One Step Read online

  About the Book

  Hilariously funny yet painfully poignant, this is a powerful and insightful story from a well-loved Australian writer.

  Dylan is struggling.

  He’s struggling with the acne that has declared war on his face; struggling with his pushy younger sister; with his nagging mum and his dad who never has time for him anymore; struggling with his old phone-me-down; and struggling with his preoccupation with girls, and what might happen if he manages to snag one.

  Struggling, but surviving.

  But when Dylan’s creative writing piece is read out in class, it sets off a chain of events that sends him on a frantic roller coaster of emotions culminating in a revelation that could make or break his survival.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Need Help?

  Acknowledgments

  That last step’s not such a big thing, not nearly as bad as I thought.

  I’d just have to lift one foot off the railing. To actually let myself kind of fall forward so I could get going. Get moving. One step would get that next step under way.

  I heard someone on the TV say once that running is falling forward and stopping yourself from going splat on the pavement by taking the next step – they said the fastest runners were the ones closest to going splat the most often. They said that running fast was hard unless you were prepared to fall a little, to take the risk, to lean forward, to let yourself go.

  I’m a crap runner. I’m obviously crap at everything.

  But I’d be flying soon enough.

  I’d be off and flying and wouldn’t they all talk about that.

  My sister’s at Mum again.

  She’s always at her, always flexing, always pushing and seeing what she can get away with. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t like that when I was thirteen. I don’t remember sniping at Mum when she bought me a present. It’s not even Hayley’s birthday, Mum just saw the T-shirt, bought it and gave it to her as a surprise. ‘Just thought of you, honey,’ was what Mum said in her hopeful, high-pitched way.

  Hayley took the Big W shopping bag, pulled out the T-shirt and pouted; she’s good at it, it’s like she practises. Then she held the shirt at arm’s length before checking herself out in the mirror above the fireplace. She draped it over her body and put her head this way and that, staring at her face in the reflection. I don’t think she even looked at the shirt.

  ‘Cool, huh?’ said Mum.

  ‘Really?’ said Hayley. ‘You think, Mum? Cool? Is that what you reckon?’ She put the shirt back into the bag and tossed it to Mum. ‘It’s more you than me. You have it. Or give it to Ronnie, she could wear it to bed.’

  ‘It looks great,’ said Mum. ‘The colour suits you, the whole cat thing on T-shirts is about to go off. Have a look at the stuff online, all those funky Euro stores are doing cats. You wait, you’ll be way ahead of the curve.’

  ‘It does look pretty cool,’ I said.

  ‘He speaks,’ Hayley said to me. ‘And like you’d know. Dylan Hester, the great stylemeister of our time. They wouldn’t be Clarks school shoes, would they? So cool for school!’

  ‘That’ll do,’ said Mum, taking the bag. ‘There’s no need for that. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. I’ll have a look for something else.’

  ‘Thanks for trying, Mum. But don’t you think it’s time you took a step back and let me find my own style? I think I’m old enough to know what works for me. You’ve had, like, a thousand years to figure out whatever it is that works for you, and it’s only kinda happening now, so how about we make this about me? Don’t you reckon? I’m not even trying to be mean, it’s just a fact. This is my time.’

  She pulled her phone out of her pocket and stuck her face in it. The conversation was over – for Hayley anyway.

  Mum looked as if she’d been kicked in the guts. She bent forward in a broken kind of way, her mouth open and her eyebrows heading for the cover of her fringe. She was going to either explode or break down. Mum’d been skitzing a bit lately so, either way, this was going to get interesting. It was a weekday: she had to get to work, and get me, Hayley and our little sister Ronnie off to school, so there probably wasn’t time for a rage. Maybe Hayley was in for a prolonged parental cold front.

  ‘Put your phone down,’ started Mum. She was upright now, but tight-lipped and scalded. Hayley didn’t respond. She kept swiping at her screen with her arse sticking out to the side.

  ‘Put it down, now!’

  I left. I had better things to do than watch another episode of My Dysfunctional Family play out in our own kitchen, and this had all the ingredients of being a nasty one. I went straight to the bathroom, locked the door and hoped for the best.

  It was hard to look, even I’ll admit that, and it’s my stupid face.

  I mean, seriously. I’ve been looking at me in the mirror for fifteen years and I know every angle to hit to find a half decent me – just not lately. I’m under siege. There’s almost no zit-free face looking back from the mirror. Some spots are better than others, but my cheeks are the worst. They’re a bloodbath, like they’ve been grated. And that bit where my nose meets my face is terrible on both sides – those deep crevices are like some kind of mongrel acne hiding spot. I can’t even get my fingers in there to squeeze the stupid things, so it’s a scratch-the-heads-off-only zone.

  I’ve got a really painful one on the back of my neck. It’s as if the God of Acne put it there to piss me off. It’s perfectly positioned between the top of my collar and the bottom of my hair. I’m sure that if I bent my head back, especially if I had a nice, fresh, newly ironed collar, the pimple would pop. I’ll have to remember not to look up until it’s gone. If it blows, and it would literally blow, then crap’d probably ooze from it for the rest of the day. There’d be this dribbled smudge of dry, manky smegma on my collar, and by the time I got to English that total dick Anton Plant would have something new to tease me about.

  If it didn’t blow, Plant would study it. That’s the kind of clean-faced dick he is.

  He’d sit behind me and analyse it. He’d grab his phone and photograph my neck-ne; he’d Instagram it and ask his followers for the best way to crack it open. He’s an idiot and there’s no logical reason everyone likes him, but then, there’s no logical reason One Direction were the biggest band in the world either. I can think of four or five reasons they shouldn’t have been, put it that way.

  And I actually reckon Anton would do those things because that’s the stuff that blows his hair back. It’s what he’s like. He’s a tool, an Insta-pest. He’s that typical blond muscly guy in the teen movies – good at sport and life and girls, and good luck to him, I suppose.

  I gently rubbed the tips of my fingers over the bolt on the back of my neck and winced. It was ready, and it hurt. A lot. This might be a good day to not feel terribly well.

  Late.

  Again.

  I grabbed my gear and left for school. As bad as school might be, it was good to leave the house, which hummed with a seething, miserable kind of silence.

  For the record, there is no such thing as a fun bus ride when you’r
e travelling with a trombone. I would guess it’s better than travelling with a tuba or a euphonium, because they’re massive, but still. A trombone’s a trombone. It’s not sexy. I doubt anyone’s looked at one and gone, Oh, man. That guy’s got a trombone. Yes, he’s a trombone player. He’s going to end up in a band and be hot and play stadiums and make millions of dollars. I should definitely do him while I still can. Absolutely. It’s just not that cool an instrument.

  It would be cool if girls wanted to root me because I’m the only trombone player in the school, but so far, there’s no evidence pointing in that direction. There’s not much evidence that anyone wants to root anyone, just a lot of hoping at this stage, but it doesn’t stop the thought process.

  I knew I should have learnt the guitar. Or been a singer, or both.

  And it’s not as if I think about sex all the time – not by choice, anyway. I don’t actively think about people wanting to root me because I’m a bad-ass, trombone-wielding rock star. Getting a boner isn’t necessarily about being horny, sometimes getting hard is just getting hard. It’s like a reflex. A sex-flex. And then once I get a chubby, even a non-sexual chubby, then I start thinking about sex.

  And for reasons I may never know and will certainly never ask my dad, the bus seems to be a great place to bar up – especially in the moments before arriving anywhere. It’s as if my dick wants to embarrass me and it’s got a ‘nearly there’ sensor. Or there’s a bump in the road that wakes it up and my dick goes, ‘sweet, arrival in three minutes. Up you get, and let’s not let this kid down until he’s worked out if he’s going to hide us behind his school bag or point us up and tuck us into the elastic band of his undies.’

  Being almost sixteen seems to be entirely about being embarrassed.

  Standing at the bus stop, I craned my neck to see if my neck-ne had got any worse. By degrees I worked my head down and up, gently fingering the top of the pimple. It was fine. It probably wasn’t as bad as I thought. I even tried raising my shoulders and pushing my head right back, putting a lot of pressure on it. There was no blast, no pop. Nothing. I checked my fingers, nothing there. All good, I thought. So I had one more good lash at it, pulling my collar tight around my neck in an attempt to create a worst-case scenario. My head was way back, my eyes at the sky and my fingers gently rubbing the tight skin across the head of the zit.

  ‘You’re not waiting for a bird to crap in your mouth are you, Dylan?’

  I snapped my head forward to see Madison Ansey. I nearly fell over. I could feel the heat rising up my chest and into my neck and knew I was turning purple in front of her. How embarrassment. How totally, horribly embarrassing. I’m basically squeezing a boil between my head and collar and rubbing my fingers over it and the Madison Ansey walks up and asks if I’m waiting for a bird to crap in my mouth. What a dick.

  ‘Nah,’ I kind of grunted, rubbing the back of my neck to make it look like it was sore and I hadn’t been doing what I was doing. Swallow me, bus stop, I thought. Swallow me now.

  ‘Got a sore neck?’ she said. Madison Ansey was hot in the everybody-knew-it kind of way. She definitely knew it, too, but was pretty cool about it. We’d been to the same primary school and had been catching the same bus since Year Seven, so we knew each other, but something kind of weird had happened between Year Six and now. It wasn’t as easy to talk, but sometimes we did. She was pretty nice to me, but mostly when none of her other friends were around. At least she didn’t bury her face in her phone and pretend I didn’t exist when she was on her own.

  I wondered why she was on the late bus, and not the early one we usually get.

  ‘How’d you hurt it?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Your neck. How’d you hurt your neck? I was watching you the whole way down the hill. You had your head back and you were rubbing it as if you’d hurt it. What’d you do?’

  Thank God, I thought. She has no idea. And of course she didn’t. Every mark on her face was perfect. She didn’t even wear make-up to school. It pained me to even consider what it would be like if Madison went to school and told everyone that I’d been trying to work out if my neck-zit would pop if it got squeezed between my collar and the base of my skull.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I mumbled. ‘My neck. Yeah. I think I slept funny. It’s fine, but. All good.’ I gave it a good, hard rub as if there really was something wrong with it and nodded.

  ‘I hate that,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sucks to be me.’ I rubbed my neck again, harder this time to show how badly hurt my neck was, and realised too late what a bad idea that was. I could actually feel the head of the pimple give way under my palm. It kind of stung, like ripping off a band-aid, but once that was over there was some kind of release as well. Something like a huge pimply sigh. It would be horrendous back there.

  ‘So, like, really. Is everything okay?’ said Madison. ‘It must be bad. It looks like just rubbing your neck hurts.’

  If only she knew. ‘Yeah. Nah. All good. All good. Really.’ I probably looked like I shat myself when the top came off the pimple. I kept my hand on my neck and kind of squeezed as if I was trying to loosen the muscles, but really, I was trying to stop whatever was happening back there from getting all over my collar. Longer hair would have been real good.

  In the first positive news of the day, I remembered there were a couple of band-aids in my bag for blisters from when my school shoes were new. Mum had her moments.

  Ashley Smythe was walking down the hill towards us with a face full of her mobile. Madison nodded at her and rolled her eyes in a playful way. ‘Better go, hope your neck gets better.’ She sidled up to Ashley and wrapped an arm around her. Ashley responded with a circus of OMGs and a huge hug, as if she hadn’t seen Madison for years. I took the chance to quickly wipe my hand on the back of my pants.

  ‘You have to see this,’ Ashley said to Madison. ‘It’s completely epic.’

  The girls locked heads and stared at the screen. They didn’t laugh, they squealed. Then they laughed. Then they must have watched it over because they squealed again. Madison sent a sideward grin in my direction which, unless I’d known better, I would’ve thought was an invitation to come and look.

  I wanted to know what they were watching so bad. Who was it? Where was it? What were they doing? I watched them for a while, hoping that Madison might call me over for a squiz, but it was Ashley who looked at me next and said, ‘Stalker!’ She said it in that high-pitched, singsong way she said most things – Stall-kerrr. It probably wasn’t meant to be as mean as it felt. Madison kept her face in Ashley’s phone.

  I dug in my bag, found the band-aids and unwrapped one. It took a bit of fumbling, but job done. No one had to know what was going on back there, and now, with a bit of luck, they never would. I made a mental note to get more band-aids out of the bathroom.

  I pulled out my phone, my plugs, listened to music and scrolled through my contact list to make it look as if I had something really interesting to do until the bus arrived. It’s embarrassing, but I’ve got a completely lame phone – no apps, crappy screen, dinky buttons – it’s hopeless. It’s a phone-me-down from my uncle after I drowned mine when Hamish Banning sent me and my iPhone off Jump Rock into Sydney Harbour.

  It was only an old one, but still. He should have bought me another one.

  When I told Mum and Dad what’d happened, they said if Hamish had pushed me into the water, it was his responsibility to replace my phone. At first they didn’t believe he’d had anything to do with it. They said I must have gone for a swim and forgotten I had it in my pocket. I didn’t tell them we’d been at Jump Rock because that would have brought on a different world of hurt. They reckoned I would have gone in without thinking because basically, ‘you jump into everything you do without thinking. It’s the perfect analogy of your life, Dylan.’

  Seriously, I know the lecture by heart: ‘You never think about consequences. Your Year Adviser is right, your brain has gone to mush. We’ve just got to
hope he’s also right that once you clear Year Nine, or God forbid, we have to wait ’til Year Ten, you’ll be a reasonably decent and thoughtful human being again. And for you it’ll be a welcome return to the human race.’

  ‘Yeah, good one,’ I’d said. Why did they have so much trouble believing me, especially when bad things happened? It was as if the equation for life in our house was Me + Everything = wrong, but Mum + Dad = always right.

  Well, stuff that. I told them I hadn’t just gone for a swim, that I’d been pushed into the water. After a bit of prompting I told them the pusher was Hamish Banning. They were more interested in knowing what else he was pushing – there were a couple of stories going around. But I said ‘just me’ because it was easier telling that much of the truth. I thought that would be that, except they decided to apply their awkward, parental logic to the situation which meant they reckoned Hamish had to buy me a new phone because he murdered my old one.

  Of course I couldn’t tell Hamish that.

  Of course Mum and Dad said I had to.

  They didn’t know Hamish, only of him, which didn’t stop them thinking they knew exactly what he was like. Had they known anything, they would have realised hell would freeze over before he bought anything for anybody. Now, if Mum or Dad’d said, ‘He has to steal you another phone,’ there was some chance of success. Most nights they’d ask me if he’d got my replacement phone, so I had to keep coming up with new excuses as to how I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him. Mum said she was going to see Mrs Banning at some school thing eventually, so I could either sort it out, or she would sort it out for me.

  The whole thing was a fast track to miserable.

  Eventually I mustered the courage to tell him he owed me a new phone, but I tried to make it funny. Like, he did owe me a phone, but if he took me asking the wrong way, he didn’t really. You know? I tried to make it so he could be a good bloke and take it seriously if he wanted to or, if not, it could be a joke and he wouldn’t punch my head in.