“Who are the MySpace Generation and how can they be represented in a

work of fiction?”

Name: Alasdair Duncan, BA

School: Faculty of Creative Industries, QUT

Submitted for: Master of Arts (Creative Writing)

Year of completion: 2008

1 Keywords: Social networking, MySpace, online ethnography, young adult novel, Schoolies

Week, Australian

Abstract: This document contains a creative work – the text of a young adult novel, The girl and the sea – and an exegesis examining the MySpace Generation through the methodological prisms of online ethnography and literature review

2 Table of Contents

Statement of original authorship...... 4

Section 1: Creative work...... 5

‘The girl and the sea’ ...... 5

Section 2: Exegesis ...... 149

1.0 A personal introduction...... 149

2.0 Preliminary questions ...... 150

2.1 How many users are on MySpace ...... 151

2.2 How does MySpace function?...... 153

2.3 Why discuss MySpace? A personal perspective ...... 154

3.0 Methodological approaches to studying MySpace...... 155

4.0 Literature review ...... 157

4.1 Constructing identities on MySpace...... 157

4.2 The hyper-connectivity of the MySpace generation...... 159

4.3 The use of abbreviated language forms ...... 160

4.4 Building and maintaining friendship groups online...... 162

4.5 Forming romantic relationships online ...... 164

5.0 Online ethnography ...... 165

5.1 Choosing a MySpace user ...... 166

5.2 Who is Jason?...... 169

5.3 Analysing Jason ...... 170

6.0 Representing MySpace users in my own creative practice...... 175

7.0 Conclusion...... 178

8.0 Bibliography...... 179

3 Statement of original authorship:

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award in this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature

Date

4

The girl and the sea:

a novel

Alasdair Duncan

5

Drinking by the pool on Friday afternoon … all seems well, but

that’s kind of how these stories always start

Okay, so that group of guys sitting around by the empty pool in the backyard of that sprawling suburban palace? Those are my friends, and the house belongs to my family. We moved in a few months ago – my parents were concerned that it might be a disruption to my final year of school, but I guess they weren’t too concerned. City-wide water restrictions meant that we were never able to fill the pool, so at the moment, it’s just sitting there, an empty expanse of concrete. I guess that’s annoying for my parents. It’s good for the guys, though, because they can come around and try out new moves in there without having to embarrass themselves in front of the other people in more public arenas. About my friends … we might look like a bunch of overly entitled, private-school douchebags to you, but hey, first impressions are not always entirely inaccurate. So we might all have straight teeth, and those of us whose parents will allow us to drive might have pretty nice cars, but don’t hold that against us.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m still in my uniform – my tie’s undone, my socks are all bunched up around my ankles, and my shirt, which used to be white, is now covered in marker pen from where people have signed their names and drawn pictures and written various in-jokes that only we would understand, but none of this stuff matters, because as of about three hours ago, we’re finished with school forever. We’re graduates. We’re young men. Doesn’t that just scare the shit out of you?

I guess at this point in the story, it’s probably going to be useful for me to introduce you to my friends. Zach is the English guy with the cheeky grin and all-around air of superiority who has just attempted to pull a sweet aerial trick in the bottom of the empty pool but has stacked it and fallen face-down on the concrete instead. Dean had laughed at the time and called Zach a fag, even though he himself had stacked it worse not five minutes before, and they both kind of had a homosexual air about them to begin with. Dean and Zach spend most of their time referring to each other as fags, queerdogs, homos, Brokebacks, but

6 thanks to Zach’s English accent, phrases like fudge-packer and cock-smoker sound way more erudite and sophisticated coming from him.

Speaking of Dean, he’s the skinny guy with the moderate-to-heavy Fall Out Boy issues – upturned collar, hair parted in an amazingly specific way, unshakeable air of boy next door-ishness – leaning against the side of the pool and talking on his phone. He’s deep in conversation with his girlfriend Callie – I know this because he’s speaking in hushed tones and apologising every five seconds, thinking we can’t hear him. He and Callie are going to be staying apart from each other this week and, if the frequency of these phone calls is any indicator, she’s already suffering a heavy case of separation anxiety.

I’m sitting by the side of the pool with my feet dangling over the edge, drinking one of the beers we stole from my brother and thinking deep thoughts, my laptop sitting open on the concrete nearby. Luke is the tall, handsome, built-like-a-tank dude next to me, turning his beer bottle upside down to see if there’s any left inside. You wouldn’t think that Luke, with his irresistible-to-chicks brown eyes, his big cheesy grin and his puppy-dog charm would end up being the bad guy in this story, but there you go.

7

Some much-needed authorial interjection

About what I’ve just said … I should probably explain that a lot of this story is actually going to be told that way, with annoying moments where the author (who would be me) drops in to comment on what’s happening. If you don’t think you’re going to be able to tolerate that as a literary device, then I guess you should probably thinking about bailing out now, because it’s only going to get more infuriating from here.

I guess I’ve always liked to write, but I never thought about doing it seriously until early in my final year of school. I broke my arm (skating accident … don’t ask), which wasn’t the end of the world – I got a lot of sympathy from girls and whatnot, especially form this one girl at Luke’s party – but it also sucked because it meant that while I was healing, I couldn’t go to swimming practice anymore, so I needed another extra-curricular activity to fill in the time after school. My parents suggested creative writing, and I’d always done well enough in

English class and whatnot, so I figured I might a well give it a try.

The classes happened every Wednesday after school – our teacher was a comic- book nerdy type who looked a bit Seth Cohen-ish but was actually a uni student called Jason, who’d graduated from our very institution a few years earlier and was now the editor of a literary magazine I’d never heard of before, but after finding a copy in the library, realised was actually pretty good. Those classes turned out to be okay. I would spend most of them just stuffing around on my laptop and reading out bits of my writing for the express purpose of trying to impress the one or two girls who would ever turn up, but I guess some pretty useful stuff rubbed off. Jason was always telling us how if we’re stuck for something to write, we should draw on our own experiences – things that have greatly influenced us or transformed us as people. I guess that’s why I’m writing about the week that directly followed the end of school … it’s probably what you’d call a formative time.

I don’t know that you’d really be able to pin my friends down to any kind of traditional high school stereotype; in fact, in spite of what the accepted wisdom (and the plot of every high school-themed movie and TV show ever) might suggest, there were really no clearly- defined social groups. Most of the boys, in fact, just did their own thing and got along. Almost

8 everyone, even the nerdy guys, would play a bit of sport; the sporty guys would get stoned with the skaters and the skaters would play World Of Warcraft with the nerds; my mates and I were somewhere in the middle of that, and most of the guys from our grade would go to the same parties, drink the same beer and try to hook up with the same All Hallows girls, with roughly the same amount of success, on the weekends.

Though it might have made for a more interesting read had I done things differently – if I’d made out that my friends were magnificent nerds who triumphed over adversity to get laid in the final act, or jocks with hearts of gold stumbling towards that last big victory – but for the purposes of this story, I felt that I should try and present versions of them that were as true as possible. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty and the hapless – specifically Zoe, the girl who’s involved in all of this, and who would probably kill me if I used anything resembling her real name – but trust me, what you’re about to read is, for the most part, all completely true.

9 The fine, noble and in no way irresponsible or life-threatening

tradition that we in these parts like to call schoolies week

I’ll get onto Zoe in a minute, but before that, I should probably tell you the reason my mates and I are all gathered by my house. If we seem excited or on edge or whatever else, it’s because several hours from now, we’ll be road tripping down to Byron Bay to get an early jump on the fine and noble tradition known around here as schoolies week. There are probably some of you reading this who don’t come from my homeland and who therefore have no idea what the last part of that last sentence means, but fear not! If you’re curious, and you can’t be bothered taking the time to put this book down and look it up on the internet

(not that I can blame you), schoolies week is:

The tradition within Australia of recent high-school graduates embarking on week-

long holidays, often in surf-adjacent destinations, following the conclusion of their

high school exams.

That’s the official definition at any rate. A more useful definition might be:

The tradition within Australia of recent high-school graduates road-tripping to surf-

adjacent destinations for week-long escapades involving:

1. Engaging in awkward drunksex of the kind that leaves hair matted with

sand and pine needles and dignity in a similarly bedraggled state;

2. Drinking in quantities prodigious enough to anaesthetise a rhinoceros of

reasonable size (frequently a precursor to activity number one);

3. Picking fights in public (a handy tactic for guys to impress girls in a

display of dominance; frequently a precursor to activity number one);

10

4. Participating in embarrassing, videotaped activities that will remain on the

internet for all eternity (sometimes involving acts of vandalism; frequently

involving activity number one);

5. Playing music of the absurdly loud variety (to the disgust of the middle-

aged couple in the apartment next door; frequently to mask the noises

from activity number one);

6. Passing out in a variety of locations, including but not limited to

expensive hotel rooms, strangers’ apartments, the street, and the beach

itself (frequently involving … I’m not going to spell this out any longer,

you clearly get the idea).

So there you go. It might sound like a fairly spoiled, sex-obsessed way to behave, but to be fair, we’re all products of a spoiled, sex-obsessed generation, and you have to embrace the cliché while you’re young and stupid, you know?

A lot of people we know are going to the Gold Coast – my older brother went a few years ago and had a great time – but you can’t do anything good there anymore. Like anything that’s been way too popular for way too long, the fun has all gone out of it. In fact, there’s a story that circulated at my school for most of this year about some guys in the year above ours who were staying in a big apartment on the avenue. Having signed a piece of paper swearing that they would not drink or have parties of any sort in the apartment, they went ahead and smuggled in several cartons of beer and some girls, which attracted the attention of the relevant authorities, who ended up owning them something quite shocking. In the end, they were all kicked out without their deposit, meaning most of them went home five days early. (Also, a picture of them on their balcony ended up on the front page of a national newspaper to illustrate one of those ‘Australia: Where did we go wrong?’ stories about troubled youth, but we all agreed that this was just an unfortunate coincidence).

11 For those reasons – as well as the fact that Luke’s parents own a holiday apartment there – the guys and I are going down to Byron Bay instead. My brother’s taken the afternoon off work to drive some of us down. Luke was going to take us in his car – his parents bought him a late-model WRX when he got his driver’s license, a fact that he likes to rub in about every five seconds or so – but they got upset after seeing some horrifying current affairs story about young people on the roads and decided that he wasn’t driving anywhere.

None of that really matters though, in relation to the following bit of information: specifically, the fact that because the gods have decided to smile on me, Zoe and her friends will also be staying in Byron Bay throughout the week.

12 A confession that probably needs to be made

Before I tell you about the girl, and about what happened between us that week, I should probably fill you in on my track record with the opposite sex. I mean, I like girls – girls are awesome – but I’ve never been all that good with them. I’m just, I don’t know … not that cool a guy. I have my friends (like Luke, for instance, who’s never been without some doe-eyed female following him around since pre-school), and I guess I can follow along behind them and appear sort of cool, but I’m not. I don’t even know basic things, like slang words and euphemisms and what they actually mean. I didn’t even know what 50 Cent was talking about in that Candy Shop song until the post-formal party when Luke’s girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend)

Vanessa explained it to me. To be fair, she didn’t actually explain it – she demonstrated with a

Chupa Chup. Part of me was surprised at how thick I’d been and the rest was thinking that

Dean was actually a pretty lucky dude.

I mean, I did have girlfriends all the way through school. Okay, one girl specifically … and it lasted for about eight months. But still. I think that’s pretty impressive. It was a girl called Audrey, who went to All Hallows, and the two of us went out for most of grade eleven.

At the time, I was the envy of most of the gang – they were fairly pissed off with me because I was spending less time with them and more time talking to Audrey on MSN and whatnot, but I mean, come on … When you’re going out with a girl, you kind of need to milk it for all it’s worth, you know?

So yeah, it was never completely serious between Audrey and me, although this one weekend, her parents went away and I skipped training one morning to be with her and hang out at her house. It wasn’t really a big deal, although it felt that way at the time. My parents were certainly upset when they found out – they were furious with me, as though I was neglecting my studies and throwing away all my future prospects for this girl – and it was, of course, a massive overreaction, but I think in a way they were just glad that I’d finally given them something to be upset about. It flew in the face of all accepted logic and wisdom, but they treated me like I was a hardened criminal or something, allowing me to feel like I’d done something really genuinely bad for once, and ensuring that my friends were in total awe of me.

13 The truth of it, though, is that nothing actually happened with Audrey that weekend. I went into all sorts of unnecessary detail with my friends, telling them all sorts of stories about how we’d done it on her parents’ bed and in the pool and blah blah blah, but the truth was it had never really gotten that far. That didn’t matter, though, as I had a story that I could build up to the status of a myth. At its most basic, the story of what happened between me and

Audrey that weekend became a sort of default position for me to assume, so that whenever my manhood might have come into question, I had it to fall back on. It was good to have that story … one less thing to worry about. When the inevitable break-up came – Audrey never found out about the stories I’d been telling, but was seeing another boy behind my back anyway – I didn’t feel too bad. I’d gotten everything I needed to out of our relationship.

I guess I never really liked Audrey all that much. We were often in the same room at the same time, and that was fun, but Zoe was something more. She was a whole different thing.

14 Zoe, the girl whom I like and who is kind of the whole point of this

story

One of the more useful things our creative writing teacher told us is that, in Shakespeare, the protagonists’ perfect and sacred love is often contrasted with the profane and comical supporting cast … to emphasise it or something. If the comical, profane losers of the piece are my friends – and you’ll discover fairly quickly that this is just what they are – then Zoe is the love interest. She’s perfect. In fact, she’s kind of the whole point of this story.

I met her in the city on a Friday afternoon. It was totally random, but you know how those Fridays go … from three-thirty pm onwards, you and everyone you ever met and everyone those people ever met all gather around in that one tiny section of the mall outside of Hungry Jack’s. I mean, for real, if you dropped a bomb on that little section of the mall, you’d pretty much kill every school-aged dude in the city.

Either way, we were hanging out on the mall and I was trying to conceal a rather embarrassing secret from my friends. They were all standing around in a tight-knit group talking about, I don’t know, some party they were planning to crash that night or which sister of which guy had given it up the weekend before (like they would even know), but I was on a mission to find a book. I should probably clarify here, it’s not that my friends don’t read – they’re pretty massive geeks, and I know for a fact that Zach knows everything there is to know about Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and can explain to you in absurd amounts of detail if you have a couple of hours to spare – but a bookstore is just not the kind of place you want to bring them on a Friday afternoon, you know?

So yeah, I told the guys I was going to get a burger, before making a break for it and heading to the big Borders down the street. As I walked in the big set of sliding doors to try to find what I was looking for, I had my iPod headphones and Vampire Weekend or whatever

American blog band we were all listening to that week blasting to discourage people from talking to me. A friend – actually a girl called Heather I had tried but failed to get on with at a party the weekend before – had recommended a book to me, The Amazing Adventures Of

Kavalier & Clay by an author called Michael Chabon. She told me how beautiful it was and

15 how it had made her cry and actually made it sound like a really good book, so I figured … yeah, why not. This girl liked Michael Chabon, I liked this girl, so if I tracked the book down and read it, other girls like this one might in turn like me. Do you see the leap of logic I made there? I hope so.

I was on the bottom floor of the big Borders on Elizabeth Street, walking around to try and find the right section, moving past new release crime novels and travel guides to places

I’d probably much rather be going to next year than university, and that was when I saw her.

…

16 Information you would see if you were to look at Zoe’s MySpace

profile

Name: Zoe Hetherington

General Interests: Feathers, crossword puzzles, Zach Braff, people who abbreviate words in text messages, people who don’t abbreviate words in text messages, pop music, indie music, celebrities who write blogs, celebrities who don’t write blogs, caramel, making lists, Swedish music, boys, long jackets, seeing bands, staying in and watching DVDs, the 1920s

Music: Brooding, pretty boys from NYC, disco, post-punk, Fall Out Boy, Death Cab For Cutie

TV Shows: Anything overly verbose, American and preferably comedy-oriented

Movies: The Godfather Parts I & II, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Lost In Translation, The

Nightmare Before Christmas

Books: The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, The Pokey Little Puppy, anything by Michael

Chabon because I <3 him all the way

Heroes: Anyone who writes a book, anyone who doesn’t have a myspace profile

17 That Friday in the bookstore, continued

I’d finally managed to locate the fiction section, and subsequent to that, having followed the letters of the alphabet from ‘A’ to ‘B’ and eventually to ‘C’, turned a corner, and there she was.

I didn’t know her name at that stage, but the second I laid eyes on her, I forgot all about

Heather … y’know, Heather? That girl from the party I was telling you about, whose recommendation was the whole reason I’d come to the bookstore in the first place? No?

Doesn’t matter.

I can’t remember the book that she was looking at – it may have had some children on the cover – but I remember her distinctly. Something about her reminded me of that girl from the movie Amelie … it might have been the dark hair, the big pretty eyes or the face that looked like it could break out into a big, hopeful grin at any moment. She had on a form-fitting band shirt (I was too distracted by the form, at that point, to pay much attention to the band), along with an abundance of chunky necklaces and bracelets, and shoes that made her look kind of like a messed-up version of a ballerina.

I was confounded for a second and looked right at her – embarrassing and thoroughly stalker-ish, I know, and not likely to endear me to her in any way, but I seriously couldn’t bring myself to look away. She noticed me, or course, and looked up, as I was looking away. She looked away. I looked back at her. She looked at me again. Things happen to me in real life that would never even happen in movies, they’re just so ridiculous and cliché, but I guess maybe that all those clichés have to come from somewhere. We looked at each-other for a second before she returned to her book, smiling just a little bit, and I turned, red-faced to the shelves.

Amazingly enough, I was able to scan the rows and rows of ‘C’s until locating a copy of Kavalier And Clay . I picked up the chunky cream-coloured paperback, running my finger over the raised lettering on the front and then turning it over in hopes that there would be a plot summary or something printed on the back. I tried to read the text, I kept going over it – something about war, a comic book superhero – but it just seemed like a big mess of words, and my eyes kept sliding away from it, anyway. I was aware of the presence of the girl, right there next to me. This was no good. Was she looking at me? Was she judging my taste in

18 literature, even though it wasn’t even technically my taste in literature? It was all too hard. I opened the book to a random page.

‘That’s really good,’ I heard her say. I looked up to find her pointing towards the book in my hand. ‘The one you’re holding,’ she continued, as if prompting a sweet but slightly slow younger brother. ‘I’ve read it. It’s really beautiful.’

‘Um, thanks …’ I said.

‘Why are you thanking me?’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘Did you write it?’

‘Not that I remember,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘I used to go out with a boy who was a writer. He was always writing these really terrible poems about me and posting them on his Live Journal. And he was kind of a bad kisser.’

What? I didn’t know what I could possibly say to that. I always seem to attract girls who are way smarter than I am – either that or girls who are completely crazy. Ask my friends, it’s a long established tradition.

‘I’m not a writer,’ I told her.

‘But are you a good kisser?’

Oh, what now? I found myself wondering if I really felt comfortable discussing my prowess as a kisser – really quite good, by the way, in case you were curious – with a random girl in a bookstore in the middle of Friday afternoon rush hour, but I didn’t have to worry too long because she changed the subject.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I always say the most random things to strangers. Do you mind? I’m really sorry. I mean, I don’t really need to know if you’re a good kisser or not. You look like you might not be that good of a kisser, but I’m usually wrong about stuff like that. Oh god,’ she continues when she sees the look on my face, ‘I really need to stop talking now.’

‘It’s fine,’ I began, not sure what else to say.

‘Well, it’s nice to have met you,’ she said. ‘I should really leave you alone now. You’re probably thinking I’m totally weird. I hope you like your book.’

19 I look at the copy of Kavalier and Clay in my hands, only now vaguely remembering the reason I came in here. ‘It’s not my book yet,’ I say. ‘I haven’t bought it yet.’

At that point, I heard the muffled ringing of a mobile phone, the tune of a song by some young band I recognised but couldn’t place straight away. ‘Oh shit,’ Zoe said, fishing around for it in her bag, ‘that’s my friend. I think I was supposed to meet her somewhere ten minutes ago. Here,’ she said, grabbing the fat paperback from my hands. Before I could stop her, she removed a black felt-tip pen from her bag and began to write on the inside cover.

‘Umm …’

‘There.’ In a series of extremely rapid manoeuvres, she dropped the pen back in her bag and answered her phone. ‘Be there in a minute, sorry!’ she said to whichever friend of hers was on the other end. As the girl brushed past me, smelling like coffee, she smiled and handed the book back to me. ‘Now you have to buy it. See you.’

I watched her leave, still not entirely sure of what had just happened. As she walked out the sliding doors into the drizzling afternoon and the throng of office workers and skate kids and city people, I opened the book. Written there was an email address – a line from a song that was also one of my favourites followed by the requisite series of symbols and letters

– and a name: Zoe.

20 The reason I keep my lap-top with me at all times

‘This week is going to be huge,’ Luke is saying to nobody in particular, to all of us.

‘You what?’ Zach asks from the bottom of the pool. Zach has stopped skating for now, and is sitting with his back against one of the concrete walls, to catch his breath. Zach is constantly saying things like ‘you what?’ to reinforce his English-ness; he’s convinced that it impresses girls, but it’s reached the point where he does it even when there are no girls around.

‘This week is going to be huger than mental,’ Luke continues. ‘I can’t even express it to you guys. It’s going to be insane. We’re free? Do you realise what that means?’

‘That we’re white and middle class and live in what could broadly be called a Western democratic society?’ I offer.

‘What?’ Luke asks.

‘Nothing.’

‘It means,’ Luke continues, undeterred, ‘that this week is going to be off the hook.

We’re in this together, we’re brothers, and we’ve got a whole week of freedom ahead of us to do whatever we want.’

‘Dude, do you even listen to yourself when you talk?’ I ask. Then, adopting a faux

American accent, movie-trailer style: ‘ They were in this together … They were like brothers

…’

Luke shakes his head. ‘I was expecting more of you, Haydo. This is our week . We’re gonna look back on this shit when we’re eighty and think how it was the best time of our lives.

We’re gonna …’

A noise from my laptop interrupts Luke’s train of thought, letting me know that one of my friends has just come online and sent me a message.

‘Dude, are you serious?’ Luke asks me. ‘You’re attached to that thing. Are you gonna be carrying it around with you all week?’

‘Dunno. Maybe,’ I say, noncommittal.

21 ‘Dude,’ Luke says, ‘it’s Friday afternoon, it’s schoolies; we’re gearing up for the biggest week of our lives, and you’re stuffing around with your little online gay porn chat community? Poor form, dude, exceedingly poor form.’

‘Aww, give him a break,’ says Zach, his grin broadening. ‘He’s gonna need lots of time alone with it this week. For those tender, special moments ...’ Still in the bottom of the pool, he walks over to me and grabs my ankles, thrusting his hips in a nonspecific way and threatening to lick me.

‘Dude,’ I say, attempting to kick Zach away. ‘It’s not like that. My laptop and I are just friends. Really.’

When I turn my laptop around to check it out, the following is waiting for me in a chat window:

ZOE: LOLZ. I can’t believe yr online right now, nerd

I watch the cursor flicker as I consider my reply. Why Zoe would be online on this weirdest of afternoons – the end of school, a kind of weird limbo where none of the old rules apply anymore – is beyond me, then maybe she’s on for the same reason I am … it’s something familiar. For a second, the idea that she might have come online specifically to see me comes into my head. I discount this idea fairly quickly because it would be weird and full of myself to consider such a prospect, right? In the end, I settle for a reply that I hope is witty yet oblique enough not to be too obvious:

HAYDEN: My friends said much the same

ZOE: I’ll bet they did

HAYDEN: What are u doing online, then?

ZOE: Not much ... downloading porn, pirating music, the usual

And so, the conversation between us continues. Luke stands up to get another beer, and brings back one for me too. I chug about a third of it – it tastes incredible on this hot afternoon – and listen to the background chatter of my friends, gearing each-other up for how

22 many girls they’re going to attempt to ensnare this weekend, as I focus my attention back on

Zoe

HAYDEN: You scared?

ZOE: A bit … seems so weird that we’re out of school forever

HAYDEN: I know

ZOE: We had a chapel service this morning, and at the end of it, there were a whole heap of girls standing out the front crying, and it was all, like, OMG, I’m gonna miss you so bad, I can’t

believe it’s over, and blah blah blah

HAYDEN: We had that too

ZOE: And part of me was like, come on, what’s wrong with you bitches? But part of me could

feel what they were going through at the same time. I almost found myself going up to hug

them before I finally came to my senses, and I was all, no fucking way, are you crazy?

HAYDEN: Hahha

ZOE: But I found myself really thinking about it after that … I mean, is it okay in moments like

these to identify and, like, share memories with people you essentially couldn’t stand all the

way through school?

HAYDEN: I guess so. I mean, all bets are really off in these situations

ZOE: I almost had a tender moment, but then I thought ... fuck it

HAYDEN: Nice work

ZOE: So now we’re all around at Chloe’s place getting horribly drunk on goon

ZOE: It’s nice

HAYDEN: Some of the guys are around at my place … My bro’s driving us down to Byron a

bit later this arvo

ZOE: Oh, that sounds nice. We’re not going ‘til tomorrow … whatcha doing now?

HAYDEN: Not much. Deano’s on the phone to his girlfriend and Zach just tried to pull a sweet

move on his board and greatly reduced his chances of having kids

ZOE: Um, can I ask you something …? Srsly?

HAYDEN: Sure … what’s wrong?

ZOE: I just really need to know … what the hell is it with the ‘o’ thing and boys?

23 HAYDEN: What do you mean?

ZOE: You know, the ‘o’ thing – like, it seems to me that if you’re a boy, there’s some sort of a

rule that you’ll automatically add that ‘o’ sound to the end of anyone’s name who’s also boy

whenever you’re addressing him. You know, like, Deano, Steveo … they probably call you

Hayd-o, yeah?

HAYDEN: Oh yeah. There was a big meeting a while back … all the dudes in the world got

together, we passed the ‘o’ thing into law

ZOE: Yeah?

HAYDEN: Yeah, we’re pretty hard and fast when it comes to enforcing that one. You have to

use the ‘o’ pretty frequently in conversation or it means expulsion from guy world

ZOE: Sounds terrible

It seems that throughout the last part of this amusing yet superficial exchange, Zoe and I were dancing around the point somewhat. There’s a question one of us is going to have to ask. You see, there’s a bit of information that I’ve been withholding from you until this point in the story. It’s not very fair of me to do that, but hey, I’m the one who’s writing this, so I get to make the decisions, and I’m not going to give it all away at once.

The thing is, that one afternoon in the bookstore was the only and only time I’ve actually met Zoe face to face. Are you totally shocked by this information? Are you thinking what a complete douchebag I am for being one of those guys who develops, you know, serious feelings for a person based entirely on internet conversations and MySpace? Not that

I have serious feelings for Zoe or anything … I mean, come on, I’m seventeen, and you’ve met my friends, I don’t even know what serious looks like.

But yeah. I like Zoe. We’re into the same stuff. Her taste in music and movies is pretty great (for a girl). She always has really funny and intelligent things to say and I have fun just trying to keep up. Maybe I’m being a complete emo about this – maybe if I was a guy like

Luke I would have gotten to the point well before now – but either way, I think she’s awesome, and based on the (not insubstantial) number of hours we’ve put in talking over the internet, I think she likes me too. So, to the inevitable question:

24 HAYDEN: Hey, we’re both going to be in Byron this week, yeah?

HAYDEN: How would u feel about maybe meeting up at some point?

And then, after I hit the enter key … nothing. I drain the rest of my beer as I wait for

Zoe to reply, which seems to be taking an age. Have I phrased the question all wrong? Is it way too weird to suggest that we meet up – I mean, have I been looking at our relationship wrongly this entire time, and are we really just friends? Why should that matter – I mean, friends meet up on schoolies all the time, for sure. Just because I’m asking to meet Zoe, that doesn’t mean anything has to happen . I mean, shit …

ZOE: Sorry, had to get more goon and plug my iPod in to charge

HAYDEN: K

ZOE: But yeh. I’d love to meet up

HAYDEN: Cool

ZOE: Why are u all monosyllabic all of a sudden?

HAYDEN: Sorry, just a bit distracted

HAYDEN: The guys want to get moving soon, I think

ZOE: Hahha, k. Meeting up sounds like fun

ZOE: We’ll be down there on Sunday – our place won’t be ready til then, it’s kind of a whole

long story

HAYDEN: Txt me when you’re there?

ZOE: Hahha, okay.

HAYDEN: Why do you keep saying ‘hahha, okay’ all of a sudden?

ZOE: Lol, sorry. I’d better let you go if the guys are calling

HAYDEN: Cool. So I’ll hopefully see u soon

ZOE: Totally

25 Packing for the trip – an adventure in alcohol

I recently read that book Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas , and I know it’s one of those books that you’re more or less required by law to read at my age, but at the risk of sounding like even more of an irritating adolescent (possible at this point?), parts of it really rubbed off on me. As a tribute to Hunter S Thompson (I like to think so, at any rate), and a concession to the fact none of us, technically, is of legal drinking age, we have stacked the back of my brother’s four wheel drive with as much liquor as it was humanly possible for us to get our hands on prior to the trip. After pooling our financial resources, and calling in various favours, we’ve managed to accumulate a collection that includes:

1. Six bottles of Jim Beam Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey: Of all the drinks that

have made me sick, and there are an awful lot of times I’ve been sick and in an awful

lot of places, I’ve never been sick on this stuff. I fully intend to push my tolerance to

the limit this week

2. Four bottles of Stolichnaya Vodka: A tip for inexperienced drinkers – don’t mix it with

orange juice or you’ll feel really, really ill the next day. We drank it this way one night

in an old house that Luke’s parents were renovating, and the next morning, I woke up

in a spare room, wrapped in a carpet, with no recollection of how I got there

3. Three bottles of Jose Curevo Tequila: At the post-formal party, Zach and I hatched a

plan to lure the host’s dog into the host’s upstairs bedroom, for the purposes of

locking said dog, a border collie, in said bedroom, in order to ‘surprise’ the host on his

return. I don’t want to go into the specifics of this plan, or the fallout from the fact that

drunkenness caused us to pick the wrong bedroom, but suffice to say, I don’t really

like to drink tequila anymore

4. Six cartons of Toohey’s Extra Dry: Six multiplied by twenty-four is a sum it takes me a

while to do in my head, but will one hundred and forty-four beers be enough to see us

26 through the week? Probably not

5. Two cartons of VB: A less premium but still arguably drinkable beer, for if and when

the other beer runs out. When this stuff runs out, we’re screwed

6. Six boxes of nasty, cheap red wine: Not only is this stuff disgusting, but if we get

through it, I’m pretty sure we’ll actually be dead by the end, and nobody wants cheap

wine to be their last drink

27 An unrelated story about an unrelated girl on the drive down

My brother Andrew – who’s a second-year software engineering student, in case you were wondering – is going to be driving us down for the weekend. He has the day off uni and work, and I think he kind of misses the whole schoolies experience of hanging out with mates and getting loose, so he didn’t take much convincing. Andrew’s a bit of a geek, but he’s a pretty awesome guy; he assisted in the purchasing of the contraband alcohol for this trip, and he’s pretty much always there to do brotherly stuff like this if and when required.

He pulled up about half an hour ago in his four-wheel drive, and right now, we’re cramming everything into it that will possibly fit. The booze was the first challenge, but the cartons stacked up pretty neatly against the back seat – he was a little shocked at how much we were taking, but not as shocked as he was at the wide selection of electronic equipment

(most of our computers, Dean’s Wii, a stack of DVDs and a collection of audio-visual cables so vast they’d probably stretch to Byron and back on their own) we had.

‘What is it you guys are actually planning to do down there?’ he asks as we merge onto the freeway, checking to make sure he doesn’t get clipped or cut in half by any of the other near-identical four wheel drives making the same journey south.

Luke roars with laughter at this. ‘Dude, you know how the saying goes – party like a rock star, fuck like a porn star …’

I’m thinking how typical it is of Luke to come up with this kind of egregious bullshit; the fact that Zach is chuckling along with him in the back seat makes it all the more annoying.

Dean is not laughing, but Dean continues to be oblivious to everything – at some point this week, we might actually have a conversation with him, but for now, based on what I can tell from the occasional backwards glance, he pretty much just seems to be sulking.

‘Guys, we need to think about this strategically,’ Luke continues. ‘Think of what it’s gonna be like tomorrow night – masses and masses of drunk and disoriented chicks, all milling around down at the beach, lost and waiting for guys like us to come along and sweep them up in our arms ...’

‘Not me,’ says Dean, the first words he’s spoken to us all afternoon. ‘I just got off the phone to Callie.’

28 ‘Again?’

‘She’s calling me a whole bunch. She’s nervous.’ Dean slumps down, trying and failing to adjust his wiry frame into a comfortable position, pushing his knees up on the back of my seat, then letting them slide down. ‘She’s staying up the Goldie, but she’s coming down to see us on the Friday, and she’ll be pissed if she even suspects I’ve been in the same apartment as a girl.’

‘Dude, help me understand what’s happening here,’ says Zach. ‘I didn’t even think you liked Callie.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘In fact,’ Zach continues, ‘I’m fairly certain I remember you saying you were going to break up with her?’

‘I tried ...’

‘And?’

‘She wouldn’t let me.’

‘You pussy,’ Zach laughs.

‘Hey, she’s really scary. She’s intense. I’m afraid she’d ... I dunno, hurt me.’

Callie is a girl who Dean met at V Festival early in the year. We were all down on the barrier waiting for this English band we like and who were late; our little group of friends was right near theirs, and she singled Dean out, asking him to take a camera phone picture of her and her friends. We were all pretty drunk on beers Dean’s brother had smuggled us from the drinks tent (a common theme of most of our days out), and by the time the band were halfway through their set, Dean’s hand was under Callie’s top and the two of them were pashing off, much to the distaste of all those around them.

The courtship that followed was as swift as it was strange. Callie is way more intense than Dean’s used to … more intense than any of us have ever seen, in fact. She went to some special school for unusually talented creative kids and wants to be either a film-maker or a wildlife activist or the singer in a punk band or a writer. On the last score, she’s actually working on a book at the moment – it’s an edgy and shocking expose of the sex and drug- soaked manners of the MySpace generation, and she wanted to finish it in time to be the youngest published author in her class, but exams got in the way.

29 We suspect that Callie is going out with Dean purely for research purposes. She talks to me a lot over the internet (she says I’m a nice guy … there’s a total shocker) and has shown me sections of the book. It takes place across skate parks, school art rooms and house parties in upmarket suburbs, full of fashionably-dressed kids who speak in pop culture references and whose parents are never, ever home. There is a sex scene in a tent at a rock festival, a sex scene in a school supply cupboard, and there are an awful lot of sex scenes in the protagonist’s parents’ bed. If half this stuff is based on fact, then Dean’s a very lucky guy.

Either way, Callie’s going to Paris next year before she attempts to finish the novel, so by the time she gets back, there might be some French dudes in the mix there as well … we’ll see.

‘Well, for those of us who still have the right of eminent domain over dicks,’ Luke says, steering the conversation back on track, ‘this week is going to be massive. I’m going to be very disappointed in all of you if you don’t at least make an effort to get amongst that shit.’

‘I think you’re somewhat failing to grasp the intricacies of the female mind,’ Zach says in his best Oxford lecturer voice. ‘Girls like to hang in packs – better chance of survival that way, safety in numbers – and the ones who’ve broken away from the pack already have boyfriends. There’s no way you can infiltrate that friendship circle.’

‘So all we do is wait for one of the drunk ones to veer away from the pack ...’

‘Why do they have to be drunk?’ I ask.

Zach smirks at me. ‘Would you have sex with Luke if you were sober? Actually, that’s not a good example ...’

I reach back to try and punch that smug English fucker in the balls, but he blocks my punch and tries to kick me in the elbow.

‘Hey!’ says my brother, deciding to be the adult in this situation. ‘Any more of that and

I’m turning this car around.’

‘Whatever, dudes,’ Luke says, determined to return to the subject of girls.’ Let’s just say I was talking to Pagey and he says he’s already hooked something up with this chick he met online.’

‘Pagey?’ Zach asks with disdain. ‘Fucking bollocks.’

30 ‘I’m serious man,’ Luke says, shaking his head. ‘He met this All Hallows chick at some GPS sports carnival – y’know, Pagey’s the big volleyball jock and all that, and chicks go absolutely mental for him.’

‘Of course they do,’ Zach says. ‘He’s non-threatening. All homos are.’

‘Why is it always the gay shit with you guys?’ Dean asks, but they ignore him utterly and continue.

‘So yeah, it turns out this chick is from way out in the middle of nowhere, but they’re promising to keep in touch, swapping email addresses – Pagey hopes to be swapping a lot more with this girl, by the way, just let me tell you that – and before you know it, she’s added him to her Facebook or some bullshit like that …’

‘Wow … Facebook. Dude’s a player,’ Zach says, a sarcastic note in his voice.

‘So I guess you don’t want to hear about this chick’s webcam?’

‘What webcam?’

‘Turns out this chick is a total exhibitionist … she has a Mac Book with one of those little webcam attachments in the top, and Pagey’s chatting away to her one night, talking about, I dunno, exams or some bullshit like that, when out of the blue, she tells him how much she hates to type and asks if he wants to use webcam instead …’

‘How do you know all this stuff?’

‘Pagey told me.’

‘When the two of you were spanking it together?’

‘Fuck up, faggot.’

‘Question – do the two of you have Auto Focus parties?’ Zach asks him. ‘Is Pagey, like, the gruff John Carpenter to your dewy-eyed Bob Crane? How long before he snaps and beats you do death?’

‘What the fuck? Anyway, so he says yes, and before you know it, this girl has got her top off and she’s got them right there in his face … right there in the webcam, I mean.’

‘Wow ...’ I say. I’m not entirely convinced that any of this is true, but while Luke’s on a roll, it’s better just to let him go with it.

‘So before you know it, Pagey’s right into it – he’s standing around in his jocks and she’s watching and applauding and shit and the whole thing builds from there.’

31 ‘That’s disturbing,’ Zach says.

‘So did they …?’ I venture.

‘Over the internet, I think, yeah,’ Luke says.

‘Does that count?’

‘It’s a grey area.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Anyway, she and Pagey are both gonna be down the Gold Coast for schoolies.

They’re meeting up this week then who knows what …’ He trails off, looking pleased with himself.

‘What’s her name?’ I ask.

‘The chick? Fucked if I know.’

‘Nice.’

Dean looks vaguely forlorn, glancing at us briefly before looking back down at the screen of his phone. Callie is probably texting him again now.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s beside the point. What matters is that you guys need to man up this week. I’ve got girls in my phone, man … I’ve got them all over the place. This

Natalie girl I know? Have I told you guys about her?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘She’s a babe. Met her at a party at Pagey’s house … she’s gonna be down in Byron this week.’

‘Good for you,’ I say.

‘And she’s gonna be one of hundreds,’ he continues. ‘I plan to give ‘em all a little taste. I’m gonna forget all about that bitch Vanessa this week ...’

Oh yeah, Vanessa – remember the girl I told you about, with the Chupa Chup? She broke up with Luke about six months or so ago, cheated on him with some guy from the First

XV at Nudgee. It was pretty traumatic for him at the time – a lot of late nights on MSN, a lot of drinking (not that we wouldn’t have been doing those things anyway, but we put in the extra effort for Lukey, y’know?), but after a while, he came good. Vanessa’s still a subject that comes up, but I think now it’s more out of bitterness than anything else … That Luke might

32 plan to fuck his way through the entire female schoolies population of Byron to get back at her is probably a stretch, but then, it might not be much of one.

I mean, Luke is my closest friend, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I kind of marvel at what an incredible douchebag he can be. I know that, as a teenage guy, I’m meant to be horny all the time and disrespectful to women, and I’m not meant to know better until at least my twenties (so my brother and his uni friends have said), but I wonder, at our age, does having a little respect for women really make you such a loser? To look at Luke and the guys, you’d certainly think so. Then, out of all of us, Luke’s the one who’s almost definitely guaranteed to get laid this week, so maybe the joke’s on me.

33 A few broad generalisations about cars and the people who drive

them – and a few fairly specific ones

We’re cruising along in the four-wheel drive, and the view from this vantage point is pretty good. The variety of cars on display includes:

1. Old, banged-up pieces of shit, especially rusted-out station wagons, with all four

windows down and various arms and legs hanging out; and trunks full of eskies and

mattresses and surf gear and as many as six people crammed in the front;

2. Newer, shinier sedans, a lot like the WRX Luke’s parents bought him, filled up with

dudes (why is it always guys who drive these things – is it something to do with

compensating for inadequacies in other areas?) who will probably not get as much

play as the dudes in the rusted-out pieces of shit;

3. Four-wheel drives … there are so, so many of these, much like the one that Andrew

drives. Now, I’m not saying that people in four-wheel drives are specifically reckless

individuals – Andrew is a remarkably safe driver, boringly so in fact – but almost

every time you see a heinous act of some sort performed in traffic, there’s a four-

wheel drive involved. I was crossing the road in front of school not two weeks ago

when one such car – driven by a woman who was talking on a cell phone with one

hand while applying make-up with the other and checking her hair in the rear-view

mirror, veering across the road like an insane Kimora Lee Simmons – nearly took me

out. Now, not all four-wheel drivers are the deranged trophy wives of hip-hop moguls

– most are just reckless suburbanites or the offspring of said individuals – but it pays

to watch the road sometimes, y’know?

4. An ageing family wagon that has been painted white, with words scrawled all over it

in black – variations on SCHOOLIES 2007 – FUCK YEAH!; LIVE FREE OR DIE;

PARTY LIKE A ROCK STAR, F$%K LIKE A PORN STAR and various other things

34 that are probably unsuitable to print in a text such as this one. Writing stuff like this all

over a vehicle whose roadworthiness is dubious at best is a really good way not to

get noticed by police, y’know?

I’m staring at the family wagon so intently that, at one point, I accidentally make eye contact with the dude in the driver’s seat. Holy fuck, I’m thinking … of all the things that you can do on the road, especially if you’re a dude, one of the biggest unspoken rules is that you never make eye contact with another dude. If you do, you’re either looking for a fight, or looking to engage in a gay sex act of some sort. I’m not really down with either of these things

(no offence to any gay dudes in the vicinity … hell, I’d probably fool around with Shia Labeouf after a few beers, but everyone would do that, right?) but I’m hoping I haven’t doomed

Andrew to some sort of premature road rage death, or worse, a car chase followed by a horrifying backwoods sexual assault. The further we get from a major city, the more likely that kind of shit is to occur.

When the dude driving the wagon grins at me and offers a lazy wave, it occurs to me that he’s actually a lot less threatening and a lot more stoned than I first thought. Whew. The surfboards strapped to the top and big drawing of a marijuana leaf on the side door perhaps should have given that one away. As we cruise past the van, one of the back windows slides open and some girls pop out, grinning at us and waving their arms around. I hadn’t noticed the girls before and, to be fair, would never expect girls to be riding around in a van like that in the first place, but you never know. Luke leans out the window and starts shouting back at them, trying to convince them to flash us some skin or something equally grown up. Luke and the girls – and the driver of the car – participate in this game for a while before Andrew gets annoyed with the whole process and speeds away. Ahh … you kinda have to marvel at the brainless camaraderie of young people sometimes.

After about forty-five minutes on the road, Andrew pulls into a big service station for petrol, and the guys decide to go on the hunt for supplies. There are all kinds of greasy fast- food outlets inside the servo, running the gamut from truly disgusting (a sandwich joint with a sullen dude who looks like Comic Book Guy pre-breast reduction surgery) to the sort of tolerable (a fried chicken place of the sort you’d really, really like if you were drunk or hung over … things we plan to be a lot this week) with some fairly cute girls behind the counter.

35 We ignore the fast food for now, cutting a swathe through the shelves near the counter. Zach and Dean grab a bunch of random shit that they decide will be indispensable for the trip – a fistful of weird American candies with exciting-looking yellow wrappers, various different kinds of potato chips, some of those energy drinks that come in the long, thin cans.

Zach also grabs a box of condoms – a few extras to supplement the three others we perhaps optimistically packed –and the inevitable conversation about size ensues. Zach assures me that everything’s bigger in England, because of imperial measures, but I’m not having any of his bullshit today. Besides which, having witnessed the object in question first hand – drunken party, big line for the bathroom, don’t ask – I can say with a degree of confidence that, metric or imperial, it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

While the guys pay for their shit and my brother finishes putting petrol in the car, Luke and I hang about in the air conditioning and look at the various girls in the vicinity, weighing up their physical attributes. Luke considers the various things he’d do to them – or talk them into doing to him – and I encourage him half-heartedly, mostly wondering about Zoe and what she’s up to this afternoon. The van we saw on the highway has also pulled up in the service station, and a brunette girl – big sunglasses, tiny bikini with an Australian flag on it – has gotten out to wash down the windscreen. This really sets Luke off … he starts rattling off the things he’d like to with her chest that, despite my fondness for making lists, I’m not going to include here.

Back in the car, Zach passes around a box of the American candies while Dean, who has broken into the alcohol supply in the back, passes around four freshly cracked-open beers. Andrew tut-tuts about this as well – I’m not sure if it’s because he disapproves of our drinking or because we haven’t offered him one – but back on the road, as I drain the last of my beer, my trepidation begins to wear off. Luke’s irrepressible horniness and the dangers of being run over by a four-wheel drive aside, maybe this is actually going to be a fun week after all.

36

Some tender brotherly advice

The apartment is on the outer edge of town, on Lawson Street, just before it climbs the hill and becomes Lighthouse Road. The apartment building looks like it would have been hot shit around the time that the guys and I were born, but is a little worse for wear now – still, it’s stumbling distance from the beach, and is in the main street of Byron Fucking Bay, so as far as places go, it’s pretty damned good.

As soon as Andrew pulls up on the grass outside, Zach throws the door open and bounds across the street, yelling as he goes about how we’ve finally arrived. Luke is already digging around in the back of the car, and when the front half of him reappears, it’s holding four beers, one for each of us. I crack mine open and we clink bottles together, marvelling at the fact that we’ve finally arrived.

Zach’s return is sudden and swift – he dashes back and tackles Dean to the ground, manoeuvring in such a way that his crotch is pumping up and down in the vicinity of Dean’s chest. Dean tries to push him away, which only makes Zach go harder at it. ‘Duuuude,’ Dean says, ‘if I spill my beer, I’m gonna fucking kill you.’

‘Cheer up, you whiny little bitch,’ crows Zach. ‘Look where we are!’

We begin to take stuff out of the back – Luke’s and my sports bags slung over my shoulder; various electrical cables and delicate pieces of equipment that Dean insists on carrying in himself because we’ll probably break them; box after box of beer and spirits (did we really pack this much? It’s a little overwhelming to look at it all being paraded this way

…we might all be ending this week in comas, on the news, or with blurry pictures of our genitals on display on the internet. I’m not quite sure which one is worse).

‘I remember my schoolies,’ Andrew says, hauling the last carton of beers out and sitting it on the grass.

‘That surprises me,’ I say.

‘Dude, it was only two years ago.’

‘No, it surprises me that you remember any of it.’

37 ‘Ahhh …’ he looks across at me and we smile at each-other. ‘I remember the highlights.’

‘What were those?’

‘It doesn’t matter, because I know you’re a good kid and you’re not going to be doing any of that stuff.’

‘Any of what stuff?’

‘You won’t do anything stupid, will you?’ my brother asks as we lug the last of our stuff – two more cartons of the beer, a bag with my clothes – from towards the building. I wonder for a second if he’s taking the piss, which would be more like my brother’s style, or if this is an actual bonding moment.

The expression on his face suggests that he’s being serious, so I tell him ‘no’.

‘Good,’ he tells me. ‘It’s my job as a brother to ask.’

‘I know,’ I say, ‘and I won’t.’

‘Stay safe, okay?’

‘Okay.’

I think that in the movie version of this story, following the boisterousness of the road trip, this would be a quiet, sentimental interlude – an exchange of brotherly love. In fact, if I were music supervisor on said movie, I would probably have Death Cab For Cutie’s song

Brothers On A Hotel Bed, or something equally emo, playing over the top. Of course, this isn’t a movie … it’s a sweet and slightly awkward exchange of the kind you have from time to time, but talking about it makes you uncomfortable, so I’m not going to discuss it any further.

38

Girls like nerdy guys, right? Or have I totally been acting on a false

impression for the last seventeen years?

The first time I really spoke to Zoe was a few nights after our encounter in the bookstore. I sent her a MySpace add request the day after we met, and nervously waited for her to accept, which she did, along with a post on my main page asking me if I had read the book yet and what I thought. I had considered a reply as I looked at her picture. It felt good seeing her at the top of my comments list; good to know that other people would be browsing my page and would see the picture along with the comment, realising that I had some sort of association with this extremely hot girl. In the day that followed, we commented each-other back and forth a few times, but I hadn’t heard from her in a while (perhaps one of my ‘enlightened’ comments on the Michael Chabon book alerted her to the fact that I hadn’t actually read as far as I’d claimed) and was beginning to worry, when something kind of great happened.

It was just after nine, and I was in my room with the door shut. I should have been working on an assignment, but was instead bouncing around like an ADD crack monkey (I think you might refer to it as multi-tasking, but that’s way too flowery a phase to encapsulate what essentially amounts to pissing about on the internet and wasting epic amounts of time in the pursuit of meaningful conversation, contraband music and sexual arousal). I was busily engaged in …

a) Searching for torrents to download (a boring pursuit these days, since I mostly have

all the music I like anyway);

b) Changing the song every two minutes (whiny indie rock about guys who can’t get

girls, or hip-hop songs by guys who pretend they can get girls?);

39

c) Talking to Dean (about a fairly riveting website we’ve both been looking at comparing

good and bad celebrity breast enhancements);

d) Talking to Zach (about forthcoming comic book-to-movie adaptations), and

e) Lazily browsing pornography (but finding it impossible to be genuinely aroused by any

of the sad-eyed Russian girls or the too-skinny guys who made the odd guest

appearance, and instead imagining elaborate back stories for them; this also partly

informed my conversation with Dean)

… when a chat window opened up that succeeded in distracting me entirely.

Zoe: Hello

I stared at it for a few seconds, the little cursor blinking like mad, wondering what an appropriate course of action might be. I was not mentally prepared for this; I was feeling neither funny nor charming, and both of these things are kind of essential when you’re trying to impress a girl, especially one to whom you’ve been telling little white lies and claiming to have read her favourite book when you really haven’t, yes? Also, I wasn’t wearing any pants, and even though I knew Zoe couldn’t see my bare legs and state of half-arousal, I was sill pondering the politeness of talking to her sans the extra layer of clothing. I realised I might have left it for too long, as she messaged me again a few seconds later:

ZOE: Hello?

HAYDEN: Oh, hey. I was distracted, sorry

ZOE: If you’re doing boy stuff and I’m interrupting I can totally leave you alone.

HAYDEN: Boy stuff?

ZOE: It’s okay, my brother has such an epic collection of pornography that he had to buy an

extra hard drive to fit it all in

40 HAYDEN: Sounds like fun for him

Good thing she couldn’t see me blushing over the internet.

The conversation that we had that night ultimately ended up being way more intense than anything I’d actually bargained for. She told me things about herself (and I told her things too), that looking back on it now, seem really embarrassing and personal and not the kind of thing you’d say to anyone you’d only actually met once. I guess, though, that that’s the power of the internet – you’re disconnected from each-other, so it’s not like it’s all that personal, but at the same time, once you say certain things, you can’t pretend that the other person misheard or hope they won’t pick it up, because the evidence is right there in front of you in black and white (I’ve seen some people who use colours like bright blue for the text in their

MSN windows, but I think that’s just kind of weird and upsetting).

I told her all about my old girlfriend Audrey and what happened between us that weekend; how I let all my friends think we’d had sex even though we hadn’t, and how things are now weird and awkward between the two of us. Zoe told me all about her parents, who were and still are in the middle of a huge divorce. She’d been going around to her mother’s house and was disturbed by the lack of food in the fridge – on the last trip, she’d discovered a half-empty jar of olives and a tomato – and the conversely huge amount of alcohol, including two-thirds of a six pack of beer that fuelled all sorts of wild speculation. What did it mean – did her mother have a boyfriend now or what? I tried to console her in as non-controversial a way as possible as we both said things like ‘I can’t believe I’m telling you all this.’

That particular conversation lasted until about two in the morning. Zoe and I both attempted to sign off several times – with her citing school the next day and me overall tiredness as factors – but we couldn’t seem to get away from each other. Every time we’d try to say goodbye, she’d say something funny, or mention something that would spark off a long dissertation about movies or the various television shows I would download and watch. We clicked in every way; I told her she was a nerd trapped in the body of Amelie, and she told me

I was a nerd trapped in the body of a nerd, and so it went.

Subsequent to the Michael Chabon, which I really liked a lot, Zoe recommended a whole lot of other books for me to read. It really wasn’t even a matter of recommendation a lot

41 of the time, I’d just look at the lists and lists of titles that ran down the side of her MySpace page and pick the ones that looked the most interesting. Sometimes, I worried that Zoe picked books based only on the length of their titles – I came across one called The

Unbearable Lightness Of Being , which I enjoyed, and The Perks Of Being A Wallflower , which

I did not – and wondered if her reading habits, though clever, weren’t maybe a little indiscriminate. It was the same with music – though she listened to a lot of stuff, some of which was actually awesome, the songs she seemed to like best were the really wordy ones by eyeliner-wearing American bands. You know the ones I mean … I’m Like A Lawyer The

Way I’m Always Trying To Get You Off, I Slept With Someone In Fall Out Boy And All I Got

Was This Stupid Song Written About Me, things like that.

I didn’t always like the stuff she liked, but I enjoyed talking to her about it, and from there, it wasn’t long until we were on MSN almost every night.

42 Sharing a bedroom with friends (and other places to draw the line)

Our stuff is sitting just inside the front door of the apartment – which turns out to be fairly big inside, more so than I’d expected – as we try to figure out what to do with the place. Luke’s parents come down here a bit, and they’ve clearly renovated it up to a respectable state – although it’s hard to imagine all four of us cramming in here for the course of a week. I mean, one weekend, we took all our computers to Dean’s house and set them up in a LAN in his garage, and after two shower-free days of eating, sleeping and drinking fairly heavily together in that confined space, the fug in the air was so thick with the smell of old pizza, unwashed socks and Lynx deodorant that Callie (who showed up on Sunday to spend time with Dean) declared it the foulest foulness she had ever encountered. Add to that the fact that, the night before, Zach had rolled on top of me in his sleep and latched on to my right nipple so hard he actually drew blood, and you can see why I’m a little reluctant to share a room with these people.

This apartment is a lot roomier, but still, the thought of us spending ten days together in such a space is enough to get me reasonably concerned. I think the only practical solution is for us all to be as drunk as possible at all hours of the day, and I certainly have faith in the ability of my friends to make this plan work.

To give you some idea of the layout of the apartment, then, this is how it looks:

KITCHEN: The idea of us having a kitchen is kind of laughable … I mean, what do

we need an oven for? For any application beyond storing vast quantities of booze,

we’re not going to have much use for it. The kitchen is already crowded with bottles,

all over the countertops and everywhere.

BEDROOMS: The situation with the bedrooms could be a tricky one. There are two

bedrooms … one of which has a double, and the other two singles. The thought of

four of us dudes packing in there is, well, disturbing to say the least. The issue of

where we’re all going to put our shit is one thing; the thought of what’s going to

43 happen if any of us brings a girl back is a trickier one. Then again, with my friends,

that’s not necessarily likely to happen.

LIVING ROOM: There is a big stereo set-up in here, along with a huge TV beside it,

and an array of furnishings that seem to have come straight from an Ikea catalogue. It

seems really odd that Luke’s parents would just leave expensive shit like this lying

around in a holiday place, but I guess that’s how his family are. The guys have

already started setting their computers up; various items of clothing, thongs, and

cables everywhere, a box of DVDs … I mean, Jesus, did we come down here to get

off our faces and meet girls and party on the beach or did we come here to play

World Of Warcraft again? At least the place comes equipped with wireless (thanks

heaps to Luke’s parents for that) so I’ll be able to keep in touch with Zoe while we’re

down here.

BALCONY: The neat, tiled area out the front, with a barbecue to one side, reminds

me for some reason of a photo that showed up in the papers around this time last

year; taken with a telephoto lens, it showed a group of twenty or more guys crowded

onto a high-up balcony in various states of undress; some of the guys had girls

wrapped around them and others had trucker hats pulled down over their eyes, some

were chugging beers, others passing around joints, and almost all of them were

leering and giving the finger to the camera. The photo ended up on the front page of

the Courier Mail to illustrate the dangerous and debauched situations that young

people find themselves in over Schoolies … hell, if our week gets even a tenth as

dangerous and debauched as that, I’ll be happy.

During the unpacking process, there is an extended argument about who’s going to sleep in what room, and who has a specific claim to sleep where – it’s all essentially fairly childish, but that’s the way the guys and I like to do things.

44 ‘Guys,’ Luke says after we’ve fought about it for a while, ‘the main bedroom’s mine. I figure there’s no argument there, given that firstly, my folks own the place, and secondly, I’m probably going to be the only one getting laid this week.’

‘Okay,’ says Dean, ‘I take issue with the second point, but the first one is undeniably solid.’

‘Right,’ says Zach, ‘and we don’t want to stand between you and the armies of male lovers you’ll be bringing home over the course of the week ...’

‘Hey,’ Luke says, ‘you guys will all be sharing a room. Maybe you can get over the grief by indulging in some sorta creepy nerd three-way.’

‘Maybe you can suck my dick.’

The conversations I have with my friends sometimes remind me of that Eminem skit – the one where the guy from the record label orders him to start rapping about things other than homosexuals and Vicodin – but with these guys, there’s rarely any Vicodin involved.

‘We’ll be fine,’ says Zach. ‘If any of us picks up, we’ll just take the chick back to her place. Or, y’know … Maybe we can work out a system.’

‘Like a sock on a doorknob?’ volunteers Dean. ‘I saw that in a TV show once.’

‘I’ll put a sock on your doorknob,’ says Zach.

Jeez. This is going to be a fun week.

45 Making a bet, and marvelling at the listlessness of Paris Hilton

The mechanics of tonight, as with most drunken nights, pretty well defy explanation … we start to drink and pretty well just keep going. By the time ten pm comes around, were all comprehensively hammered. Things have already stated to come out in the conversation – girls we all wanted to fuck but didn’t have the nerve to try, often girls that one of the other dudes in our immediate circle was dating; declarations of how we’re never going to forget each other, how this is going to be the best week ever. Forgive my cynicism, if I’m sounding like a hardened drinker – I’m really not, I’m as tipsy as fuck right now, and behaving just as awkwardly as any of the guys here, but I like to think that I have some perspective, you know?

I recently read an article about this thing called the ‘bro hug’, the idea being that guys are often averse to physical displays of affection, but if you’re really shit-faced or just really feeling the love, you can engage in one of these. The idea is that it’s a light embrace, involving only a limited amount of actual physical contact. You kind of touch shoulders with the other dude, pat each-other on the back or whatever you like to do. It’s a way of establishing the bond, or … fuck it, I’m really not terribly sure, but there has been a lot of it going on already tonight, and I’m expecting there to be a lot more.

Luke is talking, and has been for some time, but I’m not managing to catch a whole lot of what he’s saying. My mind is wandering in all sorts of directions. The alcohol is clouding my thoughts and making it difficult to hear, but I try to make a conscious effort to get back into the conversation, to try and follow along. ‘I mean, seriously guys, seriously,’ he’s saying, ‘I’m talking about how girls are like … okay …’ Luke nods his head a few times, clenches his fists as though he’s trying as hard as he possibly can to remember and articulate a really, really important point. An epiphany.

‘You okay dude?’ I ask cautiously.

‘I’m fine,’ he says, throwing his arm around my shoulder and then letting me go just as quickly. ‘I’m fine, I’m … okay. Girls. Girls are like … they’re like little baby deer, okay?’

‘Baby deer?’ Zach splutters. ‘Like what, like ... Bambi?’

46 ‘Girls are like … Girls need to be rescued. For real. You know, you see some little baby deer, all, like, skinny and shit, with the wobbly legs and the big eyes and you just wanna

… y’know, you just wanna pick it up and cuddle it and take care of it.’

‘I dunno man,’ Dean says slowly, ‘I’ve never seen a deer …’

‘That’s not the point I’m making, dude. It’s like a … what’s the word?’

‘A metaphor,’ I offer.

‘That’s right!’ Luke explodes with good cheer, offering me his beer bottle in such a way that suggests I’m meant to clink my bourbon and coke against it. ‘Fuck yeah, listen to this guy; way to pay attention in English, you fag.’

‘I’m not the one threatening to have sex with baby deer ...’

‘Shut up dude, it’s like metaphysical and shit, like you were saying. It’s like, just like you are with the deer, you wanna take care of it and that stuff, if you see some skinny little piece with blonde hair and big tits, you just wanna, y’know, take her home and take care of her and breed with her and shit. It’s instinctual … survival of the species and all that stuff.’

‘How do you equate hugging a baby deer with fucking a hot chick?’

‘Dude, it’s fucking meta . You know. It’s deep . Shit. I need another drink. You guys know what I’m getting at, right?’

Luke stands to grab himself a fresh beer, while Zach and Dean huddle, involved in a conversation so deep I can’t even comprehend it. In the midst of all this, my phone vibrates, lurching across the tabletop as it does so; I pick it up and see a new message from Zoe:

WE R @ RACHEL’S GETING

DRUNK N WATCHING TALENTED

MR RIPLEY. JUDE LAW = QUITE

THE SEXY BITCH! ☺ LOL. HOWS

THINGS IN BYRON?

I consider my reply for a moment, and text back:

47 BYRON’S GD. WASTED NOW.

LUKE TALKING COMPLETE

SHIT … WANTS TO MOLEST

BABY DEER. FUN TIMES

I send the message and put my phone back down on the table, wondering what Zoe would make of these guys. A lot of the time, I feel bad for participating in the misogynist freak show that is my group of friends – it’s all the more hilarious since I know how little contact they’ve actually had with members of the opposite sex – and if nothing else, I believe in respecting women. I know you haven’t known me for a terribly long time, so you have no reason to believe that statement, but I do. Why I don’t try and stop Luke from saying the awful shit he does, I don’t know, but hey, inappropriate metaphors involving baby deer or not, they’re still my friends, and I still like hanging out with them.

‘I mean,’ Luke continues, having returned with a fresh beer from the esky,

‘sometimes, you see a pretty girl walking towards you, and your paths are just about to cross, you know, and you do that thing where you duck to the side a bit, and kinda smile at her as she passes. And she’s dressed alright and looks cute and probably has a boyfriend or something, but you think, what the fuck, I could still hit that.’

‘I doubt you’d hit anything, dude.’

‘I’ve hit it more than you fags have ever hit it ... unless you count each-other.’

‘I have not now, nor will I ever have sex with any of you guys,’ Dean slurs.

‘Come on, I’m going somewhere with this. You imagine this girl, and, y’know, she looks a bit distracted coming at you, and she’s heading for the door of some shop or whatever, and you give her one of those smiles as you let her pass, and she smiles back at you and it’s just …’

‘Who the hell is this girl?’

‘She’s not real, dickhead. She’s a hypothetical girl. That’s the point. What I’m saying is, you have all this stuff burned in the back of your brain, this upbringing stuff about being polite to people that your mother teaches you when you’re a kid. You’ve got all that stuff, but you’d also kinda like to have sex with the girl, so even as you’re smiling and stepping aside to

48 let her pass, in your mind, you’re kind of going over all the ways it might be possible to hit that, and it’s weird the way those two fit together, y’know … politeness and the urge to get laid.’

‘Do you ... do you say these sorts of things to girls?’ Zach asks. ‘Because, to be honest, I can imagine something like that coming off as a little, well ...’ Zach narrows one eye and smirks English-ly, ‘... creepy.’

‘Fuck no,’ says Luke, ‘you don’t say that stuff. You don’t do anything beyond get them drunk, agree with everything they say and occasionally remind them of what hot shit you are

… you know, slip stuff like when I was doing charity work with those brave Indian orphans or, y’know, when I was captain of the First XI into the conversation.’

‘Dude … when were you in India?’ Dean asks.

‘Fuck man, I was never in India, keep up. I’m making a point . I’m saying that, y’know, there are certain techniques that you use when you wanna talk your way into a girl’s panties.’

‘You’ve never been anywhere near a girl’s undercrackers … except for Vanessa …’

Zach draws the word out, laughing drunkenly as he does so.

‘I’ve tapped plenty of girls dude,’ he says, ‘and fuck that bitch.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Zach asks. ‘Those girls you mentioned in the car earlier – where are they?

Where’s Natalie ?’

‘Look, Natalie and her friends are coming down tomorrow, alright. I’ll hit that shit, I’ll hit it hard.’

‘Yeah right. You’ll spank it hard, you mean,’ Zach laughs.

‘Yeah, like in the shower!’ Dean adds, cracking up with laughter, as though the joke had somehow been ambiguous before this helpful qualification.

‘Fuck both you guys. I’ll bet you I can tap Natalie before the week is out. Actually, no, to hell with stopping at one girl – I’ll bet you I can tap seven.’

If this was one of those movies where people spit out mouthfuls of beer when surprised, Zach would have done just that. Instead, he asks: ‘What the fuck?’

‘Seven girls, seven days of schoolies … fuck yeah, man. It’s perfect. It’s almost too perfect.’

‘There’s no way you can get with seven girls.’

49 ‘You care to make it interesting?’

Zach narrows his eyes, leaning across the table to be closer to Luke, ‘that’s quite ballsy of you. How interesting do you wanna make it?’

‘Okay,’ says Luke. ‘Losers buy beer for the winner for the rest of the summer …’

‘Why is the ‘losers’ in that sentence plural?’ I ask. ‘What makes you so sure you’re going to win?’

‘Because girls can’t keep away from me and you guys are all douchebags?’ Luke puts forward.

‘I remain unconvinced,’ I say.

‘I don’t think beer is enough,’ says Zach. ‘I mean, beer’s great, but if – or I should say when – you fail, I think something a little more public is in order.’

‘What, like streaking down Lighthouse Road or something?’ Luke asks.

‘No, but it’s interesting that your mind went straight to that place,’ says Zach.

‘I think,’ Dean says, taking over, ‘something a little more personal. I think, aside from the beers – you can buy me Pure Blondes, by the way – you need to do something humiliating ...’

‘You mean I get a Pete Wentz haircut like yours?’ Luke asks.

‘Amusing, but no. You need to let all your friends know that you’ve failed and that the mighty Luke does not have the pulling power he thinks he does …’

Zach now has an evil grin. ‘Yeah, I think you need to post a MySpace bulletin to that exact effect … and you need to individually message everyone on your friends list and tell her that what an embarrassment to the male sex you are and how badly you let the team down.

Also, Dean, Pure Blonde? You are a homosexual.’

Amazingly enough, Luke seems keen on this idea. We tear one of the side flaps off a bear carton and write the exact terms of the bet there – sloppily, given all we’ve had to drink – in black marker pen, after which, we all date the contract and sign our names. The bet begins tomorrow, Saturday, after which, Luke has until next Saturday morning to bag exactly seven girls. It should be interesting to see how this turns out.

For the next few hours, we hammer out the specifics of the bet, addressing issues like what actually counts as sex. Blowjobs are a grey area, we reason, given that even in

50 extreme circumstances, intercourse on a first date can be a tricky thing, but anything less than that is sketchy, and even then, blowjobs must be taken on a case by case basis. Multiple partners (like that’s ever going to happen) are counted individually – so if, say, tomorrow,

Luke happens upon a troop of sexually frustrated septuplets from country Victoria, he automatically wins the bet. It’s girls only, obviously … Luke can hook up with as many dudes as we want (we stress this part), but it will not affect the outcome of the bet.

At around two thirty, we try to watch the Paris Hilton sex tape (Zach has downloaded it … strange boy), but Zach himself is the only one who’s even remotely interested. ‘Oh man,’ he keeps saying, ‘I don’t care what you guys think, that weird nose or not, she’s fit .’

After about twenty minutes of extreme boredom with the odd fit of nervous laughter thrown in – the listlessness of it shocks us all into numbness … can any girl really be this utterly disconnected from the sex act? – we mostly just pass out instead, dreaming of the punishments we can dispense to Luke if and when he fails to score seven times. I mean, he’s never going to do it … right?

51 A hung-over journey into the sweltering heart of madness … if by

‘sweltering heart of madness’ you mean central Byron Bay on a

Saturday morning

We wake up late on our first morning in Byron – Luke is the last of us to get up, around eleven, and yet he still somehow manages to give us a stern lecture on why we should be out making the most of the week rather than at home sleeping off hangovers and letting the vital juices of our youth or whatever the hell drain away. Breakfast seems like far too complicated an issue right now, with far too many variables to be taken into consideration, so we decide to each crack open a beer instead and not worry about it. For the sake of our sanity – not to mention the fact that refusing to sober up is by far the best hangover cure – this seems like the only reasonable option available to us.

Half an hour or so later, we’re standing around central Byron, feeling fairly dissolute and wondering what to do for the afternoon. We thought about getting some food, but the

Subway on the next street back was far too crowded. We’re contemplating walking down to the water to check that out, but Luke seems happy to walk around town for a while, checking out the variety and attractiveness of girls on offer, not to mention the competition.

‘I’m telling you guys,’ he says, as we walk past a bank of crowded ATM’s, ‘Byron is a hotbed. There are girls everywhere here and they’re good to go. It’s all new for them. They’re away from school for the first time, probably away from their boyfriends …’

‘That’s charming,’ I interrupt.

‘That’s the truth. Strange town, lots of liquor, the ladies are all getting loose …’ A cluster of girls walk past; at the head of the pack, a blonde and an Asian girl, staggering, laughing, both in an identical shade of fluoro pink. The blonde walks with her reasonably ample chest sticking out, although the Asian is actually way cuter, even if she doesn’t seem to realise it yet.

‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ Luke says. ‘Those girls, tonight … hell, I might even knock over two in the one go.’

52 ‘I’m famished,’ says Zach, apropos nothing. ‘I told you we should have waited in line at that Subway.’

‘We’ll find something,’ says Luke.

‘I’m hungry now .’

‘What are you, five? Just chill for a minute, dude. We have food at the apartment. I wanna walk around for a bit, check out the talent on offer.’

We reach the corner of the main street, weaving our way through the crowd, and stop next to one of those shops that sell trendy and expensive surf clothing. It’s so crowded inside that the skinny brunette chicks and the dudes in board shorts and thongs are elbowing their way through the racks, which is weird when you think about it. I mean, all of the kids who’ve come down here for this week’s mass exodus would surely have known they were coming to a surf town and packed accordingly. Is there any need to go shopping for clothes? Are people really waking up all over Byron going, hot damn, packing this ski jacket was a really unfortunate choice ? I somehow think not. I’m not opposed to the idea of surf shops or anything – I mean, most of my clothes come from places just like this one, but that’s kind of the point.

Everyone can do this at home. Maybe it’s the terror of being cut off from the shopping experience – no hanging out in malls or food courts, no browsing for stuff to buy – that has drawn everyone here. Then again, when it comes to familiar things, I’m hardly one to complain. I can, and do, use the internet all the time at home, but the idea of being without my laptop for a week was so horrifying I couldn’t even comprehend it, and I can’t even describe the massive relief I felt at learning we had wireless in the apartment. That’s different, though. I need it to keep in touch with Zoe.

We duck inside a creepy new age shop – marvelling at dolphins and crystals and fairies, all of them in various shades of pink – on display, but the woman behind the counter hears our sniggering and her dirty looks suggest that we should probably leave soon if we want out manhood intact. We walk past a sushi restaurant and think about stopping for some, but in our hung-over state, it does not seem like a particularly attractive proposition.

Eventually, after about half an hour of walking through town, turning corners and stopping to admire girls, we find ourselves at the beach. We’re standing at the top of a grassy

53 slope, feeling the cool salty breeze on our faces – in one direction, the coastline curves up towards the lighthouse at the top of the hill, while in the other, it just disappears lazily into the distance. The sand is white and sparkling and the ocean, stretching out into early afternoon haze, is an inviting turquoise blue.

The crowd in front of us, all scantily-clad guys and girls playing beach Tetris, seem at odds with the tranquillity. There are groups of dudes in shorts and little else lying around covertly drinking beers (you’re not allowed to drink down here, but with the hundreds of kids, who’s going to stop you?), some of whom have pitched tents on the beach. Nearby, some tall, jock-y dudes are chucking a football around as girls (and a small cluster of other dudes nearby) pretend not to watch. The beach is all fashion and attitude and flesh on display, and even the pale, pudgy guys (guys like me, that is) seem to be confident enough to walk around in just boardies. The girls are all in tiny little outfits … their backs look warm and naked, in a way that kind of makes you want to rest your face in them, and only the tiny little string tied around the back of their necks reminds you that they’re wearing anything at all.

As we walk down onto the sand, the music from all around us comes in waves – hip- hop beats; distorted, synthy French house music; mopey indie rock, which, here, in this context, seems to have a bouncy, even summery feel to it. There is a lazy, messy, feel to the whole proceeding … there are couples holding hands who are comfortable and have clearly been together a long time, and others, who have clearly only met the night before, and are sprawled unconscious around each-other, or just kind of touching nervously. ‘Gentlemen …’

Zach says as we stand in front of the water, ‘we’re here!’

We plant ourselves not far away from where the small waves are lapping at the sand, looking at the girls who walk past, trying to spot people we know or recognise and staring out at the vastness of the ocean pondering what it all means (mostly the first two). Nearby, there are three guys our age throwing a ball around, running in and out of the surf. They all look remarkably ... together. They’re all pretty well toned and they all have colour, like they spend a lot of time out in the sun; they look loose-limbed and easy and unencumbered. One of the guys has his hair mostly shaved and another is wearing board shorts with pictures of little constellations on them and the word VOLCOM repeated over and over, but the three of them, for all practical purposes, look identical. All three are wearing aviator sunglasses and all of

54 them have the same satisfied look. They splash around in the water, running in and out, diving under the waves and sprinting up the wet sand as foam laps at their feet.

I don’t know, I guess I never really understood sports that involve a ball – even watching them makes for a somewhat boring experience. There’s no real outcome to what these guys are doing – it’s all physicality, all movement, no questions or concerns, just fluid motion. While part of me is coming up with these profundities, a larger part is also hoping the guys don’t throw their ball anywhere near me. It’s not that I wouldn’t be able to catch it – I mean, I’m not that uncoordinated, that I’m aware – but if I did, then I’d have to make a show of running around, holding the ball close to my chest to try and keep the others from getting it, or I’d have to pick the right moment to throw it to someone else and I’d try to do it and completely miss the mark. At that point, well, I just know there’d be people watching, and I’d have to save face, say something smart-arsed about one of the other guys and it’s just ... it’s a series of steps that you have to take, but I really don’t want to do it.

The dudes run around and around in circles, towards and then away from us, and eventually, their game takes them farther up the beach and out of sight. At a certain point, we grow bored of sitting around – ‘there are no fit girls here anyway’, says Zach – and we head back to the apartment to begin the serious task of drinking.

As we reach the top of the grassy slope, we see some kids hanging around near the top of the slope who look noticeably different from most of the well-scrubbed youngsters on the beach – they all look a couple of years older, and all have the scruffy dark hair that goes with emo guys gone to seed; the shirts with the names of punk and hardcore bands on them; one of the dudes has a pierced lip, and another, even though he only looks nineteen or whatever the hell, has tats all down one leg. Local guys, definitely. We’ve been warned to watch out for them but, y’know, how dangerous can they really be?

There is a girl with them, looking bored and glancing hopefully, every now and then, at the beach, while the guys around her all scowl and shoot menacing looks at anyone who dares to come close. Luke looks at her and she looks at Luke as we walk past; the guys size us up and mutter in our direction, and the whole time we’re walking back towards town, I’m thinking, fucking hell Lukie boy, please don’t get us killed on our first day here.

55 Luke further attempts to demonstrate his power over girls

The light has begun to die outside, and I’ve long since lost count of how many beers I’ve had.

We’ve been drinking quickly, aggressively, all afternoon. When I open the fridge in search of food (I have a sudden, inexplicable craving for cheese – I want to bite into a whole block of it, like on that old Seinfeld episode) I become weirdly fixated on an almost-empty six pack on the top shelf. It has been torn apart – all that’s left is one beer, sticking out from the paper cover at an odd angle, like the broken neck of a helpless woodland creature. For a second, this seems like it might be an appropriate metaphor for something, but my brain hurts too much to think about it, and I continue my search for cheese but come up empty.

‘I know it’s here somewhere,’ Dean yells from the main room, as he searches around frantically for his iPod cable, convinced, as he has been for the last hour or so, that he has left the thing at home. God knows that would be a tragedy – a week without listening to Death

Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service and all those sad songs about lost love would be unbearable. Dean, though, has turned a little frantic. He searches around for it in his bag, cursing as he goes, and throwing various things aside – boxer shorts, a half-empty flask of

Jim Beam, and somewhere in the middle of it all, a teddy bear.

‘You fucking what?’ Zach splutters with laughter as he sees this. The bear’s brown fur is matted with age and care, and one of his ears seems to be slightly chewed, but his little red tongue pokes out jauntily.

For a second, Dean freezes, and his eyes widen in horror. ‘Guys, it’s not what you ...’

Dean lunges down to grab the bear, but Zach gets there a little quicker.

‘Ello!’ Zach shouts, his eyes bugging out with glee. ‘What have we here?’

‘Give him ... give it back dude,’ says Dean, making a move on Zach, but Zach jumps out of the way, leaping up onto the couch and holding the bear just out of Dean’s reach.

‘What’s his name then?’

‘He doesn’t have a name,’ Dean insists.

‘I have a name!’ Zach squeaks, performing a crude ventriloquist act with the bear.

‘C’mon dickhead, give him back!’

56 ‘Tell us the bear’s name or he gets it,’ says Zach, taking the teddy’s head in one hand and legs in the other and making threatening ripping gestures.

‘Okay, fine ... his name is Marcus.’

‘What?’

‘C’mon, I’ve had him since I was a kid. He’s good luck.’

‘Why Marcus?’ Zach asks.

‘I don’t remember.’

Zach’s eyes widen, and he begins to pull harder at either end of the bear. ‘Yes you do.’

‘Okay! Don’t hurt him.’

‘Don’t hurt him ?’

‘I had an imaginary friend called Marcus,’ Dean says in a rush, ‘my parents thought it was weird and they bought me the bear so I could project my weirdness onto him, and now you know that so can I have my fucking bear back please?’

I can’t help but sympathise a bit – I mean, if I was a girl, I’d probably think it was cute, maybe just a little bit, to see a guy with a teddy bear – although I can’t help but feel relief that

Zach is today’s designated tremendous pussy, meaning that I’m off the hook for now.

When Zach’s done laughing, he throws the bear back to Dean, who immediately disappears into another part of the house, presumably to hide his special little friend somewhere. As Dean exits stage left, Luke enters from the right, snapping his phone shut and looking even more pleased with himself than usual.

‘What’s up with you then?’ Zach asks him.

‘What’s up with me, you deranged British faggot, is I’m thinking about what I’m going to do to you little bitches when I win this bet. Natalie’s been texting me. She’s coming over here. Any minute now, in fact.’

‘Really?’ asks Zach.

‘Yeah. And not that any of you will be interested, but she might even be bringing some friends around.’

‘Sharing the good times,’ says Zach, ‘I like it.’

57 ‘Shut the fuck up, dude. And don’t say things like sharing the good times around these girls or you’re never going to get any.’

To prove that he’s not completely full of shit, Luke whips out his small silver Nokia and shows us a text message, from around six minutes ago, with Natalie’s name on the top:

HEY CUTIE – IS IT OKAY IF I

BRING SOME OF MY FRIENDS

ALONG?

‘Cutie ?’ Zach snorts. ‘Who are you, her little brother?’

‘What’d you say?’ I ask.

‘I dunno, haven’t replied yet,’ says Luke. ‘I figured I’d gauge your opinion first … y’know … see if you wanted some girls around tonight or if you’d be happy just getting shitfaced and playing video games while Natalie and I …’

‘Come on you unimaginable douchebag,’ says Zach, ‘just reply already.’

Luke laughs, and types out a reply:

JUST AS LONG AS THEY’RE HOT

GIRLS SUCH AS YOURSELF

Moments later, as Zach convulses on the floor in fits of nervous laughter, a reply comes:

HAHHA, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE

TO FIND THAT OUT WHEN WE

GET HERE

Oh man, I think, as the two of them whoop and holler it up. I wonder why it’s so easy for Luke to get away with stuff like this … if I was even remotely that flirtatious in a text with a girl I didn’t know, she’d probably send her brother or some other random six-foot-five dude

58 around to my house to pummel the living shit out of me. Luke replies, tells Natalie the address, and I guess from there, we’re pretty much set.

‘Well bruvva,’ says Zach, ‘although I remain sceptical, you might actually be able to pull your that thing out of your pants tonight and get some.’

‘Hey,’ he says, ‘I’m a man of equal opportunities. There might be some in it for all of us.’

‘Hahha, yeah. Now you might finally know how ya mum felt …’ Zach says, laughing.

He addresses this comment to Luke, but is looking at me while he says it.

‘Yeah, you dirty fucker!’ says Dean as he returns to the room, iPod cable now in hand, also gazing in my general direction. ‘What was up with that?’

Throughout all this, Luke is looking at me with slightly narrowed eyes.

Okay, so I should probably explain about this … Ya mum jokes are common in our circle – as they are with all young people, I guess – but this one is kind of pointed in that …

Okay. It’s not something we really talk about all that often. Or at all. It’s a sore spot for Luke and it’s … It was nothing too weird, or nothing overly weird, anyway. What happened that night is a part of our friendship that Luke and I never really talk about – in so far as you talk to your guy friends about anything, you know – but I should probably explain exactly what went on. I could keep insisting that it was nothing weird or gross, but then it might sound like I was protesting too much, making something out of what was really, honestly nothing at all.

Okay, here goes.

59 The incident my friends are referring to

It was a party that my parents were hosting, one of many that year. I was in grade eleven, I was looking sharp in the suit that had recently failed to get me laid at the Somerville House semi-formal, and there were several cases of Moet and various bottles of scotch, vodka,

Campari present … what more is there to say? I had been tending bar for a bit, flashing grins at friends of my parents as my hand was shaken, as enquiries were made about my grades

(average) and girls (in short supply) and my future prospects (blah blah blah) and I was knocking them back, getting more and more fast and loose, and when I attempted a trick with a champagne bottle a’la Tom Cruise in that movie and it didn’t work out so well I was relieved of my duties. It was nine and I was plastered. Subsequent to this, the only thing I really remember about the party is that I spent a lot of time talking to Luke’s mother, also drunk.

That’s essentially where the complication arose.

I remember standing out on the balcony – I’d taken off my coat and my tie was hanging around my neck. I was staring at the lights of low-lying suburbs, cars on the bridge, the spooky light at the airport, contemplating whatever you contemplate when you’re sixteen and thinking the kinds of deep thoughts about life that, even though you lack the necessary vocabulary and the experience (definitely the experience) to correctly articulate them, still feel profound and tremendous. None of my friends were present (it was not that sort of party), but

I had received a series of text messages from Luke (drunk and down the coast … my plan had been to go there too, a matter that had been discussed at not insignificant length at breakfast yesterday) that told a garbled story of a car broken down, a girl who couldn’t or wouldn’t recall the name of her absent boyfriend, and I was considering a reply when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

She looked pretty that night – she was wearing her blonde hair out, and kept flicking it back behind her ears. She had on a low-cut dress, red, that shouldn’t have looked good on my friend’s mother but somehow did. It was her greeting to me too – ‘hello there, Hayden’, she’d said, and run her hand down my lapel, ‘don’t you look handsome?’ Partly, it was the everyday, patronising way that adults talk to precocious youngsters, but it also felt like

60 something more, like some kind of a Mrs Robinson thing. Anyway, I was drunk, and that probably had something to do with it, also.

I was telling her all about school – how I was thinking about doing business at uni, how complicated and amazingly far-off this enterprise seemed; about rowing practice, how it was such a struggle to get out of bed in the morning when it was still dark and you felt like the only person in the world who could possibly be up that early, but then you get out there on the river with the other guys, and you watch the sun come up … suddenly you forget the bullshit and you’re just y’know … there, and it feels so good, and the whole time I’m telling this story, she’s looking at me with this smile , and I mean … it was absolutely impossible to describe, but having her there, knowing that she was listening … I didn’t feel like a kid. She wasn’t looking at me as though I was a kid. And that felt incredible.

For some reason, Mrs. Stefano seemed really interested in what I had to say. I don’t even remember what I was talking about – you know what it’s like, you’re drunk, you’re trying to impress someone and you end up talking reams and reams of complete bullshit. In that place where you feel like you have to keep talking, where, if you stop, if you lose their attention, everything is going to fall apart.

Her husband (Luke’s dad) was nowhere to be seen – earlier in the night, he’d asked me how I was doing at school but hadn’t really waited for a reply, had started circulating and I believed had spent most of the night talking to my dad. At a certain point, I ran out of things to say, drinking even more of the champagne, and she started talking to me, about her job, about the kids – she asked me how Luke was doing, how was he doing really , and I guess I lied to her and told her ‘Okay … Luke’s doing okay’, and she seemed happy, like this was confirmation or something, and I felt guilty, but it was difficult to feel bad for too long.

Some friend of my parents, a woman I recognised but whose name I couldn’t remember even if I tried, approached us, kissed Mrs. Stefano on the cheek then kissed me on the cheek and asked me how I was doing at school, told me how big I was getting, then launched into a story about a trip she and her husband had recently taken to Italy, and I listened for a while, but because of the champagne, I found it quite hard to follow the conversation, so I drifted off, but as I was leaving, Mrs. Stefano touched my arm and told me

‘I’ll catch you before we leave’. I didn’t really know what to make of this but it didn’t seem like

61 the normal kiss off you gave to people at parties – you know, I’m just going to get a drink but

I’m really interested in talking to you and will of course do so when I return, unless I don’t – but I was sufficiently lightheaded and the situation was sufficiently charged that my attention was definitely aroused.

After that I spent a while walking around the living room, changed the CD – Frank

Sinatra, When I Was Seventeen, it seemed appropriate, and I was semi passed-out on the couch, I couldn’t even tell you how much time had passed, when I saw Mrs. Stefano drifting towards me – the next thing I was aware of, I was standing with her and she was motioning towards the speakers, telling me the music was good, asking if it was mine. I told her it wasn’t, that I couldn’t even dance, which brought her into some sort of sad, nostalgic fugue about how no boys my age know how to dance. I got a little defensive at first – I dunno, trying to prove my manhood to her or whatever – but I realised what the whole thing was leading up to before long. Sure enough, she asked me if I wanted a dance lesson, and it seemed like the perfect time, and I nodded.

Before I was even fully aware of what was going on, we were dancing. She moved my hand to the small of her back, told me I was the man so I had to lead, and there were a few clumsy steps as I tried to find my feet, and she kept saying forward back left right

forward / back / left / right

over and over until it became a kind of mantra, and I was leading but really all I had to do was follow, and just keep listening to her, forward, back, left, right, one, two, three, four and after a while it didn’t even feel like an effort, it was just the two of us, and she told me I was a good dancer, I was very good at this, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I was thinking that whatever was going on was insane; that she was my best friend’s mum; that she had a good thirty years on me, and we danced together for a bit longer, me trying to look alert but kind of ending up slumped on her, and I was dimly aware of people leaving, of it getting late, and of her sitting me down on the couch, telling me it had been nice, what an attractive young man I was turning into.

62 The next thing I remember is my dad patting me on the shoulder, saying softly ‘I think it’s time to call it a night, don’t you, Hayden?’ I’ve never resented anything more – or at least not until I saw Mrs. Stefano again, her husband’s arm around her waist, but somewhere between the dance lesson and my dad, I’d had another glass of champagne – where had it come from? I absolutely couldn’t tell you – so I didn’t protest much, or at all, I just felt glum and kind of resigned to the situation. He shook my hand, she patted me on the shoulder as well and told me good luck with school and dad led me up the stairs and … I was still in my clothes – minus the bow-tie and the shoes – semi passed-out on my bed, thinking … Oh yeah.

63 A small Japanese car disgorges the first actual girls we’ve seen all

weekend

The subject of the cocktail party is quickly abandoned – Luke gives me a friendly punch on the shoulder and does so a little too hard, but after a while, we crack open fresh beers and the tension seems to abate.

About an hour after the initial flurry of text messages, a small Japanese car comes onto the driveway, pumping out distorted electro beats that suggest a sound system at least twice the size of the vehicle. The car disgorges, although I’m not sure how they could all possibly have fit in there along with the stereo. The leader of the girls – I say leader because she’s the one who was driving, and because she’s the tallest and curviest of them all – emerges from the car first.

The three girls seem to be engaged in three different conversations, but when Luke leans over the balcony and shouts at the tall, model-y one with the dark, shiny hair, all attention is diverted to him. ‘Ladies, welcome!’ he says. ‘The good times start here!’ Part of me is really kind of offended that he could possibly come up with a line that cheesy to say to the girls … another part of me is kind of impressed that Luke can come out with lines so demonstrably stupid and still have girls hanging off him. I guess it’s a talent.

Luke bounds towards the door to let the girls in, taking his shirt off nonchalantly and draping it across the back of a chair. That’s another thing about Luke … most guys, if they take their shirts off to impress girls, just look desperate or grasping, but when Luke does it, any and all girls around him seem to lose all sense of self control. Even my sister Amy – who, by sheer, terrible coincidence, is going out with a girl also called Amy – gets all hot and bothered when he’s around. I’d do it too, the shirt thing, but number one, I have too much self- respect, and number two, I’m kind of pale and not all that well toned. Actually, it’s mostly number two. But I like to think that my humour and intellect are enough to impress, and they often are … as long as Luke’s not around to distract.

Oh yeah, Luke. Right now, he’s ushering the girls inside. ‘Welcome to our humble home,’ stuff like that. At this point, though they’re walking in different directions and engaged in different conversations, the girls seem to exist as a single creature, with six legs, six arms,

64 three smiles and a unity of purpose that seems a little intimidating. Perhaps the most intimidating thing about them is the fact that they look and sound like real girls – as opposed to the perfect, boring, lifeless girls you might encounter on a TV show – and the fact that they are right here in our apartment, waiting to be impressed, or at least to be entertained.

The girls carry with them a selection of brightly-coloured alco-pops in packs of four.

The sweet, sugary drinks that they place haphazardly on the countertop and in the fridge come in a variety of colours and flavours – de-virginated pink; early morning stomach-reflux green; hotted-up Commodore yellow. They each crack one open as the guys begin to flock around them – music is turned up, the laughter and conversations start to happen, and before long, time begins to blur.

Amongst the three is a tall, gawky yet amazingly cute girl called Amy (I know, right, what are the chances?), who turns out to be just as amazingly nerdy as I am, and we spend an hour or two on the couch talking about superheroes, about comic books, about the awfulness of Spider Man 3 ... the whole thing seems almost too good to be believed, and in fact, even though we’re both drunk, as a silence falls, a weird feeling suddenly comes over us.

‘Um, Hayden,’ she says, as she turns her raspberry Vodka cruiser round and around in her hands. It starts to look like the missing colour from the set – acutely awkward conversation scarlet. ‘I have a boyfriend.’

‘Oh man,’ I say, ‘oh shit, I totally wasn’t hitting on you.’

‘Really?’ she asks, seeming a bit uncertain.

‘Yeah! I mean, I think you’re really awesome, and I mean, it’s cool that you have a boyfriend. I have … I mean, I don’t know if you’d call her a girlfriend … I don’t know if it’s gotten that far yet.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

‘There’s a girl that I’ve been seeing … not really seeing. We met once, in the city. She recommended a book to me.’

‘So … this girl works in a bookstore?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘not that. She’s just a girl who hangs around in bookstores and looks like

… have you seen that movie, Amelie?’

65 ‘Oh, she’s adorable!’ Amy becomes noticeably more excited. ‘So you girlfriend looks like that?’

‘She’s not really my girlfriend … we met that one time, I added her to my MySpace, and since then, we’ve talked a whole lot …?’

‘Like, on the internet?’ Amy asks.

‘Yeah, you know, we’ve talked, and we’ve traded mix tapes …’

‘Oh my god’, she all but gushes. ‘That’s really sweet! That’s amazing, that is like, so incredible!’

‘Yeah … I mean, I really like her, but it’s complicated.’

‘So … I mean, are you like, dating? On the internet?’

Our conversation has caught the attention of the two other girls, Natalie and Leina, who slowly begin to drift in our direction.

‘I don’t know,’ I begin, slightly embarrassed. ‘I mean, we’re really close. We’re super close, and I like … I mean, I tell her things about me. I find it really easy to talk to her.’

‘Hmm … on the internet?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s very different from talking to someone in real life.’

‘I know …’ I say, sighing just a bit.

‘So did you have, like, the spark? When you met her?’

‘I think so. I mean yeah, we do. Totally. You know, that day we met, she wrote her name and her email address down for me in the front cover of a book so I’d have to buy it.’

‘Are you serious? That’s so cute! Natalie, did you hear that?’

By this stage, Natalie and Leina and listening intently, and I’m really feeling kind of sheepish, and not entirely sure what I should say. As I’m talking – and I’m talking a lot, thanks to the alcohol – I’m going over the story in my head, thinking about how absurd it is to be hung up on a girl I’ve only really met once. Am I a stalker, or a crazy person to think she’d really honestly be that into me?

66 A fairly detailed conversation about the etiquette of internet

relationships

At this stage, though, the rules and procedures of dating someone over the internet have opened up untold new avenues of conversation. Leina, as it turns out, was in a similar situation with a boy she met in the food court at Chermside one evening. Their two groups of friends merged, and as they sat eating fried chicken and sushi and throwing ice cubes at one- another, she and a scruffy skater boy called Patrick became close. They kissed behind a rack of scarves at a trendy surf and skate store (it really tickles me that Leina has chosen to include this particular detail in the story, by the way) but had to go their separate ways.

Patrick, as it turned out, lived two hours north of the city, so for them to take their flirtation further would have been a problem, had it not been for the magic of MySpace and

MSN. They talked almost every night; she confided in him and he in her; they traded mp3s of punk bands and he would draw hugely detailed sketches of her and sometimes the two of them, then take digital photos and post them on her profile. They were mad about each-other, she said, but the problem came down to the little box on her MySpace marked ‘relationship status’. She felt a deep and special connection to him (which is always the way, after all), but was tortured, TORTURED as to whether of not to she should upgrade from ‘single’ to ‘in a relationship’.

Leina agonised over this problem for weeks – she wanted to do it, partly for the validation it would give her, and partly so her friends would see, but mostly because she really liked Patrick and his sweet romantic gestures and wanted to take their relationship (or at least their relationship status) to the next level. She wanted to raise it with him, but could never find the right time, as every time she considered it, she felt uncomfortable and vaguely like a stalker. The decision, though, was made for her when saw pictures on a mutual friend’s profile of Patrick getting a little too friendly with a mysterious redhead at a party the previous weekend. She blocked him in the end … it was sad that it had to happen that way, but really, what other choice did she have?

67 Some famous friends who I’ve neglected to mention until now are

introduced

After a long discussion about MySpace, and a hell of a lot more to drink, I start to feel reassured that perhaps I’m not an insane stalker, and that perhaps Zoe and I might even have a chance at something awesome. Provided she doesn’t hook up with any random skater boys at any parties … although that kind of stuff doesn’t bear thinking about too much. It’s actually kind of a shame that I’m attached to Zoe, because that Leina girl found my story (and by extension, me) fairly adorable. I beg the girls not to tell my guy friends about Zoe – I would feel kind of strange about that, you know, until she and I actually meet up – and they agree not to say a word.

As the party continues, the group scatters, we all crack open fresh drinks. Dean plugs his iPod into the stereo and begins blasting music – some trendy band from Sydney who we’ve all seen about six times at various festivals, and from whom a lot of people seem to be taking their fashion cues lately. Amy and Leina start to dance while Zach and Dean look on.

When the song is done, the Pod shuffles to another trendy young band, Zombie Ghost Party.

Zach stands up as if to change it, but it’s too late.

‘Ohmygod, leave it on! I love these guys,’ she shouts. ‘They went to Terrace, didn’t they?’

‘Yeah …’ I say, trepidatious.

‘Wait … didn’t you say before that you went to Terrace too?’

‘Yeah …’

‘Ohmygod, that’s amazing. So did you ..?’

I cut her off, as several of the guys are a little sensitive about this issue. ‘Yes, we knew them.’

‘Oh wow! So were you, like, friends with them and stuff?’

‘Not really. They mostly just kept to themselves. And they were away a lot, with the band …’

If you’ve listened to the radio, or clicked around a bit on a social networking site, or switched on your television, or hell, just been awake in the last year or so, you’ve probably

68 encountered Zombie Ghost Party. It’s a ridiculous name, and they’re a ridiculous band, but as these things go, they’re ridiculously well known, and by association with them, we’re probably a lot cooler than we have any right to be.

‘I heard they were in town this week. Aren’t they playing one night?’

‘I think they are.’ The boys are indeed in Byron this week … in fact, we received a group MySpace message from them to let us know that they’d be playing a free show on

Thursday night. Even though we’re pretty much vibrating with jealously at all the girls and all the free shit they’d be getting, we might even go along.

‘So are you guys going to be hanging out with them?’ Amy asks hopefully.

‘I don’t know, we’ll see’

‘Well if you do, you should totally let us know.’

‘I’ll totally do that.’

I could tell you right now that the spoiled, famous brats from Zombie Ghost Party will actually end up having a huge bearing on the way this whole week will turn out, but then I’d be giving away a big part of the story and I really don’t want to do that.

69 The night gets late, the party gets messy

It’s much later now, and I’m quite a bit more drunk. I miss Zoe – which in itself is kind of absurd – and think strongly about texting her, but Amy assures me that I shouldn’t, that I would come across weird and clingy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the guys are out on the balcony talking to the girls; Luke and

Natalie are in a corner by themselves, and he’s pulling the standard moves, talking to her and looking at her like she’s the only person on the face of the earth. I’m only dimly aware of how much we’ve had to drink, but you can no longer see the surface of the table for all the half- empty beer bottles and overturned plastic glasses. At one point, one of the guys turned the barbecue on but then lost interest in cooking, and now it sits there, smoking ominously, with corn chips and salsa (why?) covering most of the surface.

At a certain point, Amy and Leina decide to leave – they both hug me, and both wish me the best of luck for my meeting with Zoe, if and when it ends up happening – and we swap phone numbers and promise to keep in touch, and whether we will or not is maybe another matter, but hey, it’s nice to know that people care. Natalie decides that since she can’t drive anyway, she might as well stay the night and drive home in the morning … Leina and Amy kind of roll their eyes, like yeah, that’s gotta be the only reason you’re sticking around, but decide that they’ll walk back to their apartment anyway, and if they get raped and murdered on the way back, they’ll absolutely, one hundred percent hold Natalie responsible. Natalie says that’s an acceptable scenario, they hug, and with that, the girls are off.

As it sinks in that Luke is the only one of us who will actually be having sex tonight, the mood turns a little reflective. He and Natalie are off in their own little world – they’re in the living room, looking for tunes on Dean’s iPod, but mostly so they can be alone together. I can’t hear them, but I can tell from his body language what’s happening – this is an old trick of

Luke’s where he’ll show a girl his bare chest, tell her he’s thinking of getting a nipple pierced and ask her what she thinks. She’ll look at it long and hard, and maybe even run a hand over it – as Natalie is doing – and it’s quite clear that the whole point of the exercise for Luke to give the girl a closer look at his incredibly toned chest, but girls invariably go along with that.

70 Dean, Zach and I are getting progressively more wasted outside on the balcony – there’s a chill in the air that’s weird for November, but being here with them feels kinda nice.

Nicer than I’d admit to if I was sober, but the chances of that happening ever again seem fairly slim at this point. I switched to bourbon some time ago and did not look back. It seems to be a night for moments of clarity – those wonderful, drunken moments you can really only have when you’re seventeen and completely, hilariously wasted on Jim Beam and beer and you realise that you have the greatest friends in the world, and just how damned much they mean to you. This is what it’s all about . You clasp hands, you pat each-other on the shoulder, and you articulate these feelings … over and over again.

Dean is slumped down in his chair; his feet are up on Zach’s knees, but Zach, who would normally make more of an effort to register his displeasure at being in such close physical proximity to another dude, doesn’t raise any real objections.

‘If Luke has sex tonight, I’m gonna be pissed,’ says Dean.

‘If Luke has sex tonight, I’ll be astonished,’ says Zach, slurring the last word so it kind of comes out as ‘ashtonished’.

‘Natalie’s hot,’ says Dean. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘Luke always girls,’ Zach adds. Our sentences have been getting shorter and shorter.

‘Like that one,’ says Dean. ‘You remember that one ...?’

‘Be more specific,’ says Zach. Schpesific.

‘That homestay girl. You remember. Japan trip? Grade eleven? That homestay girl?’

‘Oh fuck, yes!’ Zach says, suddenly animated, grabbing Dean’s socked foot tightly then releasing it. ‘That girl from ... where was that?’

‘Kyoto,’ I tell them.

‘Yes! Oh God, what the fuck was that girl’s name ?’

‘Luke says she kissed him,’ Dean says. ‘That day we all went to the museum.’

‘He told me they did more than that.’

‘No way. You know Japanese chicks. All prim and proper and shit. That wouldn’t happen, even for Luke.’

I try to keep my head up and stay into the conversation, but the more I do that, the more the world spins, and the easier it is to stare down into the bottom of my mostly empty

71 glass. The ice is melted and what’s left of the bourbon and Coke has turned a weird shade of red, with a pathetic rim of bubbles turning into white scurf around the edge.

‘Guys …’ I say, ‘I’m not feeling great, I think I’m gonna go to bed.’

I’m not entirely sure they even hear me.

‘Noriko!’ Dean yells. ‘That was her name!’

At this point, I call it a night.

72 Welcome to my somewhat neurotic world

I wake up late, feeling somewhat fuzzy. Clearly Dean and Zach have managed to emerge already; the beds are empty, the sheets tangled and sweaty, and the floor is strewn with t- shirts and boxer shorts, sweaty and cast aside, and the air smells vaguely of socks and Lynx deodorant. I stumble across the room to check my reflection in the full-length mirror attached to one of the cupboard doors; my hair is kind of a mess, sticking up at various odd angles, and my eyes, when I inspect them closely, pulling the skin back and moving my head from side to side, appear bloodshot. How does that Bruce Springsteen song go …? I check my look in the mirror, I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face . I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I’ve had better days.

My phone is sitting on the floor near one of the beds, plugged in to charge. I pick it up, and the icons on the screen tell me that there is one missed call and one message. Shit.

How could I have slept through that? I fumble with the buttons to unlock it, and see Zoe’s name come up on the tiny display. My stomach lurches a little and I’m not quite sure what to do – would it have been worse to answer her call, hung over and all messy in the head than it was to miss her and leave her hanging for … how long? I check the time of the call and discover that it was nearly four hours ago. Oh, this is just a fantastically wonderful turn of events; way too much to deal with in this queasy, pre-breakfast state. I check the message.

JUST GOT TO BYRON! TRAFFIC =

BULLSHIT LOOKING FORWARD

2 SEEING U SOON MAYBE? XOX

ZOE

There are so many things to decode in that message, my head actually hurts to think about it. I mean, seriously … Zoe and I have been talking on the internet for ages, we’re pretty good friends, so it’s obvious that she’d end the message with a little, affectionate touch, right? I mean, that’s what you do with your friends. The XOX … I mean, that’s like a kiss and a hug and another kiss. Is that platonic? Is that, like, I want to do these things to you ? But

73 then there’s the issue of the traffic, which just throws a whole other, crazy spanner into the works. Talking to someone about the traffic is like talking to them about, I don’t know, weather conditions or something, right? It’s neutral. It’s not sexy. It’s not I can’t wait to get into bed with you, you tremendous hottie or anything like that. It’s … traffic.

Then there’s the phrase ‘looking forward to seeing you soon maybe’ to worry about; not to mention the question mark. Damn that question mark. Damn it to hell. I pace the room, one hand holding onto my phone, the other running nervously through my hair, flattening it into an even weirder shape than it was when I woke up. When a girl says that, does it mean she’s actually looking forward to seeing you? That she’s nervous? The exclamation mark, though, casts the question mark in a whole different light. We just got to Byron – exclamation mark! We’re in Byron, I’m glad to be here and it’s sure going to be great to see you … maybe.

This is all too much to think about. I’m clearly going to need to consult with the guys.

When I make it to the living room, Zach and Dean are sitting in front of the large flat screen television flickering in the background, in the midst of a fairly involved discussion.

‘Okay,’ says Dean, thinking really hard about something. ‘Natalie Portman, The Rock,

Will Smith, in a spy movie. Go.’

The two of them are playing The Imaginary Movie Game – someone, a long time ago, thought this game up, or maybe stole it from the internet, and since then, it’s become kind of a staple activity for my friends and me, especially when drunk or bored. The rules are pretty simple, and you can do it in any place and at any time. Player one names three actors and a genre – player two must then come up with the plot for an entire movie based on that information.

‘Hmm …’ says Zach. ‘Will Smith is an FBI agent under cover as a terrorist, and The

Rock is a terrorist under cover as an FBI agent …’

‘Okay,’ Dean says, ‘this is pretty weak stuff so far, but continue.’

‘And Natalie Portman is a pole dancer who steals The Rock’s briefcase, but it’s really a bomb that will destroy New York in a matter of hours unless Will Smith can find her. The twist is that The Rock has a secret gay crush on Will Smith, and if they can’t be together, then he wants the world to end instead, so …’

‘It’s always secret gay crushes with you,’ says Dean.

74 ‘It’s not me. It’s The Rock.’

‘... so Will Smith and Natalie Portman are actually old lovers,’ I interrupt, ‘and when she finds out he’s undercover, she tries to blackmail him; she ends up handcuffed to the suitcase; there’s a big car chase with millions of dollars of damage, and in the end, Will Smith switches the briefcase out so The Rock explodes as he’s escaping into a helicopter, while Will and Natalie take the other briefcase, which actually has ten million dollars in it, and ...’

‘Wait, what other briefcase?’ Zach asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘there’s another one.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s a movie.’

‘You’re not very good at this, Hayden,’ Zach says after a while.

I shrug, opening the fridge and contemplating the bottle of cold water that’s there before wondering if I should just bite the bullet and have another beer instead. ‘Can I ask your opinion on something?’ I say to the guys after a while.

‘What is it?’ Dean asks.

‘It’s this girl ... Zoe, you know the one?’

‘What, you mean your internet girlfriend?’ Zach laughs.

‘She’s not my internet girlfriend. I’ve met her.’

‘Once,’ Zach says.

‘We didn’t meet on the internet. The only way she could be an internet girlfriend is if

I’d never met her face to face. Either way, she’s coming to Byron this weekend.’

‘And ...?’ Zach asks.

‘Well, I dunno. Do you think I have a chance?’

‘Of what,’ Zach chuckles, ‘meeting up for a quiet chat down in Byron?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Well bruvva, I’ve seen photos, and if the girl in them is indeed Zoe – I’m not entirely convinced of that, by the way – then she’s hot. She’s damned hot.’

‘Thanks,’ I say.

‘Hot enough that she probably has a boyfriend she’s not telling you about ...’ Zach says.

75 Shit. The thought of that hadn’t even occurred to me until just now.

‘Yeah,’ Dean interrupts, ‘or that she just wants to be friends with you. Just friends is the worst. She likes you, but not in that way ...’

‘Yeah,’ Zach says, ‘and if that’s the case, you have even less of a chance than Luke of getting any this week.’

‘I dunno about that,’ Dean says, cautiously. ‘Luke was getting pretty friendly with that

Natalie girl last night …’

‘Are they still here?’

‘I dunno, man,’ I say. ‘When I passed out, they were still talking. Hey, is it too early for a beer?’

‘It’s never too early for a beer,’ Dean says.

‘Hey, get me one too,’ asks Zach.

I crack open two beers for the guys and one for me, pass them around and slump down on the floor at Zach’s feet. ‘Luke can’t have gotten all that far last night. I mean, that

Natalie chick seemed like a nice girl. She wouldn’t …’

‘She wouldn’t fuck him on the first date?’

‘No, I should say not,’ I tell them.

We pause to consider this for a moment.

‘Does oral sex count as part of the bet?’ Dean asks.

‘I dunno,’ Zach says, shrugging, ‘we need to sit down with Luke and work out the terms of this thing.’

‘I mean,’ I say. ‘Oral sex is acceptable on a first date.’

‘It’s practically compulsory,’ adds Zach.

‘So even if they didn’t …?’ Dean asks.

‘Mmm-hmm …’ I mutter.

‘They probably …?’ Dean continues.

‘Yes,’ says Zach.

‘What are we watching?’ I ask.

‘Jackass,’ both of the guys say at once.

76 I probably didn’t even need to ask – one look at the borderline retarded dudes on the screen jumping off stuff and running amok on the streets of Tokyo tells me straight away what’s going on, television-wise. My friends are really into this show, maybe a little too into it. I kind of hope they don’t try to replicate any of the crazy Jackass stunt shit – crazy stunts, after all, being the whole point of the show – this week. When my friends watch this stuff after a few too many beers, stuff often happens. Once last year, Dean actually set himself on fire for a period of about thirty seconds. We didn’t tell our folks about that one … or anyone else, for that matter. My friends … gotta love ‘em.

Jackass finishes and then there’s an MTV promo and then another show featuring blonde LA girls who look like carbon copies of each other and is called something like Who

Wants To Be Exploited? We sit there in silence, drinking our beers and watching it.

‘Hey guys,’ I ask after a while, ‘if a girl signs off a text message with an XOX, what does that mean?’

‘It means you’re a faggot,’ Zach snorts.

‘I concur,’ says Dean.

‘No, but seriously … I mean, I like Zoe. I kinda like her a whole bunch …’

‘Oh Hayden! Haaaay-den …’ Zach slides down off the couch, moaning my name repeatedly while he thrusts his crotch in my face, ‘oh, you’re such a big boy, Hayden, oh god, give it to me ...’

I push Zach away and we slap each-other around the head a little bit, and eventually, when he’s on the floor, panting and laughing, I tell him: ‘You know, you can laugh all you want dude, but you’re the only one without an actual flesh and blood female lined up for this week

… Dean’s got Callie, who’s also a chick, or at least she was the last time I checked …’ Dean snorts at this. ‘So at this point in time, it looks like you’re probably gonna be sitting here on the couch picking your butt and popping secret boners over Johnny Knoxville all week.’

Dean shrugs. ‘He makes a fair point.’

‘I just don’t know, guys,’ I say. ‘I mean, the XOX, does that mean she likes me, or …’

‘Dude,’ Dean cuts in, ‘I never really thought I’d have to say this to you, but you’re thinking too much. You need to chill. She obviously likes you or she wouldn’t have been

77 engaging you in what I can only assume is a coy, white-bread internet flirtation for the last however many months, right?’

These are the most words either of us has heard Dean say in several months. For a second, Zach and I are so stunned by his sudden burst of forthrightness that we are both silent.

‘I guess,’ I say, taking a moment to gather my thoughts.

‘Okay, and she knows what you look like and hasn’t yet gone running for the hills, which is also a good sign, yeah?’ Dean continues.

‘You could say …’

‘Morning, fellas.’

It’s Luke, standing over the other side of the apartment and looking pretty damned smug, not to mention pretty damned pleased with himself … it might have something to do with the girl standing over there next to him.

I’m not quite sure what to do right now, or how to behave. We all knew that Natalie was here, but seeing her here, a flesh and blood female, with her hair all messed up, wearing one of Luke’s oversized shirts and looking, well, pretty damned post-coital, is still a shock to the system. The others are just as mute; Zach’s expression is frozen, his eyes are wide in shock, and his blonde head is poking up kind of like one of those meerkats in the documentary.

‘Morning, guys,’ she says. It takes a while before any of us can reply, before Zach can squeeze out a half-hearted ‘morning … Natalie.’

When it becomes clear that further scintillating conversation is probably not going to be on the agenda, Natalie turns to Luke and asks if she can have a drink. Luke asks if she’d prefer alcoholic or non-alcoholic, and she has to think about it for quite a long time.

78 In town for lunch, including some surly encounters with locals, and

an incredibly graphic sex story from Luke … in other words, a fairly

normal day

We’re at the Subway in town, waiting to get served and feeling a little under the weather and more than a little surly, but that might not be a bad thing, because our mood matches pretty much exactly that of the kids who appear to work here. I say appear to because, well … you know why. They’re standing behind the counter, looking at the many hung over out-of-town kids with barely disguised contempt and moving at a pace that could probably best be described as glacial. A couple of the girls appear to have stopped working all together and are leaning over the counter talking to a pair of emo-ish dudes with tatts down their legs and sideways caps, who have an air of cultivated menace about them suggesting that they’re almost definitely locals.

The restaurant, as I mentioned, is crowded beyond all rational explanation with kids who probably woke up about the same time as we did, and with roughly the same craving for warm, sandwich-y deliciousness. It’s raining lightly outside, and with the crowd in here, the air has become somewhat steamy. Everything is a little too bright and a little too artificial-looking.

Someone has tuned the radio in to Triple J, and the music – some new Swedish group who recently got an 8.8/10 review on Pitchfork; I know these things – plays at a volume that could probably most accurately be described as ear-splitting. Luke fidgets, simultaneously checking out two sleepy-looking indie girls in the line ahead of us, tapping his fingers on a metal railing, and promising to tell us all about his adventures with Natalie last night just as soon as he can get some decent food in him. Right , I’m thinking , I can wait .

When we finally get to the counter and order, the girl there – blonde, a little bit

Christina Aguilera-ish if Christina Aguilera was two feet shorter and a dude – takes what feels like an age to prepare our sandwiches. She manages to screw up both Luke’s order and mine

– I’m too hung over and, frankly, too scared to say anything, but Luke keeps pushing the point. He asks for olives and doesn’t get any, so when he asks again, she grabs a handful so

79 pathetically tiny it almost has to be a challenge. When Luke asks for more, she shoots him a look so contemptuous it actually stops him in his tracks – not an easy thing to do.

A group of dudes almost identical to us stand up from a table near the window, and we rush to claim it before anyone else does. The table is covered in empty paper cups and balled-up sandwich wrappers and balled-up sandwich wrappers stuffed inside empty paper cups, and there is a slow, sticky puddle of spilled coke at one end. This seems to be the debris of several groups before us – I’m almost afraid to disturb any of it as we sit down, in case this table later proves to be a site of archaeological significance.

‘Holy shit,’ Luke says once we’re settled. ‘That was one angry girl.’

‘You would be if you had to work here,’ says Dean, his mouth already half full of food.

For a minute or so, we are silent, tearing into or sandwiches like animals. It’s not just that we are distracted by the food; we’ve known Luke for long enough that we can sense what’s about to happen. Sure enough, as he wipes his mouth clean with the back of a hand: ‘Whoa guys, let me tell you. Last night with Natalie ... that shit got pretty intense.’

I grunt in assent, pretending to be fascinated by the writing on the back of my soft drink cup. This is all the impetus Luke needs to continue.

‘You saw her, right? She looked so sweet and innocent, but fuuuuck ...’

Luke embellishes from here, telling how he started off with her nice and slow, and about how you have to really listen to girls, echo back what they say in order to make them feel smart and whatnot. As he tells the story – focussing on the detail about how he poured her a vodka and cranberry with a triple shot of vodka and slid his fingers in under the elastic of her panties as she sipped it – I can’t help but think that the Natalie I met last night is just, I don’t know … too damned smart to for a guy like Luke. Then again, the only vague hint of sex

I’ve been getting is on the internet with a girl I only met once in a bookstore, so what does that say about me? Go Luke.

Eventually, Luke gets to the part where they did the deed … he’s really proud of himself and smirking the entire time. He told her ‘we don’t have to’, which is a really smart and sensitive thing to say and makes girls completely lose their shit in bed, apparently, because she then whispered back to him ‘… but I want to’. She gave him a blowjob – nice and slow, he says, with two hands around it (YEAH RIGHT, I’m thinking, but don’t say it out loud) – and

80 after that, they snuggled for a long time and he ran his hands through her hair and told her she was gorgeous. Again, according to Luke, this apparently makes girls putty in your hands.

I’m sceptical, but then, Natalie didn’t exactly spend the night in my room.

We get up to leave the Subway, wiping our mouths with napkins, Luke with the back of his hand. Dean trains the last of his coke and then shakes around the ice in the cup just in case, just on the off chance that he might find some more … he is unsuccessful, and actually looks really sad about it, in a puppy dog sort of a way. We ball up our wrappers and leave them there on the table for future fast food archaeologists. After this, we exit, walking out

Reservoir Dogs-style, slow motion, with Luke as the leader of the pack.

Out on the street, the rain is still coming down lightly, and the Byron dudes who were inside the restaurant before are now leaning against a nearby wall, attempting to look menacing. One is wearing black shorts and cons and has tatts all down one leg, and the first thing I wonder when I look at him is how long they took to do, and whether or not they hurt when he got them. The thought of this guy lying in a tattoo parlour on his stomach and crying, with one leg stuck up in the air at an odd angle, is especially funny for some reason, although

I try not to dwell at it. Luke, it seems, is also looking in the dudes’ direction, and when they look back at us, there is a hint of menace in their eyes, something that the people in the white family wagon definitely didn’t have.

The guys in Byron really have a problem with out of town kids, it seems. The one without the tattoos – who has on a sideways trucker cap and whose lip is pierced – asks us what the fuck we’re looking at. Luke tells him that we’re not looking at anything … I’m not entirely sure if this is meant to reassure him or not, but the way in which Luke says it suggests aggression. I’m gritting my teeth, thinking dude, leave them the fuck alone , but Luke seems determined to take the bait. One of the dudes mutters something about tourists, and Luke says pointedly – to us as much as to them – that Byron is a tourist economy, which is, after all, how their mummies and daddies keep them in Converse sneakers and My Chemical

Romance albums. This comment either goes over the dudes’ heads, or they choose to ignore it, muttering darkly at one-another instead. Either way, we manage to escape unscathed, for now.

81 Zombie Ghost Party: Behind The Music

All up and down the main road, there are throngs of kids our age, but none of them seems to be moving with any real sense of purpose. Friends stand around in clusters; occasionally, someone will break away from one group to join another, but the overall impression is of actors who’ve been dropped in without a script, and are milling around waiting for some sort of direction. We begin to merge with the crowd, our own sense of purpose somewhat lacking, when we spot some familiar figures across the road … specifically, some dudes from our old school who are now fairly disproportionately well known as a result of the media-saturated world in which we live.

‘Oh no fucking way you guys, is that …?’ Zach stops us in our tracks, points at an unspecified point across the street.

‘Is that who?’ I ask. There are a large number of guys standing there, all of whom look pretty much identical. I crane my neck, annoyed, trying to figure out what he’s so interested in.

‘Over there , dickhead. Those guys.’

‘Isn’t that …?’

‘Are they the guys from the band?’

‘Those fags?’

The guys from Zombie Ghost party are indeed standing there, looking wonderfully dishevelled, especially the lead singer, Max, who is being fawned over by some willowy- looking indie girls. The way the guys in the band dress, it’s like they’re sponsored by General

Pants or something; it’s kind of insane. It’s the whole indie fashion thing … the huge sunglasses, the oversized white shirt that looks like it’s filled with tiny bullet holes … the vintage Nikes that were ugly at the time and look even more ridiculous now. Asinine, retina- scorching retro-revivalist fashions are not just for girls any more, it seems.

Okay, so I guess I should probably give you a little background on these guys.

Zombie Ghost Party is a group of dudes who went to school with us; in fact, Brendan, the drummer, was in my history class in grade eleven, and sat in the row in front of me. Those jokes you hear about how you know the stage is level because there’s drool coming out both

82 sides of the drummer’s mouth? That stuff is pretty much entirely true. Once, during a unit on the Second World War, he put his hand up and asked, in this really slow, deliberate voice,

‘Miss … is Hitler still alive?’ To think of the girls this guy must get now … it sickens me. But

I’ve digressed somewhat from the point of this story.

Zombie Ghost Party formed in grade ten, in Brendan’s parents’ garage. After a few name and line-up changes, the boys – with their angular fringes, clattering bass, haphazard synth stabs and yelping vocals, courtesy of Max – were signed to an enormously trendy indie label after some guy from down south happened upon a song of theirs on the internet and had them on a plane to Melbourne the following week. If they’d been popular around school before, this elevated them to the status of legends.

It all happened pretty quickly for them after that. The record label put an obscene amount of money into pimping out a MySpace page for the band, and before long, their friends list was filled up with nubile and probably extremely underage girls offering to do things that would not have gone down well at our all boys’ school (actually, I can’t say that for a fact … we’ve all heard the rumours about Oliver, the keyboard player but maybe that’s not best discussed right now). After the MySpace slot, things got kind of huge for them; they supported The Reset Button on a national tour, and their single, I Used To Be A Victim Of

Your Love, Now I’m A Refugee, became a surprisingly big hit with the fourteen-plus crowd.

They were fawned over by the fuzzy-haired girl on Video Hits, and given an even more obscene amount of money to record a debut album. Their music, of course, was horrible, and pretty much always had been, but with a bunch of the label’s cash – and some time spend in a London studio with a prominent indie dance producer who would later enter rehab for a debilitating crack addiction – they were somehow able to fluke one of the biggest selling albums of the year. Nobody’s quite sure if they graduated from school or not, but at the moment, that doesn’t matter so much, I guess.

Max and Oliver from the band are standing on the other side of the road … the guys go up and say hi. Luke, even though he openly despises them, goes right up to Max and greets him effusively and back-slappingly, as though the two of them are old friends. Max clearly has a vague idea, at best, of who Luke is, but he plays along anyway, saying ‘hey man’ and hugging him back as though the bond between them is long established and

83 special. Luckily for us, Dean is actually old friends with Max – they went to pre-school together, and this long-standing memory is one that Max’s doubtlessly fogged memory has not edited out just yet. Max and Dean exchange an elaborate handshake which turns into a hug, and it becomes clear pretty well straight away that they’re tight.

Max seems a little out if it as we exchange pleasantries, but when Dean asks him how it is touring the world (the boys have just come back from Japan), he comes over all melancholy. ‘It’s a trip, man,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘It’s a real trip. We were staying at this hotel in Tokyo and the rooms were so small, and there were these girls there, and oh man, they were weird. There was this Swedish or Norwegian girl and she was so weird. She was like three feet taller than the Japanese girls. We drank whiskey and played Connect

Four.’

‘The hotel was crazy too,’ says Oliver, possibly the first time he’s spoken. ‘There were all these … rooms. And we kept getting lost inside all these rooms. Kanye West was staying there.’

‘We went to his show,’ adds Max, ‘and afterwards we played Connect Four with his entourage. It was a trip.’

The conversation continues in this vein for a while – Max tells us that the band have hired a house up on Lighthouse Road – a really expensive and disconcertingly huge house; he seems to be a bit freaked out by the size of it and unsure of where the money is actually coming from – and as the various band members’ attention is diverted by a posse of young- looking girls, he tells us that we should come up and see them.

‘I dunno guys,’ Luke says as we walk away. ‘That Max seems to be full of shit.’ I suspect most of his scepticism boils down to jealousy, but as Dean points out, the guys from

Zombie Ghost Party have the hook-ups, and while they might be douchebags, their house will be amazing, and the girls there probably even more so. Given that it would be a killer place to party – and given the terms of Luke’s bet – it seems absurd that they would turn down such an invitation. Luke grudgingly says he’ll think about it.

84 Sitting on the balcony talking to the girl I’m kind of in love with

using the power of wireless internet … it sounds like a rejected Fall

Out Boy song title, but it’s actually how I spend my afternoon

After our not entirely unexpected brush with fame (hahha), the guys and I head back to the apartment, where we crack open some fresh beers and, unable to come up with any worthwhile plans for a fresh assault on Byron Bay this evening, stick on a DVD of The Big

Lebowski instead. Since they and I can already quote pretty much every single line from this movie – and because I’m feeling kinda restless and missing Zoe – I give it a miss and head out onto the balcony with a beer in one hand and my laptop in the other.

My MSN takes a while to connect, and I sit with feet up on the table, edgy and uncomfortable in spite of the cool breeze, hoping to see Zoe there waiting for me. Well, maybe not specifically waiting for me, but, y’know. I’ve barely even connected when:

ZOE: Heya!

HAYDEN: Heey! So yr finally in Byron?

ZOE: Yep. It was a long trip, I did some things that will probably haunt me til the day I die, but

yes, I finally made it down

She tells me more about her trip down, the apartment she and her friends are staying in, and I tell her stories abut Byron so far; we continue making awkward jokes at each-other for a while until the subject of last night’s party comes up, and, more specifically, of Luke:

HAYDEN: We kinda have a bet with him …

ZOE: How’s that work?

HAYDEN: I’m not sure I want to tell you …

ZOE: Why? Is it guy stuff? I can handle guy stuff, I’m tougher than you think.

HAYDEN: It’s not that specifically … I’m worried that, like … right now, I’m presuming that

you think I’m a nice guy.

85 ZOE: You’d be correct in that presumption.

HAYDEN: Right, so I’m worried that if I tell you about my participation in this plan, you’ll think

I’m some kind of crazy … um, how do you spell that word …?

ZOE: I don’t know.

HAYDEN: Misogynist … Is that the one where you hate women?

ZOE: That’s the crib note version of it, I believe.

HAYDEN: I’m worried you’ll think I’m one of those.

ZOE: Now you definitely have to tell me about this plan of yours. What do you have to do.

HAYDEN: I don’t have to do anything. I’m more of an observer than a participant.

ZOE: And …?

HAYDEN: Okay, it’s to do with my friend Luke.

ZOE: The one who was saying all those charming things about All Hallows girls?

HAYDEN: Yeah, him. We were saying that … Okay, he was talking about how easy it would

be to, you know, like, to meet girls on schoolies. Drunken girls, on the beach, at parties.

ZOE: That’s beautiful and touching.

HAYDEN: Hey, none of this is me! I’m just observing, like I said. But Luke was telling us all

about, like, how great he is with girls and how much they’re into him …

ZOE: What’s not to love? He sounds like a charmer.

HAYDEN: So we said to him, yeah, sure, if you’re so great with girls, why don’t you go pick up a girl tonight? And then we just started talking bullshit to each-other and upping the ante,

and eventually he said, okay, I won’t just get one, I’ll get seven.

ZOE: What? Simultaneously?

HAYDEN: No, one for each day of the week.

ZOE: Wow … okay.

HAYDEN: I feel ashamed to be a part of this.

ZOE: You should.

HAYDEN: Are you judging me right now?

ZOE: Hey, who am I to interfere when it comes to observing the mating habits of others?

HAYDEN: Hahha.

ZOE: So how’s the bet working out for him?

86 HAYDEN: Well … he invited some girls around last night, and one of them stayed til this

morning.

ZOE: Wow. Did they ..?

HAYDEN: We think so.

ZOE: Okay.

HAYDEN: You know what’s weird …

ZOE: What?

HAYDEN: Luke always talks really loudly at girls, and I don’t know what that is. Do you find it

a turn-on when guys talk loudly at you?

ZOE: I’m more of an MSN kinda girl.

HAYDEN: Hahha. But it’s weird, you know? It’s like he thinks he’ll engage them on some

primal level, like he’s taking it back to caveman days, and by shouting the loudest he’s

displaying his ability to keep away dinosaurs and other wild beasts …

ZOE: You jealous?

HAYDEN: Why would I be jealous?

ZOE: I dunno.

HAYDEN: I mean, when you’re hanging out with your female friends, have you ever heard

one of them, like, praise a guy for the loudness of his voice?

ZOE: We mostly just braid each-other’s hair and have pillow fights.

HAYDEN: So it’s never come up?

ZOE: I’ve never heard it come up. And can I just say for the record that you’re a complete

weirdo?

HAYDEN: You’ve been saying that since we met.

ZOE: Maybe we need to meet again.

HAYDEN: Yeh. I think so.

ZOE: What are you up to?

HAYDEN: Not much, You?

It kills me to be so nonchalant … I mean, like, yeah, I’m not up to anything much at all, just chilling, just kicking back, I’m not really up to much. Maybe if you’re also not up to much we

87 could, I dunno, meet up somewhere and do some more of not much … It’s ridiculous, but I guess it’s one of those things you need to go through.

ZOE: We’re going for a drive today.

HAYDEN: K

ZOE: My friend Lauren has a cousin who lives down the coast. He and his friends are having

some party tonight and I said I’d go along.

HAYDEN: Sounds like fun.

People say it’s easy to hide your real emotions on the internet, but I don’t think that’s a hundred percent true. I mean, some guys make bad jokes to hide their crushing disappointment, and others just become sullen and monosyllabic. Damn ... I wish I could pull out a word like ‘monosyllabic’ right now. Girls are right into guys who use big words … right?!

ZOE: It’s probably going to suck … But, you know, I think I should be responsible. Go along

just in case Lauren, I don’t know, drinks a bottle of Jim Beam and ends up pregnant with

some local guy’s baby.

HAYDEN: Or worse, her cousin’s …

Oh, nice. I totally saved that one with one of my stellar attempts at humour. Nice going, dude.

ZOE: Hahha, quite. It would be more fun to hang out with you instead …

HAYDEN: We’ll have other chances. We’ve got all week.

ZOE: Maybe tomorrow some time?

HAYDEN: That could be awesome.

ZOE: Okay, I should get going. The girls are waking up and they’re looking hung-over and

angry.

HAYDEN: Sounds terrifying.

ZOE: You have no idea. Lauren has a stash of Red Bull in the fridge. If I get between her and

it, she may actually punch me in the face.

88 HAYDEN: Hahha. I think we’re gonna go check out Byron, see what’s happening in town,

maybe go to the beach.

ZOE: Work on your tan ..

HAYDEN: My computer tan, you mean?

ZOE: Hahha! Okay, I really gotta go.

HAYDEN: Talk so you soon.

ZOE: Byes <3

Yes, I am aware of that little love heart that pops onto the screen as Zoe logs off, and yes, my world does temporarily implode. All girls talk to their friends that way, right? I mean, the little heart is an affectionate gesture. It doesn’t actually mean, you know, I love you or anything as serious as that … Should I have responded in some way, as in, reciprocated, or said something lame in an attempt to be funny, as is my usual way of dealing with such interactions? I’m in way too fragile a condition for this shit, and I’m way too sober … I’m going to need a drink – probably several, in fact – if I’m to continue facing the day in some rational manner.

89 Even if your band name is as dumb as Zombie Ghost Party, it’s

still possible for you to rent an awesome and expensive house on

Lighthouse Road … apparently

As the afternoon drags on, my restlessness seems to spread to the other guys in the apartment … I’m not sure how the state was reached, but by mutual consent, we’ve decided it’s far too early in the day to do shots, but the movie has finished, so we’re sitting around in the living room drinking Jim Beam with old Beastie Boys songs cranked up on Dean’s iPod.

Luke is laying half on and half off the couch and is still spinning variations on his story about

Natalie – how amazingly tight she was, how he had to talk her out of doing it a third time because he was just so tired – as we listen, vaguely resentful and partly unconscious.

As Luke begins to get tired of repeating himself – no mean feat for a dude of his extremely limited conversational abilities and absurdly inflated sense of self-worth – the discussion turns to what we might do this evening. Dean suggests playing video games and drinking a lot more until inspiration strikes, but the point is made that we’re young and free and this is the best time of our lives and we’re absolute pussies if we don’t go out and make something of this evening. We discuss the Zombie Ghost Party option and decide that, even though the guys from that band are almost definitely douchebags, their rented house will probably be beyond awesome, and there will almost definitely be drunk and hot girls there, just like in the song.

We get our shit together, lock the apartment up and begin the trek up towards the top of Lighthouse Road; despite how furiously busy Byron has been so far this week, this part of town seems relatively quiet. There are only a few cars parked in the gravel lot halfway up the road – some surfer dudes who look to be in their twenties are camped out there in an old van, and we wave at them as we go.

The large, modern structure at the top of the road that we take to be the Zombie

Ghost Party house actually turns out to be a garage. We make our way around the side, past some fairly spiky foliage and up a set of sandstone stairs, to what could be the main entrance

(although it could be a supply cupboard or something ... all bets are apparently off). We ring

90 the buzzer and knock on the red cedar door a few times, although nobody seems to hear us, and we eventually have to call Max on his phone to come let us in. He answers the door in boxer shorts and socks, carrying a bong and looking significantly bleary-eyed, although he is hugely pleased to see us nonetheless.

‘Fellas!’ he says, his eyes narrowing and his mouth forming a big, cheesy grin;

‘Dudes! Good to see ya!’ He and Dean trade a complicated, slow-motion handshake, and

Max slaps him once on the back before ushering us all inside, telling us that his house is our house, offering us the tour, offering us drinks and offering us some highly illicit all in the space of a rambling but extremely entertaining sentence.

The house, predictably, is huge … so ridiculously huge, in fact, that it seems like they’re really not entirely sure what to do with it, and have retreated to various corners, letting the wide empty spaces and extremely tasteful furnishings speak for themselves. As Max shows us around the cavernous entrance hall, it becomes very clear that this is a place for grown-ups, and the band, not knowing the first thing about acting like grown-ups, have reverted to their most basic of child-like states and set to work on trashing it. I have no idea what kind of damned fool entrusted this place to a group of chemically-altered seventeen and eighteen year olds, as separated from authority figures as they are from any sense of responsibility, but hey, I’m not here to critique, I’m just here for the ride.

The kitchen is amazing, and is fitted out with all kinds of stainless steel appliances, and an oven that I’ve seen in some friends of my parents’ house and I happen to know is worth more than a small car, but the guys really haven’t put the kitchen to very effective use

… there are pizza boxes scattered throughout; on the island in the middle of the kitchen is a collection of empty Jim Beam bottles so large its actually a little scary. How the fuck did they get through all this booze? It doesn’t really matter.

There is an esky full of Coronas sitting in the hall, and an entire section of the double fridge is filled up with them. I’m not sure how it was physically possible to come by all this beer – Max mutters something about a sponsorship deal before telling us to take however much we want – but it seems to have made them confused and dissolute. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything like that, we each grab a beer before moving on to the upstairs living room, the next stop on this Max’s magical mystery tour.

91 The living room is a big open space, with polished wood floors and big, plush sofas that can be rearranged into any position that’s called for. ‘We’re thinking of moving these around for the party,’ Max begins a little vaguely, ‘but we don’t know where to put them.’

‘When are you guys having a party?’ Luke asks.

‘Oh man,’ Max turns around, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t tell you this already. It’s after our show on Thursday – it’s gonna be off the hook! We’re playing down at the beach on Thursday with a whole bunch of bands – Bad Day Dying is gonna be there, The Cutters – and then we’re coming back here. It’s gonna be the best party evaaaaaahs .’

‘Sweet dude, so can we come along?’

‘Hell yeaaaah ,’ Max says. ‘There are gonna be girls here, there are gonna be brews

… It’s gonna be mad. Just don’t tell too many people, okay?’ He suddenly comes over all serious, furrowing his brow. ‘We don’t want to lose our deposit on the house ... y’know ... that would be ... bad … for that to happen.’

‘Yeah man, definitely,’ Luke says reassuringly, ‘you definitely have our word on that.’

As we continue the tour, Max takes us out to the terrace. I’ve gotta say, it’s pretty great out here, and it beats the hell out of the balcony we have at the apartment. Looking straight ahead, you can see the tree line – if you’re in the mood to get that close to nature – but looking down, you can see the vanishing pool, which right now is filled with a fair cross section of incredible looking girls. ‘I’ll introduce you to those guys later,’ Max says, hustling us along, ‘they’re cool, but c’mon, there’s a whole heap more to show you.’

Next stop is a downstairs room containing a drum kit, a keyboard, and a variety of guitars, basses and amps strewn around haphazardly, along with a bong bigger than a medium-sized dog and the remains of a large plasma-screen TV. As it turns out, the guys might already be facing some difficulties in terms of the deposit – Max mentions that, after or maybe during a rehearsal, Brendan was annoyed at something that was on MTV, threw a mostly-full beer bottle at the screen, and now it doesn’t work properly. They haven’t told the real-estate agency yet … they’re not entirely sure of what to do.

When we get back upstairs, a guy I don’t recognise – floppy hair, skinny, indie fashion casualty – is sitting on one of the sofas reading a book called The Unbearable Lightness Of

92 Being, although from what I can tell, he mustn’t be reading all that fast, because he’s holding the book upside-down.

‘This is Tiberius,’ says Max, by way of introduction. ‘We met him in an alley in

Melbourne when I was being sick after too many Jager shots one night and he’s a Scorpio and he’s also directing a video for us.’

‘Do we have MDMA in the house?’ Tiberius asks, slowly and carefully.

‘Uhh…’ Max thinks about it for a long time. ‘Negative.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Am I sure I don’t have MDMA?’

‘Yeah … You sure you don’t… have some that you might have … y’know … forgotten about?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. We’ve been over this. We had this same discussion an hour ago.’

‘Hey man, be chilled … I’m just saying, y’know, this is a house of love. We’re all good here, y’know, there’s like, there’s no tension or whatever here. I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine. So, y’know, maybe we do happen to have some, but…’

‘Look, you must know people in Byron who you can buy it from …?’ Max asks.

‘Yes,’ Tiberius says.

A long pause.

‘Well … why don’t you go ask some of them?’

‘Okay.’

93 If this was Los Angeles, we’d probably be part of some actor’s

super sweet entourage, but it’s Byron Bay, so we’re just a bunch of

dudes sitting by the pool checking out girls

We grab some beers from the seemingly limitless supply and head down by the pool. A group of girls are sitting boredly on and across some plastic deck chairs – trading iPod headphones, drinking big purple drinks, reading Cleo and Cosmo and Frankie magazines – but they perk up noticeably when Max arrives. When he slumps down in the centre of them, some sort of power play happens between the girls, before a blonde one takes the lead – she moves up behind Max and starts rubbing his shoulders, her legs either side of pale but well-defined torso. I wonder if they’re going to have sex later. They might.

We sit by the side of the pool for a while, dangling our feet in the water, drinking and listening to the conversations going on around. Luke tries his luck with the deck chair girls, but establishes fairly quickly that they’re here for band members only, so a lull falls over us and we sit, letting the smooth-hip hop playing from the stereo behind wash over us, and listening to the girls as they talk to and over one-another.

‘Alyssa was out with a bunch of Grammar guys …’ says a tall brunette from behind a huge pair of sunglasses. ‘She was all over them. It was wrong.’

‘You mean the guys who crashed that party at Lauren’s house?’ her Asian hottie friend asks.

‘Yeah, those were the ones, they were really gross, but she totally wanted to fuck at least two of them. Anyway, everyone was doing Jager bombs at the apartment and they’re all hyped up and so they decide to take it down to the beach …’

‘Oh my god. That would be right. I hope it was really sandy. I hope she got sand in her vagina. She’s such a bitch.’

‘That’s mean ,’ says the brunette, ‘but yeah, I know what you mean about the sand.

Anyway, she and the two Grammar guys are on the beach and they’re near this big bonfire, but they try to convince her to go up in the dunes with them …’

‘Typical …’

94 ‘No, that’s not even the best part. She doesn’t want to go with them so she tries to pull away, and then these two guys – these two Byron guys – come up to them and are all like, the girl said no , like they’re trying to defend her honour or something.’

‘Wow …’

‘I know.’

‘Byron guys are so gross.’

‘I don’t know …’

‘What?’ asks the Asian. ‘You like them?’

‘Some of them are kind of cute, I guess.’

‘Eww. No. Continue.’

‘Yeah … so the Byron guys and the Grammar guys actually start fighting over Lauren, and she’s there thinking oh my god, what the fuck is happening, have I, like, exited from reality and landed in some bad movie here or what?’

‘Wow …’

‘So then she told them to cut it out, that it was ridiculous, even though she was, like, totally honoured that they were fighting over her and stuff. Then she went home with one of them.’

‘One of whom?’

‘The Byron guys.’

‘Oh my god. That bitch. I hope he knocks her up. I hope he knocks her up and when their little emo baby’s born, I hope it has piercings and the piercings like totally rip chunks out of her flesh …’

‘That’s horrible!’

‘I know, right.’

‘Still, I would totally do a Byron guy.’

‘Eww! No. They’d be gross. They’d be smelly.’

‘I like smelly boys.’

‘That’s why you hang out with a band.’

95 Okay, we might not be part of a super sweet entourage, but my

friends still get into way more trouble than is good for them

Early the next afternoon, I wake up, feeling kind of hazy, at the apartment … the other guys are awake already, watching DVDs in the living room, but Luke is not. In fact, nobody has seen him at all. It’s all a little surreal. Last night, at Zombie Ghost Party’s house, those girls by the pool had pushed him over the edge. He decided that Byron guys were having all the fun – more to the point, taking all our women – and it wasn’t right. Something needed to be done.

We pointed out that this was kind of a ridiculous thing to be concerned about – as of last night, we’d heard of one out-of-town girls who might have had sex with a Byron dude, and that was a rumour at best – but Luke wouldn’t be deterred. He decided that it was integral to the bet – and to humanity – for him to find a Byron girl. At the very least, he would really be able to rub it in the faces of some of the local guys.

We hung out at the Zombie Ghost Party house for a few hours after that – we drank a lot more, played ping pong, hung out with the girls from the pool, who actually turned out to be sort of nice (I beat them both at ping pong but the brunette, Anna, demonstrated a scary ability to drink us all under the table). We ended up playing that video game where you have to sing along with dubious pop hits of the last twenty years, and Zach ended up performing a moving duet of the Titanic theme song with Anna, a feat that was beautiful and startling and in no way the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened.

As the night wore on, Luke got more and more worked up in his conviction that he would find a Byron girl . We stumbled back to the apartment pretty late – Zach had Anna’s number in his phone, and even though the exchange of details was more a drunken act of effusiveness than anything else, and they would probably never actually call each-other, Luke was still sort of upset that it wasn’t he who got the number. We split up after that – Zach,

Dean and I went back to the apartment to drink more, play videogames and, denied any real- life girls, perhaps go on an excursion into the world of pornography, but Luke would not be deterred so easily. After declaring us to be pussies, all, he swaggered towards the beach in search of Byron chicks to mess around with, stopping only to relieve himself in some bushes.

96 We received various text messages throughout the next few hours – Luke updating us on his success, conveying vital statistics of various girls – but after a while, they stopped coming. We all passed out around three and assumed that he would be home later (or at the very least, crashing at the hypothetical Byron girl’s house), but by mid-afternoon, when attempts to contact him had proven futile and no Luke sightings had been recorded, we started to worry, if only a little bit.

I walk through the apartment, bleary-eyed, surveying the carnage that has begun to build up – the bottles lying everywhere, the general disarray – and, making an executive decision to ignore it, taking my laptop out to the balcony. I sit at the table and wait for it to connect.

Zoe is online. It might be too much to hope that she’s there waiting just for me, but I get a little stomach-jumpy and nervous and excited when I see her, and quickly ask:

HAYDEN: How was the party?

ZOE: Really weird … the guys around here are scary

HAYDEN: How so?

ZOE: Lauren’s cousin picked us up in some bright green ute … The whole front part of it was

filled up with this huge sound system and it had rims on it and the whole bit

HAYDEN: Wow

ZOE: Yeah, and I mean, my dad has a BMW that’s practically older than I am so, y’know, I’ve

never been in a car like that before

HAYDEN: Hahha.

ZOE: And yeah, it was really cramped up the front because it’s me and Lauren and her

cousin and some friend of his who insisted on coming along for the trip, and we all had to

share the front seat. It was incredibly intense

HAYDEN: The guy didn’t try to have his way with you, did he?

ZOE: Hahha, just about. He was between Lauren and me – I said I wasn’t coming unless I could have the window seat – and he kept trying to make me drink these cans of bourbon. He

showed me this big scar that he had on his stomach from getting attacked by a bull.

HAYDEN: That sounds kind of cool

97 ZOE: Oh no, Hayden. You’re not one of those guys who go around with the notion that chicks

dig scars, are you?

HAYDEN: Not specifically

ZOE: Good. Because we don’t.

HAYDEN: I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I go swimming with sharks or whatever.

ZOE: Hahha, do

HAYDEN: So what happened at the party?

ZOE: It was surreal. There was a fight. I’ve never been to a party with an actual fight before.

Unless you count my dad’s fortieth birthday, when mum walked in on him and her best friend

in the kitchen … And come to think of it, last night’s fight was also girl on girl …

HAYDEN: Oh no

ZOE: Lauren and I were both terrified … She dragged me to some guest bedroom and we hid

in there for about an hour and drank vodka

HAYDEN: Sounds like fun

ZOE: No! These people came in and didn’t even see us and were seriously about to start

having sex on the bed until Lauren got up and started screaming at them. It was all kind of

downhill from there

HAYDEN: How’d you get home?

ZOE: This Reece guy we met was going into town to pick up his girlfriend. Lauren all but

offered to blow him in exchange for a lift

HAYDEN: Intense

ZOE: It didn’t come to that, which is fortunate, I think

HAYDEN: That’s nice for Lauren

ZOE: Hahha, yes. We were catatonic by the time we got back to the apartment. We just

watched DVDs and drank and felt grateful to be alive. You wouldn’t believe the fight we saw

at this party … two girls in tiny little Jennifer Lopez outfits tearing each-other’s hair out over

some boy

HAYDEN: I kinda wish I’d seen that

ZOE: No, you really don’t. Anyway, I’m mostly feeling like shit right now

HAYDEN: Understandable

98 ZOE: I’m thinking about going into town for a rejuvenating coffee it you want to come hang

with me for a bit …

I’m thinking this sounds like the best idea ever, and I’m about to type something to that effect – while simultaneously wondering what to wear, and if I should beat off in the shower first to get rid of some of the nervous jitters I’m suddenly feeling, when my phone starts to ring.

HAYDEN: Sounds great – hey, brb

ZOE: K

The sound of my phone is muffled, and after searching around the room – in my bag, under a copy of Spin that is lying open on the floor – until I find it buried in a pile of t-shirts.

The caller ID comes up as ‘withheld’, which strikes me as a little odd, but I answer anyway.

‘Dude! The person on the other end says in a hoarse whisper. ‘Dude, you there?’

‘What?’ I ask. ‘Who the hell is …?’

‘Dude!’, he says again, raspy. ‘Haydo. It’s me, it’s Luke. You there?’

‘Yeah I’m here … why are you …?’

‘No time to talk,’ he cuts me off. ‘It took me ages to call; I couldn’t remember your number, Listen, I’m in town …’

‘What?’

‘Shut up, dude. I only have fifty more cents.’

‘For what?’

‘For the payphone, numbnuts.’

‘What? What payphone?’

‘Listen! I’m on a payphone in town … I’m near some vegetarian restaurant.’

‘Why are you whispering?’

‘Because, dude – you remember that Hayley chick?’

‘From the beach last night?’

‘She has a boyfriend.’

99 ‘Shit, dude.’

I glance across at my laptop, bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet, tense.

The cursor is still sitting there, blinking, as Zoe waits for me to come back online. The urgency in Luke’s voice gives me the sense that his problem, whatever it is, is not going to go away, and is going to require immediate attention … my immediate attention, damn it all. Shit , I’m thinking as I listen to Luke talk, please don’t go offline, please don’t go offline . It would, after all, be bad form to pike on Zoe’s and my first date only minutes after making it.

‘He’s here . Shit, man. He and about ten of his mates. It’s …’ The payphone beeps menacingly. ‘Shit. Look, I’m in town near this restaurant …’

‘What’s it called ?’

‘I dunno … it’s … it’s vegetarian food.’

‘We’re in Byron , dude, that doesn’t narrow it …’

‘Don’t be sarcastic Haydo, just get the fuck over here. This dude’s really pissed; he and his mates are all out the front of this restaurant on the main street. Come help me out.’

‘I can’t, I’ve …’

‘You what? I’m dying here, c’mon! Don’t be such a little pussy!’

‘Dude, I …’

‘Come find me. Now. Bring the guys. I’m gonna need backup. This is …’

The frantic beeping of the phone suddenly cuts out as the call disconnects. Shit. I realise this is going to be my problem after all. I return to the internet, where Zoe is still waiting.

HAYDEN: Hey, when r u going?

ZOE: I was thinking kinda now-ish

HAYDEN: Shit. I can’t believe this, but something’s kinda come up

ZOE: In the last five minutes?

HAYDEN: It’s a rly long story

ZOE: If yr worried about meeting, we don’t have to

100 HAYDEN: No, no, it’s not that. It’s my friend Luke. He got with some girl and it turns out she

had a boyfriend and now he’s lost somewhere in town and about to get beaten up by like half

the line-up of My Chemical Romance

ZOE: That sucks for him

HAYDEN: And for me. I have to go rescue him

ZOE: You have interesting friends

HAYDEN: I most certainly do. So yeah, I kinda gotta go … can we meet up a bit later in the

day?

ZOE: Hahha, that’s okay – give me a call

HAYDEN: Definitely

ZOE: Okay, I need caffeine now or I’m gonna die. Talk soon <3

After Zoe signs off, I try and get my head together, pulling on a grubby pair of socks and cursing my life, my friends, my inability to get laid, Byron guys, Byron girls , the effects of alcohol on the adolescent brain, and especially Luke.

101 If we were on the streets of Tokyo, we might well be badass ninjas,

but even here, by the beach, we can still go on a badass ninja

rescue mission

Given that my options, at this point, are limited rescuing Luke or explaining to his parents why their son was set upon and killed by a group of chromosomally challenged Byron dudes, I decide that a badass ninja rescue mission is in order. Dean and Zach are in the living room; they have graduated from DVDs to playing some fighting game. Dean’s character, a cheerfully retarded looking guy with a staff, is beating the shit out of Zach’s, an Asian girl whose disproportionately large rack would probably put her at a disadvantage in any fight.

Though their general demeanour suggests an unwillingness to face the challenges of the day, they become noticeably more animated when the prospect of being involved in an actual, real-life adventure arises.

The guys quiz me on the details – what happened? How many guys? Has Luke already been beaten unconscious, and if so, how badly messed up is he and will he ever wake up from the coma? – but I’m feeling sort of grumpy from having missed out on the chance to meet up with Zoe, so I’m not spectacularly responsive. The guys pause the game and head to the freezer for some rejuvenating ice blocks, and I follow them – everything’s better after a delicious raspberry or grape flavoured icy treat.

I decide that the only way I’m going to be able to rescue Luke is if I make the task seem like something I want to do. As a kid, I’d dream up hugely elaborate contrivances to make annoying day-to-day tasks seem more bearable. I mean, for example, if I was going to the dentist, I wouldn’t be Hayden, I’d be Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, having smuggled vital government secrets back from the Middle East inside one of my molars. The pain of the extraction would then be a small price to pay, for the greater good of mankind … or something. I’m not entirely convinced that this technique will work anymore, but if I’m going to put any sort of effort at all into rescuing Luke, I’m clearly going to have to do it not as Hayden, but as a badass Ninja.

102 I slip on a pair of thongs and step out the front door of the apartment building, immediately regretting my decision not to wear sunglasses. It’s the kind of bright, glary morning that seems to exist only to mock hung-over individuals – the vastness of the sky, the dull brightness of the light making my head spin uncomfortably. Zach and Dean tumble out the door, their enthusiasm annoying me more than the headache that has slowly begun to come on. ‘Give me those’, I say, snatching the aviator sunnies from Zach’s head and slipping them on. It seems like he’s about to call me on it, but the ‘don’t fuck with me today’ expression on my face is clear enough that be backs off fairly quickly.

It becomes clear that Zach and Dean are planning to method-act their way through this whole ninja thing, while my enthusiasm for which is diminishing by the second. I don’t know why I told them about it in the first place. I’m pretty sure real ninjas are a lot stealthier – and a hell of a lot more coordinated – than three hung-over recent high school graduates, but this doesn’t deter Zach and Dean any. They hug walls closely as they pass, sneaking up on each other and striking with imaginary swords, and every time I point out that it’s basically an absurd thing to be doing given that the Byron dudes will just snap them in half even harder if they bear witness to such a display, the ninja game just gets more intense.

The buildings become larger and more frequent the closer we get to the centre of town – we pass by older, ratty-looking motels with brightly-coloured beach towels draped over the railings and scruffy, decidedly seedy-looking kids draped over each other. Those who could be bothered leaving the house this early in the day are out on the streets, wondering listlessly and chomping down on junk food in all its brightly-packaged goodness. A blonde- haired girl sits in the gutter, speaking loudly into her mobile phone; ‘he’s being a little bitch, he won’t talk to me at all, even though I told him I was sorry and he knows I’m not that good of a driver ... what? No, we haven’t told his dad yet. I don’t know. It’s just a scratch, it’s not like I crashed the fucking thing.’ She looks up at me and smiles half-heartedly as I pass, and I do my best to smile back.

We scan the crowds on the street to try and find a group of kids who look like locals.

In the end, it’s surprisingly easy to spot them – with their long socks and hoodies, the tattoos and lip-piercings, the stray crops of facial hair suggesting goatees in their very early infancy; these dudes could not be anything other than locals. As well as all these features, they just

103 have … I don’t know, that certain look of anger about them, grinding their fists into their palms and looking around suspiciously at all passers-by. They’re standing beside a laneway, not dissimilar to the layout Luke described, and one of them is making a big deal of his smoking, puffing out almost as though he wants someone to comment on how badass he looks. I mean, not to sound too puritanical, but come on ... at this point, everyone knows it’s bad for you. Why anyone our age smokes is a mystery to me. Maybe I could ask this guy – when he and his friends are done beating us up, that is.

Choosing what we hope is a safe vantage point behind a group of Japanese tourists

– who seem confused and horrified as to why there might be so many marauding teenagers in this otherwise quiet beachside town – we observe the dudes and plan our next move.

‘So, chaps, do we think that’s them?’ Zach asks.

‘Who the fuck else could it be?’

‘What could he possibly have done to get all those Neanderthals so angry with him?’

‘It’s Luke,’ I say, ‘we’ll never know. But we need to get him the fuck out of here so I can go home and drink a lot more to block out the memory of the fact that I spent schoolies doing shit like this instead of hanging out with my girlfriend.’

‘That Zoe chick’s your girlfriend now?’ Dean asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I guess. Maybe. No. That just came out. We need to get back to the task at hand.’

There is a laneway just behind the group of dudes, filled with cafés and twee-looking touristy places. We decide to send Dean on a recon mission – he’s the scruffiest of all of us, and therefore the one least likely to attract the attention of the locals – across there to see what he can stake out. We watch him as he saunters across the street, trying not to attract attention but narrowly avoiding being taken out by a speeding BMW. Real fucking smooth , I think, as everyone on the other side of the street stops what they’re doing to stare and smirk at him. Dean continues undaunted, stopping for a minute or so to ‘casually’ look at some stuff in the window of a surf shop before ducking down the alleyway.

‘It’s definitely him,’ Dean tells us upon returning. ‘He’s in front of some vegetarian restaurant. Looks kind of like shit. He seemed surprised that we made it.’

‘That’s great,’ I say. ‘So what’s the story?’

104 ‘I dunno.’ Dean runs his fingers through his dark hair, spiking it up nervously as he speaks. ‘Says he was down at the beach last night at some bonfire, and he met some girl named Tracey or Stacey or Becky or ...’

‘It’s probably not important right now,’ I say.

‘Yeh, anyway, he says she was all over him and shit, and they ended up sneaking off into the dunes. They ... well, you probably know the next bit, but after that, they fell asleep. So early this morning, Becky or Stacey’s friends – including her boyfriend – came looking for her and found her giving him ...’ Dean looks genuinely embarrassed at this point, and refuses to complete the sentence.

‘Giving him what?’ Zach asks.

‘He called it a ‘good morning BJ’. Anyway, he says he barely had time to pull his pants up before one of the guys started laying into him – he has a black eye by the way, pretty bad one – but he managed to escape and anyway, yeh. That’s when he called Haydo.’

‘So ...’ I say, ‘what do we do now?’

‘I guess this is the part where we come up with a plan.’

105 Distracting the Byron dudes – a clear example of the fact that I

indulge my friends way too much

Leaving Dean at his post, Zach and I head off on a reconnaissance mission down the laneway, to discuss the specifics of the escape with Luke. When we find him, Luke is sitting at a wooden picnic table, eating from a big plate of curry and grinning sheepishly – it turns out that one of the girls from the vegetarian restaurant took pity on him and provided him with food for free. It has to be said – Luke does rock the black eye, messy-hair look pretty well.

‘So I’ve been thinking about how we get out of this one,’ he says, through a mouthful of lentils and rice, ‘and I think I know how we’re going to do it. It’s foolproof.’

You know, when you hear those words, that the person who utters them has no idea what they’re talking about, and that circumstances are almost definitely going to turn from unpleasant to very, very unpleasant. This is especially true in Luke’s case. Luke has never had a foolproof plan in his life. A smarter guy would, for example, have brought a girl back to the apartment rather than doing it RIGHT THERE ON THE BEACH when her boyfriend was probably METRES AWAY THE ENTIRE TIME , but that’s the way Luke’s mind works.

‘What?’ I ask. ‘What is this great plan you speak of?’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘basically, I need you guys to provide a distraction.’

‘You what now?’ I ask.

‘Look, fellas, it’s easy. You remember the other day at the Subway?’

‘Umm …’

‘Look, look, it doesn’t matter. All I need you to do it walk out there – be nice and casual about it – and stand within hearing range of those Byron dudes.’

‘Okay …’ Zach says. ‘I’m dubious, but I’m listening. What do we do after that?’

‘Then just, y’know … Talk shit about Byron. Say what a terrible place it is or how all the guys here are fags or something. Then I sneak out while they’re distracted, and we’re home free.’

‘Ummm ...’ says Zach, ‘I understand the part about you being home free, but what happens do us?’

‘Well … you distract them, like I said’ Luke says hopefully.

106 ‘I mean, after we distract them,’ I say, ‘when we have eighteen or so local dudes beating the shit out of us?’

‘I dunno,’ he says, flustered, ‘you deal with it. It might not get to that.’

‘It will get to that,’ I say.

‘Then you run for it!’

‘What?’

‘You run away. You can run pretty fast. And they’ve got those wallet chains and long shorts to get all tangled up in …’

‘You’re grasping, dude,’ I tell him. ‘That’s pathetic. That’s never going to work.’

‘Look,’ he says, grabbing me, the smell of sweat desperation a palpable force around him, ‘it’s this or nothing. I can’t stay here. They’ll kill me.’

‘They’ll kill us, ’ I say.

‘Come awwwwwwn ,’ he says. ‘Just do this for me. I’d do this for you.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ I say, ‘and it doesn’t matter, I’d never be in this situation in the first place. It’s redundant, it’s …’

‘Don’t give me that shit. Don’t use words like ‘redundant’. So you paid attention in

English. Big deal. Please. Just do it. It will be easy. Come on Haydo … be a mate. Be a buddy.’

To say I’m sceptical would be a fairly drastic understatement, but Luke’s backed into a corner, literally, and since I’ve come this far, I might as well get on with it. ‘You owe me big time,’ I say, knowing that as soon as we’re out of this mess, any promises he makes to me will be completely forgotten about.

‘Big time,’ he says, grinning, hugging me and Zach nervously. ‘You too.’

Zach grunts in response.

Minutes later, Zach and I have sauntered out past the sushi place at the end of the lane and are standing in the street, close enough to the hoodie-wearing Byron dudes that they can hear us, but near enough that we can make a run for it if and when the fuckers decide that they want a piece of us.

‘Umm …’ I say to Zach, who is biting his bottom lip nervously. ‘Byron is so … wack. I mean, for real.’

107 ‘Yeah …’ he says, prodding me on, uncertain. ‘I mean ... what’s the deal with ... you

Australians?’

‘I dunno man. And the guys here,’ I say, glancing to the side. A skinny, skater-looking dude at the front of the pack – whose nails have been painted black and whose Cons are tied up in such a way that the tongues stick out – is looking our way. He elbows his friend, a bigger dude whose eyebrows are so indistinct they’re practically joined, and he looks across at us too.

‘Yeah,’ I go on. ‘They hate outsiders so much, but come on. This place is a …’ I struggle to remember what exactly it was that Luke said the other day. ‘It’s a tourist economy.’

‘For sure,’ says Zach. For God’s sakes, man, could you contribute anything less to this discourse? I’m thinking.

‘And that’s how their mummies and daddies keep them in … y’know, black hoodies and Panic! At The Disco albums.’

‘What did you just say?’ the guy with the eyebrows asks.

Oh shit. I’m not prepared for this sort of conflict.

In grade three, an older boy stole my tuckshop money every day for three weeks, and every day, I hid behind the adventure playground rather than tell anybody about it. When my mum found out, she wrote a note to the school and the boy was punished … the fallout from that, obviously, was far worse than if I’d just let him keep the money or, you know, stood up for myself. It wasn’t exactly my finest hour.

‘Who?’ I ask, glancing furtively in the dudes’ direction for any sign of Luke. ‘Me?’

‘Yeah you,’ the dude says, ‘you and the English faggot. What did you just say about us?’

‘I …’ It seems that this may not be the day I learn how to stand up to bullies. ‘I didn’t say anything. You guys are awesome.’ I have all of their attention now. Zach is hopping up and down on the balls of his feet, but I still can’t see any trace of Luke.

‘I like your hoodie man,’ he says. ‘I mean, seriously. It’s a good look for you. Where’d you get it?’

‘You and your boyfriend need to go back to England,’ the hoodie-wearing one growls.

108 Luke’s head pops out from the alleyway, frantically darting from side to side like a small rodent of some sort, wondering if and when it will be safe to emerge into a world of predators.

‘My Chemical Romance is a really great band …’ I say, hopefully.

‘Get them,’ says the big dude.

At this point, Luke makes a run for it, knocking over a chair outside the sushi restaurant and shattering a soy sauce bottle on the pavement. Luke tears away in one direction as we dash off in the other and soy sauce spreads slowly, like spilled blood. Zach is streaking ahead and all I can do is try to follow him, dodging clusters of brightly dressed, sunglass-wearing kids as I listen to the heavy footfalls on the pavement behind me. Luke’s on his own now … God’s speed, I’m thinking, as Zach turns sharply into a side street and I follow close behind.

I feel a tug from behind; someone has a hold of the back of my shirt. I pivot around – nearly losing my balance, my ankle twisting painfully on the concrete pavement – to see the skinny skater dude looming over me. He might have painted nails, sure, but from this angle, he still looks like kind of a badass. And the expression on his face tells me he’s about to beat the living shit out of me.

You know in movies how time will suddenly stop, and the hero will see himself, in flashback, as a child, a suggestion of much more innocent times? As the skater dude grabs the front of my Goonies shirt and twists it around, drawing me in closer, that’s what seems to happen. Suddenly, I’m no longer in Byron – I’m in grade three again, cowering behind the adventure playground, wondering if the woodchips underfoot are in any way edible.

It’s week number two of Ben Schmidt’s reign of terror, and the scariest kid in grade four has stolen my lunch money yet again. As I hide behind the treated pine slats of the climbing frame, I wonder what it is about me that caused Schmidt to single me out; if he’s shaking down other kids in grade three, and for that matter, what he plans to do with all the lunch money he’s hoarding – this being Tuesday, by my calculations, the sum of his ill-gotten booty will total no less than $17.50. What’s the money going towards – drugs? Guns? Loose women? I make a fist, tense and release it. If only I could stand up to Schmidt; punch the fucker right in the middle of his rodent-like face. If only I could …

109 At a certain point, it dawns on me that I’m back in Byron, and the skater dude is lying on the pavement in front of me, the bottom half of his face messy and dark with blood. He raises a hand to his face, and it comes away bloody also. There’s a lot of it – it’s about as unlike from a movie as it’s possible to get. People are staring. The skater dude looks slightly stunned, but he’s slowly getting his bearings, and he looks pissed off.

‘Dude …’ says Zach. We do the only sensible thing.

Half an hour later, we’re back at the apartment – we’re still a little out of breath, but we’re fearing significantly less for our lives, and having successfully flattened the skater dude

(wiry little fucker or not) has made me something of a hero in the eyes of Zach and Dean.

We’ve opened four fresh beers to celebrate what has turned out to be a very successful rescue mission. Luke is smirking at all of us, his bare feet up on the railing.

‘What the hell was that?’ he asks, shaking his head. ‘ My Chemical Romance is a good band ? Did you want that guy to make you his bitch?’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Dude,’ he says, taking a long swig from his beer then wiping his mouth off with the back of his hand, ‘it was worth it.’

See what I mean?

110 The Zombie Ghost Party show – an adventure in near-nakedness

and songs about girls

Zoe and I have been texting most of the afternoon, making furtive plans to meet up at the

Zombie Ghost party show, down at the beach tonight. If it’s like any other outdoor show I’ve been to in recent times, it will be a bunch of drunk dudes with their shirts off dry-humping one another while their girlfriends look on in a mixture of amusement and confusion. I don’t want to get too drunk – if I do, chances are I’ll look like a total douche around Zoe, not really the impression I want to make on our second ever meeting – so I try to take it easy. She texts me again, tells me she’ll meet me there around eight, and I tell her I’m looking forward to it (I question whether or not I should end the message with one of those dumb smiley faces, before deciding that I should).

The guys and I set off around seven, as the last of the afternoon light is dying. We take some beers for the road (I do too – I figure I’m allowed to be a little drunk, just not too obscenely drunk) and head off towards the beach. There is a lot of fluoro on the streets; at certain points, it’s difficult to move for all the guys in short shorts and pink singlets, unafraid to show off their hairy legs and chests. I mean, I’m not gay or anything, but it seems weird that ostensibly heterosexual guys in this decade are so comfortable looking so, well, faggy … I mean, where do gay guys go from there – do they take it up a notch, or do they just say fuck it and leave the game all together?

When we get to the beach, there are metal fences set up all around the concert area, and several very unamused looking guys checking ID, summarily rejecting people who look too drunk or otherwise seem like troublemakers. The guys and I chug the last of our beers and then ditch them up in the dunes before heading down to the gate. As we wait to get in, a young, wiry-looking dude with crazy, sticky-outy surfer hair is being forcibly ejected by one of the security guys; he tries to wriggle out of the security guy’s grasp several times, which only makes the grasp tighter. As he’s pushed down onto the sand, he slurs some words that are pretty well unprintable (even given everything that’s come before in this story).

We’re let in without incident – security give Luke a long look, as though he might be carrying concealed weaponry or otherwise planning to get up in people’s faces inside the

111 concert area, but he puts on his best angelic face, and in the end, they let us through. There is a temporary stage set up on the sand, and even though it’s only early evening, the area is already kind of overrun with kids; blonde girls in really skimpy outfits and charity wristbands who are probably here to try and get access to the Zombie Ghost Party boys before or after the show … Then of course, you have the hardcore guys who are here for the punk band … it’s quite a mix, and the two groups don’t seem to be getting along all that well.

We’ve been in the fenced off area for about half an hour, debating whether or not to move towards the front of the stage when I get a text from Zoe saying that one of her friends was too drunk and they wouldn’t let her in. She’s planning to do the right thing and walk this friend home, and suggests that maybe we should meet up at the party afterwards. I guess I’m a little upset about this (I mean, I’ve been checking my phone obsessively for texts for the last hour, kinda jittering with anticipation for Zoe’s arrival) but I guess we’ll just have to go with it. I reply to her, let her know yeah, sure, it’s probably a good idea.

By now, the sun has gone all the way down, and the beach is floodlit, lending everything a surreal and slightly scary edge. The first band – The Reset Button – is already on stage at this point. The band is two guys wearing fairly sinister masks, only adding to the weird, tribal feeling on the beach right now. The Reset Button’s first album was the soundtrack to many, many parties from the year just gone by. There’s something sort of feral and strange about them. The guy on the left mostly stays behind his keyboard stack, throwing out pummelling dance beats and big, squelchy bits of sound. The vocalist is pogoing up and down, shouting repeated mantras, and the kids at the front are pogoing and shouting with him. It’s all sweat and repeating melodies and surreal touches.

As the band play, all kinds of things are going on around me. A shady looking dude enters into a transaction of some sort with a group of kids who look like they might have been fresh-faced and innocent on their first day here, but are currently flying somewhere around

Jupiter. A redheaded girl in an oversized t-shirt and a belt is shouting weird nonsequiters into her phone – I can’t hear what she’s saying, but she seems very, very determined to get her point across, in any case. All around, kids are dancing and holding up glow sticks. I’d be more into the music (the band are currently playing their biggest single, which was huge in the

112 alternative charts a year or two ago) but I’m not really into it, preoccupied with thoughts of

Zoe.

When The Reset Button leave the stage, some roadies get up to shuffle some instruments around and play some bass notes and an unseen DJ takes over, playing tunes to placate the crowd. It’s ten minutes or so before Zombie Ghost Party appear on stage. They are a lot prettier than the last band – something that many of the girls in the audience seem to be vocally aware of. Max’s floppy hair is a big feature. He’s wearing a pair of thick-framed glasses that don’t have lenses in them … as if he’s going for some sort of geek chic look.

The music is very swoony, all keyboards and effects-heavy guitars, and when they play their big song, about losing the phone number of a pretty girl who disappears on an international flight, the kids in the audience are ecstatic, jumping up and down, but I’m imagining Zoe as the girl in the song, hoping she’ll be at the party tonight, wondering if maybe all along I’ve just been imagining her.

113 The party at Lighthouse Road

After the show – sweaty, and with our hearing severely damaged – we make our way up to the house on lighthouse road. Other, larger groups of kids seem to be doing the same thing.

One such group is walking just ahead of us, laughing and falling over each other. On the outer edge of it, a tall, skinny blonde dude runs rings around a pair of girls, who giggle and slap at him, trying to grab the vodka bottle from his hands.

When we get to the Zombie Ghost Party house, there is already quite a crowd in the front yard. The tastefulness of the house – the coffee-coloured walls, the lights shining up from the garden beds, the little Japanese touches that look like they came out of some interior decorating magazine – seems at odds with what’s going on around. A boy and a girl are rolling around on the dewy grass, kissing; clusters of kids are passing around cigarettes and

Jim Beam bottles; a scruffy emo kid wearing a shirt with the slogan CHEER UP, EMO KID is ripping up large chunks of the lawn with the front of his skateboard, laughing at something unknown and unfathomable. The lack of appropriate adult supervision is exciting and scary at the same time.

Luke’s eye is still well and truly blackened thanks to his confrontation with the Byron dudes, but he is secure in the knowledge that chicks dig war wounds, and therefore feels that the odds of getting on with a girl tonight are pretty much assured. I tell him I’m not so sure about that, that the idea of chicks being into scars is, if not an urban legend, then a somewhat inflated version of the truth, but he gives me the brush-off. Knowing Luke, he’ll probably score either way.

We make our way into the house, which is already obscenely crowded. The lights are low, and there are clusters of kids in the hallway and the kitchen who look at us menacingly as we pass. There is muffled music coming from somewhere inside the house, and someone has filled eskies with Mexican beer, placing them at strategic points. In spite of the sheer number of kids here, the eskies all seem to be full, replenished by some unseen hand.

As we make our way to the living room, a pair of willowy, middle eastern-looking girls dances past us, brushing up against me and eyeing me off a little as they go. I turn to look, but they’ve already disappeared into the crowd. When we reach the living room, the couches

114 have been pushed to the side, creating space for a dance floor, and a set of DJ decks has been set up in front of the fire place, towering several feet above the heads of the kids below.

The vibe in here is kind of like the best suburban party ever, like something out of a cheesy movie from the 1980s but pushed to its most ludicrous extreme.

The DJ is someone I vaguely recognise – I think he was one of the guys playing tunes down by the beach earlier. He is tanned and bare-chested, with fluoro markings on the upper half of his body (someone has drawn these quite painstakingly) and a big pair of sunglasses. He’s wearing sweatbands around his head and wrists, like a tennis player, and these too are fluoro-coloured. He’s cueing up tunes on a laptop, and hard, heavy electro beats and pummelling form the speakers beneath, with synth-y bits that alternately shimmer and drone. Every now and then, a cut-up vocal will play over the top and this will set all the kids on the dance floor off.

Out on the balcony, girls are chugging red wine and vodka out of Slurpee cups. The guys’ attention is wondering in different directions, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we get split up. I finish my beer and Zach hands me another one (where did he get it so fast?), which I begin to chug. The beer is wonderfully cold, and I suck it down like water, terrified that I’m going to sober up any second, and the only thing that will stop me from doing so is drinking a whole lot more.

I text Zoe and tell her where we are, and a few minutes later, I hear my phone beeping in my pocket, but I’m distracted by yet another beer and tell myself that I’ll answer the message in just a second; just a second. The night is beginning to fragment. Dean and Zach are still tailing me, but we’ve lost Luke. He’s probably with some girl already, getting her good and drunk, talking his way into her pants. Damn him. I’m feeling kind of light-headed, and frustrated that Zoe still hasn’t replied to my message when I remember the beeping and pull the phone from my pocket.

Zoe’s message says that she and her friends are on their way. I try to call her, but all I can hear is the music. With my phone pressed to my ear, I struggle my way back out onto the deck (we came back inside at some point … I don’t quite remember when or how). I zig when

I should be zagging, walking into a group of dudes and nearly spilling one of their drinks. I apologise, duck out of the way before then can make anything of it, get distracted by a girl in

115 a FRANKIE SAYS RELAX shirt who tries to dance with me (what’s the polite way of saying no in these situations?) and step outside. There is something happening on the other end of the line but I can’t tell what – the music is still overwhelming. I say Zoe’s name a couple of times, waiting for something to happen, but the voice I hear is indistinct and far away, so I apologise and hang up.

I begin texting her to let her know where I am when several of the dudes from Zombie

Ghost party sweep past – Max recognises me and grabs me by the arm, telling me that he’s going up to the DJ decks and that I have to join in. It’s pretty much impossible to say no – when I try, his face is impassive and blank behind a huge pair of aviators – so I follow him up to the decks. The kids on the dance floor cheer when they realise it’s now Max behind the DJ decks. They cheer for me as well, probably assuming that I’m another member of the band.

I’m feeling weird and dizzy but it’s oddly nice to see all the kids below cheering, and when

Max tells me to cue up a song on the laptop, I do what he says and hope for the best.

Scrolling through the laptop’s play list is kind of a nightmare, but eventually, I find a song that I like and drag it into a big grey box that says NEXT. I assume the computer will do the rest, and it does – matching the beats correctly, segueing from one song to the next just like a real life DJ would. It feels kind of good to do that … I could get used to it, and in fact, I think I’d like to do it again right now. Max, who is dancing beside me on the platform, hands me a bottle of vodka. It burns a little as it goes down, jolting my system, but I guzzle it down anyway. Max picks up a pair of headphones and presses one to his ear, pretending to listen intently to what’s going on. It seems like he’s going through a fairly unnecessarily complicated process for what essentially amounts to playing songs from a laptop, but it looks cool, and the kids on the floor seem to like it, so why the hell not?

A girl staggers up and seems to be convinced that I’m one of the members of Zombie

Ghost party. I try to tell her that I’m not, but thanks to the loud music and the fairly massive amount of alcohol circulating in my system, I’m not communicating this notion terribly effectively. She tells me that she loves Hearts Aflame, one of Zombie Ghost Party’s (and therefore my) biggest songs, and she asks me if I helped to write it. I tell her I didn’t, but she seems really sad, so I pretend it’s part of a bigger joke, and tell her, no, I didn’t help to write it,

I wrote the whole thing.

116 At this point, surprisingly, the girl’s senses seem to return to her – she asks me if I’m really in the band, because she doesn’t remember seeing me on stage. I tell her I was there – that I’m the keyboard player, and was hidden behind the keyboards for most of the show. This answer strikes even me as faintly implausible, but for some reason, the girl seems to accept it, and her smile returns. Even as I’m talking to the girl – spinning bullshit lie after bullshit lie –

I wonder why I’m doing it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m aware that I need to text

Zoe, and soon. I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket, but it’s way too loud to deal with that now, so I tell myself I’ll look after it later. When I’m done playing DJ, I’ll text Zoe. She might even see me up here, and that would be super sweet. Max ushers me back to the decks, tells me to cue up another song, and I consider my options.

117 Surveying the damage and wondering why some people look good

even when they’re passed out drunk and drooling on themselves

I wake up the next morning on the floor in one of the guest bedrooms. Zach is lying half on and half of the bed; his foot is in my face, and it smells like his socks haven’t been changed for about three days. I grab him by the ankle and try to push him out of the way, manoeuvre it back onto the bed, but all he does is moan a little and flex his calf muscle.

I’ve been having dreams about water – one where my friends or people who look like my friends are at a party on the beach drinking glasses and glasses of it, another where I’m on a boat, gulping mouthfuls of seawater and vomiting it all up only to drink more. My head is pounding, and given that my only option, if I stay here, is getting in bed with the token English kid, I sit up (slowly, because the world seems to be spinning and spinning), slip my jeans back on and, feeling the weight of my phone in my pocket, check it out to see if there are any messages from Zoe. There is one, received at one-thirty this morning, telling me she’d arrived at the party, asking where I was. Alongside the message, there are three missed calls. This is probably an ominous sign, but in my current state, I’m not really fit to contemplate it.

When I stand, I see the redhead girl from last night in bed with Zach; her arms are tangled around him, and although one of the straps has come loose from her shoulder, causing her copper-coloured dress to slide down and exposing at least half a breast, I’m way too much of a gentleman to stop and check it out. Her face is kind of smooshed up against

Zach’s; their noses are touching, and there are twin streams of drool coming from both of their mouths. It would be kind of a touching image if it weren’t so, you know, odd and awkward.

I make my way out into the hallway and try to remember which direction the kitchen is in … the question of how I actually made it to the guestroom last night, and what, if anything, happened to me along the way is perhaps a more troubling one, but it’s one I’m not really equipped to address right now so I let it pass. There is a tasteful Japanese print on the wall in the hallway, and next to it, several photocopied pictures of Sid Vicious and Debbie Harry, blue-tacked up at extremely eccentric angles, that one of the guys from the band probably put there.

118 A naked mannequin, dismembered, and with an anarchy symbol drawn for some reason on the crotch, sits on the landing of the house’s central staircase. I make my way through the living room; the DJ booth has largely been demolished, there are record covers scattered all over the floor, and a variety of willowy girls are passed out, across and over each-other, on the suede lounge chairs. One of the girls, dressed in a fluoro-coloured

FRANKIE SAYS RELAX shirt, moans a little in her sleep and rolls over – I watch her as she readjusts, and an impression from the chair’s fabric is very clearly visible on her pink cheek.

The whole thing would look kind of like some kind of a Tsubi fashion shoot if the girls didn’t see to be covered in a light glaze of vomit. That might be a deliberate touch, though … in the wake of Pete Doherty and Lindsay Lohan and various other Young Hollywood screw-ups, drooling on oneself while unconscious might actually be the new black.

Immediately after making that observation, four things occur to me:

1. That I’m really actually kind of a douche;

2. That it’s exactly the kind of graspingly sarcastic remark Zoe would appreciate;

3. That I have no idea where the hell Zoe is, what she got up to last night and if

she’s even going to be speaking to me today, but mostly:

4. That my head hurts way too much to even be contemplating this stuff in the first

place.

From the living room, it’s only a short hop (thank God) to the kitchen, where there is water. Sweet, life-giving water; everything will make more sense afterwards, I suspect. As I stumble into the kitchen, I notice two emo-looking dudes, who seem as though they might not yet have been to sleep, on the floor kissing noisily and fervently. A exploded packet of

Cheetos sits on the tiles beside them, and their faces and fingers are covered in Cheeto dust

… the skinnier of the two has it all down the front of his Parkway Drive shirt, and I watch, hypnotised, as his tongue lolls about and a wet, yellow clump of the stuff transfers itself from there to the other dude’s lip ring. Part of me feels a little awkward at having to witness this

PDA, but a larger part of me really, really wants some Cheetos. I debate whether I should ask them for some, wondering if they’d mind, but they’re so intensely focused on what they’re doing that they don’t seem to notice when I enter the kitchen, so I decide to leave them to it.

119 Unable to find a clean glass, I pick up a paper Slurpee cup with a vague residue of raspberry red liquid congealing in the bottom, fill it up under the ice machine and drink what

I’m fairly certain must be about eighteen glasses of water. The grinding noise of the ice machine doesn’t distract the two emo guys, who are now kind of splayed across the tiles, looking as though they’re about to initiate the next phase of some bizarre, Panic! At The

Disco-inspired mating ritual. My stomach and head hurt equally, but at least I’m semi- hydrated.

Leaving the guys to it, I stumble back into the house, which is weirdly hushed given the relatively late hour. I can hear birds in the trees outside, and the whole thing feels a lot like the unnatural calm you come across in movies right after the huge explosion, when everything is about to change for the worse. I walk out onto the deck and look down into the pool, which is filled with plastic chairs and, oddly, another mannequin. One of the guys from the band has passed out on an inflatable raft and floats lazily by, and a drowned guitar is vaguely visible at the very bottom of the pool. Looking down gives me a sense of nausea which, after a while, becomes too much to deal with, so I retreat altogether and make my way to back to the bedroom, hoping to catch a few more hours’ sleep.

The hallways of the house are chilly and unfamiliar, and as I stumble across the carpeted floors, I’m only vaguely aware of where I am, and can’t quite remember which door it was that I came from. Taking a shot, in a hallway I’m pretty sure is mine (same print of the

Japanese fishing boat, same pictures of Debbie Harry pouting out blankly at me), I open a door and hope for the best.

Although there is a bed in here, and the bed has two people sleeping on it, it becomes clear pretty well straight away that it’s not the room I came from. It’s dark in here, and I go to close the door, getting most of the way there before I realise that one of the figures on the bed looks familiar. It’s Luke, wearing only boxer shorts – the rest of his clothes, including the Presets shirt – are strewn everywhere, and his arms are half-curled around a girl next to him.

Though I’m a little jealous that Luke managed to get laid last night while I did not, my first instinct is to be proud of him for overcoming adversity and living up to his part of the bet.

As I look more carefully at the girl, though, I start to wonder why she looks so familiar.

120 Something about the Amelie hair, what her cheekbone does to the angles of her face, suggests that I’ve seen her around before, that I know her from somewhere.

If I can make an aside to the reader very briefly – I’m sure you saw this coming. In fact, I’m sure that, several pages ago, if not before, you worked out that this was bound to happen, that there was no other way for the story to go. Still, that that doesn’t make the following sequence of events any less traumatic.

Anyway, in the seconds that follow, it dawns on me that the girl looks familiar because I’ve seen her MySpace picture a hundred times; because I’ve spent entire school days fantasising about her and because, at this point in the week, I was kind of hoping that I’d be the one waking up next to her. Yes, you guessed it.

Zoe and Luke, passed out in bed together. Fantastic!

121 What would be the normal thing to do in a situation like this?

The enormity of what has happened has not quite sunk in yet – my girlfriend (yes, I’m calling her that now) and my best friend spent all of last night doing it like rabbits, while I was passed out drunk in the other room.

Not really sure what else to do, I go back to the apartment. None of the guys are here, and the place has a spooky, empty kind of feel. Things here are fairly dissolute; the tiled floor in the kitchen is covered in a sticky, red goo from a spilled bottle of vodka and raspberry, and elsewhere, there are fragments all over the floor from a smashed drinking glass.

The silence is unnerving so I think about putting some music on, but I’m really not sure what I want to hear – I scroll through dozens and dozens of bands and albums, trying to find something appropriate before vetoing just about everything, skipping through The Shins

(too sad), Peter, Bjorn & John (too happy), Lily Allen (cheery fuck-you's to exes; altogether too appropriate) and Nelly Furtado (why do I have this on my iPod in the first place?) before settling on an old Beastie Boys album (loud, bratty and pissed off … kind of just the thing I need right now).

I pace around the apartment for a while, turn the music up, and then when I get bored of pacing, I have a shower, although I don’t really feel the water hitting me, just an unpleasant, shaking sensation. When I get out of the shower, I grab one of the bottles of Jim

Beam, mix a bourbon and Coke at about a seventy/thirty ratio in favour of the bourbon, then take my laptop out to the balcony. I skim some blogs for a while without really reading them, then play seven or eight rounds of this stupid online game, the rules of which I can’t quite work out, although they involve hitting a series of coloured blocks in a certain order. I’m simultaneously furious that I keep losing, and relieved because of the focus it gives me, when an MSN chat window pops up:

ZOE: Heeeeya ;)

After a while, when I don’t say anything, she adds:

122 ZOE: I’m so sorry I missed u last night. I looked for you like literally everywhere

And then, after a longer pause:

ZOE: We got there pretty late – I was texting you and calling you and I looked for you

everywhere but couldn’t find you

HAYDEN: I saw u there

ZOE: Okay … why didn’t you come and say hi?

HAYDEN: U were busy

ZOE: Was I?

HAYDEN: Yeh

ZOE: Ummmmm …. What’s up Hayden, is everything okay?

HAYDEN: Let’s see

ZOE: Okay, you’re speaking in monosyllables now. Guys only speak in monosyllables when

they’re shy or angry …

HAYDEN: I’m not angry

ZOE: Then what’s going on?

HAYDEN: I’m wondering at what point in the evening you decided to give up and sleep with

my best friend?

ZOE: What are you talking about?

HAYDEN: I saw you guys together

ZOE: When? With who?

HAYDEN: I saw u in bed with him, this morning

ZOE: That guy? Nothing happened, I think he must have passed out next to me or something

later that night … that definitely wasn’t what it looked like

HAYDEN: If this was bad TV or a movie that’s exactly what you’d say

ZOE: Yes, wow, you’ve correctly identified a cliché from popular culture. I like you. I tried to

find you last night. I looked for you for like an hour – I didn’t even know that guy was your

friend

HAYDEN: That doesn’t matter

123 ZOE: I’m not going to talk about this any more with you. I thought you were a cool guy, clearly

I was pretty wrong on that score

At this point, Zoe disappears, her status changing to ‘offline’. I’m shaking too much to even think straight, so I pour myself some more of the bourbon (I’ve finished the first one already), crank the music even louder and consider my next move.

124 Sitting on the beach feeling like I want to die … it sounds like an album track by The Cure, but, surprisingly enough, it’s how I spend

my afternoon

The weather cleared up a few hours ago, although right now, it seems like too absurdly sunny and bright an afternoon to be feeling this, well … dissolute and pissed off. I’m sitting by the water’s edge with the mostly-empty bottle of bourbon planted between my feet. The kids around me are all just doing their thing – throwing around a football, listening to music, lying around kissing and talking. I lie back and look at the expanse of pale blue sky, and at the clouds that sometimes drift past. I see clouds in the shape of a husky dog, an iceberg, my best friend sleeping with my girlfriend behind my back, the essential futility of the desire to find true love, and a jellyfish.

I unscrew the cap from the bourbon and swig what’s left in the bottle, not really recoiling from the taste anymore. I turn the bottle upside down, looking at it intently as though my angry stare will somehow case a few more precious drops to appear, and when that doesn’t work, I start beating on the base. Still no luck, damn it all. I contemplate my next move

– whether to go back to the apartment for more supplies, and risk the potential confrontation with Luke, or stay here, staring at the water and channelling my emo side some more.

It’s at this precise moment that I turn around and see her. She’s sauntering down the beach by herself – her hair is being tousled by the wind but she doesn’t seem all that troubled by it. In fact, she looks kind of amazingly good – like the brunette girl from The OC who was meant to be the sidekick but was actually way cuter than the anorexic blonde girl you were meant to think was the prettiest. She’s listening to music on an iPod and occasionally swigging from a bottle she’s keeping in a brown paper bag. My first reaction is excitement at the prospect of more booze; my second is that Natalie looks pretty damned hot right now.

As she passes, I throw a nod in her direction; noticing me, she beams, a smile that seems surprisingly genuine, and bounds over to where I’m sitting.

‘Heeeeeeee-ya, Hayden!’ she says, slightly out of breath.

‘Hey Natalie,’ I say, surprised she remembered my name.

125 ‘I can’t believe you remember who I am! That’s so odd …’

‘It’s not all that odd,’ I say. ‘You’re probably the hottest girl I’ve met all week.’

‘Wow!’ she says. ‘Forward!’

I nod, try to crack a smile, but don’t entirely succeed.

Natalie regards me quizzically. ‘You look sad,’ she tells me.

‘Yeah.’

‘You look like your dog ate your homework then aliens from the planet Pete Wentz came and landed on top of your house and ate your dog.’

I laugh in spite of myself: ‘That’s weirdly specific,’ I say.

‘Thank you! I try to be as specific as possible at all times.’

‘How’s that working out for you?’

‘Good’, she says, still relentlessly cheerful. ‘Mind if I sit down?’ As Natalie asks this, she flops down on the sand next to me, kicking her flip-flops off and offering me a swig from the bottle.

I accept it and take a swig, coughing a little when I realise it’s red wine instead of the vodka I’d been expecting. ‘Why the brown paper bag?’ I ask.

‘I like to keep things on the down-low?’

‘You want to know something?’ I ask.

‘Sure.’

I lean in close, whisper: ‘ I think the secret is out …’

‘What?’ She laughs in my face. ‘Oh God, Hayden, you’re so random. It’s cute. Gimme that.’ I realise she’s pointing to the bottle.

I swig from it again – trying to look hard-boiled, like a private detective in an old movie or something like that, before realising that I mostly just look ridiculous. I hand it back.

‘Thank yoooooooo-uuuu!’ She takes gulp, a little of the red wine spilling out down her chin … my first thought is to reach across and brush it away, but that strikes me as ludicrous, given that this is the second ever conversation I’ve had with this girl, and we’re both kind of shitfaced. That’s the kind of thing Luke would do , I think. In this situation, he would offer his assistance without a second thought, and he would probably go on to get something out of it, too.

126 Before I can really react, though, Natalie has finished swigging the wine and is wiping her chin with the back of her hand. ‘Hey!’ she says, her attention focussed suddenly and jarringly on me, ‘I thought you had a girl! You met her in a bookstore and you were going to get together this week …’

‘It didn’t work out,’ I say.

‘Oh. That’s too bad. It seemed like you were really into her.’

I shrug, gesture towards the wine again; I figure that the nerdy, excessively verbal thing has gotten me precisely nowhere these last few days, so maybe I’ll try and do the strong, silent, tough act for a little bit.

‘Are you trying to be all strong and silent and tough right now?’ Natalie asks.

‘No,’ I say, a little too insistently. ‘It just … I thought things were going great, but then one of my friends …’

‘Listen, Hayden,’ she interrupts, ‘I’m really sorry that this girl broke your heart, if that’s what happened, but you know what? If she did that, then it’s her loss, because you’re really sweet.’

‘Is that good?’ I ask. ‘When a girl says you’re sweet?’

‘Oh Hayden, you’re so serious. Yes, it’s good. I also think you’re cute. It’s good when a girl tells you that, too.’

My head is literally spinning right now; I have no idea where this conversation is going or how we got here. I swig some more of the wine, hoping that it will give me a second to clear my thoughts or to establish what exactly is going on here.

‘That’s very … forthcoming of you.’

‘Well, you told me I was hot.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yeah, it was like the second thing you said to me before.’ She looks at me expectantly, nodding her head slowly, as though she’s trying to prompt a response of some kind.

‘So Hayden, there’s a big party happening at my place right now, and I’m about to ask if you want to come back there with me… are you ready for that?’

‘I think so,’ I tell her.

127 ‘Great. So …’ she begins. ‘Do you want to come back to my house?’

‘Yes.’

Didn’t even have to think about it.

128 Heading to a party at Natalie’s house, feeling drunk, drunk, drunk

and suddenly pretty good about things

Natalie and her friends are staying in a house in the backstreets of Byron, on the opposite side of town from our apartment – it’s a fairly big place, there seem to be a lot of rooms, with a lot of strangers moving in and out. It could just be the unfamiliar environment, or it could be the fact that I’m more than a little pissed, but as I walk inside and look at all the strange kids going about their strange business, I start to feel kind of threatened by the whole thing, or at least a little queasy. Strangers always seem menacing when you’re drunk; you’re never sure what their purpose is, and every action becomes sinister and strange.

Natalie leads me into the main room, where the furniture has all been arranged around the edges, leaving the central area free as a dance floor. Not many people are dancing, specifically, more just milling around, kissing, doing whatever. A cluster of vaguely punk, vaguely emo guys are standing over near the stereo, scuffling to plug in and unplug their iPods so they can DJ from them. The music will often cut off, jarringly, in the middle of a song, and then start up again soon after as something completely different, which isn’t exactly helping the vague sense of nausea I’m fighting off.

‘Wait here,’ says Natalie, steering me towards a vacant couch, ‘I’m going to get some more wine for us.’ I sit, obediently, and try to figure out whether the music we’re listening to is emo or punk or hardcore … I always get my genres mixed up – that is, when I can detect any discernable difference between them – and I’m always terrified to enter the debate for fear of getting it wrong and embarrassing myself royally in front of my other people.

Across the room, a DVD of Finding Nemo is playing, with the sound turned down, on a large flat screen TV. I watch it, somewhat catatonic, but am able to follow, in spite of the lack of sound, given that I’ve seen this movie probably about fifty times and could easily recite large chunks of it in my sleep. Don’t tell anyone that, okay? It’s really quite embarrassing and shameful, but … I don’t know. A part of me just really likes the cheesiness of it, of how the father follows his son all the way down the Pacific Ocean to Sydney … The fish in that movie,

I mean, I know they’re a little creepy with their almost-human faces and everything else, but

129 they’re just, I don’t know, genuine. They stick together. Marlin would never betray Nemo, for instance, the way that douchebag Luke betrayed me and took away the only girl I ever …

Whoa. I start to feel a little queasy again, not entirely happy with the places this train of thought is taking me, so it’s lucky that Natalie returns when she does, with some red wine and two glasses for us.

‘We’re not drinking out of the bottle this time?’ I ask her.

Natalie laughs. ‘I’m all class,’ she says. ‘I bring it.’

She hands me the bottle, a screw top, so I can do the honours, but after a few awkward, failed attempts at getting it right, she huffs comically and takes it back to open herself. ‘Am I going to be doing all the work?’ she asks me.

‘I … um …’ I stammer.

‘Oh, forget it, bad joke,’ she says, hanging me a glass so full that it almost overflows. I try to make my hand as steady as possible when I grab it, so as not to destroy the couch – or spill any on Natalie, more to the point – but by the time I get the glass to my lips, cheap red wine is all over my fingers.

‘Hey!’ she says, before I can take a drink, ‘aren’t we supposed to toast or something?’

‘What are we toasting to?’ I ask, tentatively offering her my glass.

She narrows her eyes, as if deep in thought, but her gaze remains on me. ‘To good times … to being young and stupid.’

‘I don’t think I can do it,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘This, with you … I mean, it’s not you. You’re really hot. You’re amazing, it’s just … it’s too much.’

She looks at me strangely. ‘You have been with a girl before, right?’

I arch an eyebrow, trying to be cool and knowing, but with my head slumped forward and the vague urge to be sick, I’m fairly sure it looks ridiculous. ‘Yes, I’ve been with a girl before.’

‘Okay … Soooooo, what’s the story, Hayden? Do you prefer guys?’

‘No , I don’t prefer guys.’

130 ‘It’s okay if you do … In fact, if that’s the case, there’s a boy I know who you totally need to meet …’

‘That’s really not necessary …’

‘It’s a boy called Kristian … he’s forever going out with douchebags but you seem really sweet.’

‘I’m not into guys … sorry. Your friend sounds nice though.’

‘Okay, so what is it?’

‘It’s … look, it’s do with a friend of mine. I thought he was a friend …’

‘Okay …’ she says uncertainly.

‘Or actually, it’s a girl. That girl I like. Zoe.’

‘I thought you said …’

‘It’s to do with Zoe and this friend.’

‘Right. I think I can see where this might be heading.’

‘She … I really liked her, and they … last night, I was at a party, we were supposed to meet up there, but I got drunk and passed out ...’

‘That sucks,’ she says.

‘Yeah, and when I woke up this morning, I found her in bed with my friend Luke.’

‘Oh,’ she says uncertain, ‘yeah. Luke. He’s an interesting guy.’

‘He’s a shithead.’

‘Although if you think about it,’ she begins, uncertain, ‘he can’t have known … I mean, if he’d never met her before, he wouldn’t have known she was your girlfriend. And she probably had no idea who he …’

‘It doesn’t matter!’ I say. ‘They had sex. She did; with somebody else. That’s enough.’

‘Sooo … are you here with me because you like me, or because you want to get back at them?’ she asks me.

‘Natalie,’ I say, I think you’re really awesome. I think you’re incredible …’

‘Yeah, yeah …’ she rolls her eyes.

‘No, I told you that before and I totally stand by that. It’s just … Zoe had sex with

Luke, and you had sex with him too …’

‘Umm … Hayden, what?’

131 ‘You and Luke. I mean, that kind of makes things weird between …’

‘I never had sex with Luke,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘Well … I mean, didn’t you? I thought you guys …’

‘What did he say?’

‘I think he may … I think the phrase I tapped that came up.’

‘Really? Oh my god, that little shit!’

‘So you didn’t …?’

‘No.’

‘Not even …?’

‘Look, I’m not one of these girls who don’t consider blowjobs to be sex.’

‘I didn’t say you were.’

‘I have friends like that …’

‘I’m sure you do …’

‘But Luke and I definitely didn’t have sex at any point.’

‘So what happened?’ I ask, confused.

‘He seemed really interested in it at first … I mean, I thought that’s the reason he invited me over. I’m not normally like that … I mean, I wouldn’t normally just sleep with a boy, but I’ve known him for a little while and he seemed cool, and it’s schoolies, y’know?’

‘Yeah …’

‘So I went to see him, to this party, and he was getting me drunk and coming on really strong and I was like, okay, he’s cute, why not? Except when we got to his room, it seemed like he just wasn’t into it.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, look, it was weird. He seemed right into it, but then he started talking about some girl named Vanessa …’

‘His ex?’

132 ‘That’s the one. He kept telling me what a bitch she’d been, you know, for dumping him, which I assumed is what happened, and that he’d been really upset about it for months, and it was just so hard, hiding it from the guys, y’know …’

‘Wow.’

‘And I thought he was just looking for sympathy – you know, like he was looking for my shoulder to cry on or something, but after a while that didn’t seem to be it.’

‘Why not?’

‘He was just … he was really upset. He kept telling me how he liked me so much better than Vanessa, you know, that I was cuter, that he could just tell that I was just a much nicer person … I didn’t know what to do. It was a little bit creepy, actually …’

‘So why … like, why didn’t you leave?’

‘I felt like I should stick around. You know … he started to cry. I felt like I should, I don’t know … try and comfort him or something.’

‘So if you never …’

‘Hayden, did you actually see Luke and your girlfriend, y’know, engaged in coital relations of some sort?’

‘No …’ I say.

‘What exactly did you see?’ she asks me.

‘They were … I mean, they were in bed together.’

‘Luke and I were in bed together, but that certainly went nowhere …’

‘I’m suddenly realising that, yes.’

‘Do you want to be with Zoe?’ she asks.

‘I think so?’

‘So why don’t you go be with her?’

‘Because I … oh no, I …’

I don’t get to finish the last bit of that sentence, because I’m too busy vomiting in

Natalie’s lap.

133 Realising that I’ve been the world’s biggest fool and potentially

screwed things up with the awesomest girl I’ve ever met

For a girl I’ve just puked a stomach full of red wine and bourbon all over, Natalie is surprisingly understanding and helpful. I’m so embarrassed I feel like actual death might be a possibility, but she deposits me in an upstairs bathroom and leaves to get a change of clothes. The tiles in the bathroom are interlocking brown shapes, strange and frightening relics from another era of bathroom design, and I have to force myself to stop staring at them as the patterns swim in front of my eyes.

Natalie returns a minute later, dressed differently but still smelling ever so slightly of stomach acid. ‘I’m so sorry …’ I say again.

‘Look, Hayden, you’re a sweet guy,’ she says. ‘I’m not even going to hold it against you that you puked up god knows what over my jeans – which cost a small fortune, by the way – but I think you should get yourself cleaned up and find Zoe as quickly as possible so you can apologise to her. Here.’ She thrusts a bottle of mint-flavoured mouthwash into my hands, and I rinse and spit like a good boy.

‘Do you think she …’ I begin. ‘I mean, you’re a girl …’

‘So I’m led to believe,’ Natalie says.

‘Would you forgive someone if they … I mean, the things I said to her were pretty mean?’

‘Well, I’m a reasonably forgiving individual, but I think you already know that … As for

Zoe, I don’t know. You’re just going to have to go after her and find out. Be brave.’

‘You think so?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Okay, I plan to spend the rest of tonight looking for a cute boy who will neither vomit nor cry all over me. Since I’m done giving you my Tony Robbins inspirational speech treatment, maybe you can get the hell out of my bathroom?’

134 If this next part was a Disney movie, it would probably be called

‘Finding Zoe’

I ring Zoe’s phone several times, but she doesn’t pick up – hardly surprising, considering everything that’s happened between us. I try to come up with some scenarios to rationally explain why Zoe might not be picking up – she lost her phone while being attacked by sea monsters; she lost her phone while on a Mission Impossible-like assignment in the Middle

East; she lost her phone at the Zombie Ghost Party house last night. Except for the last one, none of these make a whole lot of sense … I’m hoping the last one is true, but it seems increasingly unlikely. In the end, I send Zoe a series of texts. Each one says something to the effect of: I’M REALLY SORRY, I’VE BEEN A GREAT BIG SHITHEAD, CAN WE PLEASE

MEET UP?

She doesn’t respond to any of them, which seems fair enough.

In the end, unsure of what to do, I walk down to the beach. There are kids with bonfires down by the water, kids drinking and shouting, and in the dark, with the pounding music that seems to be coming from everywhere, their figures all look a little sinister, like they’re involved in some kind of primitive fire ritual. A guy who strongly resembles Tiberius, the film maker, is dancing around one of the first, totally out of his head, wearing feathers and what looks like a girl’s summer dress … a girl with exactly the same manic expression on her face – and wearing a similar outfit strangely enough – is holding his hands and dancing with him. It’s nice for him that he found someone.

There is a figure sitting by the edge of the water – the same spot, strangely enough, that I picked earlier in the day, when I was staring up at the clouds and pondering the hugeness of the universe and my tiny place within it (… and drinking, but mostly pondering the thing about the universe). As I draw closer, things about the figure start to seem familiar – the way she carries her shoulders, the way her hair is cut, kind of like that girl from Amelie. It doesn’t take me long to realise who she is.

Though there are hundreds of other kids on the beach, Zoe is alone. If this was one of those bad teen dramas, I know how things would end up – the tearful night-time reunion on the beach, the breaking of the waves, the swelling guitar pop on the soundtrack, probably

135 Death Cab For Cutie or something like that. This is not bad TV, however, and I might well be completely screwed.

As I approach her, I notice two more dudes coming in from the other side. In their black hoodies and knee-length socks, they have the look of local guys, and drunk, swaggering local guys at that. They’re walking faster than I am, spurred on by drunkenness or desire or just by the sheer fact of being young and irresponsible and out looking to party.

They encircle her, one either side, making movements like hyenas I’ve seen in wildlife documentaries, and it’s obvious that she’s trying to ignore them at first, but they’re steadfastly refusing to go away, getting in closer and closer, up in her personal space more and more.

One of them tries to touch her and she swats him away; though I’m too far away to hear the conversation, I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

I don’t know if it’s drunkenness that projects me forward, or just the desire to protect

Zoe, but I start running; it’s difficult to move fast on the sand, and my ankles hurt, a jarring with each step, but I’m determined to get to Zoe. I don’t know what I’m actually going to do when I get there – for all I know, these guys will knock the crap out of me – but that seems immaterial at this moment. At worst, I think, I can take out the smaller of the two before the bigger guy gets to me kicks my teeth out. It’s not a plan, but it’s a plan nevertheless. Zoe’s already reasonably disenchanted with me, I presume, so getting into a fight in front of her won’t sway her opinion much, anyway.

‘Come on,’ the taller dude is saying, ‘it’ll be fun.’

‘What will be fun is if you leave me the hell alone,’ says Zoe.

‘Aww,’ says the shorter one. ‘You’ll love it. Come on. We have beer there, and good tunes, and you get to roll with us …’

‘Yeah, with us,’ the taller one is saying. ‘We promise we’ll take good care of you.’

There’s something nasty about the way he says the word ‘promise’, though I can’t quite articulate what.

Zoe’s quite obviously not enjoying this – the two guys have moved in even closer, and it looks like her only escape route is into the surf. She’s half standing up now, looking as though she might even be contemplating swimming her way out of this. It’s gotta be better than the alternative.

136 My drunkenness, or courage, or whatever, allows me to speak up: ‘Hey!’ I don’t know what comes after ‘hey’ – I don’t think I’ve ever been beyond that point before – but it seems as though I have the guys’ attention. I clench my fists and glare at them, hoping my parody of a tough guy stance is not totally obvious.

Time seems to stop for a second as they stare at me; if these two dudes are the hyenas from the documentary, I’m the gazelle, and at this point, their primitive minds are working overtime, thinking of all the ways they can destroy me, preparing to lunge forward and feast on my carcass.

Except this doesn’t happen. They’re both staring at me, kind of slack-jawed. The smaller one shoots a glance to his friend and back at me.

‘Isn’t that …’ he says.

‘That’s the dude that flattened Nathan,’ confirms his friend.

I think I might have seen a movie once where this happened, so perhaps it’s something obscure stored in the back of my memory, some desire for mimicry that causes me to step forward and say: ‘Yeah, that’s right, I fucked your friend up, and I’m going to fuck you up too if you don’t step away form my girl.’

As they consider their options, the caveman brain kicks in, and the air around us seems to change. It’s thick with fear and male hormones. They have two options – either call my bluff and beat the crap out of me, or run for it.

Obviously, my scary face works. They retreat, slowly picking up the pace until they have a good few metres on me, then bolt back up the beach, shouting indistinct obscenities as they go.

It’s just me and Zoe now. She’s still half-crouching on the sand, looking frantic and relieved and angry all at once, not exactly an easy combination.

‘I’m not your girl,’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘I didn’t need to be rescued,’ she tells me, sitting back down on the beach. ‘I can look after myself.’

‘I know, but those guys were …’

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘You know, for saving me. Thanks anyway.’

137 ‘That’s okay.’

I’m finding myself in all kinds of unfamiliar situations tonight. I wonder if I’m meant to sit down next to her at this point, or just leave. Do people like to be alone in circumstances like these? I mean, I can’t very well leave Zoe alone on the beach, not with dudes like that around. She doesn’t need a rescuer, or a chaperone or whatever, but …

‘You’re in the midst of a tortured interior monologue right now, aren’t you?’ Zoe asks.

‘You’re asking yourself if you should sit next to me or be a knight in shining armour and escort me back home …’

‘Umm …’ I say.

‘Sit down.’

‘Okay.’ I’m not going to refuse any direct instructions at this point. I sit next to her, making a place for myself on the sand. She stares at the water, not at me, and I do the same.

We sit there for a while, gazes straight ahead, not touching each other.

‘This would be the time for an apology, I guess,’ I say.

‘Do you deconstruct every conversation like this?’ she asks me.

‘Pretty much.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay. I thought you and Luke …’

‘Luke would be the big dumb jock with the horrible morning breath who decided to pass out next to me last night?’

‘That guy. I thought you … I mean, I thought something must have happened.’

‘Why would something have happened?’

‘That’s the way Luke operates. I mean, as it turns out, that’s not the way Luke operates. Based on a conversation I had a short time ago, I’m actually starting to suspect that he’s a virgin.’

Zoe looks at me, mildly disgusted. ‘So … you think I de-virginated your friend?’

‘No.’

‘Then what are you babbling on about?’

‘I thought something might have happened between you, and my subsequent actions were based on that assumption.’

138 ‘Like when you were so horrible to me on MSN this morning?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘about that. ‘I’m really sorry about that.’

‘Are you going to tell me that you can explain?’ she asks.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘that was more or less my next move.’

‘Okay then.’

‘Luke’s ...’ I begin, not sure of what to say next. ‘You remember I told you about the bet?’

Zoe turns her head abruptly, stares straight at me. ‘Oh my god, that was your friend

Luke?’

‘Like I said …’

‘Oh. I’d forgotten all about that. I kind of thought you were joking when you told me that your friend was out to sleep with all those girls …’

‘No.’

‘So you assumed …’

‘Kind of.’

‘That doesn’t make it any better, Hayden,’ she tells me. ‘I mean, it’s no less insulting for me. I’m not the kind of person who would just go to bed with a random at a party. You know that about me.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So why would you even think …?’

‘The evidence seemed kind of compelling at the time. Look,’ I add, ‘I’m really sorry. I acted like a complete dick this morning. I should have known better.’

‘Yeah you should,’ she says, with sarcastic emphasis on the ‘you’.

‘Is there any chance you’re going to forgive me?’ I ask her.

She regards me for a long time, narrowing her eyes and tilting he head slightly to the right. ‘There’s a chance,’ she tells me. ‘I’d say … I don’t know. I’d say there’s a sixty percent chance.’

‘Sixty is okay,’ I say. ‘That’s a lot better than nothing. It’s better than fifty. It’s more than half …’

‘That’s correct,’ she says.

139 ‘It’s almost sixty-six, which is just under two thirds …’ I begin. ‘So really, you’re saying that there’s a two thirds chance you’re going to forgive me.’

‘If you want to put it that way, then okay,’ she says.

‘But sixty-six is so close to seventy, we might as well just round it up to seventy.’

‘You’re pushing it,’ she says.

‘I like seventy. I’m going to stick with that.’

Zoe looks like she’s about to laugh, but keeps her poker face on instead.

‘I’m sorry I was such a dick,’ I tell her.

We stay silent for a while, staring out at the dark water. At a certain point, she puts her head on my shoulder.

‘Who’s Nathan?’ she asks, after a few seconds of awkward silence.

140 If this was a video came, my confrontation with Luke would

probably look something like what happens when Mario pounds

the crap out of Bowser, but I don’t really think of myself as a Mario

… I’m way more of a Luigi

In case you were wondering, I didn’t spent that night with Zoe – I mean, she’s forgiving, but she’s not that forgiving, and either way, I’m not that kind of guy. We make plans to meet up at the beach the next day. I walk her back to her place, and a promising but awkward not-really- a-kiss later, I’m walking back to mine, headphones on, still feeling drunk, walking along like life’s a music video and I’m the star.

It’s late when I get back to the apartment. When I get there, Zach and Dean are sitting in the couch in just socks and underwear, playing video games, blissfully unaware, I’m pretty sure, of anything that has taken place over the last twenty four hours. Dean’s girlfriend

Callie (remember her from way back in the first chapter?) is also here, and is sitting on the floor, looking thoroughly bored.

‘Oh my god!’ she yells when she sees me come in. ‘Finally, a real person to talk to!

These guys have just been sitting around playing their stupid fighting game and ignoring me and it’s not kosher at all . They should be going out. In fact, I have my suspicions ...’

‘Hi Callie,’ I say, as she leans in to hug me. Dean and Zach grunt hello from the couch, their eyes trained on the screen. ‘I thought you weren’t coming til Friday?’

‘I wasn’t,’ she says, ‘but the Gold Coast was boring . You can’t have any fun up there.

Not that anything fun is happening down here.’ Callie has cut her hair since I saw her last – it’s still blonde, but now it only just covers her ears; Callie once told me that her idol was Edie

Sedgewick, a girl who apparently hung with Andy Warhol and has had a book written about her. I’ve seen pictures of her, slathered in eyeliner in a tiny little dress, and I think Callie must be taking a lot of very literal fashion cues from them.

‘We’re having fun,’ says Dean, his gaze still fixed where it is. ‘Die, die, die!’ he adds, tapping the control pad particularly hard.

141 Zach drops his controller in frustration, rocking back on his chair and then stamping his feet on the floor. ‘Best of five,’ he says.

‘You’re on.’

Callie rolls her eyes. ‘So how are you, Hayden? You look pleased with yourself.

You’ve met up with that girl from the internet, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ Zach laughs, attention suddenly focussed on us. ‘Haydo’s Russian internet bride.’

‘She’s not from Russia,’ I say, embarrassed, silently cursing Callie for her absurdly direct questions. ‘I met her in a bookstore.’

‘Right,’ laughs Zach, ‘so she’s a geek?’

‘She’s amazing,’ I say, immediately and painfully aware of the fact that I’ve used the word ‘amazing’ in front of my friends to describe a girl, thereby marking me out as the world’s biggest pussy. ‘Where’s Luke?’ I ask, deflecting the conversation in a direction other than mine.

Zach laughs at this. ‘Luke brought home another chick from the party,’ he says.

‘Another chick?’ I ask, what do you mean.

‘He’s set another record, sly dog,’ says Zach. ‘Two in one day.’

‘Umm … can you be more specific?’ I ask him.

‘Luke hooked up with some girl at a house party last night. He said she looked just like some girl from some French movie …’

‘Amelie?’ I ask him.

‘That’s the one. Yeah, he met her upstairs – he said she couldn’t keep her hands off him. Typical Luke shit. He didn’t even find out her name, but they spent the night up there. He reckons they did it once last night and then again this morning.’

‘Right,’ Dean jumps in, ‘ then , as he’s leaving the party, he meets this girl in the kitchen . She’s like this killer redhead, from country Victoria or something. She’s never been out of her country town before. Luke brought her back here, says he’s going to show her the ropes.’

‘Guys,’ I say, ‘I hate to be the one to break this to you, but I’m pretty sure Luke’s full of shit.’

142 ‘What do you mean?’ Dean asks.

‘It’s an outside possibility, I admit, but I think there’s a chance Luke might even be a virgin.’

‘What?’

Callie snorts at this. ‘Damn right he is.’ Now we’re all looking at her. She rolls her eyes. ‘You boys are so full of shit. You don’t notice anything. Of course your friend Luke is a virgin.’

‘You can tell just by looking at them?’ Dean asks.

‘Yes, I can,’ Callie says. ‘ I’m amazing.’

Zach shifts around nervously on the couch.

‘That and the fact that he told me about it,’ she continues.

‘Huh?’ I’m not sure which one of us asks this, but it doesn’t matter.

‘It was at a party one night, I forget when,’ Callie says. He was really drunk and he cornered me and before I could say anything, he just started blubbering about his ex-girlfriend and how much he loved her, and how she’d asked him to save his virginity until they got married and he totally said yes but then she cheated on him the next week. It was sad. I actually felt bad for the big drunken douche.’

‘Why didn’t you tell any of us about this?’ Dean asks, incredulous.

Callie shrugs. ‘Never came up.’

‘But Luke has that fit girl in his bedroom right now!’ says Zach.

Callie shrugs again. ‘Maybe he does. I’m just telling you what I know.’

‘One way to find out,’ I say.

Dean and Zach follow me down the hall to Luke’s room, giggling, with Callie, shaking her head, behind them. Putting my ear to the door, I can hear muffled voices, but not much else.

‘Should I open it?’ I whisper.

Dean and Zach flash me nervous I don’t know expressions, and in the end, I just decide to say screw it , and throw the door wide open.

Luke and the redhead are, indeed, on the bed together. In fact, Luke’s in what might describe as a truly obscene position – his head is on the girl’s lap, and he’s weeping.

143 ‘It’s okay,’ she’s saying. ‘Break ups happen for a reason … I’m sure your ex will let you be her friend again, if you let her.’

Luke’s shoulders are heaving, and there are tissues scattered around the bed. He and the girl notice us at more or less the same time. She seems a little surprised, but Luke, whose eyes are glistening and whose nose is running, has a distinct deer-in-the-headlights expression.

‘Your friend’s a bit messed up,’ says the redhead. ‘He’s been crying about his ex- girlfriend for the last half an hour. Oh, and he said something about how he tried to hit on some Byron girl whose boyfriend beat him up? I’m not sure what happened there, you might want to ask him. My name’s Lauren, by the way.’

144 The stupid stuff you do when you like someone a whole lot – I’m

warning you, this scene will probably make you quite sick

Zoe and I have been walking hand in hand along the beach for a while. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculously corny, and we’re getting back into bad TV show territory, but that’s really what happened. I could have made something up – I could have lied to you at the point – but I respect you enough to tell the truth. It’s just after nine in the morning – way too early to be awake – but I really couldn’t wait any longer to see Zoe, and she was already awake when I called. I meet her at her place and take her for breakfast and coffee in a little café in town – one of those obscenely overpriced places, with strong coffee and really thick toast that has about eight different kinds of fruit in it, places that make you feel grown-up and civilised for being there. I never realised how it felt to buy coffee and breakfast for a girl you really like before – it’s nice.

As we get to the top of one of the dunes, I see a wooden railing, and something greater than me – that force that causes guys to attempt dumb yet athletic feats in order to impress girls – takes over. I leap up onto the railing and start walking backwards, all the time looking at her and grinning and trying to keep my balance. It’s lame, but these are the lame things you do when you like someone – and when you have an almighty coffee buzz on.

Zoe laughs. ‘You’re … walking backwards,’ she says after a while.

‘I know.’

‘I’ve never seen that done before. Outside a movie, I mean. In fact, I don’t know that

I’ve seen it done in a movie either.’

‘Well, it’s known to happen,’ I say.

‘I don’t doubt it. I have to say, I’m impressed.’

‘You like it?’

‘Nobody’s ever done that for me before … walked backwards. It’s a first.’

‘Well, if anyone’s worthy of a backwards walk, it’s you.’

‘Really?’

‘Totally. Guys should be falling over themselves to walk backwards for you.’

‘Umm … is that a compliment?’

145 ‘Yes.’

‘So these backwards walks … do you do them for all the girls?’

‘No. I don’t do this kinda thing for just anybody.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘Actually, you’re my first.’

‘What, this is the fist time you’ve had an audience?’

‘Yep.’

‘I’m honoured.’

‘You’d better be.’

‘Well I am.’

‘It’s weird but … I feel comfortable around you. I feel comfortable doing … y’know, stupid stuff around you. I’ve never felt this comfortable around a person, which is strange, considering we’ve only just met. I mean, I know you from the internet and whatever but … does that sound strange?’

‘No. I know exactly what you mean.’

‘This is also a first. Right now, at this point in the conversation, most people would think I was weird. Most people would think, like, what have I gotten myself into, with this backwards-walking internet stalker …’

‘You’re a weirdo.’

‘Okay.’

‘I don’t care. I like that you’re a weirdo.’

‘Okay.’

At this point, she kisses me on the cheek.

‘I’m a weirdo too,’ she says.

‘I don’t think you are.’

We both sit down on the wooden railing; without me having to guide her, Zoe moves her head down so it’s resting in the crook of my shoulder. It feels kind of amazing.

‘I kind of want to tell you something …’ she begins. ‘It’s weird.’

‘It’s probably not,’ I assure her.

‘I don’t know why I want to tell you these weird stories all of a sudden …’

146 ‘Because you have a coffee buzz on and it’s schoolies?’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Continue.’

‘Well, the thing is, I’ve never told anyone this before, but I’m a total kleptomaniac.’

‘Is that the one where you pull your hair out?’

‘No. It means I steal stuff.’

‘Really?’

‘All the time. Just little stuff.’

‘Wow.’

‘It started with keys. I used to have a thing for keys. When I was a kid, my parents split up; I was only eight years old at the time, and it wasn’t one of those horrible divorces or anything, they were pretty civilised about it, and it was for the good of everyone and they were happier apart and blah blah blah, but by dad moved to Melbourne and I missed him a lot.’

‘I guess you would.’

‘So I used to cry all the time, and finally, mum gave in and she let me fly down there to see him. This was around Christmas time, and he hadn’t found a place yet, so he was staying in a hotel room that his company was paying for. I was there for about two weeks, and

I was by myself a lot of the time because dad had to go to work and whatever …’

‘Sounds bad,’ I say.

‘It was okay. I knew he was coming back. But the point of the story is, I wasn’t allowed out into the city, but I had my own key to the room, so I could explore the hotel, go up to the pool, and ride the elevators up and down. I met a boy from Canada and we promised to write each-other letters but I guess we didn’t after a while. Anyway, dad was around at night and he took me out to dinner and to the theatre and other places like that and it was fun. I really didn’t want to go home.’

‘Why didn’t you stay?’

‘Couldn’t, it was too complicated. But on the morning when I had to go, I packed all my stuff and dad took me to the airport, but on the way, as I was about to get on the plane, I realised I still had the key … to the hotel room. Dad forgot to ask for it back, and I was about to give it back to him, when I thought … no. I think I want to keep this. It felt good. It was like I

147 had a way to escape; if I ever wanted to run away, I could just jump on a plane to Melbourne and I’d have the key to this room.’

‘They probably changed the locks or something.’

‘That’s not the point. I just liked the idea that, in theory, there was somewhere I could go. It was comforting, somehow.’

‘Okay.’

‘Anyway, after that, it became a really bad habit. I used to steal keys from everywhere

I went – from restaurant bathrooms, from school, from everywhere.’

‘It’s a good thing you grew out of that.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Right.’

‘There’s an old music box I have at home and its filled with keys. It’s funny.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I just like to know there’s somewhere I can go.’

We sit there in silence for a while, watching the water, the sun on our faces, and then she kisses me again, this time not on the cheek.

I had been worried that, because Zoe’s and my rapport was so good on the internet, we would have nothing to say to each-other in real life, but right now, sitting on the beach, it’s clear that I shouldn’t have worried so much. An hour goes by, and she lies there with her head in my lap – she has one iPod headphone and I have the other – and I’m thinking about the awesome, amazing mix tape that I plan to make for her when I get home.

148 1.0 A personal introduction

It was 2005, a hot, sticky night at beginning of a hot, sticky Brisbane summer, and I was sprawled on my roommate’s floor, talking on the phone to a close friend (I’ll call this friend

Bec, because that’s her name). Bec, a recent university graduate, had joined the exodus of young people and left town for a sweet media job in Sydney. I missed her terribly at the time, and the fact that a plane ride (or a ten hour drive) now stood between us and our always fun afternoon drinking sessions only heightened this sensation.

I mentioned this to my friend, at which point she told me about MySpace, a new website that was all the rage amongst the hip young things in the world of Sydney media

(although, to be fair, she had found out about the site via her little brother). MySpace was unique in that it allowed users to create personalised profiles, and then socialise, becoming

‘friends’ with other users on the site. The pictures were pretty, Bec told me, and there were plenty of opportunities for professional networking as well as casual stalking. You could even have your favourite song play as the theme music to your MySpace page (at the time, I recall, hers was something by Rufus Wainright). She encouraged me to start a profile of my own, and assured me it would be a great way to keep in touch.

This MySpace stuff sounded like a fad – an amusing way for students to avoid homework, perhaps, but nothing more than that. Nevertheless, several days later, a nagging sense of curiosity led me to log on and check out the site for myself. With increasing scepticism, I entered my email address, date of birth, relationship status and a recent photo, but my irritation at all the personal questions dissolved as soon as I got a look at my own profile. As a child of the 80s who grew up with a particular fondness for video games, the idea of seeing all my personal information condensed in this attractive and easily-navigable form was somehow … awesome.

As I modified and tweaked the profile, my involvement with MySpace grew. Choosing which movies to list amongst my favourites turned out to be an intense emotional journey. At first, I attempted to list my entire DVD collection, but this task, as I ran back and forth between the living room and my computer, proved unnecessarily time consuming. After that, I decided upon a minimalist approach and listed only my favourite directors – Wes Anderson, Sofia

149 Coppola – but something about this smacked of pretentiousness. In the end, I went with a selection of childhood favourites ( Ghostbusters , Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ) along with newer, artier American indie films ( Lost In Translation , Igby Goes Down ). These cultural texts, I felt, said a lot about me as a person, and it was important that I make the balance exactly right.

MySpace was interesting to me in that it allowed me to stay in touch with friends and contacts (and occasionally stalk randoms), but as a creative practitioner, my interest extended far beyond this. When I joined the site, I was making notes for a Young Adult novel I planned to write, a love story that would take place over the week of the schoolies celebration. As I sketched out my young characters, though, my thoughts returned to MySpace. If the younger generation (like Bec’s early-adopting brother) were using this site, then surely some in-depth research into the MySpace phenomenon would benefit my creative practice.

At that point, the question came to me fully formed: “Who are the MySpace generation, and how can they be represented in a work of fiction?”

2.0 Preliminary questions

As a preamble to this essay, the question must be asked – why analyse MySpace at all?

What is the cultural significance of the site, and beyond that, what is the value of MySpace? It is best, perhaps, for the discussion to begin with an analysis of the phrase ‘the MySpace

Generation’. Early in my research, I found myself using this term as a catch-all to describe the vast numbers of young people who use social networking sites, believing it to be my own unique coinage. I discovered, though, that other critics and researchers were also using this phrase. The most prominent among these was Larry D Rosen of California State University, who has, since 1997, published extensively on the subject he refers to as the ‘psychology of technology’. The more essays and journal articles I read, though, the more I saw the phrase

‘the MySpace Generation’ appearing.

MySpace is a part of the broader phenomenon of social networking, which itself is a generic term for a range of internet-based communication platforms. Though MySpace was established in 2003, its roots go back to the birth of what many critics refer to as Web 2.0.

The phrase Web 2.0, attributed to Dale Dougherty (2007, p18), refers to a post 2001 ‘shake

150 up’ of the internet, characterised by a popular rise in interaction, networking and self- publishing, allowing users to share information and, most importantly, to collaborate in new ways (Criswell, 2008). Social networking is a significant facet of this, perhaps the most significant.

The significance of MySpace to the group known as Generation Y is also worthy of discussion at this point. Generally acknowledged as the group of people born between 1978 and 1995 (Adams, 2007) 1, Generation Y are characterised by a greater reliance on technology and gadgets than previous generations, are frustrated with slow-paced environments and have little tolerance for traditional hierarchies and outdated technologies

(Rothberg, 2006). Products of stable economic times and luxurious living conditions (Haag, as cited in Rothberg, 2006), the Ys are a generation who grew up with video games, the internet, instant messaging, email and, most significantly, with an in-built flair for multi-tasking (Rosen,

2006).

Rosen theorises that, given the current popularity of social networking in this demographic, Generation Y – the net generation – has become the MySpace Generation

(Rosen, 2006). This is not to say that all members of Generation Y are technologically literate, or even have access to computers and the internet – online social networking is a phenomenon observable in industrialised societies with a high penetration of both technology and technological literacy. Likewise, the phrase ‘the MySpace Generation’ does not suggest that MySpace is actually the most popular social networking site in terms of active users or subscribers. However, given the historical significance of MySpace – and the site’s penetration of popular culture – the phrase ‘the MySpace Generation’ will be used throughout this exegesis.

2.1 How many users are on MySpace?

Though the array of available social networking sites is diverse, MySpace is without question one of two or three key players. MySpace is a dynamic environment, with new members

1 The definition of Generation Y is fluid – some say that these individuals, also known as the ‘Net Generation’, are the group born up to 2000; others put the cut-off date at 1994; based on my research, the consensus is around the mid-1990s

151 joining every day – in fact, since the site’s inception in 2003, as a platform for independent musicians to show off their product, it grew so rapidly that, just three years later, it was the seventh largest English language website in the world (Rosen, 2006). There are many competing social networking sites, but the closest competition comes from Facebook – once intended only for Harvard students, the site was opened to the public in 2006 and has since grown in popularity to rival MySpace.

Various questions need to be addressed, however, before an in-depth analysis of

MySpace can commence. Firstly, how many users in total does the site have, and secondly, how many of these users are young people? As of 2006, the estimated number of MySpace users worldwide was 87 million (Goodings et al., 2007), and figures from the 2007 show

MySpace as the third most popular website in the United States, with 36 million page views a day (Long, 2007, p38). The most current statistics, from January 2008, show that the number of registered MySpace users has swelled to 110 million (Stetler, 2008). To put these figures in context, Rosen points out that MySpace, if it were a recognised nation, would be the thirteenth largest country in the world (Rosen, as cited in Twersky, 2006).

The issue of how many young people are actually online – and more specifically, on

MySpace – is a more vexing one. Though the number of users over 25 is growing, teens are still the biggest MySpace users – in fact, Rosen’s 2006 research found that nearly half of

MySpace users were under 18, and most were under 16 (Rosen, 2006). These figures point to the percentage of MySpace users who are young people, but what about the percentage of young people who are MySpace users?

Numerous studies have been done, and numerous statistics are available, but few critics are able to agree on an exact figure. Coupled with this, most of the relevant studies are

American, and therefore biased towards that country’s young people. Sandy Hayes cites a

January 2007 Pew Charitable Trust survey, suggesting that 55% of all online American youths aged 12-17 have created profiles at social networking sites (Hayes, 2007, p59). Jillian

Cohan cites a Pew survey from 2005, whose figures suggested that approximately 84% of

American teens were online, and of those, about two thirds used instant messaging to communicate with friends (Cohan, 2007, p2), which again suggests 55%. As both of these

152 figures come from the same source – and the total percentage of children online has not changed significantly in two years – their veracity seems questionable.

Rosen’s statistics differ significantly from those of Cohan and Hayes – he quotes a

2007 survey undertaken by the Forrester Research Institute, which suggests that up to 80% of American youths with access to the internet have MySpace profiles. Even more significantly, the Forrester figures suggest that 96% of online youths have used some form of social networking technology, be it chatting, text messages, blogging or visiting social networking sites (Rosen, 2007). The Pew figures, however, were constrained by age (12-17), whereas the Forrester figures quoted by Rosen did not make explicit any such age limits. At a rough estimate, then, more than half and as many as four-fifths of American teens with access to the internet have MySpace profiles – a significant chunk of the population.

One further caveat must be made at this point – although one can observe the number of profiles that exist on MySpace, it is trickier, perhaps impossible, to determine how many of these profiles are active. Based on data collected during ongoing traffic analysis,

Friert makes the bold assertion that as many as 34% of early MySpace had abandoned the site altogether as of 2007 (Friert, 2007). Whatever the reason for this – many suggest that the exodus of older MySpace users coincided with the site’s introduction of hyper-targeted advertising (Business Wire, 2007) – many of these abandoned profiles, never deleted, still appear on the site, leading to a false impression of how many people actually use and engage in a meaningful way with MySpace.

2.2 How does MySpace function?

Having examined MySpace on a demographic level, it now becomes necessary to look at the site in a more nuts-and-bolts way – specifically, to examine how MySpace functions, from a user’s perspective. In the simplest possible terms, the site allows its members to build their own profiles – personalised web pages containing a combination of biographical information

(generic information on age, gender and relationship status), lists of personal preferences, weblogs (blogs), miscellaneous text, and images. Users are able to select and display background images, post their thoughts in ‘bulletins’ and communicate via customised instant

153 messaging software. All biographical information is inputted by the user when the profile is created, and can be manipulated at will; there are other options, to include more specific details such as body type and sexual preference, although these are able to be hidden

(Goodings et al,, 2007).

For the uninitiated, Rosen evokes the physical appearance of a MySpace page thus:

‘Visualize a child’s bedroom with posters of rock stars, loud music and homework

strewn across the bed. Now add a combination of yearbook, personal diary, and

social club and you have MySpace’ (Rosen, 2006) .

David Kirkpatrick’s evocation is more specific, although no less vivid:

‘[MySpace is] a mishmash of modern media, rich with music and video and comedy.

It’s like a rock and roll club – chaotic, loud and packed. Many user profiles are

flamboyant, with flashing text and music that starts pumping as soon as you arrive’

(Kirkpatrick, 2007, p158).

After creating a profile, a MySpace user may add ‘friends’, a process by which links to other profiles, accompanied by pictures, are placed on the user’s main page (the dynamic of making ‘friends’ and creating communities on MySpace will be discussed in greater depth in a subsequent portion of the exegesis). Communication on the site can be either synchronous

(live interaction) or asynchronous (delayed), and can involve two or many more people.

These communications are either one-to-one (in the case of private messages, IM chats, and comments left on private user profiles) or one-to-many (bulletins posted, and also comments left on public profiles). In some cases, such as in the instance of wikis, online communication is many-to-many, but this is seldom the case with MySpace.

2.3 Why discuss MySpace? A personal perspective

154 At this point, I feel I should return briefly to my earlier question – why analyse MySpace at all?

If anything, my reasons for embarking on this project were best articulated by the New

Scientist ’s Amanda Gefter (2006), who said that, while older adults go online to find information, the younger crowd go online to live. She also identified a widening generation gap between adolescents, for whom the boundaries between private and public, offline and online – are blurring, and older adults, who might still find this same technology foreign and upsetting.

The social group who ‘go online to live’ are of great interest to me as a researcher and a creative practitioner. As previously outlined, the very notion of ‘the MySpace

Generation’ is one that comes with a number of caveats. Online social networking is a phenomenon observable in societies with a high penetration of both technology and technological literacy, usually western, industrialised nations, with some exceptions such as

Japan and South Korea, where three out of every four citizens are internet users (Wood,

2007). Likewise, the MySpace generation is a particular demographic within Generation Y – not Generation Y itself. MySpace, likewise, is only one of a number of popular social networking sites, and is by no means the largest in scope or reach.

My aim, with all this in mind, is to use this notion of ‘the MySpace Generation’ as a jumping-off point – to analyse the traits common to Generation Y’s who use social networking sites, and synthesise these into a working definition of who the typical MySpace user is. As an extension of this, I have set out to create a Young Adult text that explores the blurring of boundaries between the real world and the world online; a text that is informed by the

MySpace Generation, but also one that speaks to them in their own unique syntax. Most importantly, my aim is to create an authentic literary voice for the MySpace Generation.

3.0 Methodological approaches to studying MySpace

Subsequent to analysis of the existing body of criticism and research surrounding the

MySpace Generation, I decided that a two-pronged methodological approach was necessary.

The first of these was a literature review. Having read extensively online and in peer reviewed journals, I discovered that, while many critics and academics have written on various aspects

155 of the MySpace Generation, none had unified these elements in a satisfying or complete way.

An attempt to synthesise the various disparate pieces of scholarship on the MySpace

Generation, then, is the first aim of this essay.

Through my research, I identified five key attributes that mark out members of the

MySpace Generation. These individuals construct identities for themselves online, are hyper- connected, communicate with a series of commonly-accepted abbreviations, build and maintain friendship groups online, and also frequently form romantic relationships there.

While it is arguable that there are other attributes that mark out members of the MySpace generation, I selected these five, as they provide a basic but also highly specific frame of reference, and also because they proved to be the most germane to my creative work (more on this later). I decided that, in the initial part of this exegesis, I would attempt to explore each element of this schema in turn in order to build a picture of a typical MySpace user and inform my own creative practice.

My second methodological approach was an ethnographic one – specifically, an online ethnography. The field of online ethnography is an emerging one, taking the traditional ethnographic approach of observing and documenting communities and placing it in an online context. For this study, I drew heavily on two sources – the first of these was Annette N

Markham’s The Methods, Politics, and Ethics of Representation in Online Ethnography , and the second was Lewis Goodings, Abigail Locke and Steven D. Brown’s study Social

Networking Technology: Place and Identity in Mediated Communities. The former suggests a theoretical basis for the field of online ethnography, while the latter is an attempt by a group of ethnographic researchers to examine the dialectic between collectivity and place by studying a selection of MySpace profiles.

Initially, I had planned to conduct detailed ethnographic studies of four MySpace users, and study their interactions over a period of several months in line with Markham’s notions of online ethnography. I realised, however, that this approach was beyond the scope of my project, and decided to narrow my criteria and focus on a close examination of one

MySpace profile. Accordingly, this portion of the essay focuses on Jason 2, a twenty-year-old

2 Not his real name

156 MySpace user from Melbourne, examining his profile in relation to the five proposed key attributes of the young MySpace user.

4.0 Literature review

Though this essay does not draw significantly on critical theory, at this point in the discussion of identity, I feel I should make brief mention of the critic and cultural theorist Judith Butler.

Butler has written extensively on the constructed nature of gender, which she believes is a learned performance rather than a pre-existing state – ‘a doing, though not a doing by the subject, who might be said to pre-exist the deed’ (Butler, as cited in Boucher, 2007). Though

Butler’s writing deals with gender, her notion of performativity can be applied to other fields of study – specifically, I believe, to the study of online social networking.

In terms of Butler, the deed is everything, and there is nothing but the doing. By this logic, members of the MySpace generation are not ‘born’ – rather, they follow the social scripts associated with being part of this generation, and perform the appropriate roles (much like men and women, in Butler’s writing, perform according to the roles society lays out for them). Butler’s notion of performativity is worth keeping in mind when analysing the identities that MySpace users ‘perform’ online.

The following five points constitute a broad overview of the body of literature relating to online social networking, and an attempt to synthesise this information into a series of key attributes relating to the MySpace Generation.

4.1 Constructing identities on MySpace

Alison George of the New Scientist poses a pertinent question in relation to the construction of identity on MySpace – you wouldn’t tell a stranger on a bus about your sexual habits, so why do millions of people freely reveal information like this on social networking sites that are viewable by anyone (George, 2006, p50)? In her article, she uses the example of COLS, a young MySpace user whose public profile says that he is a smoker who partakes in various

157 drugs, has multiple piercings and tattoos, and has severed relationship ties with his father. In the pre-MySpace era, George says, she may never have known COLS – now she is privy to some of his most intimate details. She laments the sheer volume of information that young people post about themselves online, and questions whether or not one day, they might live to regret the level of transparency with which they conduct themselves on MySpace.

MySpace also allows users a forum to strategically reveal and manipulate information relating to themselves. In fact, Goodings et al. (2007) suggest that self-presentation is a key aspect of the MySpace experience, and that, through their profiles, adolescents are able to construct and maintain a particular version (or particular versions) of their character, interests and values. Attention to and tailoring of details, they argue, are routine presentational issues for all MySpace users (Goodings et al., 2007), who, through their profiles, can choose to reveal everything from musical and literary tastes to drinking and drug habits, political and religious views, sexual orientation and inner thoughts and feelings.

The notion of constructing identity on MySpace becomes particularly significant when adolescents are taken into account. Rosen argues that social networking sites, particularly

MySpace, are key sites for the experience of adolescent socialisation. ‘They can be someone different if they want, they can post something controversial and see how people react’

(Rosen, as cited in Knepper, 2007). For example, on MySpace, young people can make overtures about their sexuality in order to ‘test the water’, and work from there to the real world; a shared interest in a pop cultural artefact like, say, a Death Cab For Cutie album, might even bring youngsters of a similar persuasion together.

Chris Wilson discusses ideas surrounding identity in his essay MySpace as a

Personality Lab . He borrows from the discourse of psychology to introduce the terms ‘identity diffusion’ and ‘identity achievement’ (Wilson, 2007), suggesting that the former is an early developmental stage which settles, in many people, around college age. For present high schoolers, Wilson says, MySpace is an environment for the building and testing of new images and personas in an online environment – it gives them the opportunity to practice being different, and establish, express and alter various identities. One must not forget, though, that all MySpace profiles are constructed. George (2006) points out that many users

158 have multiple profiles across multiple social networking platforms, and might well present different versions of themselves on, say, MySpace profiles and online dating sites.

4.2 The hyper-connectivity of the MySpace generation

A key trait of the MySpace generation is an expectation of instantaneous communication across a number of platforms, or hyper-connectivity. The best way to illustrate this point is, perhaps, anecdotally. In Teens Are Plugged In, But Are They Disconnected? Jillian Cohan cites the example of a girl named Liz Wheeler:

Liz Wheeler says she doesn’t need to be in constant contact with her friends. The 17-

year old Wichitan craves solitude when she’s working on art projects. But on vacation

in Paris this summer, she felt lonely and depressed. “I went through withdrawal,” she

said. Unable to send text messages or update her Facebook page, she convinced her

mom to let her make overseas calls from her hotel phone (Cohan, 2007, p1) .

Another girl, Ashley, suffered anxiety when her cell phone service cut out for half an hour while on a family ski trip, saying ‘I was terrified I wouldn’t get a text’. A third young networker, Grant, has other ways of staying in touch – ‘when my phone battery dies, which is a huge tragedy,’ he says, ‘I’ll get on my laptop, on IM’ (Cohan, 2007, p2). Cohan’s article is filled with cases like these – amusing, if slightly worrying accounts of teenagers who live in fear of being disconnected from their circle of friends.

Cohan is critical of the perceived trend towards hyper-connectedness, saying that it adversely affects young people’s chances of developing into independent, self-reflective adults. Nancy Cheever has spoken out about the adverse effects of hyper-connectedness, highlighting a tendency towards social isolation, depression and other issues (Cheever, as cited in Knepper, 2007) in teens who spend long periods of time on MySpace. She does, however, add the caveat that these adverse effects might also be associated with spending long periods of time in front of computers, and might not be related specifically to MySpace.

159 In general terms, though, the idea of instantaneous communication seems firmly entrenched in the minds of the MySpace generation. To further this notion, Rosen (2007) suggests that email is no longer the preferred communication method of young people, who have turned to more direct methods like text messaging, instant messaging and communications via sites like MySpace. MySpace acknowledged this trend in 2006, when the site introduced MySpace IM (Centaur Communications Ltd, 2007).

As well as being hyper-connected, members of the MySpace Generation are adept at multi-tasking, and in absorbing many different forms of media simultaneously – a phenomenon that Hempel and Lehman (2005) refer to as hyper-distractibility. Members of the

MySpace Generation are able to chat to five friends simultaneously, listen to music, browse the internet and do schoolwork all without leaving their desks.

4.3 The use of abbreviated language forms

In his article Is The King’s English Dead? , Jim Ducharme (2006) puts forward the notion that commonality leads to clarity – specifically, that we are prone to using terms or turns of phrase that, while not technically correct, nonetheless communicate meaning. The rules of grammar, he suggests, are often secondary to relaying reliable information clearly and concisely. The communication shortcuts and abbreviations that have evolved over the last decade thanks to the simultaneous spread of mobile phone and computer technology are of particular importance to the MySpace Generation, and their development and significance is discussed below.

Many mobile phone service providers allow only a limited number of characters per text message, and this limitation, coupled with the small size of many mobile phone keypads and the resultant mechanical difficulty of texting, led to the development of a text message shorthand. Rosen highlights constructions such as:

LOL, brb, cya, POS and LMAO (“laughing out loud”, “be right back”, “cover your ass”

or “see ya”, “parent over shoulder” and “laughing my ass off”), shortened words (nite

instead of night), emoticons or smilies, [capitalisation] to imply a strong statement (I

160 AM MAD AT YOU), lack of appropriate capitalisation (i instead of I), removing

unneeded apostrophes (don’t) and other tricks to minimise texting effort (Rosen,

2007).

A similar language of abbreviations and shorthand phrases has developed in the online world. Edwin Kee’s (2002) Understanding elite speak traces the genesis of what he refers to as a pollution of the Queen’s English (The critics, it seems, can agree on the commonality of the new grammar, even if they can’t agree on a monarch). Elite speak, or ‘leet speak’, he says, represents a natural progression from mobile phone-based acronyms like

LOL and ROTFL. He says that ‘leet speak’ developed with online gamers and Internet Relay

Chat users (the online elite) who, over time, developed a system in which words were shortened, and letters substituted for numbers. For example, the letter ‘l’ and its upper case counterpart ‘L’ might be replaced with the number “1” – likewise, ‘3’ stands in for ‘e’, ‘7’ for ‘t’ and ‘5’ for ‘s’ so that ‘leet speak’ becomes ‘1337 5p34k’ (Kee, 2002). In this system, new users, or ‘newbies’, become known as ‘n00b5’. 3

Rosen and Kee’s views on the new grammar both relate to the concept of orality.

Fordham University’s Lance Strate has written extensively on this subject, relating the popularity of social networking sites back to deep-seated patterns of human communication.

He contends that humans evolved with speech rather than with the written word, and that the highly formalised rituals of social networking sites echo the oral cadences of much earlier cultures (Strate, as cited in Wright, 2007). Orality, he says, is participatory, interactive, communal, and focused on the present – all of these are qualities inherent to social networking.

Strate’s observations would seem to be in line with those of Kyoto University’s Nobuo

Masataka – after extensive analysis of Japanese teenagers and their mobile phone habits,

Masataka (as cited in Campbell, 2005) concluded that, in the communications they made, which favoured group cohesion over meaningful content, the teenagers were displaying similar behaviour patterns to certain species of monkeys. Masataka’s suggestion was that text

3 Kee’s article also makes mention of the evolution of the phrase ‘owned’. In the world of online gaming, the victor in a game is often said to have ‘owned’ the losers with his skills; thanks to the proximity of the letters ‘o’ and ‘p’ on the computer keyboard, as well as the rapid typing necessary in online gaming ‘owned’ often came to be spelled ‘pwned’, or ‘pwn3d’.

161 messaging was used to maintain group cohesion rather than communicate meaningful content, an observation that lines up with Strate’s notions of orality and social networking.

Both of these feed into the next area for examination, the building and maintaining of friendship groups online.

4.4 Building and maintaining friendship groups online

As previously discussed, one of the major features of MySpace profiles is the ability to add and maintain a lattice of hyper-linked ‘friends’. Rosen (as cited in Twersky, 2007) suggests that the typical MySpace user has about 200 of these ‘friends’, a selection of people who might be known intimately to the user in real life, casual acquaintances and complete strangers. A friend can be a person, a popular band, a pet ferret, a large corporation … the potential is pretty well limitless. Users of MySpace can choose to display their favourite friends in a “Top 8” (or “Top 16” or “Top 24”), or, if they choose, not display any friends at all.

Profiles, explain Goodings et al. (2007), are connected through a series of hyperlinks that are attached to an image the user chooses to present … users who wish to increase the number of links to their profile need to offer sufficient details in order to (a) make their profile

‘searchable’ by other users and (b) provide grounds for other users to initiate interaction on the basis of shared interests.

Hayes (2007) contends that the number of photos displayed in the ‘friends’ column is an open validation of status. The more friends you have, the more popular you are – this equation is as easy to work out online as it is in real life. Hayes refers to ‘the basic conflict of teenhood’, suggesting that social networking sites speak to a dual need for individuality and togetherness within adolescents – allowing them to proclaim individuality while simultaneously fitting in with the culture of the community.

Commonality of interests is key to the notion of community on MySpace. Goodings et al. (2007) note that exhaustive lists of favourite bands and musicians are a key feature of many profiles, and the significance of these lists goes well beyond the aesthetic. Steve

Pearman, who worked alongside Tom Anderson on the original design of MySpace, articulates the process of ‘friending’ elegantly:

162

I know you, and I see one of your friends. Look at them – they’re friends with this

band. The band is doing a show. They’re at this awesome club. Here’s a guy who

also goes to that club and is a Battlestar Galactica fan – maybe he and I should be

friends (Pearman, as cited in Kirkpatrick, 2007) .

In Pearman’s example, a friendship is formed between strangers based entirely on common pop cultural interests. This is one of the key ways in which the MySpace generation form the bonds of friendship.

Forming friendship is one thing, but members of the MySpace generation also go about maintaining friendships in unique ways. In fact, many critics have identified strong parallels between interactions on social networking sites and those that took place in primitive tribal cultures. Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University, had this to say: ‘In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you … When you look at [social networking sites], you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each-other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are’ (Wesch, as cited in Strate, 2007).

In tribal societies, says Wesch (as cited in Strate, 2007), people routinely give each other jewellery, weapons and ritual objects to cement their social ties. The same can be said of social networking sites like MySpace – users trade pictures, animations, YouTube videos and the like, arguably for much the same reason. Masataka’s (as cited in Campbell, 2005) notion of group cohesion also comes into play here – users trade pictures of Britney Spears’ nether regions or the Lol Cats 4 not to communicate any sort of inherent meaning, but rather, to maintain group cohesion. The parallels between tribal cultures and MySpace are not to be taken too literally, however. As Wesch points out, in tribal societies, people develop bonds via face to face contact, but on the internet the need for this is eliminated, allowing people to declare friendship on the basis of much more tenuous connections.

4 The LolCats are an absurdly popular internet meme featuring amusingly-captioned photos of adorable cats and kittens … by the time this exegesis is marked, they may feasibly have disappeared from the public consciousness completely in favour of some other absurd amusement, so please disregard this reference at will.

163

4.5 Forming romantic relationships online

The previously mentioned notion of online relationships developing without the necessity of face to face contact is particularly interesting in light of the ways that the MySpace Generation form romantic bonds. In a play on Dale Dougherty’s coinage, Wortham (2007), in Wired magazine, refers to this phenomenon as Dating 2.0. Lamb and Johnson (2006) put forward the notion that MySpace is an important site for the creation of new relationships – the core of social networking sites is the ability to identify people with similar interests and needs, they say, and it’s natural that this would extend beyond friendship. ‘Relationships are important to tweens and teens. Boyfriends, girlfriends, best friends, and peer group friends are all nurtured online through the use of rating systems, virtual reputations and commenting functions.

Rosen (2007) has analysed online dating from a more academic perspective, and his article on The Impact of Emotionality and Self-Disclosure offers various facts and statistics relating to online dating. In line with Wesch’s (as cited in Strate, 2007) notion that social networking removes the need for physical proximity, Rosen says that online dating often begins not with a face-to-face meeting, but rather, with the viewing of a photo profile.

Subsequent to this, he says, comes a flurry of instant messages – a ‘getting to know you’ period characterised by a ‘flurry [of] messages back and forth with early self-disclosure by both parties’ (Rosen, 2007). Rosen then quotes an earlier study by McKenna, Green and

Gleason which found that, because of the much higher level of self-disclosure, online relationships would develop faster and often be more stable than offline ones (McKenna,

Green & Gleeson, as cited in Rosen, 2007).

The most pertinent examination of the practice of MySpace dating (not to mention the wittiest) can be found in Leslie Simon and Trevor Kelly’s book Everybody Hurts . Though this text functions primarily as a primer to the ‘emo’ subculture, and is more discursive in nature than Rosen’s academic analysis, Simon and Kelly recognise the cultural importance of social networking, and devote a section of the book to the internet, including a breakdown of the

164 rules of MySpace dating. They offer, for example, a step-by-step guide to taking the perfect picture in order to snare a potential partner (Simon & Kelley, 2007, p59):

1. Grab your digital camera.

2. Go into the bathroom.

3. Face the mirror.

4. Hold digital camera, lens facing out, near the middle of your chest.

5. Cock head to the side.

6. Pout.

7. Click shutter.

Subsequent to this, Kelly and Simon offer a list of advice to readers as to the process of finding a romantic partner on MySpace. They caution readers to look out for certain types of profile picture – shadowed, blurry, or extremely close-up photographs, they counsel, are often signs that a user might have something to hide, physically. Likewise, they counsel against regularly checking the profile of your crush – software like SpySpace exists to track profile views, and stalking, they say, is an unattractive quality. Bragging about the size of your genitalia is out, but bragging about the size of your record collection is most definitely in. Most importantly, they say, a new crush should be placed in the ‘Top 8’ section (echoing Lamb and

Johnson’s comment about the importance of rating systems), to display an active interest

(Simon & Kelley, 2007).

5.0 Online ethnography

One of the first (and perhaps most obvious) statements in Annette M Markham’s The

Methods, Politics and Ethics of Representation in Online Ethnography is that internet-based technologies present new and interesting challenges to the research scenario. As Markham notes:

165 ‘In technologically mediated environments, self, other and social structures are

constituted through interaction, negotiated in concert with others. The extent to which

information can mediate one’s identity and social relations should call us to

epistemological attention. Whether or not we do research of physical or online

cultures, new communication technologies highlight the dialogic features of social

reality, compelling scholars to re-examine traditional assumptions and previously

taken for granted rubrics of social research’ (Markham, 2005, p794) .

In her essay, Markham goes on to state that the internet also provides a unique field for study in terms of the construction of identity. In online environments, she argues, the process of identity formation is one that must be initiated deliberately and self-consciously.

While offline, our identity can be informed by mannerisms, gestures and physical characteristics, online, the first step towards existence is the production of discourse, whether in the form of words, graphic images or sounds (Markham, 2005). Markham’s essay was published in 2005, at exactly the point when the number of users on the MySpace community began to explode. MySpace, in a sense, is the perfect illustration of Markham’s argument, in that it represents a community where discourse is literally produced in the work of text, graphic images and sounds.

5.1 Choosing a MySpace user

With the body of knowledge on online ethnographic research rapidly expanding, I was faced with the question: what will be the best way for me to go about conducting an inquiry into

MySpace? Brulen University’s Mário Guimarães conducted one of the first online ethnographic studies, and his approach was an interesting one. From 1998 to 2000,

Guimarães conducted a study of The Palace, a platform which allowed users, visually represented by dynamic avatars, to converse and interact. In this study, Guimarães sought to examine the ways in which users of the site ‘appropriated and resignified’ (Guimarães, 2001) the multimedia resources of The Palace through their own interactions. Through observation

166 of The Palace’s community, he aimed to create a basic framework for fieldwork in future online ethnographic studies.

Due to the dynamic nature of internet interactions, Guimarães found it essential to keep accurate and up-to-date logs of his discoveries. As he put it, because ‘websites often change or vanish completely, it is useful to have them on hand for future reference’

(Guimarães, 2001). Most significantly, he took digital ‘snapshots’ of his desktop during key moments of his observation. For similar reasons, he saved all of the textual exchanges on the site in log files, systematising them in the order in which they were recorded. In the process of doing this, he created what he referred to as a sort of ‘fieldwork diary’.

At the conclusion of his paper Doing Online Ethnography , Guimarães provides a series of hints and tips for online ethnographers, reproduced here for reference (Guimarães,

2001):

- Organise the fieldwork diary in both hierarchical topics and chronological order;

- Adopt a consistent colour coding to signal relevant data in the diary or use [an]

off-the shelf application to handle and categorise qualitative data;

- Take plenty of screen-shots and find an application to deal with them (both for

capture and browsing);

- Create a rule for file naming that puts both the logs and [screenshot] files in

chronological order;

- Index the textual data using programs to increase the speed and flexibility of text

search;

- Employ databases to store recurring data (as demographic records and

informants’ details) that can be used later to corroborate or give hints to

hypothesis

167

Using Guimarães’s approach as a basis, I read various online ethnographic case studies, trying to find researchers whose aims were similar to mine. In the end, I decided that the best approach was the one of Goodings et al. (2007) in their study of place and identity in mediated communities.

Goodings et al. obtained their data from a search of open access MySpace profiles.

They searched using the following criteria: age (between 18 and 35, which is the default setting), gender (men and women), location (UK), what are they here for (networking). Their search initially yielded 3000 people, from whom they singled out profiles with evidence of an identifiable sequence of exchanges between two speakers. Their study was concerned with temporality, and their aim was to identify a sense of shared space across social networks.

While Goodings et al.’s study was concerned primarily with temporality, mine had the much more discursive aim of identifying and analysing the pages of ‘typical’ member of the

MySpace Generation in line with the criteria divined from my literature review. My original aim was to study four MySpace users – two male and two female, preferably from within the same friendship group, to establish the ways in which they constructed identity online, maintained friendships, used abbreviated language forms and various other criteria. I realised, though, that a study of this size was beyond the scope of my project, and subsequently decided to concentrate on just one MySpace user. 5

Using Goodings et al.’s (2007) method as a basis, I modified the search criteria to suit my needs. I searched for the following: age (between 18 and 21), gender (men and women), location (Australia, given that I am concerned, in my creative practice, with writing a novel for

Australian teenagers), what are they here for (friends). The search initially found three thousand people, but I selected a profile at random from the first page of results.

I subsequently analysed my chosen profile in depth, capturing screen-shots and retaining certain pieces of text in line with Guimarães’s approach. While MySpace counts as public domain, I have decided not to include any of my screenshots, or any photos found on

5 The question of whether analysis of one MySpace profile can truly be classified as an ethnographic study – as opposed to, say, textual analysis – doubtless needs to be asked at this point. Although my study only focuses on one MySpace user, my research was a good deal broader – before choosing this user, I viewed countless profiles and recorded the traits common to each. Even though this thesis is a case study of one particular MySpace user, I believe that the broader study and fieldwork I did in order to devise my framework of traits typical to the MySpace Generation is sufficient to qualify this study as an online ethnography.

168 my chosen profile in this essay. Descriptions of certain photos and images are included as appropriate in section 5.2. I also changed the name of my subject and his friends in order to maintain a degree of anonymity. The time signature on comments left on my user’s profile remains the same, as do various biographical details provided on his profile page. Various key biographical details provided by my subject are listed in section 5.2.

5.2 Who is Jason?

Name: Jason

Age: 20

Gender: Male

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Mood : Amused

General interests: I love hangin out with friends, playing various sports, drawing,

playing video games, watchin movies, watching the swans(sydney rule) and relaxing

around. Oh and music, i love music, xkcd webcomic rules too.

Music: OLD SCHOOL ROCK AND ROLL, oh and some new stuff is ok 'THE

BEATLES RULE!!!!!!!'

Films: O yeah i luv films. Hmm so many but which do i think deserve to be mentioned

in this section? OK my favourite movies are: Rocky, Sin City, Kill Bill vol 1&2, Snakes

on a plane, Akira, Ninja Scroll, Batman Begins, The Monty Python movies, Star Wars

ep1-6, Pirates of the Caribbean 1&2, and a whole heap of others

Television: BEST SHOWS: Futurama, Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, Iron

Chef, My name is Earl, Lost, Prison Break, Heroes, Footy Show, Football, South

Park, Real Stories, Rove, thank God your here, whose line is it anyway, Arrested

Development, Frasier, Media Watch, One piece, Naruto, glasshouse, spicks and

specks, scrubs, Seinfeld

Books: any sci fi is pretty good usually

Relationship status: Single

Here for: Networking, Friends

Orientation: Straight

169 Hometown: Cheltenham

Zodiac Sign: Libra

Children: Someday

Education: In college

Occupation: student/kfc

Income: Less than $30,000

5.3 Analysing Jason

Having analysed these superficial elements of Jason’s profile, some in-depth analysis is now necessary. Does Jason display tendencies that conform with the five-point MySpace

Generation schematic? In this section, I will systematically analyse Jason according to the five criteria.

As Goodings et al. (2007) made explicit in their study, MySpace is a forum that allows users to strategically reveal and manipulate information relating to themselves, in order to construct and maintain a particular version of their character. On his profile, Jason deliberately and strategically constructs himself as a geek. For one thing, he admits to reading and enjoying books – based on my informal browsing of MySpace pages in the 18-21 age range, I can say that this sets him apart from many of his peers. The large number of movies and TV shows that Jason lists would also broadly put him in the geek category, especially his professed liking for such Anime titles as Akira and Naruto.

In the ‘About Me’ section of the profile, Jason describes himself in his own words, and the first thing he chooses to say is ‘OK, so in one sentence, im kinda of [sic] a geek’. In a nearby section of the profile sits a box containing the results of a quiz entitled ‘What High

School Clique Do You Belong To?’ – his result indicates that he is a geek slash nerd, and a picture of John Heder in character as the uber-awkward Napoleon Dynamite sits to the left to underscore this point. Further down the profile in the ‘Who I’d Like To Meet’ section, Jason professes a desire to meet ‘a real life, old fashioned pirate (the kind that seeks out treasure and stuff)’. Again, in terms of my informal MySpace browsing, this sets Jason apart from his

170 (male) peers, many of whom post photographs of lithe young women like Jessica Alba or

Anna Kournikova in this section.

Throughout the profile, Jason also chooses to present himself as an artist. He professes a love of drawing in his ‘General Interests’, and, in the ‘About Me’ section, declares:

‘My dream is to become a great artist and actually get paid for drawing, that would be pretty damn sweet’. To further reassure casual browsers of his artistic aptitude, Jason posts another box on the right hand side of his profile, this one containing the results to a quiz entitled ‘Who

Were You In High School?’ The results of this quiz, accompanied by an image of a young woman in red spraying graffiti, identify Jason as an ‘Arty Kid’: ‘Whether you were a drama freak or an emo poet,’ the accompanying text says, ‘you definitely were expressive and unique. You’re probably a little less weird these days – but even more talented!’

In strategically deciding which personal information to reveal – and actively modifying and augmenting that information – Jason has made the decision to present himself as a sensitive, artistic geek rather than a dominating alpha-male. He has deliberately chosen this persona, and is testing it out, as Wilson (2007) suggests, in an online environment. In addition to offering this information about his persona, Jason also represents himself through the use of numerous photographs – these, however, will be discussed in a later section of the essay, in relation to Simon and Kelley’s (2007) notions of constructing a MySpace profile to attract a romantic partner.

Jason’s profile does not display a particular tendency towards hyper-connectedness – the fifty posts displayed in his ‘Comments’ section stretch from September 26, 2007 to

January 24, 2008, meaning that, on average, friends make posts on his profile around twelve times a month. Certain MySpace users in Goodings et al.’s (2007) study communicated significantly more than this, and indeed, my informal MySpace browsing showed users whose profiles might attract fifty or more comments in a single week.

Jason does, however, communicate with his friends across multiple platforms. On

October 1, 2007, at 6:30 PM, Jennifer 6 left a post in his comments section that read: “hey, you're online and I'm bored, go on msn!!!” Likewise, Jason’s friends use his MySpace to keep

6 Not her real name

171 track of his location and physical well-being – on October 8, 2007, at 12:55 AM, Ben 7 posted:

“Dude, you were a no show at uni today! But since you're on myspace i guess you're still alive!” The urge that Jason’s friends display to be in constant contact with him – and more specifically, Jennifer’s desire for instantaneous communication – is in line with notions of the hyper-connectivity of the MySpace Generation.

In terms of the language Jason uses to express himself on his profile, he does not seem to be particularly reliant on the ‘733t 5p34k’ or abbreviations discussed by Ducharme

(2007) and Kee (2002). The notion that clarity of expression can be achieved without strict reliance to the rules of grammar, though, is apparent on his profile, especially in the comments that his friends leave. On January 18, 2008, at 9:19 PM, Jessica 8 posted a comment: ‘u never come on myspace??? My arse u don’t!’ Later, she added: ‘i will call u … and u will be playing guitar hero no doubt.’ Though Jessica’s comment is largely unpunctuated (save the cluster of question marks), substituting the abbreviation ‘u’ for you and leaving the first-person ‘I’ in lower case, her meaning is clear. At some point, Jason communicated to Jessica that he seldom comes on MySpace, but, seeing him online, she has determined this statement to be false. She intends to call him, and while she doesn’t make mention of when this will be, she feels confident that he will be playing video games, a favourite pastime. Jessica, in her truncated expression, is displaying a trait key to members of the MySpace generation.

While Jason himself is not prone to ‘733t 5p34k’, an image he includes on his profile, of a panel from XKDC Web Comic, is of particular interest. The panel is positioned to the left of the profile, underneath ‘Interests’. The text reads: ‘THE BEST PART OF GETTING OLDER

IS GONNA BE INTENTIONALLY MISUSING SLANG AROUND TEENAGERS JUST TO

WATCH THEM SQUIRM.’ Below this text, a larger stick figure says ‘OH MAN. THAT SONG

IS SO PWNED!’ Next to him, a smaller one twitches nervously. This cartoon evokes, in a very literal sense, the ways in which certain turns of phrase can communicate meaning to the initiated (in this case, teenagers) but be lost on others (their elders). That Jason chooses to include it on his profile suggests an awareness of, and a willingness to poke fun at, the linguistic conventions of the MySpace Generation.

7 Not his real name 8 Not her real name

172 Jason has 218 friends on his profile, with a box in the ‘Friend Space’ section highlighting his ‘Top 16’. In this, Jason conforms to Rosen’s (as cited in Twersky, 2007) notion of the typical MySpace user, who has around 200 friends. Jason chooses to highlight 16 of his friends, doubling the number of the default setting – perhaps, as Hayes suggests, he has done this as an open display of popularity, or as a validation of status (Hayes, 2007).

Jason’s profile is public – meaning that, in the initial stages of my research, I was able to open it and access all of his information, and anyone else with access to MySpace will be able to do the same. His profile is searchable by anyone, and accordingly, it displays various invitations for interactions with others. In professing his love of the XKCD web comic 9, Jason tacitly invites other fans of this website to share their feelings with him. Similarly, in the ‘Music’ section of his ‘Interests’, Jason makes the somewhat emphatic statement that he loves ‘OLD

SCHOOL ROCK AND ROLL’, and also makes mention of the fact that ‘THE BEATLES

RULE!!!!!!!’ The bold text and surfeit of exclamation marks are tacit invitations to interaction with other fans of The Beatles and classic rock.

In terms of Wesch’s (as cited in Strate, 2007) notion of the parallels between interactions on social networking sites and rituals in primitive cultures, Jason’s MySpace also offers up some insight. Wesch suggests that, on social networking sites, users trade pictures and animations in the same ways that primitive people traded ritual objects – to cement social ties. There are various examples of this on Jason’s profile.

On October 1, 2007, at 5:34 AM, Ben posted a picture of a video game character on

Jason’s profile, along with the message ‘Not only do I steal your friends, I'm in your games.’

Likewise, on October 28, 2007, at 6:59 AM, Jessica posted a message that read, simply,

‘STEVE HOLT!’, a quote from the cult Fox Network show Arrested Development .10 Neither one of these comments conveys any meaningful or essential information. Ben’s post suggests, firstly, that the video game character in the picture bears a physical resemblance to

Ben, and secondly, that his friendship lattice is intertwined with Jason’s, and they share many of the same contacts. Jessica’s post simply establishes, or reinforces, a shared love of a cult

TV show. Both of these are examples of members of a friendship group communicating in order to maintain cohesion – one of the central characteristics of the MySpace Generation.

9 ‘A web comic of sarcasm, romance, math and language’: http://xkcd.com/ 10 Simon and Kelley devote a section of Everybody Hurts to Arrested Development , which was cancelled in 2006, but still enjoys a large following on DVD.

173 The ‘Details’ section of Jason’s profile lists his sexual orientation as straight, and his relationship status as single. This alone is not enough to suggest that he is searching for a relationship, however, elsewhere in the profile, he makes this desire explicit. In the ‘About Me’ section, directly after expressing his wish to be a successful artist, Jason adds the following:

‘....oh and i suppose [I’d like to] fall in love with someone who loves me back, that'd be pretty awesome too: P’. The self-consciously casual language of this statement (‘i suppose’) and the positioning (in the midst of various pieces of text and images that portray him as a sensitive, artistic geek) suggest a strong desire on Jason’s part to attract a romantic partner.

If it’s safe to say that Jason’s profile is geared, in part, towards finding a mate, then it bears analysis in terms of Simon and Kelley’s step-by-step guide to how to create the perfect

MySpace picture in order to snare a potential partner. Clicking on the profile picture on the main page of Jason’s profile takes the user to a photo section, where 49 pictures are displayed across two albums. Some of these pictures are miscellaneous works of art (not

Jason’s) and one displays a collection of empty liquor bottles with the caption ‘fun fun fun’, but for the most part, these pictures present Jason, either alone of in groups. In some he is playing sport, others show parties and trips to the beach, and in an album marked ‘Ball’, he and his friends are dressed in formal clothing.

One of the ‘Ball’ photos shows Jason sitting at a table surrounded by five girls in low- cut dresses (a male figure, at the edge of the frame, appears to have been cropped out). In response to what could be construed as a coded display of sexual prowess, on November 11,

2007 at 4:41 PM, Rhys 11 posted the comment: ‘I *especially* love how the only other guy at the end is cut off. You player [Jason]. Wink.’ Another photo, captioned ‘camera posing’, reinforces Simon and Kelley’s (2007) notion of what constitutes the perfect MySpace picture.

In ‘camera posing’, Jason is seen from the chest up, with his head cocked to the right; his hair is tousled, his eyes stare past the viewer, and his grin is inscrutable. In terms of my informal

MySpace browsing, I can say that many profiles include a stereotypically ‘MySpace’ shot, which is often flagged as such by the user … ‘camera posing’ is Jason’s.

While it cannot be said that members of the MySpace Generation conform to the points laid out in my schematic, Jason, a user chosen from a random sample of 3000, had a

11 Not his real name

174 profile that resonated with all five. In terms of my creative practice, Jason’s profile was invaluable. I had wondered how I would apply the schematic to my own work, writing about members of the MySpace generation in an authentic and meaningful way – Jason’s profile, his manner of expression and the identity he created online proved inspirational to my ongoing creative piece.

6.0 Representing MySpace users in my own creative

practice

The final part of this essay concerns my young adult novel, The girl and the sea , and discusses the specific ways in which my creative practice has been shaped by my research into the MySpace Generation. The girl and the sea is the second part of a proposed trilogy – all three books take place in the New South Wales beachside town of Byron Bay during the

Schoolies Week festivities. Each book has a different narrator – for the sake of glibness, I will characterise these narrators as a girl, a geek and a gay dude. The girl and the sea is narrated by Hayden, the geek, and tells the story of the various obstacles that befall him as he tries to meet up with a girl named Zoe.

Romance is central to the plot of The girl and the sea . Until their eventual meeting on the beach at the end of the book, Hayden and Zoe have met only once, on a rainy afternoon in a bookstore. Though they are instantly attracted to each-other, their relationship, subsequent to this initial meeting, takes place online, via MySpace and instant messaging.

The book opens with the two of them conversing via instant message, but in a key flashback to their first online encounter, Hayden describes the ways in which an initial exchange of

MySpace comments led to an intense IM chat lasting several hours. She tells Hayden of her anxiety surrounding her parents’ divorce, peppering her comments with phrases like ‘I can’t believe I’m telling you all this’. McKenna et al.’s (as cited in Rosen, 2007) notion of self- disclosure comes into play here – because of the high-level of personal information they trade, Hayden and Zoe’s relationship progresses much faster, emotionally, than it might have if they were to date face to face.

175 Hayden narrates the novel, and the reader experiences Zoe through him – through their IM chats, and through references to her MySpace profile. To portray Zoe in this way was a deliberate decision on my part – I wanted her to be a character whose identity existed most clearly in the online world. Early on in the story, Hayden presents the reader with a précis of

Zoe’s MySpace profile (much like the one I presented earlier, in section 5.2, of my user

Jason). Zoe’s profile lists various general interests (feathers, caramel, making lists, the

1920s) as well as those of a musical (Death Cab For Cutie) and literary (The Unbearable

Lightness of Being, The Pokey Little Puppy) variety. The various interests listed on Zoe’s

MySpace profile create a picture of her for the reader. Just as analysis of Justin’s real-life profile gave the impression of him as a sensitive, artistic nerd, analysis of Zoe’s fictional one suggests a literate, precocious and pop-culturally aware teenager.

In terms of his desire for hyper-connectivity, Hayden is most assuredly a member of the MySpace generation. He keeps his lap-top with him at all times (even if he feels the need to justify this to himself and the reader) and is terrified of the prospect that he might miss an opportunity to chat with Zoe. In this sense, he is like Jillian Cohan’s (2007) teenager, Ashley, who lived in fear of her cell phone reception dropping out while on vacation. A further example of Hayden’s hyper-connectivity is the previously-mentioned chapter in which Hayden and Zoe converse over IM for the first time. In the lead-up to this conversation, he is simultaneously searching for music to download, listening to different music, chatting to various friends, lazily browsing pornography and paying minimal attention to an assignment … and he achieves all of these things without leaving his computer. He is a true multi-tasker, and in this, a representative of the MySpace generation.

Like Justin, Hayden is not a particularly avid user of the ‘733t 5p34k’ or abbreviations.

He and Zoe frequently trade text messages, and when she concludes one of these with

‘XOX’, he flies into a panic spiral, wondering if the hugs and kisses implied are platonic or something more, even asking his friends for advice on the matter. Later, Zoe signs off from an

IM conversation with a ‘<3’ symbol, a shorthand way of saying ‘love you’. Hayden is also panicked and confused by this, wondering if he should have reciprocated, and for that matter, if the informal way that the heart was conveyed suggests mere friendship. While their conversation contains some instances of abbreviated text – the letter ‘u’ substituted for ‘you’,

176 etc – Hayden and Zoe are two highly-verbal characters who pride themselves on written expression, so their communication is less reliant on abbreviated language forms than the users described in Section 4.3.

In a broader sense, though, Hayden thinks and expresses himself like a member of

Generation Y – The girl and the sea is told in a way that is deliberately intertextual, jumping between traditional prose, IM chats and frequent meta-textual interjections from Hayden himself. Hayden is prone to expressing himself via lists (at one point, he gives a specific breakdown of all the alcohol he and his friends bring on their Schoolies trip), and is inspired to make frequent pop cultural observations of the world around him.

The notion of the social networking site as a space for adolescents to create and experiment with different personas is also addressed through the Hayden character; however, rather than presenting a fake version of himself on the internet, Hayden uses it as a space to disclose a masculine sensitivity that he hides in his day-to-day interactions with his friends.

Luke is the dominant force in Hayden’s friendship group, the alpha male, and he projects a predatory masculinity that Hayden, for the most part, falls into line with. Hayden is often uncomfortable with this scenario – on the car trip down to Byron, he is fairly disgusted with

Luke’s talk of conquest (referring to is as ‘egregious bullshit’), but he does not say anything for fear of retribution. Through his internet-based interactions with Zoe, though, Hayden can express a version of himself that he feels is closer to the truth. Some youngsters use the internet as a place to make overtures about emerging sexuality; Hayden uses it to explore the possibility that he might not be the rollicking misogynist Luke expects him to be.

My final point in this section might be best illustrated with a reference to another pop cultural text – specifically, to the movie Cloverfield. In his review, Bruce Newman (2007) praises Cloverfield for being the first movie to entirely discard traditional ‘film grammar’ in favour of the new video-based visual language employed by websites like YouTube and

MySpace. Newman praises the ‘visual language’ of the film, which he says would be equally at home on the screen of an iPod as it would in a cinema. In light of this, my own text, The girl and the sea , could be viewed as a novel that discards traditional ‘novelistic grammar’ in favour of an aesthetic closer to the raw, unfiltered texts that the MySpace Generation create on the internet.

177 In writing The girl and the sea , my aim was to create a voice that would resonate authentically with the MySpace Generation. The Hayden character is not just a hapless romantic hero – he is a young man of his time, raised on video games and the internet, adept at multi-tasking and technologically literate. Hayden’s traits are those of the MySpace generation, but more significantly than that, The girl and the sea , with its inter-textuality, its rapid pacing, its idiosyncratic use of language, its sense of immediacy and its pop cultural awareness, represents the inner, emotional world of the MySpace Generation as much as does the outer, physical one.

7.0 Conclusion

In writing this exegesis, I have offered academic insight into the MySpace Generation – examining the body of criticism and scholarship currently available on the subject, as well as conducting an ethnographic enquiry into the typical young MySpace user – but, in a more personal sense, I have attempted to bridge the gap between myself as an academic writer and myself as a creative practitioner. In creating a schema of the ‘typical’ MySpace user – examining the elements of this individual as laid out in the literature, and then testing these through the study of a randomly-chosen MySpace profile – I have created a template that future researchers will be able to draw upon, accepting, rejecting, building upon or deconstructing it. However, through this line of enquiry, I have also enriched my own creative practice – my study has enhanced my awareness of the MySpace generation, but, as a creative practitioner, it has also enhanced my ability to write about this generation in an authentic and non-patronising way.

If the final section of this exegesis – the component dealing with my creative practice

– is less comprehensive than the rest, it is because, as a creative practitioner, I am a firm believer in Edgar Allen Poe’s dictum that the writer must ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’. Therefore, I will conclude with the statement that the most complete articulation of my discoveries about the MySpace Generation can be found in my novel, The girl and the sea .

178

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