Page 3 of Unspoken Words
“Elliephant,” he muttered.
“Chris, you can wash. Eloise, you can dry.”
Chris clamped his ball with his hands. “But, Daaaad—”
“No buts, Chris.”
Dad’s eyes shot from my idiot brother to me and then back again, as if he were watching a tennis game and we were the players. But they soon relaxed, and a small smile crept in at the corners of his mouth. I wasn’t sure why, but Dad really did love camping. Nothing could ruin his happy nature-vibes. Not even us.
He sighed. “Look … the Bourkes are new in town, and Mrs Bourke has been appointed as my school librarian. When she mentioned that she and her husband enjoyed camping, I invited them to join us for the holidays.”
“Of course you did,” Chris retorted.
I couldn’t help but giggle. Luckily, I suppressed it before my true I’m-really-not-happy-to-be-here feelings were betrayed.
“Connor has just been through an unimaginably tough time where they used to live,” Dad added. “So do me a favour and be nice, make friends … Enjoy each other’s company, okay?”
Bull crap!I’m staying in my tent.
“He better like footy,” Chris mumbled before opening his door and exiting the car with Mum and Dad.
Before Mum closed her door, she paused, her eyebrow arched. “You coming?”
I shook my head and diverted my gaze to a barren tree.
She sighed and made her way to my side of the car before opening my door and leaning forward to pluck my headphones off my ears. “Wrong answer.” Mum placed her hands on either side of my face, forcing me to look into her green eyes. “I know this is not what we promised, sweetheart. I know we said we would spend the summer holidays at the beach. And I know you hate us right now because we broke that promise—”
“I don’t hate you,” I mumbled, wiping the tears that were pooling in my eyes.
Mum’s fingertips were delicate as she helped rid them from my face. “Good, because you’re not allowed to hate us.”
Scoffing mildly, I deliberately avoided her emerald gaze. It was a gaze that had you forgetting your annoyance and thinking about nothing other than row upon row of leafy evergreen trees, merry little leprechauns, and the Emerald City in Wizard of Oz. My mother’s gaze was magical. Hypnotic. And like my mother, I, too, had vivid green eyes and red hair, red hair I hated with a passion and would be dying as soon as I was old enough to do so.
Apparently, the age of ‘nearly’ thirteen wasn’t quite old enough.
“Ellie, honey, please don’t be upset. The way I see it, you can be miserable and have a miserable time, or you can accept that sometimes things don’t pan out the way we want them to and, instead, make the most of a crappy situation.” She smoothed my hair and cupped my cheeks. “So, what’s it gonna be?”
I shrugged.
“Well, until you decide, I want you to get out of the car so that we can introduce ourselves to the Bourkes. After that, perhaps you could go for a walk and think about how you’re going to play out the next two weeks.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine.”
She pressed her lips to my forehead then smiled. “Good start.”
*
Mr and Mrs Bourkeseemedlike nice, quiet, loving, Carol and Mike Brady types. As for their son, Connor, he definitely wasn’t part of the Bourke Brady Bunch. When Dad introduced both Chris and me, Connor met our gaze for the briefest of seconds before asking if he could be excused. Talk about rude and disinterested.
I guess I couldn’t blame him for wanting to escape the campsite, though, which was exactly what I’d done shortly after he had. I wasn’t in the mood to be sociable either, not to Mr and Mrs Bourke and certainly not to my parents or my football-kicking douche brother. I was in Hell. A mosquito-ridden, dirty, smelly Hell, and no one seemed to care but me.
Now gazing out over the river, which snaked through several mountains flanking our campsite, I reluctantly admitted to myself that the sparkling water rapids were kind of pretty even though they weren’t the beautiful, blue ocean I craved. So were the many towering gum trees lining the riverbanks, together with bottlebrush shrubs dotting the area like chocolate chips on a cookie. In fact, the entire scene before me was soothing … in a dirty poo-brown kind of way.
I sighed for the gazillionth time that day and collected a stick from the ground before stepping onto a fallen tree trunk, which jutted out over the river from its embedded position in the dry bank. Jumping once, twice, and happy that it was sturdy, I slowly edged along it until I found a spot where I could safely sit and swirl my stick in the water—a perfect place to sulk. Eventually, I would read or write in my notebook, for both things were as natural to me as breathing.
I loved reading and writing … and music, Madonna, and pizza. But words were everything. They were stories, history, songs, the news, and law. The written word was our past, present, and future, and in my future, I was going to be a writer. I may have only been ‘nearly’ thirteen and unfamiliar with much of life and the world we lived in, but I knew that. I knew deep within my heart that I would write till I died.
No one would stop me.
