by Cath Crowley
‘You are responsible,’ he says. ‘You run a bookstore.’
‘I help run a second-hand bookshop that doesn’t make very much money,’ I tell him, drawing an important distinction before I get out of the car.
The first person I see when I walk inside is Rachel. I can tell by the way she stares that I look better than I usually do. ‘I’m pleasing to the eye, aren’t I?’
‘Hard to tell,’ she says. ‘I’m blinded by your ego.’
It’s something Lola would say. The old Rachel would know that I secretly worry about the way I look and she would have made a reassuring comment. It’s more proof that things have gone off the rails between us. I don’t know how to be with her anymore.
Martin says he’s going to to look for George, and after he’s left I fill Rachel in on what he said in the car. ‘He told me he likes her.’
‘He told you or you badgered it out of him?’
‘He offered the information after some persuasive questioning.’
‘George seems very keen to avoid him. Stop trying to set them up.’
‘Are you planning on fighting with me all night?’
‘Only if you keep saying stupid things,’ she says, as we walk into the lounge room where Justin is standing. He’s in a suit, clean shaven. ‘You didn’t mention it was an eighteenth birthday,’ Rachel says, looking at the balloons. ‘Or that it would be formal.’
‘It’s not really formal,’ I say, as a girl in pink walks past.
‘I’m choking on taffeta and perfume, Henry.’ She points ahead of her. ‘Justin has revealed his face for the occasion.’
‘Lola didn’t mention it was this kind of party. But you look good in old jeans,’ I say, and she walks towards the kitchen to get some water.
Amy and Greg are in there, both of them looking like they peeled themselves off the pages of a magazine. He’s in a suit – a very cool suit, I have to admit. Her dress actually stops me breathing for a second.
Like Rachel, I’m not in formal wear. If news isn’t music-related, Lola frequently forgets to pass it on. I grab two waters and lead Rachel into the garden so we can sit away from all the formally attired people.
The Hollows are setting up on what looks like a rented stage. We sit in the front row and watch Lola intently so we don’t have to talk. After around five minutes she says into the mike, ‘Stop staring, start talking. You’re freaking me out.’
‘So, did I do anything else stupid last Friday night, apart from what I’ve already heard?’ I ask, trying to make some conversation.
‘Many, many things,’ Rachel answers.
‘Like?’
‘You sang,’ she says.
‘Troubling. What song?’
‘“I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston.’
‘More troubling. Anything worse than that?’
‘Is there anything worse than that?’ she asks.
‘I could have been wearing white leather during the rendition.’
‘No leather. Just some dramatic hand gestures.’ She does a small re-enactment that looks disturbingly accurate.
I can’t stop picking out the changes in her. I’ve been doing it all week. I used to know everything down to the scar she had on the back of her knee, a downwards-running river from where she scraped against a nail in Year 7. Now it feels like we’re getting to know each other for the first time. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Seeing each other again.’
‘I guess,’ she says.
‘Give me a break, Rachel. I’m trying here. Fill me in.’
‘Fill you in?’ she asks.
‘Boys. School. Friends. You’ve been avoiding questions all week.’
‘There’s nothing much to tell.’ She moves her chair back so some people can pass, and because I’m still staring at her and I haven’t dropped the subject, she says, ‘Okay. Well, there was that guy – Joel Winter.’
‘He’s your ex?’
‘Sort of. Yes. I don’t know. We left things undecided.’
‘Do you have a picture?’ I ask as The Hollows start playing.
She shakes her head.
‘Not on your phone?’
She gives in and takes out her phone. ‘He looks like Greg Smith,’ I say, and she puts the phone back into her pocket. ‘I didn’t mean to insult him. I meant he’s good-looking.’
‘Okay, you have to stop being pathetic,’ she says. ‘You have to stop thinking about Amy. Stop staring at her, stop wanting her. Just stop. And if you can’t actually do it, then you have to at least pretend that you’re forgetting her because she won’t come back if you’re chasing. That’s not Amy’s style.’
I am being pathetic, she’s right. But surely right now I’m allowed to be pathetic and my friends just have to deal with it and not point it out. ‘This is the time you tell me how great I am.’
‘You want me to lie?’
Rachel’s come back as an entirely different person. She’s rude. She’s been rude all week, and not just to me. She’s been rude to my dad, which is shitty. I decide to let her have it. ‘You’ve insulted my dad and ignored my mum. You don’t answer George’s questions and you’re rude to Martin.’
‘I’ve been driving him home,’ she points out.
‘Because my mum pays for your petrol and it means you can leave at five. You won’t let him speak in the car.’ I take a breath. ‘You haven’t written, you clearly don’t give a shit about me and now you come back and call me pathetic. And you’re complaining about cataloguing the Letter Library, telling me my dad’s having a midlife crisis – which he might well be – but that’s understandable given that he’s losing the bookshop. Meanwhile, I’ve lost Amy, George is missing Mum. What have you lost, Rachel? Apart from your sense of humour?’
She raises her middle finger at me.
‘Very grown up,’ I say, and she raises her other one.
‘If you don’t want to work at the bookshop, don’t. If you don’t want to be at the party, leave. You have a car.’
‘Thanks for reminding me, Henry,’ she says, then she tips the last of her water down the front of my jeans, and walks out.
I sit here shifting between feeling terrible about what I said to Rachel and feeling good because I stood up for myself and most of all feeling like I’ve wet myself because of Rachel’s parting move.
After about half an hour, Martin walks over and sits next to me. ‘Great party,’ he says, like what he’s really saying is, This is the worst place I have ever been in my whole life. Fuck you for bringing me here. Even when he’s being rude, Martin is polite.
‘You seemed to be saying in the car that I should make a move on George,’ he continues. ‘That, if I made a move on George, she would welcome that move.’
‘I thought you weren’t planning on making the move.’
‘I wasn’t. And then I changed my mind because we’d been talking to each other for an hour and I was making her laugh, and she was leaning close to me and it seemed like it’d be okay to kiss her.’
‘But I was wrong?’
‘You were wrong,’ he says. ‘I am definitely not attractive to her and worse, she’s in love with someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Someone who is attractive to her, presumably.’ He shakes his head a little, like he can’t make sense of the evening in any way. ‘‘You think you’re so hot,” she said. I don’t think I’m hot. I think I’m geeky. I think I’m a geeky guy who likes computers and wants to be a lawyer.’
While he’s talking a text comes in from George, letting me know that she’s going home with Rachel. I wave to Lola and Hiroko and tell Martin that I’ll drive him home.
‘It’s possible the party wasn’t a great idea,’ I say as we get to the front door and walk through onto the front lawn where Greg is standing with Amy.
‘They just keep turning up around me. He’s doing it deliberately.’
‘I like Rachel better than Amy,’ Martin says, as if that’s even relevant.
&
nbsp; ‘Rachel doesn’t let you speak in the car,’ I remind him.
‘She lets me choose the radio station. She lets me eat in the car. She stops if I need to buy something on the way home. She just doesn’t let me talk.’
Before I can reply, Greg calls over to me. ‘Couldn’t find the bathroom?’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Greg,’ Amy says, which gives me some small hope that she will realise, in time, that he can’t not be an idiot because that’s how he’s made.
‘I’m not the one who wet myself,’ he says.
I should be mature and walk away from Greg. But I’m not mature, as evidenced by my life. I pick up the garden hose that’s sitting by my feet. It’s got a pressure nozzle, which is convenient. I don’t hose Greg all over. I get him where Rachel got me. Exactly there. It gives me great satisfaction that I’ve probably ruined a very expensive suit.
While Greg’s yelling, Martin and I walk to the van, get in, and drive away.
The sense of satisfaction lasts till the first set of lights. And then I start thinking about Rachel.
Rachel
I’ve lost those octaves
What have I lost? What have I lost? Only everything, you complete moron. I’ve lost more than you, that’s for sure. I’ve lost Cal; I’ve lost my old mum, the old me. I’ve lost an entire ocean. That’s seventy-one per cent of the earth, that’s ninety-nine per cent of the biosphere. I’ve lost ninety-nine per cent of the biosphere, and you’ve lost Amy.
You’ve lost a girl who, the last time I checked, dotted her i’s with tiny little self-portraits. A girl who checks her reflection in the mirror every second minute of the day. A girl who watches you fall on the floor in front of her and doesn’t help you up.
I’m throwing myself through the crowd, my mind on the car, on my getaway, on maybe driving off and leaving this city behind, leaving the job and Henry and Rose, when George tugs the edge of my t-shirt and asks for a lift home.
I pretend not to notice that she’s crying. I tell her Henry’s in the backyard, and that she should look for him. I’m not going home. I don’t know where I’m going, exactly, but it’s not back to the bookstore or back to the warehouse.
She looks hurt and walks away past a group of shining girls. ‘What are you wearing?’ the tallest girl asks George as she passes, and then laughs. George looks different, sure. But a thousand times better than them, with her black dress and gold tights and that streak of blue shocking the darkness of her hair. She says something to them, but she’s outnumbered, so when they call her a freak, she starts crying. They laugh even more.
I recognise the tall girl. Cal and Tim pointed her out to me in their school yearbook once. ‘Stacy basically runs the place,’ Cal said. ‘If she doesn’t like you, no one likes you.’
‘Does she like you?’ I asked them, and Tim answered that she was, fortunately enough, unaware that they were alive.
George clearly isn’t in that fortunate position. Cal would hate me for not helping her. I have this impossible feeling that he’s actually here, watching. Who are you Rachel? How did you get here?
I walk the short distance and pull George from the girls. Her hand is small and warm. It holds me back like it needs to be held, so I don’t let it go. I don’t let go all the way across the lawn, past Amy and Greg, past people sitting on the fence. I hold it till we reach the car.
After she gets in, she texts Henry to let him know that she’s with me, and then she silently puts away the phone.
‘Tell me,’ I say. ‘If you want, tell me.’
‘I was talking to Martin,’ she says. ‘We were hiding in the top floor bathroom to get away from the crowd. God, Henry’s an idiot. He didn’t even check if it was formal. So, Martin’s there with me, his knees leaning against my knees, and he’s talking about funny things to make me laugh. We’re talking for ages, and it’s great. I don’t talk like that with anyone – at least not face-to-face. And then he leans in and kisses me.’ She puts her boots back on the dash, and pulls her knees in close, folding up.
‘It took me by surprise, so I pushed him back, and he hit his head and then it got weird. He said he thought that’s what I wanted and I was embarrassed so I told him he needs to get over himself because he thinks he’s hot, which he doesn’t think, and then he left before I could fix things and now he feels like an idiot when I’m the idiot.’
‘Why are you the idiot?’ I ask.
‘Because I did sort of want to kiss him, but at the same time I like someone else.’ She looks at me with mascara-smudged eyes. ‘But the “someone else” isn’t really an option. I mean, I want him to be an option, but I don’t know if he is.’
George is a lot like Henry when she starts talking about something. It’s not all that easy to follow her line of thought.
‘The guy that I like writes to me in the Letter Library,’ she explains. ‘He leaves – at least he was leaving – letters between pages 44 and 45 of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.’ She pulls her shirt open a little so I can see the sky-blue 44.
‘Do you know who he is?’ I ask, thinking that the guy she has on her skin could be anyone.
‘I think I do. I’m pretty sure. He hasn’t come to get the letters that I’ve left in the book for a while so I’ve stopped leaving them. I haven’t stop waiting for his, though.’
‘You’re certain that Martin didn’t write them?’ I ask, and she says she’s certain he didn’t.
It’s a shame. I like Martin and he seems to like George plus he’s here, which this letter writer isn’t.
‘I lie in bed thinking about him, you know?’ she asks, and I do know. I haven’t felt that way for a long time, but I know.
‘What would you do?’ she asks, and it occurs to me that George can’t have that many good friends if she’s asking me that question. ‘If it were you . . .’ she says.
I think back to that night when I was desperate for Henry. When Lola and I were laughing and breaking into the bookstore. In hindsight, it wasn’t my best idea.
‘I’d play it safe. I’d wait and see.’
Since she doesn’t know about the letter that I wrote to Henry, I just tell her that I loved someone once, who didn’t love me back. Then I met a boy called Joel, who did. I tell her how good it is when someone you like wants to spend time with you. Real time.
‘Did you sleep with Joel?’ she asks, and it feels as though George and I are alike. We’ve both had great brothers but no sisters to ask about things like this. George seems young tonight. She is young. She hovers on the edge of her seat, waiting to hear my answer.
‘I did,’ I say. ‘After a while and when I was sure.’
She asks me about it, so I tell her. And as I do, I almost feel how I did that first night that Joel and I were together in his room. His parents were away. We’d already decided. His hands moved over my skin in velvet jolts. The actual act was okay the first time, but it got better as we knew each other more. The parts that I really miss came after sex, when we’d lay together in our warmth, talking about the future. ‘It’s a big deal,’ I tell her. ‘People might tell you it’s not, but it is.’
Drunk boys in tuxedos cartwheel across the road in front of us. Girls, sheeny and strapless, applaud.
‘I like your dress better,’ I say to George, and start the car to go home.
My plan is to deliver George to the bookstore and keep driving. But when we arrive I look through the window and see Michael talking to Frederick and Frieda.
It reminds me of nights in Year 9 when they all helped Henry and me with English. The bookstore was always a hub of people who loved words and ideas and wanted to talk about them. Michael charged other students for tutoring, but he said I was like a daughter and refused to take my money.
Henry’s right. I don’t have a sense of humour anymore. I lost my friends in Sea Ridge because of it. They tried to hang in there with me but I pushed them away, the same way I pushed Joel.
‘Are you okay?’ George asks.
‘Not really
,’ I say, and follow her inside to talk to Michael.
I ask if I can speak to him alone for a minute.
‘Certainly, Rachel,’ he says, and we walk towards the Letter Library. He puts his hand on the books, the way a person might do to feel the heat from something. ‘There’s twenty years of history here,’ he says. ‘More, if you count the history of each author.’
I already knew all the things that Henry reminded me of earlier. I knew that Sophia and Michael had divorced. I knew they were selling the bookstore. But my skin is thick since Cal died. All the sadness of losing him is sealed in and no one else’s sadness seems to get through.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been rude this week,’ I say, and he accepts my apology without question.
‘I know it’s a difficult job. That’s why I chose you.’
His words weigh me down but I want them anyway. ‘I’ve finished the alphabetising,’ I tell him. ‘It took me all week.’
I try to strike the right tone – gentle, kind – but I’ve lost those octaves and my voice sounds harsh. ‘I still think it’ll take longer than six months, even with overtime.’
‘The job’s too big,’ he says, with all the octaves I’ve lost.
It is, but that’s not what I’m trying to tell him. ‘If you give me a key to the bookstore, I could work double time. I could catalogue when it’s quiet, that way I won’t be interrupted by customers.’
‘Thank you,’ he says, and runs his eyes over the spines of the books. ‘It’s a library of people, really,’ he explains, and gives me a spare key.
George and Michael go upstairs, and Frederick and Frieda go home. I stay and continue work on the Letter Library, trying to see it as a library of people. If it is, it’s people who Michael doesn’t know. It’s like Cal’s box in the car. It’s the leftover things that don’t add up to anything that matters.
I’ve promised, though. The Letter Library is the heart of the bookstore, and the bookstore is Michael’s life, so I’ll try. It’s Henry’s life too. I don’t know how he’s planning on living without it. I keep imagining the whole family returning to the shop the same way Mum and I drifted in and out of Cal’s room.