Haunting of Lily Frost (13 page)

‘I think they're the same thing,' I say.

Julia looks up at me then. I expect her to be angry, to show me how much she hates being challenged, but instead she looks sad, and I wonder again what she's hiding and whether she'll ever let it come out.

‘I want you to write an essay around the moral question, “Would you lie to protect your friends?” I want to hear your opinion, but I also want you to reflect on what Rebecca's choices are in the book. Understood?'

If this was my old school there'd be groans or complaints from various students, but here, where the class is small and Mrs Jarvis is the teacher, everyone just takes down the topic and starts writing. Except for Julia. She's still looking at me, and I wish I could read minds.

The Taylors' house is huge; not big and rambling like our Gideon house, but sharp and imposing. The drive winds its gravel way between two long lines of old elm trees. There are horses in the front paddocks and cattle in the back. It's one of those properties you drive past when you're travelling through a town and stare at from the window of your passing car, impressed by its size and order.

Without really knowing how to escape, I find myself following Danny up the drive to the front door. He takes his shoes off. It's one of
those
houses. I have to sit down to unlace mine. The laces of my old falling-apart black Converse tend to knot themselves over and over, so it's never easy to just slip them off. Danny leans against the door and waits for me. I haven't asked where Julia is, but I'm hoping she's gone somewhere else.

He must be frustrated by the length of time it's taking me, because he bends down and says, ‘You can leave them on.'

Although I'd rather not take off my shoes, for fear of a) releasing the stink that I know will be there, because I slept in them and haven't changed my socks for over twenty-four hours, and b) a general concern about the state my socks are in, there's no way I'm going into their house wearing shoes when clearly no one else is. So I persist, tugging crazily against the knots, and realising that if I had really sharp superhero fingernails I would probably just cut them off.

Danny's mum must hear us talking, because the front door swings open and I look up into the face of a woman who is exactly like Julia, but thirty years older. ‘You must be Lil.'

‘Yeah. Ah, yes, Mrs Taylor. I'm Lil.'

Finally the shoelace surrenders and I can kick off one shoe, and start desperately working on the other. But I should probably stand up and greet her properly. I sort of hobble with the one shoe off, and (sure enough) green toenails popping out of the holes in my sock, and the other shoe still on.

‘Hi,' I manage to say.

‘Come in. Julia's in her room.' Great. She assumes that because I'm a fifteen-year-old girl, I'm here to hang with Julia.

‘Just have to get this shoe off. I'd be no good in Japan.'

She looks down and then up, taking it all in. Clearly she likes her teenagers to be a bit neater than I am. ‘Japan?'

‘Mum, she means because they have to take their shoes off all the time.'

‘Yes. Well, I expect they don't have laces.'

I can see exactly where Julia gets her sense of humour. Luckily, we must bore her, because she just disappears like she's finished with us. I finally manage to rip the other shoe off, almost removing my heel in the process. Danny sighs, with relief I think. Maybe he thought he'd be here for another hour, waiting for me.

‘Come on, I'll show you around.' He seems older in his house. Maybe it's because I wasn't expecting him to live in a mansion, so now I see him differently. He walks down the hallway and I have to skip to keep up with him. As he passes various rooms, he indicates with a flick of his hand what they are. ‘Dad's study. The lounge. The playroom. Spare bedroom.'

‘This place is massive.'

‘Yep.'

And it is. It not only has heaps of rooms, but they're huge, too, as if a team of giants lives here. It seems crazy
that you need all this space just for four people, but
maybe they like having their own wing. I guess if I lived with Julia I'd be pretty happy not to run into her in the
morning, and fight over whose turn it was to have the first
shower.

‘Bathroom number three.'

I laugh at this. ‘Are you kidding?'

‘Nup. We've all got one.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know. Dad jokes that it was his civic duty to keep the local builders in business for a year, so he built a huge house. Took them nearly two years in the end.'

‘You must almost be able to go a whole day without seeing each other.'

‘Almost.'

We zigzag down another hallway. This house is bigger than my new house
and
my old house put together. It's not a particularly nice kind of big, though. Just big. It's all cream and neat and there's no stuff anywhere. I guess they've got a room they can store all their stuff in. The stuff room. We walk past a couple of ugly paintings and I can't help but stop and look at them. One is a painting of a large green bowl with purple grapes cascading down the
side. And the other is a flat bowl of red apples. They are
the sorts of paintings you do when you're learning. Every
thing slightly out of perspective and flat looking. Before I say anything I check the signature in the corner. Sure enough. There's a J Taylor.

‘Julia's?'

‘Julia the first.'

It takes a minute for me to work out what he's saying. I must look confused because he adds, ‘My mum.'

‘Oh. Right. They're both Julia.'

‘And this is my room.' He walks in but I don't. I can't. It feels all too weird. ‘You can come in.'

‘Nah. It's okay.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know. Your mum.'

‘Lil, the house is huge. She never comes down here.'

‘Really?'

‘We can play a horrifically violent video game and you can go home scarred for life, if you like.'

‘Why didn't you mention that before!'

And I start to walk in, feeling all right about being alone in the bedroom of a boy I hardly know, when I hear a voice behind me.

‘You're everywhere I look.'

‘Oh, Julia.'

‘Don't you have a home to go to? Oh yes, of course you do: it's Tilly's home.'

‘Jules. If you're going to be a bitch, then shut your door.'

‘Why did you bring her here, Danny?'

I love it when people start arguing about me as if I'm not there. Particularly when there's nowhere I can escape to.

‘Because I'm being friendly. You should try it.'

‘I already have friends. I don't need any more.'

Sighing, Danny turns to me. Maybe he's realising it was a really bad idea to invite me over. ‘Let's get out of here, Lil.'

‘Fine by me.' As I walk away from Julia, or Jules or whatever she wants to be called, I wish I'd peeked into her room before going. I love sniffing round in people's houses, and I doubt I'll ever be invited back here, so there probably won't be another chance.

Danny's mum is on the phone when we walk past. She holds her hand up as if she wants us to stop, but Danny just waves back and grabs my hand, like he's pulling me out of there. I feel so weird holding his hand, and I'm almost relieved when he lets go so I can put on my shoes. I'm too embarrassed to look at him, and focus completely on tying my laces.

‘Sorry about Julia.'

‘That's okay.'

‘She's been like this since Tilly—'

‘I probably would be too if my best friend, Ruby, went missing.'

‘She didn't go missing. She ran away.'

‘Sorry, I thought – well, Julia said she was missing.'

‘Yeah. Well Julia is wrong.' His tone is sharper than I've heard from him before. What does it matter whether she went missing or she ran away? Maybe it's easier to bear if you know someone left voluntarily. Although, that'd make it worse, maybe.

‘Are you angry with her?'

‘Can we stop talking about Tilly?'

Any closeness that I felt with Danny when he grabbed my hand before has gone. Now I feel awkward and nervous around him, and wonder what else we can talk about.

We walk down the long drive. I can feel my phone vibrating in my pocket and I wonder if it's Ruby. I'm not sure how Danny would react if I answered it. He might be one of those people who get offended if you answer a phone or a text when you're with them. I don't know him well enough, and anyway I don't really want to talk to her when I'm with him. Now in particular, because I don't know what she's ringing to tell me. The problem is, if I don't answer, she'll assume I'm sulking or worse: that I'm jealous, and then it'll put even more distance between us.

‘My phone's beeping. Do you mind?'

‘Go for it.'

Of course by the time I grab it out of my pocket, it's stopped. One missed call from Ruby.

‘You can call them back if you want –'

‘It's okay. I'll just text her.'

Texting while I walk has never been my strong point, but I'm trying to do it as fast as I can so Danny doesn't see the message, and it doesn't take up too much time.

‘With Danny. L8r.'

I smile as I hit send. It's pretty much what she sent me yesterday and I wonder if she'll assume I'm messing around.

As we're about to walk out of the driveway, a dog starts barking behind us. I immediately start to hurry, but Danny spins round as the dog throws himself up onto him.

‘It's okay, it's just Luther,' he says as he wraps his arms around the dog and pulls it close. It's the dog from the river. My whole body has stiffened. I often have this feeling when I'm around big dogs, especially if they're like this, because they remind me of the one that terrorised me when I was little.

‘He's friendly.' Danny smiles at me as his face is getting licked.

I don't care if he's friendly.

Luther starts sniffing my fingers and I pull them away, hating the feel of his hot breath on my skin. He mustn't like my quick movements, because he snarls at me, rolls his lips back and shows his teeth.

Danny seems surprised. ‘Luther!' he says sharply as he pulls the dog away. I feel stupid being scared, but I can't help it.

‘Sorry! He's not normally like this.'

‘Dogs and I don't really—'

‘No worries.' Danny stands up, clicks his fingers and Luther bounds back down the drive. As Danny turns to look at me, he smiles. ‘River or river, Lil?'

‘Let me think – river!'

‘There's nowhere else, really. That's where we usually go after school. It's pretty much the only place to hang.'

‘Do you swim there?'

‘There's a spot where it's safe enough to – but not where you saw us at the bridge.'

I'm breathing more normally, now that we're off his family's property and walking back into town. Mum's probably wondering where I am. She was never home until after five when we lived in the city, so she didn't have a clue what I got up to after school, but now she'll know that I wasn't there when Max arrived home.

‘It's weird. If I was walking around in Melbourne, we'd meet up with heaps of kids from school.'

‘Yep. Here there's just cows.'

He's right. There are cows – lots of them – mooing at us from the fence lines.

‘So why did you move here?'

‘Dad was out of work and Mum got a retrenchment package, so they thought it made sense.'

‘No one moves here.'

‘Yeah, so I worked out.'

‘I've been nagging my parents for years to leave, but they won't. They love it. They're a bit like Julia. They know everyone and everything. But I'm planning to leave as soon as I've finished school.'

‘That's three years away.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘No one I know thinks that far in advance – not much further than some party that's coming up.'

‘Well, it's different here. Most of us want to escape.'

We're on the edge of town now and I'm glad we don't have to walk past my house, just in case Mum's watching from the window to see where I am.

Two weeks ago I didn't even know Danny, and now we're walking through town together like we're almost friends. Ruby and I have a few friends who are boys, but none of them are cute. They're just boys we happen to be friends with because we like the same music or movies or something. But I don't hang on my own with boys very often. It's usually in a group, so this is a bit strange.

Danny slows down. ‘That's old Samuel's house.'

It's even more falling down than ours is. A total ghost house, it could've come straight out of a movie.

‘We used to knock on his door and run away.'

‘Nice.'

‘Yeah, he loved it.'

‘Does he still live there?'

‘Uh-huh. He must be ninety, but he's pretty scary now. No one plays there anymore.'

There's an old lady in the front garden of the house next door. She's kneeling on the grass and pulling out weeds. Her garden is immaculate. Beds of flowers all arranged in colours and patterns, with pinks and reds together, yellows and oranges, and lots of green.

As we pass, she looks up and smiles. ‘Afternoon, Danny.'

‘Hi, Mrs Cotton.'

‘Who's that you're with, then?'

Danny doesn't give me the chance to say anything: he's already talking for me. ‘This is Lily Frost.'

‘Ah yes. You're new. Moved into the Sarenson house.'

‘That's right,' I get in quickly.

‘Nice that Danny's taking you under his wing.'

The way she says it makes me feel like it's not nice at all, like it's something to be scared of. Danny fusses next to me, ready to go.