PROLOGUE
Kirsty sat in the back seat of her mum’s ancient hatchback, drawing a getaway route on a rumpled paper map with a glitter pen.
She was good at drawing getaway routes, even when she had a banged-up arm. Besides, concentrating on the neat glittery line was keeping her mind off the hot vinyl seat. And the broken aircon. And the fact she’d been stuck waiting foragesin the car.
She was good at other things, too, like fobbing off cranky landlords with hard luck stories, and she was especially good at buying yesterday’s loaf of bread for like twenty cents or whatever.
She could make her brown eyes go all sad and droopy and hungry-lost-dog-looking. The man at the bakery at the last town—William Creek? Or was it in Oodnadatta?—had been a sucker for sad, droopy eyes. He’d snuck a sticky bun into a white paper bag and handed it down to her along with the day-old bread.
She had to be good at all these things—and more—because of the family curse.
Kirsty snuck a peek through the car window to check her mum was still in the hotel-motel office and (phew) out of earshot. ‘Bad s–h–i–t happens to Foxes,’ she whispered.
The words were chiselled into the headstone of every dead Fox since the dawn of time, according to her mother. And yet, Kirsty still wasn’t allowed to say the s–h–i–t word, or spell it out loud. It didn’t even count that everyone at school (when she went to school) said worse. Eleven-year-olds aren’t allowed to swear, not until they’re eighteen, her mum would say.
Kirsty traced her pen along the squiggly line of Callie Creek Road but it came to a dead end. ‘Fudgebucket.’ That wouldn’t do … what if that mean-eyed woman from behind the hotel-motel counter came after them in her ute? It wouldn’t be the first time they’d had to empty their suitcases by the side of the road and hand back teaspoons and fluffy towels and some of the money from Mum’s lucky tin.
She leaned down to check. Yep. The old biscuit tin was still there, safe as anything. She reached for it but winced when the plaster cast on her arm went clunk under the car seat. Stupid thing.
Stupid her.
Stupidarm, which she better stop thinking about because that was in the past, and she and Mum didn’t do that.
Her attention now back on the map, she saw a yellow line that looked promising; maybe it was a highway that would take them someplace new. When bad s–h–i–t happened to Foxes, they upped stumps and took off. Finding themselves some new luck, her mum called it. Mum was always happiest in a new town, because it meant she had new pokie machines to try.
Kirsty nearly jabbed her glitter pen through the map when her mum ripped open the driver’s door and leapt in.
‘Let’s go,’ her mum said, panting.
‘Are they after us?’ Kirsty said, having another stickybeak through the dusty car window.
‘Not this time, sugarplum. She let me write her a cheque from the bank, but no point hanging around tempting fate, right?’
Totally right. Fate, lady luck, whatever her mum called it,lovedchasing down the Foxes. ‘But there’s no money in the bank, is there, Mum? You said I’d get sneakers when we had money in the bank.’ She could say that with just Mum there, because Mum wouldneverget mad and grip her until she had purple fingerprints spotting her arms.
Crunching the gears with a hand that was trembling a bit, and revving the engine, her mum dropped her sunglasses down her nose and twisted towards the back seat. ‘The hotel-motel lady doesn’t know that, does she?’ she said with a wink, before pulling the little car out onto the cracked road.
Kirsty grinned. ‘What about Colin?’
Colin was the love of Mum’s life. At least, he had been for about three weeks, and he was okay. Before that, Stew had been the love of Mum’s life, for ages and ages, and he hadnot at allbeen okay.
Her eyes wanted to look at her arm, but she couldn’t let them. No going back … that was the rule.
Before him it had been the one with the gold tooth who played the harmonica all the freaking time. Donny? Danny?
‘Turns out, Colin won’t be joining us, sugarplum. It’s you and me again. Want to climb through to the front?’
‘What about Colin’s jacket?’
Her mum grabbed the plaid fleece that was sitting on the front seat and chucked it out her car window. ‘I don’t see a jacket.’
All right then. Kirsty undid her seatbelt with her good hand and squidged her way through the vinyl seats until she was plonked nextto her mum. ‘I reckon the town we should try is Marla, Mum. It’s two hundred and nine kilometres away, and I saw a notice stuck to the door of the laundromat saying a cattle station out there needed a cook. You know, just in case the pokies are ganging up against you again.’
‘Well, aren’t you the clever one,’ said her mum. ‘A new town, a new job, and no-one hunting us down for unpaid rent … you know, you might have broken the curse, Kirsty Fox.’
Maybe. Kirsty grinned. She was kinda used to it now—breaking the curse every time they took off for somewhere new. When the bad s–h–i–t happened, she and Mum always got to go off on another adventure somewhere and forget all about it.
Running away from bad s–h–i–t was kinda fun.