Page 14 of Bay of Plenty

“Yuck.” A stab of disgust seized her face. “My father called me that. It’s been CeeCee for years.”

Like a grimy postcard from the past, I remembered her father, Scrumy, leaning against the campground shed in his stained undershirt, slugging beer from a bottle, watching kids on the trampoline. Rosemary appeared in the kitchen and bumped CeeCee’s hip.

“Hey, girlfriend.” Rosemary stroked CeeCee’s head like she was a kitten. “Look at our Ceec. Not only a pretty face, but she pretty much runs the beach.” She sucked in a breath. “Jeez. See what I did there?”

“You always give me too much credit.” CeeCee dipped her pointed chin, making her face a heart shape.

She handed her wine to Rosemary in a move I would have sworn was intended to get rid of her.

“Good to see you, Isla,” she said softly. After checking that Rosemary was busy in the courtyard pouring wine, she slipped closer.

What was she up to? She was small, but she’d been in that gang. My palms were slick with sweat.

“Hey, I want to talk to you about the bullying at school.” Her voice dropped low and thick with regret. “I’m so sorry I never stood up for you. I’m ashamed of myself.” Pain misted her round blue eyes.

Years of my unshed tears threatened to surface, but I willed them back. I never cried, and I wasn’t going to start now. But she’d seen what had happened. She was a witness. More than that, she was the first person to acknowledge it.Bevan and I never talked about it because that would have made it intolerably real.

Her distress clutched at my windpipe, making it hard to breathe. My mind stirred through the soup of those long-festering memories of her with those other two girls. One picture tried to bob to the surface. The steam cleared, and the image sharpened with a startling clarity. After Janey had died, CeeCee had shuffledbehindthose two girls.Behind them, head bowed and silent.

“I remember now.” I reached out and squeezed her hand. “You never called out to me. You never did anything to me.”

“I was as scared of them as you were, but that’s no excuse.”

Her words slammed into me. Poor CeeCee. I swayed and gripped the ground to steady my stance. I’d always prided myself on noticing small things. As a young kid, these small things filled the stories I wrote with Janey and Kingi. I molded this skill in high school to alert me to kids who planned to taunt me. For mySunday Newsstories, those small things led to a bigger truth.

But I’d missed this.

*

Rosemary called for us to come out to the courtyard. She handed us glasses of the wine CeeCee had brought.

“Hold the champers,” she trilled. “This is Snow’s sauvignon blanc, and they’re drinking it in Londinium. That’s London to you plebs. Ceec, give Isla the deets on where she can buy it, eh?”

“Impressive. How many bottles do you export?” I asked.

CeeCee fiddled with the other wine bottle. Her hands were shaking. “Oh, that’s Snow’s department. He doesn’t like me talking about his businesses.”

She flinched at Snow’s name, which set off warning signals, and I checked out her neck. Her romper had a high, shirred collar, but that was the fashion. She hadn’t pushed up her long sleeves even though the night was so hot it had left the hibiscus floppy and gasping.She looks miserable.

Her words sparked a few nods and hmms. “It’s true,” Rosemary said. “He won’t even let her pilot for his tour company.”

Before I could ask more, CeeCee turned to me and encouraged me to take a sip.

It couldn’t be good. Snow wasn’t a winemaker. “Mmm, lovely,” I said. And I meant it. Crisp, lemongrass, kiwifruit…delicious.

CeeCee must have seen the surprise on my face. “Snow knew Bevan’s parents made a beautiful wine. He had a plan for marketing it.”

We sat down to Mum’s smoked fish pie, bobbing with soft-boiled eggs in a creamy sauce spiked with mustard and, like every good Kiwi pie, topped with cheesy mashed potatoes. It was followed by her classic passionfruit pavlova, fluffy with crunchy meringue on the outside. My spirits drooped with a mix of sadness and remorse. She made my favorites.

They chatted for an hour about people I’d forgotten. My ears perked up when Kui mentioned her niece was a cop. I considered her a possible contact. Mostly, I sipped wine and tried to keep up, but their words dissolved like the sun into the back bush, glowing the sky pink. They had so much to say, even though it was obvious they’d seen each other yesterday, their lives a continuous rotation of updating. I felt the old distance between them and me, like I didn’t belong—this time not in a harsh or negative way, but in that I wanted different things.

They didn’t ask much about my life, except what I had for dinner back in London—mostly what Shay cooked—maybe because they knew I’d been fired, but mostly because questions here were seen as prying.

A car horn blared from the front of the property. Kui’s youngest son, Rangi, had arrived to drive them all home. Mum packed up a huge mound of leftovers, including the pavlova, which collapsed into a blob of white. This deterred no one. “Pav, best eaten for breakfast the day after,” Mum said, and they all agreed. Bevan said she’d walk home along the beach, and I insisted on joining her.

I was surprised to find myself smiling as we waved the others off into a night that had finally cooled. Did I have friends here after all?

Chapter Eight

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