Up Over Down Under (7 page)

Eliza decided the best course of action was to present an air of calm, cool, collected self until she deciphered the social system here. She threw her shoulders back and made her way to a chair near the windows.

Eliza may not have been the queen bee back home, but she had a comfortable, large circle of friends, and it was awkward suddenly to feel like she was the odd man out.

Well, this is a change in perspective,
she thought to herself as she made her way to an empty seat.

“Oi! You the American?”

Eliza glanced over to see a tall, dark-haired girl looking at her from the next aisle over. She was backed by another girl leaning in from the chair on the far side. Both had their gray blazers tied around their waists, and the sidekick had a shock of blue hair framing the right side of her face, fading back into a brown razor cut.

It was slightly intimidating. Not that Eliza was going to let them know it.

“Um…yeah…that's me.” She coughed, trying to psych herself up to sound more assured about it. “That's me.”

“How you goin'?” the tall girl said. For all that her looks were kind of edgy and “bad-girl,” she seemed pretty friendly.

“Excuse me?”

“How you goin'?”

“Just to the chair here. Is it taken?” Why were they looking at her so strangely?

Now both of the girls laughed in unison.

“Nah…Go on, take it,” the tall girl continued, moving closer to Eliza so that she wasn't shouting across the room. “I'm Jess, and this's Nomes.” She jerked her thumb at her backup dancer.

“Hey. I'm Eliza.”

“So, have you ever been to Melbourne before?”

“No, never been to Australia. I've never been west of California before.”

“This is your first time out of the U.S.?” Jess asked with surprise. “A country bumpkin?”

“Oh no, not at all. I've been to South America and the Caribbean, and last year my dad took us to Paris for my mom's birthday.” The words came out in a rush, and Eliza realized that after a few days with Estelle and the twins, she was sort of starved for company from girls her own age.

“No way! I totally want to go to Paris! What was it like?” Jess asked with wide eyes.

“It was totally great. I've got pics on my laptop I can show you sometime.”

“That'd be cool.” Jess smiled.

“I like your hair,” piped up Nomes.

“What?” Eliza asked, reaching for her head. She remembered that she had twisted her hair into a bun in the back and had two ebony chopsticks with sparkles holding it in place. “Oh, this?”

“Yeah, it's cool. How do you do that?” Nomes asked.

“It's not hard, I'll show you.” Eliza took out the chopsticks, shook down her hair, and with a deft flip, twist, roll, and skewer, had redone her hair perfectly.

“Right on, that's excellent. Welcome to St. Cat's.”

“Thanks!” Eliza smiled. “So, this is pre-calculus, with”—Eliza checked her schedule sheet—“Mrs. Carroll?”

Jess nodded. “Carroll's cranky, but she grades easy and she doesn't like throwing too many exams.”

“And then I have”—Eliza checked her sheet again—

“world history.”

Nomes perked up again. “Oh, I'm in that one, I'll get you there. After math I'll show you the way.”

Nomes and Jess were a lot different from Eliza's friends back home, she could tell just from their brief exchange. For starters, even in a school as liberal as hers, the children of politicos were not the type to dye their hair Day-Glo colors. That mere detail made these new girls seem the tiniest bit dangerous.

Which, for Eliza, sounded just about perfect.

 

 

For the next four hours Eliza played perpetual catch-up. It was strange joining things in the middle of a year. Back home, she was friends with nearly everyone in her class. Here, nobody was rude to her or anything, but most were too consumed with finding out what each other had done over vacation to pay much mind to the new girl.

Despite some aggressive-looking piercings (one nose, three in her right ear), the blue streak in her hair, and a tiny scar above her eyebrow, Nomes turned out to be really nice, and she took Eliza under her wing for the morning. The teachers each made a point of welcoming her, and Eliza got no end of amusement from hearing all of their Australian accents. It was hard not to like someone who spoke in that singsong. Her classes seemed pretty similar to her classes back home, and she didn't see that she would have a lot of trouble getting up to speed on the work. Eliza was a good student and always had been, much to her parents' delight.

At lunchtime, Nomes guided her through the halls to the cafeteria. They spotted Jess sitting with a couple others at a table and made their way over.

“So, how you going?” Jess smiled.

“Just here. Can we join you?”

“No,” Jess said, startling Eliza. “I mean, yeah, sit down, but when someone says ‘How you going?' they're not asking, ‘Where are you going?'—it means ‘What's up?'”

“Oh…that makes more sense.” Eliza paused for a moment as all of the conversations she'd had so far that day came rushing back to her. She felt her cheeks flood with color. “I was wondering why everyone was asking me that. I told one person I was going by foot….” She rolled her eyes at her own lameness.

Jess laughed and turned to Nomes. “And you let her just humiliate herself?”

Nomes shrugged. “It was dead priceless.”

Jess laughed again. “No worries,” she chirped, clapping Eliza on the back, “you'll catch on.”

“So you're trading with Billie Echols, right?”

“Yeah, I'm staying with her family here.”

“They're in Toorak, right?” Nomes asked.

“Nah, South Yarra, I think,” Jess replied.

Eliza honestly couldn't remember, and just shrugged her shoulders as she ate a slice of apple.

“I don't know for sure, but they're nice enough, and Billie and I traded a couple e-mails as well,” she said.

“Yeah, they're good people.” Jess nodded. “We all went to middle school together, but Billie's kind of into the whole eco-warrior thing—she's always off at rallies or getting people to sign petitions for the ‘Save the Wombat' or whatever. It's good stuff, just gets to be a bit much sometimes, I guess. That's her best mate Val over there.” Jess pointed to a girl sitting a couple tables away who was wearing her uniform with Crocs. With socks underneath.

Dad's going to love Billie,
Eliza realized.
They'll be able to talk “Save the Whales” for hours.
While Billie definitely wasn't part of Jess's group, Eliza also realized that St. Catherine's was a pretty small school, and everyone seemed to know everyone else pretty well.

“Billie's dad is a riot, isn't he?” asked Nomes. “He's a bit of a bogan turned city boy.”

“What's a bogan?” asked Eliza.

“Someone from the country.”

Eliza nodded, trying to commit the new slang term to memory.

The rest of lunch was spent talking about boys and shopping—two subjects Eliza felt very at home with, even if she didn't know the boys in question. It seemed that there were several boys' schools in Melbourne and that the girls had a pretty elaborate ranking system of where the cutest guys were.

It also turned out that the Echolses lived in a great location, near one of the best shopping areas, and the girls all made a plan to spend some time over the weekend exploring the finer points of Chapel Street's stores.

Eliza decided that, as first days went, this one had been pretty successful.

 

Over the course of her first week, Eliza slowly began to feel more at home with her schedule and her surroundings. She learned how to take the tram to and from school each morning and would meet up with Jess each day a couple of stops from her own so that they could chat the whole way to school. Eliza found that she had some precious information about what was happening on upcoming seasons of TV shows like
Gossip Girl
and
Lost
because they hadn't aired down under yet. By the end of the week, she felt really comfortable with Jess and Nomes.

At lunch on Friday, Eliza was hoping she'd be invited to do something fun with them over the weekend when she remembered that she was going to have to start her internship on Saturday.

“This totally sucks,” Eliza moaned as she bit into her tuna fish sandwich. “I can't believe that I have to spend my whole Saturday at this stupid internship.”

“Well, the orientation is this Saturday, but usually it won't be, right?” asked Nomes, who was eyeing her tray of cafeteria food with great suspicion.

“Not sure. Some of it's going to be after school on Wednesdays, but we'll have to do a couple of full days over the weekend here and there,” Eliza replied dejectedly. “I have to do the environmental internship because of my dad, but I guess it could be worse—after all, it's a day down at the beach, right?”

Jess and Nomes chuckled.

“What?” Eliza implored.

“Nothing, nothing at all. You'll have a rippa' at the beach!” Jess said with a toothy grin.

 

 

When Eliza had pictured Australian beaches, she'd imagined a tropical paradise lined with gently swaying palm trees and possibly an Australian lifeguard hottie to play Frisbee with or to help her apply her suntan lotion.

But what Eliza got instead was a rocky coastline in the port of Melbourne backlit by factories with not a palm tree in sight.

And the lifeguard? Oh no, there was no such hottie. Instead, there was Mr. Winstone, a thin man in his fifties with a bushy mustache, hairy earlobes, and a very questionable enthusiasm for unpleasant work and unpleasant weather.

The other problem was that since she'd been in Melbourne, the weather had not climbed above about 10 degrees Celsius. Ten degrees Celsius itself didn't mean much to Eliza, but a little Googling determined that, in fact, it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit that day at the “beach.” So therefore it was more like a sandy, surfy tundra. A sandy, surfy,
rainy
tundra. It was the middle of winter, after all.

But interning waited for no exchange student, and thus Eliza found herself standing on a cold, windswept rocky beach under gray clouds, wearing rubber waders and a rain slicker and holding a plastic collection jar in one hand.

This stinks.
Eliza was shivering down to her waders.

“Four seasons in a day we get 'round here,” Mr. Winstone said with a wink.

“Really…that's amazing. All four?” It was amazing. In a bad way.

She glared at her collection jar. Apparently part of her responsibilities included taking soil samples and testing them for mineral levels, which would determine the rate of potential erosion. In all honesty, it was a nice counterpoint to the work Eliza's father was doing at the EPA, which, while all
about
the environment, didn't seem to involve much time spent in the environment.

“Now make sure you try to get at least one jar of each of the types of soils listed on your sample sheet, okay?” Mr. Winstone reminded Eliza and the four other students. “You'll be collecting from different areas of the shoreline so that we can compare and contrast. I'll then take all the samples back to the lab, and we'll get a better picture of how pollution is affecting the erosion of our ocean ecosystem—including the creatures that live all through the tidal zones of the bay.”

Eliza spent her day scraping grains of sand into glass jars, trying her best to muster up the enthusiasm the other interns seemed to have. But eco-warrior she was not, and by the time it was over, she was soaked through with rain and seawater and chilled to the bone.

It wasn't the worst day of her life, but one thing was for sure: there was
no way
she was going to get a tan of any sort if this kept up.

At least the weather was only going to get better as the semester went along. All she had to do was look at the palm trees that lined the edge of the bay and think warm thoughts.

 

 

“Oh, you poor dear. Let me get you a cuppa and some bickies while you get changed into some warm clothes,” Estelle cooed when she saw Eliza standing in the kitchen sopping wet.

After she'd changed into fresh clothes and warmed herself over a cup of mint tea, Eliza started to feel a bit more like a human being. Her fingers were less numb, though they still looked like prunes.

She decided to ask Estelle about something that had been on her mind all day. “Who planted those palm trees by the boardwalk that we passed in the car?” she asked.

Those were lying palm trees. Trees that made you think a beach was a place of sun, warmth, cute boys, and volleyballs. Those palm trees were an insidious form of false advertising by very sick people—that was for sure.

“You mean in St. Kilda?”

“Yes, I think so. That was a joke, right? I mean, palm trees aren't really native to the area, are they? They were planted by the tourist office or something to convince the world that it's warm and sunny all the time, right?” Call her paranoid, but Eliza suspected a conspiracy at work. How else would she have ended up doing her impression of a drowned wombat with the rest of the environmental crusaders?

Estelle laughed. “I suppose it's possible. Rose-colored glasses and the like. But just you wait until things warm up and we head down to Sorrento; it's magnificent. Hang in there, and the winter will be over soon.”

Eliza drew another sip of her tea, quiet and thoughtful.