“Oh shit,” I yell and start running but Gemma has already beaten me to it. It looks like someone has bashed it in completely and the gravel around us is peppered with sharp shards of glass.
“Oh my god,” she cries out, her hand to her mouth. “My uncle is going to kill me.”
“Gemma, it’s okay,” I say, even though it’s not really. She’s had one hell of a day.
“How is it okay?!” she cries out, and her eyes start to water. “I don’t have a job to come home to, how am I going to afford to replace the window?”
I raise up my hands and come toward her. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll help, I’ll pay for it.”
She glares at me as if I said the wrong thing. “Who do you think you are, some Prince fucking Charming swooping in with heroics? I don’t need your saving.”
Whoa. I blink at her, shocked by her sudden anger.
I’m about to retort with a “What?!” but Amber is peering through the window and screeching.
“Holy fuck!” she yells. “There are things living in it!”
We all gasp and immediately leap backward away from Mr. Orange. Not one of my finer moments.
“Okay, hold on,” I say, manning up. I quickly run along the forest edge and pick up a long stick. There are a few other cars in the lot that also have their windows smashed, victims of hooligans, but there’s no one else around to see this.
I edge back to the bus and try to look through the part of the window that Amber was at.
She wasn’t wrong. I can see small fuzzy bodies moving along the floor of the van and on the front seats.
“I’ve got this,” I tell the girls and grip the stick harder. I motion for Gemma to give me the keys. She throws them to me and I catch them in one hand. I creep my way over to the driver’s side. There’s a lot of condensation and fog inside the windows so I can’t see much except the shadows of something moving inside.
I quickly go over what Gemma had told me, that there were no big predators in New Zealand. Still, I’m being overly cautious as I unlock the door. I take in a deep breath or two, then fling it open.
All I see next are claws coming at my face and a whoosh of wings. I duck and whack the air with my stick but it doesn’t hit anything but empty space.
Beside me a kea parrot lands gracefully with a few beats of its red and green wings and stares at me, as if to say, Why do you have a stick and why are you breaking into my newfound sanctuary?
I straighten up and look back into the bus. There are at least three other parrots inside, perched on the back of seats and the steering wheel.
Gemma and Amber squeal girlish sounds that I may have made when the parrot flew at me. They come to stand behind me.
“Jesus,” Gemma swears, holding on to my arm, and for that moment I don’t regret my decision to become the parrot fighter. “Keas.”
“Wow,” Amber says breathlessly. “Why would parrots break into our car? Unless . . .” she looks at me with quizzical eyes. “Unless instead of Planet of the Apes . . .”
“Amber,” I say, holding my palm out to her. “Stop.”
“. . . this has become Planet of the Parrots,” she finishes.
I throw my head back and sigh and it takes us a good ten minutes of poking them with the stick and waving our arms around like monkeys to make sure every parrot is out of the bus.
Miraculously there doesn’t seem to be much stolen. Amber is missing two bottles of Waiheke Island wine she picked up in Auckland and Gemma can’t find her iPod, which is another financial blow for her, but everything else, including her uncle’s stash of seventies porn, remains in the van.
Naturally, both the thieves and the parrots have left a colossal mess but it’s getting dark and we need to camp somewhere. We throw towels over our seats and head out along the road, me in the back and the girls in the front. The wind is cold as it whips in through the back window and the moon is out when we finally pull into our next stop, Arrowtown.
We find a holiday park that has a spot for us and it’s not long before we’re all getting settled for bed. Naturally, I let Amber and Gemma have the foldout below while I take the bunk. The last few times I’ve slept up here I haven’t fallen to my death, and besides, it’s the only place in the bus that the pooping parrots didn’t have access to.
I don’t tell them that, of course.
The next morning there’s dew covering the tarp above my head and everything feels slightly damp, but it’s warm compared to the last few nights out in the bush. I wake up before the girls and try to land in the bus below without waking them. I make good long use of the showers at the campsite. It’s the first shower for days—and it’s a hot one—and I stay in it as long as possible, even though it means pumping more twenty-cent coins into the machine.
By the time I emerge, my skin is pink and red like a newborn but I don’t care. I feel like I’ve washed all the grime and controversy of the last few days off of me.
Thankfully, all the beauty stays with me. The sunset and sunrise over Key Summit. Gemma’s honest words. The look on her face while she took in the world, so new to her. The feel of her between my arms.
I want her so badly and it’s more than I can bear. Her sudden frost keeps me back and I’m constantly misreading her looks and her words, wanting to believe that she feels something for me but so afraid that it’s all in my imagination. It was almost like she flirted more with me when she was with Nick, and now that she’s not, I’m nothing more than some guy paying for petrol.