Stagefright (2 page)

“Won’t take a minute,” he said, collecting up an assortment of balls, bats and mitts. “Just need to get an idea of your skills. Make sure you start at the right level.”

Velvet failed to catch, hit or kick whatever was thrown in her direction. When Mr Kislinski asked her to shoot a goal, she put on her mother’s reading glasses (which she’d brought for just that purpose) and peered around short-sightedly until she located the netball ring. She missed that too.

“We’ll have to start you at the lowest level, I’m afraid, Velvet,” Mr Kislinski said sadly. “But don’t worry, we’ll soon have you up to scratch.”

Velvet watched Mr Kislinski jog off. “I don’t think so.”

She’d been forced to go to an awful school. She’d had to drop French, which was her best subject. She had to write an essay about What I Did Over the Holidays. She put her hand on the arrow-pierced heart pinned to her uniform and made a vow. There was one thing she was not going to do, and that was play sport.

Miss Ryan appeared, wearing baggy orange shorts and an enormous Garfield T-shirt. She was in charge of Year 9 girls’ sport.

“All right, girls, let’s do some laps of the oval before we start our netball.”

Velvet jogged for about twenty metres and then got a stitch. She walked the rest of the laps, ignoring the panting girls who streamed past her time and time again. There was only one other girl who wasn’t sweating and straining. She appeared to be striving for the slowest jog in history.

“Come on, Hailie,” shouted Miss Ryan. “You can do better than that.”

Hailie Murchison was in Velvet’s maths and humanities classes. She was one of those stupid boy-crazy girls who thought being smart was a social handicap. Velvet didn’t like her. Hailie jogged up alongside her.

“Have you got your periods yet?”

“Excuse me?”

“Just asking,” Hailie replied, as if chatting about menstrual cycles was a perfectly normal way to start a conversation with a stranger. “Well, have you?”

“Of course.”

“How old were you?”

Velvet looked around, hoping no one was listening.

“I don’t know, twelve I think.”

“God, you’re lucky.”

Velvet’s stitch had gone. She was about to jog away, but Hailie hadn’t finished quizzing her.

“Got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

Hailie smiled. “That’s my boyfriend over there.” She pointed in the direction of the football pitch. “The one with the Iron Man T-shirt. Gorgeous isn’t he?”

Velvet didn’t find muscles attractive. “No.”

“Geez, you’re a snob.”

Hailie jogged even slower to make sure the gorgeous boyfriend got a good look at her in tight-fitting singlet and shorts, though Velvet didn’t think that her stick-like body was likely to get any male too excited. Velvet started to run. She actually managed to jog a whole lap before she got stitch again. She stopped, chest heaving, and pretended to do up a shoelace. Hailie wasn’t far behind, but she was busy smiling at the boyfriend and wasn’t looking where she was going. She crashed into Velvet and both girls fell in a heap.

Velvet pulled herself out from under Hailie. “You should watch where you’re going!”

Hailie lay writhing on the ground. Velvet thought she was faking at first, but real tears streamed from her eyes and there was a bone in her ankle sticking out at the wrong angle.

Miss Ryan came running over, T-shirt and arms flapping. “Not your ankle again, Hailie! I knew you shouldn’t be jogging yet.”

She bent down to help Hailie up, but Hailie squealed with pain.

“Oh, oh,” wailed Miss Ryan, looking around for help. “Nestor!”

The gorgeous boyfriend came running over from the football field.

“Can you carry her to sick bay, Nestor?”

“Nah. I’ve got a shoulder injury. Can’t risk it. If it gets worse, I won’t be able to play next week.”

“Velvet, help me,” Miss Ryan said.

With Velvet supporting her on one side and Miss Ryan on the other, Hailie hopped to sick bay.

“That’s the third time she’s broken that ankle,” Miss Ryan told Velvet.

She recounted the history of Hailie’s ankle – the two previous breakages, their inability to heal, the perpetual cast that had only been removed in the last week of the summer holidays. Velvet put on a concerned face and tutted. Anything to get out of sport.

Yarrabank High was sports mad. The students played every ball game known to man – soccer, Aussie Rules, cricket, baseball, basketball, volleyball, lacrosse, tennis, hockey. Then there was swimming. Yarrabank boys had been state swimming finalists for fifteen years straight. In the two weeks that Velvet had been at the school, they’d had three assemblies with motivational speeches from famous old boys – one played football for Essendon, another batted for the Bushrangers, and the third had three Commonwealth Games bronze medals hung around his neck.

There were no restrictions on the sports girls could play. There were girls’ teams even for Australian Rules and lacrosse. The Muslim girls had a special sports uniform that included long pants and a hood, all in the school colours. There was wheelchair basketball for disabled kids; judo, kung-fu and wrestling for the thugs. And in winter there was a sports camp in the snow.

Though the rest of the school was falling to pieces, the sports’ facilities at Yarrabank were better than those at St Theresa’s. There was the Olympic-sized Hawker Hardware Pool and a new gym, which was the biggest in the state.

Yarrabank’s motto was
Semper Vigilatis Vestribus Pilas
, which, according to the school song, meant “always keep your eye on the ball”, but the translation popular with students when they sang it at assembly was “always watch your balls”.

Velvet was sure there wasn’t another student in the whole school who read serious literature. No one had heard of Isobelle Carmody or JRR Tolkien. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the small classrooms were packed with smelly, foul-mouthed boys.

Velvet hated every day at Yarrabank High, but she dreaded Thursdays the most. At St Theresa’s, Velvet had been president of the Literary Club, a member of the Madrigal Choristers and first clarinet in the school orchestra. Occasionally, wearing an attractive leotard, she had taken part in a lunchtime tai chi group. But sport? Never.

She now spent all her waking hours devising ways of getting out of sport. She soon learned that, at Yarrabank, illness didn’t exempt you. No amount of coughing, limping or bandaging had got her excused. It was disgusting the way the rest of the school was so enthusiastic about sport. Everyone – all the loud-mouthed boys from her class who never listened to a teacher; all the girls with black-rimmed eyes and multicoloured hair; the thugs with tattoos and shaved heads; even the emos with piercings and black hair hanging in their eyes – happily changed into their sports uniforms and applied themselves seriously to sport. It was like a disease.

Velvet had to try out in the gymnasium next. She couldn’t vault or hang upside down from a bar. She couldn’t even do a backward roll.

A group of girls in what looked like white pyjamas caught Mr Kislinski’s eye.

“Sofia,” he called out.

A girl with short black hair and a dagger tattooed on her neck came over. She had a mean look in her eye.

“This is Sofia Ritano,” he said, “our state judo champion.”

“Show Velvet a few simple movements, Sofia.”

Mr Kislinski was distracted by a pommel horse routine that was getting loud applause.

“Hi, my name’s Velvet.” Velvet smiled at the girl. She didn’t smile back. “Look I don’t know the first thing about ju –”

Before Velvet knew what had happened, Sofia had tripped her, thrown her on her back and wedged her knee against Velvet’s windpipe.

Mr Kislinski came back. Velvet was still gasping for breath.

“Perhaps athletics might be more your thing,” he said.

Running last in a race was easy, flattening the hurdles as she attempted to jump over them wasn’t hard either, but snapping the low jump bar took a certain amount of skill. Mr Kislinski was not one to give up on a potential sportsperson, but Velvet was a match for him. When he suggested she try out in the pool, Velvet told him about the congenital disease that made her allergic to chlorine and had been responsible for the tragic deaths of three family members.

Mr Kislinski was undaunted. “I’m sure we’ll hit on your special skill, Velvet.”

By the end of her third week at Yarrabank, Velvet had tried out for every team sport and failed at each one. Mr Kislinski was still working his way through the track and field disciplines. He had a pile of what looked like weapons at his feet.

“How about shot-put, Velvet?”

He called over a small Year 7 boy to demonstrate. The boy tucked the shot-put under his chin like a professional and hurled it a surprising distance.

Mr Kislinski applauded. “Well done, lad. Now you have a try, Velvet.”

Velvet picked up one of the metal balls. It was heavy. She summoned all her strength and threw the shot-put and it flew quite well, but in the wrong direction. It landed on the Year 7’s toe. After he had been helped off to sick bay, Velvet concentrated on the other track and field sports. Her discus scattered the students at the long jump, her javelin caused a flurry in the garden of the retirement village next door and her hammer broke a window in the gym.

Mr Kislinski sighed and surrendered. “I’m afraid you’ll have to join the cultural studies class.”

Velvet put on an award-winning display of disappointment, while mentally high-fiving herself.

“It’s over in T6.”

Velvet turned and hobbled across the oval, a smile creeping over her face. It’d taken three weeks of hard work, but she’d won. No more sport.

Two-thirds of the classrooms at Yarrabank High were wooden temporaries. Parents had raised funds for exciting projects like the gym and an indoor basketball court, even new goalposts. There was currently a lamington drive and a skip-a-thon in progress to raise money for bigger change rooms. Local businesses had sponsored the swimming pool and the grandstand and covered them with logos, but it seemed no one was interested in having ordinary classrooms named after them.

T6 was squeezed between the far side of the football oval and the fence. Even for a temporary building it was remote. If it had been any further away from the main building it would have been outside the school grounds.

Velvet’s mood of triumph faded as she opened the door. T6 wasn’t so much a classroom as a storeroom. The cultural studies class consisted of only six or seven pupils, but it seemed crowded. The students shared the room with excess sports equipment – piles of baseball mitts, boxes of beanbags and stacks of gym mats. At the other end of the room were paint-splattered easels, a broken potter’s wheel and various containers of dried-up paint and clay. It was actually the art room, but no one had enrolled in art that year.

The students all looked up for a moment as Velvet walked in, and then went back to their computer games, MP3 players and conversations – except for one overweight student who was asleep in the back row, his head on the desk among the remains of his lunch.

Velvet found herself a desk. “So what do we do?”

“Whatever you like,” said an Asian boy who was playing a game that involved exploding zombies.

Velvet might have thought he was good-looking if she was interested in boys – which she wasn’t.

“Isn’t there a teacher?”

“Yep.” The boy jerked his head towards the back of the room. “What’s your name?”

“Velvet.”

“Mr MacDonald, say hello to Velvet.”

The overweight, sleeping figure was in fact the teacher. He didn’t stir.

“I’m Peter,” the Asian boy said, and went back to his zombies.

None of the other students bothered to introduce themselves, but Velvet recognised some of them. Hailie, whose foot was in plaster, was filling in a
Does He Think You’re Sexy?
quiz in a Dolly magazine that must have been at least ten years old. Roula, the girl with the blue-streaked hair who Velvet had seen on her first day, was painting her nails green. There was also a muscular African boy with cropped hair and a body like a junior Arnold Schwarzenegger who was doing ab crunches in a corner. Velvet had heard Year 7s reverently whispering his name as he passed in the schoolyard. He was Jesus Mbele, the previous year’s soccer best and fairest. A boy with a sullen expression was playing a purple electric guitar decorated with lightning bolts. The guitar wasn’t plugged in. His long hair was tied back in an untidy ponytail. He wore glasses and had bands on his teeth. As he plucked the strings his head swayed from side to side, as if he could hear the full sound of the notes and not the thin metallic plinks. He was too engrossed in his music to notice Velvet. A boy with his back to the class was kneading a lump of clay and forming it into something. He was the only one who seemed to be doing anything vaguely “cultural”.

Roula blew on her fingernails. “What’s your name?”

She was in Velvet’s humanities class, but obviously had not been paying attention when the teacher introduced her.