Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett

Author:Sonya Hartnett [Hartnett, Sonya]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5193-0
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2009-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

ON MONDAY MORNING her friends flock to her; it’s not her they want to see, but their handiwork. “Ugh.” Victoria sticks out her tongue. “It looks infected.”

“It’s not infected!” Samantha squawks. “Everything was clean, you saw it!”

Plum stands like a cow in a yard while her friends mill about her. Their Monday-morning uniforms smell clean and freshly ironed. They are gathered in the thoroughfare of the locker corridor, and around them parts a noisy tide of girls burdened by bags as unwieldy as rhinos, armed with spiked plates of textbook. Plum is bumped and knocked, scuffed and buffeted. Caroline’s face puckers at Plum’s cauliflowered head. “Does it hurt?”

Plum nods briefly, as one for whom suffering is inevitable.

Sophie says, “My ears didn’t look like that after I got them pierced. Mine didn’t go all purple.”

“Well aren’t you so special.” The assembly bell is ringing, and Samantha wheels away. “There’s nothing wrong, Aria!” she yells over a shoulder. “In a few days you’ll be fine! Stop sooking!”

“I wasn’t sooking,” Plum points out — but her friends are dispersing, flicking away like minnows into the crowd, and a strong broad girl whom Plum doesn’t know advises her curtly, “Out of the way, idiot.”

On the bus ride home there’s a moment in which the bubble that is Plum’s self-confidence seems unable to rise, and the prospect is that, even at home, she will feel weak and unwanted. This has never happened before. Arriving home, she heads straight to her room, where she retrieves the briefcase with urgency. She touches each object, balances their weights, compresses them inside her hands. Today the coin is her least favorite. She has tried to befriend the coin, admire it, see good in it, but has failed. The coin is ugly, and should never have been minted. She wonders if a coin can be burned or melted. She conjures a force field around her body, tells the coin in a monotone, “I cause you pain I cause you pain.”

She rocks on her haunches, craving to run to Maureen — Maureen who is always pleased to see her, who is a river, rather than a war — but the Datsun Skyline is parked in the driveway like a great blue tumor. That man is a pest. Instead she lies on her bed flipping through an encyclopedia of movies, thinking about her birthday, her upcoming party, the many potholes in her life. Her bag-of-concrete body. Her ball-of-fire ears.

On Tuesday at lunchtime, Sophie is crying. It is not Plum’s shoulder upon which her old friend chooses to weep, so Plum does as Rachael and Caroline are doing, and hovers in the background being concerned. “What is it?” they ask Victoria, when Sophie has recovered enough to stumble off to the tuckshop for a Wagon Wheel. Victoria explains that Sophie has lost the bracelet of which she’s been so proud, and Caroline gasps, “Oh no! Lost already? Father Christmas only just gave it to her!”

Plum stares after Sophie, keeping her thoughts to herself. Her friend has lost a treasure, but she still gets to go to the tuckshop.

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