Love-shy

ALSO BY LILI WILKINSON:

A Pocketful of Eyes

Pink

Angel Fish

The (Not Quite) Perfect Boyfriend

Scatterheart

Joan of Arc

First published in 2012

Copyright © Lili Wilkinson 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The
Australian Copyright Act
1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone:    (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax:        (61 2) 9906 2218
Email:     [email protected]
Web:      
www.allenandunwin.com

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from
the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74237 623 3

Cover photos © iStockphoto; Ada Summer / Corbis;
Patrick Moynihan / Getty Images
Cover and text design by Lisa White and Jade Raykovski
Set in 12/18 Adobe Garamond
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The idea for this book was born over breakfast in
Tenby, Wales, sitting opposite one of my dearest
friends, Sarah Dollard. Without her storytelling
madskills, all my books would have ambivalent
characters and unpunchy climaxes, and without
her friendship, life would be significantly less
awesome. This one's for you, Snazzy.

PRINCIPLES OF JOURNALISM

1. Journalism's first obligation
is to the truth.

2. Its essence is discipline of
verification.

3. It must strive to make the
significant interesting and relevant.

4. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.

5. Its first loyalty is to the citizens.

6. It must keep the news
comprehensive and proportional.

7. Its practitioners must maintain an
independence from those
they cover.

8. It must provide a forum for public
criticism and compromise.

9. Its practitioners must be allowed to
exercise their personal conscience.

Energy rightly applied
and directed will
accomplish anything.

NELLIE BLY
pioneer female journalist

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

Acknowledgements

About the author

1

I
FOUND A STORY
.

Before I joined the team, our school newspaper couldn't really be called a newspaper. It wasn't fit for wrapping fish, and not just because it wasn't printed with organic inks on unbleached paper. The typical headline was generally something like
SOCCER TEAM TRIUMPHS AT REGIONALS or YEAR ELEVEN ADVENTURES AT ULURU
. Nobody was interested in serious journalism. Except for me.

Since I came along, I'd written an analysis of the contents of the chicken-and-corn-in-a-roll sold at the school canteen (trust me, you don't want to know – suffice to say it didn't come from a chicken), an investigation into literacy levels in Year Seven, an exposé on the teachers who smoked outside the back door of the staff room, and a variety of penetrating interviews, unflinching reviews and frank profiles.

Nobody cared, of course. I was pretty sure nobody even
read
the
East Glendale Secondary College Gazette
. But it was all I had, until I could get out of this dump and go to university and then become a
real
journalist. I was going to be one of those freelance journalists who wasn't tied to a paper. I mean, sure, the hustle and bustle of deadlines and copyedits and that whole sense of camaraderie was alluring – drinking hard liquor at one's desk late at night and exchanging stories of adventure and intrigue while clustered around a single television watching some massively significant piece of breaking news. But I wanted the freedom to travel the world and write about whatever I felt like and then sell it to the
New York Times
, the
Guardian
,
Vanity
Fair
,
TIME
Magazine. Penny Drummond was going to be the next Nellie Bly or Christiane Amanpour.

It was hard, developing one's writing skills on a school paper. I had to go deeper than the Drama Club's premiere of
Equus
, or the fact that our hockey team had once again failed to win a game this year. I needed something grittier, more compelling, more personal. I needed to climb inside somebody's life and report back from within their soul. I needed to get my teeth into some real long-form investigative journalism. I needed a story.

And then I found it.

It was a Tuesday, so I'd had Debating at lunch. We were practising for our next round of regional finals. We'd win, of course, because I was third speaker on our team and I always win. Last month the third speaker from the other team didn't even present his case. He just stood up after me, looked down at his shoes and burst into tears.

Anyway, I stupidly left my diary in the library after Debating and didn't realise until I was on my way to English for fifth period. I turned and headed back to the other side of the building, cutting through the Year Twelve lockers and up the stairs to the library. Mr Gerakis wouldn't mind if I was a few minutes late for class. I was his best student, after all. So I slipped into the library and through to the little room where we had our Debating meetings. My diary was there, right where I'd left it. And then it happened.

The security gate by the library exit door whooped. I turned around to see who had set it off, but all I saw was the big wooden door closing.

‘Hey!' I shouted. ‘Wait!'

Was someone stealing library books? Mrs Green, the librarian and one of the teachers outed in my piece on staff smoking, was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the library was completely empty.

One of the nearby computers chimed a shutdown tone. Was it the library book thief? What had they been doing on the computer? And why had they shut it down instead of just logging out? Maybe they were running a stolen-library-book cartel.

Every journalistic bone in my body started to hum. Maybe this was it. Maybe
this
would be the key to my next big story. I booted up the computer, all ready to undertake a browser-history search, or, if the cache had been emptied, do something tricky and clever involving the ISP. But as I double-clicked on the browser icon, a window popped up. ‘Firefox closed unexpectedly. Would you like to open the most recently viewed tabs?' Too easy.

There was only one tab. And it wasn't at all what I was expecting.

‘
Loveshyforum.com
?' I said out loud. ‘What on earth . . . ?'

It was a very simple website containing a home page, an FAQ and a forum. The homepage had a short paragraph and list in what I felt was an ill-chosen font.

This website is a resource for men suffering from love-shyness. Love-shyness is a debilitating psychological condition aff licting men all over the world. Do any of the following describe you?

1. You are a virgin.

2. You have never dated, or rarely date.

3. You have never had a romantic or sexual relationship with a member of the opposite sex.