Finding Cassie Crazy (4 page)

Dear Emily

Wow. That letter really kicked arse. Do you want to chill or something for a minute though? Getting worked up like that can't be good for your blood pressure.

I didn't mean to offend you. Okay, now I'm lying to you. I did mean to offend you, because I thought you were buried under a landslide and we needed a few rounds of explosives to get you out. I thought maybe there was a real you under all that crap.

And I was right! There's a real you and like I said, she kicks arse!

I see now that all the crap was for your teacher. Why didn't you just say so? I did think maybe you had a bit of a thing for your teacher, like maybe you wanted to get into his pants. But I didn't realise it was to do with your
assessment
.

Wow, if you can degrade yourself that badly, maybe you
should
get into his pants? Have you thought about asking if he would give you extra marks for a blow job?

You've got to learn some pride, Emily.

You've got to make me proud of you.

Yours sincerely

Charlie Taylor

PS You actually think that only private school kids have connections? You want to know what my brothers do? Brian's a cop with connections with the local Triads. Jack's a cop with connections with the local Mafia. And Kevin's a charter member of a motorcycle gang called the Pitbulls. As in those dogs that get their teeth into your flesh and don't let go, even if you hit them with a sledgehammer.

And you think I'm wetting myself because your daddy's a partner in a law firm? Bite me, baby.

Hey Lyd

Inside this envelope, you will see my painting of your dog nose-diving into the Breakfast Pyramid. I spent the whole art class doing sketches to get it right. Is it right?

Okay. Here's the thing. How do I know you're not a snake?

We need more than a couple of letters to establish that you can be trusted. Don't get me wrong, you seem pretty cool, but if I've figured it out right, you also seem to be the daughter of a judge.

Now, he might be a loser who forgets your birthday, but that could be
exactly
what I need to be concerned about. Maybe you're looking for ways to get Daddy's attention?

For all I know, you're waiting to get enough dirt on me and then you're heading for the Breakfast Pyramid and saying: ‘I've caught you a drug dealer, Daddy.
Now
will you say Happy Birthday?'

That's all hypothetical of course. I categorically deny that I deal in drugs.

So what we're going to do is, we're going to do a few tests. If you can do these things for me, even though you might get caught, then I'll know you're not your daddy's little angel.

This is the first test:

It's to set off my school's fire alarm. That's it. You might think it's kind of unimaginative but I haven't got an imagination. You ask Radison. (That's our English teacher.)

The alarm has to go off straight after lunch on Tuesday next week and it has to be serious enough that the whole school spends fifth period on the oval.

If you pass my tests, then I'll know you're not a snake.

Okay, and I'll show my respect by obeying you too. You want me to tell you my dreams?

The dream I had last night was this: I was a kookaburra sitting up high in a eucalypt with my feathers camouflaging nicely into the bark and way down on the ground I see a slither of something sharp. It's a snake. So I move.

I move without stopping to figure out a strategy. I don't stop or think, I just fly. Straight down like a jet plane, heading for a crashlanding in the grass, and next thing I've got the snake.

Then I fly it to the nearest rock so I can smash it against the rock until it's dead. Then I rip open its middle and eat out its guts.

Catch ya

Seb Mantegna

Cassie

Why don't you ask someone who I am?

And then ask what I do to people I don't like.

Matthew Dunlop

Hey! You still with us? Still enjoying our questions?! In this Part, we leave more room for your answers, so you can spread your wings! A recurring theme will be ‘senses'. Tell us about your five senses!

Okay, well, first you should try less open-ended questions. What do you want to know about my senses, exactly?

And second, you should know that I'm only doing this because I want to be an author. It's not because I respect you.

No offence.

I'm in German right now, and this is what's happening. Frau McAllister is getting off on humiliating David Corruthers. She wanted him to write up the sentence, ‘If I had a donkey, I would ride it to school every day' and he's written, ‘If I were a donkey, I would ride myself at school every day.' Big deal, it's close enough.

It's weird the way some teachers are happiest when you make mistakes.

Anyway, as I was saying, I've decided I'll keep writing in this Note-book. Because I've noticed something: I never get right inside my head when I write. So I'm going to use this book to try.

Great! We loved that! Now, tell us, what are your favourite things to eat?

My favourite things to eat include tortoise shells and eucalyptus leaves.

BUT IT'S NOT TRUE. IT'S A LIE! I'M TAKING YOU FOR A RIDE!!!

What star sign are you? Does it capture your personality?

I think we need to invent some new star signs. None of the old ones work for me. I've thought up one called ‘Britney'.

A Britney is a happy-go-lucky person who wants to be a nurse or a meteorologist when he or she grows up. Britneys have fingernails that break easily. Britneys need plenty of calcium.

Tell us something surprising about yourself. Are you a smoker? Or perhaps you are a sword fighter!

I can't believe you know about my sword fighting. Who told you? So, you also know how I spend a couple of hours each afternoon slaying dragons?

Actually, I'm not a smoker either. I used to be but I quit last year because Emily made me. The things you do for your friends.

Em made me quit smoking after they did anti-smoking at school. They showed us this ad which has a girl putting a cigarette in her mouth and not realising that the cigarette is a metal hook. You would surely realise. But anyway, the hook goes through the girl's lip. Do you get it?
Hooked
. Brilliant.

But after that, Em could never look at me with a cigarette without imagining the hook through my lip. She's such a sucker for mind games.

Now you tell me a little about yourself.

Write down a thought for the day.

Today, I'm thinking that this book is a waste of time and I'll never be an author in a million zillion years.

Time for another QUICK FLICK! Tell us the first memory that comes into your head!

I remember Cassie walking towards us across the primary school playground, carrying her skipping rope. It's her birthday, so she got to ring the Old Bell for the start of lunchtime.

Em and I are already halfway through our Vegemite sandwiches and she's just walking across the yard.

She did a bad job ringing the Old Bell. Em and I are excellent at it when it's our birthdays: we can make it go ja-jing, ja-jing, like a real brass bell should.

Cass just made it go: clangetty, clangetty. Crash. She must have been shaking it side to side.

Cass arrives and says, ‘The bell sounded stupid, huh?'

And Em says, ‘Derrrr, Fred,' and I say, ‘Maybe yes, maybe no,' and Em says, ‘Don't worry, it's because you're no good at being the centre of attention,' and Cass stands still in front of us, with a funny look in her eye, winding the skipping rope around her wrist.

What is a sound that you like to hear? Tell us all about it!

You know, there's this background noise in my head sometimes, like electricity or maybe like frogs croaking.

One time I was getting a bus home from school and a family of ducks crossed the road. I was sitting in the seat right alongside the driver. This was when I was maybe eight years old and in love with the bus driver. He was fatter than half a bus and named Barney.

‘Hey kid,' Barney always said. ‘It's all happening, eh?'

I always pretended I knew what he was talking about. ‘Oh yeah,' I always said. ‘It's really happening.'

I sat there bumping along next to Barney, waiting for it all to happen. And Barney would lean his fat stomach forward over the steering wheel at T-intersections, to look both ways.
Or he'd concentrate on getting the bugs off the windscreen by aiming at them with washer-fluid and the wipers.

So this one time, I was getting the bus home from school as usual, and I saw a mother duck and her five little baby ducks. They were on the side of the road. I sat there watching through the dusty window and I forgot to tell Barney. I saw them but I didn't say a word.

Barney was watching some noisy kids in his rear-view mirror, and shaking his head about them and, next thing, the mother duck decides to head herself and her five little babies across the road.

None of the bumps was big enough to make the kids up the back hit their heads on the roof. Just a little bump and then bumpity-bumpity-bump.

‘Christ,' Barney said to me. ‘Was that what I think it was?'

‘Yep,' I said.

Barney raised his eyebrows—like
whoops
—and drummed on the steering wheel with one hand. Like someone in a band.

What is a smell that you like to smell? Tell us all about it!

I don't know if that was his name or not. Barney. That could be just a name I made up.

I have a lot of dreams about sex. I mean, dreams about what I think sex is like. I think it must be good. If kissing is anything to go by, it must be great.

What is a feeling that you like to feel? Tell us all about it!

Sometimes I get so worried about Cassie it makes me cry. I try to get her to talk to Em and me, like she used to, but she just smiles and says she's fine.

She hasn't said anything about the letters she gets from
Brookfield, for instance. She reads them and smiles to herself kind of secretly.

Whereas Em is hysterical about her penfriend. She keeps telling us that she's never writing to him again, but I know she will because she always wants the last word.

But I don't know about the guy who's writing to me. At first I thought he was okay, but then he sent his kookaburra/snake letter. I hate it when guys get all serious like they're the ones who know how the world really works. Whereas girls are only playing at life and we have to be careful or we'll get ourselves
and them
into trouble.

Now I don't know how to answer him. I could do his ‘test' for him. To show he doesn't scare me. But doesn't that mean he's the one with the power?

What is a sight that you love to see? Tell us all about it!

I think I'm going to throw this stupid, frigging, waste-of-my-time Note-book away.