This is How We Change the Ending

by Vikki Wakefield

  ‘What do you mean?’ He’s so intense. It’s making me nervous.

  ‘Go ahead.’ He crosses one leg over his knee and leans back in his chair. ‘Anything.’

  He’s wearing retro Air Jordan 1 Off-White. Merrick would probably swap his entire deck for a pair of those.

  ‘Okay, what do you call those plastic things on the end of your shoelaces?’ I say.

  ‘An aglet or a Flugelbinder. Originally made from shrunken sheep intestine.’

  I’m sweating. I unzip my jacket and lay it across my legs. Another blast of rotten egg spreads through the classroom. It’s definitely coming from the hood. ‘Who invented the zipper?’

  ‘Whitcomb Judson.’

  ‘What’s that awful smell?’

  ‘Ammonium sulphide. Come on, McKee.’

  I shrug. ‘So you know more than me. You’re supposed to.’

  ‘Did you know the answers to the questions you asked?’

  he says.

  ‘Yeah. Of course.’

  ‘You played it safe.’ He leans forward. ‘So how do you expect to learn anything new?’

  ‘What’s your point? What happens if neither of us knows the answer?’

  ‘Poetry.’

  ‘Poetry?’

  ‘Poetry, art, human endeavour,’ he says. ‘The quest for the unknown. True science is about worlds already explored, but great poetry speaks to something deep inside you. It’s not just words. It lights a fire in your belly—it alters the way you see yourself and the way you see the world.’

  ‘I’m missing lunch.’

  Blink. Blink. ‘Ask me something I don’t know.’

  ‘How would I know what you don’t know?’

  Doesn’t he get it? He’s picked the wrong student. He’s like a caricature of every Robin Williams character ever, and he’s making me play a game I’m not interested in playing.

  ‘Can I go to lunch or what?’

  He waves his hand. ‘Yes. Go.’

  I gather my things and kick the chair under the desk. He should try to convert someone who actually cares, like Zadie or Will, not stack his fragile teacher ego-eggs in a busted basket like me.

  He’s doing the wet sandcastle thing again.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, and I mean it.

  He opens his lunchbox, slowly unwraps a sandwich, and takes a bite. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I like poetry,’ I offer. ‘But nothing you say will convince me to love it. I just don’t give a shit.’

  A torpedo of chewed crust exits his mouth. ‘Pah! You think I’m talking about poetry?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Look, you can end up an under-educated smart kid or an overeducated robot—that’s up to you. This institution wants to teach you to learn. But teachers aren’t textbooks. We’re here to teach you to think.’ He taps his head. ‘I have answers, thousands of them. But ask me something I don’t know—ask yourself something you don’t know—and we crack open the universe.’

  I have questions I’ve never asked anybody. Worries I’ve never shared. Thoughts that circle and collide and die screaming because they never make it outside my head. What Mim said is true: stuff like that, if you let it go, it’s a survival risk. You can’t let it go unless you feel safe.

  —

  Tash is picky. She says we’re aiming for the trifecta: low visibility for us at night, high exposure for the artwork during the day and peak curiosity about the message, which means a cluster of works in a concentrated area will be more effective than an opportunistic hit. And we need to complete this operation over a single night.

  We’ve been scouting the area around Youth for over an hour. So far Tash hasn’t opened her backpack once, and my heart rate has been over a hundred the whole time.

  Finally, she stops at a stobie pole near the corner shops. ‘Here.’ She snaps a pair of rubber gloves from her pocket and hands them to me. ‘Put these on.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  ‘It’s messy. You hold and I’ll spray.’ She opens the backpack containing the paint cans—four black and one red. ‘If we’re busted, grab the backpack, run as fast and as far as you can and ditch it somewhere. Then keep running. Right?’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘You have longer legs. You’ll cover more ground.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘The same, except I’ll set fire to the stencil.’

  I pull on the gloves. ‘I guess this makes me an accessory.’

  ‘Press hard and don’t let the stencil slip. My reputation is at stake.’ She shakes the spray can. ‘Are you scared?’

  The sound of ball bearings rattling inside the can is ridiculously loud.

  ‘Yeah,’ I confess. ‘Is that pathetic?’

  ‘No. It’s smart.’

  Tash lines up the stencil and starts spraying. For the tag, she tilts the smaller stencil on an angle, and adds a dash of red for the flame.

  She pulls the stencil away and steps back. ‘That is fucking beautiful.’

  I have to admit, it is.

  ‘Having fun yet?’ she asks, smiling.

  It feels good to fight back, even if what we’re doing is illegal. ‘I’m not sure. I’ll let you know when I do.’

  We hit nine more stobies along the main road, the rear walls of Bunnings and Officeworks, the fence outside Jack Berry Dog Park, four bus-stop shelters and the concrete retaining wall near the Macca’s drive-through. Nothing privately owned, but that was only because I managed to convince Tash that stencilling Agnes’s Corona would be a step too far. The Macca’s one was tricky—even at 2 am there’s hardly a break between customers—but it’s by far the most visible. Tash reckons it’ll be cleaned up by the afternoon, but by then hundreds, if not thousands, will have seen it.

  We walk for half an hour, through backstreets and alleys, Tash singing quietly. She has her phone on shuffle. One minute it’s R&B, the next it’s a soppy love song from the sixties, or it’s techno or house, and she skips tracks partway or messes with the volume until my nerves twang.

  ‘Can’t you just let one track play all the way through?’

  She starts a different song. ‘If I’m not feeling it, I skip it.’

  ‘So make a playlist of songs you do like.’

  She stops. ‘Why? How do you do it?’

  I pull out my phone to show her. ‘Top 100 of all time. This way I’m never disappointed.’

  She passes my phone back in disgust. ‘God, that’s like when people ask what would you eat if you could only choose one meal for the rest of your life, and you say pizza—and you mean it.’

  ‘What’s bad about pizza?’

  ‘Pizza isn’t bad. Eating it voluntarily for the rest of your life is. It’s a dumb question.’

  ‘It’s a hypothetical question. It’s not about food—it’s about having a standpoint.’ I put up both hands. ‘Are you pizza? Or are you ice cream?’

  ‘Neither,’ she says. ‘I eat whatever I want whenever I want.’

  It gets me thinking about Merrick and our similarly pointless discussions. He’d choose pizza, for sure. And it’s all fine for Tash to say she’d eat whatever she wants, but what if the question isn’t purely hypothetical at all? What if your choice is chips or…chips?

  Now we’re at the underpass. Tash decides it’s too high and too dangerous—we’d definitely be spotted if we tried to spray upside down from the top of the bridge. We take a break underneath, on the slopes, and Tash opens her bag. She shakes the cans. All but a single black one are empty.

  ‘What do we do with them now?’

  Tash frowns. ‘Dispose of them responsibly, of course,’ she says.

  I laugh. Apparently she’s serious, which makes me laugh harder. There’s a pain in the back of my thigh: I’m sitting on a sharp stone. I shift my weight, leaning towards her, and—she kisses me.

  The mad beat in my chest isn’t a nice feeling. It’s panic. I thought I’d give anything to be kissed by a girl, but this is all wrong—wro
ng time, wrong place, and I have a strong suspicion it’ll become another bad memory.

  Tash notices I’m not kissing her back. She pulls away. ‘Is it me?’ she says in a small voice.

  ‘No. I don’t want to get with anybody, really.’

  ‘Are you shy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gay?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘What then?’

  I shrug. ‘Just—busy.’

  ‘Busy?’ Her mouth goes slack. ‘Okay. Fine.’

  ‘I mean I’ve got too much stuff on my mind.’

  She folds her arms and pulls her knees to her chest. ‘It was just a kiss.’

  I stand up and dropkick an empty can. It ricochets off a pylon. ‘Yeah, that’s where it starts.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Then you want to come to my place and you hate where I live because it’s tiny and it stinks, and we can’t be alone because I share a room with my brothers. And you can’t handle the way my old man looks at you and he makes disgusting comments about us, so the only way we can be together is at Youth, which will probably be shut down anyway. We end up doing it one night in the middle of the school oval and it isn’t romantic at all, and the condom breaks and six weeks later you tell me you’re pregnant. It’s likely you’ll have twins and when they’re born one of them won’t be right in the head, and we’ll have to live in a Housing Trust unit—like we do already—and I’ll spend all our money on drinking and gambling and you’ll cry all the time and—’

  She holds up a hand. ‘Wow. You’ve got it all worked out, don’t you?’

  ‘Not me. Statistics.’

  ‘You’re right. We’re doomed. We have to break up.’

  ‘But we weren’t even—’

  ‘I’m kidding. It’s okay, I reckon you’d be shit at it anyway.’ She kicks my leg gently.

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Kissing.’

  ‘Probably.’

  She makes eye contact with a shrug and a sniff. ‘My house stinks too. It’s noisy. My stepbrother has his mates over all the time and I don’t feel safe.’

  ‘That sucks.’

  ‘Hey, it could be worse.’

  ‘Worse how?’

  ‘We know things could be different. What if we didn’t know any better? Like, imagine being okay with the way things are, you know? That would be so much worse.’

  ‘No, it really wouldn’t.’ Not knowing sounds better.

  Tash jumps up. ‘We shouldn’t hang around in one place for too long. Let’s go.’

  I want to go. I also want to stay. How is that possible? Sometimes I think I’m still so far from willingly approaching another human being, I might as well be my own postcode.

  Tash has already moved on. ‘Are you coming, or what?’

  ‘Wait.’ I point to the eye on the underpass. ‘You have to yawp. It’s tradition.’

  Tash thinks for a long time before she lets out a sound like a barking seal. Walt would be pleased.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Claim your future. Visualise your goal. Go towards it every chance you get.

  I’m lying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling and visualising the hell out of eating a meat-lovers’ pizza since the new neighbours had a Dominos delivery an hour ago.

  I’ve been waiting until everyone’s asleep to start the hero assignment. I thought this one would be fun and easy (I’m a master at imagining alternative realities and I’m all too aware of my own flaws), but try rewriting history with the distraction of Jake muttering in his dreams and the sound of sirens, plus stains on the ceiling that seem terrifyingly symbolic, shaped like mushroom clouds and burning buildings.

  I left my English workbook in my locker, so I pull out my current notebook. By the light of the torch on my phone, I flip to the last few blank pages.

  Maybe I won’t bother starting a new one. Thoughts and words only take you so far—like expecting to represent your country in the luge when you’ve only ever practised in the bathtub and you’ve never seen snow. (I have a sudden, painful urge to trade Cool Runnings quotes with Merrick.)

  I check the rubric I copied from the board. It doesn’t say we need to consider obstacles or setbacks, nor does it specify anything about not being allowed to inherit a large sum of money from a mysterious benefactor.

  At the top of the page I write: So You Want to Be a Hero.

  SCENE 1:

  By some miracle, I get to the laptop cart first.

  ‘Hey, thanks, McKee,’ Kobe says. ‘Give it up, wanker.’ He grabs one end of the case and pulls.

  I yank it back. ‘No.’

  ‘Last chance.’

  ‘No.’

  He lets go and dead-arms me.

  I hug the laptop to my chest and wait for Mr Reid to notice there’s an uprising. There’s enough noise that Reid could remain ignorant of the standoff until there’s blood.

  Kobe punches me again. ‘Give it up now or you’re fucked later, dude.’

  ‘It’s a laptop, dude.’

  He lowers his voice. ‘I’m coming for you.’

  I raise mine. ‘Look, I’m flattered, I really am. But I have to be truthful—I’m a less than experienced lover.’

  ‘As if.’ Kobe’s eyes dart around the room. ‘You’re weird, you know that?’

  ‘Yes. I know. I’m still not giving you the laptop.’

  ‘You don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Actually, I do. I have possession and you don’t. I can give it to you or I can wait for you to take it.’ I tuck the laptop under my arm. ‘I’ll wait.’

  He lunges left. I do a half-turn, forcing him to step past. He corrects and comes back the other way. I spin again. To everyone watching it must look we’re playing a game of invisible totem tennis.

  Kobe is running out of options, and so he commits social hara-kiri by stepping forward and giving my chest a vicious pinch.

  I turn to my now mostly silent classmates. ‘What is this strange ritual? Should I reciprocate?’

  ‘Cripple nipple?’ Will offers. ‘And probably not.’

  I rub my middle finger in a circle around the sore spot. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just not that into you.’

  (If Mr Reid was paying attention that would be his cue to tell me to be more original, but he’s not.)

  Zadie delivers the killer blow by offering her laptop to Kobe.

  Kobe is forced to turn it down, or look like a pre-schooler. He turns red and slinks off to his seat.

  On my way back to mine—victorious!—I whisper to Zadie, ‘I’ve seen our futures. None of this will mean anything in a few years. You and me are going places.’

  This scenario has several variables. It’d pay to slip Mr Reid a strong sedative and wear my ‘I killed it. Sir’ T-shirt, and if he ever asks us to share our scenes with the class I’ll be back to square one on the game board.

  SCENE 2:

  Rat and Pug are following Owen Kleinig after school again. This time I’m the last caboose, and I’m packing a flick-knife I snatched from the security guard’s tray of confiscated items. (This is feasible—he doesn’t pay much attention on the way out.) I leave a large enough gap to allow Rat and Pug plenty of time to catch up with Owen and, when I hear him shriek, I burst into the clearing brandishing the knife.

  ‘Stop!’

  Rat sneers. ‘Says who? You?’

  Pug presses Owen’s face closer to the rusty tip of a broken couch spring.

  ‘Here are your options,’ I tell them. ‘Public shaming, or private mutilation. You both roll up to school tomorrow and tell Miss DeVries all about your sustained bullying campaign, or I’ll let Owen Kleinig here engrave his initials on your bums while I hold you down.’

  ‘Okay,’ Owen says.

  Iholdup my free hand.‘Patience, Owen Kleinig. Letthem choose.’

  ‘Oooooo,’ he repeats. ‘Kaaaaay.’ He contorts his body and, so swiftly Pug doesn’t realise what’s happened, Owen has his arm twisted behind his back. ‘O. K. They�
�re my initials.’

  That took an unexpected turn. Mr Reid was right: I’ve got nothing original. Anyway, I think Owen Kleinig might just save himself, so I put a line through his scene. It would be funnier if Owen’s name was Fyodor Uglov.

  Jake gets out of bed and wanders down the hallway to the toilet. I turn off my torchlight. When Jake comes back, he drags the shared quilt and pillow from Otis and crawls underneath the bunk with them. Otis whimpers and pats the space Jake left behind.

  I hold my breath, ready for the screaming, but after a few minutes their breathing is synchronised again, even though they’re apart.

  SCENE 3:

  I’m perched on the roof of one of the abandoned warehouses on Smith Street, peering through a broken window slat (reminiscent of the warehouse heist scene from 2 Fast 2 Furious). Brock Tuwy and Shaun Fallon are presiding over their one-person sweatshop, Merrick, who’s stripping copper from a coil of cable taller than he is.

  ‘Faster,’ Tuwy says.

  Merrick holds out his hands. ‘I’m bleeding.’

  Fallon kicks him and he falls onto his side.

  He crawls to a dark corner on his shredded hands. ‘No more,’ he whimpers.

  Fallon laughs like an evil overlord and drags him by the collar, back to his station.

  I wait for my white-hot fury to subside. I must be patient; I have to out-think them. Everyone knows you can’t run a successful crime racket with two enforcers and zero brains.

  Silently, I remove four glass slats to allow myself entry, dropping them (also silently) over the edge of the roof. I crawl through and balance on a narrow steel beam like a cat.

  Merrick has spotted me. Tuwy and Fallon are too deep in conversation to notice. Merrick stares up at me with his tear-streaked, hopeful face; he points to the roof, and the gloomy interior of the warehouse lights up with an otherworldly glow. (It’s Merrick, using his superior mathematical ability to calculate the sine, cosine and tangent of the triangle that is a me, a vicious hook on a long chain, and Tuwy’s head.)

  This is going to take faith, athleticism and brute force—not Merrick’s equations. Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.

  I leap. I grasp the chain with both hands, slide down and grip the hook between my feet. The chain (conveniently attached to a metal conveyor thing) carries me with increasing momentum towards Tuwy and Fallon. The racket makes them look up, but it’s too late—at the last second, I strike out with both feet and the hook embeds itself in the fatty flesh of Tuwy’s chin.