The War of Wind and Moon (Season One)

Chapter Eight

Mia was awake long before her 6:45 alarm was due to ring and not just because she kept rolling onto her back and being woken by Sunday night's, now flourishing bruises. It was Thursday and she wasn't going to be able to talk her way out of the counselling session Vice Principal Kostopoulos had rescheduled. If she was lucky, she'd be able to keep Mrs. Paige focused on catching up on the extra work changing schools had created, rather than discussing why she'd moved. Mia had a plan. She'd been up till 1 a.m. filling in and colour-coding a study timetable. She was quite proud of it. Every fifteen minutes from 8a.m. to 11p.m. of the next month was jammed full of enough work to make any counselor worth their salt want to spend a full session discussing taking breaks and the benefits of extra-curricular activities and exercise.

She worried a little that she might have overdone it. If Mrs. Paige was too kind hearted she might want to reach out to Mia's mother. The last thing Mia needed was for Patricia to find out she was seeing the counselor but she was pretty sure that as long as she could convince Mrs. Paige that she accepted her advice, it should be fine.

Movement in the hall. A muffled voice... A raised voice. "I don't care what your records say! I had a long conversation with a perfectly lovely but evidently incompetent young lady only a week ago."

Oh no. Not again.

"Well, yes," her mother shouted. "I'll thank you to check again!"

Knowing what she'd find but hoping she was wrong, Mia reached a hand out of the warmth under her doona and reached for the lamp switch hanging over the edge of her desk, beside the bed. Squeezing her eyes closed in case it did turn on, she pressed the switch. Raising one eyelid ever so slightly confirmed her fears. The room remained in pre-dawn grey.

Anger fizzed from her chest to her gritted teeth. Every single time they moved house, her mother would wait to transfer the electricity to their name until it was cut off by the last tenant and then call the electricity company and shout and cajole and lie until they agreed to put it on without penalising her for not transferring it in time. Sometimes Patricia managed to get them to give her a credit for her trouble.

Mia understood that her mother was trying to save money because they had so little, but she also understood that her mother could have been working full time, not just during the Uni holidays, if she wanted to. Patricia had been offered a permanent position at the temp job she'd taken just these last holidays, as she had the holidays before and before that, but being "just an employee" was beneath her. What Patricia Delaney wanted was what she'd had before Mia had been born: to be a rich man's wife. And nothing – not even being twenty years older than her classmates - could sway her from the belief that the place to meet a rich husband was the same place she'd met Mia's father. University. Not that she was entirely wrong. She'd fallen in love with several rich husbands over the last eight years - just not her own.

Mia pulled her arm back into the warm and listened to her mother's familiar fight with some poor customer service officer at the electricity company.

"Do I need to speak with a supervisor? Electricity is an essential service and I'm a single mother with a young child freezing in her bedroom in the middle of winter!... Yes, I'll hold."

Ah, the seventeen-year-old young child thought, the killer blow. If it didn't work it meant at least twenty-four hours, sometimes seventy-two, without heating and light. At least in this flat they had gas cooking and hot water. It would also mean an angry morning. Come on, Mia prayed to the anonymous customer service officer, just give in.

"Yes...Six hours?" Patricia's tone softened. "Well, I suppose that's the best I can expect. Thank you."

A clatter of hard plastic on a surface. The flick-and-suck of a cigarette being lit. A low, satisfied chuckle. Mia let out her own breath. It fogged before it dispersed. That would make the morning easier. As would pretending she hadn't heard the phone call. She closed her eyes at the sound of her mother's footsteps approaching her bedroom door.