Plenty Read Free Page A

of jasmine and compost.
    It was such a brilliant smell.
    Maddy lay by the pond and sighed.
    The stars spread across the sky, each in their exact place. Each next to their exact right neighbour. Laid out almost exactly like the school project on astronomy she and Sophie-Rose had just finished.
    Milky Way.
    Southern Cross.
    Taurus the Bull.
    Maddy remembered lying out here with her Dad. Actually, she remembered lying out here
on
her Dad. He’d taught her about the stars. Human beings are made of stardust, he’d told her. And water, of course.
    “You are just my little mess of stardust and water,” he’d said.
    Dad had also taught her about the constellations – their names, their stories. They had plenty of names. Plenty of stories.
    The six big stars in the north were called the
Pleiades
. It was a Greek word. And there were too many vowels in it in Maddy’s opinion, even for someone who loved spelling.
    It was Mum who had showed her how to say it.
    “
Play-eee-dees
,” she’d said, pulling her mouth into shapes that made Maddy laugh. “Now you say it.”
    Play-eeee-deeeees
.
    The Pleiades were seven girls in Greek mythology. They were sisters who were turned into stars by a god. After thousands of years travelling together in the skies though, one of the stars disappeared and now there were only six. But at school Mrs Trang had said one of Melbourne’s first people called those same stars the
Karatgurk
– a name that had the regular amount of vowels. So that’s what Maddy called them.
    Mrs Trang said these first people were called the
Wurundjeri
. It was a word Maddy liked to whisper to herself in the quiet. She lay whispering it now.
    Wuh-run-jer-ee
.
    In the Karatgurk story, the stars were girls too. They’d been the first to make fire and they carried it, in embers on the ends of their digging sticks. Then there was some trouble – something about a crow stealing the fire. Maddy could only remember that Bunjil the eagle put the Karatgurk in the sky, safe from the crow. Now their embers were the stars. The lost star was the youngest girl, always chasing the older ones.
    Maddy liked to think of herself and the Emmas and Sophie-Rose, sailing the sky like the Karatgurk. Last night at the campout the conversation had turned to this favourite subject.
    Maddy had said if they could be star queens, they could decide who to reward and who to punish. She would, for instance, scatter ice-star seeds in good people’s gardens and the seeds would grow into diamond trees. Also they’d only wear dresses made of the finest frost with snow crystal crowns.
    Emma D, who worried about her freckles, said all star queens would have skin bathed in the light of the Milky Way. And Emma B, who worried that she wasn’t very important, said everybody would have to look up to them if they were star queens.
    And Sophie-Rose had said, “
Der
! Where else would they look?”
    Even Emma B had laughed. That was the thing about Sophie-Rose. She was sharp but she was funny.
    Maddy lifted her hands and framed the stars in her fingers. She wished she could put this sky in a box and take it with her. She moved the frame across the sky, catching the whole Milky Way.
    She moved the frame down into the backyard.
    There was a dark shape standing by the shed.
    “Pumpkin, pumpkin,” sighed Dad. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
    He was standing in his train pyjamas with a sad face.
    “Nothing,” said Maddy, coldly.
    Dad sat down next to her. She was too big to lie on him any more. Only a week ago he’d told her to get off. He’d said she was big as a planet and would squash him into a black hole. She’d thought it funny then. But now it was different. It was like he
wanted
everything to change. Like he was happy about it.
    Venus was twinkling just behind his head, but Maddy would not look. The sky became morning and they didn’t say one word. She tipped her face back and her nose stood dark against the sky.
    “You know,” said