The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay (12 page)

Nick closes the study door behind him, shutting out the catcalls and cheering that accompanied our walk to this room.

‘We've got five minutes.'

I'm not sure if he's looking at me as he says this or not because I'm just leaning against the study wall, arms crossed and staring at the floor. My heart is beating so fast it feels like it's actually hitting my chest. Five minutes? Five minutes of what, exactly? I don't know if I'm excited or terrified at the thought of what lays ahead.

I never expected this. I so badly wanted him to choose me and so badly didn't want him to choose me, all at the same time.

And then it happened. ‘I choose Rachel.' Not Zoë or Amanda or Leanne or Kate Winter, or any of the other girls. Nick had specifically requested me. And, I have to admit, that when he said my name, I got the same feeling in my stomach as when they announced me as a prefect late last year. Because he may be a pain and annoying and a million other things, but Nick McGowan is gorgeous, in a dishevelled, blond surfie kind of way.

Naturally when he said my name, I played it cool and pretended to be disinterested. I rolled my eyes. I made a horrified face at the carpet. I definitely made sure I didn't look pleased. Or worse, enthusiastic. And then I looked at Zoë across the circle. Just from looking at her face, I'd know what she was thinking. Our eyes met. She nodded her approval.

So now I'm here with Nick. Alone. In a study at Sally West's house. With the door shut. And ‘Kokomo' by the Beach Boys is playing on the stereo outside.

‘So . . .'

‘So . . .'

‘Thanks for going along with this.' He smiles at me as though I'm here for a job interview.

‘Whatever,' I say, looking away and trying to keep the combined fear and excitement out of my voice. I wish I hadn't eaten quite so many Cheezels. Oh God. What if I taste like fake cheese stuff?

‘What time is it now?'

I glance down at my watch. ‘Eight-forty-five.' I try to say this in an alluring manner. Then I flick my hair a little bit and try to look seductive. But not slutty – I don't want him to think we're about to have five-minute sex. I look out the window and start singing along to ‘Kokomo' in a nonchalant, I'm-really-laid-back kind of way. I love this song.

‘I hate this song,' says Nick, with his back turned to me.

‘Me too.' I roll my eyes as if I'm completely over it while making a mental note to hide my ‘Kokomo' cassingle when I get home.

I glance at Nick. He doesn't seem to be interested in me at all. He's too busy looking at the bookcase in Sally West's study. Pulling covers out, reading the back-cover blurbs. Putting them back.

‘So how long do we have in here?' I say, trying to hurry him along. I know full well we've only got five minutes but I want to get the ball rolling.

‘Five minutes,' he calls over his shoulder.

‘So . . .
'
Try to think of something to say. Say something. Say something.

‘So, good idea suggesting that we come into this room.'

He pushes a copy of
The Road Less Travelled
back into the bookcase. ‘Well, this way they won't know what we did.'

What the hell does that mean? Suddenly I just want to get this over and done with. ‘Well, I'm ready whenever you are.'

He turns around and looks at me with a puzzled expression.

Oh shit
.

It's a horrible moment. One of those horrible moments when you immediately know that you've said the wrong thing. That you've just made a complete fool of yourself.

‘We're not actually going to do anything, you know that, right? We're just going to tell them that we pashed.' He stops, shakes his head and says, ‘I hate that word. Anyway, we'll just tell them that we kissed and they won't know the difference. You knew that,
right
?'

It takes a second for me to register the meaning of his words.
We can just tell them that we pashed? He has no intention of kissing me. Ohmygod, I'm such an idiot. I should have known
. . .

‘I knew you wouldn't be interested because of your boyfriend.'

My brow furrows and then the penny drops. My boyfriend. I'd completely forgotten that in the library that day I'd told Nick McGowan I had a boyfriend.

‘You
do
have a boyfriend, right?' Nick's face is moving from puzzled to suspicious.

‘Yes.'

‘That's what I thought.'

Nick takes a seat in the swivel chair behind the desk. I slide down the wall and onto the carpet, rest my head on my knees and wait the next few minutes out. ‘Don't Worry, Be Happy' plays on the stereo outside.

‘They've locked us in.'

‘What?'

Nick turns the doorknob but the door won't actually open. He pushes against it with his shoulder. Then he turns to me, ‘Those morons have pushed something heavy against the door.' He shakes his head and rolls his eyes.

I hear them laughing outside.

I slide back down the wall onto the carpet. ‘Could this evening get any worse?'

Yes, apparently, because no sooner are those words out of my mouth then George Michael's ‘I Want Your Sex' comes booming through the stereo in Sally West's lounge.

Ohmygod I want to die
. I don't know where to look. My face heats up. So I stare down at the carpet.

Nick McGowan walks back across the room to sit on the big, black leather swivel chair behind the mahogany desk.

‘My God, you cross your arms a lot.'

I look up.

‘I've never met anyone who crosses their arms as much as you. It's really standoffish.'

‘Well, I'm stressed. I've got a lot on my mind.'

‘Like?'

‘Like three assignments, and we've got a Biol exam coming up, and tomorrow is my last chance to win the Party Hostess of the Year title at work. And I've got to win it.'

‘Do I even want to know what
Party Hostess of the Year
is?'

I make a sarcastic face at Nick. ‘It's a competition at the restaurant where I work. It's the award given to the person judged to give the best birthday parties.'

‘So what, there's a prize? You could win money or something?'

‘No, it's just, it's just a title. You don't get anything. Anyway, the point is that I've
got
to win it.'

‘Why?'

‘Why what?'

‘Why have you got to win it? Is that what you want to do? Do you want to work with little kids or something? Are you hoping that it will help you get a job?'

I snort. ‘No. I want to do Communications.'

Nick McGowan looks surprised. ‘Sooo what difference does it make if you win the award? What does it matter?'

‘Well—'

‘Hello, lovebirds.'

We look up to see Kate Winter in the doorway. ‘They were sitting on opposite sides of the room,' she yells out over her shoulder. ‘I knew he wouldn't kiss her.'

She turns back and looks at us, a smug expression on her face. I feel my cheeks go red. I feel embarrassed and humiliated and for a second I feel like I might actually cry, until Nick McGowan gets up, taps Kate Winter on the shoulder and says, ‘Kate, you've got food in your teeth.' Then he turns to me, offers me a hand up off the floor and says, ‘Let's go get something to eat.'

We're standing in Sally West's kitchen, staring into her fridge.

‘I don't think we should be going through their fridge. We should be in the pool with everyone else.'

But Nick's not listening. He's too busy pushing past containers. ‘Yeah, but it's thirty-four degrees, I'm starving and we need something cold. Where's Benson when we need her?'

‘Yuck. Who eats beetroot?' I pick up a can of tinned beetroot that's sitting on a middle shelf. ‘It looks the way it tastes.'

‘Rachel, Rachel, Rachel – the beetroot is the best part of any hamburger. In fact, I would go so far as to say that a hamburger is not truly a hamburger unless it has at least three' – he holds up three fingers to my face – ‘slices of beetroot on it.'

I screw up my face and push his hand away. ‘Beetroot? You're joking, right?'

‘No. I love the stuff. It's the sweetness of the beetroot combined with the salty flavour of the beef patty. Then there's the texture and the colour. It's the whole aesthetics of it. Beetroot has a lot going for it.'

‘You're insane.'

‘One day, Rachel, if you're very, very lucky, I'll share with you my secret recipe for beetroot and hommus dip.'

I pretend to gag and say, ‘I'd rather eat my own vomit' as he opens the freezer door and picks up a dark blue ice-cream container.

‘Ahh, Double Chocolate Swirl ice-cream. Now we're talkin'.'

‘I don't know about this.'

‘Stop panicking. Mr and Mrs West are overseas. They'll probably come back fat. We're doing them a favour.' I follow him out the screen door to take a seat at the small cast-iron table and chairs on the patio.

I look down at the ice-cream bucket. ‘But Sally and her brother are still here. This is probably theirs.'

Through the screen I watch Stacey and Amanda walk into the kitchen and grab a box of chocolates out of the fridge. When they see Nick and I sitting out on the patio, they wave.

I wave back.

‘See, they're doing it. They're raiding the fridge too.'

I turn back to Nick. ‘Stacey brought those chocolates with her, fool.'

He holds out a spoon and says, ‘Do you want some or not?'

I hear someone coughing and then wheezing inside.

‘Hear that? That's a smoker's cough. That'll be you some day, considering how much you smoke. You're such a—'

Suddenly there's a crash. Nick and I both turn our heads just in time to watch Amanda Towers collapse onto the slate tiles of the kitchen floor. And before I can even process what's happened, Nick has run inside.

Inside, Stacey races out of the room to fetch the phone, leaving Nick and I with Amanda, who is lying unconscious on the floor. Her face has suddenly become covered with a lumpy, red rash and her lips and tongue are swollen and blue, distorting her face.

‘If Stacey's calling 000, what are we meant to do?' I turn and look at Nick McGowan, who is kneeling next to Amanda, talking out loud to himself.

‘Dr ABC, Dr ABC. D, is Danger. Is she in danger?' He looks around. ‘Okay, no.' He adjusts Amanda's head so that she's lying completely flat on the kitchen floor. ‘R is . . . shit – what's R?'

He looks at me.

‘I dunno. I dunno, Nick. You're the one who's done these courses. Maybe R is recovery?'

‘No. R is, R is, Response. R is response. Amanda, can you hear me?' I watch Nick McGowan shake Amanda gently by the shoulders. ‘Amanda? Okay, no response. No response.' He runs his fingers through his hair and looks up at me. ‘I can't remember what to do. Two first-aid courses, and I can't remember anything.'

‘Yes, you can.'

He looks down at Amanda. ‘Okay, what does this look like? Lips and tongue swollen. Rash. This is like an allergic—' He spots a bracelet on her arm, and bends closer to examine it. ‘This bracelet says she's allergic to peanuts. She must have accidentally eaten something with peanuts. Her throat is swelling up. She's gonna stop breathing soon. Dr ABC, so A is Airways.'

Stacey rushes back into the room. ‘An ambulance is coming. Five minutes.'

‘Did Amanda just eat something with peanuts?' I look at Stacey, unable to mask the panic in my voice.

‘Well, we thought the chocolates we had were plain. But—'

Nick says, ‘Don't worry about that. Get her handbag. They'll be an EpiPen in her handbag. The bracelet indicates Amanda has medication with her all the time.'

‘Okay,' I say.

‘A
what
pen?' says Stacey.

But Nick's not listening to Stacey, he's talking to himself about Amanda's breath being very faint and something about a pistol grip. He tilts Amanda's head back, pinches her nose and says out loud ‘Blow. Look. Listen. Feel. Okay. Okay. That's it. Let's go.' I watch as Nick McGowan starts to give Amanda Towers mouth-to-mouth.

‘Handbag,' says Nick, between counts. ‘Get her handbag.'

Stacey stands frozen, staring at Nick McGowan.

‘Stacey, go and get her handbag.
Go
!'

Thirty seconds later Nick is instructing us to tip the contents of Amanda Tower's handbag onto the kitchen floor, telling us to look for something that looks like a cross between a mascara and a syringe.

I find the white and yellow EpiPen in a zipped compartment of her bag, and Nick wastes no time in ripping off the cap, pulling down Amanda's jeans and jabbing the needle into her thigh.

The doorbell goes.

Stacey says, ‘That'll be the ambulance.' But Nick doesn't look up, or even notice the others who have started to wander in from the pool. Instead he just keeps a firm grip on Amanda's chin and keeps counting out the breaths.