Trust by Kate Veitch Page A

their tits, their faces. You’re meant to get turned on, not zoned out!
    And then, with a hot gout of shame, what wasn’t fantasy came crashing in on him: the insistent, intrusive memory of the fight he’d had with Clarence before their quarterfinals match. It wouldn’t let him go: the stupid things he’d never meant to say, the cringe-making memory of his high-pitched cry: ‘You don’t care! You don’t care about us .’ Tears, god, tears had brimmed from his eyes, and Clarence had seen them. Seb rolled his head back in agony, only to find himself looking up at the poster of Rafael Nadal above his bed: his awesome biceps and lion-like gaze. Rafa would never crack up like that, no fucking way!
    They had gone out then and played so unbelievably badly, worse than if they’d never been on a court together before. Visser and Chong, the doubles team who’d always shared an instinct for how each other would move, almost like they were the same person in two bodies: down in straight sets.
    And now Clarence was gone. Gone for good, gone for ever, and there was not a single freaking thing that Seb could do about it.
    He lay on his side with the laptop propped against a pillow, and went to Facebook. No, Clarence hadn’t updated his status, not since the day before the doomed match. Seb updated his own: pondering icebergs . Cool and deep, that was the idea. And icebergs too were mostly hidden, below the surface. So did that make them great big fakers, just like him? He roamed from one friend’s page to another, commenting on a photo here, posting on a wall there. He checked out Sylvia Albanese’s page: shit, she had close to five hundred friends! What the hell was going on with Sylvia Albanese? Did she really want him to be her date for the senior school social? Year Twelve chicks, especially ones like Sylvia, never wanted Year Eleven guys to take them to the social. And yet Sylvia and a couple of the other girls like her all seemed to be angling for the same thing. Weird .
    You didn’t have to go to the social with a date. In fact, the school discouraged it. Until last week, Seb had assumed he and Clarence would cruise in together, cool and casual, dance a bit and just hang, having a good time with all their friends, male and female. Whereas a male–female couple who went to the social together was likely to spend a good part of the evening making out. Was that what Sylvia expected? And the other glamour girls?
    The mobile phone on his bedside table thrummed. Rolling over to look at the message, he saw it was from his sister, just on the other side of the plasterboard wall. U awake? Okay, damn it, any distraction was a good one right now! He rolled back to the other side of the bed and rapped twice on the wall. Two knocks came quickly in return.
    ‘Whassup, face-ache?’ he said quietly, sticking his head round the edge of her door.
    Stella-Jean beckoned him in. ‘Can’t sleep.’
    ‘Nah, me either.’ With a single long step, Seb crossed the narrow room whose pink walls were barely detectable behind the chock-a-block shelves, the pinboards, photos, stuff from Bali, and fancy dresses on satin-covered hangers displayed like they were in some museum. With some difficulty, he found himself a perch on her similarly cluttered bed. His sister was sitting up cross-legged in her PJs; busy making something, as usual, working some kind of green ribbon around the top of that thing that looked like a kid’s toy. Knitting Nancy: dumb name. He pointed to the lengthening tube spooling from the bottom of the little wooden figure. ‘Old Nancy looks like she’s having a big green poop.’
    ‘Charming.’ Stella-Jean gave the tube a quick, efficient tug and kept twisting the ribbon in and out round the metal hooks atop Nancy’s head. ‘Like that disgusting old sloth-cloth you’re wearing. You do realise it’s more hole than fabric?’
    ‘Wouldn’t be a sloth-cloth if it wasn’t full of holes.’ Seb looked down proudly at the