Bella's Backyard Bullies

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Text, Samantha Turnbull 2015

  Copyright © Illustrations, Sarah Davis 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 985 7

  eISBN 978 1 74343 982 1

  Cover and text design by Vida & Luke Kelly

  For Mum, Dad, Michael and Charlie

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  Emily opens her inbox and we all gasp.

  Watch your back – OR ELSE.

  ‘Or else, what?’ I ask, trying to sound tough.

  ‘What are you looking at, Bella?’ Chloe asks.

  I point to the unopened email. ‘This. It looks like hate mail.’

  Grace squints at the monitor. ‘It was bound to happen sooner or later. All true celebrities have a crazy stalker or two. That’s why they need bodyguards.’

  Emily shrugs. ‘Exactly 85 days and five hours ago I was a nobody,’ she says. ‘This wouldn’t have happened.’

  That’s Emily Martin for you: a maths and computer genius who loves to talk numbers. She’s also one of my three best friends. The other two, Chloe Karalis and Grace Bennett, join us in a huddle around Emily’s laptop.

  Until this year, there weren’t many people at school who even knew Emily’s name, let alone the fact she could code an entire website.

  Emily starts tapping numbers into her computer’s calculator. ‘By my estimation,’ she says, ‘at least 97 percent of the 673 students at Newcastle Public School know who I am.’

  Emily is not exaggerating. The girl is famous.

  She’s no movie star. She’s not even on one of those lame reality television shows. Who watches those, anyway? If we wanted to see people get makeovers we’d have a front-row seat for live performances at Emily’s house – her mum is a beautician with a home salon.

  You see, Emily’s not well-known in the ordinary sense. She’s an internet sensation, and now a president. Not president of Australia – yet. She’s the president of…drumroll, please…the Anti-Princess Club.

  Emily, Grace, Chloe and I formed the club because we were sick of people trying to turn us into princesses.

  The rest of the world, especially our mums and dads, thought girls should behave in a certain manner, look a certain way and be good at certain things. The final straw was when Emily’s mum entered her in a spew-worthy beauty pageant.

  And that’s where the sixth of April comes in. The day of the pageant.

  Emily let her mum curl her hair, paint her face and dress her in something so sparkly she looked like a walking string of tinsel. Then, just before she appeared on stage, we helped her change into tracksuit pants and a plain old T-shirt. The real Emily Martin.

  She took charge of the microphone and told the crowd why it was wrong to run a contest based on beauty over brains.

  Of course, Emily didn’t win. But someone in the audience filmed the whole schemozzle and uploaded it to the net. The footage went viral. And that’s how Emily became a celebrity.

  Within a week, more than a hundred girls had emailed Emily or cornered one of us in the school playground asking to join the Anti-Princess Club. We couldn’t fit so many into our headquarters, which is a treehouse in my backyard, so Emily built the Anti-Princess Club website.

  We four best friends still hold official club meetings every week, but we also meet with the other club members online. We mostly help them with homework, but sometimes they just want to chat about random stuff.

  That’s what Emily and I were doing when we found the hate mail.

  ‘I think you need to open it, Emily,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s just a silly hoax.’

  ‘Okay, here goes,’ she says.

  Click.

  The sender’s address is one I don’t recognise: catsmum@plutomail.com

  ‘Plutomail is just a generic email service anyone can use,’ Emily says. ‘But I’ve no idea who Catsmum is.’

  I re-read the email in disbelief.

  ‘What is a real girl, anyway?’ Chloe asks. ‘We’re all real girls, whether we like princesses or not. Who do you think this Angry person is?’

  Emily scratches her chin. She does that when she’s thinking. ‘I don’t know. But it looks like Angry is my first official enemy.’

  I puff out my chest. ‘Then I’m your first official bodyguard.’

  Bodyguard Bella. I’ll have to break in my new boxing gloves. And nunchucks. And maybe my ninja stars.

  ‘I’ve finally figured out the perfect recipe for kourabiedes,’ Chloe says. ‘AKA Andromeda.’

  I pull my bum up onto the bench and take a squiz at the list of ingredients. It just looks like a recipe for biscuits to me.

  ‘Koura-what?’ I ask. ‘And Androm-what?’

  Chloe’s grandmother appears in the kitchen. ‘Kourabiedes is Greek shortbread,’ she says. ‘And Andromeda is a princess from Greek mythology.’

  She should know. We call her Yiayia, the Greek word for ‘grandmother’, because she’s from Greece.

  ‘Yasou, Bella, hello,’ Yiayia adds. ‘I thought the club meeting was at your treehouse today?’

  ‘It was,’ I say. ‘But Mum’s letting me sleep here tonight.’

  Chloe greets Yiayia with a kiss on the cheek. ‘Mana mou says it’s okay too.’

  Mana mou means ‘my mother’. Chloe’s parents are also from Greece, but they moved to Australia before she and her brother Alex were born. They own a restaurant underneath the apartment where they live.

  Chloe is an awesome cook, but she doesn’t want to work in a kitchen. She wants to be a scientist, so she treats recipes like laboratory experiments – starting with a question, constructing a hypothesis, testing her theories and analysing the results.

  ‘You’re correct, Yiayia,’ Chloe says. ‘But I’m not making Andromeda the princess.’

  I thought it was a little strange for an anti-princess to be baking royalty. ‘There’s another Andromeda?’

  Chloe mixes the ingredients in a big silver bowl. ‘That’s right, Bella.
I’m making Andromeda the constellation.’

  I spy some star-shaped cookie cutters on the bench.

  Yiayia chuckles. ‘Paidi mou,’ she says. ‘Always coming up with a way to mix science into your chores.’

  Chloe kneads the sugary dough. ‘Dad asked me to bake some biscuits for the restaurant, so I may as well make them stars. I’ll set them up on a tray just as they would appear in the night sky.’

  I stick my finger into the bowl for a taste and Chloe playfully taps me on the knuckles with her spoon.

  ‘Astronomy is my favourite type of science,’ she says. ‘Or maybe it’s biology. No, it’s chemistry. Although I do like dendrochronology.’

  She stops before she lists a branch of science starting with every letter of the alphabet.

  ‘Astronomy is good,’ Yiayia says. ‘Did you know I saw the first man on the moon? On television, of course.’

  That reminds me of the trouble brewing in cyberspace. ‘Yiayia, you should read this email Emily was sent.’

  Yiayia’s reading glasses are dangling on a chain around her neck. She pulls them up to her nose and unfolds the printout I hand her.

  She inhales sharply and rests her hand on her heart. ‘Tromeros,’ she says. ‘Do you know who it’s from?’

  I shake my head. ‘I’m visiting Grace tomorrow morning and we’re all meeting at the treehouse in the afternoon to figure out a plan of attack.’

  Crack. Chloe bangs a rolling pin on the benchtop. ‘You know what I loathe about the myth of Andromeda?’ she asks, forcefully pressing the cookie cutters into her dough. ‘It’s the way Cassiopeia goes around bragging about how beautiful Andromeda is, as if that’s all anyone should care about. She’s just like Cinderella or Snow White or boring old Sleeping Beauty. Don’t princesses have anything to offer other than prettiness?’ She pokes a clove into the centre of each star.

  Yiayia nods in agreement. ‘Yes, it is the bragging about being beautiful that gets Andromeda into trouble.’

  I’ve never read a Greek myth. ‘What happens to her?’

  Yiayia reaches for an encyclopedia from her collection and heaves the thick book across the table towards me. ‘You can read about Andromeda in here, Bella.’

  I don’t have the heart to tell Yiayia I could find the story on the internet without lugging such a heavy book home, so I carefully slide it into my backpack.

  ‘Let’s just say that after all she’s been through, Emily could be the modern-day Andromeda,’ Chloe says. ‘And it’s our job to protect her.’

  Thump, thump. Thump. Thump. A visit to Grace’s house can get a little, thump, noisy.

  Grace lives in a slightly crampy cottage with her mum and dad, plus three brothers, Tom, Oliver and Harry. Luckily she gets a room to herself while the boys have to share.

  ‘Have your parents ever thought about moving one of your brothers in here with you?’ I ask. ‘Their bedroom must feel like a sardine tin with the three of them in there.’

  Grace looks up from the exercise mat. She’s bent into what I think is a hamstring stretch.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding, Bella,’ she says. ‘I don’t know any girls who share a room with their brothers. I actually wouldn’t mind too much, but my dad would never even consider it.’

  Grace’s dad grew up on a cattle station in the outback with six brothers. Grace reckons his mother was the only woman he’d ever spoken to before he moved away for high school. Even then, he went to an all-boys’ college and barely saw a girl until he met Grace’s mum. By then he was all grown up.

  Thump, thump. Thump. Thump.

  Grace rises from the floor and opens her bedroom window. ‘Stop kicking that ball against the house!’

  ‘Don’t be a sook, princess!’ an unfamiliar voice yells back.

  I jump to my feet and squeeze my head through the window next to Grace. There are four boys playing with Grace’s brothers.

  ‘What did you call me?’ Grace asks.

  Grace’s dad hears the fuss and heads outside. ‘Sorry, Grace,’ he says. ‘I was about to take these guys to the oval for training anyway.’

  Mr Bennett is the coach of a junior boys’ soccer club. He’s still getting used to the fact that his daughter has inherited his athletic talent. His girl-free upbringing meant he’d always considered sport as a boys-only thing.

  A smaller boy with a shaved head spits on the ground as the group moves off to the oval down the road.

  ‘Have you ever seen them before?’ I ask. ‘I can’t believe they used the P word on you.’

  Grace resumes her floor stretches. ‘No idea who they are,’ she says. ‘I guess they’ve joined one of Dad’s teams. He’ll warn them not to mess with me again.’

  ‘How has your dad been?’ I ask.

  She grabs the edge of the bed and starts a round of tricep dips. ‘Better – he’s finally agreed to let me swap ballet for athletics training.’

  I throw her a high-five from my perch on the bed. ‘That’s awesome! You can replace those useless ballet jiffies with some high-tech running shoes.’

  I hang my head over the bed and look underneath. There it is. A hidden soccer ball.

  ‘When are you going to tell your dad you’ve taken up soccer too?’ I ask.

  Grace breaks into star jumps. ‘One step at a time, Bella,’ she says. ‘One step at a time.’

  Something’s out of place, but I can’t put my finger on what it is.

  I look around the first floor of the treehouse. Cushions on the rug, check. Chocolate jar on the bench, check. Comic books in a stack, check.

  Maybe my eyes are playing tricks. I’m constantly moving things around in here. It’s the designer in me.

  I’ve still got fifteen minutes before the Anti-Princess Club’s meeting, so I open Yiayia’s encyclopedia – it’s one on Greek mythology. What did Chloe mean when she said Emily could be the modern-day Andromeda?

  I slam the encyclopedia closed. Now I understand.

  Emily’s mum, too, thought her daughter was better-looking than everyone else, and that’s why she entered her in a pageant. Things didn’t go to plan for Cassiopeia, and they sure didn’t work out the way Emily’s mum hoped either.

  The thing is, all the anti-princesses are beautiful. Emily has amazing long red hair and green eyes. Grace is blonde and tall with muscly arms and legs. Chloe has shiny black hair and quirky glasses. As for me, I have brown skin and curls that flow down my back.

  When it comes to what looks good, as an artist I consider myself a bit of an expert. And the answer is: there’s no right answer.

  Some people love watercolour paintings, I like bright comic-book-style posters. We all have our own definition of beautiful. That’s why someone was bound to disagree when Queen Cassiopeia claimed her daughter was the prettiest girl on the planet. Duh.

  I reopen the book.

  ‘Oh, puh-lease!’ I yell.

  So poor Andromeda was offered up to a sea monster for lunch. And Emily is being threatened by a virtual sea monster – a cyberbully. That’s what Chloe meant.

  ‘Who are you talking to, Bella?’ a voice calls from below.

  I open the door and see Emily, Chloe and Grace on the grass. ‘Come up.’

  The anti-princesses climb up and sprawl on the cushions.

  ‘I’ve just read your Andromeda myth, Chloe,’ I tell her. ‘And I thought fairytales were bad. It’s just another spew-worthy story about a damsel in distress.’

  We call fairytales unfairytales because of the way they make girls seem so helpless.

  Chloe rolls her eyes. ‘Tell me about it,’ she says. ‘The princess is rescued by the man in the strange flying shoes. So spew-worthy.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like the type of story that fits our motto,’ Grace says, getting up to grab a chocolate.

  Then it hits me. Our sign! The Anti-Princess Club motto ‘We Don’t Need Rescuing’ isn’t hanging above the entrance to the treehouse. That’s what’s out of place.

  ‘Has anyone seen the sign f
rom above the door?’ I ask.

  Everyone shakes their heads.

  ‘Never mind.’ Maybe I did move it and just can’t remember.

  Emily clears her throat to get our attention. ‘I call this meeting of the Anti-Princess Club to order,’ she says. ‘I don’t think there’s any great mystery about what our first matter of business is today.’

  Straight to the hate mail it is.

  Emily pulls her laptop from its case and flips it open. As the computer fires up we hear voices outside.

  I’m standing to go to the window when a soccer ball comes flying through the curtains.

  ‘Look out, Bella!’ Grace yells.

  The ball bounces off the wall and knocks our chocolate jar off the bench. It shatters on the floor.

  ‘Be careful!’ Chloe says. ‘There’s broken glass everywhere.’

  I carefully step through the shards towards the door. The voices outside are getting closer.

  ‘Good shot,’ says one.

  I peer out and see my brother, Max, with four other boys. ‘Who said “good shot”?’

  Max looks scared. He knows I’m angry. He points to a bigger boy with hair like a yellow mop.

  ‘You’re the boy from Grace’s house,’ I say. ‘Are you the one who called her a princess?’

  The boys crack up laughing. All except Max. He knows better than to mess with me, especially since I’ve started learning how to throw ninja stars.

  The other anti-princesses join me in the doorway.

  The mop-haired boy sniggers. He looks about eleven, maybe twelve. Not quite old enough for high school.

  Emily puts her hands on her hips. ‘You think you’re funny? You could’ve hurt someone.’

  A middle-sized boy with a blond ponytail puts his hands on his hips. ‘You could’ve hurt someone,’ he mimics in a high-pitched voice.

  Emily’s face turns red. Like a beetroot. Or a fire engine. Or a beetroot crossed with a fire engine. I have a tube of oil paint in the same shade – it’s called Crimson Glory. ‘Who ARE you?’ she yells.

  The boy with the shaved head spits on the ground.