She shook out her dark curls and sat back, trying to coax a sliver of comfort from the bus seat. But there was not even a sliver to be found. Generations of butts had sat in that seat before her, she reckoned, and each of them had squashed a wee bit more puff out of the seat cushion until there was none left for her.
Her phone buzzed again, and she checked it. Finally—the one member of her family she could count on not to ask her if she was sure she felt up to traveling on her own, and had she packed enough snacks in case she got hungry, and how no one would blame her if she wanted to put off the trip for a few weeks or months so that Cousin This or Auntie That could come with her, or ideally wrap her in bubble wrap and lock her in her room so she couldn’t get herself into any dangerous situations…
She plugged in her earbuds, accepted the video call and propped the phone against the back of the seat in front of her.
Her cousin Aroha’s face appeared on-screen. Aroha was a few months older than Sheena’s barely scraping twenty-three, with long dark hair and a wicked smile. Her voice crackled through Sheena’s earbuds.
“Have you not even left the country yet? Geez, cuz, get a move on.”
Sheena laughed. “I’m trying!” She lifted her phone so that her cousin Aroha could see out the bus window. “Guess where I am.”
“Move your thumb off the camera then, egg.”
“Fussy much…” Sheena held the phone up in front of her face, careful of her fingers, so she could see the same landscape she was showing to her cousin. Aroha was half the country away, back in the South Island, while Sheena bussed her way north. That was weird to think about. They’d grown up together—or failed to grow up, their parents might say—school, uni, work. And now Sheena was heading off to see the world and Aroha was staying home.
Stop it, she told herself firmly. Her inner sheep twitched its nose. No, not you. Me! I have to stop acting like they’re all right about me and I’m just some silly lamb who can’t cope on her own.
“Is that Ngauruhoe?” Aroha sounded awed.
“Yeah.”
The mountain stood proudly on the rolling plains, cloaked in snow. Seeing it like this, Sheena could see where the stories of Ngauruhoe and the other North Island mountains warring their way across the landscape had come from. The mountain looked as though it might rear up at any moment.
“Nice.” Aroha poked a finger accusingly at the camera; Sheena could just see her, reflected in the window. “But it’s not exactly Las Vegas, is it?”
“I’m trying! Gotta do Roto-Vegas first, see the fam up there.” Rotorua. Sulfur City. She’d only been there once before, on a family road trip when she was ten. Old enough to keep herself out of trouble but not so old she goes looking for it, Nana had said, which was wishful thinking. Sheena never had any trouble finding trouble. Her sheep made sure of that.
She caught her own eyes in her reflection and winced. Last time she’d been in Rotorua, thanks to her sheep’s blithe absent-mindedness, she’d wandered into a cordoned-off zone and found herself at the edge of a sinkhole bubbling with mud. Her sheep had pulled its head out of the clouds long enough to panic, she’d shifted… and front-page news on the local paper the next day had been the story of the plucky fire-service cadet who’d rescued a miniature lamb from a sizzling mud bath.
Sheena’s mum still had the photo on her mantelpiece.
“I can’t believe they’re making you visit all the rellies before you go on your OE,” Aroha said.
Sheena turned the phone around so that she could see her cousin properly. It gave her time to bite back her automatic response: I can’t believe you’re not coming with me.
The ‘Big OE’, or Overseas Experience, was a rite of passage for young New Zealanders. Pretty much everyone Sheena had been at school with had, facing a life cooped up on a tiny island at the bottom of the world, instead springboarded themselves as far overseas as they could manage to spend their early twenties bartending or waiting tables in the UK and the USA. Sheena was a little late off the mark, but she’d finally scraped together enough money for a plane ticket to the USA and a buffer to live off while she looked for work. Her visa had come through the month before, her flight was booked for a few days in the future, and the next stage of her life was so close she could almost taste it.
“I can’t believe I’m actually going,” she said instead. “Everyone’s acting like I’m going to get myself murdered the moment I step off the plane.”
“Just don’t absent-mindedly wander into any trouble. That shouldn’t be hard, right?”
“Har, har.” Sheena sighed. “Seriously. And now I’m visiting all the rellies before I go… I feel like Mum arranged that just so I’d feel bad about leaving and change my mind. It’s having the opposite effect though.” She made a face. “Everyone keeps saying how much I’ve grown.”
“They’re just trying to make you feel better.”
“What, about being bigger than I was when I was pre-pubescent?”
“All I’m saying is people saying that last time they saw you, you were knee-high to a grasshopper, doesn’t mean much when you’re now only waist-high.”
“Hey! You’re just jealous because I won more A&P shows than you.”
“I think you’ll find it’s my name on the rosettes, ya manus.” Aroha did the finger at the camera and laughed.
“Your name and my codename.” The Agricultural and Pastoral show had been a key date on the calendar in the small town where they grew up. Local kids raised up sheep or calves during the spring and competed at the festival to see who’d produced the biggest and best-trained animal. Sheena had never won biggest… or
