Star Page 13

  I stare at her in disbelief. As if sensing my shock, she gives me a hug, right there, in front of everyone. The crowd applauds, then Stella welcomes the next person to the stage.

  Oliver takes my hand, and before I know it, I find myself offstage again. Then there’s a hand on my shoulder. I swivel to see Stella. Her mouth’s moving. ‘Catch me at the end of the day; I want to ask you something.’

  It takes a moment for my brain to process the words. I’m still shaking slightly from the experience.

  When we sit back in our chairs, I turn to Oliver and stare at him in wide-eyed disbelief.

  He stares back. ‘That was so awesome, Sky. Seriously.’

  But there’s no more time to talk as a new guy steps up to the microphone and clears his throat. But I can hardly even comprehend his words. I can’t wipe the grin off my face.

  The rest of the day passes quickly. More talks, more information—some of which goes over my head. At times, I feel like I’m an observer in an entirely new world. I’ve seen it online—the discussions and comments and posts—but in person it’s a club I’ve only just joined. And there are references to events past and present that I don’t know of, have never even heard of. All I know is, this is one club I want to join.

  During the lunchbreak we go to an adjoining room where organisations have set up stands. I collect more leaflets and stickers, and watch screens playing a mixture of inspiring messages and distressing images.

  I pick up one leaflet on canned hunting in Africa, where rich people go to shoot animals in zoo-like conditions. It sounds insane. The animals have no chance to escape. I think of Dad and the hunting ethics he told me about, the philosophy that entwines humans with nature. When I think of the Aboriginals of Australia, and the native peoples of the US, and their connection to the land, I can understand that view. But today, as a paid sport? Not at all.

  I take a leaflet to show Dad; maybe it’ll spark a new conversation on what he’s planning to do next, which I hope isn’t to return to hunting. I send him a message asking how last night went at the Country Music Festival. He responds immediately telling me it was beyond expectations. He showed the pictures to the mayor, Greg Stevenson, aka Marissa’s father, after the show was over, and Greg couldn’t stop gushing.

  As Oliver and I eat the lunch we bought at one of the stands, a couple of people say hi, recognising us from the stage. Even better, they ask where they can see the video, and Oliver jumps in with the address of Keep Kind.

  A few hours later, as evening approaches, he’s grinning like a little boy when he shows me how our numbers keep increasing.

  ‘Eat dirt, Jaxon,’ he mutters. ‘This is viral.’

  I roll my eyes. Seriously.

  I check the time and look around for Stella in the crowd, but don’t see any sign of her. I wonder what she wants to ask me.

  Chapter 14

  With the conference program officially over, the doors to the courtyard have been opened. Even though the sun’s still out, fairy lights are strewn around the old brick walls, and food carts and stands circle the periphery. People move back and forth between the tables holding biodegradable paper plates, bottles and cups.

  ‘Well done.’ A guy slaps Oliver on the back. Oliver turns to thank him, but he’s already disappeared into the crowd.

  As we consider our dinner options, I see the girl with the heart tattoo standing by the nachos. She’s pointing at me and whispering to her friend, the girl with red lipstick. I feel my face grow warm.

  They walk over to me. ‘You’re the one who put up that video,’ red-lipstick girl says. ‘We wanted to come over and say well done. That was brave.’

  ‘I’m Sky,’ I say, grinning like I’ve just won a prize. ‘Oh, I mean, thanks!’

  ‘I know you from Facebook, right?’ the blonde girl asks. ‘We’re friends.’

  I look at her and suddenly her profile picture and real-life face merge and match. ‘Oh my God, yes. Issie! It’s so good to meet you in real life. Sometimes it’s hard to know when you’re online if someone’s legit or not.’

  She smiles and puts her hand on the heart-tattoo girl’s shoulder. ‘And this is my friend, Celeste.’

  Promising to stay in touch, they each give me a hug, before taking their nachos.

  Oliver and I scan the options again. I feel a rush of warmth, approval and appetite mixing inside me. This is a vegan event, and I’ve never had so much food choice before. Hungrily, I examine the stir-fried noodles from the Thai stand. But I end up choosing falafel with all the trimmings, while Oliver opts for a mushroom pizza dripping with vegan cheese.

  The courtyard is filling up, but we manage to find a place at the end of a long trestle table. Someone to my left squeezes tomato sauce onto a samosa and offers it to her friend. ‘Taste this; it’s sooo good.’

  ‘Sky!’ Stella appears beside me making me jump. ‘There you are! And Oliver too. You free for a chat?’

  ‘Sure!’ Like I would ever say no to the most inspiring person ever.

  She puts down her IAAD water bottle and a tray of vegan sushi then sits down, elegantly swinging her knees over the long bench.

  ‘Look at your eyes!’ She gazes into my face. I’m used to this; I have an unusual condition called heterochromia, so one of my eyes is brown and the other is green. I only learnt that’s what it was called when I was in Alaska. I’d thought for years that I’d inherited the green gene from Mum and the brown gene from my father.

  ‘Over here!’ Stella waves at Miguel, who’s standing nearby with a burger looking like a male model. He sees Stella and makes his way towards us. When he reaches our table, he climbs over the bench and squeezes in beside Stella. I beam, feeling like a superstar, graced by the presence of the most important people in the room.

  Oliver and I take turns congratulating Miguel then we tell them both how inspired we were by their speeches.

  Miguel, at Oliver’s urging, explains the details of his tattoo. We sit transfixed as he runs his fingers over the numbers and slowly, like it’s a trick of the eye, we see the groupings of numbers merge into a shape: the outline of a baby cow. It’s genius.

  ‘I love to see young women taking leadership roles in the movement.’ Stella picks up her chopsticks, giving me a chance to look at her bracelets. One is silver with a large turquoise stone, another is plaited with gold and thread, and then there’s the Wonder Woman one I’d noticed before. Each is singular, different, but they work together in perfect style.

  Perfect. That’s exactly the word I’d use to describe Stella.

  She picks up a piece of avocado and cucumber sushi. ‘Tell me about yourself, Sky.’

  ‘Me?’ I feel suddenly shy. ‘Well, I guess—’

  Someone puts a hand on Stella’s shoulder just as she pops the sushi in her mouth. An older woman with dark hair streaked with grey exclaims, ‘I am such a fan! I read your posts every day and I just wanted to say thank you. I’ve been in the movement a long time, but you’ve really taken it to the next level.’

  Stella asks the woman’s name, between chews, and thanks her warmly. Then, when the woman leaves, she looks back to me and I start again.

  ‘I grew up in Sydney, and then I moved to—’

  ‘Stella!’ A man with round retro glasses appears to my left. ‘Long time no see!’

  Stella smiles widely and they talk for a moment about some conference in Madrid and how good the food was. I can’t believe how international this group is, how connected they all are. I try to imagine myself travelling the world to conferences on animal rights, hanging with awesome activists and dedicating my life to animals. Beyond.

  The guy is still talking. ‘Did you eat the paella from the stand at the back, you know the one?’

  ‘So good!’ Stella’s eyes widen. It seems like everyone here is a foodie as well. Veganism has sometimes been a struggle for me, especially at school events and birthday parties, but I’m starting to see how it can be a pleasure, a way to connect.

  ‘And
the keynote speech was inspiring.’ He runs his hand through his wavy hair. ‘Although two steps forward, one back, what with Japan’s announcement of commercial whaling. You going to the LA conference?

  Stella nods. ‘And you know who is coming out of retirement for it?’

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it,’ he says with a grin.

  It’s all insider information. I wonder if I’ll ever be privy.

  ‘Anyway, let’s talk a bit later. I’m just ...’ She nods towards me.

  ‘No problem.’ He nods politely to Oliver. ‘Well done to you both.’ Then he gives a wave and walks off.

  ‘Sorry, Sky,’ Stella says.

  ‘It’s okay. We can talk another time if you want.’

  ‘No, no. I—’

  ‘Stella!’ A woman practically runs towards us. ‘Oh my God, you were so good—I mean, you always are. But seriously. Awesome. I was wondering, you know when you—’

  I’m just about to give up on being able to speak to Stella when Miguel interrupts. ‘She’s just in the middle of something here, sorry. Catch her in ten minutes, okay?’

  Stella smiles apologetically, and the woman nods and disappears.

  ‘I’m putting a cone of silence around us.’ Stella makes an elaborate rainbow motion with her hands. ‘Now, tell us.’

  I give her a summary of my life to date, or rather, my activist life, from being a vegetarian to going vegan, saving Chirp, speaking out at our school event and ending up with my picture in the newspaper and the farm agreeing to go half free range. I talk about flying to Alaska, discovering my father was a hunting guide, and how I wanted to save the moose. Then I get to mine and Oliver’s YouTube channel, and how my dad went out with the guys and captured the video of the joey.

  Stella listens attentively, and protected by our cone, no one interrupts.

  ‘Well done, girl,’ she says when I’m finished.

  Miguel points at Oliver. ‘And this young man here too.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Oliver says his green eyes lighting up. I take a moment to admire my boyfriend, with his ruffled maple-syrup hair and honey-coloured skin.

  ‘It is good, eh?’ Miguel says, eyeing Oliver’s pizza.

  ‘Great,’ Oliver says, ‘for vegan cheese.’

  ‘You’re not vegan?’ Miguel asks.

  Oliver looks to me and back at Miguel. ‘Not totally.’

  ‘What, cheese? Eggs?’ Miguel furrows his brow. This is making me uncomfortable.

  ‘Yeah.’ Oliver lifts his shoulders in a half-shrug. ‘A bit.’

  Miguel shakes his head. ‘You can’t do that, my friend. Do you understand?’

  ‘But I’ve been veggie since I was born.’ Oliver frowns. ‘I’ve never even tasted meat. I only eat cheese and stuff sometimes.’

  ‘Dairy is worse than meat.’ Miguel’s voice is matter of fact. ‘Calves ripped away from their mothers shortly after birth, trucked to slaughterhouses ...’ He tells us that the young male calves who are of no economic benefit to the dairy industry are taken to slaughter so young that their umbilical cords are still attached. He describes the suffering of the mother cow, who has to undergo a repetitive cycle of impregnation, birth and the emotional stress of having their young taken away. Then he takes out his phone and shows us a video of a mother cow bellowing for her baby once the truck has driven away. I know a bit about this from fact sheets I’ve read, but to hear it now, from Miguel, it’s heartbreaking.

  I don’t want to look at Oliver, but I can feel him deflate beside me.

  Stella adds, ‘Let alone the issue of exploiting the mother’s body for the milk she makes for her young.’

  Miguel fixes his gaze on Oliver. ‘You can’t be a murderer sometimes, Oliver. Imagine a lawyer arguing to a judge: “He only sometimes kills people.” You either are, or you aren’t.’

  ‘He barely eats dairy,’ I say, fighting the impulse to bite my nails. ‘I mean, almost never.’ That’s not quite true, but I don’t like hearing murderer and Oliver in the same sentence, or seeing him put down.

  Stella seems to take pity on us and she puts her hand on Miguel’s shoulder. ‘Let’s focus on the positives, dude. You were once in their place too. Remember that. How old are you guys, anyway?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ I say.

  ‘Nearly seventeen,’ Oliver jumps in.

  ‘Still young.’ Stella picks up an avocado sushi.

  Miguel cracks his knuckles and swigs from his drink bottle; the liquid inside is yellowy brown and the bottle is labelled Kombucha. I succumb, and chew my nails.

  ‘Sky,’ Stella says, ‘I’m writing a long-form piece on kangaroos. It seems to me the Australian psyche is conflicted; you laud them and yet despise them. This attitude of cleansing the land of native animals to make way for profitable cattle and sheep, categorising them, conveniently, as pests when it’s the farm animals who are in fact not indigenous, it reeks of colonialism, to be honest.’

  I force my hands into my lap and nod in agreement, although I’m not quite sure what she means.

  ‘And your video is the missing piece of the puzzle. I needed a human element, not just theories, philosophy, ethics and facts. The key to journalism is storytelling— real people with real stories.’

  ‘You mean Pete?’ Oliver says.

  She nods. ‘If that’s the guy in the video then, yes, exactly.’

  ‘But we can’t show his face.’ My heart rate quickens at where this conversation is going. ‘My dad took the footage, and he’d get into trouble.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘The guys he went out hunting with.’

  Her eyes widen.

  ‘He didn’t hunt—my dad I mean—he just went with them to take pictures.’

  ‘Right.’ She nods.

  ‘And Pete’s still at school. I don’t know if ...’ I try to remember the reasons why we can’t identify him.

  Stella spots someone in the crowd. ‘Hold on.’

  She gets up and returns a few moments later with a thirty-something woman with coiffed blonde hair. ‘This is Ruth. She’s an Australian lawyer and she might have a few thoughts on what our limitations could be.’

  Stella explains the situation with the footage, Pete’s blurred-out face and how we’ve concealed his identity. Ruth has her back angled away from me and she speaks in a very soft monotone, so it’s hard to catch what she’s saying. Stella clarifies with me that my dad filmed the act on private property without Pete or his father’s permission.

  She and Ruth back and forth for a couple of minutes.

  I hear Stella ask, ‘How about if I did a little research into which kids at ... What’s the name of your school, Sky?’

  ‘West Creek.’

  ‘West Creek.’ She refocuses on Ruth. ‘I could research which kids go hunting with their dads and interview a few of them. And if I deduce, from my own investigations, who may have performed that act—’

  Ruth interrupts with some muffled law mumbo jumbo; I hear the words surveillance devices act repeated a couple of times. When she finishes, Stella rests her finger on her lips thoughtfully.

  ‘So, if I compile a list of boys in the school who are known to hunt, mention Pete’s name but imply he’s a question mark and not explicitly say—’

  Ruth interrupts again and they continue talking. Finally, Stella nods, thanks Ruth and sits back down.

  ‘Okay. We have to work out how we can tread the line here. You saw the original footage and you’re sure it’s Pete?’

  Oliver and I both nod.

  ‘One hundred and ten per cent?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say confidently. Pete kicking the joey will forever be burnt into my cells. New anger surges inside me. Pete did something horrendous and he shouldn’t get away with it. I think of how he went to buy a donut the very next day, like nothing even happened.

  Stella faces Miguel. ‘We could do the same thing we did with—’

  ‘Beverly,’ Miguel finishes.

  ‘Right. What a piece of work she was.’ She sighs, still looki
ng at Miguel. ‘But I’m not sure if it applies in this case. Beverly posted the evidence herself, remember?’

  I furrow my eyebrows. I don’t understand what’s happening.

  Miguel picks up on my confusion and explains. ‘While Stella pursues the more intellectual path of journalism,’ he gives her an affectionate pat on the back, ‘I’m more of a people person. A name and shame campaign that everyone can get behind will work well here.’

  ‘Name and Shame?’ I ask.

  ‘On my platform, Expose Them.’ His dark eyes are so intense. ‘Naming and shaming is simply a public declaration that someone has done something wrong. Social media is a powerful tool to call people out. As we say, those who sow seeds of cruelty will reap the consequences. Pete is the perfect candidate—we haven’t had an Australian before, let alone a kangaroo incident.’

  Stella puts her hand on mine. ‘Miguel and I started working together last year, which is why I had to recuse myself when the judging panel assessed his nomination. We have different approaches but the same aim—to hold people accountable for their actions, draw a razor-sharp line showing that cruelty is unacceptable.’

  ‘Unacceptable,’ I parrot.

  ‘We,’ she removes her hand from mine to motion to everyone around us, ‘will not be party to this endemic behaviour any longer.’ She picks up her handbag and digs around inside it before pulling out a pen. ‘His name is Pete ...?’

  I freeze. How much should I tell her? I look at Oliver for a signal, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Last name?’ Stella prompts.

  ‘Kelly.’ I look at Oliver again. There’s no sign on his face that I’ve disclosed too much, so I think it’s okay. If anyone’s trustworthy, it’s Stella.