One Long Thread by Belinda Jeffrey Page A

what was left of my sandwich remembering the way Barry had looked at me that night at the pub in Humpty Doo. We had hardly set eyes on each other. But you didn’t hate someone that hard without loving them equally. Barry was my Romeo. Well, not mine, exactly. Just my idea of one.
    â€˜We could meet at the tram and say we’re going to each other’s houses. We could get away with it. Come on, what do you say, Button?’ Becky said one afternoon at school.
    I don’t know how it came to be that my school friends called me Button. I tried to think back. Sally would have been around at that time, too. We were in the same class for grades one to three. We had intersecting groups of friends. Most of us ended up in high school together and I guess it just happened.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I said. Something about the risky adventure being proposed didn’t thrill me as much as it should have. I was approaching seventeen, shouldn’t I have been crying one minute and laughing the next? Moody with hormones like all my friends? I began to think there was something terribly wrong with me.
    â€˜Oh, but you’ve got to come, Button. Won’t be the same without you.’
    I shrugged and they were placated by the gesture – it was good enough for them. I was in.
    Becky clapped her hands together, smiled large around her braces, and leant over to side-hug me. I wondered what Sally would have said if she had been there, instead of me. And the thought made me smile because it didn’t take much imagining to know she would have been leading the charge and anything they suggested would have seemed childish in comparison.
    I wondered what my friends liked about me. I never clashed with anyone. Peacemaker, I supposed. And Sally and I had been a double act, until she left. I wondered if they still liked me because I reminded them of her. I told them all sorts of things, when they asked, about what Sally was up to. So no one knew we hardly talked anymore. I told them everything I knew and more. Everything, except Barry. I kept Barry to myself.
    We didn’t hear from Sally very often. Sometime after I returned from Darwin after meeting Barry, Sally sent us an email – probably the longest ever – attaching a newspaper article about an incident involving Barry at the Top End Croc Jumping Cruises, where she worked, that had made headlines around the country. Just seeing Barry’s name there in print caused my heart to stir.
    The Croc Jumping Cruises gave me something to tell my friends about. Sally had been working there since leaving school. I don’t know how she convinced Mum to let her leave school. But I guessed – not that anyone had said anything to me – that she hadn’t left voluntarily and the option of her returning was not possible. Pretty soon after starting at the Croc Jumping Cruises she had enough money to buy her first car. Dad never thought I knew but, when Sally asked, he’d paid half.
    Trust Sally to have found work that made her sound exotic and wild. She had something not one of our friends had, or had even heard of. Even I had a job more unusual than most of our friends who worked at service stations or coffee shops, cafés and McDonald’s. But not Sally. She worked for a place that took people in glass-walled boats for tours along the river to see crocs jumping out of the water. Sally worked in the café and Barry worked on the boat.
    I liked the power of telling this story to our friends. Well, I guess they were just my friends by that time. The way their eyes widened, the way Sally sounded so much older and wiser by crocodile association. How the Northern Territory may as well have been another country for how different it sounded. Kangaroos running wild down the streets, Aborigines living on the land, black as ebony keys. Sally’s life was as exotic as any of us ever got. And I knew her. We had shared the same body, once. I was as