Friday Brown by Vikki Wakefield Read Free Book Online

up the stairs.
    ‘She hates me,’ I said as I wiped off my backside.
    Silence snapped his hand open and shut— yap yap yap —which I took to mean that Darcy hated everybody.
    I was the centre of my mother’s world for sixteen years. It was a strange feeling, that someone I barely knew could dish out dislike based on a badly timed giggle. It made me wonder whether my opinion of myself was wrong. Vivienne protested too much sometimes. She told me she loved me enough for two, that fathers were overrated. She kept me close, even closer when she was out of love. Was I in fact deserving of dislike? How could I measure my own character with only one reference?
    I resolved to be nicer to Darcy with the see-through skin.
    Silence led me into the kitchen. Crates were lined up around the table but there was nobody there. Coke sat flat in plastic cups, swimming with cigarette butts. Cold chips—just the overcooked and greenish ones—were lying on a sheet of butcher’s paper. It seemed as if there had been a meeting, abandoned.
    Silence scraped together a handful of chips and shoved them into his mouth.
    ‘Where is everybody?’ I asked.
    He pointed up.
    ‘What’s up there?’
    Attic, Silence whispered. The word seemed to stick in his throat. He cleared it. The effort made him cough and even that sounded like someone had turned his volume down. After a minute of breathless hacking and hoicking into the sink, his face was pale. He collapsed onto thefloor, his chest an over-inflated balloon. I heard his lungs crackle.
    I patted him on the back. ‘Should I get someone? Tell me what to do.’ Don’t die, don’t die on me, kid. I wanted to run for help but my feet felt like they were fused to the floor.
    ‘He needs his inhaler,’ an Aboriginal girl said from the doorway. ‘I’ll get it.’ She disappeared up the staircase. When she came back, she held a small, blue canister to Silence’s lips and cupped the back of his neck.
    He inhaled the mist. Within seconds, his breathing steadied and he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.
    ‘I’m Bree,’ the girl said. She had short, curly black hair, a dimpled white smile that took up most of her face. Bottomless eyes. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. ‘Relax, will you? He’ll be fine in a few minutes. It happens all the time. Asthma.’
    Her accent was warm and familiar, her voice gravelly. Her words rolled over each other like marbles in a cup.
    ‘Do you need more?’ she asked Silence.
    He pushed her hands away.
    ‘Dust sets him off,’ she said to me. ‘Are you ready? Come on, everyone’s upstairs.’
    I thought about what Carrie said. Pledge. Allegiance. Sacrifice. Virgin. Well, maybe not the virgin part, but the other things sounded serious and binding. And what I needed then was not to be bound, not by anything, especially people.
    ‘Arden said you were small,’ Bree said and started up the stairs.
    Silence followed. He looked back at me standing by the sink and raised his eyebrows.
    I shook my head. ‘I should go.’
    ‘It’s dark,’ Bree said and kept walking. ‘Come on. I brought rum. Carrie’s got vodka and pretzels.’
    Silence clapped.
    Pretzels. Pretzels were harmless enough.
    The attic space was cavernous, echoing. We entered through a square in the ceiling after climbing a rickety ladder that groaned and flexed under our weight. The windows were blacked out and a sloping roof touched the top of my head in places. The light from two candles drew looming shadows on the walls.
    They sat on the floor in a semi-circle.
    Arden wore a trench coat that spread like a dark pool around her. Cigarette smoke drifted in a halo around her face. She handed the butt to Malik and he crushed it on the sole of his boot.
    ‘Here she is,’ Arden smiled.
    Joe added to a chain of pretzels by biting the corner off one and linking it to the next.
    Carrie gave me a fang-toothed smile and slapped the empty space next to her. She offered me a bottle of vodka and