Gracie Faltrain Gets it Right (Finally) (13 page)

‘You have to tell Gracie that we're friends,' Annabelle says.

‘I will. I need to find the right time.'

‘Kally feels like she's lying. So does Dan.'

‘It's not like Faltrain tells me about all her new friends.'

‘It's different and you know it.'

Why is it different? Because Faltrain would say it's different? Because she'd say there are rules and I can't kiss her enemy? All the good stuff in me is finally rising to the surface.

‘Martin,' Annabelle says in a way that makes me think she's been talking for a while but I haven't been listening. ‘You can't have a new start if you don't deal with the past.'

‘Since when do you care so much about Faltrain?'

‘Since I know that you do.' She looks me straight in the eyes as she says it and that's when I figure it out – I think maybe I'm in love with Annabelle Orion. And that is news that Faltrain is definitely not going to take well.

‘I'll tell her,' I promise. ‘Soon.'

I warm up next to Flemming for the school game Saturday morning. I think about that envelope with the answers. I think about all the warnings people have given me about him. When you kick the ball around with a guy for six years you get to know him, though. Yeah, he's an idiot, sometimes. But mostly he's one of the good idiots. He took those notes because he doesn't trust that he can make it on his own.

‘How was the end of camp?' I ask.

‘Boring. I should have gone off with you and Alyce.'

I stretch my hamstrings and try to look casual. ‘So, Mum and Dad and Jane are helping me revise for the English essay. You want to come over this afternoon?'

‘Don't tell me what to do, Faltrain.'

So much for casual. ‘I bet you haven't opened that envelope yet. It's not too late.' If I know Flemming he'll look
at it Sunday about midnight. ‘If I can pass without cheating then you can.'

‘If you don't want the stuff, give it back. I've got someone who'll buy it off me.' We're not talking like mates, now. Our sentences are cut short so nothing important fits.

‘It's in my locker.'

‘Give me your key.'

‘It's open.'

He looks at Kally, Char, Esther, Natalie and Joanna sitting on the bench. ‘They're scared,' he says. ‘They should be.' We run into the game but it feels like we're not on the same side anymore. How did that happen so quickly?

Corelli's the only player who cuts the girls any slack today. The other side slams them and our guys don't pass the ball. They're mad that Coach's brought in new players. They don't trust the girls to make the shot. So they do what our team always does when it feels threatened: they pull together and shut out the enemy.

Coach sends the girls on one at a time. One at a time I try to kick them the ball but I'm not enough. One at a time the guys show them what I can't explain: that the practice match is going to be tougher than they ever expected.

‘You did good,' I say after. And then I take them through, one point at a time, how they could do better. ‘It's hard when you feel like you're alone out there,' Char says.

She's right. Last year was rough but I had players on my side. ‘I'll fix that before next week,' I say. No one can make it when they feel like their back's against the wall.

I look across at Flemming sitting on the bench. ‘No one.'

I don't watch Brett play football this afternoon. I arrive at Gracie's game as Andrew's leaving. He sees me standing there and slings his bag over his shoulder. ‘Gracie's gone,' he says. ‘She went with Woodbury. I have to get something from school. You want to come?'

I nod.

‘Where's Mason?'

‘He's busy.'

I think back to when I first tutored Andrew and I had no idea what to say. I read up on soccer and cars and tried to talk about them. ‘Just be yourself,' he told me. ‘I like listening to all the stuff that goes on in your head.'

‘I watched a documentary the other night that explained there'd be no drinking water left before the end of our lifetime,' I tell him today.

‘I guess it's lucky we've got Coke.'

‘On average 1.55 litres of water are needed to make one litre of soft drink.'

‘You're very serious, aren't you?'

‘I try hard not to be. We're not walking in the direction of the school.'

‘You know what? It doesn't matter. Tell me about that documentary. The world's ending, right?'

‘It is eventually.' I turn my phone off so Brett can't call. ‘But it's not ending today.'

‘So Linda, Kirsten and Maggie were cut,' Kally says at trials this morning. At the beginning of the year I didn't think I'd care who was cut as long as it wasn't me. But even the state cuts aren't clear-cut anymore.

I run onto the field. I play my hardest. I force myself to forget about the girls who aren't here. The more I play soccer, the more complicated winning gets. Because this time, it's the girls from my team who I have to beat, not the opposition. And if I beat my friends, I can't get around the fact that a part of me has to lose.

‘Talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity,' Jane says before school Monday.

‘Shut up, I'm trying to remember my analysis terms. English essays were made to ruin our lives. I bet teachers get together on Saturday nights and plan torture to inflict on us.' I flick through my notes. ‘What's the meaning of hyperbole again?'

‘You're kidding, right?'

‘Yes, I am.' Call the Guinness Book of Records. Gracie Faltrain knows enough about English to make a joke.

I sit up the front and lay out all my pens, pencils, erasers and rulers. ‘Got enough there, Faltrain?' Flemming asks on the way past.

It's his way of saying sorry. I hit him with my ruler. It's my way of saying sorry back. ‘We're still mates?' I ask.

‘Yeah, we're still mates, you idiot.'

I check that each pen works. I'm starting to understand
Alyce. I never cared before if I had a pen because I never had anything to write. Today I don't want to lose a second.

In reading time I look through the article. ‘Plan it in your head,' Kally told me. ‘The same way you map out plays in soccer.' Mrs Young blows the whistle. And I start kicking goals. I keep right on kicking until she says, ‘Pens down.'

‘. . . and in the conclusion, I wrote that the writer intended the reader to feel fear . . . I'm boring you, aren't I?'

‘Strangely enough, no,' Dan says. ‘And that's surprising considering I've heard what you wrote three times now.'

‘I just never had so much to write in an essay before.'

‘Go on, then,' he says, stopping at the lights. ‘Tell me again.'

‘Okay . . .' I start. And I love how he smiles.

I am definitely on my way up the school ladder and for the first time in my life I'm not talking socially. I wrote a whole essay yesterday in English and today I'm ready for a Maths test. I actually finish five minutes before the bell.

‘I am on my way to being a brain,' I say to Kally and Alyce in homeroom. ‘I may need to get glasses.' And that's when things start to fall apart. It's my own fault. I know better than anyone that as soon as a person brags about their luck that's when the person's luck runs out. Mine runs all the way out the door, today. It runs out screaming.

‘We've had an anonymous tip that some students cheated in the English essay yesterday,' Mrs Wilson says. ‘There's going to be a locker search.'

Of course there's been a tip. I bet Flemming tried to sell those answers to every failing kid in school. I try to catch his eye but he's staring straight ahead. And that's when I know without a doubt that the envelope is still in my locker.

I wait with all the other Year 12s in the corridor. My stomach twists like Dad on the dance floor. There's nothing I can do, now. Flemming opens his locker and it's clear. I open mine and it's not.

‘Oh Gracie,' Mrs Wilson says. I hate the way her voice sounds. I hate that the word about me moves quicker down the corridor than a rumour of free food at the tuckshop. I hate that Dan will hear about this before I get the chance to explain. But what I hate more than any of it is that while I'm standing here, taking the rap for something I didn't do, Flemming stands there with his mouth shut.

I wait outside Principal Yoosta's office. Mum and Dad have been called. Jane, Alyce and Kally look through the window and mouth, ‘Hang in there,' until the school secretary tells them to go away. ‘Can I go to the toilet?' I ask her after the bell's gone.

‘Make it quick,' she says.

Flemming's standing in the corridor. ‘Faltrain, what's happening?'

‘Nothing, yet. I'm waiting for my parents to get here. You said you were taking it on Saturday.'

‘I forgot.'

‘They're going to ask me where the answers came from.' He doesn't say anything. ‘I didn't even look at them. I'll be off the school team.' He still doesn't answer. ‘I can't believe you're letting me take the fall for this.'

‘You'd do the same thing if this was the other way around.'

‘No. I wouldn't. We've been mates for years. Doesn't that mean anything?' He's quiet again. ‘I guess not.'

I was so stupid. Coach saw it. Martin saw it. I trusted Flemming and the minute things got tough he turned his back.

Mum and Dad arrive. The secretary tells us to go through to Principal Yoosta's office. ‘This is very serious, Mr and Mrs Faltrain,' he says.

‘I know,' Dad answers. ‘That's why Helen and I would like to hear our daughter's side of the story.'

Mum nods and reaches for my hand. ‘Tell the truth, Gracie.'

As much as I hate Flemming right now, I won't turn him in. I was stupid enough to take the answers from him. I was stupid enough to think about using them. ‘I didn't cheat. A friend gave me the envelope and I put it in my locker. I never even looked inside.'

‘And the name of the friend?' Principal Yoosta asks.

I keep my mouth shut. We go around and around in circles but I won't tell them. Mrs Young walks in after a while holding my analysis. ‘Well?' Mr Yoosta asks.

She nods at Mum and Dad and sits down. ‘Firstly, I would like to say that without a doubt, Gracie has not cheated prior to this point.'

‘You're certain?' Principal Yoosta asks.

‘Her essays reflect no knowledge whatsoever of the texts.' Ouch.

‘This essay shows a marked improvement but that's because she studied hard this week.'

‘She did,' Mum says. ‘Bill and I helped.'

‘The work has a style to the writing that could only come from her.' She smiles at me.

‘That might be the case,' Principal Yoosta says, ‘but the fact remains that the answers were in her locker and she has admitted to taking them from a friend.'

They don't expel me and Mum won't hear of them excluding me from classes. So my punishment is losing my spot on the school soccer team. I have detention on Friday afternoons for the next three weeks, so that makes training the state girls hard but not impossible. I have ‘cheat' added to the end of my name, though. And worse than that, Flemming, a mate, treated me like I'm nothing.

I'm sent home for the rest of the day. Mum and Dad walk on either side of me. Everyone stares. We pass Coach on his way to class. I can't look him in the eye. I've trained with him and the guys for five and a half years. I can't believe I won't be a part of the end.

‘It wouldn't take a genius to work out which of your friends gave you the test,' Mum says in the car. ‘Andrew Flemming, right?'

‘They might have gone a little easier on you if you'd given them his name, baby.'

I stare out the window as the world passes by. ‘You believe that I didn't cheat, don't you?'

‘I know you,' Mum says. ‘I believe you. I also believe you're stupid enough to entertain the thought of cheating. Am I right?'

‘Yes.'

‘Gracie, why didn't you come to us earlier? We could have helped.'

‘Because earlier you weren't listening to me. You would have made me quit school soccer anyway.'

She rubs her eyes again. I'm making her really tired this year. ‘We can argue this around and around in circles. Will you ever think about cheating again?'

‘No.'

‘Do you plan on working hard to pass Year 12?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then this is the end of it.'

‘You're not grounding me?' ‘You just lost the thing you love the most for a stupid mistake. We're not punishing you even more. I don't want you seeing Andrew, though.'

‘Not a problem, Mum. I don't plan on it.'

Jane, Alyce, Kally and Dan walk in at four. ‘I'm off the school team. It's my own dumb fault. I should never have taken the answers from Flemming.' I look at Dan. ‘I didn't do it.'

‘I'm the guy who listened to a word-by-word account of your essay four times. You don't need to tell me. I've got somewhere to go. I'll call you later.'

‘What do I do now?' I ask. ‘You have Tim Tams with us.' Jane pulls out a packet. ‘You kick it to goal at the state trials and you keep training the girls for the practice match.'

‘You say, “Stuff you, Andrew Flemming” and you make it anyway,' Kally says.

‘You study.' Alyce pushes up her glasses.

I take their advice. I study for part two of the English assessment. I go over my Food Tech notes so I don't let Corelli down. And then, late at night, I sit next to Dad on the
couch. I get close to him. He puts his arm around me. ‘It hurts when a friend lets you down,' he says.

I move in closer to him. ‘Yeah. It really does.'

We watch a documentary on female Grey Nurse sharks. ‘The stronger babies eat their brothers and sisters while they're still inside their mother,' the narrator tells us. Maybe the old Gracie Faltrain would have said: ‘It's a shark eat shark world in high school. And only the toughest survive.'

But that's just a stupid philosophy to live by. I move in even closer to Dad. I watch the babies snapping at each other. And it's harsh. Way too harsh.

I go home after I've been to Gracie's and ask Mum to drive me to Andrew's house. It will be too dark to walk home, after, but I need to see him. Or, maybe it's the other way around. I think he needs to see me.

‘You've come to yell, too?' he asks, sitting on his front step. ‘Woodbury was just here. Who's he to call me an idiot?' Andrew tears off pieces of sandwich and throws them on the grass. ‘He doesn't even know me.'

I watch as two birds fight over the crusts. ‘You have to own up.'

‘Everything's clear-cut for you, isn't it?' His voice sounds like it did on that day he broke up with me.

‘This is clear-cut,' I say.

‘It's not for me,' he answers, his eyes on the grass. ‘Dumb birds,' he says, and I watch him rain the last of his crusts down on them till he's left with nothing. ‘Go home, Alyce,' he says. ‘Just go home.'