When It Drops Read online

  PRAISE FOR WHEN IT DROPS

  ‘Cheeky, irreverent and heartwarming.’ —Didirri

  ‘A precious coming-of-age story that Australia needs.’ —Alice Ivy

  ‘A captivating story of navigating adolescence, self-esteem and drum programming. Caleb’s coming-of-age really spoke to me.’ —Japanese Wallpaper

  ‘The true-life story of the SoundCloud generation.’ —What So Not

  ‘A funny and sincere debut novel that offers great insight into the backstory behind overnight success and the self-doubt that comes with all creative processes. A journey of self-belief and the importance of surrounding yourself with good people.’ —Woodes

  ‘They should make ARIA awards for books, then give them all to Alex.’ —Suffa, Hilltop Hoods

  For my mum, Helen, whose sound still echoes through the universe.

  Ella

  by BVTTON

  Westlake, you make my chest ache

  You know there used to be a time you were my best mate

  Now I’m up late

  I can’t think straight

  Keep hoping everything is just a mistake

  But even though you left me all alone

  I think it’s about time we moved on

  I don’t want to be cold to you

  I just want to grow old with you

  I don’t want to be cold to you

  I just want to grow old with you

  First day, you went your way

  And then the whole world led me astray

  Low-key

  It nearly broke me

  Really hope you didn’t mean to go provoke me

  But even though it caused me so much pain

  I want to be in your life again

  I don’t want to be cold to you

  I just want to grow old with you

  I don’t want to be cold to you

  I just want to grow old with you

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  For someone who detested awkward silences, Caleb Clifford sure had a knack for making them. He was like an awkward-silence magician – just when you thought there was no chance that a comfortable social interaction could be disturbed, he would grasp his beautiful assistant, say the magic word, and sssSSSWWOOOOSH – cringe-worthy dead air magically appeared.

  Only instead of grasping ‘a beautiful assistant’, it was more frequently ‘an asthma puffer’, and what he said was usually not so much ‘a magic word’ but ‘an obscure League of Legends reference’.

  In fact, if you took a high-powered camera with roof X-ray technology and pointed it at Riverview High, then zoomed in on the demountable classrooms in the north-west corner of the campus looking for the wiry, brown-haired kid holding a four-pen, you would see that Caleb Clifford was in the middle of an awkward silence right now …

  ‘Mr Clifford, I hate to interrupt, but is there something interesting about that blank wall?’

  Caleb snapped out of his daydream about why the inventor of shampoo decided to call it that, and became aware of his surroundings. Beige walls, louvre windows and his year ten History teacher, Ms Agzarian, tapping her whiteboard marker on her hand like a troll with a club.

  Uh-oh.

  Her lips were pursed as tight as her bun and she was glaring at him with an ‘I’m not angry, I’m just … okay fine, I’m angry’ face. Silence filled the room – except for the ominous noise of marker on palm.

  … Tap.

  … Tap.

  … Tap.

  He approximated she was tapping at 110 beats per minute. Even. Controlled. Threatening. He could feel the eyes of his classmates – the innocent awkward-silence bystanders – penetrating the back of his skull. He had to answer.

  ‘Um … not … really?’

  It was an okay effort, but not good enough to take the spotlight off him. Ms Agzarian sighed.

  ‘I see. Well, in that case, care to share your thoughts?’ Caleb cared about a lot of things. The environment. Animal welfare. His win/loss ratio on FIFA. ‘Sharing his thoughts’ was not on the list of things he cared for. Despite that, as he was yet to master spontaneous combustion, he needed to come up with an answer.

  Something.

  Anything.

  And so, Caleb Clifford answered the only way he knew how.

  Honestly.

  ‘Um, well, I was just thinking about why the inventor of shampoo called it that,’ Caleb said, pulling back the curtain on the biologically normal but decidedly unorthodox inner workings of his brain. ‘Like, “sham” as in “fake”, right? And “poo” as in, well, poo. So, like, fake poo? Why would anyone want to put that in their hair? Even if it does smell like, um … pomegranate?’

  Caleb optimistically looked behind him, searching for affirmation from his classmates.

  Crickets.

  No standing ovation. Not even a sitting one. Just twenty-three faces staring at him with expressions ranging from blank to incredulous to plain old pitying. He slowly performed a turn of shame to face his teacher again.

  ‘Intriguing as always, Caleb,’ Ms Agzarian finally said. ‘But I was actually hoping for your thoughts on the topic that we were discussing. So, tell me, Mr Clifford, in your insightful opinion, what was Lennon’s greatest achievement?’

  Thank. The. Lord.

  Finally – something Caleb was more than equipped to answer.

  You see, Caleb Clifford had been fed three things from birth – bananas, cheese singles and the Beatles. It was his father who’d introduced him; most nights there’d be an album from Paul, John, George and Ringo spinning on the household’s record player while his mum made dinner and the kids did their homework.

  Caleb could picture it now: his dad’s sandy hair, and his huge smile encouraging Caleb’s reluctant mother into a slow dance until the two of them got swept up into a blur of laughter and twirls, Caleb watching and singing along from the couch. He smiled. Finally, all of this extracurricular John Lennon study would come in handy. He cleared his throat and gave the most thorough answer he’d ever delivered in his entire schooling career: ‘Well Miss, for me, “Julia” is Lennon’s greatest song – it’s on the Beatles’ 1968 self-titled album, which is known as The White Album, and yeah, the lyrics are incredible. As for his best actual achievement though, I reckon it would be the Let It Be album as a whole, because it was the Beatles’ last one as a band, and it came out in 1970, a month after they broke up, so to be able to make something so great knowing the end was near is quite an accomplishment.’

  Caleb breathed a sigh of relief and slumped back in his chair, ready for the hum of classroom activity to fade back in and envelop him in its safe cocoon of sound.

  Instead, Ms Agzarian raised a hand to her face, pinched the bridge of her nose, and let out a noise that, in English, could best be written as, ‘Erghh.’

  The class’s laughter erupted like one of Caleb’s heftier pimples after a solid
squeeze. It turned out the tapping of the whiteboard marker in Ms Agzarian’s hand was just the intro to a horrible song. Now Al Murray was banging his fist on the table like a bass drum, while Sarah Aaron’s and Georgia Flipo’s giggles provided the melody. And over the top of everything, someone in the distance moaned, ‘Oh god, kill me now!’

  What a hook.

  Caleb sat, confused, in the middle of this awkward orchestra. Why was everyone laughing at him? I mean, he knew the answer, generally speaking. But why were they laughing at him in this specific instance? Did he get the release date of Let It Be wrong?

  Ms Agzarian tried her best to conduct the symphony of adolescent amusement back to a shimmering silence. Caleb wasn’t sure if this was better or worse.

  ‘OKAY, OKAY. THANK YOU, class. Caleb, as you should well know, given this whole semester has been on the Russian Revolution, we are of course talking about Vladimir Lenin, the dictator, not John Lennon from the Beatles. As talented as he was, I don’t remember John Lennon starting a revolution.’

  Caleb considered telling Ms Agzarian that there was a Beatles song called ‘Revolution 9’, but thought he’d better keep his mouth shut until the end of the lesson, which mercifully came a few minutes later.

  DUNnnDUNnnDunndunndunn.

  Caleb slunk back to his locker to grab his bag and console himself in the company of his buds. No, not his friends. He didn’t have enough of them to use the plural. He was rushing to his earbuds.

  Dumping his books into his backpack, he furiously wrenched the white cords out of the front pocket and jammed them into their respective holes, immediately feeling a sense of calm.

  To many people, earbuds would be inferior to real buds, but not to Caleb. He figured:

  They always gave you what you wanted to hear.

  You could adjust the volume depending on how much of a headache you had.

  If things got tangled, it was relatively easy to straighten them out again.

  Unfortunately, Caleb had learned about no.3 the hard way, but he didn’t want to think about that right now.

  He left the locker room as quickly as possible and opened Spotify on his phone. According to Screen Time, it was his most used app, organised with precision and packed with plenty of playlists hand-picked for his every mood – happy, sad, thinking about Ella Westlake. There were playlists for road trips, Christmas, one he would give to Ella Westlake that he thought she’d like, one for studying Maths, one for studying Science, one for studying Ella Westlake’s Instagram. There were loads.

  Today was a rough day, so he hit play on ‘Turbulence’ by Jake Townsend. It was a song he always brought out to make him feel better when things weren’t going well. (The fact that during the last few months he’d had it on an almost constant loop tells you all you need to know.) The track was in G minor and went for four minutes and forty-eight seconds, which would mean he’d have to take the long way to the auditorium if he wanted to hear the whole thing before he got picked up. Which he did.

  Caleb’s gangly stride took him along the fence line around the oval, next to the water source from which his school derived its name. Unfortunately, Riverview High was more of an aspirational name than an accurate one, the ‘river’ in question being more of an open concrete drain.

  It’s hard to fly, when you’re stuck in the sky

  It’s hard to fly, when you’re stuck in the sky

  Jake Townsend’s lyrics and fuzzy guitar chords filled Caleb’s head as he wandered along, shoulders hunched. It summed up exactly how he felt. Stuck. From about 1.13pm on his first day, he’d regretted coming to Riverview. With the exception of Ella Westlake, all of his primary school friends and even his older sister went to Montaigne College, a regal sandstone campus twenty minutes away that had an actual view of the Jacques River. He wished he’d done the same.

  The masks come down, I start to cry

  It’s hard to fly, when you’re stuck in the sky

  In fact, there was really only one thing that made his school life tolerable, and as Caleb neared the pick-up spot next to the school’s dingy auditorium, he could see her standing there, struggling with a an incredibly large double bass case.

  ‘Hey Miralee, need a hand?’

  ‘Oh my god, Caleb, that would be great, thank you!’

  Miralee Kahn was a minuscule ornament of a person, and Caleb’s only – and therefore best – friend at this godforsaken educational dungheap. She had jet-black hair and wide, dark eyes, and for some unknown reason had chosen to play the double bass in the school band despite the instrument being at least double her size.

  Oh, and also she liked to talk. A lot.

  ‘I’ve got to take this home and practise, we started a new song in band today and I was struggling hard, it’s so fast and my fingers are too small, so if I’m going to practise I need to take it home, but it’s such a punish, Dad had to buy a whole new car to fit it in, he’s waiting for me over there, I better go so he doesn’t get angry. How was your day? Mine was rubbish, we had double Journalism …’

  Caleb smiled and silently dragged the case along the walkway as Miralee explained the personality flaws of their Journalism teacher. They’d only met properly at the start of the year, but since then they’d become super close. Maybe it was because they both loved the band Northeast Party House. Maybe it was because they were born only a month apart. Or maybe it was because Caleb was the only person who seemed to not only tolerate, but actively enjoy Miralee’s verbal onslaughts. Or, as Miralee put it, he was ‘a good listener’. Miralee’s penchant for conversation worked in Caleb’s favour as well: as long as he was with her, awkward silence could never get a foothold.

  They arrived at her dad’s idling BMW SUV.

  ‘Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I wish you were in the band so you could help me all the time!’

  ‘I wish I was too now,’ Caleb groaned as he hefted the case into the back. ‘A few weeks of this and maybe I’d actually have muscles.’

  Miralee laughed. ‘You should join. It’s never too late.’

  Caleb shrugged. Being a music lover, he’d given band a shot in year seven, but it hadn’t really worked out. Despite having a crack at every instrument and loving the sound they made in the hands of a professional, his body just refused to produce sounds that anyone would call ‘not shit’. His fingers were too wiry and banged weakly over a piano. His lips wouldn’t spurt hard enough to give more than a pathetic toot from a trumpet. And the bassoon? Well, that just had a stupid name, and he refused to be associated with it.

  ‘I might stick to producing. Thanks, though,’ he said.

  ‘You still haven’t shown me your songs, you know. You promised that sometime –’

  ‘MIRALEE!’ her dad called from the front seat. Caleb could make out his stern face through the tinted windows.

  ‘I better go,’ she grimaced. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  And with that, she lifted her tiny frame into the back seat and the car drove off.

  Caleb pointlessly waved goodbye, then leaned against the auditorium wall. He was about to press play on another song when he spied two bogans holding Macca’s bags and choofin’ durries next to a bush.1

  Caleb didn’t know one of the kids, but the other was unmistakably his younger brother, Nathaniel Montgomery Clifford. It was weird seeing someone with such a regal name sporting a mullet haircut, but there Nathaniel stood, his freshly barbered follicle mudflap a remnant of last week’s Under-15s footy trip.

  It was the second time Caleb had seen Nat smoking. Their dad had always told them just how bad it was, but there was his brother, sucking one down anyway. Hopefully, along with the haircut, the smoking was just a phase. Nat had always been more popular than Caleb, but recently it seemed he had morphed from ‘cool-cool’ into ‘mean-cool’. Sure, it was still a more desirable label than Caleb’s – he currently self-identified as ‘not-cool’ – but he didn’t particularly like the transformation.

  Nathaniel lifted his eyes, and Caleb
froze. He didn’t want Nat to think he was spying on him, but he also didn’t want to look like he was trying to avoid his brother. So Caleb did the eighth thing that came into his head – he waved.

  This proved to be a bad move as – due to an illness Caleb had suffered since childhood called ‘Being Unco’ – his phone slipped from his hand, which left the device dangling precariously from his ears by the cord, mere centimetres off the ground. Caleb quickly fished it up like a freshly caught salmon, avoiding his third cracked phone screen of the year.

  Nailed it.

  He glanced back and saw Nat roll his eyes. Ahhh, brotherly love.

  A beep penetrated Caleb’s sonic cocoon. He looked up and saw the familiar pink hatchback trundling up the school driveway. Rachel waved and smiled from behind the wheel, and Caleb returned the greeting, notching up his third wave – and his third smile – of the day.

  If Caleb Clifford were a sound, he would be the noise a caterpillar makes when munching a leaf. If Nathaniel Clifford were a sound, he would be a cat audibly complaining about a cute costume it was wearing. If Rachel Ebony Clifford were a sound, she would be a circular saw grinding a firecracker. Blue hair, pink headband, black Ray-Bans. She screamed a sort of confidence that Caleb could only hypothesise about. It made him feel both jealous and safe, because although she was completely different, she did love him.

  ‘Hey, Butt-face!’

  In her own sort of way …

  ‘Hey, Rach.’

  Butt-face wasn’t really an insult as much as it was an abbreviation of Caleb’s childhood nickname, Button. All the Clifford siblings had one, a relic of a kids’ book their dad had read them called The Munch Bunch. It was about a town of vegetables and featured three baby mushrooms called Tiny, Button and Champ, and their father had decided these would be their nicknames from that day forth. Rachel was the only one still hanging on to the glory days, though.

  Caleb climbed into the passenger seat.

  ‘Where’s Champ?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘He’s coming.’

  ‘Wanna drive?’

  Caleb shook his head. He’d got his Ls six months ago, but had barely amassed three hours in his logbook.