Excerpt from How It Feels to Float by Helena Fox, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The bell rings.

"Please email me your essays by midnight!" calls Mr. Birch over the scrape of chairs, the shoving of laptops into bags, the clatter of our bodies beelining it to the door.

Now it's break.

At break and lunch, I always sit with Grace—and Evie and Stu and Miff and Rob and Sal. The Posse, they call themselves. I should say: We, as a collective, call ourselves The Posse. I am in The Posse. I am an integral member of The Posse, I think.

Grace and I have sat with The Posse since the first day of Year 9. We were both new. Evie saw us hovering uncertainly in the schoolyard, and decided we belonged to her. She brought us over to the bench under the tree by the fence. There, everyone interviewed us. What bands did we like? Did we prefer a day at the beach or inside? Had we readThe Communist Manifesto? Had we seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Did we like it? Did we have a tattoo? If not, what would we get and where?

The group made the questions sound like conversation. But I could feel everyone marking us invisibly. Tick, tick, cross, tick, tick.

I let Grace answer first and watched everyone's faces. I crafted my answers the way their smiles went.

In the end it was okay. We could stay. But of course we could stay!The Posse is inclusive! The Posse is Love Incarnate!

We would have more people in The Posse, but most people are stupid, says Miff. We, The Posse, agree.

Before I came to this school, I was never in a group, so being in one—especially one with a name—was quite the novelty. It still is, because, I mean, I belong to six other people and they say they miss me when I'm not there. I've sat on the bench under the tree by the fence for just over two years now, laughing and saying things I think I'm supposed to.

And almost every second of every minute I'm with them, I feel like I'm seeing the scene from somewhere else. In front of a screen maybe, watching someone else's life.


I walk to the lockers. Grace is standing by mine.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey," she says. She smells like lavender—it's from the moisturizer she gave me for my birthday, then borrowed two months ago and forgot to give back.

I open my locker. I put in my books.

"Hey," I say again. My hands are actually shaking, which is stupid, because this is Grace, my best friend, who lives down the street and one left and two rights away from me. Grace Yu-Harrison, who knows all the songs from the Beatles' White Album (like me), loves The Great Gatsby(like me), and the art of Alexander Calder, especially his mobiles, which move when you blow on them. (We did this, one Sunday in Sydney, when the guard wasn't looking. The wires trembled at first, then danced.)

Grace lives with her mum and stepdad, who are workaholics. I'm not exaggerating; they literally can't seem to stop sitting in their offices, going to meetings and conferences and dinners with other workaholics, and coming home late. Grace has a lot of time to herself. Her dad lives in Wagga Wagga, which is so far from the sea it may as well be fictional. She has a pool and a hammock that fits two—we often swing in it after a swim.

Grace is also stunning, the kind of gorgeous most people try their whole lives to be. She has kissed five and a half guys. Half because one guy turned and vomited two seconds after their lips touched.

"It was disgusting," she said. "He nearly threw up in my mouth!"

I haven't kissed anyone else but her.

In the four-minute walk from the lockers to our bench by the fence, Grace usually talks. She says we should dye our hair, but not blue because everyone's doing that, so maybe silver? And she tells me about the drawing she did of her dream last night, and about Suryan in Year 12 sending her a photo of his penis, which she calls a dick, and which I say is unfair to all the people called Richard, and Grace laughs.

Excerpted from How It Feels to Float by Helena Fox. Copyright © 2019 by Helena Fox. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.