Chapter One

When you say I’m negative, I feel like punching somebody. Maybe you.

She’s wrong. What I lack is the motivation  to ‘create and sustain healthy relationships’.

It’s all crap because no product is going to make you stronger, sweeter, more attractive, or happier. You have to do it from the inside – and you’re not going to find a more positive attitude than that.

Asterisk. Except chocolate. Chocolate makes you happier.

Everyone else has read the brochure. I don’t know what I’m doing here, why I have been chosen. The camp counsellors call us ‘Youths with Potential’. At first I thought they meant potential prisoners, but some of the others are softer than me. Broken.

I do know we were all given the chance to do the Solo – twenty-four hours in the bush by ourselves - but not everyone took it. In fact of the twenty-five of us here, only five picked it.

There was some fine print. There was an asterisk, and I missed it.

2 Callum’s Belly

Sometimes you look at someone for the first time and you think straight away that they’re gorgeous. Other times you see just an ordinary person, and then a while later, after you see how they carry themselves and you watch their personality shimmer through their features, you suddenly realise they are the kind of beautiful that you can’t look away from, and you wonder why you didn’t see it the first time.

I was at the kerb when Callum arrived at the camp. There was a woman in the car with him. It could have been his mother, or maybe his social worker dropped him off the way mine did. The woman spoke to him for a moment, putting her hand on his shoulder, and he nodded.

As he climbed out, he swung his bag over his shoulder. I twitched my mouth in a brief smile, but his eyes glided over me as though I was just another tree or signpost, his expression as inscrutable as a cat’s, and then he slouched down the path towards the buildings.

His face was shiny and his hair was damp at the hairline, as though he’d been in the pool, or just finished playing sport. Callum looked like he’d had a really expensive haircut about six months ago, but now it stuck out everywhere.

He wore a houndstooth vest that might have been stolen from an ancient golfer, skater boots and two leather wristbands, then some really sensible dress shorts like the ones my geography teacher wears with his socks pulled up.

He had criss-cross scars on his forearms. They looked designed, ritualistic and deliberate. It wasn’t a pattern exactly – maybe some ancient, lined script, Inca or Mayan.

He looked like an unwashed musician – one of The Strokes.

My first thought was that he was cute but not special. The outfit was borderline. Usually people who make a statement with their clothes don’t have much else to say.

I also decided to ignore him next time I saw him because he made me embarrassed about the twitch-smile when I was already nervous, which was why I was standing on the kerb practising my breathing when the others were already gathered in the courtyard between the mess hall and the cabins, swapping names and the kind of jokes that will become had-to-be-there recurring jokes over the next few weeks.

I was trying to breathe, while inside I was imagining what would happen when I finally went down the path to join them.

The group is conversing and I stand at the edge listening. I laugh when they laugh, and then I start thinking of something to say, because you’re not officially part of the conversation until you’ve added something and somebody has acknowledged it with a reply.

I’m concentrating on what I’ve planned to say – I’m examining it for yuk-yuk value, cleverness, or sarcasm. Does it sound big-headed? Does it sound ignorant? Do I really know what I’m talking about?

I open my mouth and my heart starts beating because even if it is fun and clever they may not acknowledge me. They could skip past the comment as though it never happened, leaving me space to slink away, knowing my place.

Let even one of them try to talk to me after that! For the whole rest of camp I will wear my earphones and stick my face in a book, pretending I’m antisocial by choice. I’ll yawn in their face, or burn them with an acid smile.

Worse, there might be that long pause where they exchange glances. They could all shuffle away and form a tighter circle, leaving me on the outside.

Worse still, one of them could acknowledge my comment by giving me a gentle explanation of all the ways in which I am wrong, ignorant and not funny.

Worst of all – someone could cut me down with a quip, leaving me exposed and desperate like a tourist stranded on a coral reef.

Maybe they just won’t like me? As long as I splash around the shore of the conversation, never dipping in, I won’t have to know either way.

Another car pulled up on the other side of the street. There was a girl inside. I shook my hands and plucked at my clothing. I closed my eyes and tried to do positive scenario projection, but I couldn’t.

When I opened my eyes again, the girl was standing in front of me. Her face was white and when she spoke she let out a big whoosh of air as if she had been holding her breath too.

‘I’m so glad I don’t have to go in by myself!’

She said her name was Bethany. I thought she was nervous, but later I realised she was always like that. Even when she smiled she was pinched and breathless, as though she had just received sad news and was waiting for things to get worse.

We walked down the path together. The group stood silent in a loose cluster, hands in pockets, with their bags between their feet like penguins with eggs.

Callum yawned, stretching out his arms and his vest rode up above the hem of his pants. I could see the little line of hair below his navel disappearing into the elastic band of his underpants. I thought I was looking discreetly, but Bethany raised an eyebrow at me and we both giggled. Our bonding moment.

The next morning at breakfast I watched Callum talking with the other boys. He was fidgety. He had his forearm on a chair next to his, rocking it back and forth, jiggling his knee, rolling his shoulders.

He was wearing a blue checked cowboy shirt with the sleeves ripped off. When he scratched the back of his neck I could see the pale skin of his side, just below his underarm. There was the beginning of a wide scar, white and raised with stitch marks like a fishbone. It made me wonder if he’d taken the scarification thing too far, or if he’d been in a really bad car accident. It was a puzzle and I worried at it like a loose tooth.

I think about Callum. When I am having lustful thoughts about, him that’s what I imagine – I see those parts of him that are not private, but secret anyway.

3 Opening Line

Your opening line tells people what you care about and what sort of attitude you have. It makes a picture in the other person’s mind and it doesn’t really matter what else you say after that. They already have an image of you in their head.

I usually start with a story about when I lived at Nan and Pop’s place. They had a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Macquarie. The house was perched on the edge of the lake and had views to the south. People stayed there just for the night or maybe for months at a time. Nan made meals for them while Pop fished and took care of the garden. He taught me the names of all the trees and shrubs.

The house was old and creaky and had a timber verandah running all the way around the outside. There were pots of geraniums in the corners and a swinging chair with a vinyl covering that fluttered and slapped in the wind.

All the doors to the bedrooms were on the outside, leading onto the verandah. The only internal doors went from the kitchen to the dining room and then into the sitting room where there was an old TV on wooden legs, and a table with what Nan called ‘the tea-and-coffee-making facilities’, which was really just a sugar bowl and some individually wrapped biscuits.

I slept in a room on the east side of the house which had three sets of bunk beds all covered in fuchsia-coloured chenille bedspreads with a fringe around the hem. Nan said it was retro. She told me they were coming back in - she’d seen them at Spotlight. Pop said they were antique.

At the bottom of the garden, at the water’s edge, was an old timber boatshed. Inside there was a rowboat tied to a winch. You turned a lever and the boat would travel down the rail and into the water. Pop and I used to drop crab pots into the bay in the afternoon and collect them the next morning. The crabs inside snapped their claws. I’d squeal and laugh. Pop said that sound carried over water because there was nothing to stop it. He said people would hear my shrieks in New Zealand.

While Pop worked in the garden, Nan and I made cupcakes from a packet. We ate them straight out of the baking tin before they even cooled.

I liked that picture. I hoped the people I told could smell the baking and the salt spray, and hear the lap of the water over the crushed shells and coarse dark sand that was the shore. I wished they would see my grey-haired guardians as playful and sincere – active and at the same time still and constant. I wanted them to imagine me as a lanky tomboy with a ragged fringe that I cut myself, and grazes on my knees from climbing trees.

On that first night at camp, Bethany had the bunk above mine. She told me that for her seventh birthday her parents had given her a puppy, a book on how to raise a puppy and a bowl, collar and lead all in the same shade of lilac which had been her favourite colour at the time. She had called her puppy Minty, but he was very energetic and after a few weeks her parents decided that their family wasn’t ready for a dog so they gave Minty away. They also gave away her book on how to raise a puppy and the matching bowl, collar and lead.

Callum’s first story was about how one day he had been body-surfing with his dad and they swam way out to the breakers off a sandbar. After a while Callum noticed that his father wasn’t there any more. He looked back at the beach and his dad was sitting on the shore, arms wrapped around his knees, watching. When he saw Callum was looking he held his hands over his head, palms together – a shark fin.

‘He saw a shark and he swam all the way in. Fair dink. Didn’t bother to call out to me or anything!’ Callum grinned and shook his head. ‘Silly old bastard. Could have at least got them to turn on the siren or something.’

When I heard Bethany and Callum’s opening lines I wondered how they had been chosen to come on this camp. I wondered what sort of potential they had that I had too. I wondered if my opening line was as see-through as theirs.