The Sentinels of Eden, Books 1-4

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The last class of the day dragged on and I kept feeling like everyone was invading my space. All I wanted was to get home so I could finish my Biology revision and then pretend I was going to yell at Harry for an hour or two. Which, of course, I wouldn’t do because he might say something else I didn’t want to hear.

Nicole had been given a detention when the school found out she didn’t have permission to be in town, but being able to produce her completed essay saved her from a worse fate. Not that she seemed in the least bit grateful to me. Had I ever been that annoying?

I crossed out the maths problem that I was stuffing up and started again.

‘I heard he was so upset he left town altogether!’

My head snapped up to see who was whispering. It was Taylor, one of the blonde Barbie dolls in the front row. She was using the sort of whisper that wanted to be heard by the whole class.

Tessa leant forward, her manicured nails gripping the edge of the desk as she whispered just as loudly. ‘Who left town?’

‘Bane. I heard he came in this morning, emptied out his locker, and just drove off again. Exams are only a month away!’ Scandal dripped from Taylor’s voice.

Personally I thought there was a bit of a jump between emptying his locker and leaving town. But what if he really had been expelled? I hadn’t yet had a chance to report him for the knife incident but it had hardly been a private scene. Anyone could have dobbed him in. I should have felt relieved that I didn’t have to be the one to do it but I actually felt a little bit worried. Okay maybe not worried, but I did want to know if it was the incident with me that had made him leave. I decided to just be an adult about it so after class I went straight to the office.

‘I have a book that Ben Millard lent me that I need to return to him but his locker is empty and I haven’t seen him today. Has he changed lockers?’ Well, maybe a little false backstory wasn’t so adult, but it seemed simpler.

‘I’m afraid he’s no longer attending this school,’ Mrs Carpenter replied as she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her long nose with one hand and smacked her mouse against the desk a few times with the other.

That didn’t really tell me if he’d been expelled or left voluntarily. More sweet-talking required.

‘Did he change schools? Should I drop the book in at St Catherine’s or will he come back for graduation?’

She stopped trying to move her cursor and peered at me. ‘I don’t think he’ll be coming back. He just dropped out without any good reason that I’m aware of. You might just have to keep the book.’

Bingo. I knew it wouldn’t take much to get her to sing. Lovely heart has Mrs C, but she keeps her mouth shut about as well as anyone else in a small country town. So, not expelled then. For some reason that made me feel relieved, and a tiny part of me felt a bit sad that he’d come so close to the end of VCE and not finished. Still, he must have had his reasons. I thanked her, reached over to plug her mouse cord in properly, and then left.

Utterly ridiculous. Some sort of cruel joke? Unlike Harry. My fingers were going numb so I rolled over onto my back again. That made three whole revolutions since I had woken at 2.17am. I was like a lamb roasting on a spit. A sleepless, very annoyed roast lamb. Basting in the memory of Harry’s words. Your mother’s grave is a lie. At the time, his warm brown eyes had seemed so placid, so peaceful, like he was telling me that all I had to do was click my heels together three times and I’d wake up in my mother’s arms.

Stubbornly, I kept my eyes shut because opening them would be admitting that I was awake. If only I could sleep without hearing that mournful music! It was painfully beautiful. At least, I remembered that it was beautiful but I couldn’t quite recall the music itself. The conflicts were frustrating. I dreaded the pain of it, but still longed to sleep so I could hear it again, and I was exhausted, but too tired to endure any more of the sadness that came from sleeping. So I flipped over yet again. The backs of my eyelids were really boring.

Your mother’s grave is a lie.

What possible reason could Harry have for saying something like that? There had been a coroner’s report. Nothing mysterious. Hideous, sad, tragic, but not at all mysterious. But I couldn’t keep pretending Harry hadn’t said it.

The floorboards were freezing as I crept down the hall to the study. It took a while to dig under the piles of poultry magazines leftover from that time when Aunt Lily decided to enter her Orpingtons in the Nalong show, but I finally pulled down the old photo album with the faded green vinyl cover. I didn’t have a lot of family history from my mother’s side, and it was pretty much all in that album.

The desk lamp threw the old sepia photos into stark brightness, so that I imagined the young couples in the pictures were about to cringe away, squinting. I apologised for disturbing them as I flipped through to the back of the book. Just a few coloured pictures graced the pages. There was one of a man holding a child above his head by her ankle with a woman standing nearby tilting her head upside-down to look the girl in the eye. They were all laughing. There was a 1970’s lime green Ford station wagon in the background, so the child was most likely my mother. She had wavy light brown hair, same colour as mine but not nearly as thick and crazy. There was another photo of my grandmother, riding a bay stockhorse at a country show, and the next page had a picture of a young guy standing on a beach with his wetsuit peeled down to his waist. He was leaning on a surfboard wedged into the sand and his wet hair was an explosion of long curls. Man, my dad had kind of nice abs.

The wedding photo on the next page made my eyes flood. My mum’s dress was exquisite, and my dad couldn’t take his eyes off her despite the two groomsmen behind him who were about to pour their glasses of champagne over his head.

The last photo in the book was slightly blurry, as if the photographer had tried to take a sneaky shot. In it, I recognised myself as a toddler, and my mother was clutching me to her chest with one arm and pulling back the blue curtains to open my bedroom window with the other. It looked like she was singing …

Eight seconds later I burst through the door to my aunt’s bedroom, switched on the light and slammed the album onto the bed violently enough to make Inara hiss. I was too upset to speak. All I could do was point to the photo, my trembling finger tapping against the curtains in the picture. The blue curtains. The ones that had replaced my pink Barbie ones after I’d torn them with the plastic sword Noah had been given for Christmas. The Christmas after my mother had died.