Little Sister Read online

  “I got top marks in the Biology assessment test,” she bragged, carefully selecting the crispiest roast potatoes before passing the bowl to Beth. “Ms Morales thinks I might make the state’s top ten for the final exam.”

  “That’s my girl,” said Dad, beaming with pride. “They’ll be fighting over you when university offers come out.”

  “We’re doing biology in Science at the moment,” I said to remind Dad that he had more than one “girl”. “Today we were dissecting frogs and Maz and Prad dropped theirs and its stomach exploded all over the floor.”

  “Allison, that’s not an appropriate topic for the dinner table,” snapped Mum, who’s as fanatical as Brandy about being “appropriate” at all times. If she hadn’t trained as a nurse she’d have made an excellent etiquette teacher. It didn’t help that Mum reckoned Maz was part of the reason my marks weren’t better, since they began to drop around the time Maz started at Whitlam. If Mum had her way, I’d be best friends with a Beth-clone.

  Larrie seized my dressing-down as an opportunity to turn the conversation back to her. “Beth and I made a new study timetable for the exams. We’re going to do six to eight hours every single day of the study break, with regular breaks for exercise, meditation and fun.”

  Ugh. Only my sister could schedule “fun”. Mum and Dad beamed, offering each other silent congratulations on having such a studious elder daughter. If anyone noticed me spearing my peas with such force that a few flew off my plate, they didn’t let on.

  After dinner Beth helped me clear the table (even though Mum told her not to worry about it) while Larrie performed her nightly ritual of crossing off another square on the calendar, counting down to her first exam. “Three weeks to go,” she announced.

  I kept a countdown of my own – to when Larrie’s exams finished and she’d be out of my school life forever. Five weeks and three days. Thirty-eight days until Whitlam would stop seeing me as Larrie’s little sister and start appreciating the real Al Miller. I hoped I could last that long.

  After I’d finished the dishes and taken out the garbage and put the vegie scraps on the compost, I went to my prison cell bedroom and logged on to Facebook to see what people who had a life outside of being their sister’s slave had been doing.

  Maryanne Dekker found a bit of frog in her hair. Ack.

  Simon Lutz is officially a learner driver.

  Prad Chandarama is trying to explain to his parents that hot lead singers don’t need to finish high school.

  Nicko Nickson beat Prad’s high score on Guitar Hero – w00t!

  I mentally added the status update I would’ve posted if I didn’t think most of Whitlam High would see it:

  Al Miller wishes she was an only child.

  4

  “Five weeks and two days. Five weeks and two days,” chanted Maz when I told her about Larrie’s performance at dinner the night before.

  We were sitting in our usual spot down the side of the Humanities block (and as far away from Brandy’s office as possible), watching Simon and Prad divvy up my lunch, which I had no appetite for.

  I plucked at the grass on the ground between us. “I don’t know if I can last that long. It’s like my whole life’s on hold waiting for Princess Perfect to stop making me seem crap by comparison. I wish I could get in a time machine and fast forward to the end of Larrie’s exams right now.”

  “Y’know, forward time travel is possible, according to Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity,” said Simon, whose ability to catch the smallest snippet of other people’s conversation and turn it into a nerd science rant was uncanny. “But you’d have to be inside a hollow, high-mass object like Jupiter to do it.” He grinned, waiting for us to get the joke.

  I ignored him. “At least after next Friday I won’t have to see her at school every day. Once Year Twelve’s on study break, Brandy and Morales and the rest of Whitlam will see that I’m more than just Larrie Miller’s little sister.”

  Maz started to say something, but when Nicko sat down between us she seemed to change her mind.

  “Have you heard about the SkoolDaze battle of the bands?” he asked.

  Maz and I shook our heads.

  “It was posted on Whit’s Wit this morning,” said Simon, who, as the school’s unofficial Help Desk, was responsible for making sure Whitlam’s blog ran without a technical hitch. “The winner gets to compete for the regional title and a place in the state finals.”

  “Sounds like the break Vertigo Pony’s been waiting for,” said Prad, reaching across me to high-five Nicko.

  A cloud of those men’s deodorants that women are meant to find irresistible, but in fact smell like air freshener, hung in the air as their palms met in front of my face, making my nose twitch.

  “Vertigo Pony?” I said when my sneezing fit was over. “I thought your group was called Holiday Road Toll.”

  “Too depressing,” said Maz, the band’s keyboard player, stylist and marketing manager. “I thought we might have better luck with a more upbeat name.”

  Holiday Road Toll/Vertigo Pony formed about a year ago. Basically, Maz invited herself to jam with Nicko and Prad one day and then kind of took over. After a few weeks, she’d even convinced the guys to ask me to be the group’s percussionist, since the rhythm settings on Maz’s keyboard weren’t up to much. It was nice of her to try to include me, but I said no. Compared to Larrie’s musical showing-off accolades, shaking a tambourine and beating the occasional bongo would only have made me look pathetic.

  In retrospect, I should’ve given it a go because a few days later Maz came racing from her Music class to tell Nicko and Prad she’d found the perfect percussionist. It turned out that the quiet guy she’d been sitting next to all term not only had his own drum kit, but also shared her love of early David Bowie and Belle and Sebastian. Which is how Simon ended up hanging out with us at every opportunity.

  “So what do we have to do to enter this competition?” asked Prad.

  Nicko grinned. “I already signed us up for tryouts. They’re on the Friday after next.”

  “That gives us two weeks to get our act together!” Maz sounded panicked.

  “It’ll be fine,” said Prad, in a lazy drawl befitting someone whose Year Nine report had described him as “incapable of anxiety, even when it is warranted”.

  “We need a plan,” said Maz. “Band meeting after school, okay?”

  Prad and Nicko exchanged sideways glances. I’d overheard them a few times moaning about Maz’s compulsion to plan and organise everything the band did, even though without her they’d still be sitting in Nicko’s bedroom playing AC/DC covers.

  “Can’t,” said Nicko, a little too quickly to be convincing. “I have to study for a German test tomorrow.”

  “Me too,” said Prad.

  “But you don’t do German,” said Maz.

  “I mean, I’ve got a … another test,” said Prad.

  “And I’m filling in for Mum in the pharmacy so she can run some errands,” said Simon, looking genuinely disappointed.

  “I’ll help you,” I offered. Any excuse to delay getting home to Larrie’s tantrums.

  Maz arrived at the top gates fifteen minutes after the final bell. She hooked her arm through mine and swept me along without breaking the stride of her angry march.

  “What happened to you?” I asked, struggling to keep up.

  “Your sister happened, that’s what. She wouldn’t let me leave till I’d done up my tie properly and put on my belt. We need to plot some serious revenge.”

  Plotting revenge is Maz’s main hobby aside from music and her cats, Ziggy and Major Tom. She can spend hours thinking up increasingly cruel ways to get back at people who’ve wronged her.

  We got to the bus stop just as the last School Special pulled away from the kerb.

  “Shiz. Looks like we’re walking.”

  “Let’s go to the village,” said Maz. “I need chocolate.”

  “The village” is Kingston
Shopping Village – the local business association’s fancy name for the strip of shops and cafes on Kingston Street. It’s a twenty-minute walk from school, but it was a sunny spring afternoon, perfect for strolling past the neighbourhood’s blossoming trees and sunbaking cats.

  “What sort of revenge have you got in mind?” I asked when Maz finally finished chatting to the Siamese on the corner.

  “Hmmm … what are Larrie’s weaknesses?”

  “You know she doesn’t have any. My sister and Mary Poppins are Practically Perfect in Every Way, remember?”

  Maz paused to pat a round tabby. “Hello, big guy. Come on, Al, she must have some sort of phobia or fear. Something that she feels sick even thinking about.”

  I thought about it while Maz cooed some more at the cat. “There is the dairy thing, I s’pose …”

  “Perfect! Let’s see her try to threaten me with a detention when her gut is churning from a lactose overload.”

  Larrie was born with congenital lactase deficiency, which means her body can’t digest the lactose in milk products at all – not even the tiniest trace of it. She almost died because of it when she was a tiny baby. When I was born, Mum assumed I had the same condition, so a dairy product never touched my lips until Lily Ng’s fourth birthday party – the day I discovered the joy of ice-cream cake and ate five slices. Mum almost had a fit when I bragged about it afterwards, but when I suffered no ill effects from my dairy adventure, she accepted that I didn’t share the condition. Of course, we still only have soy milk and tofu gelato at home because Larrie’s so paranoid about what might happen to her if she accidentally comes into contact with the slightest trace of lactose. (What does happen to her is “explosive diarrhoea”. Seriously.)

  When we finally got to the cafe after stopping to greet every feline that crossed our path, we ordered iced chocolates with extra whipped cream in honour of Maz’s plan. We hadn’t actually worked out how to execute it, but with Maz I’d learned that plotting revenge was far more fun than going to the effort of carrying it out. Her plans usually went no further than being satisfied that she could avenge herself if she wanted to.

  Maz opened her notebook to a fresh page and we brainstormed all the things Vertigo Pony needed to do to prepare for the SkoolDaze finals, which she was certain they’d make it to. By the time we’d scraped the last of the chocolate syrup from the sides of our glasses, she’d filled two A4 pages with notes on everything from how often the band had to rehearse to what they should wear on stage. Like I said, Maz likes to plan.

  We walked on the other side of Kingston Road on the way home, to lessen the chances of Mum spotting us through the front window of the medical centre. Unfortunately, this meant passing right in front of the Lutz Family Pharmacy. I kept my eyes straight ahead and my walking pace steady, praying Simon wouldn’t see us.

  I needn’t have worried. Maz was too busy going on about Nicko’s bass-playing talents to suggest we stop in and say hello. I tried to think of a way to casually mention Josh’s name, while we were on the subject of talented guys, but I couldn’t get a word in before we reached the corner where Maz and I go in opposite directions to get home.

  “If Princess Perfect gives you too much grief tonight, just remember the plan,” called Maz as she turned into Queen Street.

  Al Miller will have her revenge.

  5

  On Thursday Ms Morales handed back the frog diagrams we’d done for homework. Mine was so covered in red pen it was difficult to make out the corrections, but there was no mistaking the mark at the top of the page (nine out of twenty, dismal even by my standards), or the “suggestion” that I ask Larrie for some tutoring before our Science exam. Simon quickly stuffed his diagram into his folder, but not before I’d spied the twenty out of twenty in the top corner. Nerd.

  “Our next area of study,” announced Ms Morales, “is genetics.”

  Simon hissed a Gollum-esque “Yesss!” under his breath. Double nerd.

  “You’ll remember from our unit on reproduction last year that during fertilisation half of one parent’s chromosomes combine with half of the other parent’s chromosomes,” said Ms Morales, drawing her standard sperm-meets-egg graphic on the board. “This means that we inherit fifty per cent of our genes from each parent – although which fifty per cent is entirely up to chance. These gene copies make up an individual’s genotype.”

  I tried to concentrate on what she was saying, but after ten minutes of alleles and chromosomes and DNA, my mind wandered to more interesting things. Like imagining Josh Turner inviting me to the Year Eleven formal. The thought of Larrie’s jaw dropping when he arrived to pick me up (in a limo; wearing a tux; carrying roses) was priceless …

  My reverie was interrupted by Simon thrusting a piece of paper under my nose.

  “What’s this?”

  “Homework. We have to classify ourselves according to our inherited traits,” said Simon. “You mark which phenotypes you have and then you can see what the genotype is.”

  I gave him the blank expression I reserve for when he spouts technobabble and Klingon.

  “You put an ‘x’ in the column for characteristics you have – the phenotype – like eye and hair colour,” he said, pointing to the table on the worksheet. “The genotype is the letters that show whether it’s a dominant gene that you’ve inherited from both parents, or from one of them, or if it’s recessive. For example, both my parents have brown hair, which means my red hair must come from both of them carrying the recessive gene for red. Does that make sense?”

  I nodded, because it was easier than asking him to explain it a third time, and stuffed the worksheet in my folder.

  Things didn’t improve in English when we got our Romeo and Juliet essays back. I knew I hadn’t made a huge effort in my discussion of the role of fate in the play, but I hadn’t expected a C.

  “It might help you to read a few other people’s essays,” Mr Franklin said when he saw my face fall. “To get some ideas about how to make your argument more persuasive.”

  Of course, when he said “other people” I knew he meant Larrie, but there was no way I was going to ask if I could read her old essays. I may as well have gone up to her and said, “You’re the only one with a brain in the family.” Which she’d have agreed with.

  Even in Art (which I’d only taken as an elective because Maz had promised it would be a bludge) when Mrs Gaunt came round to see our self-portraits, she said, “Allison, I’ve been watching your work develop and it … well, scares me.”

  I studied my drawing. Admittedly, it was more stick figure than Rembrandt, but surely it wasn’t scary? From what I could see, other people’s work wasn’t that much better than mine (other than Maz’s, which was so realistic it could have been a photo of her). But then, the rest of the class wasn’t being measured against Larissa Miller, who’d won Whitlam’s annual art prize every year until she dropped the subject in Year Eleven to concentrate on Maths and Science.

  I can’t remember a time when teachers haven’t compared me to Larrie, but when I graduated from Kingston Primary to Whitlam the comparisons changed from “You’re just like your sister” to variations of “You’re not as good as your sister”. In every subject, from PE to Drama, and especially in Science, within a few weeks of starting Year Seven my teachers’ disappointment in the Other Miller Girl became obvious.

  At first I tried to show them that I had inherited Larrie’s sporting ability, photographic memory and artistic talent. I worked my guts out in the lead up to the Year Seven half-yearly exams, my colour-coded study schedule modelled on Larrie’s own. And I did well. But not as well as Larrie, who came in the top three for every one of her subjects and earned extra house points for leading the Year Nine debating team to victory and captaining the junior swimming squad at the same time.

  When Mum and Dad saw our midyear report cards laid side by side, their disappointment was obvious. I may not have failed my exams, but I’d failed to reach the bar Larrie had set for me.
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  “It’s not like you’re knocking yourself out to get good marks,” said Maz when I moaned to her at lunchtime about my day in Larrie’s-little-sister hell.

  “What would be the point? No matter what I do, until Larrie’s out of the picture the teachers are always going to think she’s better than me.”

  Maz’s eyes dropped, as if she was suddenly fascinated by the ground in front of her. It’s what she does when she’s preparing to say something she thinks you don’t want to hear. “Al, I don’t want to bring you down or anything, but have you considered the possibility that things might not change when Larrie leaves Whitlam? I mean, sure, you won’t have to see her every day or listen to her boring announcements in assembly, but I don’t think the teachers are going to forget her overnight.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the guts. For as long as we’d been best friends, Maz had agreed that my second-best status at Whitlam would end the moment Larrie was off school grounds for good. Now it almost sounded as though she thought I deserved it.

  “Maybe you have to make them see you differently,” suggested Simon, who’d been silent for so long I’d assumed he had his invisible earbuds in.

  “What?” I didn’t try to disguise the hostility in my voice.

  “My dad has this saying: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always got’.”

  “Thank you, Confucius. When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.”

  Maz shrugged. “Maybe it’s worth a try.”

  I glared at her, mentally invoking Best Friend Rule #1: You’re always on my side.

  “Will you sign my petition?” Sally Rechichi squatted between me and Maz and held out a clipboard. “We’re trying to start a gay–straight alliance at Whitlam, but student council rules say we have to get at least 101 signatures before they’ll present the motion to the school board.”