Charlie Franks is A-OK Read online

‘She gets nervous. Prince gets nervous too. I might take the jump down a bit.’ Ness walked out into the ring and pulled the highest pole off the stand. ‘Try that.’

  Again, Tessa brought Prince in towards the rail at a canter. I could feel Ness’s tension beside me, and as they got close to the jump, both she and I kind of lifted off our seats at the same time, like we were jumping over ourselves.

  ‘Well done,’ shouted Ness, and then she looked around at me, flicking a fly from under the brim of her hat. ‘Did you just do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You anticipated the jump.’

  ‘I guess. I couldn’t help it.’

  She nodded towards Fozzles. ‘Hop on. You should have a go.’

  ‘On the jump? Awesome.’

  In three seconds flat I was on the horse and in the ring, and cantering towards the rail.

  ‘Slow it down.’ I could hear Ness yelling out from the side. ‘You don’t know what to do.’

  But it was too late. Fozzles was already flying across the jump, mid-air, with me on her back, shocked into silence, even though inside I was squealing. We landed and kept running until I realised what we were doing, so I pulled her in and around to come back to Ness. She and Tessa were standing there with their mouths open.

  ‘Seriously, you just jumped,’ said Tessa. ‘That was amazing.’

  ‘That was dangerous,’ said Ness. ‘You should have waited for me. When I said “you should have a go” I didn’t mean straight away. There’s a lot of learning to do so you don’t come off and kill yourself.’

  I hung my head to show I was sorry, but I wasn’t really. I peeked out at her and smiled.

  She gave me what looked like a reluctant, don’t-do-that-again, fierce kind of smile. ‘Have you ever jumped before?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nup.’ I was still smiling—I couldn’t stop—and I could still feel the blood gushing through my arms and legs.

  Ness looked at Tessa. ‘I think I’ll be training the two of you.’

  My plans to grab the brushes and saddle blanket and head home disappeared from my brain. Three hours later, after jumping and more jumping; low first, until Ness was satisfied I could control Fozzles (and myself) and then finally, a little bit higher, when my legs and arms and everything was sore and saddle-tired, Mum rang Ness to find out where I was.

  ‘You’ll come back tomorrow, yeah?’ asked Tessa. ‘We’ll have to get in as much practice as we can before school starts next week.’

  I made a face at her that said ‘there is no way you are going to stop me coming back here and jumping over stuff on my horse’ and we both laughed until I made another face, this one not so happy. ‘School.’ Even though I hardly ever get nervous about stuff, there was something about starting a new school in a week’s time that was creating a kind of bubble in my stomach. It was weird, and not a feeling I’d had in a long time. ‘I wish we were going to the same school,’ I said. For some reason Mum and Dad had ended up sending us to the Anglican College in town, not the Catholic school down the road that James and Tessa went to.

  Tessa rolled her eyes. ‘I know. Parents, right?’ She made an effort to look more cheerful. ‘But you and Coco will be fine. Everyone in your year will love you.’

  I shrugged my shoulders and smiled. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Mum was kind of mad about me not coming back straight away. ‘You could have at least called.’

  It was true, so I felt a bit guilty and apologised. ‘Sorry, Mum. I really am.’ I meant it, so she didn’t stay mad. (She never really does with me, unlike Coco. In fact, she spent pretty much the whole of last year being mad with Coco, but then, everyone else was too, me included, so it wasn’t that surprising.) Instead, she served up dinner, and then was nice enough to listen to me talk and talk and talk about show jumping and how awesomely cool it is.

  ‘Did you actually jump over that pole thing in the yard?’ Coco couldn’t quite believe it. She’s a good rider, but she’s not what you’d call brave. ‘Did you feel like you were going to fall off?’

  ‘It just kind of happened. The first time, at least. And then it was like I had to do more of it. It was amazing.’

  Josh shrugged. ‘Jumping motorbikes is better.’

  Coco took his bait immediately. ‘Motorbikes don’t love you like horses do.’ She never just lets him be. She either bites back or makes a big fuss about deliberately ignoring him, which just makes him tease her even more. I get Josh back by smiling nicely and ignoring him, without all the drama.

  ‘Motorbikes are cool,’ I said, and Josh looked first surprised and then pleased.

  ‘You’re not jumping your motorbike,’ Mum and Dad said in unison, from across the table.

  ‘Let’s change the subject,’ said Mum.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s talk about the year ahead.’ He likes conversations like this, all about plans and dreams and things the family should do together. ‘What do you guys want to achieve this year?’

  Josh made a face. ‘Do jumps on my motorbike.’

  Coco twisted her mouth. ‘I don’t know. Like maybe, just make friends at school.’ She shrugged, then looked shy. ‘And hang out with James, obv—’

  Josh cut in with a ‘woo woo’ sound and was shushed by Mum who gave him a glare.

  ‘Stuff like that,’ Coco finished up. ‘Normal kind of stuff.’

  The table was silent for a moment and then I opened my mouth. ‘I want to do something,’ I said. Although it was more like an announcement than just normal words. Mum put her fork down and Dad stopped chewing his mouthful. Coco turned to look at me and even Josh moved his head.

  ‘I want to be a champion show jumper.’ It came out of somewhere in my belly. I hadn’t actually planned it or thought about it, even though if someone had asked me, I would have known that was what I was thinking. But when I heard the words come out of my mouth, and saw them form shapes above my head, it made it certain.

  ‘I want to do show jumping on Fozzles.’ I said it a bit more loudly this time. ‘And win.’

  Dad swallowed and cleared his throat. ‘It’s a good thing to want to do something. But you don’t necessarily need to win. Maybe just participating is what you’re after.’ He tilted his head to the side, and seemed a little concerned. ‘All the competition we had in the city is what I wanted us to get away from. Being ordinary is okay, you know.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Coco, and Josh nearly fell off his chair. Dad and Coco being allies was a new thing. They’d had pretty much a constant stand off for the whole of last year. And for Coco to agree with him about being ordinary, of all things, was obviously a bit too much for Josh to take, because now he was spluttering and choking on his glass of water.

  ‘You okay, Josh?’ Mum asked. ‘Could you try not to react to your sister that way? She said something sensible and she doesn’t need you going crazy about it.’

  She went to get him a napkin to cough into and the conversation changed and didn’t come back to me for the rest of the meal.

  But I’d said it and I knew it was true. I wanted to jump. I wanted to do show jumping and win. It was a bigger buzz than riding, even though that was great too. Plus, I already loved competition; I’d proved that every year at the swimming and sports carnivals. I loved a challenge. Nothing was more of a challenge than learning a new sport and being the best at it. Anyway, it turned out that not only was I a natural, Fozzles was also a natural. And me on Fozzles was a totally ace combination.

  ‘I’ve seen her jump before,’ Ness had said that afternoon, ‘but she gives even more with you on her back.’

  Maybe Dad didn’t understand but I knew Mum would. She ‘got’ me like no one else in the family did, not even Coco, which is surprising because we’re twins and everything.

  Everyone thinks we should be exactly the same, but they forget that it’s identical twins who are like that. Fraternal twins like us are really just two sisters who happen to have been born on t
he same day. No one expects two normal sisters to be exactly the same. And Coco and I are really different. She’s beautiful and I’m not. She cares about what she wears and I don’t. She’s hilariously funny when she wants to be, although she doesn’t laugh that much herself. I make stupid jokes sometimes but I laugh more often. She makes a fuss and I shrug my shoulders.

  Probably the biggest difference between us is that Coco holds back a bit. She’s cautious; she watches everything and figures stuff out before she tries it. I jump right in. Last year, when we arrived here, I was on a horse the day after we met Tessa and James. We rode everywhere all year long, while Coco refused to leave her room or even walk down the paddock.

  What no one knew was that she’d been watching everyone and getting secret lessons from Ness. The day she turned up riding Cupcake, amazingly cool and awesome, was the day James fell in dreamy-smoochy love with her. Tessa told me that later, and I laughed. I mean, that kind of love at our age? It just shows another difference between Coco and me. She’s into that. I’m totally not. I’d rather run a race and win it.

  Mum gets me. I think she was probably the same as me when she was a kid because she’s often said how much she wasn’t like Coco. Mum has her sports trophies in a box in storage, but she doesn’t look at them much. She says she’d rather look at mine, and I have a whole heap in my room. Running, swimming, cross country, even gymnastics for a bit. I’ve done lots of stuff, and Mum’s always taken me and she’s been there for all my competitions, clapping on the sidelines. So I wasn’t worried. Dad might not understand me wanting to win at show jumping, but Mum did.

  After we’d cleaned up from dinner and I’d swept the floor, I’d had enough of listening to Josh and Coco bicker over the dirty dishes. I made Mum a cup of coffee, just the way she likes it, and took it out to her on the grass. The sun was finally going down; there was a pink and grey haze hanging in the air, and I could feel some cool currents sneaking up from the river. I sat down next to Mum and wiped my perspiring nose.

  ‘This will be the last week we’ll have to sit on the grass,’ she said. ‘Dad should have finished the deck in a few days.’

  ‘It’s going to make the house perfect. I still can’t believe we live here. And we built the house ourselves.’

  ‘I know. Crazy.’ She laughed and sipped her coffee.

  ‘I’m going to miss not being at home when school starts,’ I said. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

  ‘It’ll be different for you.’ Mum put her hand on my back. ‘School is different from home schooling. It’ll probably be a shock to go back, even though we only home schooled for a year.’

  ‘I’ll miss being with you the most.’ I smiled at her.

  She smiled back and blew a kiss at me. ‘I guess you could stay home, if you really wanted to.’

  ‘No,’ I said. It was decisive and strong. ‘There’s a show jumping Inter-schools competition I want to go in. And after that, there’s State level. Maybe even Nationals. I looked it up. And I want to win it.’

  Mum raised her eyebrows. ‘School it is, then. Are you nervous?’

  I ignored the bubble in my stomach. ‘Nah. School’s easy. No problem at all.’

  ‘Well, I’ll take you to all the equestrian competitions.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Same as I always have.’

  ‘Aw, you’re so nice.’

  ‘We’ll do it together. I’ll cheer you on all the way.’

  3

  Chapter 3

  The sun woke me up on the first morning of school. I bounced out of bed, ready to go and jump on Coco and annoy her, but she was already awake, dressed and staring at herself in the mirror with her hand up to her hair, holding it all at the back of her head.

  ‘Ponytail?’ she asked, then let some of the hair go. ‘Or maybe like a half ponytail, so it’s kind of up but not all the way up.’

  I rubbed my eyes. ‘Why yes, good morning, Charlie. How are you? Are you well? How’d you sleep?’ I smiled. ‘Are you nervous about school?’

  She rolled her eyes, but in a nice way. ‘Whatever. I think I’m going with it half up. Or maybe not. Maybe a messy bun?’

  I stuck out my tongue at her and made a quick exit, down the hall and out to the kitchen, where Mum was already up and making lunches for us.

  ‘I didn’t miss making these last year.’ She smiled at me. ‘Chicken salad sandwich for you?’

  I gave her a hug.

  ‘You nervous?’ She kissed my head.

  I shrugged. ‘A little, I guess. But it can’t be that bad, right?’

  ‘I’m sure it will be fine.’ She threw me a box of cereal. ‘Eat. And then get dressed. You have to make sure you get up to the bus stop on time.’

  I ate, then I pulled on the clothes Mum had bought for us the week before when they’d finally decided which school to send us to—white uniform shirt, checked uniform skirt, white socks and black shoes.

  I was just about ready to go when Coco saw me. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ She had that ‘I’m-going-to-fix-everything’ look on her face. ‘You’re wearing it like that?’ She put a lot of emphasis on the ‘that’.

  I threw my backpack on the ground and stepped into the hallway with my hands up and away from my body. ‘I have no idea what I’ve done wrong, but you obviously want to change it, so go ahead.’

  She moved next to me, pulling at the waist of my blouse, bending over to adjust my socks and then tugging at my skirt.

  ‘You’re making it shorter.’ I tried to slap her away.

  ‘Yeah. Like, durr.’

  ‘But it’s the right length.’

  She gave me a stare. ‘It is so not the right length.’ She tugged at it again and folded something over at my waist. ‘Now it’s the right length.’

  Without a mirror in front of me, I couldn’t see the difference, so I just shrugged and let it be. Coco was going to have her way, no matter what I said, and it was no skin off my nose if she wanted me to wear my uniforms tweaked in her particular Coco way. I honestly could never tell the difference between the way I put my clothes on and how she did it, but I figured if it was important to her and kept her happy, I’d let her dress me.

  She peered in at my face. ‘Makeup?’

  ‘No.’ I hadn’t even thought of that. Obviously Coco had; her face was covered in a paste of something close to skin colour and her eyelashes looked like they’d been dipped in a bucket of tar.

  ‘Not even a little? Primer?’

  ‘Is that paint?’ I was just teasing. I knew what primer was; Coco had insisted on giving me makeup lessons so many times I was at least familiar with the concept of primer. I also knew what an eyelash curler was. I wasn’t going to use either a curler or primer, though. In fact, the only way makeup ever got on my face was if Coco put it there.

  ‘I’d better not die before you get married,’ she’d said once. ‘You’d turn up to your wedding day in jeans and a scummy old t-shirt if you had your way. At least if I’m there you won’t embarrass yourself.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever,’ I’d said, and she’d made annoyed eyes at me.

  ‘Can’t I just get some mascara?’ she said now, still looking at my face.

  Dad interrupted. ‘No time, Coco. We’ve got to get to the bus.’

  Getting to the bus meant all of us getting into our massive four wheel drive, going along two kilometres of bumpy, unsealed road, through three different farm gates and then going up the hill on the twenty minute trek of the ‘driveway-that-isn’t-a-driveway’, as Coco calls it. It’s a dirt track that winds up around our mountain, past caves and cliffs and over rocks, until finally you get out onto the main road.

  The first time we ever visited the farm, after Dad bought it as a surprise, we turned off the main road and just about fell out of the car. ‘It’s a bit of a steep driveway,’ Dad had said, but he didn’t tell us it was practically vertical, with potholes and rocks and logs to get over, all the way down.

  I’d laughed and hooted with Josh because of the adrenaline, but
Coco (being Coco) had screamed and cried and protested, which had just made Josh and me laugh even harder.

  ‘So we have to do this every day?’ asked Coco. ‘Even if it’s raining?’

  Dad scoffed. In one year he’d turned from a suit and tie wearing city finance guy who wouldn’t have known one end of a shovel from the other, into a flannel-shirted and Akubra-hatted farmer who feels better the dirtier he is. ‘Rain? Ha! A little bit isn’t going to hurt you. That’s why we have this car.’

  Coco narrowed her eyes. ‘What if it’s pouring? For three straight days? Or what if there’s like the biggest storm in the entire country? Are we going to have to go to school then?’

  ‘The biggest storm in the entire country?’ said Josh. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Look,’ said Dad. ‘If the road gets blocked off with a landslide or a waterfall or something, obviously we won’t be able to get through. But it would have to be a lot of rain. You’re going to go to school, okay?’

  I grabbed Coco’s hand and gave it a squeeze. I know when she gets nervous; she gets cranky and fusses around. She was definitely nervous that morning, with the prospect of new kids and making friends and all that stuff she really cares about.

  ‘It’ll be cool,’ I whispered to her. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  And it was. We got on the bus, we got to school, we found the teacher waiting for us, as Mum had already arranged. Josh was taken to his year group and Coco and I were introduced to some girls who’d been given the job of looking after the new kids.

  ‘Hi, I’m Matilda,’ said one of them, and introduced her friends, Sarah, Jemima and Baylor. Coco’s face lit up immediately and her shoulders seemed to relax. I looked at the girls, then I realised why. They all had the same hairstyle as Coco, who in the end, had gone with what I would have called ‘no hairstyle at all’, just her hair long down by the side of her face, but really, really straight. Their faces also looked like Coco’s; makeup stuff all over their cheeks and sooty eyelashes that a chimney sweep would be proud of.

  Before I even knew what was going on, they started gushing at her. ‘Hi! How are you? Oh, we’re so glad you’re, you know, nice. We were told we’d have to look after the new girls, and you just never know what to expect, right?’