Love-shy by Lili Wilkinson Page A

the house.
    Observations on Nick Rammage, aka PEZZ imist. Monday, 8:36 a.m.
Subject arrives at his locker. He ’ s wearing fitted black jeans, a black T-shirt with white, weathered lettering on it, his ubiquitous large headphones, black Converse sneakers and a chunky black watch. He carries a black backpack. Subject doesn ’ t make eye contact with other students in his vicinity. He keeps his head down, with his long fringe hanging in his eyes. However, his casual gait and slouched posture make him seem aloof to his peers, rather than awkward and antisocial.
    I didn’t have English on Mondays, so I couldn’t observe Nick up close in class. I scoured the school grounds for him during morning recess, but he was nowhere to be found. How was I supposed to observe and analyse my subject if I couldn’t even find him?
    I fidgeted through the next two periods, and when the bell rang for lunchtime I sprang from my seat and sprinted to the Year Ten lockers, where I spotted Nick pulling his lunch from his backpack before sauntering outside. I followed at a distance, trying to appear nonchalant. I was skipping my meeting for the Gazette – but I was on official journalistic business and, despite what Thomas Jefferson said, who really cared whether we led with a story about the school rowing team or an interview with an ex-student who had a minor role in Neighbours ?
    I felt quite the gumshoe, watching Nick, waiting, subtly following him. He ended up on an isolated bench by the science building, overshadowed by a concrete stairwell.
    The temperature had risen over the weekend, and it was quite hot in the sun. Being totally aware of the dangers of the sun in regards to dying of cancer , something many of the tanorexic girls at my school were not, I situated myself beneath a shady tree and watched Nick from across the courtyard.
    1:07 p.m.
Subject is sitting on a bench eating a sandwich. I ’ m too far away to discern exactly what kind of sandwich, but the bread is certainly white. I hope he knows how high white bread is in processed sugars. He ’ s balanced on the backrest of the bench, with his feet on the seat. His eyes are closed and his head is moving up and down slightly, I assume to the beat of the music pumping through his headphones.
    I wondered what he was listening to. Love-shys weren’t supposed to like rock music or anything loud or discordant. They liked melodic, romantic music. So the chances that Nick was listening to the kind of music everyone thought he was listening to were pretty slim.
    He opened his eyes a crack and scanned the courtyard. I pretended to be absorbed with writing in my notebook. When I looked up, he was staring at someone over to my right. I followed his gaze. Was this her? The long-haired girl?
    It was.
    She was a Year Nine girl. Her name was Amy Butler, and she was a swimmer, like me. She had long brown hair (of course) and was very pretty in a petite pixie way. Her hair hung loose down her back. She was sitting with a group of other girls of mid-tier popularity, mostly blonde but not in a pouty, peroxide kind of way, more a healthy, sporty, tampon-commercial kind of way. Amy tended to smile in a distant manner, and when the other girls laughed, she would join in a few seconds late. I could see why she seemed like the perfect love-shy fantasy girl. Sweet, quiet, pretty, long brown hair.
    The thing was, I knew Amy Butler. We’d spoken a few times at swimming, and last year she’d been in the SRC, so I’d had plenty of meetings with her. And Nick had it all wrong.
    Amy wasn’t the gentle, romantic girl he was looking for. She was quiet, sure. But that wasn’t because she was shy and sensitive. It was because she was kind of boring . She wasn’t smart, or funny, or rude, or irritating. She had excellent backstroke technique, but that was all I could think of in her favour, apart from the fact that she was pretty. She was sort of . . .