You Were Made For Me

by Jenna Guillaume

  Thanks for being here.

  Always.

  Right back atcha.

  But wait. We should probably mention that big talk we had, right?

  Oh . . . I wasn’t sure how much you wanted to . . .?

  We promised to tell the whole truth, right?

  Well, except the parts you censored.

  Yeah, but those needed censoring. This part . . . doesn’t. I’m not ashamed.

  I’m so proud of you.

  We’d been painting mostly in silence for about ten minutes when Miss Lui announced she was going to make a cup of coffee.

  ‘You girls want anything?’ she called as she walked away. We both shook our heads.

  The silence continued for another moment, then Libby and I both spoke at once.

  ‘I’m s–’

  ‘Are you –’

  Libby smiled at me. ‘I’ll go, okay?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I sighed. ‘Not exactly . . . but I’m feeling a little better now.’ I put down my brush and turned to her. ‘Libby, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I haven’t been there . . . I know I’ve been really absorbed in my own shit.’

  She nodded. ‘You have. But I mean, so have I.’ She kept painting. ‘I tried to talk to you about it all a bunch of times, but I don’t know . . . I just couldn’t. And it wasn’t only because of you. It’s on me, too.’ She looked me in the eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can we hug now?’ I said.

  She grinned and held out her arms and I leaned right into them.

  That was the part that broke the ice. Then Miss Lui came back and we all chatted about minor things, like this YouTuber Libby and Miss Lui were both obsessed with, and the merits of oat milk over almond milk. It was exactly what I needed.

  But what came next, I needed even more.

  As we walked home, Libby and I, we talked and talked. And she came to my place and we talked and talked some more.

  I spoke about everything that had gone on over the weekend – with Guy, with Declan, with Theo . . . and with Michael.

  There was hurt in her eyes. ‘I’m not surprised,’ she said. ‘I suppose I should tell you what happened with us.’

  ‘Wait, let me make you some tea first,’ I said.

  Once we both had big cups of peppermint tea, Libby and I settled on my bed, Max on his back between us.

  ‘Things hadn’t been right with Michael and I for . . . a while,’ Libby said. She pressed her lips together. ‘He kept . . . he kept saying he wanted to get more physical. And it made me really uncomfortable.’

  She took a sip of her tea, considering her words before she went on.

  ‘I never told you this – but Michael and I, we never really even kissed.’

  ‘What?’

  Libby cringed. ‘Yeah. It’s – every time you mentioned how you felt like such a freak because you’d never been kissed, I wanted to die a little bit inside. Because, well, if that made you a freak – what did it make me?’

  ‘Libby I – I’m so sorry.’

  She shrugged. ‘You didn’t really know, and that’s not your fault. Obviously, I didn’t like to talk about it. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. ’Cos the thing is, I could have kissed Michael, if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t want to. At all.’

  She looked at me then, like she was trying to read my face. I waited for her to continue.

  ‘I really, really care about him. I love him, even. But whenever he tried to get physical, it just made me recoil.’ She sighed. ‘It was okay when we were younger. I mean, it’s not like he was really trying much anyway. I told him I didn’t want to kiss him, and he respected that. But in the last year, he kept bringing it up. And then he started to say that he wanted to do more. And he said he felt like I wasn’t attracted to him. And he didn’t know why we were even together if I didn’t want to kiss him.’

  ‘Oh, Libby,’ I said. I placed a hand on her arm and she looked at me with tears in her eyes.

  ‘So I told him – I said to him, fine. Let’s just break up then. And so we did.’

  I could feel tears in my own eyes as hers spilled down her face. I leaned over and enveloped her in a hug. It was awkward, because Max was between us, but we made it work.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this?’ I said quietly.

  She pulled away. ‘I didn’t really know how. I mean – at first, I was scared. And then you were so caught up with Guy. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said it felt like you’d abandoned me.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said for the thousandth time that day.

  ‘I know. I get it. Mostly. But it made it really hard. And besides, I was trying to process it all myself. Figure out what it meant. I did a lot of googling.’ She put her cup on the floor and turned to me, her shoulders squared. ‘Here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘I think . . . I’m . . . asexual.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay.’

  ‘And maybe aromantic, too . . . I’m still kind of working through it all.’ She picked up her cup again, tracing her finger around the edge of it. ‘The romance stuff is honestly the most confusing to me. I mean, like I said before, I’m pretty sure I love Michael, but what does that even mean? What kind of love is it? I don’t know.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘I do know I don’t feel sexual desire. And it turns out that’s actually a totally normal thing. A lot of people experience it. I didn’t even realise, but then I found all these YouTube videos and – wow, it made me feel so much better. But it’s been . . . a process. It still is.’

  I nodded. ‘Can you show me? Some of the videos, I mean? I’d like to understand more.’

  She smiled and let out a deep breath. ‘Okay. You . . . you don’t think I’m a total weirdo?’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ I said, smiling back at her. ‘But not because of this. Not remotely.’

  She laughed and pulled out her phone. We spent the rest of the afternoon, heads together, watching videos and talking.

  It felt like I was home again.

  Okay. Now I’m crying.

  Sorry. I hope that was okay? Everything I said?

  Yes. Yes.

  Katie . . . I’m glad we’re friends.

  Me too. More than anything.

  <3

  <3

  Twenty-Two

  School was easier to face now that Libby and I were friends again . . . but that didn’t make it easy.

  Declan Bell Jones ignored my existence, which just piled more weight onto the stacks and stacks of regret I was already filled with. For kissing him . . . and for even liking him in the first place. He’d really just been using me, I’d realised. He’d enjoyed the attention, but he’d never really cared about me. Just look at the way he’d thrown me under the bus when things got sticky. What a gutless disappointment he’d turned out to be. I couldn’t believe I’d wasted so much time and energy on him.

  I’d spent so long obsessed with perfection, with this twisted idea of what I wanted and needed in my life. I’d got it all wrong. I’d messed everything up. And now I’d have to live with it.

  Mikayla Fitzsimmons and her friends, meanwhile, had all come down with terrible coughs. You know, the kind that caused them to splutter ‘ahem*slut*ahem’ whenever I was within two metres of them. I’d managed to block all the messages I’d been getting, although some still slipped through, and I was determinedly ignoring them in real life as well. But I can’t say it didn’t get to me.

  Libby was cooking up all kinds of ideas for revenge, but I pointed out that making out with Mikayla’s boyfriend was maybe the worst thing I could’ve done to her already.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘Now she’s stuck with a cheater like him who can’t even kiss. I almost feel sorry for her.’

  Libby snorted. ‘I can safely say I will never feel sorry for her.’

  I laughed, and tried to push away my worry that Mikayla would strike again. It just added to my ever-present niggling guilt about Guy.

  I hadn’t spoken to him – or Theo – sin
ce the night of the party.

  I hadn’t even seen Guy. I’d thought about going around to talk to him a thousand times, but whenever I imagined the possible conversations we might have, they always just ended in more hurt. So I kept my distance. He was better off without me, anyway.

  I’d glimpsed Theo in his yard a couple of times, and at school occasionally. He acknowledged my presence with a nod, but that was it. It was the longest we hadn’t spoken to each other. Longer even than the Great Monopoly Incident of 2013.

  It made my heart ache more than just about anything else that had happened.

  I threw myself into getting the mural done again. Ms Walker had, miraculously, given me permission to do it during classes and to stay back after school so I could finish it by Friday – the day of the formal, and when the unveiling of the murals was supposed to happen. It was stressing me out, but it was also a very welcome distraction.

  I’d changed the design, just to make things harder for myself. But I also weirdly felt more passionate about it. After Miss Lui’s big talk on how unimportant inspiration was, I’d actually found some again. I just hoped it would turn out the way I wanted. Or, at least as close to what I wanted as was physically possible. My finished works never looked quite as good as they did when they were just in my head. But I had learned that done was better than perfect.

  It’s not like perfection actually exists, anyway.

  Twenty-Three

  ‘I don’t know about this,’ I said, looking in the mirror and adjusting the straps of my dress. It was a vintage one from the ’90s I’d picked out on a shopping trip with Theo months and months ago. Remembering his smile when he’d convinced me to buy it sent a pain through my chest, which was already feeling tight. ‘It feels wrong to be going with . . . everything that’s happened.’

  Libby came up next to me and fixed the corsage she’d bought me to my wrist. She was wearing a black suit and looked absolutely killer. ‘We’ve been through this already. You can’t hide out in your room for the rest of your life. You’d regret not going.’

  It was the regret thing that had convinced me in the end. That, and the idea of doing something like this with Libby. We’d agreed to go together, with the rest of our friends, just like we’d originally planned. It had been a totally weird, wild and rough couple of months, but it felt important to celebrate our friendship tonight.

  Libby and I stood side by side, looking at ourselves in the mirror hung on the back of my wardrobe door. ‘Let’s make this formal our bitch,’ she said.

  We were laughing as we made our way into the lounge room. The smile disappeared from my face when, amid my mum’s gushing and my dad snapping photos, Theo stood up from the lounge, running a hand through his hair and sending me a small – but dimpled – smile.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. He looked me up and down and nodded. ‘You look . . . nice.’

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out of it. I didn’t know what to make of his presence.

  ‘And what about me?’ Libby said.

  He laughed. ‘You look good, too.’

  ‘Let’s get some photos of the three of you together,’ Dad was saying, and Mum pulled Theo over and arranged us in front of the plant in the corner because that was the ‘nicest backdrop’, apparently.

  ‘I can’t believe how much you’ve all grown,’ Mum said, swatting at a tear in her eye.

  ‘Muuum, don’t start,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, your parents are here,’ Dad said to Libby, looking out the window. Her parents were driving us to the function centre where the formal was being held. Libby and my parents headed outside to meet them, and I started following after them, but Theo grabbed my hand.

  ‘Actually, can I talk to you for a sec?’

  ‘Oh, um, sure,’ I said, trying to ignore the way my heart had started thudding.

  ‘I really liked the mural,’ he said softly.

  I felt myself blushing. ‘Thank you.’

  The murals had been ‘unveiled’ today at the school assembly, which was held in the quad.

  I’d finished mine literally that morning, and while there was still a lot of work I would have liked to do on it, the main gist of it was there and that was all that mattered.

  All that mattered. That’s what the mural was. The people that mattered to me.

  I’d kept the idea of showcasing the different aspects of school life. And Guy was still in there. But just once now. The other scenes were now peopled with Libby, and Amina, and Nat, and Jordan, and Alex . . . and Theo.

  It was far from perfect. But it was there. I was there.

  Theo reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box.

  ‘Listen . . . I know it’s been a weird week. Slash month. Slash year. And I’m not gonna lie and say I’m not still mad at you. I mean, I still don’t really get it all and – well, I think we’ve got a lot of stuff we need to talk about.’ I bowed my head and he gently placed a hand underneath my chin and raised it again. ‘But tonight’s not the time for that. Tonight . . . you should just have fun. You deserve it. You do,’ he said when I scrunched up my nose.

  He grabbed my hand and placed the box he’d been holding into it. ‘I bought these a while back. After you got the dress. I just thought they’d go with it, you know . . . but, uh, you don’t have to wear them if you don’t like them.’ He cleared his throat.

  Inside the box was a pair of earrings, sparkly and blue, perfectly suited to the colour of my dress.

  ‘They’re lovely,’ I said, looking up at Theo. Our eyes locked for a moment before I blinked and turned away. I slipped the earrings on, looking in the mirror hanging above the lounge, telling myself the awkwardness in the air was due to the unresolved issues we had to talk about, and not other unresolved feelings that I wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge.

  Before Theo and I could say anything else, Libby stuck her head in the door, with Melissa right behind her.

  ‘Look at you!’ Melissa cried, holding up her phone to snap some photos. ‘I had to see you girls all glammed up.’

  ‘Are you coming or what?’ Libby said to me, talking over her sister and earning a pointed side-eye, followed by an affectionate chuck under the chin.

  ‘Let’s get this show on the road,’ I said.

  By the way, don’t think I didn’t notice the way Theo said ‘have fun’ to you and the way he touched your shoulder and the way you looked at him and –

  As for the formal itself, where do I even begin . . .?

  The décor was tacky as hell. The formal committee had had zero budget so they’d used crepe paper to fashion –

  No one cares about the décor.

  People totally care about the décor.

  You’re stalling. Get to the good stuff.

  Good stuff? Like when we were dancing with Nat and Jordan and then we managed to drag Amina onto the dance floor and all five of us did that silly routine we made up at Jordan’s sleepover in Year 8?

  That was pretty good.

  Or when Mikayla Fitzsimmons and her friends were pointing at us and laughing but we were having so much fun didn’t even care?

  That was even better.

  Or when I was heading to the toilet and Mikayla Fitzsimmons tried to trip me over, but I managed to maintain my balance because, well, miracles do happen, I guess?

  Yes. That was the best. At least until what happened next.

  Ah, you mean the part where –

  Yes! That part! Tell it properly.

  Oh, NOW you want me to go into detail.

  Mikayla Fitzsimmons had tried tripping me over, like I said. But I didn’t fall. Instead, I turned to her and said, ‘What is your problem?’

  She laughed a hollow laugh. ‘Isn’t it obvious? You are.’

  She reached behind her to where Declan was standing and pulled him closer, grabbing his hands and placing them around her waist. She stuck out her chin and raised an eyebrow, daring me to react. Declan, meanwhile, apparently found a spot on the ceiling absolutely fascinating
, because he was staring up at it like it was all he cared about in the world.

  I sighed. ‘Listen, Mikayla. I’m sorry about what happened at the party. I really am. It was a mistake.’ I looked at Declan, who had now found something on the floor to distract himself with. ‘A big one. But you’ve been treating me like crap for years. And I don’t deserve it. Neither do my friends.’ I looked at Libby, who had made her way to my side. She smiled and looped her hand in mine.

  ‘Whatever. Lezzos.’

  I opened my mouth to speak but Libby squeezed my hand and started talking instead. ‘Oh, Mikayla. Mikayla, Mikayla, Mikayla. The fact that you think that’s an insult just shows how sad you are. You know what’s even sadder, though? This is it for you. This is your peak. Your life doesn’t get better than this. But for us? It’s only the beginning.’

  ‘And we’re off to a pretty good start,’ I said.

  Together, we turned and walked away.

  Mikayla called something after us, but it didn’t even matter.

  She had no power over us anymore.

  Mic drop! Boom!

  I love that part.

  Of course, it helps that she’s not coming back to school next year. We don’t have to worry about her at all.

  But we wouldn’t anyway. Because we’ve GROWN. Unlike her. Or Declan Bell Jones, the douche.

  Oh my god, Katie. That IS character growth.

  Wait, sorry, I mean Kate.

  It’s okay. You can call me Katie.

  What’s this? More growth? You better watch it, soon you’ll be hitting the ceiling.

  Alright, that’s enough.

  Okay, but it’s really not, because we haven’t even got to the highlight of the evening yet.

  I thought that was us telling Mikayla Fitzsimmons that she was sad and pathetic.

  Come on, Katie. You’re the desperate romantic.

  Ohhh, right. Yeah, I did love the part where you told me you were going to speak to Michael and talk through everything. Because you didn’t want to leave things so messy. How did that go, by the way?

  We’re talking. We both got hurt. It’s still messy. But . . . it’s less messy than it was. Anyway, THAT’S NOT EVEN THE POINT.