Girls in Boys' Cars Read online

  About Girls in Boys Cars

  A complicated friendship.

  A roadtrip in a stolen car.

  The stories that define us.

  And two funny, sharp, adventurous young women who refuse to be held back any longer.

  Rosa was never really trying to hurt anyone, no matter what they said in court.

  But she’s ended up in juvenile jail anyway, living her life through books and wondering why her best mate Asheeka disappeared.

  A page-turning novel about a complicated friendship; a road trip through NSW in a stolen car; the stories that define us; and two funny, sharp, adventurous young women who refuse to be held back any longer.

  For my mother and for all the girls in boys’ cars

  CONTENTS

  About Girls in Boys Cars

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  LIFE ON THE INSIDE

  EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LITERATURE I LEARNED IN A PORN STORE

  PLACES I’M THINKING OF STARTING THIS BOOK

  A CHAPTER WHERE I SHOW MY SUPERPOWERS

  COSMIC RADIATION

  A CAR IS THE THING WITH MAN PARTS

  ON THE 48TH FLOOR

  PEEING IN SMALL CUPS

  NAN IN A WHITE PLASTIC CHAIR

  WRONG SIDE

  WAITING FOR BOYS’ CARS

  GIRLS IN BOYS’ CARS

  WE ARE MOVIE STARS

  ONCE AGAIN WE LEARN THAT WE REALLY CANNOT DRIVE

  THE MAGIC FARAWAY HIGHWAY

  MINTO STORIES

  INSIDE AND OUT

  THE FIRST CHARGE ON MY CRIMINAL RECORD

  A CHAPTER ON SEX

  GIRLS IN HOTEL ROOMS

  ON THE ROAD

  HOW I GOT THAT ACCESSORY TO ASSAULT CHARGE

  A FURTHER EXPLANATION OF THAT ACCESSORY TO ASSAULT CHARGE

  AND THEN THE NEXT CHARGE THAT CAME SHORTLY AFTER THAT

  I LOVE A SUNBURNT COUNTRY

  RODEO

  VISITING HOURS WITH DAD

  LAKE JINDABYNE

  AT THE PUB

  ASHEEKA GOES MISSING

  WOMEN DRIVING OVER CLIFFS

  SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

  SIX MINUTES

  EAT, PRAY, LOVE

  LAKE EUCUMBENE

  THE TELLING BITS

  THE QUIET BITS

  IN RETROSPECT

  WALKING

  EVACUATION CENTRE

  GIRLS ARE COMPLICATED STORIES

  HOW I GOT THAT SECOND CHARGE OF RESISTING ARREST

  HITCH

  YASS

  LIMBO LAND

  DUST

  STORIES IN BOOKS AND ON PHONES

  ELVIS, ELVIS EVERYWHERE

  STORIES AND MORE STORIES

  THE SECOND CAR WE STOLE

  THE TURNING

  JAILBIRDS

  AUSTRALIANA

  THE ’RITH

  LEARNING EMPATHY

  Acknowledgements

  About Felicity Castagna

  Also by Felicity Castagna

  Copyright

  Newsletter

  LIFE ON THE INSIDE

  Sometimes the past is a long arm that reaches out and slaps you in the face. And then you’re awake to everything and nothing at all. It’s like looking in the rear-view mirror – you only get a partial picture of the places you’ve already left and sometimes you’re not exactly sure of what you saw.

  In my case that rear-view mirror was always full-up with Asheeka smacking cherry-flavoured gloss across her lips until I pushed her out of the way or we backed into a Welcome sign in a drowned town that suddenly caught on fire or we sped away from the police in a car that just wouldn’t go fast enough or came close to running down some boys (who deserved it) with a vintage neon-pink Cadillac . . . you get the picture. And just for the record I was never really trying to kill anyone – whatever they said at my sentencing hearing – I was just trying to run down that giant M on a pole in the parking lot at my local McDonald’s because it was too much of a loaded symbol in my life – you know like the green light at the end of the pier in The Great Gatsby or something.

  Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Asheeka and me, we were always in each other’s way somehow. She made it hard to see all those things behind me and all those things in front. We were like that: taking turns leaving each other at the side of the road as we drove that car away from our lives and back again. Now that she’s missing, it’s easier and harder to get a grip on things. I’ve got to concentrate on learning to grow my own skin and sit in it.

  They tell me I’ll soon be transferred out to where the other girls are in the centre. But for now I’m in isolation, where everyone starts out, and I’m trying to distract myself from that light in my cell that keeps buzzing and blinking on the ceiling. I close my eyes and imagine those bright orange cans of Fanta Asheeka used to buy from the tobacconist for a dollar, the sweetness of them, the way they turned your tongue a funny burnt colour and made everything you ate afterwards taste like neon lights.

  And I’m thinking that maybe me and Asheeka, we were never really running away from anything at all, maybe we just had to keep going forward because it was the only way we could get back to ourselves.

  EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LITERATURE I LEARNED IN A PORN STORE

  Maree, that’s the counsellor in this place, she says that if I like books so much I should write one. It’d give me a chance to reflect, she says, on how someone like me ended up in some place like this. Maree, she’s nice and all, kind of like one of those teachers who must have been really great at one time but now can’t see their way past the tiredness of doing it too long. She brings me books from the centre library, so I can’t fault her all that much, but I don’t think she knows who someone like me really is. It’s the same thing the magistrate said when he sentenced me to six months in a juvenile correction centre, the same thing my mother said too. But I am acting like me, that’s the thing, I’ve got lots of different me’s bubbling away on the inside, trying to get to the surface. We’re all made up of lots of stories. I read that somewhere in a book. You know, like peeling back the layers of an onion – that’s not from a book, that’s from the movie Shrek. It’s the same concept, though. I learned that every day I was on the road with Asheeka, when all we did was pull stories out of each other, sometimes by force, sometimes because they just escaped from our mouths when we didn’t want them to. Telling those stories was like unravelling a ball of yarn that stretched out longer than any road we drove in that stolen car (and then the next car we stole after that).

  But I have to say I don’t much like the books Maree chooses for me. She keeps on bringing me those vampire romance books all the girls are into. I’ve never understood the big deal about them. What’s so sexy about some guy who wants to bite you and suck out all your blood? As if that’s not completely disgusting even if they do look good without a shirt on and their pasty-arse skin glitters in the sunlight.

  Truth is, my taste is more discerning than that. Everything I know about literature I learned at the porn shop on my way home from school. No way I would have gone in there, except that in the second week of year seven I lost my copy of Anne of Green Gables that we were studying for English and I could see they had that movie tie-in edition in the window.

  On the inside there is an ‘Adults Only’ sign that points to the upstairs bit where they keep all those plastic dicks. Downstairs, there’s books packed sideways onto endless dusty shelves to get more in and old cardboard boxes spewing bright-coloured books onto worn-out carpet.

  Sue, with her bright blue eyes and her leathery sun-baked hands, is always sitting at the back of the shop reading something with one of her drawn-in eyebrows raised in an upside-down V like she’s
really thinking about something super hard. She told me once that she gets all the books in her store cheap because when the bookstores don’t want them anymore they end up being pulped in giant machines that turn them into blank photocopy paper. She can’t stand it, the idea of all those stories being shredded, so she buys them all and has moved most of her handcuffs and latex and the magazines with all the boobs on the covers upstairs. And now she’s got more interesting company than the customers who climb the stairs without looking at all those books she’s got on the bottom level: she’s got people like me (or mostly just me).

  That first year of high school I split my time pretty evenly between the porn shop and hanging with my nan at the retirement village after school. Then I’d go to McDonald’s until my mum got home at six or so – I liked it there. I liked it there most afternoons and sometimes Saturdays and Sundays. Maybe like isn’t the right word here – it was more about finding comfort in habit, in knowing that you could just sit there and no one expected you to do anything else but eat.

  My dad lived in one of the old red-brick apartment blocks to its north and my mum had moved into the 48th floor of the Meriton luxury apartments to its south; my nan’s retirement home, school and that porn store weren’t too far from it either so those golden arches were the sun everything in my universe revolved around. Everything, everything, everything was strange that year but between stuffing my face with chips and my head with books I could keep it at bay a little.

  I liked the way that in the porn store there was this unspoken rule that everyone who came through the doors suddenly became invisible – no one looks up at each other, there’s no kind of awkward chit-chat like when you run into someone you know at the supermarket or something.

  Sue’s the only one who acknowledges I’m here. I like that. I liked that a lot in year seven and even in year nine when things started to get better or later when I realised that things were just same same but different and I wanted to be invisible again. Every now and then Sue kicked me out of the shop, not so much for using her place like it’s a library but because she said I needed to go get a life outside of a book. Doesn’t stop her from encouraging my reading though.

  Once, Sue gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. It’s about this guy called Holden who complains too much. I liked it in the end, though, the way he takes off from everything in his life, searching for some place where he feels free. I guess, on reflection, that’s what we did too. He starts that book with something about how he knows everyone probably wants to hear the story from the beginning, where he came from, what his family was like, all that background, but he tells the reader that he’s not so interested in starting from that place, so he begins the story somewhere in the middle where most stories really start. All that background comes later in the book, though. No one can really escape all that backstory, I guess. We never could. No matter how far we drove from Parramatta, it always came back like a fly you were constantly trying to brush away from your face.

  PLACES I’M THINKING OF STARTING THIS BOOK

  There is always the problem of starting the story too early or too late or even in the middle but then I guess that also brings up an even more complicated problem which is, where is the end and the beginning anyway?

  So, I can’t work it out really, where I should begin The Book of How I Got Here but I think that maybe I need to go back again to that summer before year seven and I probably need to spend a little more time talking about me when I was a super fat nobody with a bowl cut stuffing all my anxiety down my throat in handfuls of hot chips at North Parramatta Maccas.

  I was lonely but I also wanted to be alone. I used to live in this house which was loud, loud, loud, loud. My grandparents lived with us and they were always out there on the lawn in the same white plastic chairs holding court. Nan’s a Greek-Egyptian and he was Italian. Between them they spoke a lot of the languages of the neighbourhood. At the start of the summer before year seven started, Pop died in his sleep and Nan kept getting lost because she’d forget that he was dead and wander around the neighbourhood trying to find him at the TAB or the home of the guy who made grappa in his bathtub.

  Nan went to a home and Mum and Dad split up not too long after that. I think, in truth, it was Nan and Pop who kept our family together for so long. I think Mum wanted to be with his family because she didn’t have much of her own and Dad’s a good man but all the things he’d seen in the army had broken him and Mum couldn’t take it, just us and him.

  I guess that’s the whole story, but not quite the whole story of why I let myself became invisible in year seven. My story is a lot like this Marvel comic I really like called Invisible Girl. Before she became invisible she was living her best life with all her family on another planet but they all got hit by a meteor shower and when she woke up she’d fallen to earth and all the cosmic radiation made her invisible. That’s exactly what happened to me except that I fell to earth and then I had to begin high school at an all girls’ school and, also, nothing is more scary than teenage girls. I didn’t know how to talk to anyone. There was too much noise in my head and the couple of girls I knew from primary got sick of me not being all that fun, so I guess at the end of the day I crashed to the earth and let myself sit in all that radiation. I rubbed it all over my body and covered myself in all its cosmic gooeyness.

  Invisible Girl’s an old version of me that still comes up, knocks on my bones, rises to the surface of my skin occasionally. But she comes up less and less these days. She’s one of the me’s I’ve left behind. I’ve tried so many ways of getting rid of her. Some of them, okay, most of them, weren’t such great ways of leaving her behind. But I’m trying now, trying just to be myself and be more visible in what Maree would call a much more productive way. Let’s just leave her where she is for now because I’m trying to let her sit there somewhere deep inside my gut where she can remind me who I am but not take over.

  A CHAPTER WHERE I SHOW MY SUPERPOWERS

  It was Asheeka who helped me to work out that being invisible could also sometimes be my superpower. That’s why I was always the one who would pull the fire alarm at school. I could stand there in front of that bright red lever in its case, suspiciously by myself. I could pull it, or I could keep standing there. I could scream and rip off my clothes and run around the school yard naked – not that I ever did that but I’m pretty sure no one would have noticed anyway.

  I started pulling the alarm after Asheeka and I became friends in year nine. Asheeka told me once, when we were on the road, that she needed those screeching bells to echo through the hallways so that they weren’t always just in her head. I know now that there was probably a lot more going on in Asheeka’s life than I understood back then but the most obvious thing was that she’d had an epic fallout with one of the other popular girls at school, Catherine.

  Catherine was also how we’d become friends despite the seeming impossibility of it – because I was sitting there one afternoon at Maccas, at my own table, away from all the other kids who came there after school, when Catherine walked by and called me fat and shortly after that Asheeka chucked a frozen Coke at her head. I told Asheeka it was the most amazing thing anyone had ever done for me and she told me very matter-of-factly that she thought if I was going to be fat I should be prepared for people to call me out on it. She’d just chucked that frozen Coke at Catherine because she was a bitch and she didn’t like her. But anyways, we stuck together more and more that year and the years that came later.

  I pulled the fire alarm a lot after that. I’d wait until everyone was tucked away inside those classrooms and I could breath again and then I’d open up that glass case and pull the lever down slowly. The bells rippled through the building and the red flashing lights on the ceiling started to go off and I’d walk slowly out of the school and to the park across the road where everyone would shortly line up in their home room groups in front of disgruntled teachers with clipboards who just wanted to get back to their desks. In those early yea
rs, I’d just look over at Asheeka standing there in her line staring up at the trees and I’d know that Asheeka, like me, had been given a moment to catch her breath before we had to go back into the classroom and I’d have to sit there again, looking like I was cool and calm and collected when all I wanted to do was unzip my skin and jump out the window and Asheeka had to be that person again, smiling, with all the other girls, being the centre of attention.

  I want to flash forward now, to the last time I pulled that alarm. It was almost the end of year eleven. I guess it was the final time we escaped, before we really, really escaped in that car and we just kept going, I guess you might say it was the first time we realised that we didn’t always have to turn back.

  I did it like I always did: I waited for the girls to file into the classrooms. I stood there and watched them flick their hair and laugh and whisper some story to each other that I’d never be a part of. I wanted . . . not to be them – it wasn’t anything as simple as that. I wanted whatever they were creating with their easy jokes and loud laughter and I wanted what they made for themselves when they walked down those halls like nothing was ever going to trip them up.

  I pulled the alarm and walked.

  In that park across the road I found Asheeka. ‘Good job,’ she whispered in my ear, and we walked together casually, like we’d planned it, across the road while all the teachers fumbled with their orange safety vests and someone tried to marshal twelve hundred girls with a giant megaphone that spewed robot-sounding words no one could understand.

  We made it up to the train station in less than the time it was probably taking to organise all those neat rows of girls, but caught up in the excitement of having gotten away with things, we realised too late that we’d got on the wrong train. Instead of heading towards the city we were heading back into deep, deep suburbia, where the yards were getting bigger and the roads were getting wider and flatter and the Hills hoists and their endless rows of baby clothes poked out from above wooden fences.