[Read] Hot Desk Extracts: Jacinta Dietrich - The Ringmaster

As part of The Wheeler Centre's Hot Desk Fellowship program, Jacinta Dietrich continued developing her middle-grade fantasy adventure novel, The Ringmaster.

The Ringmaster follows Amelia, an autistic girl who discovers a mysterious circus and an unsolved missing person’s case. This manuscript was awarded a 2024 Creative Australia grant, a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk fellowship and a Katharine Susannah Prichard fellowship.

Jacinta hopes the characters and story will appeal to readers of Jeremy Lachlan, Kate Foster, Amelia Mellor and Jessica Townsend. This is an excerpt from the opening chapter. 

One - Bug Freak

Amelia felt the ball of paper hit her back before hearing it fall to the floor. She looked around the class but no one seemed to be paying her or the note any attention. They all had their eyes on their maths books or on Mr Clarke at the front of the class. Before anyone else got the chance, Amelia bent down and quickly scooped the ball into her hand. She carefully unfolded the paper in her lap, peeling back the layers softly and discreetly. Inside was a drawing – it appeared to be human-butterfly hybrid, with murky pine-coloured wings, a scrawny human body of the same dirty green and oversized antennae too large for the small body just below. The artist had also missed the little clubs at the end of a butterfly’s antennae, giving the illustration a moth’s anatomy instead – rookie mistake. On closer inspection, Amelia realised the image shared her unruly tangled hair and the freckles that dotted her nose and cheeks. Her heart plummeted to her stomach. Around the edge of the page were the same two words repeated over and over – bug freak bug freak bug freak bug freak bug freak bug freak bug freak.

Amelia looked around the room. Mae caught her eye. Her smirk, once so familiar, now had a touch of evil to it. No – more than a touch. She was pure evil. How Amelia had ever been her friend, let alone her best friend, baffled her.

Also bug freak? Come on! Amelia couldn’t count how many times had she explained to Mae that butterflies weren’t bugs but were actually insects. A common misconception she was regularly pulling people up on. All bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs. The difference was all in the legs, the wings and how many parts in the body. Amelia had definitely taught Mae all of this. The mistake (was it a mistake or was Mae riling her up on purpose?) grated on her.

Amelia knew many people appreciated the beauty of a butterfly and enjoyed seeing one flit through their garden, but Amelia’s interest went far deeper. She wanted to know everything there was to know about them, from what the different species look like and how to spot them right down to how did they pee and where did they sleep. The rush of joy she felt when she discovered something new about another type of butterfly or taught someone something they didn’t know was like no other.

Thinking, talking and learning about butterflies filled her body with a buzzing excitement and a warm glow. When she learnt how to read, she devoured any and all material related to butterflies. She had read the entire school library catalogue by seven years old (which admittedly wasn’t very large) and every birthday requested the latest lepidoptery compendium. She would spend her birthday evenings flicking through the pages, studying any new information and comparing it to the previous edition to identify any updates she needed to catalogue away in her mind.

Her mum loved to tell stories about how when Amelia was little, she would sit in the backyard for hours waiting to see a Skipper or a Nymph or a Swallowtail, how she would lay in the grass for hours wearing her brightest clothes staying as still as she could hoping one would land on her. It was the most content Amelia ever felt, watching butterflies do their thing. Every few school holidays Amelia and her family would visit Gariwerd National Park and Amelia would spend the whole time looking to the skies, in the tree branches, along the veins of the forest.

She had told Mae all this when she had asked why Amelia was so obsessed. Amelia had tried to describe it, explaining what amazing creatures they were and how they made her brain explode with joy in the best possible way. She had taught Mae about the local butterflies that lived in Gariwerd National Park and the Dreamtime stories Aunty Ness had shared with her.

That had been in the summer school holidays. By the time the school year started, they were no longer friends and Mae seemed set on making Amelia’s life miserable.

Amelia scrunched the paper back into a ball and let it drop into her open bag beside her. She felt the muscles in her back tighten and then relax, like a rubber band extending and releasing. She took a deep breath and focused back on Mr Clarke and the front of the classroom. He was still waffling on about fractions or decimal points or percentages or whatever else and hadn’t noticed a thing.

Only he could make maths even more excruciating, Amelia thought. She bent her head down closer to her page, which should have been filled with notes and equations but was instead filled with random shapes and swirls and continued sketching in the few white spaces left. As she drew, another ball of paper hit her – this time in the head. She took a deep breath and turned around again. This time Mae stared straight at her, waiting for a reaction. Not only was Mae glaring, but so were her new clique, Sarah and Izzy. Amelia hadn’t figured out how she had been replaced by Sarah and Izzy – Mae had barely even looked at them through primary school – but they were now doing everything in their power to keep her happy. They even wore the same hair scrunchies and had matching charm bracelets – the very same ones Mae had offered to Amelia.

It had taken her all of three seconds to decide that she couldn’t wear it – the chain felt like a shackle around her wrist, the charms poked and prodded every time she tried to rest her hand and the weight as they moved made her feel lopsided and unbalanced. Mae had said she understood, that it really didn’t matter, that they didn’t need a charm bracelet to tie them together, but maybe it was just one of those things she had said but didn’t mean. Amelia was now discovering there had been lots of those.