Page 37 of Nothing Without You

‘I wanted you to stay with me. Come in the bedroom, just for a while.’

‘I can’t, she said as she pulled away from him. ‘I’ve got to go home.’

He pulled her by the arm and drew her into his bare chest. ‘Will you be my girl? See me again?’

She smiled as she looked up at him. ‘Yes. I will.’

Chapter Forty

The girls walked her home, the three of them talking about who had been with whom last night. ‘Bob really likes you,’ Sissy said. ‘I haven’t seen him bother with anyone before last night. Well not here anyway. I think he had girlfriends in Cairns, but he mustn’t be with them anymore.’

‘Are you on the pill?’ Peace asked.

Evie’s stomach lurched. She hadn’t thought about getting pregnant. Surely that couldn’t happen when you just had sex once? You would need to have done it a lot of times, and they had only done it once last night. ‘No. Should I be?’

‘Yes. You don’t want to get pregnant. I’m going into Cairns next week. Don’t sleep with him before then, and you can come with me to the clinic. They give you the pill and you don’t need your mother to know. You just have to make sure you hide it from her.’

‘Sure. That sounds good.’

As she stood in her front yard, watching the girls walk slowly back up the track towards their home, she thought about how much her life had changed in just a few days. She was still standing deep in thought when her mother’s car pulled up. Her mother wasn’t very talkative, which suited Evie. No questions or interrogations. She felt even more relief when she said she had a migraine, and suggested Evie amuse herself for the afternoon, because she intended having a long sleep.

The afternoon passed quickly, with another shower and time to sort out more belongings in her bedroom taking her mind off Bob and what had happened. He wasn’t Chris, but he was the next best thing. Now, in his words, she was his girl. All she needed to do was not see him again until she had been to the clinic in Cairns. She was definitely too young to fall pregnant.

Chapter Forty-One

Peace and Sissy came to visit her most days, and Mother soon came to know them also. It was amazing the different voices they put on when they spoke to adults. You would have thought they were the most angelic teenagers around.

‘Let me carry that for you, Mrs Romano,’ Peace offered, when Mother was unloading the groceries from her car.

‘I can watch that stew cooking if you like, Mrs Romano. You do so much. You should try and rest.’

‘Your new friends are lovely girls,’ Mother told Evie. ‘Well brought up and full of good manners. Tim and Arlo are the same. Those parents do a good job of bringing their kids up in that commune. I thought they might be a bit wild, but I can see they are the opposite.’

Mother’s impression of the commune kids meant that Evie had even more freedom, and wherever they went, so did she. Peace took her into the clinic in Cairns, and she even snuck into one of the pubs on the northern beaches with them one day. They sat laughing and talking, and she sipped a Harvey Wall Banger cocktail as if she was every bit of eighteen.

She hadn’t gone with Sissy and another friend of hers when they went to watch Bob’s band play in Townsville. It was too far away, and she didn’t want to see him until she had been on the pill for the right amount of time before having sex. Her period had been a couple of weeks late and she, Peace and Sissy had lived in a constant state of fear, the girls checking in with her every day to see if she had got it or not.

Today, when she went to visit them, she skipped all the way up the track, racing in through the commune gates to find the girls. Tim had been digging the vegetable patch over and he called out to her as she went by. ‘Oye. Who’s chasing you?’

She laughed and backtracked to talk to him. ‘No one. I came to see Peace and Sissy. What are you doing?’

‘Turning the soil. I’m going to plant potatoes and some other vegetables. I’ll get some manure from the farm up the track and work the soil over until it’s healthy. I think I want to be a farmer when I leave school. Maybe I’ll buy a couple of acres and grow vegetables.’

‘That sounds good. Don’t you want to go to university?’

He chuckled and she thought how cute he was, his long hair, blond and tangled, his bright eyes always looking like they were smiling at her. If she hadn’t met Bob, maybe she could have been Tim’s girlfriend. Too late now though, she had told Bob she’d be his girl.

‘No one at our school goes to uni,’ Tim said. ‘Most leave before they finish year twelve. They get jobs and make money.’

‘I’m going to go to university. I want to be a doctor.’

School would start in a couple of weeks. She was looking forward to getting her books in order and seeing what the new school was like. If the kids were as cool as the commune crew, life would be pretty interesting.

‘You need to do a lot of study to go to uni.’

‘Do you think I’ll like the school here?’ she asked.

Tim had come closer to her and he gave her one of his beautiful smiles, his teeth white and straight. ‘No. No one likes school. There’re too many other good things to do, like surfing and fishing.’

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