At home, Leo peeled off his hot school shirt and dunked his head under a cold shower for a full minute. He wolfed down a bowl of cereal and then they piled back into the car, with their bikes strapped on top. They drove to the empty lagoon and then Leo and Peg took off on their bikes, while Dad walked with a sketchbook in his hand and a pencil behind his ear.

  Leo pedalled fast and the hot air hit his face like a hairdryer. Bugs skimmed off his helmet. Dead leaves on the path suddenly leapt to life as he whooshed past. He pushed the pedals harder and rode faster, so he could leave everything else behind: the jellyfish feeling, the shaky Prep memories, the lunchtime buddies his teacher had lined up. For a few minutes, he felt free of it all. Forgot he was even in Dundle. Then after a few laps, the big tower caught his eye and he skidded to a stop.

  He sat on the bike with one foot on the ground. His chest rose and fell as he got his breath back and looked at the tower, about fifty metres away. There were two main parts – a big cylindrical body and a crisscrossed pattern of timber holding it up. The legs were giant stilts, with flights of wooden stairs zigzagging between them. They led to the top of the big metal body, where a balcony circled the tower, with a railing around the outside. Leo might not have cared about something like this in the city. But here, where everything was so dull and flat, the tower looked like something from another world, as if it had landed from space or was about to launch into orbit.

  Peg caught up and stopped beside him. Then Dad arrived too. The three of them stood quietly for a while, looking at the tower. Flies found the backs of their shirts. A crow rattled from a gum tree.

  ‘What is it?’ Leo breathed normally, but his whole body was hot.

  ‘A water tower,’ said Dad. ‘I guess they need them in places like this.’

  ‘I heard that it flooded here a long time ago,’ said Peg. ‘My teacher told me today.’

  Leo used his shirt to wipe sweat from his face. He had imagined lots of things in his life, but he couldn’t picture Dundle under water. It was hard enough spotting a cloud.

  ‘If it’s full of water,’ said Peg, ‘why can’t they use it to grow some grass?’

  ‘Or fill the pool?’ said Leo.

  Dad fanned his face with his hat. ‘They have to keep it for the important things: showers and baths, having enough to drink. Never know when it’ll rain again.’

  Leo started pedalling back to the car, but he kept thinking about the tower. He imagined all the water inside and letting it out to soak the thirsty ground. Most of all, he thought about how big it was. He never expected to find something that tall in Dundle, as tall as a building in the city.

  Leo’s Monday buddy, Mia, didn’t work out. She did what she had to do – showed him the toilets, the drink bubblers and the tuckshop – but then she left him alone in the eating area and sat with her friends. He didn’t mind and didn’t tell anyone about it. He wanted to get through the week without making people worry.

  On Tuesday, he was told to stick with Finn at lunchtime – a mousy kid who took two bites of a sandwich and then ran to the library. Leo followed and found him playing a complicated card game with a group of boys. They were all hunched around a table, snapping and flinging the cards and calling out words he had never heard before.

  ‘Volta!’

  ‘Shuck!’

  ‘Double dink!’

  Leo backed away. He dropped himself into a beanbag and thumbed through a book he didn’t want to read.

  Wednesday and Thursday weren’t any better: a clumsy attempt at handball with a boy called Rafi, and half an hour listening to Nicola talk about her horse. A few times, Leo tried to speak, but his sentences fell out in stuttered spurts and the buddies didn’t listen. Both days left him deflated. He knew they were doing their duty for Ms Pengari, and nothing more.

  The nervous Prep feeling didn’t drown him for the rest of the week, but it was always there, lapping at the edges. He tried a few things from The Plan, so he could tell Mum and Dad he had given it a go. As the weekend neared, he thought less about school and focused on his secret promise with Ralph. On the night he said goodbye, the promise had glimmered like a distant star inside his mind. Now it began to shine brighter, like a burning comet getting closer each day. By Friday, it was almost all he could think about.

  His last buddy for the week was the biggest boy in the class. His name was Gus, and Leo recognised him from the first day, when the soccer ball had pummelled into his stomach. Gus was a bulky kid, as if his body was built from chunks of wood. His arms were like branches and his legs like trunks. At lunchtime on Friday, they ate on a bench seat, and Gus talked about the ball as he rolled it back and forth under his foot.

  ‘My dad gave me this ball for my birthday, years ago.’ His voice was softer than Leo expected. ‘I haven’t seen Dad in ages, so I keep it with me all the time.’

  Leo had seen the ball trapped under Gus’s foot in class. He hadn’t thought about it much until now.

  ‘Most kids around here play footy. They want me to play too because I’m big. But I love soccer. One day I’m gonna move to the city and play for one of the big clubs.’

  Leo peeled a mandarin. He hadn’t expected to hear this kid’s life story, hadn’t expected to care, but something about Gus’s quiet voice drew him in. He ran through The Plan in his head, searching for a question that might fit here. But Gus got in first.

  ‘What kind of things are you into?’

  It wasn’t the question that caught Leo out. It was the pause that came afterwards. He wasn’t used to kids giving him time to talk and he found himself answering honestly.

  ‘I like … space.’ He waited to be interrupted, but it didn’t happen. ‘And I like aliens. Lots of people don’t think they’re real, but I do.’

  Gus didn’t say anything. He didn’t walk away, either, but Leo assumed he’d wandered off in his head. Probably thinking about running to the oval and belting his ball into the goal. They didn’t talk for the rest of the day until the final bell. Leo was at the bag racks, zipping up his backpack when he heard Gus muttering to himself. There was panic in his voice.

  ‘No, no, no.’ He lifted bags and swept hats aside. ‘Where is it?’ He tipped everything out of his own backpack. Pencils and scrunched paper fell on the ground. ‘No!’

  Leo stood still with his bag on his back. Everyone else had gone. ‘Are you—’

  ‘My ball!’ Gus pushed past him and hunted through a scraggly garden bed outside the room. ‘It’s gone!’

  ‘Do you remember, you know, where you last—’

  Gus climbed onto a table and stood on his toes, trying to see on top of the classroom roof. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, ‘Who took my ball?!’

  He jumped down and staggered back to the bag racks.

  Leo hadn’t moved. ‘Do you, er, want some help?’

  Gus didn’t answer. He scooped his things back into his bag and ran off. His shoes smacked the concrete like claps of thunder and Leo was left alone, like a small tree that had survived a storm. He knew the hurt of losing something precious. That’s why he’d tried to help. But Gus, like so many other kids, had ignored him.

  It didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t need a friend. The week had almost passed and soon he could forget about lunchtime buddies and Mum and Dad’s plan. His promise with Ralph would fix everything.

  Saturday dragged and Sunday meandered, but by the late afternoon, as the weekend neared its end, Leo was itchy with excitement. He walked aimless circles in the backyard and ran up and down the steps for no reason. He finally settled on the verandah just before dinner and marvelled at the Dundle sky. It was the biggest part of the picture. At Leo’s old place near the city, the sky looked like an afterthought, the last thing to be coloured once all the buildings and roads and trees were in place. Here, it filled his eyes more than anything else. As they ate dinner, the sun dipped behind the rooftops and that enormous blue sky started to fade, then grow dark. A bunch of galahs squawked from a powerline and, at the table, Peg talked about school.

  ‘I can’t wait to see Imogen and Bree tomorrow.’

  Dad scooped lasagne onto his plate. ‘They’re your friends?’

  ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘And another girl, Greta.’

  Mum forked some salad from a bowl and talked about her job: parent meetings and teenage fights and looking after new teachers. It sounded horrible to Leo, but Mum’s hands danced around, and her face was so happy. Then Dad took over and showed them some of his pictures, sketchbooks filled with windmills and fenceposts, shopfronts, road signs and cars. After only a week, everyone except Leo had found their place in Dundle.

  They stopped talking for a while. Cutlery scraped. A frog croaked. Then Mum turned to Leo.

  ‘What about you?’

  He swallowed. ‘Me?’

  ‘Are you looking forward to seeing Imogen and Bree too?’ She faked a smile to go with the joke.

  He shrugged and played along. ‘Yeah, I can’t wait.’

  It was half the truth – he couldn’t wait for tomorrow – but there was a heavy secret hidden underneath. He was looking forward to everything because of the promise he’d made with Ralph, and the promise was this: if he hadn’t made a friend after one week at school, Ralph would find him in Dundle and they would be together again. When they made the promise, Ralph had hesitated.

  ‘One week isn’t very long,’ he’d said.

  Leo threw his arms wide. ‘It’s ages!’

  ‘But won’t your parents—’

  ‘They won’t find out,’ Leo had said. ‘Not if we’re careful.’

  Now, as he leant back in his chair and watched the stars blinking in the Dundle sky, his legs jiggled under the table and the jellyfish twirled in his belly. He hadn’t tried very hard to make friends. He hadn’t really bothered with The Plan or the buddies. He’d resisted it all for the promise with Ralph and when tomorrow came, he would be with his friend again.

  Leo woke early, before the sun lit up his room. He opened the curtains, pressed his face to the window and looked up. The sky was half-asleep, dreaming of a colour between black and dawn blue. Any moment now, the white balloon would swing into view and Ralph would be holding on.

  But he never came. Leo waited by the window until Mum said her early goodbye, then he raced out to the yard and spun round, trying to scan the whole sky at once. Still no Ralph. He started to sweat. His throat dried up. Maybe Ralph would meet him at school.

  With bags on backs, he and Peg rolled their bikes down the driveway and turned onto the road. Dad was with them, pedalling a cobwebbed mountain bike he had hardly used. The streets were wide, like flat grey rivers lined with tired trees. Every surface was sapped by the sun, and even the houses and street signs seemed to lean in the heat. Leo kept his eyes up, searching for a white dot on that big canvas of blue. But he had never seen anything so empty.

  They parked their bikes in the racks at school.

  Dad hugged them. ‘You’ll be okay riding home by yourselves?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Peg, unclipping her helmet.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Leo, looking up.

  They walked to their classrooms and Leo tripped a few times as he tipped his head back, scanning for Ralph.

  ‘Who’s that kid?’ whispered Peg. ‘He was just looking at you.’

  He turned from the sky. The big shape of Gus wandered towards their classroom.

  ‘That’s Gus.’ Leo looked back up at the sky. ‘All he talks about is—’

  Soccer. That was what he was going to say. But when he glanced again at Gus, his whole body was hunched and there was no ball at his feet. It was still missing. The thing he cared about more than anything in the world wasn’t there. Leo knew how that felt.

  ‘He’s huge,’ Peg said. ‘Are you friends?’

  ‘No.’ The answer came out faster than Leo expected.

  He spent the day staring out the window and listening for a thump on the side of the classroom. The other kids paired up to talk about ideas for the pool, but Leo stayed at his desk, scribbling a picture of Ralph. When everyone else ran out to lunch, Ms Pengari asked him to wait. She wore a black witch’s hat and carried a plastic wand, ready for the next lesson about the magic of measurement.

  ‘Hang in there,’ she said. ‘The first week at a new school is always hard. And Dundle’s different from the city. It must feel like another planet.’

  Leo scratched his leg with his other foot. Another planet sounded like a good idea.

  She propped her witch’s hat higher on her head. ‘How did you go with the buddies last week?’

  ‘There’s – well – not really anyone I could – could be friends with.’ His words were limping out. He faced the carpet.

  ‘You mean, there’s no one like Ralph?’

  His eyes flicked up.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with feeling like you don’t fit. Look at me!’ She should have been scary with the hat and black lipstick, but there was too much kindness in her face. ‘It won’t be long till someone likes the way you don’t fit.’

  There was only one friend like that – and he was supposed to be floating into town right now. Leo had to get outside to check. He drifted to the eating area and lay on a seat so he could see nothing but sky. A noisy handball game bounced around nearby. A small voice asked what he was doing, but he didn’t answer. Everything sounded far away, like he had fallen under water.

  Ralph didn’t turn up at school that day. Not in the sky, not in the classroom and not at the bike racks when it was home time. Leo and Peg started riding home together, but she sped on ahead with some friends.

  ‘See you at home!’ she sang over her shoulder.

  He pedalled along the edge of the gutter and replayed the promise in his mind. A week had passed. He hadn’t made any friends. Ralph was supposed to be here.

  He gave up on the sky and watched the bike tyre spinning slowly. A soft breeze, the first he’d felt in Dundle, tickled the back of his neck. Then a grey feather swooped past his face. It flipped and twirled and climbed higher until it got stuck in a tree. Leo stopped. There was something further up in the tree, round and white. It looked like a balloon.

  He jumped off his bike and ran to the tree. It shaded a wooden bench seat and a water tap – the smallest park in the world. He circled the trunk, head tilted back, trying to spot the balloon through the mess of limbs and leaves. It was there, right at the top. This was just like the day Ralph had first arrived. Leo stepped up onto the seat and stretched for the lowest branch. It was just out of reach, so he jumped, gripped it with both hands and hung there for a few seconds. Then he pulled himself up so he was crouching on the branch, and kept on going, clambering up through the arms of the tree. As he climbed higher and the ground fell away, his heart drummed louder and his legs trembled. He was nearly at the balloon and maybe Ralph would be there too, nestled at the top of the tree, waiting for Leo to find him.

  At last, the round white shape was almost in reach. He lifted himself up one more branch and there it was. Round and white – but not what he expected. It was too round, too dirty and not a balloon at all. It was a soccer ball and it had Gus’s name on it.

  The effort of the climb suddenly caught up with him. A groan choked in the back of his throat. He sucked deep breaths and his chest burned as if he’d swallowed the sun. Cicadas rattled. A cockatoo screeched. The tree seemed to sway like it wanted to shake him off and the whole town wobbled below.

  He shut his eyes and filled his lungs with air. His heart slowed and the dizziness lifted, but he couldn’t work out what had happened. He thought it was the balloon, thought he had found Ralph. But it was just a soccer ball and now he’d be late home. Dad would fire a hundred questions at him. He’d frown and scratch the back of his head and blame it all on Ralph. Then all the grown-ups would worry again and they’d move somewhere worse than Dundle.

  Leo buried his head in his hands. ‘Where are you, Ralph?’ He needed him more than ever.

  Dad was pacing the footpath when Leo got home. He wasn’t just frowning and scratching – he was tugging at his hair and his face was red.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  Leo slowed the bike to a shaky stop. It was hard to ride while holding a soccer ball. He had steered with one hand the whole way home.

  Dad pointed at the ball. ‘Is that why you’re late?’

  Leo looked at it tucked under his arm. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But you don’t like soccer.’

  ‘Well, I’m not very good.’

  He was telling truth and lies at the same time.

  ‘And whose is it?’

  Leo remembered the name on the ball. ‘It’s Gus’s. He’s a kid in my class.’

  ‘So why do you have it?’

  Leo could feel himself getting trapped. He read Gus’s name again and thought of him slouching through the day without his favourite thing in the world. ‘Well – I’m looking after it for tonight. I’ll give it back tomorrow.’

  It was another lie wrapped in a truth, but it seemed to work. Dad stopped asking questions. The fire in his face went out. ‘So there’s nothing else I need to know?’ He shot a look at Leo’s hand. His pinky finger was tucked away.

  Leo shook his head. ‘Just that I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be late.’

 

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