Solo Read Online Free Page B

Eucalypt.
    ‘Don’t look so nervous.’ He grinned, slowing and heading my way.
    I’d watched him at lunch. He had muscles in his neck, and the suggestion of stubble, but I couldn’t see properly, because I was too far away. I was imagining the way he would smell if I rested my head on his shoulder.
    ‘I’m not nervous.’ I shrugged. Then I wished I hadn’t said that because I was obviously nervous. My hands were sweaty, my voice was shaky, and I could feel the perspiration on my upper lip. At least if I pretended it was because of the Solo he wouldn’t know. At the same time I wanted him to know, because he might say that he liked me too. But then I would go away and he might find that he liked someone else more – for example, Bethany. She had said some vague things about him, and neither of us had bagsed him.
    ‘You must know the Bogeyman rules, then.’
    I tilted my head to the side. Too slow. He thinks I’m slow in the head. He’s just being nice to me the way you’re nice to the Year 7s at school. It’s a mercy thing.
    He started to tick off on his fingers. ‘No walking backwards and whimpering – especially not in a nightie. No saying, “Is somebody there?” when you hear heavy breathing from the bushes. And never, never fall down if you are being pursued. You can get up but you’ll only make three strides before he gets you.’
    ‘And you’ve got to keep all your limbs under the sheet. Did you ever do that?’
    Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It wasn’t the same thing. It was a tangent.
    ‘I still do!’ Callum says.
    ‘I’ve got it under control,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t die. I’m the star of this show.’
    ‘Really? What’s my role then? Do I come in just before the end and rescue you?’
    I opened my mouth. I tried to think of something cool, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I’d been so proud of the star-of-the-show line. A good recovery from the tangent. It sounded spontaneous. It was a passable quip. I’m shit at quips usually. And now I had nothing. Instead I blushed and in that moment I lost him.
    There was a pause like a Chinese burn in the conversation.
    ‘Are you going to do a Solo?’ I asked.
    ‘No way!’ he grinned again. ‘It’s way too outdoorsy for me, and anyway I’m afraid of the dark. I’ve signed up for “Fingerpaint your way to healthy family relationships”.’ He waggled his fingers at me and I laughed. ‘Well, have fun then . . .’
    He was searching – trying to remember my name.
    ‘. . . Mackenzie.’
    I was glad he remembered. I still felt stupid, though. His name had been on my lips every night before I went to sleep. I felt the kind of stupid that makes you want to leave the country.

10

N ESTING
    It was a twenty-minute ride on the camp’s eighteen-seater bus from the main camp to the Solo site – just me in the back of the bus with the window open.
    Stefan and Wendy sat in the front talking. The wind whipped the words away so I could only hear snippets. Something about how she’d contributed an article to an environmental website. She wondered how they would overcome the commercial machine (or maybe she said ‘consumer’, or ‘corporate’).
    I stopped trying to listen and watched the trees closest to the road blur past my eyes instead.
    The paddocks on the way into the valley were a lush crayon green. The cattle were so fat their low, swinging bellies dragged the skin taut over their bones. They pitched and rolled on graceless legs and stared at us with faces so vague and crude they looked as though they’d been pinched out of clay.
    The trouble with crushes is the lows. The highs are fantastic when you’re having one, tripping on your own dreams. I’d run my few conversations with Callum through my head as if they were a movie – no, more like an ad – a thirty-second clip of myself being confident and desirable, speaking words that came out in the right order and with exactly the right inflection and well-timed provocative