Schoolies Week
An “In A Sunburned Country” Event Story
© 2018 Chloe Tzang. All rights reserved. The author asserts a moral right to be identified as the author of this story. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a review.
So after I came up with the idea for this “In a Sunburned Country” Australian-set story event for Literotica, the next challenge was of course, what the heck do I write? Because after you come up with an idea like this and get it going and ask everyone you know on Literotica and more than a few that you don’t know at all to write stories for it, well, you’re kind of obligated to write something yourself, roight mate?
I thought about a sequel to my other story that I wrote a while ago set in Australia, (“Chinese Eyes”), but that’d be more of a continuation of an existing story and I wanted to do something a bit more original for this one, because, you know, Australia is the greatest. Well, after the U S of A of course (waves flag with patriotic fervor), but still, okay, second greatest, which is not to slander Kiwi’s coz New Zealand is pretty great too and then there’s Canada, which is kind of a cool country… but, uh, well, don’t be a total galah, Chloe, coz you’re digging yourself into a hole here, ya drongo.
So yeah, original story. Gotta be an original story and then someone posted a comment about Drop Bears on the competition announcement comments and I was, like, OH YEAH! Drop Bears! Trouble was, that turned into a full length novel a la “A Troll is Haunting Tex’s” but set in Oz and I didn’t have the time to get it done because there were a few personal commitment type things on the schedule so I went into fallback mode and wrote my other story, which is way shorter and was much faster to write and I actually got it finished too. Just in time. Like, on the evening of the cutoff day. Story of my life.
So yeah, mate, here we go. A hot little ripsnorter of a story for you to entertain yourself with, set in Australia and taking place over that most authentic of Australian rites of passage — “Schoolies Week.” So go ahead, read on! Enjoy! Immerse yourself in an authentic Australian cultural experience. I just hope you enjoy this as much as I’ve enjoyed researching and writing it and to all you Aussie readers, hope I didn’t make too much of a drongo of myself coz this was some hard yakka, I’m telling ‘ya. And I do hope you enjoy all the other stories on offer for the “In a Sunburned Country” story event on Literotica as well! …. Chloe
* * * * * *
Monday, binge drinking
Tuesday, the world owes you a living
Wednesday, everyone calls you “man”
Thursday, every car’s a Divvy Van
Friday, one big Desperate Dateless Ball
Saturday, sorted for Rohypnol
Sunday, wake up with vomit breath
Back to the start again
So you better pray you haven’t been bad
Or you could wake up in a “Say No To Drugs” ad
Devil rubs his hands with glee
And in a booming voice shouts, “Fluffy Ducks are on me”
Schoolies Week
Schoolies Week
In hell it’s always
Schoolies Week
Schoolies Week.” TISM, from the Album “De Rigueurmortis”
* * * Schoolies * * *
“How about we go to Surfers for Schoolies Week, Ching-Ching?” Megan asked, like, totally out of the blue.
“Huh?” I said, looking up from my laptop, coz I was cramming for those final end of year exams and I wasn’t too happy about the interruption. Year 12. Last year at North Sydney Girls High School and I needed to ace these coz this was one totally competitive High School and it wasn’t the Aussie girls I was competing with. It was all those other Asian ho’s with their Tiger Mum’s and I needed to ace every exam to beat them coz those bitches were, like, totally competitive and their Mum’s were worse.
“Schoolies Week? Never heard of it.”
“Schoolies Week? You’ve never heard of it?” Megan blinked. “Ching-Ching, it’s the most important week of your High School life. Our High School life. Whaddaya mean you haven’t heard of it? Everyone knows about Schoolies Week. It’s the party week to end all party weeks, girl, and we gotta decide where we’re gonna go to totally, like, rage.”
“No time to rage,” I said, turning back to my laptop. “I have to ace these exams, Megan.”
“You’re pulling my tit, Ching-Ching. Relax, girl. It’s after all the exams are over and you’re gonna ace bloody near everything anyhow. Take five, girl.” She wouldn’t stop until I did so with a sigh, yeah, I spun my chair around.
“Okay okay, tell me about it then.” Coz I liked Megan, I did.
* * *
Megan? That’s Megan Wentworth? Yeah, she was my bestie and I lived with her and her Dad in North Sydney and yeah, that’s in Oz. Australia to you. Her Dad was Mr. Wentworth. Mark. Homestay. I’d moved poker oyna in with them at the start of Year 12 after my parents sent me to Sydney to finish High School and there’d been a Mrs Wentworth but we’ll get to her later.
Me? I’m Ching-Ching Chu. I’m from Guangzhou, ‘n that’s in China down by Hong Kong in case you’re geographically challenged, which makes me Cantonese. So my parents, they’re rolling in it. Not Li Ka-shing rolling in it, nowhere near that, but my Dad, he’s got a couple of factories making knock-off pharmaceuticals and stuff and he’s, let’s just say he’s not financially challenged.
So Mum and Dad, they decided to send me overseas for University. My English was never that great so okay, do my last year in High School overseas and a crash immersion course in English and it’d all been decided for me. Before I knew it, all the arrangements were being made and I wasn’t too stoked about it, let me tell you.
“Australia?” I’d said, radiating total disbelief. “Why Australia? Why not America, or even Canada?”
“Australia,” my Mum said, very firmly. “Nice country. Nice people. Lots of Chinese. Much safer than America. No guns. No crime. Not much, anyhow. I asked Mrs. Wong, her sons are at University in Melbourne. She’s been there and she says it’s very pleasant.”
“Canada?” I said, rather weakly.
“Vancouver? Huh! Just like Hong Kong,” my Mum said. “No point in going there. Too many Hong Kong Chinese. You know what those Hong Kong Chinese are like. So pushy. So competitive. So snobby.”
“Learn English, do your last year of High School, study hard, go to good University in Australia,” my Dad had chipped in. “No arguing with your Mum, Ching-Ching.”
So it was settled. I hadn’t really wanted to go, way too scary. Foreign country. White people. When I did a bit of reading, coz I knew zip about Australia, well, it got worse. Australia? Do you know how dangerous that place is? Sharks that’ll bite you in half. Deadly snakes. I’m not pulling your tit. You know how many of the twenty five most venomous snakes in the world are Australian? The short answer is: bloody heaps. The long answer. Twenty one. Eighty Four percent of the twenty five most venomous snakes in the world live where my parents were sending me.
“Aiiyaaah, you want a one child family?” I said to my Mum, coz my little brother wasn’t going. Only me.
“Don’t be silly, Ching-Ching,” my Mum said. “Lots of people live there and they’re still alive.”
“The Inland Taipan is considered the most venomous snake in the world. Each bite has enough venom to kill more than one hundred men.” I read it out loud. “One hundred Australian men, Mum. That’s two hundred of me.” I tell ya, I was just about crying. This was so totally scary. Even those black gangsters or that MS-13 gang in America weren’t as scary as this. “I want to go to Canada, Mum. There’s nothing dangerous in Canada.” Only bears and wolves, and they were out in the forests and mountains where they belonged. “Toronto. How about Toronto? There’s not as many Chinese in Toronto.”
“No. Already decided,” my Mum said. “Australia.”
“Spiders,” I said. Coz my Mum totally freaked over spiders. “They have poisonous spiders, Mum. Horrible poisonous spiders and you’re sending me to Sydney and oh my god, there’s this thing called a Sydney Funnel Web and it’s the world’s most dangerous spider, Mum. They’re huge and their poison’s totally toxic.” I held up my iPhone. “Look, Mum.”
“Aiiyaaaahhhhh,” my Mum screamed, jumping backwards. “Don’t show me that.”
“You’re sending me there, Mum,” I said, quite reasonably I thought. “It’s not just snakes and spiders and sharks, Mum. They’ve got crocodiles that leap out of the water and drag people out of boats and eat them. They’ve got the most venomous jellyfish in the world.”
“Really?” my Mum said. “Can you eat them? What do they taste like. I love jellyfish.”
“Mum,” I said, near tears coz this was so terrifying. My parents were sending me to near certain death. “This bluebottle jellyfish, it says here that the stings are so painful that victims go into cardiac arrest and die and when they don’t, they beg the doctors to kill them to get it over with, and there’s one guy got stung and they knocked him out with morphine and even when he was unconscious he was still screaming and they come in swarms.”
No way I was going swimming then. Forget it, and my heart was going about five hundred a minute.
“Mum, look. This cute little platypus thing? It’s venomous as well. Oh my god, even the cute little animals are loaded with poison and the plants? Oh my god, Mum, ten percent of Australian plants make cyanide. Even the plants want to kill you and there’s this tree called the gympie gympie and it says here all you have to do is brush against it and it says here that being stung by it is the worst kind of pain you can imagine – like being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time, and oh my god, canlı poker oyna some Australian soldier used the leaf as toilet paper and the pain was so bad he shot himself and all you have to do is brush up against them and the pain can last for years.”
I was shaking, I tell you. Sharks. Snakes. Spiders. Crocodiles. Jellyfish. Stonefish. Poisonous animals. Birds that sliced you open with their claws. Drop bears that plunged out of trees and bit your head off. Plants that made you scream in pain for years. No way. No way I was going there. It’d be a death sentence. Doomed. I was doomed, condemned to certain and no doubt agonizing death by my callous and uncaring parents.
“If you want to get rid of me, couldn’t you just hire a hit man and make it quick and painless, Mum?”
“Don’t be silly, Ching-Ching,” my Mum said. “Millions of Australians live there quite happily. Mrs. Wong’s sons ‘ve been there for three years and they’re still alive.”
I was totally not convinced, but it didn’t make any difference. Decision was already made. I was doomed. I was going to die a screaming pain-filled death alone in some far foreign land and my parents just laughed at me.
“I don’t want to live by myself, Mum,” I said. A last desperate attempt.
“It’s okay, Ching,” my Mum had said. “We’ve arranged a homestay with a local family. Their daughter’s going to be at the same High School we’ve enrolled you in. She’s in the same grade as you and her parents said they’ll ask the school to put you in the same classes so she can look after you. She’s learning Cantonese to, so you can help each other. They’ll look after you and we’ll come and visit.”
Doomed. But I’d do my best to survive. I could buy insect killer for the spiders. Spray the room everywhere before I walked in. Keep everything shut. I could use duct tape anywhere a snake could sneak in and if I stayed away from plants and stuck to shopping malls and buildings I should be safe. And I wasn’t going near water. Ever. Not unless it came out of a tap or it was already in a bottle. If I was really careful I’d probably survive, but I was sweating, I tell you.
Four weeks later, walking out of Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport with my Mum and Mr. Wentworth and Megan, coz they’d come to meet us at the airport, I was sweating and not because of the heat. It was actually rather nice. A rather cool twenty two Celsius but okay, I’d dressed for the threat. Knee high leather boots, coz snakes usually strike at your legs from what I’d read.
Stretch leather tights, coz short of Kevlar, which I didn’t have, that seemed about the best way to protect my legs along with a nice long skirt which, okay, looked kind of retro sixties hippy but it should be thick enough to absorb a snake strike and it overlapped my boots. Linen top from Shanghai Tang and a black leather motorcycle jacket coz that’d been the heaviest leather I could find before we left home to catch the flight and I’d lifted it from my boyfriend’s closet and it was bloody hot, let me tell ‘ya.
He’d laughed when I told him why I wanted it, but Longhai was a really nice guy and he’d given it to me with a hug and a kiss and a few other things too, but he’d said it was his goodbye present to me and I was so glad he wasn’t heartbroken or anything. He did laugh when I asked him to come to my funeral though so I wasn’t going to bother texting him and I’d already dropped him from all my social media. If he wasn’t coming to my funeral he was history and all my girlfriends had cried and hugged me and said they’d come and to be really careful and they were all horrified about spiders and snakes. Almost all, anyhow.
“How could your Mum and Dad be so cruel,” Ai-ling said, hugging me. “Can I have those clothes? You won’t be needing them anymore.” I deleted her right away.
“Aiyahh, do your best to stay alive,” Melody said. “Want photos of you with koalas before you get bitten.” I deleted her right away.
“So sorry,” Lisa said. “Be really careful, Ching-Ching.” She gave me some special spider repellent her Mum’s Chinese Medical Doctor made for me specially and it smelt awful. Don’t know about spiders but it repelled me. I gave her extra big hug. Real friend!
Anyhow, you get the idea. I was a bit worried about exposed hands so I had some leather gloves in my bag and okay, those sunnies should protect my eyes from snake venom coz some of them spit poison at your eyes, and my little beret kind of should protect my head from spiders dropping from above and I had a scarf as well so I should be able to wrap up like one of those strange Moslem people if it looked like there was any major risk.
“Want to put your jacket in the boot with the bags, Ching-Ching?” Mr. Wentworth said after we’d made it to his car alive.
Boot? Huh? Why would you put the bags in someone’s boot, nobody had feet as big as my bag but he was opening the trunk and I was totally confused.
“Boot?” I asked, rather cautiously.
“Boot.” internet casino He pointed at the trunk.
“Oh,” I said. “The trunk is the boot?”
“Yep,” he said. “You learnt American English didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “My english teacher was from California. San Francisco.”
“Well, Australian English is a little different, Ching-Ching.” He grinned. “Megan’ll see you right.”
“Too bloody right I will, Ching-Ching,” Megan said, and I kind of liked her already and she was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and she didn’t seem worried about poisonous snakes or killer spiders or plants that wanted to make you scream in pain for years. I did wait until everyone else climbed into the car before I sat down though, and I checked the seat really carefully for spiders and things coz I’d read that they liked to sneak into cars and hide.
“Ever been outside of China before, Ching-Ching?” Megan asked, and I had to ask her to say it slowly coz oh man, that accent.
“Only to Hong Kong and Japan,” I said, and wow, the traffic here was as busy as back home.
“Well, you won’t see anything much until we cross the harbour bridge,” Mr. Wentworth said, ‘n we didn’t really, although it was a foreign city and Megan chattered away, but she was so hard to understand.
“This is the Sydney Harbour Bridge,” Mr. Wentworth said, rather proudly, I thought and wow, this was totally awesome and that must be the Opera House and what a totally amazing harbour. So blue and no pollution and all those boats everywhere. Sailboats? Wow! I’d kind of like to try sailing except that reminded me of sharks and crocodiles and those horrible killer jellyfish so okay, maybe not.
“You can climb all the way up to the top of the bridge,” Megan said.
“We did that last summer,” Mr Wentworth said. “Would you like to try that, Ching-Ching?”
“Oh yeah, I’d love to,” I said, peering out the windows and there was that beautiful Opera House and I totally forgot about spiders and snakes and sharks and killer jellyfish for about two seconds.
* * *
And okay, so a couple of weeks later we did climb up to the top of the Sydney Harbour Bride and it was just totally awesome and we did a few other things too and a few months later I could totally laugh at myself for being such a dickhead although I was still pretty careful about spiders, I tell ya, mate, and my room always smelled of Raid coz yeah, I sprayed it real good every few days.
Better safe than sorry.
“What’s with all the duct tape, Ching-Ching?” Megan asked, a couple of weeks after I moved in, and she only noticed it coz I was showing her some San Da kicks and I’d kind of knocked her on her ass and she was face down on the floor and when I explained, she laughed till she cried.
“Don’t be a drongo, Ching-Ching,” she’d sort of choked out. “You’ve got sweet fuck all chance of running into spiders or snakes here. Maybe out in the bush, but not here. You’re a real dag, you know that.”
And then she went and told everyone and they all pissed themselves laughing and yeah, they all agreed I was a real dag, and Megan even explained that one to me and then I sort of smiled coz yeah, I guess it was a bit goofy really but I left the duct tape there and I still sprayed everything with Raid all the time coz you never knew and no way did I want to be that one in a few thousand statistic.
“Chinese student dies from killer spider bite.” Nope, that was so not going to be me.
So yeah, I stayed with the Wentworth’s, and they lived close to North Sydney Girls High and there were a lot of other Chinese girls there so I didn’t stand out at all, Actually, it was Megan that stood out coz she wasn’t Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese or Indian or Asian but at least she was into K-pop and she was smart enough to keep up. Most of the Chinese girls at our high school hung out together, but not me. I hung out with Megan and she’d done my English a world of good.
Except it maybe wasn’t the English my oldies had expected me to pick up. Bloody oath, no.
I’d learnt English at school in Guangzhou of course, but that was American-English. This was Australian-English ‘n after a year with Megan and her family, I wasn’t so worried about snakes or spiders and I’d been to Bondi and swum in the Pacific and watched aerial pingpong a few times and figured cricket wasn’t my bowl of rice and I knew stonefish were way up north on the Great Barrier Reef which was in Queensland, and those people who loved up there were called cane toads although I never did figure out why and of course New South Wales was the best state in Australia and Crow eaters were just losers all round and Taswegians were maybe a slight improvement on those sheepshaggers from New Zealand. Or maybe not. Depended who you talked too. I’d sunbaked with Megan on the beach at Bondi and I hadn’t freaked out much at all about sharks or jellyfish coz I just didn’t go in the water although I did kind of keep an eye out for them and I got a heck of a fright when Megan’s boyfriend grinned and yelled “hey, couple of nice white pointers there.”
I didn’t see any sharks, just a couple of topless girls heading into the water.