The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl (19 page)

Then I toss the sketchpad onto the floor, and I pull on my sleep mask and go back to bed.

•

It feels like only minutes before I sit up with a start. I tug off my mask and hurry to my window.

The white sky is still bearing down over the farm. A breeze has kicked up, rustling the tents and what remains of the scrappy Thunderdome. I’m sweaty, and my room is boiling, but as I stare out over the field the flesh on my arms becomes all goosepimply.

I rescue my phone from beneath a couch cushion. It’s just past lunchtime, and I have only one text. It’s not Grady’s doe-eye that flashes on my screen, but the puckered selfie of Petey’s lips.

Hey Alba. Is Grady with u? We’re supposed to be helping Mr Grey move the karaoke machine into the courtyard – he’s on a mission to do an Apocalypse Now-themed NYE – but I can’t find DG anywhere.

I don’t bother responding. I call Grady’s number. I’m only a little bit surprised when he doesn’t answer.

I wipe away my smudged make-up and scrub my face till my skin feels raw. I change into cut-offs and Dad’s soft blue
Archie
T-shirt that says
I’m with Jughead
on the front. And I scoot through my back door and walk away from Albany’s.

•

I head away from the farm, and the penny-farthing that has gathered a following over the last week; at this moment, a group of shirtless guys are posing in front of the oversized wheel, Christmas hats on their heads and cans of beer in their hands. After the Frida incident, I’d collected the rest of my gnomes and stored them in the space beneath the back verandah. The spots of empty dirt seem wrong somehow, a little gnome graveyard where my ceramic family should be.

I pause at the Eversons’ fruit-and-veg. In front of the window is a sun-bleached bench that has lived there for as long as I can remember. I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent on it, drawing and distracting Grady while he’s supposed to be working. On a normal Boxing Day, Mr Everson and Mr Garabaldi and Mr Grey would be perched there, side by side, sharing beers and old-man stories. But the bench is occupied by a bunch of strangers, and my three old men are nowhere to be seen.

Without thinking about it, I turn back down Main Street, and head east out of town.

•

I clear the few caravans and cars on the outskirts of the Valley, and the noise quickly disappears. It’s a good half-hour walk down the empty road, but I have this hunch I’m heading in the right direction.

Set back from the road is the primary school that closed a few years before I was born. Now, it’s little more than a graffiti-filled building in the middle of an overgrown field, with a weed-infested playground behind it. But it’s the closest place that has a proper court, and I know it’s where my boy would go when he needs to clear his head.

I hear the thud of a ball against bitumen. I duck beneath the gap in the fencing and pick my way carefully through the grass.

‘There you are,’ I say brightly as I round the building. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

Grady pauses, his back to me. Clouseau lopes across the grass and licks at my ankles. ‘Everywhere?’ Grady says as he tosses the ball neatly through the rusted hoop. ‘There’s, like, four places I could be. Where exactly did you look?’

I sit down on a bench at the edge of the court and haul Clouseau into my arms. ‘I dunno. The bakery. The street.
I
am not the detective, Grady.’

Grady bounces the ball a couple of times. It hits a nasty-looking thistle growing through the three-point line, and it careens sideways into the grass. He sighs. And he finally turns around. He rubs his palms over his hungover face before he meets my eye.

‘So. Either I’ve developed a particularly offensive skunkification ailment, or you, my friend, have been avoiding me for the past two days. Two days, Domenic. That’s, like, five months in dog years.’ I straighten my spine as my confidence falters. ‘Not to mention the hard-boiled drinking problem you seemed to have adopted …’

He grimaces. ‘Yeah. The beer might have been a mistake. If it makes you feel better, it tasted almost as crap on the way back up.’ He kneads the back of his neck. ‘And I haven’t been avoiding you. I’ve just been trying to give you “space”. Isn’t that what you said you wanted?’

I gape at him while my brain reels back over our stupid fight. ‘I said I needed head space, but I didn’t mean … Grady, do you even remember the last time you and I went a whole two days without talking?’

He sighs again. He fishes his ball out of the grass, and he comes and sits beside me on the undersized bench. ‘And do you think that’s normal?’ he says eventually.

‘What do you mean?’

He looks out over the farmland. ‘I’ve been thinking about stuff. Stuff that you said, and … I think you were right. I don’t think I’ve been very fair to you, Alba. It’s not my place to talk you into anything.’ He bumps my shoulder, but his eyes stay focused somewhere in the distance. ‘I couldn’t even talk you into doing Scouts with me when we were kids. And there were toasted marshmallow nights involved. Remember?’

‘I would have sucked at all that outdoorsy stuff,’ I mumble. ‘But Grady, I didn’t mean that I wanted you and me to
not
hang out. That’s just the stupidest idea in the universe. Especially now, when time – I didn’t mean –’

‘The thing is,’ he says quietly. ‘Everything you said … it’s stuff I’ve been thinking about as well.’ He drops the basketball and rolls it between his feet, slowly, backwards and forwards. ‘Sometimes your voice is all I can hear in my head, too. Sometimes it’s hard to see anything clearly when everything’s been so … great. You know?’

I look down at the bench beside us. It’s covered with sketchy graffiti; faded, misspelt reflections from little hands long gone. ‘Grady … when did you decide you wanted to be a lawyer? Do you even know why you picked that?’

He scoots off the bench and sits on the ground with his back to me. ‘Well, when I was a kid I wanted to be Inspector Gadget. You remember that, right?’ He runs his fingers over Clouseau’s ears. ‘Not my proudest phase, but – I dunno. I always liked puzzles. I think the world is really unfair, and I like the idea of making it a bit fairer. I would’ve been a detective, only pretty sure I’d shoot myself in the arse with my own gun.’ He swallows uncertainly as he glances up at the white sky. ‘You know why I chose law, Alba. It was because of your dad.’

‘Dad?’

‘Well, yeah. Will always had the best stories. He was always telling me about the cases he studied at law school and the weird people he met at uni. He said it never bothered him that he didn’t practise, cos he just loved learning all that stuff. Will was, like, the coolest grown-up I knew.’

‘I’d forgotten all about that.’ I stare at the top of his curls in a sudden swoop of shame. ‘You and Dad. I’d forgotten how close you guys were. I don’t know why I never thought about it before, but it’s like … you lost two dads. Right?’

‘Careless, huh?’ he says with a humourless laugh.

I hug my arms tightly around me, even though the heat from the bitumen makes my skin feel like it’s liquefying.

‘Grady. I miss my dad,’ I whisper.

He leans his head against my knee. ‘Yeah, Alba. I miss him too.’

Grady sighs. He swivels away from me and lies down on the hot, cracked ground. And I don’t know why, but I have this sudden, insane flashback of us when we were kids. We used to hang out here all the time, watching Anthony and his friends playing basketball, or Daniel ripping up the grass on his bike. And there it is again – for some reason, I can’t remember the in-between. In my memory, Grady was a scrawny, boofy-haired kid, and then he was –

He closes his eyes. I remember, once upon a time, Cleo carrying a giggly Grady upside-down by the ankles from here. Now, he towers over his mum, his shoulders way broader than hers –

‘Alba, you need to figure out what you want,’ he says with his eyes still closed. Maybe I’ve never noticed, but though his voice isn’t a gravelly man-voice like Ed’s, it’s still solid, and sort of deep. ‘And if staying here is what you really want, then that’s just the way it has to be.’

Have I really never noticed that a light layer of hair trails down his arms to his wrists, and that his hands are big, and rough from years of basketball and hauling boxes and odd jobs around town? That when he reaches up to run a hand tiredly behind his neck, the muscles in his arms pop – not as chunky as Daniel’s, but still, substantial, and so guy-like –

‘You were the one who said it,’ he says softly. ‘You said we can’t do everything together forever. Guess it’s taken me a while to get it through my head, but …’ he drags himself upright and sits beside me on the bench again. ‘I think you were right. One way or another … I suppose everything ends.’

I focus on the scuffed toe of his Vans. ‘Domenic. Way to sound dramatic. You know, it’s not like you’ll be moving to Mars. You’ll still visit. You’ll text.’ My throat feels thick, like the words burbling out of it aren’t the ones I want or mean. I swallow down a rising panic, but I can’t seem to make these impostor words stop. I nudge his shoulder with mine. ‘I’ll see you in the society pages or whatnot, and I’ll be all, like, there’s the boy I knew from way back when. It’s not the end of the world.’ And then I cover my face with my hands as hysterical laughter bubbles out of my mouth. I stand up quickly. ‘Look, I need to get back to the bakery. It’s all totally fine. I gotta go.’

But he grabs my hand before I can move. He looks at it with surprise, like he’s not entirely sure how my hand found its way into his. ‘Alba, I would stay,’ he says quickly. ‘I would change everything if you asked –’

I clutch his hand between both of mine, and I hold on as tightly as I can. ‘No. Grady … you have always been like every secret superhero I know. Just busting to rip off the dork suit and glasses.’ I take a deep breath, and I smile at him as best as I can. ‘You weren’t meant to stand still. I’ve always known that.’

‘But what about you?’ he whispers.

‘Me? I have no idea what powers I’ve got hiding underneath. Maybe something cool, like optic-blast eyeballs. Maybe something lame, like fish telepathy or whatever. But I need to find out. On my own. I think it’s … necessary.’

Grady is focusing on my hands. The bench is too low for his long legs, but he swivels one knee sideways and pulls me in just a bit closer. ‘Alba, you know it doesn’t matter where you end up. You are going to be brilliant. You’re gonna be, like, the next Ramona Fradon or something.’

‘Hey. You remember who she is? I’m impressed.’

‘I’ve learnt heaps from you, Sarah Jane Albany.’ He stares at my hands for a moment longer. And then he turns my palm over, and he kisses me gently on the inside of my wrist. ‘I’m going to hang around here for a bit. I’ll see you later, okay?’

‘Sure. Later, Grady.’

I walk home, my feet bouncing in time to the heavy bass beat that thuds down the road as I near town. I feel kind of blank. Except, when I pull open my bedroom door, there’s that thick, lumpish thing in my throat making it really hard to swallow or breathe.

I know I should use everything that’s churning through my head as fodder for my Cinnamon Girl. I should be able to haul out my pencils and translate all my messiness into brilliance on a page.

I bury my face in my green couch, and I bawl my eyes out instead.

I am not a moper. I’ve never seen much point in sulking. So – after allowing myself the rest of Boxing Day to wallow in a funk of angst and woe – I leap out of bed at five the next morning, determined to embrace life with new-found optimism. Task one? Drawing my curtains tight against the outside world, and drowning out the noise with the
Wicked
soundtrack cranking through my earbuds.

My phone buzzes with a bazillion messages from my friends – including a handful of missed calls that flash with Daniel’s clear blue eyes – but I just don’t have time for their nonsense today. I’m occupied with the much more vital tasks of painting my toenails in Wonder Woman cobalt, with red tips and perfectly spaced white stars, and then cataloguing my longboxes of comics into a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet.

In the afternoon, after using up an entire sketchpad moving the furniture in Cinnamon Girl’s warehouse, I bolt out of my chair with this sudden desire to bake. I install myself in a corner of Albany’s kitchen and churn out batch after batch of lemon-meringue cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and hand-painted fondant daisies. Angie hovers in my vicinity, though she doesn’t really say much. She does periodically check in with cups of iced tea. For some reason, she also moves all the knives to the other side of the kitchen.

That night, after battling my crappy internet trying to upload angry sketches to the Hawkeye Initiative, I can’t get to sleep. I flip my pillow over and over, trying to keep my face on the cool side, before deciding it’s just way too hot to stay in bed. I slip into the bakery and snaffle a glass of icy milk and a leftover slice of apple strudel. Then I pass out on the cool tiles.

When Mum finds me the next morning, I am splayed on my sleeping bag beneath the shelves we use for growing yeast. She stares at me with her vigilant-face on, before making this exasperated sound effect like
argamagah!
And then I am banned from the kitchen for the rest of the day.