Pink, p.7
Pink, page 7
‘Not exactly,’ Kobe explained. ‘Pink is more imaginary than other colours. Because normally when your brain gets signals from two different wavelengths, it just delivers one colour that’s in between those two. So if your brain gets the red wavelength and the green wavelength at the same time, it shows you yellow, which is exactly in the middle of those two.’
‘Oh,’ I said, getting it. ‘And it doesn’t work if you get the red wavelength and the violet wavelength, because the middle colour is green.’
‘Yes!’ said Kobe. ‘And your brain gets all confused because there’s no way you can mix violet and red and end up with green, even with additive colours. So it just invents a new colour.’
Jacob frowned. ‘I do not understand any of what you just said. But I suspect it was awesome.’
Kobe leaned back in his chair. ‘It was.’
‘Wait,’ said Jen. ‘So what you’re telling us is that not only is Pluto not a planet, but pink isn’t a colour?’
‘The crayons!’ said Sam. ‘They lied to us! My entire childhood is a lie! Next you’ll be telling me there’s no Easter Bunny.’ He leaned forward and grabbed Kobe’s shirt. ‘Tell me there’s an Easter Bunny.’
‘Well,’ said Jules. ‘There’s another reason to hate pink. Pink killed the Easter Bunny.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘I still think you’re being sexist. What else is there to hate about pink?’
Jules shrugged. ‘Pinkeye.’
Sam nodded. ‘And pink slips.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But they’re not really pink. That’s not what pink means.’
‘No?’ Sam’s eyes suddenly lit up. ‘Enlighten us. What does pink mean?’
I felt myself go red. This was not exactly sure ground for me, given my complicated relationship with the colour. Also, I didn’t like that anticipatory glint in Sam’s eyes.
‘Er,’ I said. Another excellent start. ‘Well, it’s feminine.’
Sam pursed his lips. ‘Actually, it’s not,’ he said, with the same apologetic tone he’d had when he destroyed my homo argument. Except now I realised it wasn’t really apologetic at all. He was loving this.
Jules frowned at Sam. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Ginger McFail. I know you’re busting to get your Wikipedia on, but we already had to listen to Professor Spectrum over there, so can I just do my thing now?’
‘Dude,’ Sam shrugged. ‘Don’t lose your bottle of oil.’ He winked at me and mimed zipping his mouth closed. ‘The floor is yours.’
‘Pink isn’t just for girls,’ Jules said, turning back to me. ‘It’s for plenty of other things.’
‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘Like girls.’
‘And the Pink Panther,’ Jules replied. ‘He’s not a girl.’
‘Actually,’ said Jen, picking sesame seeds out of her braces, ‘the Pink Panther refers to the diamond. The detective is Jacques Clouseau.’
Everyone looked at her for a moment.
‘What?’ she said. ‘I like Peter Sellers.’
Sam shook his head. ‘Who are you?’
‘Mr Pink,’ said Jacob suddenly. ‘From Reservoir Dogs.’
‘Pink Floyd,’ added Jules.
‘Pink elephants.’
‘There’s a town in Oklahoma called Pink.’
‘And of course, your pinkie finger,’ said Jules, picking up his cup of tea and sticking his little finger out.
I glared at him. Fine. Whatever. I didn’t even like pink that much.
‘She slipped in the middle of “The Casa Nostra” and fell flat on her face,’ said Alexis as we rocked back and forth on the tram.
Vivian and Ella-Grace tittered with pleasure.
‘And then Mr Henderson said, “Well, I suppose she has potential. ”’
They all burst out laughing. I forced my lips to curve in a smile. I hated their musical in-jokes. I hated this new club that I wasn’t invited to. This wasn’t how I imagined Alexis and me on the tram, singing together.
Ella-Grace shook her head. ‘She’s such a heifer. Ava, it so should have been you.’
They all put on sympathetic, supportive faces and nodded.
‘Um, no,’ I said. ‘Do you remember my audition? I sucked.’
‘No,’ they chorused. ‘It was just nerves!’
They were nice to pretend. But I had no potential. I belonged with the screw-ups.
‘Is anyone coming to the Melbourne Uni open day with me on Sunday?’ asked Alexis, as we jumped off at Flinders Street.
Vivian groaned. ‘Again? I’m pretty sure it’s going to be exactly the same as it has been every other year.’
‘And what exactly are you going to discover?’ asked Ella-Grace. ‘It’s not like you’re going to change your mind and go somewhere else.’
‘You already know where you’re going to uni?’ I asked. I hadn’t really thought about it yet. My parents would expect me to go to Melbourne, because that’s where they lectured. But they would want me to study politics or literature or something. Which would be fun, but wasn’t exactly going to get me a job. Not that studying mathematics was guaranteed to score me a career either.
We scurried across the road, dodging taxis.
‘I’m going to do medicine at Melbourne,’ declared Alexis over her shoulder to me. ‘And then do my PhD in endocrinology overseas, probably at Harvard.’
I swallowed. ‘What if you don’t get in?’
Alexis shrugged. ‘Then I’ll go to Yale or John Hopkins.’
I’d meant what if she didn’t get into Melbourne, but clearly that wasn’t an option.
Vivian dug in her bag for her wallet. ‘I think it’s stupid to go straight into university,’ she said, producing her train ticket. ‘I’m going to travel for a year first.’
‘Right,’ I said, relieved. ‘Which will give you time to work out what you want to do.’
Vivian looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘Oh, I know what I’m going to do,’ she said, waving the ticket airily. ‘Law at ANU, and then postgrad at Yale or Stanford. I aim to be a corporate partner at an international firm by the time I’m thirty, then I can take a year off and have a baby.’
My mouth felt very dry. I looked at Ella-Grace. ‘And you?’ I croaked.
‘I’m going straight to Cambridge. I’ve applied for a scholarship to study theoretical physics at the Isaac Newton Institute.’
I swallowed. How did she know she’d get a scholarship? Was she really so confident in her physics abilities? I wasn’t sure if I’d even pass Physics this semester.
Ella-Grace must have noticed my frown, because she smiled a modest, fluttery smile. ‘I’m already on to the second round of interviews,’ she explained. ‘It’s down to me, a Korean girl, two English guys and an American.’
I nodded dumbly. Ella-Grace was a genius. She was a five-language-speaking theoretical-physics-champion and all-singing-all-dancing genius, crammed into a teeny, bright-eyed bundle of adorable.
We pushed through the ticket barriers and lingered on the causeway between the platforms.
‘What about you, Ava?’ asked Alexis. ‘What are your plans?’
I had no idea. I couldn’t even decide whether I wanted to be dating boys or girls, let alone what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Vivian even had children scheduled!
‘Er,’ I said. ‘I’m still considering all my options.’
The girls exchanged a worried glance.
‘You’d better get a move on,’ said Vivian. ‘Time’s running out.’
‘Speaking of,’ said Ella-Grace. ‘I’ve got to run for my train.’
‘Wait!’ said Alexis, grabbing her arm. ‘Are we going to Miles’s party on Saturday?’
Miles Fernley was playing Spats Liebowitz in Bang! Bang! Jules had referred to him sneeringly as ‘the Grand PoohBah of Theatre Gheys’, but had also rather grudgingly admitted that he was a great singer. Miles had his own apartment near the Victoria Market, because his parents lived in the country. Technically his older sister lived there too, but she was all but moved in with her boyfriend, so Miles had a bona fide bachelor pad at the grand old age of seventeen.
‘I’m up for it,’ Vivian said, and Ella-Grace nodded.
‘Ava?’ asked Alexis. ‘Are you coming?’
Well. I hadn’t exactly been invited, what with it being a cast party and all. I tried to look unconcerned and blasé.
‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘I’d better run, anyway. I have to meet my mum to help buy a birthday present for my dad.’
This wasn’t true. I was actually meeting Sam at Kalahari for our first Maths study session. I was planning to wait until they’d gone and then double back out of the station and into the city.
Alexis threw her arms around my neck. ‘You are so coming. No excuses.’
Vivian kissed my cheek. ‘Ethan will be there.’
Ella-Grace kissed my other cheek. ‘He’ll be so totally into you. It’ll be perfect.’
As I walked down the laneway to Kalahari, I indulged in a small personal fantasy about the party and Ethan and his strong arms and kind heart. We would look so good together at the end-of-year formal. As long as he didn’t realise that I was a total, total screw-up.
Sam was sitting slouched on the footpath. The black of his T-shirt and jeans blended into the bitumen and the black wall of Deadthreads, making his pale skin and pale red hair look like they were floating in space.
‘Closed,’ he said. ‘Bastards.’
Sure enough, the door to Kalahari’s stairs was locked.
‘Can we go somewhere else?’ I asked.
‘Whatever.’
We couldn’t go to my house. If Pat and David met Sam, they might mention Chloe. Or they might mention Sam to Chloe, which would be worse.
‘Let’s go to your place,’ I suggested.
Sam wrinkled his nose. ‘Let’s not. Why don’t we just go to another café?’
Why didn’t he want me to see his house? What was his secret? A skeleton in the cellar? Posters of unicorns in his bedroom? I suddenly became very curious.
‘I don’t have any money,’ I improvised. ‘And anyway, we should be working somewhere quiet. No distractions.’
He put up a valiant fight, but I wore him down eventually and we jumped on a tram.
We walked down a broad, leafy street full of autumn leaves and rose bushes and big houses with turrets.
The biggest house on the street was grey stone. The garden around it was enormous, with well-stocked flower–beds and perfectly manicured trees.
Sam pushed open the iron gate.
‘Here?’ I said, astonished. ‘You live here?’
He shrugged, and hunched his shoulders over.
The house was three storeys high, with Victorian columns and curls. There were probably gargoyles on the roof. And stable-boys pashing buxom milkmaids under honeysuckle-draped bowers. And skeletons in the cellar.
Sam unlocked the front door as if he was opening the lid of his own coffin. We stepped inside, and my jaw dropped.
Sam was loaded. The house had fancy dark maroon wallpaper flocked with velvet. A huge marble staircase curved up out of sight, and an honest-to-God chandelier hung down from the floor above.
‘Come on,’ mumbled Sam, starting up the staircase.
‘Sam?’ called a voice. ‘Sam, is that you?’
A pained look crossed Sam’s face. ‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Sam, come in here.’ The voice was coming from the room to the right.
Sam’s mother was a tall, thin woman with a stylish French knot and almost no lips. She was wearing something stiff and black that probably cost a squillion dollars and was designed by an architect. Her eyebrows shot up when she saw me.
‘I hope you weren’t just going to sneak to your room without introducing me to your—’ she paused and her eyes flicked over me, ‘—friend.’
Sam sighed, and stared at his shoes. Right. Clearly it was up to me to be the adult. I stepped forward.
‘Hi, Mrs Gorr,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘I’m Ava.’
She shook my hand, but didn’t smile. ‘Pleased to meet you, Ava,’ she said. ‘I assume you go to Billy Hughes?’
I nodded. ‘I just started there. Sam and I are going to study together.’
Mrs Gorr’s lips disappeared entirely. ‘How nice,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll be a better influence on Sam than those other children he hangs around wi—’ ‘Okay,’ said Sam, suddenly springing to life. ‘We’d better get cracking then.’
He grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the room backwards. ‘Lovely to chat, Mum. We must do it again sometime.’
Mrs Gorr frowned and opened her mouth to say something, but we were already in the hall and Sam closed the door behind us.
‘Come on,’ he said, dropping his hand from my arm. He’d grabbed me so tightly I’d probably bruise.
Sam’s bedroom was off the first landing and down a short corridor. This house was enormous. The walls were all hung with gilded old photos and paintings of pokerfaced people wearing stiff-looking clothes.
His bedroom was … not what I’d been expecting.
It was like something out of a display home. Neatly made bed with plain blue bedspread. Desk with pens in a pot, and a laptop. Bookshelf.
There were no clothes on the floor, no socks escaping from drawers. No empty coffee mugs on the desk. No posters on the walls. Nothing. It was the most soulless room I’d ever been in. It was totally unlike Sam, who seemed so messy and wild.
The only personal touch in the room was an A4 piece of paper torn out of a notebook, stuck to the wall above the desk. On it, written in black Sharpie, were the words Ad Astra Per Alia Porci.
Sam saw me looking at it. ‘“To the stars on the wings of a pig”,’ he translated. ‘It was John Steinbeck’s motto.’
‘Of course it was,’ I said.
Sam offered me the desk chair and sat down on his bed. He looked as if he wanted to die. His shoulders were all hunched over and miserable. It was as though, instead of coming over to help him with his Maths homework, I’d come over to kill his guinea-pig.
We sat in silence. I checked out the books on his bookshelf. Mostly textbooks and class novels. I would have expected him to have a bookshelf bursting with tattered paperbacks and second-hand non-fiction about completely random subjects. He certainly seemed to know about lots of completely random subjects.
‘So,’ I said at last. ‘Maths?’
He nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. Maths.’
I pulled the textbook out of my bag, and dropped it onto the desk with a thump.
‘I told you we shouldn’t have come here,’ said Sam, out of the blue.
He hated it. He hated the house, the room. He was all tense and uncomfortable. This wasn’t his home. Sam’s home was the undercroft, with a shifter in his hand and nails between his teeth. I had a sudden wave of understanding. I knew what it was like to feel like you didn’t fit in your own home.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s a lovely house.’
Sam pursed his lips and for a moment he looked just like his mother. ‘Sometimes I think I’d rather be at boarding school after all,’ he said.
‘Will your mum seriously send you to boarding school if you don’t pass Maths?’
He nodded. ‘She thinks Billy Hughes is too … unstructured for me.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘We’d better make sure you pass, then. Let’s start with an easy one.’
I circled the first problem on the page. Sam recoiled visibly.
‘That,’ he said in disgust, ‘is not an easy one.’
‘It looks harder than it is.’
Sam gave me a sceptical look, but bent over to study the page.
‘So we need to find x, right?’
‘If you say so.’
‘And we’re constrained by the limitations of a and b.’ I tapped my pencil over the letters. ‘So x equals ab to the power of 2.’
Silence.
I frowned. Sam wasn’t getting it. He was uncomfortable and embarrassed. In fact, he looked exactly how I’d felt at Screw, when I buggered up the flat. And that gave me a brilliant idea.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we change the x to a v.’
Sam blinked. ‘Can you do that?’
‘Sure. It’s just a letter to stand in for a missing number.’
Sam looked suspicious. ‘Then why would you want to change it?’
I grinned. ‘Because x can stand for anything. But v stands for volume.’ I examined the problem for a moment, sorting it out in my head.
‘You need to build a box,’ I told him. ‘A box with an open top and a square base. The sides of the box will cost three dollars per square metre, and the base will cost four dollars per square metre.’
Sam was nodding. He knew this territory.
‘So,’ I said. ‘We need to figure out how big we can make the box.’
‘Surely as big as we like.’
I shook my head. ‘We’ve only got forty-eight dollars.’
Sam smiled up at me, nervous and a bit excited. I knew exactly how he felt, that magical instant when the problem clicked into place in your head and you knew you could solve it. He picked up a pencil. I leaned back in the chair and watched him. His lower lip was caught between his teeth, and he frowned in concentration, making his freckles run together. His hair flopped forward into his eyes and he brushed it away impatiently.
After about fifteen minutes of scribbling and furious erasing and more scribbling, he held out his exercise book.
‘Is this right?’ he asked. ‘It’s five point three cubic metres?’
I grinned. ‘Absolutely right. But because the problem isn’t actually asking you about volume, you should write the answer as sixteen over three.’
Sam beamed, very proud of himself. ‘You know stuff,’ he said, impressed. ‘Maths stuff.’
I couldn’t help but smile. ‘I like maths stuff.’
Sam made a face. ‘I can’t possibly imagine why.’
‘Maths is easy,’ I said, shrugging. ‘And you know that if you just apply the right rules, you’ll get the correct answer. Unlike in life.’
Sam nodded, understanding. ‘I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Exactly. Is that a quote?’
