Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a crack, marry a rat. Emily is jumping through the hopscotch, even though she’s too old for that now. Her foot comes down in the centre of each square: 4, 3, 2, 1, swivel. If she does this perfectly three times in a row, then nothing bad will happen today because she will have balanced her universe.
Molly is petite, with slinky blonde hair and creamy skin. Emily thinks if she bites her, she will taste like the centre of a moth-eaten apple, brown and soft. I’m going to chew you up and spit you out. That’s what she is thinking as she watches Molly whisper in Amaya’s ear. Amaya laughs and gives Molly the same conspiratorial look she used to give Emily when it was just the two of them, united against the world. Now Amaya belongs to Molly, and Emily belongs to no one.
Molly has kissed three boys in their class, and has 306 friends on her Facebook page. Emily isn’t one of them. She’s not on Amaya’s Facebook page either, because Amaya unfriended her.
Emily doesn’t go on Facebook anymore, because now she doesn’t have any friends.
Emily hasn’t kissed any boys. She kissed Amaya once, though. She and Amaya were lying on Amaya’s bed, reading the dirty parts of Fifty Shades of Grey aloud and killing themselves laughing.
‘Do you think you’ll ever let a boy do that to you?’ Amaya asked.
Emily screwed up her nose. ‘Oh no, that’s gross.’
‘Would you kiss a boy?’
Emily hesitated. ‘I don’t know how.’
Amaya fixed Emily with her almond gaze. ‘I’ll show you.’
And after that, all Emily could think about was Amaya’s soft lips and the feel of her tongue against hers, and how she smelt like Fuzzy Peach perfume from The Body Shop. Amaya told her that was a French kiss. Then Amaya started laughing, and they tumbled around on the bed like puppies, until Emily felt an electric current pass right through her body.
Emily didn’t see how any boy was ever going to make her feel like that.
At lunchtime, Emily sits beneath a tree on the perimeter of the field. Amaya and Molly have gone to the dell with some boys. Emily knows what they are doing. She overheard Molly telling one of the other girls in their class that her favourite hobby is pashing, which is just another word for French kissing.
Amaya and Emily used to lie on the field at lunchtime. They would take their shoes and socks off and pull their school skirts above their knees so they could get a tan. After a couple of weeks, Amaya’s legs were cinnamon brown. Emily just got more freckles. They shared Emily’s earphones and sang loudly to Adele. Emily can’t listen to Adele anymore.
Emily’s favourite hobby is hating Molly.
Molly has a purple pencil case with rounded edges and a zip. It is filled with coloured pencils with sharp points and felts that smell like their colours – strawberry, cocoa, lemon. Amaya has a Hello Kitty pencil case with a miniature pink stapler and blue hole puncher that Molly said was adorable. Amaya and Molly swapped their pencil cases after that.
Emily has chewed the ends of all her pencils, and her red pen has leaked right through her pencil case so it looks like a blood stain. It was ugly anyway, a large yellow cloth bag with a broken zip. It smells like the fermenting banana she found in the bottom of her bag last week. She wiped her bag out, but she can still smell it.
Emily went to The Body Shop last weekend and put Fuzzy Peach perfume on her wrists. Now her cardigan smells like Fuzzy Peach, and she doesn't want to wash it.
Sometimes Emily sees Tommo Hayes when she is walking home from school. Tommo is in the year ahead of her. He has spiky black hair and an earring in his left ear. His older brother died in a car accident last year when he took his Dad's car out after sniffing petrol and drove it into a power pole.
Tommo walks really slowly, as if he doesn't want to go home. Emily always catches up to him and usually she walks past him without saying anything, because she doesn't really know him. The other day she stumbled as she stepped into the gutter to pass him. He caught her by the arm and surprised her by giving her a smile. The next day, he turned around once she got close and offered her a puff on his cigarette. She didn't like the taste, but it gave her a pleasant buzz in her head. She has walked home with him every day since then.
Tommo asks Emily if she wants to come fishing one day after school. They sit on the end of the pier and watch the water moving thickly below their bare feet. Tommo has square fingers and toes that look as if they have been carved out of wood. Emily puts the bait on the hooks for him and when she gets home, she can’t get the smell of fish off her hands.
A few days later, she and Tommo walk to the beach again. This time Tommo doesn’t bring his fishing rod. He brings roll-your-own cigarettes instead, and they sit under the overhang of the cliff to smoke one.
Emily realises it isn’t tobacco as soon as he lights it. She shares it with him anyway. Soon enough she starts laughing and doesn’t know how to stop. Tommo starts laughing too, and then he wants to kiss her, so she lets him. His hands feel rough on her skin, and he smells like salt and cigarettes, and she doesn’t feel a thing.
That night, she sleeps with her cardigan next to her head, but the smell is fading. Soon she won’t be able to smell it at all.
The next day, she gets in trouble at school because she hasn’t done her English essay. That’s probably because she was sitting on her back doorstep watching the stars whirl above her as time stretched out before her like chewing gum. It makes her realise how big the universe is and how small Molly and Amaya are.
So it shouldn’t hurt when she sees them sitting on the field listening to Amaya’s iPod, the way she and Amaya used to. It shouldn’t bother her when she walks past them on her way to the water fountain, and Molly says that Emily is as ‘flat as a pancake’ and should be wearing Band-Aids rather than a bra.
Emily looks at Amaya then, and Amaya flushes, but she doesn’t say anything.
After that Emily hates Amaya even more than Molly.
Step on a crack, marry a rat.
There’s a boy Amaya has her eye on. Emily knows, because she has written his name on the inside of Molly’s pencil case – Rhys. Rhys is tall with wavy brown hair and plays cricket with Tommo.
Amaya and Molly roll up their school skirts at lunchtime and lie on the field so they can get a tan, even though it is only September. They lie close to where the boys are playing cricket. Amaya has a ring on her toe that Molly gave her for her birthday, and she and Molly are wearing identical friendship bracelets around their ankles.
Emily sits on the other side of the field to watch Tommo. During a break in the game, he walks over to kiss her in front of everyone. It’s not true to say she feels nothing, because suddenly she does feel something.
She feels powerful.
One of Tommo’s friends has his learner licence, and he drives them out to Muriwai in his brother’s Holden one Sunday. Tommo has his arm around her. The smell of his stale sweat mingled with cheap deodorant and cigarettes is almost more than she can stand. So she sucks in the smoke from the joint they are passing around in the back of the car, until the world seems bigger again.
They light a fire even though there's a fire ban. The tide is out, and the black sand is layered in swirls and curves. They gather driftwood and throw it on the fire until the flames are leaping into space. Emily feels as if she is going to leap into space too. Eventually she finds herself lying amongst the flax with Tommo’s hand up her top. He doesn’t seem to care that her breasts are small.
When they get back to the fire she sits next to Rhys. He hands her a cigarette and says, ‘You’re friends with Amaya, aren’t you?’
Emily feels something uncoil in the pit of her stomach. She breathes the smoke right down to her lungs and says, ‘Not anymore.’
‘How come?’ Rhys asks, as Tommo flops down beside her.
‘Oh,’ Emily says, as the snake crawls up the back of her throat and spits venom into her mouth. ‘She tried to kiss me – so I said I couldn’t hang around with her anymore.’
Rhys’s face falls. Tommo lets a whoop out so loud, it echoes around the cliffs. Emily feels a little shard of ice burrow into her heart, despite the heat of the fire.
‘So did you kiss her back?’ Rhys asks.
Emily puts her hand on Tommo’s knee. ‘I’m not into girls,’ she says.
Tommo laughs in her ear and runs his hand up her thigh.
‘Emily’s into me,’ he says.
Then they smoke some more weed, and then Tommo takes her back up into the sand dunes where she proves to him that she is, most definitely, not into girls.
New graffiti springs up in the girl’s toilets almost overnight. Amaya and Molly up a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Amaya is a lesbo.
Emily has a necklace Tommo gave to her. It has half a heart on it. Tommo has the other half. She goes to Family Planning to get a prescription for the pill. She starts buying her own cigarettes. When she wakes in the morning, her mouth tastes of ash and betrayal.
Amaya corners her by the bike stands after school and hisses, ‘You’re such a liar. You’re the lesbo.’
Emily looks back at her and twists the heart between her fingers, so Amaya can see the sun glinting off it. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about. I never told anyone.’
‘Good for you.’
Emily looks over Amaya’s shoulder and raises her voice, so the girls walking past can hear her, ‘Get away from me, you dyke.’
At lunchtime, Emily sits under the trees with Tommo and his friends. Sometimes she sees Molly lying in the sun with some of the other girls in their class. Her ankles are bare. Some of Molly's friends fraped Amaya a couple of weeks ago, which means they hijacked her Facebook account. They posted things like, I like to eat pussy and I wear strap-on dildos. Molly is telling everyone who will listen that she is never letting Amaya near her again.
Amaya hasn't come to school since then. Someone said it’s because she overdosed on her Mum's sleeping pills. On the toilet wall there is a new message that says, Silly bitch, try harder next time.
Now Emily is turning 15, and she should be happy. She has a boyfriend and 420 friends on her Facebook page. She is invited to all the cool kids' parties. And yet the other day, she walked past a girl on the street and caught a whiff of Fuzzy Peach perfume. That night she dreamed of tender lips and soft skin. She woke with an ache in her groin and tears on her cheeks.
Emily has 420 Facebook friends and a boyfriend, and she feels like the empty feeling inside her is never going to go away.