This is How We Change the Ending

by Vikki Wakefield

  ‘Oh. Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘For the record, that’s not ironic either.’

  ‘I know, but—come on. Tell me you don’t fantasise about your dream car.’

  ‘Whatever blows your hair back,’ I say.

  ‘My Evo will blow your hair off.’

  ‘It’s a dream car—it won’t blow anything any more than your dream girl will.’

  He thinks for a moment. ‘We should definitely fake the logbook.’

  ‘Sure, but then you’d be even more of a danger to society than you already are.’

  Merrick mutters to himself, then changes the subject. ‘Hey—when you marry Nance, you could adopt me,’ he says, as if the thought just occurred to him. Only it hasn’t, because that thought occurs to him frequently. ‘Do you think she’ll still be breastfeeding then?’

  I give him a dead arm. ‘Shut up. Anyway, she stopped.’

  ‘Bummer.’

  I add, ‘O has an unpredictable bite reflex.’

  ‘I’d still do her.’

  ‘Mate, you wouldn’t know what to do with it if it shouted instructions.’

  ‘Yeah, I would…’

  I grab one of his elephant ears and twist it until the cartilage pops. ‘Get your hand off it.’

  ‘Hey!’ He rubs his ear with one hand and fumbles for a cigarette with the other. ‘No wonder they stick out.’

  I don’t like him talking about Nance that way. Yeah, it’s weird having a stepmother only eight years older than me, but no weirder than him having a dad ancient enough to be his grandfather. Merrick senior is seventy and my old man’s half that age. Merrick’s almost seventeen, six months older than me (though he doesn’t act like it), and he thinks about sex all the time—about doing it, about watching others do it, about not having someone to do it with. Somehow he does this without mentioning that he’s never actually done it. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t. I have no privacy. I can’t even take a piss without someone knowing.

  ‘Did you know that organisms reproduced asexually for billions of years before sex came along?’ I say. ‘No mess, no fuss, no broken hearts—boom, clone yourself and get on with the important stuff.’

  ‘What’s more important than sex?’ He makes a suction-ing noise with his tongue.

  ‘Survival.’

  Merrick points to my groin. ‘You should get that looked at. You’re not normal.’

  I shake my head and walk on ahead.

  Merrick got no challengers at the pool table. I shot hoops in the Rage Cage for a while, but my court buddies Cooper and Deng were no-shows and the bugs were swarming so bad I had to pick flying ants out of my pants. I sat scribbling in my notebook until Macy, the director, kicked us out.

  I got a few words down. Not great ones, but that’s not really the point. Mostly they’re just random scenes, fragments of sentences or long letters to nobody. Ideas that probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me. They’re out of control, so they’re not poems; they have no music, so they’re not lyrics. I suppose they’re a kind of alternative reality, a possible reality more than a parallel universe. Like it could happen to me, instead of a different version of me. My notebooks are like my own private well and my words are like stones: I drop them in the well so I don’t have to carry them around. I need the well.

  It keeps me from self-destructing.

  Sometimes I wonder what might happen if I just threw stones instead.

  When we get back to the flats, Merrick waves and disappears.

  Nance is sitting on the verandah, sifting dirt through her toes. It’s just past midnight. She’s wearing a stained oversized T-shirt and her long brown hair is twisted on top of her head. She looks up. Her wide grey smiley eyes aren’t smiling. Her expression is so blank it’s scary.

  ‘I thought you were in bed, bub.’

  I don’t know why she calls me that. I love it. I hate it.

  ‘I was. I snuck out with Merrick. Went to Youth.’

  ‘I would too, if I could.’ She stands, dusting off her arse.

  I know what she means. Nobody should be as old as she is at twenty-four. Dad—Dec—has locked her out again because that’s what he does when she won’t let up. He puts her out like a cat. When he’s calmed down he’ll serenade her with his guitar until she falls for him again. And she does. Every time.

  A hacking cough from the balcony above makes us jump.

  ‘Hey, Margie,’ she calls, and waves. ‘It’s just Margie upstairs.’

  Nance names everybody according to where they live: Clancy next door, Margie upstairs, Kath on the corner, the Merricks across the way. She says it’s because she’s from the country, where nobody has street numbers or letterboxes.

  Margie flicks her ash over the railing and coughs in reply.

  Dec tolerates Margie being upstairs because she minds her own business. She has a beagle cross called Kelly; Kelly has a chain smoker’s cough too, and she’s so fat her belly almost touches the ground. I haven’t seen her downstairs in years, even though Nance said she could run around our yard because we hardly ever use it. The flats aren’t pet-friendly, but everyone keeps Margie’s secret because she loves that dog more than life. They sit at the top of the stairs every evening and Margie feeds Kelly people-food from a fork. (I worry about Kelly. I worry about the stains on our ceiling. I wonder where she shits and I’ve googled ‘do dogs need sunshine’.)

  ‘Dec in there?’

  Nance shakes her head. ‘He went out.’

  This is a switch-up. ‘With the twins locked in?’

  ‘He probably thought you were there.’ She smiles. ‘They’ve got each other. They only need me for daytime.’

  ‘I left the window up a crack. I’ll open up for you.’

  ‘He’ll kill you if he finds out you leave it open.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Wait.’ She grabs my hand. ‘Read to me. Something happy.’

  Nance is the only one I can read to, but I have to be careful what I pick. If I choose right, she gets this look like I’ve taken her far away and she likes it there. When she first came to live with us, I told her she could stay for a while but she’d have to leave when my real mum came home. She’s had plenty of opportunity to score back the point, but that’s not her style.

  ‘I started something new. It’s about Otis.’

  She nods. ‘What’s it called?’

  I breathe in and pull out my notebook. This one’s falling apart and almost full. It weighs twice as much as a new one; it always surprises me that ink can be so heavy.

  ‘For Otis.’ Another breath. I riffle the pages.

  ‘Read it,’ she says, so low I’m not sure I heard her right.

  ‘For Otis.’ I clear my throat.

  —They say

  a piece of you is missing—

  I stop. The last thing I want to do is make Nance cry.

  ‘What comes next?’

  ‘That’s it. I’ve only got the beginning.’

  Nance is quiet for a long time. She can’t tell I lied. Her eyes are shining, or maybe they’re just reflecting the sensor light.

  ‘Let me know how it ends,’ she says.

  TWO

  Our English teacher, Mr Reid, had this epic meltdown last year, when I was in Year Ten. It was Friday afternoon and nobody was paying attention—we were chucking paper and kicking chairs over as usual—when he stood up suddenly, white as, like he’d had a stroke. Smacked his palm on his desk so hard it sounded like a whipcrack. Everything stopped.

  I memorised a few of his lines. Wish I could remember more. It reminded me of Matt Damon’s monologue in Good Will Hunting, about the NSA and the bombing of the innocents and the clubbing of baby seals. Basically he said everything that’s wrong with the world can be found in suburban-sized proportions right here in Bairstal: hate, racism, crime, dirty politics, segregation, terrorism, drugs, neglect, false religion, the wrong kinds of love, and more hate. A microcosm, he called us. You’re victims, he said. You thi
nk you’re tough, but you’re not. You’re lost, and you’re surrendering the only real weapon you have. Sure, you’re pissed off that someone stole your iPhone or nicked your bike, but while you’re fighting each other something else is being stolen and you don’t even know it. You want to be angry, be fucking angry about that.

  I half-stood when he finished. I have trouble believing anything that isn’t scientific fact, but it sounded true.

  Kobe Slater laughed first. Everyone else followed. One minute Mr Reid was upright, yelling at Slater to shut up, telling me to sit down; the next he collapsed like a sandcastle when the tide comes in—only the tide was us and our perfect disdain for anyone who drives an Audi but thinks he has the right to tell us our lives are shit.

  Mr Reid never fully recovered.

  ‘Angry about what?’ I asked him when the class was empty.

  ‘School’s over, McKee,’ he said. ‘Go home.’

  ‘I want to know. What was stolen?’

  His eyes were dry and sore like he’d forgotten to blink. ‘Your future, Nate.’

  This year I have Mr Reid again. His walls are back up. After his meltdown, someone complained that he swore and he was made to apologise to the class. Some days I watch him watching us. I wonder if it would make any difference if I told him the reason I stood up last year was because I was about to start a slow clap, only I realised in time I was the only one who’d clap.

  I’m a worrier. Nance says it’s weird considering I grew up with Dec for a dad, his mantra being ‘no worries’. Dec only wears Rusty or Billabong low-rise board shorts and singlets with droopy armpits, anything that shows off his pecs and that groin v-thing he’s got going on. His head’s shaved as close as you can get without a straight razor, and he’s built like a cage fighter. Tatts, scars—he’s got a story for all of them, and he rarely wears shoes except when he has to, like in the pub or the TAB. Our flat has an old longboard stuck in the dirt out front. Nobody would steal that board for two reasons: it’s got a hole, as if something big took a bite out of it, and everyone’s scared of Dec. Never mind that surfers surf and Dec doesn’t. Never mind that we’re forty kays from the nearest beach—no waves, just low tides and crabs and stinky black mud and old blokes in waders. No worries.

  Yeah, I’m a worrier. I worry about pretty much everything, all the time. I worry about the big stuff: climate change, animal cruelty, the state of politics, boat people, whose finger is on the button, bigness, nothingness, all of it. Some nights I lie awake and think about the universe before it was a universe. Science says there are more than a hundred billion galaxies out there, and several hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. But how do we know? Who counted? I get why people believe in God; how the fuck did we get here? What if just one of those chemical reactions never happened and we never existed, or what if cats evolved opposable thumbs instead of us? Some days I feel guilty for worrying about the small stuff: schoolwork, no phone credit, no cereal, the holes in my shoes, the stupid sensor light next door that’s been left on for two years straight and beams right into our bedroom window, tricking me into thinking the sun is up when it’s the middle of the night. My circadian rhythms are fucked.

  I read a lot. Nothing but non-fiction, essays, scientific articles about evolution and adaptation, and hardcore news. Not poetry or fiction—there’s so much bullshit in the world I only want to know what’s true. Everything I learn I keep for later, because you can’t know too much in Bairstal. Tough is the golden ticket. If you get tough breaks, tough going, tough luck, tough pills to swallow, well, tough shit. You have to accept tough love, talk tough, toughen up, tough it out, be a tough nut to crack, and when the going gets tough, sure, get going, but don’t think you can leave.

  I’ve decided sixteen is a nothing age. Too young to behave like an adult, too old to act like a kid. Doesn’t help that my puberty took a timeout—my voice hasn’t fully broken, my facial hair is fluff, and my bones grew too fast for my skin, so I look like I’ve spent a month on a medieval torture rack. Oh, and acne.

  I’m treading water for now. If I can float long enough, maybe I’ll wash up somewhere else. Nance says I have Dec’s genes and one day they’ll kick in. That’s what I’m afraid of—that, and being numb. Sometimes I’ll read long articles about child trafficking or the war in Syria to prove I still care.

  I worry that it’s too much hard work to be a good person. If I was truly good it should be easy.

  It’s Wednesday afternoon. We have about ten minutes left of English, and so far Mr Reid hasn’t asked us to do much work apart from reading. He’s kicking back on his chair, eyes closed, and every now and then he emits a deep ahem, which I’m beginning to suspect is a form of echolocation. Most of the class remember last year’s rant, and we’re not quite as feral as we used to be. It’s not like he earned our respect or anything; perhaps it’s just that unpredictability is a teacher’s best defence.

  ‘McKee, wait after class.’

  My head snaps up so fast my neck cracks. I can’t tell if I’ve done something right or wrong. It’s better if I’ve done something wrong.

  I pack my things away slowly.

  I dread these after-class conversations. I’m not sure if it’s all English teachers or just Mr Reid, but he inhabits another world, where every conversation has to be meaningful and anything we say must be tested to find hidden depth. If I told him there was a room in our house with a locked door and every day we walk past that door pretending it doesn’t exist, he’d tug on his beard and say, Hmm, tell me more about this door, thinking it’s a metaphor for something deep and unresolved in my family. He wouldn’t believe me even if I said it’s a literal room, with a literal door, and we’re literally not allowed to go in there, and he’d spend fifteen minutes telling me off for saying ‘literally’ because he reckons it’s a crutch word, like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’.

  It’s exhausting. Literally.

  Mr Reid has forgotten I’m there. I clear my throat.

  ‘You’re not enjoying the war poets?’ he says eventually.

  It sounds like a trick question. ‘They’re all right.’

  He has two handwritten signs stuck to the wall behind his desk, like giant Post-it reminders.

  Revise.

  Revise!

  REVISE!

  and

  Dream—Goal—Plan—Action—Reality

  They might as well tell me to fly.

  ‘What can I do to engage you with the work, Mr McKee?’

  I shove my hands in my pockets. ‘Nothing.’

  He thumbs through sheets of paper. ‘Then how can I convince you that copying and pasting swathes of text does not constitute writing an original essay?’ He finds the piece he’s looking for and holds it up as if it’s a soiled tissue.

  Last week’s essay. The one time I cheated, when I nearly missed the deadline and I’d been stuck with Otis all night, screaming, screaming because Jake had gastro and Nance had to keep them apart and Dec was off somewhere like he always is.

  ‘It won’t happen again.’

  He hands me the paper. ‘You have referred to Wilfred Owen as Wilbur, three times, and you call Robert Graves’ muses “tarts”.’

  Since they’re probably the parts I plagiarised, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Beats me why we have to study dead poets and pointless wars anyway—it’s not like the human race has learned anything from either.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ll fix it.’

  I just want to get out of here. If I miss home group I’ll have to go to student services to sign out.

  He stares at me. Watery blue eyes, full-face beard with leftovers from lunch, a comb-over like something dead on the side of a road. Apparently he’s a Morris dancer in his spare time: dudes dancing around to folk music, ringing bells and waving handkerchiefs.

  ‘We’ll be working on something different over the next few weeks. I’d hate to see you so far behind that you fail to take advantage of this learning opportunity.’

 
‘Different how?’

  ‘Let’s just say you’ll need a clear head for a reckoning with your fatal flaw—s.’

  ‘Plural?’

  ‘Plural.’

  Finally, he blinks. Pretty sure he has two sets of eyelids.

  ‘A thousand words by next Tuesday. And a bonus thousand-word piece on Bulwer-Lytton’s line “the pen is mightier than the sword” as penance. Any form you like, but cite your references.’

  I’m already wondering if he’ll notice if I upcycle an essay I turned in last year.

  ‘Oh, and McKee? Make it original.’

  Shit. There’s nothing original to be said about that line.

  I sprint to home group, but take my time leaving the senior block. I prefer to wait for the corridor to clear out, that way I won’t accidentally bump into somebody and start something. Eyes down, slow swagger. It’s hard work pretending you don’t care about anything when all you really want to do is scream in people’s faces and push them down the stairs. Rowley Park High is a multicultural war zone and where the cultures cross turf, you get blood. There are metal detectors on the way in, but once you leave you’re on your own. At this school, the pen is mightier than the sword. These days you can’t get a knife past the school entrance, but that doesn’t mean it’s any safer. I’d run out of fingers if I had to count the number of students who’ve been stabbed with a Bic.

  Merrick’s waiting by the canteen window.

  He won’t walk home alone. It’s not that he needs protection (like I could offer any) but he says he needs a witness. I get by if I keep my head down and my mouth shut, but Merrick’s becoming a liability—too many wins at the pool table and he thinks freedom of speech is the prize, like a meat tray or something. He hardly does any schoolwork and I’m his only friend. I think he just follows me here out of habit.