Love-shy

by Lili Wilkinson

  I did freestyle for ten minutes, then backstroke, then breaststroke and finished with four laps of butterfly, which was my favourite because it requires total perfection in order to enable synchronous over-water recovery – and I enjoyed perfecting things.

  When I arrived back upstairs at the apartment, my eyes stinging from chlorine, Dad was chopping fruit. On weekends we went out for breakfast, but on weekdays we actually got out knives and bowls and did it ourselves. I spooned yoghurt onto my muesli and then scooped strawberries, banana and blueberries from Dad’s fruit salad.

  ‘How was work last night?’ I asked.

  ‘Meh,’ said Dad. ‘First Tuesday of the month is always party time over at the office.’

  ‘Tax stuff?’ I asked.

  He nodded and poured us each a steaming mug of freshly brewed coffee. Dad used to be a plumber, but now he owned a plumbing business and had a whole bunch of staff to get their hands dirty for him. He spent all of his time in his office, doing paperwork. It was weird, because Dad didn’t look at all like a plumber. He looked like the kind of man who had a skincare regime and wore Calvin Klein underwear. He was that kind of man. He went to the gym regularly. He did Pilates. He was interested in interior design. And he happened to be a plumber. Who earned a lot of money.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, watching him shake open the newspaper.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Did you ever have any trouble talking to girls at school?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Were you shy around girls?’

  Dad took a sip of his coffee. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I was shyer around boys. I always found it very easy to talk to girls. Most of my friends in high school were girls.’

  I realised that asking my gay father about liking girls was probably not going to be useful.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  I shrugged. ‘Just for an article I’m writing.’

  Dad regarded me across the breakfast bar. ‘Penny,’ he said, his carefully groomed eyebrows raised, ‘have you spoken to your mother lately?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said cheerfully.

  ‘You really should call her.’

  ‘I will,’ I told him. ‘I’ll call her on the weekend.’

  I took my coffee into my room. I didn’t want to talk about Mum.

  I opened my laptop and brought up loveshyforum.com, checking for new posts.

  And I found him.

  PEZZimist If you force a computer to shut down, will your browser reload when you switch it back on? Can someone figure out who was the last person to log on? I think I might have been busted today at school.

  The post had no replies. I clicked on the username and it took me to a profile page. PEZZimist, 16, had posted eleven times over the past six months. Short posts, usually asking simple questions about how to approach a girl. There was one intriguing question about what constituted stalking, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted more.

  I typed ‘pezzimist’ into Google. Jackpot.

  PEZZimist.blogspot.com.

  My loveshy boy had a blog! I clicked through, my hands trembling.

  18:13

  Today I was nearly discovered. My heart is still pounding thinking about it. I was in the library at lunchtime. It’s safe in there, the books are like a fortress. When the bell went, the teacher disappeared and I was on my own. I didn’t feel like going to class, so I went to check the loveshy forum. But I wasn’t alone. Someone appeared – a girl, I think, I didn’t stay to find out. What if she saw what I was doing? I turned off the computer in a panic and ran. Except I had a library book that I hadn’t checked out, and it set off the alarm. Betrayed by my own fortress. It felt like a mutiny. I just hope the girl didn’t see me. What if she thinks I stole a library book and tells someone? I don’t want to get into trouble again. I can’t.

  I had all the information I needed. He was a sixteen-year-old boy, who went to my school, and tended to overwrite. He was almost certainly in the same year as me.

  I dug around in my filing cabinet until I found last year’s yearbook. A systematic approach was required. Scientific. Methodical. Last year I’d written an article comparing the school’s demographics to those from the last census, so I knew there were about a hundred and fifty students in Year Ten, and the school’s gender breakdown was actually very much in line with the Australian Bureau of Statistics: 50.2 per cent women to 49.8 per cent men. Which meant that there were only seventy-five boys in my year level. That didn’t seem like so many. I’d just talk to every single one until I found PEZZimist. It’d be an interesting social experiment. I’d even document the process, so that once I did find him, I’d have an excellent basis for comparison to the other boys at school.

  I downloaded a Dictaphone app onto my phone, selected a crisp, fresh notebook, and laid them out carefully on my desk along with the yearbook, two HB pencils, pink, yellow and green highlighters and a blue ballpoint pen. Then I had a shower and got ready for school. Today would be an excellent day.

  ‘Penny?’ Dad stopped me as I came out of my room. He was dressed in a typically immaculate grey suit, pink and white-striped shirt and a pink and olive tie. He was probably the best-dressed plumber in the universe. I could see my face in his shoes, they were so shiny. ‘Do you mind if Josh comes over tonight?’

  Dad and Josh had been dating for six months, and it seemed pretty serious. Josh was okay, although I kind of missed it just being me and Dad.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Can we get that Malaysian banquet again?’

  What I did like about Josh was that he gave us the numbers to be able to order from the banquet menu.

  ‘Sure,’ said Dad. ‘And you can pick the movie.’

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I pick dinner. You guys can pick the movie.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  I leaned forward on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Don’t fall down any toilets today and spoil that fancy tie!’

  Dad cuffed me lightly over the back of the head as I headed out the door. ‘Enough of your cheek.’

  Weirdly, the not-a-knife-wielding-mugger girl from last night was opening her door at exactly the same time. She blushed and smiled at me, and I smiled back, safe in the knowledge that she wasn’t going to cut out my spleen.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. Her voice was barely a whisper, tiny and high-pitched, like the rest of her. Her hair was dead-straight and perfect. She wore a white shirt, pleated skirt and knee-high socks. It looked like she shopped in the children’s section of department stores. The Hello Kitty backpack once again sat perfectly positioned between her shoulderblades.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Have you just moved in?’

  The girl nodded. ‘A few weeks ago.’

  ‘It’s nice here,’ I told her. ‘The pool downstairs is good.’

  She smiled and ducked her head. She was like a teeny mouse, which made me feel like an elephant. I wanted to make her laugh or do something unexpected to prove she was a real person and not just an exquisitely detailed miniature robot.

  ‘I’m Penny,’ I said.

  The girl frowned a little, still smiling. ‘I know,’ she said, and it sounded like an apology. ‘Everyone knows who you are. And we were in the same Maths class last year.’

  She went to my school? I swear I’d never seen this girl before. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Of course you were, sorry.’

  Her smile widened into a proper grin. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, looking up at me. ‘My name’s Rin.’

  I smiled back. ‘It’s very nice to meet you, Rin,’ I said, and made an apologetic face. ‘Again.’

  We walked to the lift together, and Rin told me about her twin brothers, who’d moved out of home a few months ago to be closer to their university. She told me how huge and empty her old house felt without them, and how glad she was when her parents decided to move somewhere smaller in the city.

  ‘It takes longer to get to school,’ she said. ‘But I love being in the city all the time.’

  ‘Do you go out muc
h?’

  Rin shrugged delicately. ‘My parents don’t like me going out socially,’ she said. ‘But most of the time I just tell them I’m going to the library and then meet my friends and see a movie or go shopping. And sometimes my brothers come into town and take me out. My parents don’t mind if I’m with them.’

  I was hoping to spend the train trip to school reading more about loveshyness. I’d found some articles online about the condition, and was keen to have a full psychological profile of the kind of boy I was seeking. But although Rin was tiny and soft-voiced, she wasn’t silent. She chattered happily all the way to school, telling me about her brothers, her parents, her friends, how much she’d love to have a dog. As she talked, I touched the screen of my iPhone through my bag. I was itching to pull it out and start reading, but I didn’t want to be rude. Anyway, Rin might be a useful tool when it came to tackling the Asian boys I didn’t know very well.

  The thing that was really blowing my mind was that boys even cared enough about girls to be loveshy. I mean, after yesterday’s assessment of the boys in my class, it was hard to believe that any of them even thought about girls. I knew that girls spent a lot of time thinking about boys, because that’s all they ever talk about. Not me, obviously. I didn’t really care about boys. I mean, I was pretty sure I wasn’t a lesbian. But I had better things to do than fritter away my high-school years mooning over some dumb boy who was only interested in sport and cars and beer. Smart boys were marginally better – and usually made better competition than girls because they were less likely to cry (last month’s Debating final notwithstanding). Girls cried a lot. And went on and on about hair and makeup and clothes, which were all things I did not care about. I swam three mornings a week and one lunchtime, so I kept my hair short (so I wasn’t always having to dry it) and I didn’t wear makeup. I chose clothes that were comfortable. I didn’t own any high heels. I’d never painted my fingernails. I just didn’t see the point. So I suppose I wasn’t crazy about girls or boys – or really teenagers in general. Either way, I had absolutely no desire to touch any of them. It just seemed so boring.

  And it wasn’t like boys got any better with age. My second-favourite journalist, Katharine Graham, was in charge of the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. She had a totally useless husband, who was her boss, and cheated on her and then went crazy and killed himself. And it wasn’t until he was out of the picture that she could really pursue her career without everyone assuming that all her success was due to him being in charge because she was a woman and therefore incapable of being talented.

  Anyway, I didn’t have any horrible cheating men dragging me down, so I was ready to go. I was going to start with what I knew. The boys in my homeroom, my classes, my clubs and lunchtime activities. From there I’d spread out into other lunchtime clubs and societies, and then see what gaps were left. Every time I spoke to a boy, I’d record the conversation and later transcribe it. I’d take notes and pay special attention to whether each boy made eye contact, and whether he had any overt signs of shyness, such as sweating, fiddling or nailbiting. Luckily I’d had heaps of practice interviewing people for the newspaper, and I knew the four most important rules of interviewing:

  1. Let the interview flow naturally, like a conversation.

  2. Listen to the subject’s answers.

  3. Leave a long pause after each answer, in case something interesting slips out as they try to fill the awkward silence.

  4. Be ruthless. Revisit questions that haven’t been answered properly.

  Once the interview had been completed, I would classify each boy into one of three groups and highlight their picture in my yearbook: Non-shy (pink highlighter), Possibly Loveshy (yellow highlighter), Likely Loveshy (green highlighter). This would give me an instant visual code, so I could tell at a glance how many boys I had spoken to, the ratios of shyness to non-shyness, and how far I had to go before I could safely predict which boy might be PEZZimist.

  It was an excellent plan, neat and methodical. It couldn’t fail.

  3

  I SPENT THE MORNING PREPARING MYSELF to start my interviews. I was going to speak to the first boy at recess, but after Media Studies, Ms Tidy kept me back to discuss an article she’d read in the newspaper that morning about the way young people were using technology to experiment with language. I agreed that it was a very interesting article, and informed Ms Tidy that it had originally been published in the Guardian, and that our paper had clearly just bought it. I then told her my opinions on the financing and structure of newspapers, and how the notion of a ‘free’ press had been totally compromised by the fact that all our news outlets were owned by the same handful of media conglomerates. Ms Tidy seemed interested at first, but after a while she started checking at her watch and peering over my shoulder at the classroom door.

  Anyway, by the time I’d finished there, it was practically time for third period. I had to give a speech about my favourite animal in Italian, so I didn’t have time to interview anyone until lunch, when I also had band rehearsal.

  Of course, now that I’d properly met Rin, I saw her everywhere. We didn’t have any classes together, but I passed her in the corridors and the canteen, and she was in the orchestra as well, in the string section. I’d just never noticed her before. The Asian kids all hung out together and didn’t really associate with the non-Asians. They mostly had the same hair and eye colour, and similar-shaped faces. I supposed that made me seem horribly racist, but everyone else was such a riot of different hair and eyes and freckles and stuff that it was easier to tell them apart.

  As I sat down in the wind section and opened the snaps on my oboe case, Rin gave me a little wave from behind her viola. I waved back and assembled my oboe. Now was my chance. It was time to put my plan into action. Subject Number One.

  I turned to Jamal, the other oboe player, careful to make eye contact.

  JAMAL ZAYD

  Eye contact: Yes.

  Overt signs of shyness: No.

  ME: Hi, Jamal.

  JAMAL: Hey. Wait, why are you pointing your phone at me?

  ME: It’s a Dictaphone app. So. What do you think of this Tchaikovsky piece?

  JAMAL: Um. It’s okay. A bit tricky with the key-changes. Why are you pointing that at me?

  ME: Do you have a girlfriend?

  (SUBJECT SHOWS SIGNS OF DISCOMFORT)

  JAMAL: Um. Why do you ask?

  ME: Just making conversation. You seem like a nice guy.

  JAMAL: Oh, Ms Darling is here. We’d better pay attention.

  ME: So I’m taking that as a no. Why? Do you struggle talking to girls?

  JAMAL: She’s banging her baton on her stand. I think she wants us to start.

  ME: Have you ever kissed a girl, Jamal?

  JAMAL: Look, do you think we could talk about this later? We’re supposed to be tuning.

  ME: Am I making you uncomfortable? Does talking to me make you feel anxious?

  JAMAL: Well, now that you mention it, you’re being a bit—

  MS DARLING: When you’re quite done there, Jamal.

  JAMAL: Sorry, Ms Darling.

  Verdict: Not loveshy.

  In the breaks between pieces I also interviewed the bassoonist, and two of the male clarinettists. No joy there. The bassoonist assumed I was doing an article for the paper, and droned on and on about how the bassoon was such an overlooked instrument, yet essential to the overall tone and timbre of an orchestra. The two clarinettists had nothing of interest to say, but they didn’t seem uncomfortable talking to me, and judging by the obscene gestures they were always making with their clarinets, they were definitely not shy about expressing their alleged familiarity with the female anatomy. As everyone packed up their instruments, I pulled the yearbook out of my bag and drew big crosses in pink highlighter over the faces of Jamal, the bassoonist and the two clarinettists. Not even one yellow ‘maybe’. Still, each face I highlighted in pink was one face closer to PEZZimist’s true identity. />
  I had a free period after lunch, so I headed to the library to finish an article I was writing for the school paper about gender imbalance in our English syllabus. I picked a seat where I could also stake out the computer where I’d first discovered the loveshy website. Maybe PEZZimist would come back.

  I scribbled a few sentences for my article in my notebook, then googled ‘loveshyness’ on my phone. I could write the gender imbalance article later.

  I wanted to know why loveshyness only applied to men. Didn’t women get loveshy too? The article explained that the effect of shyness was different for women, because society had determined ages ago that men had to be the proactive partner in relationships. Equal rights were swept aside when it came to dating. It was the guy who was expected to ask the girl out – and it was also the guy who was supposed to propose to the girl. So shy girls would still get asked out and proposed to, but shy guys wouldn’t.

  The article also claimed that relationships were more important to a man’s wellbeing than a woman’s. A study of male medical students showed that the ones who got married in their early twenties were happier and more successful than those who were single throughout university. Another study took married and unmarried men and women in their fifties, and found that the unmarried women were the happiest, and the unmarried men were the least happy. This was because women had nurturing, emotional relationships with their friends, and could have proper deep-and-meaningfuls with them while eating ice-cream, whereas men were rubbish at talking about their feelings.

  Fair enough, I supposed. Although I wondered where men like my dad fitted into this theory. He was sustaining an intimate, personal relationship with another man. Could gay boys be loveshy?

  ‘I hope you’re working on the introductory speech for tomorrow night, Penny.’

  I glanced up to see Hugh Forward, my Year Ten co-captain and fellow debater, with a Biology textbook in one hand and a battered paperback of Walt Whitman poems in the other. He was automatically crossed off my loveshy list because at a cast party for the school play last year he’d tried to stick his tongue in my ear. I’d politely convinced him that this was not a good idea. With my knee. His eyes still watered a little whenever he looked at me, but that was a good thing, because it made him a total pushover when it came to drafting class policies or allocating budgetary resources for social events.