s trying to warn me with his grumbling little barks. I want to say She’s cool, she’s with me – but dogs, they see through all that bullshit.

  I let Stone Cold go in first when I open the back door. She walks through the ‘laundry’, which is just really a tub and a washer-dryer tucked behind a door into the kitchen, and into the lounge in all of about five steps. She stands next to the table
in the lounge and moves her head slowly around, taking in the panorama like she’s walked into somewhere that can’t exist in the ‘real’ world.

  Yeah, this is it.

  ‘My bedroom’s through there.’ We skim past the couch, which looks too big all of a sudden, into the hall … can you call it a ‘way’ when it’s about a metre square? And suddenly I’m a tour guide: ‘Bathroom, Mum’s room, my room.’

  My room. I have a big window that looks out the back. Poor Sarge is still pacing up and down, still on active duty. I kneel on my bed and draw the curtains. I told Mum that I like sleeping with my head near the window because it keeps me cool, but that’s a whole lot of bullshit. A bed under the window is a soft landing, if you get what I mean.

  Stone Cold’s doing that annoying chin tilt thing. She looks like she should have those white gloves on that posh ladies probably wear when they’re checking if their servants have dusted sufficiently – Tut, tut. This really will not do, Jeeves. I feel kind of ashamed that I haven’t made my bed, so I try to pull up my duvet. Kēhua has made herself a nest in my bed, sleeping under the covers like she’s a person.

  ‘Out, cat.’

  ‘You have a cat? Cats love me.’

  Stone Cold is on the bed patting Kēhua so hard I think she might snap her spine. Kēhua meows in protest, which is strange; she never meows – that’s why we called her Kēhua, because she’s silent and it’s like she’s haunting our house. Stone Cold is talking to her like she’s a baby, and when she tries to hold Kēhua like one the cat twists out of her grip and is gone.

  Yeah. Cats love you about the same as dogs do.

  Stone Cold lies on my bed while I look for something to wear. I kind of hoped that she’d leave the room, but I guess I have to get changed in front of her. I pull some trackies up over my tights and under my skirt and then take off the skirt. I chuck a hoodie over my school shirt and some sneaks on my feet and I’m ready.

  ‘Is that a stereo?’

  I put together my stereo. It’s a couple of old speakers and an amp that I’ve plugged an old Discman into.

  ‘You can use that phone as an MP3 player,’ she says, like I’m some sort of refugee from the eighties who thinks that CDs are the shit. She picks up the Discman. ‘So you can give this back to your Grandma.’