Wildlife

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Fiona Wood

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First U.S. Edition: September 2014

First published in 2013 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty, Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wood, Fiona (Fiona Anna), author.

Wildlife / Fiona Wood.—First U.S. edition.

pages cm

“First published in 2013 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty, Ltd.”

Summary: Two sixteen-year-old girls in Australia come together at an outdoor semester of school, before university—one thinking about boys and growing up, the other about death and grief, but somehow they must help each other to find themselves.

ISBN 978-0-316-24209-7 (hc)—ISBN 978-0-316-24206-6 (ebook)

1. Teenage girls—Australia—Juvenile fiction. 2. High schools—Juvenile fiction. 3. Bildungsromans. 4. Grief—Juvenile fiction. 5. Friendship—Juvenile fiction. 6. Melbourne (Vic.)—Juvenile fiction. [1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Grief—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. Melbourne (Vic.)—Fiction. 7. Australia—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.W84925Wi 2014

823.92—dc23

2013034979

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

RRD-C

Printed in the United States of America

E3

For AJW

In the holidays before the dreaded term at my school’s outdoor education campus two things out of the ordinary happened.

A picture of me was plastered all over a massive billboard at St. Kilda junction.

And I kissed Ben Capaldi.

At least twice a year, my godmother, who is some big-deal advertising producer, comes back to Melbourne from New York to see her family and people like us, her old friends.

Her name is Bebe, which is pronounced like two bees, but we call her Beeb.

She doesn’t have kids, so I get all her kid attention, which to be completely honest is not a huge amount. But it’s “quality time.” And quality presents. Especially when I
was little. When I was five, she arranged for me to adopt a baby doll from FAO Schwarz. She took photos of me in the “nursery”—they actually had shop assistants dressed up as nurses—and I showed them at school.

That was when I started being friends with Holly. As she looked at my doll, Meggy MacGregor—who had a bottle, nappies, designer clothes, a birth certificate, and a car seat—I could see her struggling. It was jealousy/hatred versus admiration/envy, and lucky for me admiration/envy won the day. Holly’s a good friend but a mean enemy.

We were at the beach house, lounging around in a delicious haze of lemon poppy-seed cake and pots of tea, talking about digging out the wet suits for a freezing cold spring swim, and whether sharks have a preferred feeding time. I was lying on the floor, with my feet up in an armchair. Toenails painted Titanium—dark, purplish—drying nicely.

I’d just put down
Othello
for a bout of Angry Birds. My sister, Charlotte, thirteen going on obnoxious, was laughing too loudly at a text message, no doubt hoping one of us would ask her what was so funny. Dad was doing a cryptic crossword. Mom was answering e-mails on her laptop even though she was supposedly on holiday. “Sexually transmitted diseases never sleep,” she said when I reminded her of the holiday concept. Gross.

She used to be a regular doctor, but she kept getting more and more obscure qualifications and went into community
health and health policy, and now she basically runs the Free World from the Sexually Transmitted Infections Clinic in Fitzroy.

If you can think of a more embarrassing place than STIC to visit your mum at work, think again, because there isn’t one.

Holly loves it. We went there after school on the last day of term for emergency gelato money so we’d have the necessary energy required to trawl Savers, and this old woman gave us the foulest look when we hit the street. Holly deadpanned her: “At least we’re getting it treated.”

Beeb was sitting on the comfy sofa, with the beautiful Designers Guild paisley fabric that she bossed Mom into choosing about ten years ago, all the bright colors now softly worn and faded, flipping through some modeling agency “books” online and saying, “Insipid, insipid, dreary, tarty, bland, blah, starved, insipid…” She groaned and stretched out her black-jeans-clad legs. “Where are the interesting gals?”

“They broke the mold after you two,” my dad said. Meaning Beeb and Mom. It never works when my dad tries to give a compliment; he’s simply not that charming.

“Thanks,” I said, thinking
interesting
is after all a modest claim.

I must have sounded way more offended than I felt, because when I glanced up from my screen all eyes were upon me. Upside down, disconcertingly, because of me lying on the floor. When I untangled my legs and sat up,
it was as though I’d surrounded myself with flashing lights and arrows. Everyone kept looking at me. Really looking. And I was wishing I’d just shut up, because my mother was probably about to remember that I still hadn’t unloaded the dishwasher and if I had time to lie there playing Angry Birds—which is quite a distant rung on her almighty hierarchy of tasks from Reading a Required Text for Next Term—then I certainly had time to unload the dishwasher, and I had to remember the family was a community, and in order for a community to function…

Beeb got up. “Come here, kid,” she said, leading me to the window. She was looking at me with a strange frown-and-squint gaze. “What did you do with all those pimples?”

“Roaccutane,” I said. “I had dry skin, dry eyeballs, and no spit.”

“Till they corrected the dose,” said Dr. Mother.

“What about all the hardware in your mouth?” asked Beeb.

“Off last week.” I ran my tongue over my teeth. They still felt weirdly slippy.

“Take off your glasses.”

I did.

“You are gorgeous. How did I not notice this?” It was a eureka moment, she said later.

“Maybe because you see my visage in my mind,” I said, mangling a bit of
Othello
.

“That is true, my sweetie,” said Beeb.

“She has a pointy nose exactly like a witch,” said Charlotte.

“Her nose is fine,” said my father, who never seems to realize
fine
is as good as an insult.

“If you like huge noses, which no one actually does,” said Charlotte.

“She’s got character,” said Beeb. “And that’s what I’m looking for.”

“You’re talking about
her
? My sister? Sibylla Quinn?” said Charlotte, her voice squeaking with growing incredulity. “She’s totally fugs. Totally.”

“Don’t use that word,” said my mother, who only recently found out what
fugs
meant, and then only because she used it, so I felt that I had to tell her, and she said, Oh, that’s disappointing. I thought it was like a cuddly version of ugly. No surprise this is the same woman who thought
lol
meant “lots of love.” It was her all-purpose sign-off for texts till I set her straight a few years ago.

“I don’t want pretty little generics; I want different; I want individual!” said Beeb.

“What for?”

“Perfume launch. A billboard and magazine campaign.
Jeune Femme Sauvage
.” She was rummaging in her latest designer version of the magic bag that contains her whole office. She pulled out a camera, took some photos of me, and studied the screen. “Perfect. God, you look like your mum.”

“Old and tired? Poor girl,” said my mother.

We looked at her. She has a high forehead and a bony
nose and a big mouth. (In both senses.) She doesn’t dye her hair. It’s cut straight and parted on one side. It’s the same color as mine. Mouse. Only she calls it rat because she’s
so
funny. She does have a great smile. And she smiled.

“Take a picture. It’ll last longer,” she said.

Beeb took a picture of me and Mom together. We’re both smiling. And I can see that even though I’m not old and tired, we do look pretty similar.

Mom hugged me and whispered in my ear:
“Dishwasher.”