The Best Thing

Shortlisted for Ethel Turner Prize, New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards 1996.

I'm like a person being tossed up in a blanket – all around me people are gripping the edges and laughing and throwing me up, getting right into the game, while I fly and fall above their heads, too scared to tell them to stop.

Mel's life is chaotic. At school her ex-friends have ganged up on her, at home her parents have lost touch with her and each other. Pug is the only good thing – loving him, in his untidy room scented and shadowed by frangipani, she finds passionate fulfilment. But his world is so different from hers – can they possibly make it together? And can she let him in on her overwhelming secret?

Learning to accept herself and him and the new life growing inside her is painful - but being Mel, she gives it everything she's got.