Take Three Girls

  About Take Three Girls

  Kate, a quiet boarder, making some risky choices to pursue the experimental music she loves.

  Clem, shrugging off her old swim-team persona, exploring her first sexual relationship, and trying to keep her annoying twin, Iris, at arm’s length.

  Ady, grappling with a chaotic family, and wondering who her real friends are; she’s not the confident A-lister she appears to be.

  When St Hilda’s establishes a Year 10 Wellness Program in response to the era of cyber-bullying, the three girls are thrown together and an unlikely friendship is sparked. One thing they have in common: each is targeted by PSST, a site devoted to gossip and slander that must have a source within St Hilda’s.

  Who can you trust when rumour is the new truth?

  Contents

  Cover

  About Take Three Girls

  Dedication

  Week 1: Identity

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Week 2: Show and Tell

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Week 3: Friendship

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Week 4: Self-Esteem

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Week 5: Choices

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Week 6: The Idea of Perfection

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Week 7: Retreat, Reflect

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Week 8: Maps, Taking Stock

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Week 9: Looking Forward

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Acknowledgements

  About The Authors

  Copyright Page

  for our families

  PSST

  CHEAP DATES WITH ANA: TOP TEN HOT GIRLS WITH EATING DISORDERS

  Have we missed anyone?. . .

  1. Bec Houghton

  2. Sav Mueller

  3. Jessie Ong

  4. Calypso Steadman

  5. Helen Pringle

  6. Antonia Tucci

  7. Meg Riley

  8. Issy Spillane

  9. Georgia Lucas

  10. Maddie Vincent

  hungryjackoff: srsly only chicks could be this stupid

  Feminightmare: Hey, guess what, you idiot – eating disorders are not gender specific. Publishing this list is creepy, slanderous, dangerous

  hungryjackoff: don’t get yr panties in a not

  Feminightmare: Let’s see what state your panties are in when you dickheads get busted for publishing shit like this

  b@rnieboy: fat sluts are hotter any day. skinny chix got no titz

  sufferingsuffragette: Dear PSST, nobody cares about your tragic lists except other losers like you. PrivateSchoolSecretsTrackr is run by PatheticSadSexlessTools

  Feminightmare: Anyone who needs help with eating disorders, call the Eating Disorders Helpline 1300 550 236 for confidential support and information. Real people know this is a serious condition and not a joke; we’re there for you.

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  WEEK 1

  IDENTITY

  Week 1: Identity

  Who am I?

  Provocation

  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’

  Points for discussion/reflection

  Each of us is an individual as well as a member of various groups – family, community, school, friendship. Our identity is developed through a combination of our personality, our beliefs and values, our cultural background, our opportunities and privilege, our experiences and actions, our defining moments.

  • Are you happy with your identity?

  • Do others see you as you see yourself?

  • To what extent do you reveal yourself to your peers?

  • Are you happy with the way others see you?

  • How might your value system inform your judgement of others?

  Task 1

  Write your first Wellness journal entry. Respond to one of the questions, to the provocation, or to any aspect of our class discussion. You may choose to keep journal entries private. Alternatively, I am available if you’d like to share or discuss your thoughts on any of our topics.

  Task 2

  Next week we will be revisiting a junior school favourite: show-and-tell. Bring to class an item that tells your classmates something about you.

  Monday 11 July

  Monday morning, six-thirty. Grey clouds bulge in the sky. Jinx says she doesn’t feel the cold, but I can’t stop shivering. We’re walking to the new pool and with each step on the frosty grass I want to put myself in reverse. It’s been six weeks since I’ve been to training. I only made it out of bed today because we’re getting our new uniforms – part one of our reward for killing it at Nationals. We’re also getting a trip to Canberra. Each member of the St Hilda’s Marlins relay team won in our individual categories. Unprecedented, apparently.

  Jinx bounces ahead of me like she’s on springs. ‘Lainie says we’re getting bomber jackets.’

  I make a noise, enough so she thinks I’m contributing.

  She stops suddenly to stretch. ‘Did you see the itinerary for Canberra?’

  ‘Uh. I haven’t looked at it yet.’

  Jinx goes back to bouncing. ‘You’re gonna love the pool. Remember how crap the old one was? All the bandaids and hair ties floating around? This one’s so clean. I feel faster.’

  Jinx doesn’t have to worry about speed. Last time we raced she beat me – clocking just over a minute for the 100-metre freestyle. She’s so tall – the bitches at school call her Slenderman, but J
inx doesn’t care. She can eat whatever. Nothing sticks. Beside her I feel like somebody’s squat aunty.

  The new aquatic centre looms before us, all glass and concrete. We pause on the step.

  Jinx puts her hands on my shoulders. ‘Go hard, Clem – Maggie’s eyeing your slot.’

  I snort. ‘Maggie Cho! I could’ve beaten her with my cast still on.’

  I flutter my hand and feel a twinge, but it’s just phantom pain, nerves. I broke my wrist back in May. For a while after the accident I still turned up for training, but it was frustrating having to sit there while everyone else was thrashing up and back so I decided I was on hiatus. And then something – someone – came along and stole my attention.

  Jinx heaves the glass door open. I smell chlorine and competition. Steam rises from the surface of the water. When Coach Beazley sees me she starts to clap, and the Marlins join in, slow at first, but by the time I reach them they’ve gone feral, clapping like I’m the second coming. Jinx bows because she’s the one who brought me.

  Beaz is all business. ‘How’s the wrist, Banks?’

  ‘Perfect,’ I say.

  Jinx is right, the water looks crystalline. I should want to dive right in, but it’s the last thing I feel like doing. I turn my attention to the new uniforms, join the frenzy of ripping into the polythene bags. The new suit is as green and shiny as a Christmas beetle. Our surnames are printed on the back of our satin bomber jackets. The relay team – me, Jinx, Lainie and Roo – floor it to the change rooms while the other Marlins look on in envy.

  Some sixth sense tells me to use a stall. I have a warning feeling, a buzz in my brain that gets louder when I close the door. I take off my trackies, take a breath and step into the new suit. I pull it up. It’s tight. It’s very, very tight. That breath I took – I’d better keep it in, like, forever, because once it goes all the stitching will too. I take the suit off and I grab handfuls of fat from my stomach. I didn’t realise it was this bad. It’s like I’ve gone up a whole size. All the sleeping in and second helpings and no training to work it off.

  I can hear the others admiring each other, and I imagine they look like sleek machines. I wait until their footsteps fade. Then I put my trackies back on and shove the new suit in my bag. I try to walk casually past the pool but Beaz strides after me.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Ah, there’s an emergency.’ I can feel my face burn with the lie. ‘My sister, Iris. She’s sick.’

  I shuffle faster until I’m practically running.

  ‘Clem!’ Her voice drowns in the sounds of swimmers.

  She’ll want to see me later. I’ll get the call when I’m in English or History. Some junior will come in with a note and I’d better have a good reason. I guess I’ve got from now until then to think of one. I imagine telling her I can’t swim because my suit doesn’t fit. She’ll want to do the whole diet interrogation. In first term Lainie lost eight kilos – she did it by chewing her food and spitting it into a napkin. I don’t know if I have that kind of willpower.

  Instead of going back to the dorm, I head for the old pool. I think I’ll be alone there, but as I walk up I can hear music: someone is playing a cello. I linger by the deep end and see Kate – Iris’s roommate – sitting on a chair at the bottom of the empty pool, bowing away. There’s a laptop on the ground beside her. She bends down, presses a button and beats sound. Kate has her back to me, but she’s so intent on what she’s doing she wouldn’t notice if there were a hundred people watching. Her live melody weaves through the recorded sounds. Something in the combination makes me feel . . . I don’t know, like the world is about to end, like everything sweet must be remembered. I lean against a tree and let the melancholy wash over me. I’m thinking that nothing changes until everything does.

  On our first day at St Hilda’s, when Iris and I were introducing ourselves to the other boarders, I said my natural state was half-fish. Iris mumbled about her idol, Ada Lovelace. Someone said, ‘If you’re twins how come you don’t look anything like each other?’ This is true. Iris is tall, I’m short. Iris is pale, I’m ruddy. Iris is flat as a tack, I’m all hills and valleys.

  When our parents packed up and moved to Singapore for work, they decided it would be too disruptive to our schooling for us to go with them. They chose St Hilda’s because it’s academic and sporty. Iris is the smart one, I’m the sporty one. Mum always says we can be anything we want, but that’s what we are. Iris was expecting me to room with her, and she still hasn’t forgiven me for choosing not to.

  I’m thinking about this stuff, but, also, I’m thinking about Stu. He’s the someone – the reason I broke my wrist – sort of.

  How it happened:

  I was running on the river track, and I literally crashed into him. I fell, landed, howled in pain. Jinx said she’d never seen my face so white. A few days later, I was mooching around the dorm when Old Joy, our housemistress, stuck her head in and told me I had a visitor. It was him! And he was gorgeous. We sat in the lounge – the only place boys are allowed – and he was being very funny and cute even with constant interruptions and surveillance. He told me his name was Stuart Laird McAlistair, and he wanted to buy me a coffee. He wrote his phone number on my cast and drew a rambling rose.

  ‘Never ring before eleven am,’ he said. ‘I need my beauty sleep.’

  No, I thought. You really don’t.

  I’d never seen a guy so beautiful.

  Our first date was on a Friday after school. We had hot chips at the reserve. Stu did most of the talking. He told me he was nineteen, and a musician. He’d been studying community work but had dropped out. When I told him I was sixteen, he scrunched his brow, faking deep. ‘That’s a dangerous age.’ He teased me about my school uniform and, as he kissed me goodbye, snaked his hand under it. I floated home, tasting salt on my lips, feeling the imprint of his fingertips on my regulation St Hilda’s tights. I’ve been floating ever since. Now mornings when I should be training are spent lazing in bed thinking about Stuart Laird McAlistair putting his hands all over me.

  Kate stops mid-bow and starts packing up. And I’m back to the real, the now, late for breakfast. I dart off before she can see me. I don’t even go to the mess hall. I just get a coffee from the machine and drink it in my room. I hang the new suit over the back of my chair, for thin-spiration. But I can’t help hating it.

  And it’s the draggingest day.

  I think about Stu, and I think about food.

  At lunch I snub the lasagne and pile on the salad. If I’m going to fit into that suit I’ll have to ease up on carbs and sugar. But I’m a defunct dieter, bound to fail.

  After lunch we have the new unit – Wellness. We lounge on the beanbags and generally take an age to settle down. My empty stomach rumbles violently. Tash (coathanger, pretty, popular) makes a face. ‘Hey, She-man, have an energy bar.’ She snorts like a pig and laughs. In the next second something flies through the air. A rubber hits the back of Tash’s head.

  ‘Ow!’ She whirls around. It was Iris. I can tell by her tiny smile. Iris wants me to meet her eyes, but I won’t do it. I hate it when my sister comes to my defence. Dr Malik is standing patiently in front of a quote on the board – I celebrate myself, and sing myself. I groan inwardly. Since when is Wellness even a word?

  Monday 11 July

  I wake with my hands in the air, curved as if holding my cello. I can’t remember what I dreamed about when I lived in the country. The city, no doubt, but I don’t have a clear recollection. I remember daydreams from then – staring at white dry fields, wishing they were streets.

  The Marlins move along the boarding house corridor, up before dawn for swim practice. Jinx and Clem slide past almost silently in socks, floorboard surfing the downward tilt outside the room I share with Iris. If you get up some speed, a smooth pair of socks will take you all the way to the Year 10 bathroom.

  We’re on the third floor, so we have the dodgy showers with the pressure of mist. The Year 11 and 12 boarders a
re above us on the fourth floor, and the Year 8 and 9s are below us on the second. The mess, kitchen, boarder study rooms, lounge and Year 7s are on the ground floor. It’s as if the water’s being sucked and heated in every direction except ours.

  I’ve heard the basement has an excellent shower, if you don’t mind the cobwebs. Every morning when I’m freezing in the Year 10 bathrooms I decide it’d be worth pushing my way through all the forgotten things they keep down there – old suitcases and chairs and blackboards and costumes – to shower under a blast of water as hot as we had back at the farm. I’d happily get naked with the spiders for that.

  Thoughts about the basement lead to thoughts about the portal – the door down there that’s too swollen to shut, forgotten by everyone except the boarders; forgotten even by Old Joy, who spends her life in constant fear that one of us will break her rules and have sex.

  I don’t want to go through the portal for sex. Sex would be nice. I wouldn’t mind a date for the formal, followed by sex, but that’s not my most pressing need at the moment. It’s not why I’m obsessed with the door in the basement.

  Instead, I imagine myself walking silently across the cold grass of a shadowy world, towards the main gates. I climb over them at the low point and land on the street. From the street to a tram, from the tram to the city, and from there to Orion, this small club above a record store where Frances Carter plays; where Emilie Autumn, Zoë Keating, Anna Meredith, Amiina and Wendy Sutter have all played. I need the portal because it could get me freedom at night without a pass, and the night is when the clubs are open, and the clubs are where the music is happening. And music, these days, is pretty much all I think about.

  I try to be quiet in the morning but it doesn’t matter all that much. Iris sleeps through anything. She sleeps through me feeling around in the dark for toiletries, through me tripping over her laptop cord, stubbing my toe on her desk (fuck!), through me shining my phone around, looking for the door handle.

  She dreams while I shower, while I come back and get dressed, while I take my cello, my laptop, everything I need for practice. She’s still dreaming as the stale heat of the boarding house gives way to crisp air, as I head into a morning so early it’s dark; so dark the stars are out, and I can imagine, for a second, that I’ve escaped into night.