stands on the side of the road and stares into the boot and doesn’t do anything? ‘It’s not my business, Henry,’ I say instead, because he doesn’t need to feel any worse.
I’m not in the mood to drive all the way across town, so Henry and George convince Martin to stay at the bookstore. ‘You can sleep in my bed,’ Henry says. ‘I’ll sleep in the shop with Rachel.’
After Martin and Henry get dressed we all sit behind the counter and watch the clip of them on YouTube. ‘You can’t really see much,’ Martin says.
‘Of you,’ Henry says. ‘There’s a fairly shocking close up of me.’ He puts down his phone after a while. ‘So people see us naked? So what?’
‘So I go back to school and face a storm of ridicule,’ Martin says.
‘I’ll be there,’ George offers, and he gives her a look that suggests that this is a very good consolation prize.
The two of them go upstairs and Henry and I lie on quilts in front of the Letter Library. He turns off the lights so we’re just voices in the dimness. ‘She left me,’ he says after a while. ‘She didn’t call my parents or the police.’ He holds up his phone. ‘Hasn’t even sent a text.’
‘In her defence, that’s a hard text to write.’
‘I used to worry sometimes,’ he says, ‘before we really started dating, that other guys were better kissers than me, and that’s why Amy and I weren’t going out officially.’
‘Speaking as a girl who’s kissed you, I can say you’ve got nothing to worry about in that department.’
‘I’m sorry I don’t remember more of it. Was I better than Joel?’
‘You were different.’
‘Did you have sex with him?’
‘That’s a personal question. Did you have sex with Amy?’
‘You’re right. It is a personal question,’ he says.
‘Maybe we should talk about something else.’
‘Things have changed between us,’ he says, but he doesn’t say how, and I’m not sure if he means things have changed between him and Amy, or him and me.
‘What good things have happened to you in the last three years?’ he asks. ‘You’ve only told me the bad things.’
I haven’t thought about the good things in a while but a lot of good happened before Cal died. ‘I won the science awards, before Year 12. And the maths awards. I swam two kilometres almost every day with Mum. Dad visited and took Cal and me windsurfing. I was Sports Captain in Year 11. What about you?’
‘I won the Year 11 English prize. I did pretty well in Year 12. I went to the Year 12 formal with Amy. Lola and Hiroko wrote a song about me. I won a short story competition.’
‘That’s a good list,’ I say.
‘Can we try again to go dancing?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I tell him, for the second time.
He falls asleep, and I lie awake, enjoying being next to him.
The Broken Shore
by Peter Temple
Letters left between pages 8 and 9
1 February – 5 February 2016
Dear George
I appreciate all the apologising, but seriously, you can stop. So everyone in class saw me naked on YouTube? The shots were mostly of Henry.
If you really want to make it up to me, maybe you could tell me about the letter guy. Who do you think he is?
Martin
Dear Martin
I know you’ve told me to stop, but I need to say one more time – I’m sorry. To make it up to you, yes, I’ll tell you about the guy, who I think is Cal Sweetie.
I’m not a hundred per cent sure it is Cal, but before the first letter arrived, he was in the bookshop a lot, and he wasn’t just here to talk to Rachel. He spent loads of his time looking through the Letter Library.
He’d tried to talk to me at school but I hadn’t said much back. You’re right. I’m a little defensive, but I don’t fit in there. I’m the girl reading second-hand books when everyone else has the latest smartphones. I wear second-hand clothes. My dad comes to school at parent-teacher interviews and loudly announces to my homeroom teacher that he can’t afford to send me on camp.
Let me be clear: I don’t care that we’re broke sometimes. The bookshop is worth it. But it doesn’t exactly pave the way to popularity. It’s easier to block people than hear them call me a freak.
But Cal isn’t like that, and I missed out on talking to him and then he left for Sea Ridge with Rachel. The letters kept coming,