Mika and Max

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Mika sat on the edge of the pool. Her blue-and-white striped swimming costume was digging into her stomach, and her shoulders were burning in the sun. It was much hotter here than at home in Sydney, and the light felt more glaring.

  Mika’s mum and dad were talking to Colette and Sam – whose house it was – down one end of the pool. Arlo and Franny were playing at the other. Max was swimming near his dad, who kept picking him up and throwing him back into the water. He was shrieking and laughing like a six-year-old, even though Mika’s mum had told her he was almost ten.

  “Phew, it’s warm here,” said Mika’s dad. “Mika, what’s the temperature?” he called from across the pool.

  “It’s hot,” Mika called back.

  “Mika has a great sense for the exact temperature,” he told the others. “What is it exactly, Mika?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Her dad frowned at her, then went back to his conversation.

  “How am I supposed to know?” she muttered. She folded her arms tightly across her stomach, just in case anyone might notice how deeply her costume was digging in there. The skin came up in rolls, like fat.

  “You could look it up on your phone,” said Arlo, popping up in the water right next to her foot.

  “I didn’t bring my phone.”

  “Yes you did.” Arlo put his hand out and mimed taking a selfie, posing and smiling in a sickly way. “We were still young, when I first met you,” he sang in a high, thin voice, now holding the pretend phone like a microphone. “I said hello na na na na.”

  “Have you been looking at my phone?” Mika had been practising her singing privately – or so she’d thought. No one anywhere, ever, was supposed to hear, or see, or even know!

  “You have a beautiful voice,” said Arlo.

  “I’m going to kill you,” hissed Mika, launching herself at him.

  “Ow!” yelled Arlo, dodging her kicking legs and trying to punch her back.

  “Mika!” her mother shouted, and the next second Mika felt strong arms pulling her away from the water’s edge. “Stop it! Stop it both of you! What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” said Mika.

  “Nothing,” Arlo sniffled, but he didn’t actually look upset, thought Mika. He looked pleased. The other adults hadn’t even noticed – or maybe they were just pretending not to. Only Franny looked interested, hanging on to the side of the pool and staring, as if she was watching an episode of Play School.

  “Mika, you should know better than that – Arlo’s younger than you. As for you, Arlo, leave your sister alone,” said her mum. “Mika, why don’t you get in the water and cool off? Don’t you want to at least get wet?”

  Mika shook her head. What she wanted was to be at Pearl’s house. Pearl was having a sleepover with Chloe tonight, and had invited her, too, for the first time this year. Pearl and Chloe went to a different high school than Mika. They’d been good friends in primary school, but now that they were in Year Seven, that was starting to feel as if it was all just slipping away.

  “You don’t even know these people,” she had complained on the drive here from the airport. “I don’t know why we have to stay with them for an entire weekend.”

  “Your father knew Sam at university,” her mum had said, “and he’s known Colette since she first met Sam.”

  “Twenty years ago,” Mika replied.

  “It will be good to catch up,” said her dad. “Adults need friends too, you know,” he added, catching Mika’s eye in the rear-view mirror. He knew she hadn’t wanted to come. She’d begged her parents to let her stay home. Not only was she missing Pearl’s sleepover, she’d told them. She was missing netball training, too, as well as an opportunity to focus on her maths.

  “You know, this is a world-famous music festival that we’re going to,” her dad had said. “I was hoping we could all have a great weekend.”

  Her dad should make his own friends, thought Mika, and not drag her into it.

  “Mika?” Her mother called, dragging her out of her thoughts. Max was standing next to her, Mika realised, pulling on her hand.

  “What does he want?” she asked her mother.

  “Ask him,” called out Colette. She was pretty, thought Mika, and a bit fat, and – compared to her mother, anyway – she smiled a lot. Maybe too much. Mika hadn’t decided yet. Sometimes people who smiled a lot were nice, but sometimes they seemed a bit desperate.

  “What do you want?” she said to Max. He didn’t talk, she remembered then, and she hoped Arlo and Franny weren’t watching. They wouldn’t say anything now, but they would later, when the adults weren’t there. “What do you want?” she could just imagine Arlo saying, and Franny – who seemed to do whatever Arlo wanted these days – would do an impression of Max: his big stare, and his sort of empty face.

  “Max has autism, so he’ll be a bit different,” her dad had told them in the car.

  “Is that the thing where people don’t smile much but they’re really good at maths?” said Arlo.

  “Not necessarily,” said her dad.

  Mika had rolled her eyes at Arlo, but the truth was, she didn’t really know much about autism either.

  “Every person with autism is different, so you can’t really generalise,” said her mum, in that way she had where she was trying to be accurate but just wound up being confusing.

  “Huh?” Franny said.

  “Let’s just say people with autism often see and feel things differently,” said her dad. “And sometimes they communicate differently, too.”

  “Differently how?” Franny asked.

  “We’ll see.”

  “What do you want, Max?” Mika asked again, more softly this time.

  Max’s blue eyes flicked onto hers.

  This was the first time he’d made eye contact with her since they’d arrived, over an hour ago. It was like receiving a tiny electric shock.

  “What do you want. Max?” she asked again.

  He smiled. His teeth were gappy and his lips were full. He had a fine sprinkling of freckles across his nose. He was good-looking, thought Mika.

  He pulled on her hand again, harder this time. He was strong.

  She stood up. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  As he dragged her out of the pool area and into the garden, Mika wished she hadn’t let him take her hand. Arlo and Franny would be watching, and she was sure they’d be laughing at her. He came to a standstill next to the swing, which was hanging by long ropes from the mango tree at the back of the garden.

  His eyes flicked on hers again.

  He looked a bit like an angel, actually, thought Mika. He didn’t look dumb, the way she’d imagined he might when her dad first told them about him. He looked pure. His blond curly hair made a halo around his face, that was like an angel’s, too.

  Max took her hands and put them on the swing, then looked into her face enquiringly, his eyebrows raised, as though he was asking her a question. Then he looked away.

  “Do you want a swing?” Her voice sounded unnaturally high. She cleared her throat and tried again, but Max just kept staring into space, as though he couldn’t hear.

  He wasn’t deaf, was he? Mika glanced uncertainly over at Colette and Sam, who were talking to her parents in the pool. Franny and Arlo were playing tag in the shallow end, and seemed completely absorbed in their game.

  Gently she prodded Max towards the swing. He was shorter than Arlo, even though they were the same age, but then, Arlo was unusually tall. Everyone in her family was.

  She put her hands under his armpits and he looked at her again. His expression was very serious, and Mika felt a bit scared. What if she hurt him? What if he screamed? But he tensed himself to make it easier for her to lift him, and he reached up and grasped the ropes of the swing as he sat down. His eyes locked onto hers again.

  “Do you want me to push you?”

  His eyes sparkled but his lips were pressed together tightly, creating dimples, as if he was pleased but didn’t want to show it. It was like a sort of secret smile, thought Mika.

  “I’ll push you,” she said.

  He glanced over his shoulder, flashing her another one of those secret smiles, and soon she was pushing him and pushing him as he flew higher and higher into the air.

  “What if Max is super smart?” said Mika, when she was back in the bedroom she and her family would be sharing for the next two days. Arlo and Franny were hitting each other with pillows while their mum unpacked their bags. Her dad was downstairs, hanging their swimmers and towels on the line. “What if he’s super smart but he can’t talk? That would be so frustrating.”

  “Max is a baby,” Franny said. “He can’t dress or feed himself, Colette said.”

  “No he’s not,” said Mika. “Just because he needs help with some things doesn’t mean he’s a baby.”

  Franny, who, at five years old had only just stopped needing to be helped with those things herself, shrugged, as if that had all happened a lifetime ago.

  “What about old people? And sick people?” said Mika. “They’re not babies.”

  “He can’t talk,” said Franny, as if that was that.

  “We couldn’t talk when we were in Italy,” said Mika. “Neither could Mum and Dad.”

  “No,” said Franny doubtfully.

  “But some people were impatient with us, and acted as though we were weird, remember? We were just the same as the people speaking Italian, we just couldn’t make them understand us.”

  Franny shrugged again, and turned away.

  Mika closed her suitcase and sat down on the edge of the bed. She thought of how she’d been feeling before Max came to take her hand. Maybe he’d just wanted a push on the swing, but maybe he’d seen that she was feeling miserable and wanted to make her feel better. Or maybe both.

  Arlo was trying to shut the suitcase lid on Franny, who was yelling “Zip me up! Zip me up!” in an over-the-top French accent. They seemed to live on a different planet, thought Mika, and watching them getting on so well all the time made her feel lonely. It would never occur to her to get into a suitcase and try to close the lid on herself, and there was no point trying. She knew she wouldn’t find it fun.

  “I’m going to get changed and read until lunch is ready,” she said, just in case they thought she might be interested in joining in their game.

  All that meant was taking off her swimming costume and getting back into the blue-and-white- striped sundress she’d worn here on the plane. Just a few months ago this dress had been long. It used to come down past her knees, whereas now it came only halfway down her thighs. And the top part, which used to be baggy, was quite fitted now. She worried that people could see the shape of her breasts underneath the ruffle at the top, but the ruffle was a big one, and her breasts were hardly noticeable. The waistband felt a bit tight sometimes, but Mika didn’t mind.

  The only other clothes she had were the ones her mother had bought her recently, and Mika could hardly bear to look at those. It wasn’t just that they weren’t her taste – Mika wasn’t quite sure what her taste was, exactly, yet, anyway – but that they made her look so strange. ‘You can exchange them,” her mother kept saying, but just at the moment Mika didn’t feel like going into a store. They had all those mirrors where she might catch sight of her reflection and get a shock, and those changing rooms where she might see herself naked. It wasn’t that she looked bad, so much as that she looked like a stranger, with differently shaped hips and thighs and knobbly bits in some places and pillowy bits in others, and it was freaking her out. She just needed some time to get used to things, she kept telling herself, but it was taking longer than she’d thought.

  Mika brushed her hair and then flopped onto her parents’ bed with her book.

  “Arlo! Franny! Mika, you too. Come and help make lunch,” her dad called. Her brother and sister danced out of the room but Mika pretended not to hear. She could feel her mother glancing at her, but Mika kept staring at her book, waiting until she could turn the page to make it seem as though she was actually reading.

  “Mika, I know you brought your phone,” said her mum, sitting on the bed next to her.

  Mika said nothing. She just kept staring at the page.

  “We laid down some ground rules, remember?”

  “And I’m not going to break them!” burst out Mika, throwing down her book.

  “You already have. We agreed you wouldn’t bring your phone.”

  “You mean you agreed. I didn’t say anything.”

  “Mika, we talked about good phone hygiene and you promised to start having regular breaks. This seems like the perfect opportunity.”

  Mika rolled her eyes. Phone hygiene. Who even says that?

  Her mother sighed. “Can you please tell me why it’s so important for you to have your phone this weekend?”

  “I’m not going to do anything on it, I promise! I just want to be able to reply if anyone texts me.”

  “Do you mean if Chloe and Pearl text you?” asked her mum gently. “And have they?”

  Mika could tell she wasn’t in trouble anymore.

  “No.” She lay her head down on the pillow and closed her eyes.

  “This is why I didn’t want you to bring your phone, Mika, if it’s going to make you crazy.”

  “It won’t!” said Mika, but she knew what her mother was talking about. Last weekend Pearl and Chloe had each told her separately that they were going to be studying, but then Mika had seen on Pearl’s social media that they’d gone trampolining together, instead.

  It wasn’t until Monday – after Mika had felt terrible about it all weekend, and cried, and shouted at everyone – that she realised it was actually a photo from Chloe’s birthday party last year, which Pearl had re-posted as a memory. Mika had actually been there too.

  “I want you to be here, with us, not checking your phone the whole time,” her mother said. “And I don’t want you fighting with Arlo, either.”

  “He fights with me!”

  “Well you don’t have to respond in kind. Let’s all try to have a nice weekend, okay?”

  There was extremely little chance of that, thought Mika, but she smiled, a big fake smile with all her teeth showing, the kind of smile she never did in real life. Her mother just smoothed her hair back and kissed her forehead and didn’t seem to see.

  After her mum left to help make lunch, Mika rolled onto her back. What would Chloe and Pearl be doing now? she wondered. They’d said they were going to make new friendship bracelets, and then maybe go for a surf. Would Pearl’s brother Perry be there? Even if he was, he would probably just ignore them.

  Mika sighed and began plaiting her hair. She wore it tied up in a ponytail, mostly. Pearl had got her hair cut short in a pixie cut a few weeks ago. It looked good, but Mika hated the idea of going to school with something different and everyone commenting, the way they had with Pearl on her social media, even if it was just to say that it looked good.

  “Hey,” said her dad, coming into the room.

  He looked happy, thought Mika. He must like it here. His face was thin and he wore glasses and nothing about him was so special, but when you added it all up to gether he was handsome. He was her dad. She sat up.

  “Can I cut my hair?”

  “Of course you can. It’s your hair.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, would I be allowed?”

  “Of course you’d be allowed. But do you want to? I like it the way it is.”

  “So you mean no.”

  “No, I mean you can if you want to.”

  Mika tried to imagine coming home with her hair cut, knowing her dad wouldn’t like it. If he didn’t like it then Mika didn’t think she would like it, either.

  “Right, Mika?” said her dad. He was frowning and looking hard at her, as though he was trying, and failing, to work her out.

  It felt to Mika as though her mum and dad had been doing this a lot, lately. Ever since the night of the piano concert, a week ago, they had been watching her more closely, she could tell.

  It was the high school variety concert to celebrate the end of term three, and until Mika went up onto the stage she had no idea how huge it was, and how high it was compared to the auditorium, which was packed with parents and students.

  Her shoes felt slippery as she set out across the wooden floorboards. She clenched her fingers and then released them, and then clenched them again. For the last half an hour she’d been soaking them in a bowl of hot water. This was meant to loosen them up, but now they felt as stiff and as cold as ice. The piano stool made a screeching sound as she pulled it out from underneath the piano and sat down, and a giant lump in her throat was making it hard to swallow. So what, though, right? It was just nerves. Nothing she couldn’t handle. She had been learning classical piano since she was seven, and had performed in tonnes of concerts and exams.

  But when she started to play she looked down at her fingers moving around on the keys and suddenly she couldn’t work out what they were supposed to be doing anymore. She felt completely disconnected from them, as though they were somebody else’s hands, and as though the music she was hearing was coming from somewhere else. While she thought all this, her fingers kept moving, and she wondered how they still knew what to do. She heard the melody they were playing, but it didn’t sound familiar. And suddenly she felt completely detached from all of this, as though she were looking at herself from very far away. She felt dizzy, as if she might throw up, and so she stopped playing, slammed shut the lid of the piano and walked offstage.