Kate Gordon - Asters Good, Right Things

Asters Good, Right Things

Text Kate Gordon, 2020

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Published by Riveted Press, a division of Yellow Brick Books.
Unit 3, 5 Currumbin Court
Capalaba, QLD 4157
Australia

978-0-6484925-7-3

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

This book is for my dad,
who always does the good, right thing and who always
knows just what to say, even on hiding days.

chapter one

Mondays good, right thing: Today, I didnt remind Esme in the ice cream shop that I asked for vanilla yoghurt, even when she gave me hokey pokey. I dont really like hokey pokey, but I didnt want to make her feel bad. I didnt mention that I asked for a cup, too, instead of a cone. I think maybe she was having a bad day.

Esme Rogers has blue hair like the secret feathers some ducks havethe ones that look like glistening eyes. I used to think they were for scaring predators. Dad says theyre to attract fish. Esme uses her blue hair to attract boys, I think. Every week theres a new one, on a stool by the ice cream shop counter, looking at her like shes the treat.

Theyre gone a few days later and she always looks as blue as her hair, afterwards. I think she loves each one of them, and shes super sad when they go.

I dont know why they would go. I think Esme is magical.

Id like her to be my friend, even though shes fifteen and Im only eleven-and-a-bit. The first time I met Esme, it felt like our souls connected.

I dont think she wants it, though. Maybe, if she wanted to be my friend, shed remember I never order hokey pokey. I wont remind her, though. I dont want to make her even more blue and, besides, if I keep her a little bit happier, or at least not so miserable, that can be Mondays good, right thin g, and it can add to the others. Even if she wont be my friend, hopefully shell still smile in that sparkling way and let me smile back.

I write it down, in my small brown notebook. Mondays thing is done. Now I can breathe. And I can walk, with my not-quite-right ice cream, all the way home and feel safe.

Ill give my cone to Dad, if its not too melted, and that will grant me extra points. Dad likes ice cream cones. Its a thing. Hell be happy with me, if I give him the cone. He mostly always is, anyway, but this will make things even better.

Maybe hell cook us mashed potato for tea. I wont ask, though. For one thing, Im probably way too old to love mashed potato this much, way too old for hokey pokey, too. Way too old for all the things that make me feel a little less tight inside.

For another thing, I dont want to ask Dad about the mashed potato because hes busy.

Dads busy because he is important. Hes a teacher and he has just been made the principal of a ridiculously fancy school in the city. I dont go there. I go to a school where theyre meant to be nice to people like me. A school where we dont use plastic and where we eat lentils for lunch out of wooden bowls and we say a prayer for bugs if we step on them. A school thats meant to be gentle and nurturing, where we dont wear uniforms, where we talk about our feelings a lot and everyone is kind and accepting and welcoming . I tell Dad they are all those things but, really, its not true. Theyre not mean, in particular. There are no bullies or cliques. Nobody hassles me, except for Indigo. They just dont know I am there.

Im very small. But thats not it.

Its not my pale brown hair, either, like peeling tree bark. Its not my sticking-out limbs and the fact I still look nine or ten at a push. Its not my reading glasses or my rabbit teeth. The reason nobody sees me, at the Albatross School, is that Im not special.

Im not like Annaliese, who sings like an angel and looks like something from a dream, or Flynn, who is cool and charismatic and destined to run the country. Im not even Indigo, whose wildness marks her out.

My school is a school for special people, and I am not one of those.

I am not destined to run the country or win a Nobel Prize or make art installations that they show at the Louvre.

Im not destined for anything. I never was.

I dont sing or dance or make sculptures of trees and I cant paint or even whistle, and my acting is terrible. I can sort of write things, I think, but nobody knows that.

I write things in my brown notebook. Things that happen and things I wish would happen and things that never will, because they involve unicorns and shapeshifters and portals to other worlds.

And I write down my good, right things . Another thing I should have grown out of, like the mashed potato and the hokey pokey. So many things I should have left behind, now Im this age, this nearly teenager, nearly grown-up, nearly, nearly age.

But I cant. I cant let go of themthe good, right things , especiallybecause if I do Ill turn into a cloud and Ill float away, and a storm will come and blow me to nothing.

The good, right things are the most important. One day, people will notice Im doing them. One day, people will see what I do, and they will see me. And then they will like me, or at least

They will stop leaving me.

Dad is in his study when I get home and my ice cream isnt too melted and he smiles when I give it to him, and then he says, Did Esme mess up your order again, Petal?

Dad calls me Petal because my name is Aster and its a kind of flower and I pretend Im too old for that, tootoo old for my dad to have such a childish, silly name for me. But, really, I like it. I like having a nickname. Most of the kids at school have one, but nobody has bothered to try making one for me.

I like being Petal.

And I like it when Dad ruffles up my hair, when he says it, even though it makes my scalp tingle. I like it when he tells me that he doesnt have much work left to do and hell come and make tea soon and I should tell him how school was before he goes back to it.

I dont tell him I really want mashed potato.

I do tell him that school was good. Its a lie, of a kind. But, at the same time, it isnt one.

It wasnt not good . It just wasnt anything .

I didnt speak in class, and the teachers didnt call on me, because they know I wont say anything. I think they dont want to embarrass me. Its nice of them, if you think of it that way.

I think, also, that they dont know what to do with me. The teachers at the Albatross School know what to do with exceptional kids. They dont know what to do with a cloud; a mouse; a pale, wilting flower.

But also, they dont call on me because all the other kids are loud, and they drown me out. They swallow me up.

At recess and lunch time, I hid in the hole in the tree that nobody knows about but me.

Im too old for holes in trees. Im too old for closing my eyes and imagining that the hole is a magic doorway to another world.

Other girls in my year have ear piercings. Im too scared of needles.

Other girls in my year go to concerts. I dont like crowds.

Other girls in my year are planning for university. I dont even know who I am now, let alone who Ill be in seven years.

Other girls in my year wear skirts and high heels and makeup and look even older than they are. I am small and I feel like I will always be small, inside and out.

Other girls in my year make up songs and they sound like the songs on the radiosongs with film clips, songs that make people stand and cheer.