Last Night at the Mount Solemn Observatory by Danielle Binks

Author:Danielle Binks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

The moment Ravi and King became friends, Em followed. She’s the eldest of three sisters, and even when Ravi wasn’t living with them he and Em stayed in constant contact through emails and texts. I don’t really remember who she hung out with before Ravi and King — she was just another face in the crowd, really.

Adelaide Jones was different.

Tonight she’s wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘To-do list: 1. Invent Universe 2. Make Apple Pie’. She has another one with the words, ‘Know Yourself, Before the Cosmos Can Know Itself’. And she once explained to me that her favourite with ‘Girl Code’ followed by a black-and-white photo of a woman standing beside a taller stack of papers, is something to do with going to the moon. She makes them all herself; designs them on her computer, buys cheap cotton T-shirts and gets them printed at Officeworks.

She’s made one for King as a going-away present; written in the tiniest of fonts is this Gwen Harwood poem he liked when they studied her in Year 12. And underneath the poem are these sketches Adelaide drew of hands held up, spread out, and little curved lines springing off the fingers to make them look like movement, clapping in excitement.

They are King’s hands; I know because Adelaide mapped them for a whole summer last year, sitting at our kitchen table or lying on a blanket down by Lake Claire — the last one I didn’t see myself, but know from the photos Blu-tacked to King’s wardrobe. Adelaide complained that they’re the hardest part of anyone to get right, so she needed practice — she said hands are like mountains up close, with all these infinitesimal ridges, and you have to be a cartographer to get them right.

I can’t say exactly when the four of them became friends, I can only guess it was around the time the rumours started, when they were at the end of Year 10. That was when Adelaide stopped hanging with her old crowd — the footballers and weekend riders — and after a party where people said she got too drunk to say stop.

King knew Adelaide — everyone did, because of who she hung out with — but also because she was tutoring me. And when she stopped hanging with the people meant to be her friends, King started walking her home after our sessions. Then I began teaching her signs in between sines, cosines and tangents. Until one day they were Ravi, Em, Adelaide and King — fundamentally and completely quadrilateral — and the rest, as they say, is geometry.

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