The Brilliant Ideas of Lily Green Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  1 SHAMPOO AND ORANGE JUICE

  2 GLOSS AND GLITTER

  3 PERFUME AND PAINT

  4 GLUE GOO

  5 MOONLIGHT AND MULBERRIES

  6 LEMONS

  7 MOUSSE

  8 BIRDS AND BERRIES

  9 HONEY AND CHOCOLATE

  10 CAT FOOD

  11 SPIDERS AND CANDYFLOSS

  12 SUGARPLUMS AND FINGERNAILS

  13 MOULD

  14 FLOWERS AND OATMEAL

  15 PETALS AND POLLEN

  16 VINEGAR AND VENOM

  17 DIRT

  18 DONUTS AND CUPCAKES

  19 HAIRBALLS

  20 CURLS AND CREAM

  21 LILIES AND IVY

  22 BUTTERFLIES AND PEANUT BUTTER

  23 VINES

  24 GOLD AND GREEN

  25 FLOWERBUDS

  26 SPARKLES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  Petal Pop.

  Melon Twist.

  Berry Crush.

  Dusting three hundred and forty-eight bottles of nail polish is a lot harder than it looks. I know because I work in my mum’s beauty salon – Kitty’s Beauty Parlour.

  See that word in the middle? It’s Beauty, with a capital B.

  Beauty is my family’s specialty. At least, it is for my mum and sister, who can plait a fishtail braid and paint a manicure with sparkly tips in less than a minute. Probably with their eyes closed. I’ve never been good at beauty treatments. Which is why I was dusting three hundred and forty-eight bottles of nail polish on that sunny Monday morning, four crazy weeks ago. I’d just finished the pink bottles and was moving onto the silvers and, as usual, my older sister, Faye, was bossing me around.

  ‘Lily, can you dust any slower? Move it.’ Faye snatched the bottle of Stardust Silver out of my hands and returned it to the shelf. ‘Now, have you scrubbed out the wax pot like I asked?’

  ‘Scrubbed and dried and ready for waxing,’ I sighed, fiddling with my feather duster.

  ‘Swept up the toenail clippings?’

  ‘Most of them were yours, but sure, all done.’

  Faye swished her shiny brown hair over her shoulder like she was in a shampoo commercial. ‘How about refilling the spray tan machine?’

  I held up my brown-stained hands as proof.

  This was our usual morning routine: I cleaned. Faye told me what to do.

  When my sister turned sixteen, Mum gave her an official job in the salon and a purple apron with Beauty Assistant embroidered on the pocket in curly gold letters. I’d only just turned twelve, so I didn’t have an official job or an apron, but Mum kept telling me I’d get one as soon as I mastered the art of cutting hair and painting nails. The only problem? I’ve always been hopeless at both. Painting toenails is way too fiddly and I have zero patience for cutting hair (why not just snip off the ponytail and get it over with?) So most of the time it was just me and my best friend the feather duster.

  I threw the horrid thing onto the salon desk and slid onto the stool behind the cash register.

  ‘Any morning appointments?’ asked Faye, wandering over to the door and turning the shop sign to OPEN. She stared hopefully out the window like there was an imaginary queue of people waiting to come in.

  ‘Uh, nope. Just another quiet day,’ I said, checking the appointment book.

  ‘Quiet?’ Faye leaned her forehead against the glass. ‘More like dead.’

  I hate it when my sister’s right, but yeah – she was right. For the past few years, this fancy beauty clinic chain called BeautyGlow had been opening shops all over town, and gradually stealing our customers. Things got even worse when they opened at the local mall. Ever since then, we’d been losing customers faster than water gurgling down a drain. It probably didn’t help that our salon was kind of old and crumbly – in a good way. I mean sure, the old purple wallpaper was curling off in places, and the giant mirror lined with light bulbs was a bit misty, and the black-and-white chequered floor was more scuffed than stylish. But I loved every little bit of that salon.

  Faye and I literally grew up there.

  If you looked carefully, you could still see the green pen marks on the wall near the washbasin, where Dad used to track our height and show customers how much we’d grown. My marks stopped at age six. Oh, and if you ran your hand over the corner of the salon desk, you’d feel a little dent from the time I slammed into it playing hide-and-seek with Faye. That was back when we had fun in the salon. Before Faye got her apron and I started washing wax pots.

  I flipped open my green notebook and drew an apron next to my latest secret formula: co-co-crazy deodorant. I’d mixed it up the night before out of coconut oil, shea butter and cinnamon. It made me smell like a tropical muesli bar, but I’d invented the recipe all on my own, which was the best feeling.

  I really love making things.

  Not things you can eat, but things you can use.

  Like the salt and seaweed body scrub I mixed up for Mother’s Day (that made the bathroom smell like fish). Or the honey and garlic pimple cream I gave Faye (which she fed to the cat). Secretly, I was hoping one day my inventions would be good enough to sell in the salon. But so far, the cat was my only fan.

  ‘Are you going to school like that?’ asked Faye, using her I’m-an-official-beauty-assistant voice.

  ‘Like what?’ I flicked a page over and scribbled down some new ideas.

  Mint-chocolate-chip foot cream? Marshmallow and egg-white bubble bath? Peanut butter and apple-cider-vinegar hairspray!

  I underlined that last one. Brilliant.

  ‘Lily, seriously, look at yourself.’ Faye prodded a sparkly orange nail at my shoulder. ‘You’re a mess.’

  I checked the salon mirror. My curly red hair was sticking out at crazy angles and there was a streak of pink guck on my school T-shirt. I’d tried making toothpaste the day before out of baking soda and mashed strawberries, but it tasted like a mooshy mouthful of chalk.

  ‘Honestly, sometimes I wonder if we’re even related.’ Faye pulled a bottle of Mango Blossom Miracle Hairspray out of her apron pocket and spritzed it at my head.

  I sneezed.

  The one good thing about cleaning the salon was that it gave me time to read the backs of all our jars and bottles, so I knew for a fact that most beauty products had weird ingredients in them. Like Stardust Silver nail polish – guess what? Made out of crushed fish scales. And the green face cream that Faye slopped on her face at night? It had snail slime in it. Actual snail slime.

  So I was pretty sure Faye’s Mango Blossom Miracle Hairspray didn’t contain any mango blossoms. Or miracles. ‘I like my hair the way it is.’ I sneezed again.

  ‘This rat’s nest? Trust me, this isn’t hair, it’s a freaky, frizzy nightmare.’

  I winced as Faye smothered me in another cloud of hairspray and scrunched and tugged on my curls until they hung in a stiff army of red spirals.

  ‘See? So much better.’ My sister squinted at my face. ‘Now, how about some cheek shimmer?’

  Please, not the cheek shimmer.

  Mum’s voice drifted out of the back office. ‘Girls, school starts in ten minutes!’

  I let out a little puff of relief. It’s not that I hated makeup. It’s just that I’d been getting Faye’s ‘makeovers’ since I was a baby, when she figured out she could cut my hair with craft scissors and colour in my eyebrows with orange texta. After twelve years of being Faye’s makeup guinea pig, I preferred making gloop, not wearing it.

  ‘I have to stick on my eyelashes, so do something useful and dust the shampoo shelf,’ ordered Faye, untying her
apron and hanging it on a wall hook.

  ‘More cleaning?’ I groaned. ‘Come on, can’t I do something else?’

  ‘No, you can’t.’ My sister swished through the beaded curtain that led up to our apartment. ‘You literally can’t do a single thing around here, remember?’ she shouted. ‘So get dusting, and whatever you do, don’t touch anything.’

  Urgh. I shook my head – hard – until my curls popped back into their old frizzy mess. Next, I slipped on Faye’s purple apron and snuck a look in the mirror. It was too big, but the gold letters sparkled perfectly in the morning sun.

  Beauty Assistant.

  I wondered, if I ever got an apron, what mine would say. Expert toenail sweeper? Wax pot scrubber?

  Something throbbed inside me, like an old bruise, but I ignored it and went over to the shampoo shelf. My cat, Crunch, was draped around a bottle of shampoo, catching some morning rays. Mum doesn’t like Crunch lounging on the shelves, but I let him because he’s almost as useless in the salon as I am.

  ‘Hey, buddy,’ I mumbled, dusting around him.

  Crunch meowed and rubbed his furry white chin against the last bottle of French Orange and Organic Coconut Shampoo. It was Mum’s favourite. She imported it all the way from France, but when we started losing customers she had to stop ordering stock, so there was only one bottle left. You could tell it was expensive because it was big and twinkly with a pretty label.

  ‘Lily? Sweetie? I hope you have a clean shirt on!’ shouted Mum through the wall.

  ‘Yeah, Mum!’ I shouted back. Clean enough.

  Same thing for the shampoo shelf. Clean enough. I was about to move on to the makeup shelf when I saw a flash of blue feathers outside the shop. Crunch saw it too: a girl was walking past with a blue budgerigar on her head. The new girl at school who was always drawing.

  Ivy.

  She must have sensed that a giant white cat was staring at her, because she paused mid-step and waved at us through the window. The budgie on her head squawked. Crunch growled. And then everything kind of … exploded.

  With a hiss, Crunch launched himself at the window, knocking the bottle of French Orange and Organic Coconut Shampoo off the shelf behind him. For half a second, both Crunch and the shampoo bottle hovered in mid-air, before gravity decided to change my life. Forever.

  Thunk – Crunch hit the window and fell in a grumpy heap on the floor.

  Smash – the shampoo bottle hit the ground so hard, the lid cracked and flew off like a Champagne cork.

  And then there was the worst sound of all – a wet glug glug glug as a gloopy stream of very expensive shampoo flowed across the salon floor.

  My insides went squishy with panic. Ivy and her budgie had disappeared, and Crunch was sniffing at the shampoo river like none of this was his dumb furry fault.

  ‘Lily? What was that?’

  Mum.

  ‘Nothing! Absolutely totally nothing!’ I shouted, setting the bottle upright. Too late. All the shampoo was dripping down the floor drain and I could just imagine the look of disappointment on Mum’s face when she found out what had happened.

  Faye’s words flashed through my head.

  You’re a mess, Lily.

  You can’t do a single thing around here, Lily.

  Don’t touch anything, Lily.

  I had to do something, but what? The only thing I could do was make stuff.

  Which gave me a brilliant idea.

  Frantically, I grabbed the empty bottle and thumped up the stairs to the apartment. The bathroom door was closed, with Faye singing off-key on the other side, so I veered into the kitchen and flung open the pantry cupboards. My fingers started to tingle. Lots of ingredients stared back at me, but I went straight for the coconut milk. Boom. I cracked open three cans and glugged the fragrant white liquid straight into the bottle.

  Next? Dishwashing detergent – ten squirts to be exact – and a good shake. The key to making beauty products is to find the perfect balance of texture and fragrance. Or at least that’s what I’d read online. And this was looking good, but it still didn’t smell right – I just needed one last ingredient. Something orange-y.

  My eyes skimmed over the kitchen window. Nothing out there but dirt, weeds and the mulberry tree. And something else … the neighbour’s orange tree dangling over the wall at the end of our backyard.

  Bingo.

  The cool morning air whipped against my face as I slid down the fire-escape ladder at the back of the apartment and thudded into the weeds below, praying that Mum would stay buried in paperwork for a few more minutes.

  I sprinted towards the high stone wall that ran across the back of our garden. Peeking through the leaves of our giant mulberry tree was a single orange, as smooth and shiny as a plastic ball. For half a second I wondered if old Rosa would mind me taking it. Rosa lived behind us, and even though I’d never met her, I knew she had some sort of huge garden.

  So maybe one little orange wouldn’t hurt.

  I stood on tiptoe and plucked the orange. The air was still, but I could have sworn the jagged, tooth-like leaves of the tree shivered.

  Weird, I thought. What kind of tree shivers?

  Two minutes later, I’d squeezed every last drop out of that orange, and Mum’s bottle of French Orange and Organic Coconut Shampoo looked (and smelt) exactly the same. And when I put it back on the shelf and wiped all the gloop off the floor, I swear, it was like nothing had happened. I even whipped off Faye’s apron seconds before she and Mum walked in.

  ‘Salon’s all clean,’ I panted.

  ‘And you’re still a mess,’ said Faye, pointing at my frizz.

  Mum just licked her thumb and wiped the toothpaste off my shirt. ‘Keep being you, Lily.’ She gave me a wink, then said what she always says. ‘Girls, today is going to be a beautiful day.’

  ‘For some of us,’ said Faye, flapping her eyelashes at me.

  I snuck a look at the bottle of orange shampoo twinkling on the shelf behind them. It was beautiful – except for the big silver bubble rippling through it.

  That was odd. But at least it was full again.

  And anyway, I had other things on my mind. Like the black braid with the purple ribbon that was floating past the salon window.

  Violet!

  ‘Vi, wait up!’ I ran down the street after my best friend while trying to scrape my hair into a ponytail.

  Violet had her head buried in her phone. I don’t have a phone yet. I was supposed to get one when I turned twelve, but with business being so bad, Mum wanted to wait until Christmas. That was if things got better by then.

  I stumbled into my usual place next to Violet and she looked up with a dazed expression.

  ‘Oh hi, Lil,’ she smiled. Her lips were covered in shiny purple lip balm that matched her ribbon and the sweep of purple shimmer on her eyelids. This was a new look for Violet. My sister would have loved it, but it gave me a strange, unfamiliar feeling, like walking into a room where all the furniture’s been moved around.

  ‘Um, nice purple … makeup … stuff.’ I gave up on my ponytail. ‘You realise you just walked past the salon, right?’ Normally Violet waited for me, but she’d been forgetting to for the past few days. Violet can be dreamy like that. If she were a beauty product in our salon she’d be the lavender hand cream: soft and sweet, with the occasional air bubble.

  ‘Sorry, I was just re-watching my latest Berry Bomb lip balm video.’ Violet held up her phone. ‘Have you seen it yet?’

  I tried not to roll my eyes.

  Another makeup video.

  During the school holidays, Violet went to drama camp and came back with a friendship bracelet from Zoe Von Hammer and a bag full of makeup. That’s when Violet and Zoe started filming makeup videos together. I’d tried watching a couple, but I always got a stomach-ache halfway through, when Zoe would dab Champagne Shimmer eye shadow or Raspberry Ripple lip balm on Violet’s face and they’d fall over each other laughing.

  Makeup videos are the worst.
/>   ‘Here, try some. Zoe gave it to me.’ Violet held out the pot of lip balm and I reluctantly smeared some on. It tasted too sweet, like fake-grape bubblegum. And the consistency was way too thick. I’d never made lip balm, but I was pretty sure I could come up with something better than that. I wiped my mouth on my T-shirt when Violet wasn’t looking.

  ‘Soooo, do you know what today is?’ I asked as we rounded the corner towards school.

  ‘Um, remind me?’

  ‘Invention-competition team selection, nerd!’ I nudged Violet, but she just did a half-smile, and I wasn’t sure if it was for me or the phone screen.

  ‘This year, it’s going to be you and me again, I can feel it,’ I said.

  ‘All right, but can we not make that foot-odour spray again?’ Violet wrinkled her nose. ‘We should make something pretty this year, like a super-amazing lip balm. Trust me, people love lip balm. My video already has over two hundred views.’

  Now it was my turn to wrinkle my nose. Every year Mr Lee holds the school invention competition for the senior years, and first prize is a silver trophy. It’s always been my favourite event, and right then, my head was sparkling with invention ideas – none of which involved lip balm.

  Still, I pulled out my notebook and scribbled super-amazing lip balm??? under my other ideas, just to please Violet. Then I yanked a brown paper bag from my backpack. ‘My latest invention. Just for you.’

  ‘No way!’ Violet stopped in her tracks. ‘I just hit two hundred and fifty views.’

  I sighed and shoved the bag at her again. ‘Vi? I made you some lavender and chai-tea bath-bubble bars last night.’

  ‘Oh.’ It took a few seconds for Violet to look up from the screen. ‘You didn’t add tea leaves again, did you? Last time they clogged my tub.’

  ‘Um.’ I hesitated, thinking about the lumps of tea leaves wedged in the bubble bars. ‘I’m still working on that.’

  Violet checked her phone again.

  ‘But there are bubblegum balls inside them, too,’ I added quickly.

  ‘Really?’ Violet blinked, and finally put the phone in her pocket. ‘I love bubblegum.’

  I felt like saying I know, because I know everything about Violet. We’d been friends since year two, when Violet got superglue in her hair and her dad brought her into the salon for an emergency treatment. After that, she kept coming over. We even had a special spot under the salon desk where Violet would read our star signs and I’d steal gumballs from the customer lolly jar, then we’d stick the chewed-up wads under the desk when Faye yelled at us. After four years, the bottom of that desk looked like the surface of the moon.