Smoke and Mirrors

Chapter Twelve

It didn't take very long for Carmen to find herself a new lifestyle entirely after being expelled from Sienna's tight-knit squad. And that lifestyle suited her better if she really thought about it. For her entire life she'd stuck around with Sienna, Trent, Noel and whatever other friends the group was accessorized with at that particular time. And she'd stuck with them because that was the way it was. And that was the way it always had been.

Carmen and Hadley had developed a strange kind of a friendship. Carmen didn't really know if they liked each-other or not, it didn't seem to stop them from spending a lot of time together. Both of them were social outcasts at school. So they stuck together.

But in some ways Hadley was still a mystery to Carmen. They never talked about the past , only the present.

"Have here or take-away?" The cashier asked Hadley.

"I'll just take it in the bottle." Hadley said picking her orange juice up off the counter. Carmen had been under the general impression that when Hadley said that she needed to get something from the cafe that the cafe would be relatively close to their school and that once Hadley had got the orange juice that her life depended on that they would head back to school. But Carmen was wrong in both cases. The cafe they went to was halfway across town from there school, only a street away from the wharf. And when Carmen looked again Hadley had sat down on the raised concrete edge that separated the grass of the bank precinct from the footpath.

"It's too nicer day to go to school." Hadley announced cracking open her orange juice. She took a sip and offered it too Carmen as though it were Grey Goose rather than some average orange juice they sold at any corner shop.

Carmen looked up at the part of the sky that was directly overhead that nobody usually looked at. That was Carmen's favorite part of the sky.

"Do you know Eli Wood?" Hadley asked. It was a fairly out of the blue question. The answer was, yes, Carmen did indeed know Eli Wood. He went to Scots College, an all boys private school in Bellevue Hill. The boys were sex-starved, making them wild at parties. Eli Wood was a stunning example of this. Carmen had been to several parties at his house over the years. He was infamous for them. They were the kind of parties where you woke up covered in chicken feathers and somebody else's underwear. It had been at one of these parties where Carmen and Sienna had their first real fight.

They were fifteen years old and it was September, when Noel, Trent, Sienna, Carmen and whoever happened to be in their squad at that time had decided to grace Eli Wood's party with their presence. The misfortunes of the day were really down to the fact that Trent was in the hospital with tonsillitis on that particular night so he couldn't look after Carmen like a bulldog as usual.

As far as Sienna was concerned there were two kinds of teenage drinking. The first was done in Noel Kingston's hotel room in the intercontinental. That was exclusive to their squad. That was where it was appropriate to dance on the table and lose count of cruisers and disappear into the bathroom for half an hour. The second was done at a big ruckus house party where there were no parents in sight. That was where you were always in control because three hundred people meant three hundred people who could destroy your reputation.

This was exactly where Carmen and Sienna had a lack of communication.

In the kitchen two older guys were having a competition that involved ten shot glasses, a cell phone timer and a bottle of Jack Daniels surrounded by a cheering crowd. Naturally, Carmen's presence became the center of attention. By the time Sienna came looking for her, Carmen was pressing the tenth glass to her lips before setting it down on the counter with that much accomplishment that the glass shattered between her fingers.