I tried the spineless music teacher, Mr. Dalgleish. But he wouldn’t commit to the exhibition theme.
“Nobody wanted it, Drew. You were there.”
“The fact that they didn’t want it made her point,” I argued, and he said I should run it past Dr. Walsh. The only person with any guts appears to be Evie Hudson, whom, inconveniently, I haven’t yet managed to evict from my head.
“Tell me, how is your mum?” Dr. Walsh asks. My heartbeat seems to lurch into my ears. It’s taken two years of practice to be able to hold myself together at school, and now is not the time to test that.
“This is about something else.”
It’s not just Evie’s frustration that motivated me. Doing something this worthwhile might pull me to the surface—even distract me for a minute from the quicksand at home.
“This isn’t my idea,” I make clear at the start. “There’s this girl …”
Dr. Walsh braces in his seat. An automatic response, probably, to the last few girl-related crises he’s had to defuse.
“The public photography exhibition you want us to do needs a theme. Evie suggested we all take pictures of girls.”
Frowning, Dr. Walsh sets his pen down on the desk. “No, Drew.”
I forge on. “Sisters, friends, mothers … lost in the moment, doing things they love.”
His focus fixes on some point on his leather-topped desk.
“Pictures of girls … as people.” My insides twist at the idea of having to drive home this obvious point. It’s what I loathe about the culture here.
“It’s a PR risk, Drew,” Dr. Walsh says, after a very long pause, during which I assume he undertakes an imaginary visit with the school’s legal team. “But this idea of yours may have merit.”
“It’sEvie’sidea,” I remind him.
“Who is this girl?”
I googled her last night. She only came up in videos of interschool debates and mock trials and for some historical society she’s in. She’s one of those “world at her feet” people. Clever and articulate. Driven in a way that I used to be once, and want to be again if I can ever get Mum through this crisis.
“I’ve never seen her at cocurricular stuff before,” I explain. But then I rarely go. And now half the school is asking who the girl is “who went off in photography.”
“She wants to change the world,” I tell him.You have no idea how much damage you do.“Starting with fifteen boys at a school that acutely needs an image overhaul.”
She’s basically your hero.
12
Evie
LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” blares and my fingers clutch Bree’s arm as she drags my introverted soul through the throbbing living room. Brilliant white strobe lights seem to pixilate the writhing bodies that lurch against me, beer splashing on bare skin as a glass bottle smashes on the timber floor, voices shrieking.
We burst onto the floodlit pool deck of the Pritchards’ mansion. It’s not an actual mansion, but it’s the biggest house I’ve ever been in and is currently hosting the wildest party I’ve ever been forced to attend.
“Relax!”Bree screams above the music. She knows this is not my natural habitat. Put me in front of the class for an English oral and I’ll smash it, but at a social event I suddenly can’t seem to choreograph my limbs and lose command of the English language.
“Come on, Evie! It’s fine! We can’t hide in the library forever.”
The library sounds good to me, but Tom Jenkins is at this party, and that’s why we’re here. Well, it’s whyshe’shere. My role is basically keeping her drinks safe and trying to find a normal way to stand while I count down the minutes until we can go.
“Back in a sec!” Bree buzzes off for drinks, leaving mestranded. I pull out my phone and attempt to look casual by texting someone (Mum) about something fascinating (this house).
Check out the fairy lights!I type, sending a photo of delicate lights threaded through the branches of a fruit tree in a giant planter. Mum and I once spent a whole weekend overhauling a corner of the backyard with lights and potted plants and old wooden furniture we found at the dump and brought back to life with vibrant paint.
When she doesn’t reply, I call her.
