I’m so ashamed of myself. And Mum would be too. Ruby, we talked about this, she’d say. I couldn’t have been more honest with you. What happened?
How do I explain that it went from a kiss to sex in a matter of seconds?
My head is throbbing, and I have a dull ache behind my eyes. My stomach feels incapable of ingesting anything without bringing it back up.
I can’t even think about breakfast. I’m still getting wafts of Joey’s scent, just above the smell of my own breath. I couldn’t risk showering when I got in after two, because Mum knows I shower in the morning. Religiously in the morning.
‘Actually, I’m going to have a shower,’ I say. Mum looks at me a couple of seconds too long. She’s about to say something so I duck round the corner, slide the bathroom door shut and slot the latch into place.
I rest against the back of the door. I don’t want her to know. Wish I didn’t have to know. I can never go back or hide from my new knowledge.
I blast the shower – steaming hot water. As hot as I can stand it. I sink into Mum’s slippery plastic shower chair. Even beneath needles of stinging spray, I can’t wash away the feeling gnawing at me.
I press a hand against the shower wall, and lift my face into the hot, searing water. This pain is good, but the regret is deep and bitter and useless. I can never undo it. Joey is a part of my story now, like a scar in my flesh.
I run my hands across my slippery stomach as water cascades over me. My wet hair snakes into my lap in loose, sopping curls. Please, God, don’t let me be pregnant. Mum would break if I had a baby at seventeen.
I would break.
Should I go see Dr David? He’s known me since I was nine. What would I say? That I’m not sure whether I could have an STD or be pregnant? Would he tell Mum? Could I stand bumping into him in town and making small talk?
No. There’s no way I can tell him, and he’s the only doctor in town. I can’t even say the words to myself. STD, pregnancy. These are words too shameful, too reckless to speak. This is adult stuff.
What the hell is Joey doing this morning? Is he sleeping, playing soccer? Looking himself over in the mirror and ticking one more girl in the grade off his list?
I breathe deeply.
You’re okay. You’re strong. You’ll get through this.
There’s a knock at the door. ‘Rube?’
I rub water over my face frantically. Try to sound normal. ‘Yeah?’
‘I made you some eggs. They’re getting cold.’
She knows something’s wrong.
Mum never makes me breakfast. Now she’s clearly nuked me eggs. Last time that happened was when Alex and I broke up as friends.
My skin is pruney. I’ve been in here a suspiciously long time.
After I’ve wrung out my hair and dressed, there’s cold scrambled eggs waiting for me on the dining table, along with a glass of orange juice.
‘So tell me about last night,’ Mum says, wheeling attentively close.
‘Well,’ I move clumps of egg around the plate. I reach for a half truth. ‘Actually, I had a bit to drink last night.’
‘Ruby, you don’t drink,’ she says, screwing up her nose.
‘I know. I didn’t plan to . . .’
A look flashes across her face. ‘Did you feel pressured into it?’
‘No, not really.’ Then I think about the way the girls headed up the campaign to get me drunk. The clapping and the booing. It didn’t feel like it was done in the spirit of fun. Maybe they needed to punish me for breaking into their circle.
‘You told me to rebel, Mum,’ I say bitterly.
‘I meant go out with your friends, have some fun.’ She takes to studying me. ‘Did you throw up?’
‘No.’ I shovel a forkful of egg into my mouth, hoping I can keep it down. ‘I’m fine.’
‘So how did you get home?’ The dots are aligning in her head faster than I want them to. When I don’t answer, she goes to the window and looks out. ‘Jesus Christ, Ruby. You drove?’
I shrug. ‘I stayed back till I was sober.’
‘You have a zero alcohol limit on your licence – what’s left of it. You were prepared to lose that? Not to mention the risk – what if you’d been in an accident? Did you think about any of it?’
I’d waited until I felt sober, but of course I wasn’t.
So the truth is no.
The truth is that I so badly wanted to get out of there and back to the warm security of my bed.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, but Mum’s not done.
What can she do? Ground me? Please do.
‘You should have called a taxi. I’d have paid for it.’
‘It was too far.’
Willaware is more than half an hour away. Like everything else, because we live at the end of the furthest road into the forest. It used to feel like a hiding place from the big bad world, but now it feels like a trap.
‘Nothing’s too far or too much if you’re not safe.’
But money for my taxi would have kept her housebound or dependant on me for the next week. It’s not as though she can drive. Well, she could, if we could afford to get the Colorado modified. Which we can’t, even with NDIS funding.
‘Next time if you drink anything at all –’
‘There won’t be a next time.’
‘Well, I didn’t think there’d be a first time. I didn’t think this was something I had to spell out to you, Ruby. I trust you, and I kind of expect you to be responsible.’
‘I can’t be responsible all the time!’ I snap.
But it’s not Mum I’m angry with, it’s me. She has no idea how irresponsible I’ve been. Joey didn’t use a condom. I can just imagine how she’d flip if she knew that.
On Monday, I drive to school. Stuff the cost of the fuel – running into Lukas on a hot, jostling bus surrounded by snide whispers would be torture. I knew Lukas had a thing for me, a crush maybe . . . but love? No boy has ever told me he loves me. On the way to school I roll his words around in my mind.
I’m stuck in roadworks driving out of Cooper’s Creek, and while I wait for the girl holding the Stop sign to turn it to Slow, I wonder if I’ve spent all my energy focusing on the wrong guy.
If I’d given Lukas a green light, I wouldn’t be in this mess. If he still wants me and I say yes to him now, he’ll look after me, protect me even. I’ll have someone to hang out with at lunch. Maybe after school too.
Things could be great with Lukas . . . If I could just make myself love him back. Is there something wrong with me that I can’t? Chante would be livid if she knew he’d confessed his love for me, and I’d . . . rejected him? Is that what I did?
Driving was meant to help me avoid the torture, but when I roll in late to class and all eyes turn to me, it’s dished out anyway – the only seat left is in front of Lukas. He leans forward as I approach. Does he know yet? He’s not sitting near Joey like he normally does. Joey’s at a bench flanked by Kyle and Jack, but I can’t even look his way. I remember how I thought Millie was a coward for staying home.
Jack leans back behind Joey and says something to Kyle under his breath as I edge down in my seat. I reach into my bag and fumble for my pencil case to pretend I don’t notice.
When the buzzer goes, I try to scuttle unnoticed out the classroom door. But as I turn into the corridor, I bump into Kyle.
‘Sing it again, Ruby,’ he says. ‘Oh, so many nights . . . What was it again?’
He bursts out laughing, getting a fist pump from Jack as they make their way to a carefree lunch.
It punches a hole through my stomach. Hooking up with Joey Milano might have been the worst decision I made that night, but it wasn’t the only one. I try to remember how many people I serenaded Joey in front of. It was a decent crowd. Who else heard me?
I’m not strong enough to deal with this.
I head for the cafeteria, just to keep my feet moving, not because it’s where I want to be. I need a quiet, soulless place for lunch, not a melting p
ot of voices and bodies and laughter. Do I chance running into the big group on the soccer field? Will Millie be back today? Will she know what happened?
Will Alex hear about it?
She’ll probably laugh. Joey’s the reason we stopped being friends. She kissed him first. Even though I loved him first. I don’t blame her for wanting him, every second girl wants Joey Milano. I blame her for knowing how much I wanted him, and kissing him anyway, then keeping it from me, thinking we could somehow stay best friends.
But now that I’ve got what I wanted, I feel only disgust. My bubble has burst into a slop.
I don’t want to see anyone. Not a soul. I make a sharp turn away from the cafeteria, and head for the library, a low-slung, ugly building with no social profile. A place for the outcasts and the socially wounded. Protective custody for those who have to watch their backs. It’s safer to segregate yourself if you become a target.
I make it to the last class of the day, English. Only forty minutes left of this agony before I can flee. I haven’t had to deal with Lukas, and as far as I can tell Millie isn’t back at school yet.
Joey hasn’t said a word to me, thank god. I’ve managed to avoid looking for him, which has been a monumental task of willpower. When you’re accustomed to keeping track of someone in your peripheral vision, it’s hard to turn off your tracking sensor. But today I shudder at the thought of him. Wish he didn’t exist. Today, I’ve walked with blinkers firmly on, not wanting to see anyone, hear anything, or speak a word. Like those three wise monkeys. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
Alex cautiously slides into the empty seat beside me. Like she’s forgotten we don’t talk any more. Or maybe because she’s heard. Whatever the reason, I’m not interested. Today is definitely not the day.
She says nothing to me, which could be because I don’t give her the chance to, but whatever. I lift my long hair over the shoulder nearest her and thank my mother for the curls that allow a curtain between us. See no evil. I can feel her, though, hands awkward on the desk, fingers picking at the label on her pen. Eventually she starts taking notes about whatever is coming out of Mrs Salustio’s mouth about Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shakespearean comedies – it’s all meaningless to me.
We’re about halfway through the play, and I decide I’m done with Shakespeare. He’s never made any sense to me, and now that he does, I don’t want him to. I don’t want to hear his poor Helena say, ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.’ I want to shake her from her stupidity. Demetrius doesn’t want her. She’s not pretty enough. She’s not enough full stop. She should quit her pathetic, sickening attempts to make him love her. Love doesn’t look with the mind, Helena, it looks with the eyes, and if Demetrius is anything like any other boy that walks the planet, it’s not even love he’s interested in.
Alex’s book slices through the curtain of my hair so that the corner of her page is underneath my nose. She has sectioned off an edge of her page in purple pen.
Someone posted a clip of you at the party. Thought you should know.
She leaves the paper there. My body prickles with panic. A clip?
I feel the colour leave my face. What clip?
This is bad. Very fucking bad.
Kyle’s fist bump to Jack this morning comes to mind.
I want to jump out the second-storey window. Land on my feet like a vampire in Twilight and run far, far away. Never come back. But I can’t ever run, can I? No matter how many times I’ve wanted to get out of this tiny town, I’m stuck here. Because there’s Mum who wants to stay. There’s Nan who’s buried here, who we can never, ever leave. And there’s our little house in the forest that holds all of our music. It’s the only home I have left.
My breathing is rapid now, my hands clammy. Pins and needles creep up from my feet and sweat trickles down my back. I can’t breathe. Can’t get air in. I grip the underside of the desk with both hands. I think I might actually die, except I don’t. I keep panting, short shallow breaths, until the room comes back into focus.
Would Kyle film me? And what part of that night, exactly, did he film? Would he stoop that low? I don’t feel I know what any of the guys are capable of anymore.
So as much as I’d love to shove the book back at Alex and pretend I see no evil, she’s the only one extending me a lifeline. And the evil is there whether I choose to see it or not.
I scrawl haphazardly on the paper, the pen slippery in my grip.
A clip of?
And wait for the corner of her notebook to slide back under my hair.
Your song.
It’s the music. Only the music.
But then the horror of that hits me. They didn’t expose what happened to my body, just my soul – the fragile membrane that holds who I am, soft and trembly and golden. Now my voice, my song, my words have been betrayed. They did it because they can. Because music makes me vulnerable. And the more honest it is, the more vulnerable I am.
When the buzzer ends the day, I scramble to my car, lock the doors and scroll through the playlist on my phone, ignoring the crack that spreads jagged fingers across my screen. I need a song that will dig into the pain and knead it out. I’m too delicate for lyrics, so I find the Chopin piece Mum leans into on her bad days. But the ache gnaws through my stomach, burrowing beyond the reach of the notes.
I ignore the hulking shadow of the bus, the hiss of doors opening, the tramping of feet and the rising voices. Watch it roar away. Faces and bodies, taunts and flippant laughter, gum and body odour. All gone. I put my car into reverse and burn out of the carpark.
I should turn right to Cooper’s Creek, but I need a safe place to view the clip. So I turn left. A short time later, left again.
I’ve had bad days before. Not this bad, but enough to need a safe place. Normally, I walk the lonely, leaf-littered streets that lead to the local airstrip, but today I drive along the Old Ghost Road whose edges are abandoned to nature, where wheat grass and dry weeds spring waist high from the heat-cracked ground.
I wonder what Alex would think if she knew I still haunted Grandad’s hangar? She’d never guess I still go there. But there are so few places in the world that take me higher. The hangar is like a small tear in the fabric of time. The only place apart from home I can be myself. A worm hole in the universe where I can bleed out my music and nobody is there to judge me.
I don’t even care if I’m speeding. I know that’s selfish, especially after Mum’s lecture on responsibility. If I lose my licence we’ll be stuck in the house. But Mum doesn’t have to live my life. And blood is pounding through my veins so fast I couldn’t slow down if I tried.
At the entrance to the carpark, flat grassy plains are stamped by concrete slabs, cyclone fences and thick rolls of barbed wire. I stop just shy of the CCTV cameras that patrol the security fences. There are two small white planes parked inside the fence, their tyres chocked with yellow wedges.
I grab a hoodie from the backseat and throw it over my school uniform, even though it’s thirty-something degrees, jam a cap low over my face and make for the access door in the security fence – the one with the heavy combination punch lock beneath official warnings about trespassers being prosecuted, fines of $5000 and ID requirements.
I punch in the code: AZC444. The buttons squeak as I press them and the gate groans open.
I scuttle across the baked concrete for the shadow of the hangar, a rat running the length of a football field. Hoping no airport official sees me.
Once upon a time, expeditions to the airport felt a whole lot less criminal, but that was back when I was under Alex’s wing, without a stolen code. With the alibi of her grandad.
I push open the heavy metal door of the hangar. Grandad’s old blue Cessna is still parked in his hangar like a patient bird. I don’t think he can bring himself to sell it, even though he failed his medical last year when he got vertigo.
I didn’t believe Alex when she told me. The sky was Grandad’s playground. How could he never fl
y again? But vertigo means you’re grounded. No more licence.
He always promised he’d take me up in her one day. ‘Far above your earthly troubles,’ he’d said. And I wanted to. But the thought of flying made my stomach tremble. It still does.
Riding a horse is dangerous enough. Nan sold hers after what happened to Mum, but it’s a lot further to fall from the sky.
Part of me was almost relieved when Grandad couldn’t fly any more. It meant I’d never have to say no. But it also meant the end of the possibility. Which felt somehow worse.
Then Alex and I stopped talking, and I lost Grandad too.
The cool, damp smell of the concrete slab washes over me. Mum says smells are their own trademark, which is why she gets a real Christmas tree delivered every year. She says we won’t remember the extra things we could have bought. What we’ll remember is the smell. And if pine trees are Christmas, damp concrete slabs are Alex. It doesn’t sound enticing, but it is.
I inhale the scent now, deep into my lungs. There it is – the smell of innocence. Another lifetime. Before Anna’s party. Before Joey. Before I had to worry about STDs and pregnancy and this clip.
I pull myself up the metal stairs to the landing of Grandad’s office. He always said he may as well be my Grandad. And Alex and I rolled our eyes. Pretended it was the weirdest thing we’d ever heard, while secretly I glowed. That’s one of the reasons Alex’s life is a Plan A. She has a grandad, a father, an uncle and a cousin. I’ve never had any of those. No one would choose my life, but for a while I was allowed to choose hers.
I peel off my hoodie and sit against the balustrade of the top floor. Drag my phone out of my pocket, hands shaking. I want to turn the phone off, shut down my pathetic Insta account. But shutting it down won’t make any of this disappear. And the need to see the clip is fierce.
I open Insta. Millie’s post is the first to hit me. A photo of her at the beach, taken from a distance. She’s in a black one piece, striking a yoga pose in the shallows. One foot against her thigh, hands pressed together prayer-like.
Her post says: New beginnings. All the feels.
Ruby Tuesday Page 5