The Anti-Cool Girl by Rosie Waterland

home, she’d head straight to the fridge and fill her glass from a chilled box of wine.
    So, the trips started to become longer, and we would stay in larger, more permanent facilities. Rhiannon and I would make friends, start at new schools (trying to explain to the kids what it meant when the principal said to your new teacher, ‘We’ve got another one from the bloody rehab’).
    I knew the Serenity Prayer by heart and I wasn’t even eight years old, and I had started to think that ‘accepting the things I cannot change’ referred to the fact that rehab would never change anything.
    But then came Karralika. The place that would definitely stop Mum going to the fridge and then disappearing for days. The place that would stop her wanting to drink from a chilled box of wine. The place that would definitely change everything. We were told that we were going to live there for months – however long it would take – to get Mum better.
    And it was definitely a nice place. Karralika was a rehab centre located in Canberra, which, even though I’d lived in fifty different places since being born, and despite being the capital of my country, was somewhere I’d never actually been. It consisted of a bunch of bungalows that families could live in together, with a massive yard and a volleyball net, and the whole thing was in the middle of pretty luscious bushland, so there would be plenty of places for us to sneak off and play.
    Straight away I was dubious that it was going to be different from any other rehab (which by now I considered something my mum just did when she wanted a break). Things were the same at Karralika as they had been at every facility we’d lived at. You wake up in the morning and go to breakfast in a big shared dining hall. Then all the kids get driven to school or day care in a minivan. I had no idea what the adults did whilewe were out for the day, but I assumed it had something to do with talking about how much they liked wine. After school, the kids would mostly just play together while our parents did more talking about how much they liked the various things they liked that they weren’t supposed to like. Then there’d be dinner in the dining hall, after which our parents would have more meetings and we would do homework, which usually just meant watching TV in some rec room. Then, before bed, there’d be ‘supper’, where you got a biscuit, and Milo and milk in a plastic cup.
    Just like camp.
    Rhiannon and I always liked being friends with the other kids at rehab, because they were the only kids we ever got to meet whose parents seemed worse than ours. There was a kind of hierarchy among us based on what our mums or dads were in for. Heroin was top of the list, and the most impressive, and wine was the bottom. Trust our mum to be addicted to the lamest thing available. But really, being at the bottom of the addiction list just meant Rhiannon, Tayla and I were pretty much the luckiest kids there.
    All the kids felt lucky to be there really, because living in rehab was the only time we ever got to see our parents consistently sober. It was the most stable and unafraid we had ever felt. Living in rehab was the only time I got to make it through entire days without feeling the toxic butterflies.
    I felt more of a sense of belonging around those kids than I had around any others. I think because, even though the oldest of us was only twelve (that was Harley – he could put a condom in his nose and make it come out his mouth, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen), we all really respected each other. For what we had been through, for what we were going through and for what we all secretly knew we would probably keep going through after we left. I don’t think at that age we even knew what ‘respect’ meant, but there was a sense of solidarity and empathy between us that I don’t think can be described as anything