Dangerous Games (3 page)

S
unday morning was grey, cold, drizzly and miserable. The clouds hung about a metre above my head, heavy and wet and threatening, as if they were about to tip a bucket on me any second. No sensible person, I thought, would choose to stay out in this for long.

‘Hey!' Soph said, bounding up to me, a bag over her shoulder. ‘Come with me to the toilets, quick.'

I followed her into a toilet block that smelt about as good as you'd imagine a toilet block would smell, and I watched while she wriggled out of her normal clothes and pulled on the skate-punk look from the previous night.

‘I'm so glad you could come today,' Soph said, as she drew heavy black lines around her eyes. ‘We're going to have the best time.'

Draz and his mates were down at the skate-ramp, belting up one wall and down the other in an endless scratch and roar of wheels on concrete. Draz saw Soph and me arrive and came to meet us. He gave Soph a big, lingering, tonsil-probing kiss, and when he released her she was breathless.

‘You remember Melissa?' Soph reminded him, when she'd recovered herself.

‘Hey,' Draz said, and jerked his chin in my direction. ‘We've got a rehearsal later,' he told Soph, ‘if you want to come.'

‘Great!' fizzed Soph. ‘Is it okay if Meliss comes?'

‘Sure,' Draz said, as if my presence was a matter of complete indifference to him, and rolled away to rejoin his mates on the ramp.

Soph and I retreated to a nearby bench and hunkered down against the cold wind. I'd come warmly dressed in my slightly daggy but very warm puffy coat, but Soph had on a cropped jacket over a cropped top, and her bare midriff already had a slightly blue tinge.

‘What kind of rehearsal?' I asked.

‘Draz is in a band,' Soph said. ‘He's so talented you wouldn't believe it. He's never let me sit in on a rehearsal before.'

‘Wow,' I said.

We sat there for a moment, watching as Draz and his mates took it in turns to hurl themselves in great swooping arcs around the bowl of the skate-ramp.

‘So have you been spending a lot of time here?' I asked.

‘Most weekends since we started going out,' Soph said. ‘And sometimes after school too.'

‘But that's not all you do, right?'

‘Oh no!' Soph laughed. ‘We do tons of stuff together.'

We were silent for a moment. The boys kept swooping up and down and up and down. I watched Draz practise
the same manoeuvre three, four, five times. Then he practised it a sixth time.

‘So how did you meet him anyway?' I asked.

‘You know the bottle shop up by the supermarket?' Soph asked.

I nodded.

‘He works there, carrying people's liquor out to their cars. You know how my parents had that big party a few weeks ago? We bought heaps of booze for it and he carried it all out to our car and the two of us got talking and … that was it.'

‘And how old is he?' I asked.

‘Sixteen. Nearly seventeen.'

‘And I guess your parents –'

‘They'd have a fit if they knew.'

‘So where did you tell them you were last night?' I asked.

‘I was with you, silly,' Soph said, giving me a sly smile.

Draz turned to see if Soph had been watching some particularly spectacular trick. Soph waved encouragingly and I thought he might come over to talk to us, but he didn't.

‘He is so hot,' she sighed, when he was in motion again.

And although he really wasn't my type I had to admit that there was a kind of grace to the way his body moved so skilfully through space, all that strength and energy and balance and muscle and willpower working together to defy gravity.

We sat there, I'm not kidding, for the next two hours
watching Draz practise. He didn't come over to talk to us once. I suggested at one point that maybe we should go somewhere warmer and arrange to meet him later, but Soph wouldn't have a bar of it. She insisted on staying there and watching Draz, and from the way he kept glancing over at her to make sure she was paying attention, I could tell he expected it. But finally he got sick of what he was doing and came mooching over to where we were sitting.

‘You coming?' he said.

Soph was on her feet in an instant. ‘Sure!'

We began to walk, and I wondered if I was finally going to get a chance to experience the funny and exciting side of Draz's personality. But then one of his skating mates started walking with us and the two of them walked just ahead of us, hooting and insulting each other and loudly abusing people I didn't know and completely ignoring us.

Soph glanced at me, and I knew she was worried he wasn't making a great impression.

‘Wait till you hear him play,' she said.

The process of getting ready to rehearse took at least twice as long as the actual rehearsal itself. Draz, Soph and me were among the first to arrive in the garage which the band used as a rehearsal space, so I got to sit around and watch while Draz and Soph pashed and pashed and pashed. But then a guy with a guitar and an amp turned up, and then another guy with a guitar and an amp turned up, and there was a lot of fiddling around with cords and mikes and amps, and Draz twirled his
sticks a lot and adjusted various bits of his drum kit while the two guys with guitars plinged and planged and tried to get their guitars in tune. And then, when they were both in tune and there were no more knobs to twiddle and everybody's amp was adjusted right we all had to sit around and wait for the singer to arrive. So we sat and waited, and the guy who played lead guitar kept practising the same riff over and over again and getting it wrong at the same place every time, and the guy who played the bass practised a bass line which belonged to another song entirely, and Draz went into these occasional flurries of drumming before lapsing once more into stick-twirling, and all three of them got angrier and angrier because the lead singer was late. Again.

I don't know if you've ever sat and listened to someone breaking off and making mistakes and never finishing a tune, or even a phrase, but it would have to be one of the more irritating sounds in the world. And when it's playing through an amp turned up to eleven, and there are two guys doing it over the top of each other, it gets really really
really
irritating.

Now here's one of the awkward things about having powers of destruction: the worse my mood is, the harder it is to keep my powers under control. I usually feel it in the back of my neck first, and then the shivers run up and down my spine, and my bracelet starts shivering and seething and moving on my wrist and its eyes glow, and then I feel a rising excitement as my powers begin to surge around inside me, and it's a physical feeling, as if my body has suddenly been filled with some volatile substance that's sploshing and sloshing around inside me
and might explode any minute. And after that I might see red spots dancing before my eyes, or I might feel like I'm being lifted off my feet by a great wave, or like the room's spinning or there's a roaring in my ears – and if I let it get to that point, usually it's way too late to stop it, because my powers have switched to overload and are just about to explode.

But they had only got to the shivery point when the singer finally walked in, and I felt my tension ease a little because I thought
finally
the rehearsal might be about to start. But first the other guys had to abuse the singer for being late, and he got all angry because they were getting stuck into him, and then they began a new round of amp-checking and fiddling and adjusting while the singer got his microphone set up. And then, finally, when I thought they absolutely
had
to get started, and there couldn't
possibly
be any more faffing about left to do, the bass player asked if anybody wanted a beer, and the boys all said yes, so he drove off to the bottle-o and we all sat around and waited some more.

By this stage Soph and I had been there for probably an hour, and I don't think anyone had said a single word to me, so I decided to break the ice.

‘So,' I said, ‘what kind of music do you guys play anyway?'

The singer gave me a look of withering disdain. ‘You can't
categorise
it,' he said. ‘It's totally original.'

‘Oh,' I said.

I didn't ask any more questions after that.

The totally original music the guys played was a very fast, thrashy, punky, guitary, noisy kind of thing
with approximately two and a half chords and lyrics I couldn't understand (it sounded like they were in dog language). They appeared to have three or four songs – although it was possible they'd just played the same song several times – but they never quite seemed to get to the end of one, because the singer would fluff his lyrics or the guitarist would lose his place or the bass player would get all funky and the singer would break off to shout at him or Draz would fall out of time and then they'd all have to stop so they could shout at each other about who was keeping time and who wasn't.

There was noise and then arguing and then more noise and more arguing, and my powers kept ramping up and swirling around and the longer I sat there the worse it got. I was clenching everything I could possibly clench to keep my powers in, but after what felt like a whole day of waiting around for Draz and his mates eventually I got too riled to hold it in any longer, and in the middle of the fifth song my powers surged up irresistibly, a bit like when you know you're going to spew, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, and up it comes, and that's what my powers did, they surged up and out of me
blaaaah
! and there was a loud bang and the lights flashed and went out and the amps crackled and fell silent and in the sudden quiet I could hear rain falling softly on the roof of the garage and a wonderful sense of relief washed over me.

‘What happened?' asked the singer.

‘Power's blown,' said the guitarist.

And that was the end of the rehearsal.

‘So do you ever just
talk
?' I asked, as I walked home with Soph. (Draz had gone off to work.)

‘Well, of course we do,' Soph said defensively. ‘We talk all the time. He's different when he's on his own.'

And maybe he was, I thought, but I would never know.

At school on Monday no-one could talk about anything but Draz. The phones had obviously been running hot over the weekend, because Emily, Sarah and Kelly had heard all about him from Celeste and Mina and all five of them were desperate to know more. When they'd got all the obvious stuff out of the way – age, school, how they met – we got down to the nitty-gritty.

‘So tell us what he's
like
,' Kelly said.

To my dismay, Soph turned to me. ‘Melissa's met him. How would you describe him?'

This was not a moment for honesty, if there ever is one when it comes to describing the man in your best friend's life. I tried to think of something positive to say. ‘He's really good on a skateboard,' I said. ‘He can do some amazing tricks.'

‘He's very talented,' Soph agreed, nodding.

‘And he's in a band,' I added.

‘What does he play?' asked Emily, who was musical.

‘Drums,' Soph said.

‘Are they any good?' asked Mina, looking mischievously at me.

‘I reckon if you like that sort of thing they're pretty good,' I said, as diplomatically as possible.

‘So what sort of thing is it?' asked Celeste.

‘It's hard to categorise,' Soph said. ‘It's a little bit skate-punk and a little bit thrash, but totally original. Wait till you hear them, they're awesome.'

‘But you still haven't told us what he's
like
,' Kelly said. ‘What's he got that nobody else has got? Why him?'

My friends all leaned forward eagerly as they waited to hear what Soph had to say. You have to understand, all of this was very new to us. None of us, apart from Soph, had come within spitting distance of a boyfriend, so my friends were eager for any crumbs of information they could get on what it was actually like. I, of course, had at least met him properly, but I still didn't understand what she saw in him.

‘Well,' Soph said thoughtfully, as if we'd asked her to explain the origins of the universe, ‘he's heaps of fun. I mean, he's funny. And he's just – I don't know – exciting to be around.'

‘Exciting how?' asked Celeste.

‘I don't know. Life isn't boring when I'm with him.'

And it is when you're with us?
I wondered, slightly offended. But I kept quiet.

‘So is it serious?' Kelly asked.

‘Oh, who wants to get
serious
?' Soph said, tossing her hair in a woman-of-the-world sort of way. ‘I just want to have fun.'

My friends all looked very impressed, but I couldn't help feeling that this sounded like Draz's attitude, not Soph's. The thing about Soph was, when she fell for something – whether it was a horse or a boy or a TV show – she fell in a big way. Soph already looked plenty
serious about Draz, and if he didn't feel the same way about her then that didn't sound good to me.