Chapter 10
Mr Peterson was in charge of the Willow Street carpool. When Kate was thirteen, he bought a battered old Kombi Van and offered to drive all the kids on his street to school.
“It’s no problem,” he told her mum. “I work from home and I’m always going up and back to pick up Deidre; this way it benefits all of us.”
It wasn’t a hard sell. The other parents were only too happy to give Mr Peterson ten bucks a week for petrol and let him chauffeur their kids, Kate’s parents included. They didn’t care that their daughter would have literally sat on nails to avoid riding in what her brother Mick had already dubbed ‘Rape on Wheels.’
“You’ll bloody well take the van and be grateful for it,” her mum had said when Kate begged for Rape on Wheels-free rides. “I’m not driving you forty minutes each way because you think you’re too good to go with everyone else.”
Kate tried to tell her mum it wasn’t because of that, it was because Deidre Peterson called her ‘Accident’ and had once taken a poem out of her diary and read it aloud so that everyone laughed at her. Her mum—who was from a generation that believed bullying was entirely the fault of the spineless victim—snorted and said, “You’re not a baby anymore, Princess, you’re about to start high school. It’s time to grow up.”
Her first trip in Rape on Wheels had gone as well as could be expected; she immediately sat on an unwrapped peanut butter sandwich Deidre had put on her seat.
Every kid in the van started laughing, including Mick and her sister Claudia. Deidre then stood up and took a picture of her stained ass with her phone. “Sorry, Accident,” she said. “It was just an accident.”
For the next forty minutes, Kate fought back tears, wondering what she’d do when she got to school with what looked like a shit stain on the back of her dress.
When the van pulled up at Point Cook Secondary, she’d stayed in her seat as the other kids got out snickering.
“Wagging, are we, princess?” Mick asked as he walked past.
Kate nodded. If she hid, Mr Peterson might not see her and she could go back to Shell Street with him and sneak home. Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on her side.
“Katie,” Mr Peterson said, sticking his head in the back of the van. “Come on, you need to go to school.”
“I can’t,” she said, pent up tears leaking out of her eyes.
“I know it’s scary but you’ll have a great time, I promise.”
“It’s not that. Deidre…I sat on a sandwich. It’s all over my dress and it looks like…please don’t make me go out there?”
She’d expected him to yell at her, to tell her to suck it up and stop being such a whiny precious princess, but he hadn’t. He’d smiled at her. “No problem. We’ll get this sorted out in no time. Wait here.”
Kate had watched as he jogged toward the front office, utterly terrified he was calling her mum. He wasn’t. He returned two minutes later waving a blue and white checkered school dress like a flag.
“It’s from lost and found. It might be a bit big, but it’ll fit,” he said, handing it to her. “Pull down the blinds and get changed, I’ll keep watch outside.”
Kate climbed out of the Kombi van feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. It was then she saw how handsome Mr Peterson was, with his thick hair and twinkly green-grey eyes. Like a movie star. She’d never really met anyone handsome before and now that she had, she couldn’t stop staring. He was so big and hard and young. How was he Deidre’s dad? He looked more like Kate’s brothers than her bald, perpetually scowling father.
“Are you okay?” Mr Peterson had asked.
“Yes,” Kate told her shoes. “Thank you.”
“Anytime, Katie…” Mr Peterson knelt down and looked her right in the eyes. As they looked at one another, Kate felt something zap from her belly into what her mum called her ‘secret place.’
“This afternoon, I think you should sit up front with me,” Mr Peterson said. “What do you think?”
Kate smiled. “I think that would be good.”
After that, Kate always rode up front with Mr Peterson, mornings and afternoons, five days a week. They’d talked about everything: books, movies, politics, the news. Mr Peterson never patronised her; if she didn’t understand something, he explained how the stock market or hydroponics or the Houses of Parliament worked. When he found out she loved studying complex systems he loaned her books like The Soul of a New Machine and The Design of Everyday Things. As Kate got older, he started teasing her about her nail polish and multicoloured hair, her failed attempts to show other girls she was just like them.
“You’re becoming a rebel without a cause, Katie. Soon you’ll be too cool to ride up front with me.”
Kate had never experienced teasing that didn’t come with the rubber band flick of dislike. She liked it. She told Mr Peterson maybe she wouldn’t want to sit up front with him because he was an old man and he’d laughed so loud, all the other kids in the van stared.
When Kate was fifteen, she won a statewide geography competition. Upon seeing her certificate her dad had told her it was rigged. “They wanted to give the prize to a girl. That’s how things are these days.”
When she told Mr Peterson, his brow had furrowed into angry lines. The next afternoon he’d handed her a rose cut from his garden, its stem wrapped in shiny tinfoil and a tiny card that read Congratulations, Katie! What a fantastic achievement! Love Kane, Jennifer, and Deirdre Peterson.
That night, Kate had locked herself in the bathroom and erased the names of Mr Peterson’s wife and daughter with liquid paper. They didn’t give a damn about her, Mr Peterson did. Mr Peterson was the only one who did.
Kate wasn’t sure why she had the kinks she had. She’d done enough research to know it wasn’t as simple as the vending machine theory of ‘insert daddy drama, out rolls a can of kinkiness.’ It was clear to anyone with half a brain that the abuse-for-kink model held no water. Girls had fathers who abandoned them, loved them, beat them, raped them or were as ambivalent as Kate’s dad was and they turned out to be Dommes, subs, bottoms, switches, lesbians, bisexuals or as straight and vanilla as they came. It wasn’t that simple.
Still, Kate had to acknowledge that she’d had a painful childhood and that during her formative years, when she was love-starved and desperate for affection, she’d fallen for a much older man she wished was her father and her boyfriend.
Before her thoughts about Mr Peterson were explicitly sexual or even romantic, Kate had known she loved him. She’d loved his voice, his hair, the way he said her name. She’d loved his kindness and his sense of humor. When she’d discovered her body in her cramped single bed, Deidre’s dad had been in the forefront of her fantasies. Those flickering girlish daydreams hadn’t even been about sex. They’d featured things like Mr Peterson laying her down in a big soft bed and saying things like “I love you, Katie. You’re the most precious thing in the world to me.”
It was embarrassing, really.
She never knew if Mr Peterson was aware of her crush on him. The summer she turned sixteen, the state government funded a legitimate school bus service and Rape on Wheels was decommissioned. Kate had cried in her bed for a week, writing long, rambling poems about the love of her life being snatched away from her. The poems themselves had been histrionic, the ‘broken wheel’ and ‘final journey’ metaphors terrible, but the pain behind them was as acute as when Aunt Rhonda had died. She’d lost her only ally.
When her grief finally bottomed out, Kate realised she had another serious problem on her hands—no friends. It wasn’t exactly a new problem, she spent most lunchtimes reading in the library by herself, but without Mr Peterson’s van rides to look forward to it seemed urgent she find some mates. Kate set about pooling her resources and found she had two valuable friend-making assets—boobs.
Boys had never held much appeal for her while Mr Peterson was around, being gorgeous and talking to her about The Wheel of Time series, but now they took on a new shine. They were nicer to her than girls and impressed both by her rack and her job at Doughnut King (she had access to a lot of free, barely-stale, doughnuts).
Unfortunately, the boys she tried to hang around with weren’t so keen on being friends—they kept trying to hold her hand and go in for unwelcome kisses at the movies. Telling them she only wanted to be friends irritated them and kissing them back was insanely uncomfortable. After a few months of trial and error, Kate stumbled on a winning boys-for-friends formula—acting totally freaking clueless. If she pretended she didn’t know what a guy’s intentions were, if she giggled and said things like, ‘Which of the girls in our class do you have a crush on? Is it Rylie? Is it Stephanie?’ boys got confused and stopped trying to kiss her and suggested they go into empty paddocks and shoot a potato gun instead.
When she perfected the art of acting clueless Kate discovered another amazing plot twist—the more she played dumb and refused to become anyone’s girlfriend, the more boys liked her. Most of them were horrible to the girls they actually hooked up with, but they invited her over to dinner with their parents, taught her to play HALO and beer pong and talked to her about all the stuff they couldn’t tell their guy mates. It was like black magic.
Being one of the boys got her through the rest of high school, but Kate always knew it wasn’t quite the way it was meant to be. The guys she hung around with weren’t really her friends. They were more like “friends.” There were always strings attached to hanging out with them—laughing at jokes that stung, listening to talk that offended, staying a virgin because they didn’t like it when she showed romantic interest in anyone, despite having no romantic interest in her. She was always ‘other’, the exception to the rule, but part of the rule all the same. Female friendship continued to evade her. Later, she learned girls picked up on ADHD markers better than boys. They sensed the strangeness hiding beneath her lip-gloss-and-ponytail attempts to be like them and backed away as though she was infectious.
Kate wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until she was almost eighteen. Her psychology teacher told her she should be getting much better marks and when Kate showed her all the extra homework she did—the practise essays and questionnaires—Mrs Winsor had frowned and recommended she see a doctor. Kate paid for the psychiatrists visit herself, and sure enough, she had severe ADHD. Severe enough that she’d be on Ritalin for the rest of her life. Severe enough that someone should have noticed when she was a kid, but they hadn’t. No one had.
Kate thought about that as her Uber sped her toward Aunt Rhonda’s apartment, how she’d grown up feeling so twitchy and weird. How she’d chipped away big chunks of her personality so she could have friends that weren’t really her friends. How her first fantasies were about a friendly dad being nice to her.
The only person who knew everything about her past was Maria and her mentor seemed to have assigned her a permanent chair in the hall of victimhood. Yes, it was a pretty sad story, Kate thought as the streetlights flashed past, but not one she wanted hanging around her neck like a dead albatross for the rest of her life. She was grown up now, she had her own apartment and Ritalin and a job. Why couldn’t she just evolve from the placid half-girl she’d been into something new and bold and brave?
Because you don’t have the guts.
The inner voice, cruel as it was, had a point. The habits she’d picked up as a kid ran deep; she apologised even if she knew it wasn’t her fault, saw her family every Christmas even though it broke her heart, and never attended a derby event without Maria, despite skating for the team for three years. Maybe her desire to play daughter wasn’t about any pseudo-sexual Mr Peterson Freud stuff. Maybe it was as simple as wanting to be the center point of someone else’s desires so she didn’t have to take any risks.
“God, I’m depressing,” she mumbled.
“What was that?” Her Uber driver, a thickset guy with forearms so hairy Kate had first thought him covered in tattoos, turned to look at her from the front seat. “You say something?”
“Um, no sorry. That was nothing.”
The driver smiled, it wasn’t a nice smile. “Didn’t sound like nothing. You having a bad night?”
A nudge of fear in her belly. “I’m totally fine.”
“Don’t give me that, sexy, talk to me. Are you having boy problems, or is it high school drama?”
The skin on the back of Kate’s neck prickled. This guy thought she was in high school and he was calling her sexy and asking her about boys. It reminded her of her role play with Ty except that had been a game and this was real life. Saying the word ‘roses’ to this man would do approximately nothing. She pulled her jacket tight around her neck, wondering what to do next.
“Girly.” The driver’s voice sliced through the air like a box-cutter. “I asked you a question.”
Kate opened her mouth to apologise again, when another hot tendril of anger she’d felt with Maria wrapped itself around her middle. Who was this guy to talk like this? To assume she was a sad teenager travelling on her own at night and try to use that to freaking flirt with her? She held up her phone. “Sorry, I’m texting my dad. He’s a detective and he’s super angry I’m Ubering by myself. I think he’s going to come out and meet me once we’re at my place. I hope he doesn’t take my phone away!”
If it wasn’t so sad, the way the driver’s face contorted with horror might have been funny. “Sure,” he said. “A detective, right. Right, right. Want me to take the next left?”
“Yes, please.”
It sucked that the world could be this way, and she’d hardly given the driver a piece of her mind, but as he flicked on the radio and started humming the worst imitation of innocence Kate had ever seen, she had to admit she was a bit proud of herself.