Whiskey & Charlie by Annabel Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

PE, which was what they’d always called it before. Charlie made a mental note to add to his collection: elastic bands were lackies , sunglasses were sunnies , phys ed was PE .
    â€œApparently she’s a lemon,” Whiskey added.
    â€œWhat’s a lemon?” Charlie asked.
    â€œA lezzo, a dyke—that’s what they call it.”
    â€œWho told you that?”
    â€œA guy in my homeroom. Asked if I wanted to go up to the football field at lunchtime, kick a footy around with his mates.”
    â€œThey play soccer?” Charlie asked hopefully.
    â€œAussie Rules.”
    â€œBut we don’t know how to play Aussie Rules.”
    Whiskey shrugged again. “Soon find out. Are you in?”
    â€œOkay,” Charlie said. He hadn’t had any better offers.
    x x x
    The lessons were easy enough. The hard part was knowing what to say, when to say it, and who to say it to. The hard part was thinking you spoke the same language and finding out you didn’t. The bell was a siren , break time was recess , when you went swimming you did not wear trunks but long shorts called boardies . People had different names. The girls were called Narelle and Charlene and Kerrilee, names Charlie had never heard of. And the boys—who were not called boys but guys—had names from American soap operas: Brett and Todd and Shane. Even the food was different. There were no lunch ladies serving greasy cafeteria food and mashed potatoes. There was an outdoor cafeteria where you chose your own lunch and ate it where you pleased—standing up, sitting down, lying on the football field if it took your fancy—no one cared. There were bread rolls smothered in melted cheese and deep-fried sausages coated in breadcrumbs affectionately known as crumbed dicks . There were licorice straps, which you bought less to eat than to attract the attention of the girls, by using the straps to whip the backs of their legs.
    After the first few days, Whiskey and Charlie no longer spent recess or lunch together. Whiskey had made friends with the football players and the kids who smoked cigarettes— smokes —in the bushes on the far side of the football field. Charlie stayed in the quadrangle, hanging around with a guy from his homeroom called Marco and a gang of Marco’s friends. Charlie did not feel that he had anything in common with Marco’s friends particularly, but he felt more at ease with them than he did on the field with Whiskey’s mates. And if Marco’s friends didn’t go out of their way to make him welcome, neither did they do anything to indicate they wanted to get rid of him, which was a good enough reason to stick around, Charlie supposed.
    By the end of their third week at the school, people Charlie didn’t recognize were greeting him between classes, shouting yo, dude and hey, man at him and occasionally offering him high fives in the corridors, which he declined to accept. They had been at the school for four weeks when one of the prefects accosted Charlie in the bathroom, saying, “Whoa, man, Whiskey never told me he had a little brother. Shit, you are the spitting image. What grade are you in?”
    â€œI’m in tenth grade, same as him,” Charlie said. “We’re twins,” he added through gritted teeth. And there it was. The part of his life he thought he had discarded in the depths of the Indian Ocean, echoing back at him from the seabed.
    Charlie had been kidding himself, thinking things could be different in Australia. Whiskey was a character. He possessed a quality Charlie had missed out on, a quality that made people want to be around him. He was Whiskey Ferns, fresh off the boat, and Charlie bet there wasn’t a single student in the school who didn’t know his name.
    x x x
    One story went like this: aged twelve, Whiskey had stolen a bottle of scotch from his parents’ liquor cabinet, slugged at it through math and biology, and then