The Shattering by Karen Healey Page B

but there were a few people from school. Hemi and Kyle were talking to each other by a chilly bin, Kyle’s hands making the motions that said he was thinking through a new beat. They saw her and waved.
    At the very end of the beach was a big group, a lot of tourist kids mixing and dancing, none of them the boys she’d managed to screen before Takeshi and Aroha turned up. Excellent , she thought, and led the way.
    Sand, Janna had discovered years ago, was a great excuse for stumbling into handy, boy-shaped support and requiring him to hold her up. Takeshi seemed to understand this important obligation and did not disappoint, his arm steady under hers.
    She stopped dead when she realised that two of the figures at a table were familiar. And not young.
    â€˜Ew, it’s the Maukis brothers,’ she said, and used her free hand to point. Octavian was taller and Tiberius wider, but otherwise they looked creepily alike, dressed in near-identical black shirts and black jeans, with the same neat beards and slicked-back hair. ‘They think they’re twenty-three or something. It’s so gross.’
    As if on cue, Octavian grabbed a dark-haired girl’s plastic cup of something, taking a sip and laughing at her outraged look as if this was normal flirting, or something. Which it might have been, if he wasn’t at least twenty years older than she was. The girl moved away, her body language screaming, Ick! Ick! Ick! Octavian followed until she joined a group of girls, who closed protectively around her, and only then did he back off, looking for someone new.
    â€˜That’s foul,’ Aroha said. ‘Those guys are the artists, right? We bought a painting from them last year, but it’s really crap. Mum ended up putting it in the guest room. They were so smooth to her, it made me sick.’
    â€˜They’re disgusting. Right, Takeshi? We met Tiberius at the art gallery this afternoon,’ she explained to Aroha.
    Takeshi looked baffled. ‘There was a . . . hat,’ he said vaguely. ‘No, uh, crown.’ His hand went to touch his hair. ‘Omoi.’
    Janna remembered the coloured light cut into little pieces and the feeling of being covered in golden warmth, like the glory that sometimes swept through her with Cherry Bomb in her hands and a song to storm through. But the memory was weirdly hazy. God, Janna, get a grip. Romance is so bad for your brain.
    Aroha seemed to be allergic to silence, especially charged silence between two people smiling at each other. ‘So!’ she said, a little too brightly. ‘What are you planning for uni, Janna?’
    She was obviously just making conversation, and Janna tried not to grimace at the topic. ‘What about you?’ she countered.
    â€˜Engineering,’ Aroha said promptly. ‘And you? Music, maybe? Commerce?’
    Janna shrugged. ‘I don’t want to go.’
    Aroha probably didn’t mean to sound so shocked. ‘You don’t want to go to uni ?’ she asked, and Janna realised that she was one of those people, the ones for whom university was guaranteed, probably for a couple of generations. The ones who went to private schools and got music lessons and tutoring and had no idea how lucky they were. Aroha hadn’t had to babysit every brat in Summerton for years to buy an old car and a secondhand bass; her parents probably just gave her anything she wanted.
    â€˜Not everyone goes,’ Janna said. ‘ Most people don’t.’
    â€˜But you’re —’ Aroha said, and bit her lip. ‘I mean, you seem really smart.’
    Janna felt her hands twisting at her corset hem. ‘Well, I’m not. I suck hard at everything in school except Music and Drama, and I screw up the writing assignments there. I probably have a learning disability, actually.’ This wasn’t nice. Aroha hadn’t meant to hit one of Janna’s sore points. But Janna could feel the anger