Raffaela and I exchange looks before she begins bustling the younger lot into the House.
The Cadets have arrived.
I’m in charge.
The territory wars are about to recommence.
They met Jude Scanlon for the first time exactly one year after the accident. At that time Webb thought nothing would make sense ever again. The pain was worse now because up till then Narnie and Tate and Webb had all just felt numb and if it hadn’t been for Fitz’s spirit blasting them out of their grief, Webb honestly believed that the three of them would have made some crazy suicide pact. But during that year, when they were fourteen years old, the numbness went away, replaced by memories that made Narnie disappear inside herself and him ache. He saw the same in Tate. Despite her ability to enjoy most of their days, sometimes her despair was so great that, in a melancholy moment when she’d allow herself to think of her family, she’d almost stop breathing and he’d hold her and say, “I’m here, Tate. I’m here, Tate. I’m here.” Tate had lost her younger sister as well as her parents in the accident. “We were playing Rock, Paper, Scissors,” she told him once. “I was paper and she was rock so I lived and she died.”
That year, a boys’ school from the city had decided to experiment and send all their students from year eight to eleven on a six-week life-education project as part of the Cadet program. They were to live by the river from mid-September to the week after the October holidays ended.
“We can play skirmish,” Fitz said, clutching his gun, his eyes blazing with the possibilities as the convoy of buses drove into town.
As his Cadet troop jogged along the Jellicoe Road, their boots thumping the ground, eliminating anything in their path, Jude Scanlon noticed the damaged poppies. There seemed to be five, bent out of shape, fragments on the bottom of the boot of the kid in front of him—damaged beyond repair. For reasons he couldn’t understand a sadness came over him and it was then he saw the girl standing on the other side of the dirt road, her eyes pools of absolute sorrow, her light brown hair glowing in the splinters of sunlight that forced their way through the trees. It was as if he had seen a ghost, some kind of apparition, which haunted him through that night. The next day he found himself returning to the very same spot, after hours, with five seeds in his pocket. Then, on his knees, he planted something for the first time in his life.
“They have to go deeper,” he heard a voice say. “Or else the roots won’t take.”
There were four of them. Two boys and two girls. He recognised one of the girls from the day before and something inside him stirred. He could tell the speaker was related to her, his hair was the same golden brown, his eyes, though, were full of life. The girl on the other side of the speaker was smiling gently and then there was a boy with a wicked grin and laughing eyes.
“Tate,” the smiling girl said, extending her hand. “And this is Webb and Fitzy and you kind of met Narnie yesterday.”
Narnie.
“I didn’t…we didn’t mean to…”
The boy, Webb, shook his head. “It always happens.”
“Maybe you should find another spot to plant your flowers.”
“There can be no other spot,” Webb said quietly.
Jude pulled the rest of the seeds from his pocket and they all took one each then side-by-side on the Jellicoe Road they planted the poppies.
Each day, at the same time, Jude would return and each day they would be there, led by Webb, whose life could not have been more different to his. Where Webb’s memories of childhood were idyllic and earthy, Jude’s reeked of indifference. Webb read fantasy; Jude read realism. Webb believed a tree house was the perfect place for gaining a different perspective on the world; whereas Jude saw it as perfect for surveillance and working out who or what was a threat to them. They argued about sports codes and song lyrics. Jude saw the rain-dirty valley; Webb saw Brigadoon. Yet despite all this, they connected, and the nights they spent in the tree house discussing their brave new worlds and not so brave emotions made everything else in their lives insignificant. Somehow the world of Webb and Fitz and Tate and Narnie became the focus of Jude’s life.
The next year, as the Cadet buses drove into Jellicoe, Jude was desperate for a sign. A sign that would tell him that things would be the same as the year before. He’d spent most of the year wondering about them. Had they fallen out of love with one another? Did Narnie still have that half-dead look? Had Fitz got himself into trouble? Had they outgrown him?
But there they were, on the steps of the Jellicoe General Store, where the Cadets always stopped to pick up supplies. Waiting. For him.
“Who are they?” the Cadet sitting next to him asked.
Jude looked at Webb’s face, the grin stretching from ear to ear.
“They’re my best friends. I’m going to know them until the day I die.”
Chapter 3
The territory wars have been part of the Jellicoe School’s life ever since I can remember. I don’t know who started them. The Townies say it was the Cadets from the city who have been coming out here for the last twenty or so years. They set up camp right alongside the Jellicoe School for six weeks each September as part of their outdoor education program. We say the Townies started the wars because they think Jellicoe belongs to them, and the Cadets blame us because they say we don’t know how to share land. All I know is that they began sixteen years ago because that’s what the Little Purple Book says. In it the founders wrote down the rules, the maps, the boundaries.
The wars take place only for the six weeks the Cadets are here and mostly they are more of a nuisance than exciting. It takes us double the time to get to town because the Cadets own most of the easy access trails. It’s always around that time that we get pep talks from the teachers and the Principal about getting out there in the fresh air and taking bushwalks. What they don’t know is that most of the House leaders confine their younger students indoors in case they trespass onto enemy territory. That is one thing you don’t want happening. Because after the Cadets are long gone and the Townies are back in their rabbit holes, the real war begins. The Houses are at one another, particularly if one was responsible for losing us territory. When I ran away with the Cadet three years ago, Raffaela and Ben went looking for me and trespassed onto Townie territory. We lost the Prayer Tree because of it. Raffaela and Ben were completely ostracised and when I returned we didn’t talk to each other much. Then we stopped talking altogether. And now here we are leading Houses together and about to fight a war.
There are Cadet sightings on the northern border of our boundaries for a whole week. The area is at least a kilometre away from where they are camped so allowing themselves to be sighted is a deliberate attempt at intimidation. Just between you and me, it works every time. The other House leaders want me to begin acting on the intelligence we’re receiving, but premature action in the past has been the Jellicoe School’s downfall and I’ll be damned if I make the same mistakes the leaders have made in the past.
On her weekend visit home, I send word through Raffaela to the leader of the Townies that we’d like to make contact. We receive no answer and the cat-and-mouse games begin. Waiting for war is a killer. Not knowing when the first strike will happen, not knowing what the outcome will be. The build-up makes us tense. Sometimes I want to walk right out there and yell, “Bring it on!” just to get the suspense over.
But it’s the home front that’s the worst. The school has always had a policy that the House leaders, with the help of the rest of the seniors, take care of their own Houses with the assistance of an adult. Every student knows that the leader has been chosen in year seven and is groomed for the next five years. But every year we have elections and pretend that the House leaders and School leader have been elected by the people for the people. The teachers fall for it. They’re pretty young and clueless. Most of them only stay three years maximum to fulfil the Board of Education’s employment requirements, so patterns among the students aren’t really picked up. They are diligent, though. Each time a Lachlan student forgets to turn up to a sports training session or music recital or debating practice, I get harassed by the teachers. From the junior dorms on the first floor all the way up to the year-elevens rooms on the third, those in my House drive me insane with their expectations. Questions about television privileges, duty rosters, computer access, and laundry. There are tears and fights and tantrums and anxiety. And Hannah is nowhere to be found. I’m furious that she has let me take care of this all by myself—almost like some kind of payback for the last time I saw her. In the past Hannah spent most of her spare time in Lachlan, helping out the House leader, but now that I’m in charge she’s gone into hiding.