Puberty Blues by Gabrielle Carey Page A

didn’t have to. But it scared me enough to tell Sue. I don’t know how Tracey and the other top chicks handled it alone. We went to the doctor’s together.
    I used Wayne’s last name, and put my age up. He knew I was lying and treated me like a slut. The chemist knew I was lying, too. He didn’t even put the pill packet in a paper bag. Just as he was handing it to me, Mrs Dixon and Auntie Pam walked in. Sue and I ran home and I hid it in the back of my underpants drawer. Even though it was such a hassle, Sue decided to go on the pill, too.

16
deadset molls
    THE Greenhills Gang was changing.
    Now we went down the beach for different reasons. We didn’t go down to check out the guys or bask in the sun—we went down to score.
    â€˜Hey Gull, can you get anything?’
    â€˜Oh yeah.’
    â€˜Wot?’
    â€˜Oh Deak knows a guy who’s got some unroole hash. Twenty-five bucks a cap.’
    Sue and I scraped together twenty-five dollars from advances on pocket money, selling old records and pawning old friendship rings.
    A cap is about half an inch long and looks like a penicillin capsule. It’s filled with a black, sickly, sweet-smelling, thick, tar-like oil.
    We surfie chicks met in the PE changing roomsduring the girls’ assembly, for a smoke. We’d all heard Mrs Yelland’s ‘girls only’ lecture a hundred times. ‘ Would you girls kindly use the sanitary incinerators provided? Mr Dunstan has been working for us for twelve years and he’s never seen anything like it …’
    We had better things to do.
    â€˜Hey, lock the door Kim. Didja get the alfoil?’
    â€˜Yeah, I knocked it off from home science.’
    â€˜Give us it.’
    I spotted the hash oil on to the alfoil. Rummaging through my bag I found a half-melted, degutted biro. Tracey lit the alfoil from underneath. I positioned my pen over the brown blotch and sucked up the smoke through the plastic straw.
    â€˜Give us a hit,’ said Sue.
    Pretty soon we were all giggling and buzzing.
    â€˜Come on, we’d better split.’
    Sue and I headed off for English.
    â€˜Do my eyes look bloodshot?’ Sue grabbed me frantically by the arm.
    â€˜Nah … Do mine?’
    â€˜Na.’
    â€˜Sorry we’re late, Miss. Left something in the PE changing rooms.’
    We joined our friends up the back.
    â€˜Deadset, I’m so out of it,’ I confided in Gail. ‘Can you smell it?’
    We panicked about our bloodshot eyes all period. If the teacher even glanced in our direction we weresure she knew. The lesson was spent with us freaking out and paranoid behind our books.
    For most of us marijuana was enough to relieve the boredom but Frieda Cummins, Jeff Basin and Cheryl Nolan needed more—their mother’s Mandrax, Valium or an acid trip at four dollars a pill. It made the day go faster and improved their reputations.
    â€˜Cheryl’s trippin’.’
    â€˜Wot on?’
    â€˜White Light. Check out the way she’s walkin’! She dropped it on the bus this mornin’.’
    During Mr Bishop’s lecture in assembly, Cheryl began to sway drunkenly.
    â€˜And you, lassie!’ he boomed down the microphone, ‘Can’t you hold yourself up?’
    Cheryl yawned at him and the headmaster ordered her up to his office, to be ‘dealt with’ later.
    â€˜Go on lassie. Move!’
    She started to move across the quadrangle, taking painfully small steps. She walked in slow motion, staring defiantly at Mr Bishop.
    No one spoke or moved. The first-form kids even stopped gawking at the dogs screwing outside the science block. We all watched Cheryl totter across the front of the quadrangle. She dragged herself up the steps, planted both feet on the top stair and turned to address the assembly. Letting out a loud raspberry, she stabbed the air savagely with an ‘up-yours’ gesture and turned to continue her trek to the office.