Leaving Jetty Road Read Free Page B

black-and-white checked chef’s pants seem to go on for miles.
    “Hope you like wheatgrass,” he says, grinning.
    “Me? I practically
inhale
the stuff,” I answer, like my legs aren’t trembling and my cheeks aren’t beet-red.
    His eyes dance at me. “You’ve come to the right place, then.”
    Next to me, Michael glances at his watch.
    “There’s just time to teach you how to make cappuccinos before the lunchtime rush, Natalie. I’ll get Loretta to show you.”
    He pushes back through the wooden swinging doors to the front of the shop, a small, sturdy, middle-aged man, always hurrying, always on the run. He’s going to be a hard taskmaster; I can tell that already. I follow him out, but not before Josh gives me another one of those smiles and my knees turn to complete sawdust.
    Everything has changed. Just like that. All day, I can’t stop smiling; and when Michael compliments me on my great “people skills,” I feel almost guilty. It’s not exactly the
work
that’s making me so friendly to all the customers.
    But I’m sure I can muster up enough enthusiasm to keep Michael happy, as long as Joshua keeps working at the café.

chapter three
    House in the hills
    “O nly one more year of singing hymns and saying the Lord’s Prayer,” says Sofia to me on Monday morning as we line up outside the school hall for Assembly. She pushes her ponytail impatiently back behind her shoulder. “I should do what Lise does, hey. Join all the school clubs in sight. What’s she at this morning—chess club? Math club? Or was it choir?”
    “I don’t think she goes to all those clubs just to get out of Assembly,” I say mildly. “She does actually want to be in them.”
    “That has to be the saddest thing I’ve heard this morning,” Sofia says darkly.
    I’m just about to protest (I can’t
stand
the way Sofe makes comments like this about Lise) when she goes on, dreamily, “Anyway, just think—this time next year I won’t even
remember
the words to the Lord’s Prayer.”
    She grumbles at me all the time about going to an all-girls school, Sofia. Before she came here at the beginning of Year 11, she went to some kind of “alternative” school in the hills, near where she and her little half brother and her mum live. She’s always going on to Lise and me about how much more fun it was at her old school. Didn’t matter whether you wore track pants or Calvin Klein, she says; the guys’d still crack farts in the locker room, and the girls scored highest on all the chemistry tests.
    Sometimes, when she says this, Lise nods worriedly: “I’m sure it’s not
normal
spending all your time with girls.”
    It’s one of the few things Sofe and Lise ever actually agree on. Sometimes I wish—you have no
idea
how much I wish—there were more of those things.
    Me, I like our school. I like the teachers, the subjects; I even like the uniform. (Well, it’s not that I
like
the uniform, exactly; what I like is not having to decide what you’re going to wear to school every morning.) On hot days the classrooms are drenched with the smell of crushed, seed-spilling fruit rotting underneath the old Moreton Bay fig tree in the schoolyard. At recess, I stand peeling oranges with Lise and Sofia under this tree, and we trace our feet along the thick roots that crack through the asphalt in wide, solid rivulets. I feel
comfortable
here.
    After Assembly, Sofia and I walk across the schoolyard toward the Year 12 locker room.
    “Hey, guess what?” she says. “I got invited to a party.”
    I wait patiently while she kneels at her locker, sorting through her books. “Who by?”
    “A guy at the Aquatic Centre. He was sitting next to me in the spa.”
    “Sofe,”
I groan.
    “Mate, he was
nice.
” She looks up at me with that big, wide smile of hers (a flash of white teeth in an olive-brown face; it’s a smile that all the guys fall for). “He goes to uni.”
    “What—studying how to chat up cute little schoolgirls in the