Girl Next Door - Alyssa Brugman [1]
'I'm dying and you've already lost interest. You're already too busy with Mr . . .' He's searching. 'Mr Pathwalker.'
'You never know,' I say. 'You might make it through tonight, and the next night and every night, and then we could go to South America together.'
Declan eyes me suspiciously. 'Will you promise to look after my cat? Because if you don't, when I die I will haunt you!' he warns.
'Of course,' I answer. 'I've told you a hundred times.'
I'm not really an animal person. We had goldfish a while ago, but I wasn't all that good at feeding them regularly. I'd prefer to be haunted by Declan than by Chairman Meow – or the goldfish. They would be so mad at me.
'Jenna-Belle!' Mum calls from inside the house.
'What?' I shout over my shoulder. We wait. My mother is expecting me to go in there to see what she wants. She calls me as if I'm a dog.
'WHAT?' I yell again.
Still nothing.
'Declan could be dying!' I bellow. 'Don't you even care about that?'
'Declan is not dying!' Mum shouts back.
It's true. Declan's not dying, he's just an emo.
'I have to go.' I stand up.
Declan doesn't say anything. He's too busy checking his pulse.
Inside, the man from the car is standing in the foyer with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. We have one of those entry foyers with the staircase winding up and a skylight at the top. The vast space and the tiles make your shoes clack and echo through the whole house, so if you're going to sneak out you need to do it through the back.
He's looking at the ceiling. Maybe he's thinking about the roof space. I've always liked roof spaces. Declan and I spend a lot of time in my roof. When I go to people's houses I always wonder if there's treasure up there.
When I'm an A-lister I'm going to make a habit of leaving treasure in people's roofs, like the way Oprah gives her audience cars.
'Bryce Cole is here to look around,' my mother tells me. 'He might take the room.'
I have a vision of him hefting our lounge room on his shoulder, like Atlas, and strapping it to the roof of his car, which isn't as dumb as you might think since Mum has sold just about everything else, and then it registers that she means the spare room. Bryce Cole might be moving in.
'This is Jenna-Belle, my youngest,' she tells him.
He offers me his hand. 'Bryce Cole.' He's not looking at me as though he only sees a jigsaw of girlie bits the way some men do, with their eyes flitting from one part to the next. He's just looking at my face.
I'm trying to think of any dictators in history with two-syllable names. When you share a bathroom with an adult they can get a little despotic, as if they have more right to it than you, even if you were there first.
I used to have big barneys with the woman who had Bryce Cole's room before. She would scream that she paid, and so I'd scream back that she paid for the room, she only had use of the bathroom. So there. Her name was Penelope Sullivan – four and three syllables – so she was obviously Napoleon Bonaparte reincarnated.
I'm doing well with Bryce Cole until I remember Pol Pot.
Pol Pot springs to mind because Declan did an assignment on him for history. He read on the internet that Pol Pot was a dope fiend and that's where the expression 'pot' for marijuana came from, but I don't think that's true. I'll have to ask him what mark he got.
I'm not sure if Bryce Cole can be Pol Pot reincarnated because I don't know if Pol Pot is dead yet, and even if he is, I'm pretty sure he was raining atrocities on his people after Bryce Cole was born. You can't be reincarnated retrospectively; otherwise we'd all be fair game. Who could sleep knowing you could wake up and be someone else? Everyone would be irritable and jumpy and there'd be even more wars.
Bryce Cole doesn't look like a dictator or a pot head. He looks kind of normal. I bet he runs a carpet shop, or delivers photocopiers or something like that, but it's hard to tell at first. He'll be the third flatmate we've had (not including Annie who lives in the