Afterlight (7 page)

‘You, uh, okay?’

He sounded uncomfortable, almost awkward. He helped me to sit up as I wiped my face
on the back of my sleeve, and I numbly registered that, for five seconds at least,
we’d been holding hands. Now if that wasn’t miraculous, then nothing was.

I was too beat up to speak, and for a moment I could have been Linda Jelly: ashamed
to be seen this way, but so abjectly grateful at the same time. When I was finally
on my feet, Jordan backed away with his hands up in a curious gesture of surrender.
It was like something you’d see partway through an old Saturday afternoon Western,
where the guy under the white flag approaches the enemy, delivers his message, then
retreats, hoping he won’t be shot in the back. I’d never seen Jordan so uneasy, almost
like he was afraid of
me
, and it made a tiny bit of my bashed-in brain take notice.

He waited for me to stumble out behind him then shut the storeroom door behind us.
‘We’re nothing,’ he muttered, not looking me in the eye. ‘I don’t know how much you
can do, or what you want, but it goes no further, okay?’

Before I could even start to frame an answer to any of that, he walked off with his
head down and his hands in his pockets.

He sure knows what to say to a girl
, I thought, the floor ducking and weaving under
my feet.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ snapped Mrs McKendry at me as I huddled in the back row,
nursing a balled-up, bloody tissue. It was the third period of the day and I’d already
suffered stoically through Biology, my eyes on the back of Jordan Haig’s head as
he gave an intelligent, off-the-cuff summary of what an onion epidermis actually
did. He’d put his words straight into practice, his eyes skimming straight past mine
as we’d all taken our seats.

We were truly nothing. That hurt almost more than my ribs did.

I was trying to put it all together—how had he come to be there?—but none of the
pieces fit. They weren’t even from the same puzzle. And now Mrs McKendry was trying
to get me to solve a probability question before a live audience—who almost certainly
knew what Claudia and her goons had done to me. It was humiliating. I couldn’t hold
my head up properly and my nose had started to bleed. Stress sometimes brings on
nosebleeds with me, which just added to my general, dazzling allure.

‘We all know what
you’ve
been up to, Sophie,’ Mrs McKendry added hatefully, ‘you
busy little Samaritan. But
that doesn’t excuse you from telling me what proportion
of smarties in that cone full of smarties is likely to be
blue
.’ She drew a ring
around the complicated looking diagram of a cone (r = 100 cm) that she’d drawn up
on the whiteboard.

Blue smarties? At a freakin’ time like this?

A feeling rose up in me that was pretty close to white-hot, exterminate-anything-in-my-path
rage. It was a weird sensation: I was almost high with anger. My hands were shaking
as I gathered up my books. She could take that cone and its load of flipping smarties
of many colours, I told myself, and—

Knowing I’d pay for it later in a million different horrible ways, I just left the
room. Even surprised myself. Held my head up as far as my neck would let me and staggered
out the door.

To my amazement, no one tried to stop me, though it was a sea of open mouths, wall-to-wall.
Biddy had told me that there was still a rumour going around after Monday’s phenomenon-in-the-toilets
that I might have somehow developed super powers. The
Hatherlea
thing had only intensified
the speculation. So even Mrs McKendry let me pass without a word.

Jordan Haig and I came face-to-face in the deserted second floor corridor where all
the Year 12s had their lockers.
What he was doing there, I did not know, but we had
to stop meeting like this. It was bad for my heart. I took a breath that hurt right
down to my toes.

He did a double take at the exact same moment, shooting me a look of such pure loathing
that I almost recoiled.

How did I deserve
that
?

He snarled, ‘I can see her, you know. And I know what she’s trying to do.’

The words set off fresh shocks in my system.

‘You tell her to keep away from me.’

That’s when I realised Eve was standing right behind me looking at him looking at
me. And she was
smiling
.

Shit, he could see her. She’d suddenly chosen to reappear right here, right now,
and he could
see
her?

‘You can see her?’ I gasped, forgetting that Jordan and I were nothing and shouldn’t
even be speaking.

Why was Eve smiling?

It didn’t make her look any more…human. If anything, the look on her face was almost
greedy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t an expression of joy, nothing as simple as that.

Jordan’s look was utterly disparaging. ‘Of course I can see her.’ He grabbed his
pack and skateboard and slammed his locker door. ‘
You never let them in
, or this
is what happens.’

‘You mean, all this time…’ I scrambled for words, for understanding.

‘Whatever she wants, tell her I’m not interested,’ Jordan shot back, averting his
gaze. He pressed his fingers into the skin of his left arm fiercely, from shoulder
to wrist, before hitching his pack higher.

Why was he so agitated? And what was he talking about? What would Eve want with him
when she had me? Suddenly, I had so many questions I couldn’t get them out fast enough.
But Jordan was already walking away.

‘Wait, wait!’ I shouted at his back. ‘
You
tell her. She doesn’t speak to
me
. She
doesn’t even
smile
at me. She just makes me do things. Why?
Why?
’

Jordan just hunched his shoulders and kept walking, which is when the haunting of
Jordan Haig officially began.

I watched, open-mouthed, as lockers erupted as he passed, their contents exploding
outwards in step with Jordan’s departure but somehow never hitting him. It was like
he moved in a protective bubble or force-field as he wedged his skateboard under
one armpit and pressed and pressed on his arms; the left first, then the right. Exercise
books, rulers, runners, folders, phones, diaries—all seemed to change course before
they could touch him.

The incredible noise caused classroom doors up and down the corridor to shoot open
in time for everyone to get a load of their personal belongings raining down from
the sky. With me just standing there like a stunned mullet, at the far end.

Of course, by then, Jordan was gone and there was nothing I could say that anyone
would believe except, maybe,
Abracadabra?

The point where the principal sent me home—after telling me not to darken the doors
of the school for a week—was the point where The Star Hotel officially came under
siege.

Just after the first evening news bulletin, a whole lot of rubber-neckers who never
usually went near a pub—you could spot people like that a mile off—came in to see
me pour drinks at the bar like I could turn beer into solid gold. As the hours wore
on, regulars couldn’t achieve the corner of a bar stool, let alone a table. Gran
was even forced to put two hired gorillas on the door and institute a red velvet
rope to keep the hopefuls in line. A red velvet rope. Like my life had suddenly turned
into the hottest VIP nightclub in town, because they’d all come to see
me
.

I winced as the TV over the bar proclaimed me
The Saviour of Sancerre Street
and
flashed up a street view of The Star. ‘Talk is,’ a female reporter said brightly
from right outside, ‘a busload of pilgrims from Far North Queensland is planning
to drop by the pub after seeing the Pope conduct a public mass at the racecourse
next month.
They’re bringing sick babies and cancer sufferers. Hoping Sophie “Storkie”
Teague will “lay on the hands” and see if anything happens. Back to you, Garry.’

‘Imagine,’ Gran slung at me dryly as we pulled beers back-to-back, barely able to
keep up with the orders, ‘the Pope and you, on a double bill.’

‘I’d come and watch if that happened,’ Dirty Neil said, licking his lips as I passed
just out of his reach with an inward shudder. ‘Make a day of it.’

Gran gave him the stink eye as she swiped his empty glass off the counter. ‘The idea!
She couldn’t heal a cold sore if she tried.’ She addressed the wall of faces pressed
up closest to the bar. ‘The Council’s even called me about permit issues and taking
out extra insurance if we decide to go ahead with a—what did they call it?—
public
blessing
. And did I tell you how much I hate the paparazzi? They’ve stuffed the
neighbourhood up good and proper. You can’t drive anywhere without a bedsheet over
your head with holes cut out in it for your eyes.’

As people laughed, someone yelled out, ‘Love!’ trying to climb up over the countertop,
‘Give us a selfie?’

I shook my head.

‘Lay on the hands? I’d love a laying on of the hands.’

‘Got no tits or bum to speak of, does she?’

Panicked, I backed away as people kept calling out and filming me with their cameras
right out in front of my
face. But there was nowhere to go behind the bar and I yelled,
‘Gran?’

I could hear Linda Jelly unloading on live TV about the endemic bully culture at
Ivy Street High. The reporter cut next to Claudia P., who said primly on camera through
shiny pink lips that Sophie Teague was a known Satan worshipper. Mrs McKendry added
eagerly that I was easily the worst student she’d ever taught in her twenty-three
years of maths teaching. ‘And to make matters worse, she’s extremely
insolent
.’

Gran was saying, ‘…And I’ve had a gutful of people trying to sneak in claiming they’re
delivery boys or C-list Aussie soap stars! We’ve even had reporters going through
our rubbish for evidence that Soph’s “special”.’

‘Gran?’

‘…And I’ve told every celebrity manager that’s called to
bugger off
in five different
ways. Said I won’t start living off my only grandchild like a maggot until I’m at
least eighty and demented…’

‘
GRAN?
’ I bawled, my voice loud and shaky. And, I swear, the entire room stopped
dead.

Gran turned, mid-sentence, took one look at my face and said, ‘Right, this is not
a zoo and she’s not an exhibit for everyone’s delectation.’ She flapped the end of
her black apron at me. ‘
You
, go upstairs. You lot, if you’re not drinking—the door’s
over there.’

The raucous laughter of strangers followed me up the stairs. The one bright point
of my night was that no one seemed to know about Jordan’s involvement, mainly because
he didn’t appear to be talking to anyone about anything. And I was glad about that,
because the way I was feeling, I didn’t really want to find out his opinion of me
over free-to-air.

The hoopla about me was even bigger than the city shooting that had set everything
in motion and brought Eve into my life in the first place. That story had been huge—
Imagine
that happening, here! In this town!
The headlines had screamed for days:
Ice! Vodka
shooters! Bikers! Strippers! Roid Rage!

But my story was bigger, because it was an excuse for every wacko psychic spoon-bending
medium to come out of the woodwork with their take on things. Somehow, they were
linking me to the Kennedy assassinations, recent sightings of alien spacecraft in
the Northern Territory and a serial killer that had been plaguing Western Australia
for decades. It was wild.

The sceptics were having a field day, too. Everyone suddenly had an opinion on Storkie
Teague. The best was when some ex-Department of Defence genius said over the radio
talkback, which Cook insisted on having on in the kitchen, that they should hook
me up to a stealth bomber and have me end the War on Terror single-handedly.

The irony of it was that what Eve had done to my life had pushed her own story right
out of the press, and there was no one I could tell that to.