Millie and the Night Heron (4 page)

‘I know that, Millie, but you can promise not to be determined to hate it.'

‘Okay,' I said, but I kept the fingers on my right hand crossed. I'd wait to see who I had to sit next to on the bus before I promised that.

The trip was the worst. I had to sit next to Mr Lawrence. It wasn't that Mr Lawrence was so bad, it was more that sitting next to any teacher was bad, unless it was Ms O'Grady. Everyone adored Ms O'Grady. She was cool. Kids queued up to sit next to her. She was pregnant and she let you feel the baby kick if she liked you. Or that's what Tayla claimed.

Tayla was the prettiest girl in our grade, if not the whole school. She had long dark hair that hung down almost to her bottom. She had perfect skin and almost-green eyes. She sat some of the way with Ms Grady and then she swapped with one of her best friends.

Nobody queued up to sit with Mr Lawrence. It was just him and me, all the way to camp. He tried to make conversation, but I didn't feel much like talking, so I did that grunting thing. It put him off after a while and we both pulled books out of our day-packs and read.

The only conversation we managed was just before we pulled in for morning tea, when he happened to catch me trying to glimpse the title of the book he was reading.

‘It's just something my wife wants me to read,' he said, a little apologetically, holding up the book.

'12 Steps to Raising Successful Teens,'
I read. ‘My mum's got that, too.'

‘Has she? Did she ... sorry, Millie. You are clearly a success story. That was rude of me.'

‘She hasn't even read it,' I said quickly. ‘She doesn't like the person who gave it to her.'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘Well, I don't think that excuse will work with my wife, unfortunately.'

‘You could always drop it in the bath. That worked for me. I always drop books I don't like in the bath. Or I did, when we had a bath. We don't have one in our new house. We've got a shower, of course.'

‘I hadn't thought of the bath trick. I have, on occasion, dropped a book in it. Not deliberately, of course. And I've always dried them carefully, in
front of the gas heater. Or with my wife's hair dryer. Never totally works. Good idea, Millie. In the bath, eh? Simple but effective. Thank you.'

You can see what I mean when I say no one was queuing up to sit next to Mr Lawrence, although it was quite charming of him to tell me I was a successful teenager, when I so obviously wasn't.

I was in the left-overs dormitory. There's nearly always one of them. Suppose you've got 44 girls from Year Seven. The dorms sleep eight, so you have five rooms of eight and one of four. The girls who don't have special friends are always bunched in the last room.

There weren't even four of us. There was Jess, Daina and myself. Jess was on some kind of medication which made her sleepy and slow. Daina was just a girl who liked to be alone. I guess they might have thought that about me, too, given my lunchtimes in the library. So they put us together, in the left-overs dormitory.

Camp wasn't looking good by anybody's standards.

It got worse. The first day wasn't so bad. We had a choice of activities. They do that on the first day to lull you into the feeling that everything will be all right. After that the pressure was on.

A chart went up in the recreation room. It divided us into four teams. I was in Koala Team.
At least
they
divided us up. There was some At least
they
divided us up. There was some split up, as were Helen-Sarah-and-Rachel. Helen and Tayla were in Koala Team. It was clear they hated each other.

Why they think team activities will build trust and friendships is beyond me. In my experience, the person on the team who fumbles the ball, doesn't run fast enough or can't think of a way to get a stupid tyre over a stupid wooden pole is hated, called names and never allowed to forget their failure. So much for trust and friendship!

I knew I would be that person on Koala Team.

I did fumble the ball and I was the only one who had any difficulty scaling the fence in the obstacle course, except for Jess who didn't count because of her medication and Brett who was just plain fat.

But I didn't get called names and my mistakes were hardly noticed. Koala Team was focused on not letting Helen and Tayla kill each other. They picked on each other's tiniest mistakes and hissed and spat at each other like wild cats.

‘You dropped that, you've cost us a point,' Tayla said, before Helen had even had a chance to catch, let alone drop, the ball.

Helen retaliated by crossing her arms and not even trying.

‘Yeah,' she said, when the ball fell at her feet, ‘I sure did. Mind you, if you'd kept your big mouth shut, I might just have been able to catch that.'

‘Tayla!' Dion shouted, ‘let's just try to finish the course, can we?'

‘I'm not interested in playing with a team who doesn't put in one hundred and ten per cent.'

‘Well, I'm not interested in playing with some stuck-up little nobody who thinks she's the greatest and criticises everyone else as though they're complete losers.'

‘Girls, if your whole team isn't playing, you'll be penalised one hundred points, and I mean that!'

‘Sorry, Ms O'Grady. See what you've done now?'

‘Oh, shut your face, Tayla. Could I care less?'

‘It wasn't Helen's fault,' I said, forgetting myself. ‘If you'd just stop being so mean, Tayla, we might get somewhere.'

‘Oh, what would you know?' Tayla turned the full force of her wrath on to me. ‘You aren't even from round here, are you? How come you think you know anything?'

‘I know what I saw,' I said, ‘and I know what I heard.'

‘Oh, do you? Well, I know what I saw on the obstacle course and that was you going around that fence without even trying.'

‘I did try. I'm just not good at things like that.'

‘Not good at much, are you, Millie Mouse? You cheated. You could get us disqualified for that.'

‘Tayla Cameron, what is going on here?'

‘Nothing Ms O'Grady. We're just discussing our group and negotiating role changes, that's all.'

‘It sounds more like shouting,' Ms O'Grady said. ‘Helen, come here. I want to talk to you. Team, take 50 points off for not finishing and a further 25 off for disputes. Then go and have some afternoon tea.'

‘See what you've done, Millie Mouse the big cheat, you've upset Ms O'Grady. You shouldn't upset pregnant women. You might make something happen to the baby.'

‘That's just rubbish,' I said. ‘Honestly, Tayla, how do you expect to get away with that kind of stuff? She's not upset, anyway. She's just doing her job.'

‘What would you know about Ms O'Grady? Do you know that she lost a baby last year? Well, do you?'

‘No. No, I didn't know that.'

‘It's true. The baby was born early. Stress, my mother said. She'd know. She's a nurse. Bet you didn't know that, Millie Mouse.'

I watched Ms O'Grady walking away with Helen. She was looking serious and shaking her head, but I didn't think we had stressed her.

‘I'm not doing any more of this,' Tayla said. ‘I feel sick. I've got a headache right here.' She pressed her temples with her pink sparkly fingernails.

‘Yeah, right.'

‘Millie, where do you get off being such a b-word. I get headaches. I get migraines. Sometimes I have to stay in bed for two days. The pain is so great that I faint if I have to get up. That's what I think I'm getting now. You don't care about anyone other than yourself, do you? You don't care if Ms O'Grady loses another baby. You don't care if I get a migraine. You're just so selfish.'

I watched her saunter off. I couldn't believe what she had just said. I did care about people. I turned to Dion, but she was busy tying up her shoelaces.

‘I care about people,' I said to her anyway. ‘I didn't know about Ms O'Grady. How was I to know?'

‘Everybody knows about Ms O'Grady,' Dion said in a flat voice, ‘and everyone knows Tayla gets bad migraines. She fainted during a tennis match once. She'd gone on with a migraine so she didn't let her doubles partner down. She's a state champion.'

‘How does everyone know?'

‘Everyone knows about Ms O'Grady because it
happened last year when Tayla's brother was in her class. And everyone knows about Tayla because she was the under-12 champion for two years in a row. Everyone in Stockie Primary knew that.'

‘Well, I didn't go to Stockie.'

‘Tayla's right. You don't know much.'

We had fruit and biscuits for afternoon tea. You were allowed one piece of fruit and two biscuits. Then it was free time. Some kids played table tennis in the recreation room. Others went for walks, kicked a soccer ball around or practised netball. I went to the dorm, lay down on my bed and read for a while.

Helen interrupted me.

‘Ms O'Grady wants to see you,' she said, poking her head in without even knocking. ‘She's in the dining room.'

I clutched the book to my chest. Why would she want to see me?

As if reading my mind, Helen said, ‘I bet Tayla's been telling her stuff. But don't worry, Millie, I'll be a witness if you need one. Ms O'Grady's cool. She listens. You're probably just going to get the poor Tayla talk.'

‘The what?'

‘You'll see.' And with that Helen disappeared.

I walked as slowly as I could over to the dining
room. Kookaburras nearby laughed at me. Normally I love kookaburras. They are one of my favourite birds. I love the shape of them and the flash of blue in their wings and I love their laughter. It sounds as though they are inviting the world to share their wonderful, wild joke. But this afternoon it sounded as though I was the joke.

Ms O'Grady was sitting at the edge of one of the tables, a cup of tea in front of her.

‘Sit down, Millie,' she said, indicating a chair that was pulled out a little, so I would be facing her. ‘Do you want a drink of something? I could rustle you up a tea, if you drink it?'

‘No, thank you,' I said. ‘I had some cordial with my fruit.'

‘How are you getting on, Millie, at school? Are you enjoying it?'

‘It's okay.'

‘You've come from a different town, haven't you?'

‘Yes.' Why everyone thought if you didn't live in this town you were an alien was beyond me.

‘That's hard, isn't it? I remember when I first came here. I knew everyone thought I was some kind of weird hippy chick from the big city. I didn't think I'd ever fit in. I cried practically every night for about a month. My husband thought I'd gone mad. Then things changed. I got to know people.
People got to know me. I made friends. I realised that some of the people I thought were cold-shouldering me felt a little threatened by my city background.'

‘I don't come from the city,' I said. ‘Mum and I lived in the country. A little country town.'

‘I realise that,' Ms O'Grady said, ‘but you are a bit exotic, Millie.'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘I think if you go home and think about it, you might.' Ms O'Grady smiled at me. I had to drop my eyes. Hers were too kind and I thought I'd burst into tears. I looked at her stomach instead, round as a shell under her stretchy skirt. Just as I looked, her whole tummy kind of rippled.

‘Oh!' She laughed. ‘This baby's going to be a dancer. Feel that, Millie!' And she grabbed my hand and placed it on her stomach.

It was amazing. You could actually feel life in there. It was bizarre, kind of scary and kind of wonderful at the same time. I couldn't imagine what it felt like for her.

‘Are you scared?' I blurted out, unable to stop myself.

‘Yes, I am a bit,' Ms O'Grady said, ‘but then I look around at all you kids and I think, well, Theresa, they've all been born and their mums and dads coped. That makes me feel a little bit
better. Your mum was fine, wasn't she? And your dad?'

‘Patrick loves me,' I said, ‘but he doesn't live with us. He's a scientist and has to be overseas. Mum did most of the coping by herself. But, yeah, I guess she was fine. I guess you have to be when you have a baby to look after, don't you? I mean, it isn't just you anymore, is it?'

‘Most people think like you do, Millie. But some people don't handle it as well as others. Tayla's mum, for example, didn't handle anything well. She had a breakdown after Tayla was born and couldn't look after her. That's been hard for Tayla and her dad. Tayla's done very well to get to where she is now, believe me. I know she can be ... a little domineering, but when she is like that, remember that she doesn't have a mum around like you have. Okay?'

I shrugged. I wanted to say, I don't have a dad around and Sheri doesn't live with us anymore so what are you going to do about that? But I didn't, because my hand was still tingling from feeling Ms O'Grady's baby and I didn't want to upset her in case anything happened to it.

‘I know things haven't necessarily been easy for you, either. But Millie, I look at you and I see a strong person with their own wonderful destiny to follow. You're an individual. You'll be fine. Tayla's
different. She's dependent on that little group she's got. She's nothing without them. Do you understand?'

‘You have to have friends,' I said.

‘Friends are good, but for some people hangers-on are essential. You'll make friends, Millie. Just give yourself a bit of time. Now, hop out and get some fresh air.'

I stood up to go.

‘By the way, Millie,' she said, ‘be brave about the rumours, too. Tayla's saying you don't care about anyone and that you wanted to give her a migraine. No one will believe her. We all know better. But keep your chin up, okay?'

‘Thanks,' I muttered. I couldn't look at her.

Minutes after I got back to my dormitory, Helen arrived, almost as though she had been watching for me.

‘Wasn't too bad?' she asked, plonking herself down on my bed uninvited.