Yellow Read Free

time I spoke to him. His name was Omar, he was a boy in my class and he had skin like chocolate, with hooded eyes that made him look like he was always daydreaming. He had a tangle of black hair, but the peculiar thing about Omar was that he had a birthmark, or something, at the very back of his head. Whatever it was, it made a patch of his hair grow completely white, as though he’d had a fright. He was lovely.
    The others called him ‘magpie’. They didn’t call him that in a nice way.
    I crushed on him with all of my twelve-year-old being until one day Cassie came to class with friendship bracelets made from yellow and green and orange wool. The colours of my eyes, she said. She tied one around my wrist and one around hers and when she whispered jokes to me in class our hair fell together. She had never been so nice to me. By the end of the day I thought that I’d be her new best friend. That Lou would have to know what it was to sit on the bus by herself during school excursions. Drunk on Cassie’s friendship, when she asked me about Omar, I told her. Then she raced over to Lou. ‘I knew it!’ she cackl­ed. Then they both squawked, pretending to be magpies. Omar changed schools at the end of term.
    I’ve just reached the bush, tears trudging down my cheeks, when a particularly gnarly tree root hooks itself over my foot and the ground comes crashing towards me.
    Ooooph.
    Just great.
    As I wipe the dirt off my knees I think it’s a small mercy that nobody was around to see that, until I hear a laugh from above. Not a mean laugh, but not a sweet one either. A brittle laugh that sounds rusty from lack of use.
    I look up.
    To see Willow Parker perched on a branch, smoking a cigarette and peering at me wryly from the one eye that’s not hidden behind her spilt-coffee hair. Her legs are swinging back and forth and her smile has disappeared back to that place it had briefly escaped from.
    â€˜Good friends you’ve got there, cupcake.’
    It’s a statement.
    Sarcastic, obviously.
    She blows a puff of smoke to punctuate her words. I look back towards my group, the Circle of them, pretty as a daisy chain. If I don’t go back to face my punishment I’m kicked out of the group until they decide to have a Circle again. That could take weeks. I really should go back.
    I should.
    I should get the pain over and done with, like ripping off a bandaid.
    And yet it hurts too much right now.
    Willow ashes her cigarette and I don’t know what to say back to her so I don’t say anything. I turn and, more carefully now, make my way to the creek. Towards home.

I follow the riverbank to where the bush clears to make way for the park. Across the other side of the river is more bush, and then South Beach. This side of the river, up from the park, is all housing commission homes. Where I live. Our houses sit in the shadow of a huge hill and all the people in town know whether you’re worth talking to or not depending on which side of the hill you belong.
    I’m not on the side worth talking to.
    Sometimes, I climb the hill just to stand up there and look around. It’s like a cobbled-together island surrounded by green, my town. Past the side that I live, the bad side, and all the way around to the right, there’s just a tangle of bush, torn open by the river, and the thrashing green waters of South Beach beyond that, the beach that’s not even worth the bother to patrol. South Beach winds its way out to the point and stops at the mouth of the creek – the point that separates the respectable people from us, the housing commission people. The good side is flanked by Main Beach, tame and sparkling. That side of the hill is where all the cashed-up baby boomers have washed in with the tide. The right of South Beach is knotted with more bush that creeps its way to Byron Bay, and past the back is farmland, where sugarcane farmers grow proud, green stalks that