Girls in Boys' Cars

by Felicity Castagna

  Asheeka’s mum pointed to me and then the couch and said, ‘You sit there,’ and I did what I was told and tried to pretend I was in another room and not watching Asheeka grow silent and smaller as she was lectured at in words I couldn’t understand.

  WAITING FOR BOYS’ CARS

  Asheeka wasn’t allowed out for at least a week after that. And between the last time I saw her and the next time I did, Christmas came and went without feeling like it had a lot of weight to it. Dad and I went to visit Nan at the retirement home. She was losing it even more now, gathering words randomly as if she were trying to build a puzzle from different sets. I crawled into bed with her, like I had most mornings until she moved to the home when I was twelve. She smelled like honey; her warm-water sack of a body didn’t move well these days but her hands did. She pulled at one of the tight curls on my head, the ones I had inherited from her, and she either told me I was beautiful or asked me to turn on the radio, I wasn’t sure which. I knew lots of bits of the languages she and my dad spoke together but they made less sense now that we hadn’t lived together in so long and she was mixing everything up into a language soup.

  Dad played with that radio she had in her room, the one she must have gotten in like 1972 or something. He flipped through the radio stations until ‘Feliz Navidad’ came on – same Christmas miracle he’d performed every year since forever. Then, as always, he performed his own karaoke version. He did it like this: like he could save the world if he tapped his feet and shook his hands wildly enough, if he winked and pointed a cheeky finger in the most seductively clichéd way possible. When he was too exhausted and sweaty he climbed into the bed too so that I was wedged in between him and Nan and we talked about the wallpaper in our old house and how Mum would go ballistic at Dad for letting me colour in the flowers on it.

  That evening, Mum and I ate frozen quiches and apple pies on the lounge and stared at the Christmas tree in the park from the 48th floor.

  Asheeka got let out of the house again a few days after that so she came over and helped me do the thing where you put on thick tights and roll your dress up a little so that it looked like you were wearing a longish shirt with pants: not the very short dress with no pantyhose that we would be wearing once we got into the lift and out of my mum’s sight. Asheeka helped me do the zip of the leopard-print dress up at the back. She said the same thing she always said when I tried it on. ‘Looks good; you need a fake tan, but.’

  Back in the living room Mum looked from me to Asheeka and back again. ‘Are those shirts or dresses?’

  ‘Shirts,’ Asheeka said right away. She smoothed down the fabric on her front, straightened her shoulders and did a little strut for my mum as though she were on a catwalk. She always did that with my mum, like my mum was one of the girls from school or something.

  Mum said, ‘Approved,’ and they high-fived and I was left standing there all awkward because me and my mum hadn’t high-fived since I was in year six.

  I reached into the fridge and took the punnet of blueberries out, ate the whole thing in two handfuls. Then I straightened the report card that I’d stuck in the middle of the fridge. At least I got a B for English and the rest wasn’t so bad. Mum hadn’t said anything though, she’d just drawn a thick red circle around my C for maths. I’m not sure what it was meant to mean. She had no comments on this or most other things.

  Asheeka was all nervous energy. It was contagious when she was like that. I opened up the cupboard and started to search for something else but she grabbed my arm and walked me out of the place.

  We took the lift down to the street where I could see that Arnold and his boys had already pulled up in front of the Riverside Theatres across the road. Jake was there too, he was wearing Nikes that flashed small red lights every time he leaned in a slightly different way against Arnold’s lowered Ford Falcon. They were all still in their basketball gear. Straight from training, probably hadn’t even bothered to shower. I guess we weren’t worth the effort. This was their Thursday night thing, after all. Basketball. Pick up Asheeka and me, then eat and hang at McDonald’s.

  No one was moving. They were all just standing there across the road scheming to do something later. That was it. That’s what all the boys do out here. Cars. Cars. Cars – driving around, leaning against them, looking good. Looking excellent. Showing off their muscles. I took a deep breath.

  ‘What?’ Asheeka replied as the air came back out of my mouth again, slow and heavy.

  ‘Jake,’ was all I said.

  ‘I thought you’d got over that by now.’

  ‘He’s a jerk.’

  ‘I know,’ she said and shrugged her shoulders like it’s a given that all men are jerks but there’s not much we can do about it. In truth every time I looked at Jake I wondered what was wrong with me. How he could be with me and then pretend I didn’t exist.

  Arnold started to honk the horn and Asheeka shouted, ‘Just wait, we’re coming.’ Then she turned to me, still looking pouty and said, ‘Boys like it when you make them wait.’ But I could tell she wasn’t so sure.

  Asheeka pretended to send an urgent message on her phone and I looked at my reflection in the window of one of the fancy bars underneath our building. Inside there were the kind of trendy people who had only just started showing up in this neighbourhood since the buildings like the one my mum and I lived in started to emerge from nowhere like shiny extraterrestrial beings landing between the old arcades. Inside, the bartender was shaking up some serious drinks with many coloured parts and the customers were wearing mullet cuts and tattoos in a way that was more arty than bogan. I tried to pull the bottom of my dress down a little so that it covered more of my thighs.

  Across the street Arnold had got out of the car and was leaning against it with both hands behind his head, looking like a disgruntled security guard who was about to kick us out of a club.

  Asheeka lit a cigarette and checked the menu outside that bar as if we might be going in. She wasn’t even smoking. It’s disgusting, everyone knows it, but sometimes it’s part of the look.

  Asheeka started asking me random life questions, How you going with, you know, everything? Got lots of friends besides me now. Good. You’re well liked now, you know. People looking at ya. Cute. I didn’t know how to do those things like making boys wait and it was making me too nervous to understand all her words even though I didn’t really want to get into that car.

  ‘Remember how you looked when you were, like, in year nine?’ Asheeka said, pushing a loose strand of my hair behind my ear and turning my body towards the glass.

  I don’t think she’d ever asked me why I looked that way when we met, or if I really ever wanted to look any different but I was different now, even though I couldn’t always feel it on the inside.

  Last month when the hairdresser made their once every two months visit to the centre, I got my hair cut short again and it looked good. It felt like me. The me I made the choice to be this time.

  GIRLS IN BOYS’ CARS

  Finally, we went across the road and got in that car. I think Asheeka knew she could only push it so far. Of course, I had to sit wedged between Tom and Jake, who had his hand shoved underneath my thigh the whole five-minute drive to North Parra McDonald’s because I accidentally sat on it when I got in the car and he decided not to remove it. I didn’t like it but I didn’t say anything. Arnold sped up and overtook every other car as though getting to McDonald’s was some kind of life or death emergency. The inside of the car was filled up with the loudness of Arnold recounting the game to Jake. All the boys smelled like sweat and Lynx sprayed over polyester. Asheeka and I didn’t say anything.

  The entire ride to McDonald’s was longer than it would have been if we’d walked. When we parked the car we all got out and hung around it. Arnold was wearing Adidas trackies and a 59Fifty cap even though it was dark. He wasn’t that much bigger than Asheeka, but he stood there like he was huge. Or maybe it was the car that made him huge – I saw that a lot with the
boys around here. It was like they got some kind of superpower from sucking in the exhaust fumes of over-modified cars. Only six months since he’d got this car and every time I saw it there was something new on it – white-rimmed hubcaps, new leather seat covers in a dark red. Not too bad looking. It was his everything and he didn’t like people hanging around inside it too much. I could only imagine how hard he must have scrubbed it after Asheeka’s brother threw all those eggs at it. I loved Ronny. Before Arnold and Askeeka hooked up he used to pick us up most days and drive us home from school via the McDonald’s drive-through so that he could buy us an ice-cream.

  I wished he still hung out with us more, Ronny, he was funny and sweet. Instead we had Arnold and Tom and Jake and we were leaning against Arnold’s car watching the Filo kids breakdancing in the parking lot. The boys didn’t say much. They just played it cool like they couldn’t care less if we were there or not. I watched Jake chatting up one of the girls from the year below me at school and I thought about telekinesis, you know, the ability to move objects like Carrie did in that Stephen King novel. I looked up at that giant M and put all my mind energy into trying to rip it off that pole and make it land on Jake’s head.

  Tom and Arnold whistled at two girls from school who got out of their car in short shorts and walked towards the McDonald’s entrance. I could see one of the girl’s bum cheeks hanging out of her shorts. She turned around and gave them the finger. They laughed and Arnold gave Tom a high five.

  Asheeka had her arms folded in front of her and was looking at Arnold like she was going to explode. ‘Excuse me?’ she said in that pissed-off tone that meant no one was going to be excused for their behaviour but Arnold and his mates ignored her. They were more obnoxious than usual. It probably had something to do with Ronny and the eggs. They went on winking and saying, ‘hey’ and ‘how ya going’ to all the girls who walked by. Asheeka’s mobile phone started ringing and when she answered it I could tell it was her mum, doing her usual check-in. I knew we could expect a call every half-hour or so while we were out.

  I was hungry. It was the kind of hungry where you know you’ll never be filled up. Asheeka ended the call abruptly and stuck the phone in her back pocket, where it started to ring again. She grabbed my hand and held it lightly in hers. She always thought I got easily distracted and wandered off too much; she liked to keep me close to her so that she knew that I was safe.

  Asheeka’s phone kept ringing. She kept on ignoring it. Arnold started talking to some girl who’d come over near him to watch the breakdancers. Asheeka flicked her hair and smiled at him but he just ignored her. There were kids taking up every bit of the parking lot, just hanging, talking to their friends, strutting their stuff. The security guy stood in the middle of the parking lot with his arms crossed. He was looking at everyone like he was going to start a fight but we all knew he wouldn’t.

  When Paul and Steve and Ellie from the neighbouring boys’ school came over to say hi, Asheeka got up all close to Paul. Everyone was talking about how Mr Spinks kicked two kids out of school the other day but I knew that Asheeka wasn’t paying attention to any of it. She’d snuggled up against Paul’s shoulder and she was looking defiantly at Arnold. Above, there was this big white moon behind the McDonald’s M and it was like every bit of everywhere was lit up. I was lost in the light when Tom put his arm around me and pressed himself against me from behind. Arnold came over and yanked Asheeka hard by the arm and dragged her over to his car where he threw her in the front passenger seat and slammed the door.

  A scream got stuck in my throat.

  No one said nothing.

  When I finally broke away from Tom, I just watched the place for a while. Tried to imagine myself out of the situation. Took my phone out of my pocket and pulled my dad’s number up onto the screen. Sometimes I hated this, the way that stuff just happened and everyone went silent but did nothing. Paul and Steve and Ellie kept on talking and Steve looked at me like he was going to eat me all up and then looked back to Jake and smiled and his smile ripped right through me. Arnold was leaning against the back of his car like he’d got his dog back in its big blue cage and I looked through the glass windows of the McDonald’s and towards some girl eating there alone and I wanted to be back there too, back to being alone, back to when no one noticed me – but instead I walked over to where Asheeka was and pressed my fingers to the windshield and there she was, arms crossed, looking like she was filled with a rage so big she could crack the windscreen with it. When I tapped the window with my nails she opened the door and whispered, ‘Get in.’

  Asheeka squished over to the driver’s seat and I noticed that Arnold’s keys were just sitting there in the ignition. I looked at her and said, ‘I’m sick of all these phonies,’ like Holden Caufield would say. No, really, I don’t think I said that at all. I don’t think I said anything, but I would have liked to. I would have liked to say it like that, like all the boys seem to do in their books. I don’t think either of us thought too hard about what was happening.

  Then Asheeka just turned those keys hanging there in the ignition and the car started to buzz beneath us and then Arnold started to pay attention. He was yelling from the outside when Asheeka pressed the button that made all the doors lock and I felt like all the weight went out of my body. She turned to me and grabbed my hand and squeezed it a little and said, ‘We could go anywhere.’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘Like movie stars,’ she said.

  ‘Us in our big fancy car. Just cruising without the boys.’

  And I willed that car to move with everything in my body and then Asheeka did what seemed even more impossible than me developing telekinesis. She put the car in reverse and tapped her foot down on the accelerator. She had one hand on the wheel and the other biting into my flesh with her shellacked nails. I looked up to where that McDonald’s M was the biggest moon in the sky and I almost couldn’t hear Arnold screaming.

  WE ARE MOVIE STARS

  This was the point in the story where Asheeka and I really did become movie stars. We headed out down Church Street, driving like we were floating, like all the boys did. Asheeka drove real slow and smooth, cruising past all the clubs and restaurants where the ordinary people, with much less glamorous lives than ours, were hanging out. Each of us with an arm out the window, we watched the movieland patches of light break across the bonnet as we moved through the night in the deliciousness of that car. We owned that space so hard and everyone knew it. They were all respecting us, you could tell. The ladies, all done up and sitting there in those restaurants, they all had the kind of half-smiles on their faces that said they just wished they could be driving with us, and even the boys walking down the street in their saggy pants nodded their heads under their backwards caps, like they knew we were as good as them. When I looked out my window and down towards the road I could see that the tyres of the car were slowly lifting off the asphalt, rising up and up, and I knew that we were on the verge of taking flight. The car went higher . . . higher . . . We took off into the moonlight, flying towards it. It sucked us up and broke over our flesh in creamy pieces. We were glowing. From up here I could see that down on earth things were made out of grid shapes. Infinite squares, rectangles within those squares. Sometimes squares within squares. But up here in the sky you’re free of all that. You’ve just got space and light. We prepared to land on the moon.

  No. Okay. Seriously now, things didn’t go like that, obviously, but I’d like to write it that way, because that was how it felt: like one of those old films where the main characters have a completely life-changing moment all of a sudden and drive off into the sunset with Beyoncé’s ‘Girls’ playing as the backing track, their hair gently flowing in the breeze and a smug smile on their cherry-glossed lips.

  One thing I have learned from all this is that before you steal a car you should make sure that you can drive it. It’s not that either of us couldn’t drive at all. Like I said, I’d almost got my Ps a couple of times but the men who
did the driving tests always made me nervous. Asheeka didn’t have her learner’s yet but her brother had been teaching her to drive his car around the neighbourhood so she was convinced she was much better than me even though I was clearly more qualified. Asheeka ran one red light and just missed hitting a pedestrian before we pulled into the parking lot of the leagues club a few blocks later.

  Boys drive so fast they crash and kill themselves. Girls splutter and choke. And choke we did at first, especially Asheeka. It was like this: she pulled up behind the leagues club without saying anything and turned off the engine. She looked suddenly so much smaller behind that huge steering wheel. And then it began, this slow-rolling sob that started as a kind of humming in her throat and then leapt out of her mouth as a scream that kept getting louder.

  I reached over and tried to touch her on the shoulder but she winced like I was hurting her so I put my hands in my lap and then I joined her, screaming, screaming the loudest I’ve ever screamed, screaming so hard that I imagined my voice passing through that windshield and out into the night where the universe could hear me.

  Eventually we both stopped. My voice gave out but I felt better, sitting there panting like I’d got rid of something and could move on. The whole car felt full-up with all that breath between us. I didn’t have the energy to talk so I just sat there thinking about the fact that my mum had never got a driver’s licence before she left my dad. In that year before our family fell apart, she got her licence and I knew, just knew that she was finally going to leave him, that she couldn’t take any more of my dad imagining people walking off the battlefield or sitting beneath our kitchen cupboards.