Love-shy

by Lili Wilkinson

  ‘What?’ I said, craning past him to see if anyone had sat down at the loveshy computer.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said. ‘The Debating semifinal. You didn’t forget, did you?’

  I laughed with just the right amount of scorn. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s all under control.’ I was pretty sure I could walk in there totally unprepared and still debate the pants off everyone else.

  I expected Hugh to walk away, but annoyingly he didn’t. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, trying to see the screen of my phone. I quickly turned it over.

  ‘Writing an article for the Gazette,’ I said. ‘Did you know that in Year Ten we only study one text written by a woman? And there are no female protagonists on the syllabus from Years Eight to Ten. I mean, what kind of message does that send to our students? Are women’s stories not worthy of study? Are the works of women writers not interesting or brave or strong?’

  Hugh’s eyes began to water at the word strong. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Fascinating. Er, I’d better go.’

  He scuttled away as I rolled my eyes. Boys. So predictable.

  Nobody came to use the computer I was watching.

  We were paired up in Chemistry to make formic acid out of oxalic acid and glycerol. I made sure I was paired with a boy.

  JESSE KING

  Eye contact: Sporadic.

  Overt signs of shyness: No.

  ME: Have you ever had a girlfriend?

  JESSE: Yes. Pass me the filtration flask.

  ME: You’re doing it wrong. The condenser goes in like this. Do you ever experience feelings of anxiety or depression? Do you have any allergies or sensitivities?

  JESSE: I’m allergic to onion. It gives me a rash.

  ME: How many hours a day do you spend daydreaming about girls?

  JESSE: Um. I thought this was Chemistry, not Psychology. Where’s the distillation flask?

  ME: You’re putting in too much oxalic acid! It’s only supposed to be 10 mg. Let me do it.

  JESSE: Give it back! Are you seriously going to do this entire experiment on your own?

  ME: I think that would be best, don’t you? I mean, if I do it, it’ll be right. Everybody wins.

  JESSE: I think the point of this experiment is to learn, not to win.

  ME: And that is exactly why I am going to go on to have a fabulous career, and you will probably end up underpaid in a dead-end job, too overwhelmed by the bitter reality of your existence to even work up the energy for a mid-life crisis.

  JESSE: Hang on. Is that a Dictaphone app? Is it recording? What’s going on?

  (INTERVIEW TERMINATED BY SUBJECT)

  Verdict: Not loveshy.

  When I got home, I checked PEZZimist.blogspot.com for new posts. Nothing.

  I sat at my desk and transcribed today’s interviews. Then I pulled out my diary and recorded today’s summary:

  Interviews: 5

  Possible loveshys: 0

  I considered adding a third column entitled Brain-addled Morons, because clearly I would be meeting plenty of them. But it was a journalist’s job to remain objective, so I would just have to rise above the idiocy of my male classmates and continue my search. I felt sure I knew PEZZimist now, from his blog posts. I knew he was different. He wasn’t like the rest of the monkeys at our school. He lived on a higher plane as well. If only I could find him, then I could rescue him from his loneliness. I’d bring his condition to the attention of the world, and when I became rich, maybe I could start some kind of charity or foundation for helping other loveshy boys.

  I pulled out my Maths textbook, but I couldn’t concentrate on integers and tangents. I kept refreshing PEZZimist’s blog and the loveshy forum for new posts. I needed a clue.

  The sound of the front door opening, combined with the aroma of a Malaysian banquet, lured me out of my room and into the kitchen. Dad was opening plastic containers and getting plates and chopsticks, while Josh poured two glasses of wine, and a mineral water for me.

  Josh looked up as I came in. ‘Hey, Penny.’

  I waved at him and grabbed a spring roll to chew on while he and Dad finished unpacking dinner.

  ‘How’s life?’

  ‘Interesting,’ I told him. ‘I’m doing a story for the Gazette that involves interviewing every boy in Year Ten.’

  Dad and Josh exchanged a Look. ‘Are you hoping to find something in particular?’ Dad asked.

  I didn’t really want to tell them about the whole loveshy thing. Not until I had a better handle on it. ‘It’s a sort of anthropological study,’ I said, spooning kung pow chicken over my combination fried rice. ‘Just trying to get a breakdown of what makes the Teenage-Boy mind tick.’

  ‘And it’s just boys?’

  I nodded.

  Dad narrowed his eyes at me. ‘Penny?’

  ‘Yes?’ I snagged a couple of chicken wings. My plate was growing dangerously full. The problem with banquet meals is there’s too much deliciousness, and you have to sample all of it.

  ‘Are you trying to find a boyfriend? Because in my limited experience, shoving a dictaphone in a boy’s face is not the best way to get him to like you.’

  I grinned as I carried my teetering stack of banquet to the couch. ‘No, Dad. I’m not trying to find a boyfriend. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my first day of interviews, there is no creature more utterly uninteresting than the Teenage Boy. With a single exception,’ I added, as Dad and Josh exchanged another Look. ‘And that’s the Teenage Girl.’

  After dinner, Dad and Josh settled on the couch to watch Iron Man 2, but I pled homework and escaped to my room. I refreshed PEZZimist’s blog. Bingo!

  19:22

  There’s a girl. I know what you’re thinking. There’s always a girl. But this one is different. There is no girl like her. I live and breathe her.

  She’s the prettiest girl in school. She has long brown hair and kind eyes. She sits with her friends at lunch and I watch her. She has a beautiful smile. I watch her whenever I can, in class, at recess and lunch. Every time I look at her, it feels as if my blood has turned to boiling mercury or icy-cold mineral water. I’m heavy and weightless and hot and cold and fizzy all at once. And I have to look away for a moment. Then I want to run and run and run until I fall down dead. It’s always been like this with me. Sometimes I just feel so much, I can’t believe that the world can contain all of me. I’m afraid that if she ever did love me back, I’d pour so much of myself into her that she’d break apart.

  I know what bus she catches and sometimes I can’t help catching it too, even though it goes in the opposite direction from my house. I sit behind her and smell the scent of her hair, like sunshine. I imagine walking her home, holding hands. Talking sometimes, and sometimes just being quiet. Smiling.

  I didn’t have any more luck on Thursday. We had a mock-exam in English in the morning (which was so easy it was insulting), so I didn’t get a chance to interview anyone during class. At recess I talked to a few boys playing downball against a wall near the boys’ toilets, but they weren’t shy about telling me what I could do with my dictaphone. In Physics, I discovered new evidence to suggest that all boys are witless morons.

  ZACH HAUSEN

  Eye contact: Yes.

  Overt signs of shyness: No.

  ME: Hey, Zach!

  ZACH: Henny Penny Lane, how are things?

  ME: Fine. Do you have a girlfriend?

  ZACH: No, but just say the word and the position’s yours.

  ME: I don’t want to be your girlfriend. Do you have trouble talking to girls?

  ZACH: Talking, kissing, loving. All systems go. No problems here.

  ME: You’re standing a little close.

  ZACH: Smell my pheromones, baby.

  ME: I can. It’s not very pleasant. Have you considered deodorant?

  ZACH: You love it.

  ME: I don’t. Really.

  ZACH: Are you recording this? Are you going to take it home and listen to my voice while you play with a washcloth in the
bath?

  ME: I don’t have a bath. I shower.

  ZACH: Bubble bath, yeah? With candles and stuff. And you just listen to my voice softly caressing your ears and mind, while you’re softly caressing—

  (INTERVIEW TERMINATED)

  Verdict: Not loveshy.

  As I made my way to swim training at lunchtime, I got trapped in a throng of giggling, Impulse-drenched, hairsprayed girls. They were discussing outfits and boys and how to sneak alcohol into the school social, and boys and boys and boys. Having spent the last two days talking to the boys of this school, I wanted to tell them they were wasting their time. But taking a good look at each of them, I realised that these vacuous excuses for young women were perfectly matched to those Cro-Magnon, meathead boys. I wondered if one of these girls was PEZZimist’s crush. I doubted it. Surely he’d have better taste.

  ‘Do you know if Nick Rammage is going to the social?’ said one of the girls. ‘He’s so hot. I’m going to ask if he’ll go with me.’ I could smell her cigarette-and-chewing-gum breath from a metre away.

  Another girl flicked her hair. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said in a stunning example of pot–kettle hypocrisy. ‘He’s got a girlfriend. From his old school.’

  I clawed my way out of the pack, gulping down fresh air. The pong of Teenage Girl irritated me all through swimming, and lingered even after I’d showered and changed.

  Hugh Forward and I were both class captains as well as Year Ten captains, and there were four other Year Ten class-captains at our meeting. Three of them were girls, so that left Nedislav Radnik.

  He was a definite possibility. He’d only been voted in as a class captain because of his Nordic good looks (did I mention that almost all teenage girls are totally shallow?), and never contributed to our meetings. I watched Nedislav carefully as we talked about the catering and decorations budget for the social, and then discussed the possibility of building a new weatherproof bike-shed. He didn’t say anything, just doodled aimlessly on the cover of his school diary.

  I tried to corner him at the end of the meeting, but Hugh was hanging around as though he wanted something.

  ‘Are you going to Debating straight after school, Penny?’ he asked, tidying up his notes at a glacial pace.

  I made up some excuse about having an oboe lesson. I could easily tackle six or seven more boys in the hour between school and the Debating semifinal.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ said Hugh. ‘I guess I’ll see you there, then.’

  Of course he’d see me there. We were on the same team, after all.

  I sprinted down the corridor, and found Nedislav outside his locker. He looked startled. I stood squarely in front of him so he couldn’t run away. Perhaps I needed to be more subtle this time so as not to scare him off.

  NEDISLAV RADNIK

  Eye contact: Sporadic.

  Overt signs of shyness: Darting eyes,

  uncommunicativeness.

  ME: Hey, I just wanted to ask you something about the meeting.

  NEDISLAV: Um.

  ME: Can you remember if Hugh said we had $1735 left in our budget? Or was it $1375?

  NEDISLAV: Um. I don’t remember.

  ME: You don’t remember? It was five minutes ago. I don’t think you really understand the responsibility you have, as a democratically elected representative of the student body.

  NEDISLAV: D-don’t you remember?

  ME: Not that I think the majority electoral system we have in this school is particularly democratic. I’ve been telling Mr Copeland that we need to move to an instant runoff preferential system to elect the class captains, and either the Sainte-Laguë method or Hare-Clark proportional system for the prefects and school captains. But as usual, everyone is resistant to electoral change. It’s probably because Mr Copeland is British.

  (SUBJECT APPEARS AGITATED … AN EXCELLENT SIGN! TIME TO CHANGE TACTICS.)

  ME: Are you planning on going to the social?

  NEDISLAV: (DISTRACTED) What? No.

  ME: Why not? It’ll be fun.

  NEDISLAV: I don’t really go out very much.

  ME: Why? Do you find it difficult to socialise?

  NEDISLAV: (LOOKS BEYOND THE INTERVIEWER AND SHOWS SIGNS OF RELIEF)

  KATE PITTMAN: Hey, baby.

  NEDISLAV: Heyyy.

  (KATE PITTMAN, IGNORING INTERVIEWER, PROCEEDS TO WRAP HER LEGS AROUND SUBJECT’S WAIST, WHILE LICKING HIS EAR. SUBJECT SHOWS NO SIGN OF CONCERN.)

  ME: Right then.

  KATE PITTMAN: (MOANS)

  Verdict: Not loveshy.

  In Media Studies, Sarah Parsons handed me a pale pink envelope. It was an invitation to her sixteenth birthday party. I guessed she had invited the whole swim team. I thanked her and let her know I’d definitely be there.

  I couldn’t say I loved attending parties. To be honest, I wished there were still structured games and activities, like when we were little. At least then there were prizes to be won. Now it was all just sitting around, making inane small talk, gossiping and (depending on the level of parental supervision) drinking.

  I understood that people enjoyed drinking, and that it made me seem like a wowser when I didn’t. But drinking made people stupid. And it was also dangerous. Never mind the fact that one teenager died every week from drinking in Australia. Never mind the increased chances of having employment problems, other substance-abuse problems, and engaging in violent or criminal behaviour. It was my brain I was worried about. My brain was my favourite part of me, and I was hardly going to interrupt its vital adolescent maturation phase with a neurotoxin such as alcohol.

  So I just didn’t see the point of parties. I quite liked it when there was dancing, but that usually didn’t happen until after midnight, by which time I was totally ready to go home. But I knew going to parties was part of The High School Experience, and that apparently I’d Look Back on My High School Years as the Best of My Life. Which I totally doubted. I suspected I’d look back on my years as an award-winning, history-making, internationally-acclaimed journalist as the Best Years of My Life. High school wouldn’t rate a mention.

  However, apart from the whole High School Experience thing, parties were a great way to soften people up, get to know my fellow students, make them comfortable with me and sniff out potential stories. I was half considering starting an anonymous gossip column in the East Glendale Gazette. Or maybe a blog. Everyone was saying that blogging was the future of journalism, and while I was obviously going to end up as one of the media elite, I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to dabble in the less reputable forms of reportage. As long as I didn’t get sucked into that black narcissistic hole of endlessly reporting daily minutiae. As if anyone cared what you had for breakfast. Get a real job. Not that I would get sucked in, of course. I’d be one of those hard-hitting, behind-the-scenes bloggers who expose corruption and scandal in the mainstream media and government. Like Julian Assange, but without the getting-arrested-for-sex-crimes part. It might actually be a good back-door entry into real journalism. But an East Glendale gossip column probably wasn’t the back door I was searching for. And anyway, I had more important things on my mind.

  I was only two days into my interviews, and I was already seeing potential for a whole series of articles about teenage boys, of which the loveshy article would be only one. Why did Nedislav Radnik struggle to communicate verbally, but had no trouble with explicit public displays of intimacy? What exactly made Zach Hausen such an over-confident sleaze? Maybe one day all my articles would be collected in a book.

  I eyed off my next subject. Bradley Wu. He’d won some short-film competition last year, and we’d done a piece on him for the paper. He was skinny and didn’t have any friends because he spent all his time in front of a computer, painstakingly editing his videos frame by frame until they were perfect. I hadn’t done the interview myself (it wasn’t much of a challenge, after all: STUDENT WINS FILM GLORY blah blah yawn), but I vaguely remembered the article. It had contained an inappropriate apostrophe and two spelling mistak
es because people just don’t care about attention to detail. But I couldn’t remember if Bradley had come across as being particularly shy or anxious.

  I squinted at him. Actually, I had interviewed Bradley for something. I remembered he had a slight lisp and said adverTISEments instead of adVERtisements. I just couldn’t remember what the article was about.

  I slid into the chair next to his. He was editing another short film – something involving cars and a guy wearing only one gumboot. He was wearing headphones and peering intently at the screen. I tapped him on the shoulder and he started. I touched the record button on my Dictaphone app and smiled in a friendly and encouraging way.

  BRADLEY WU

  Eye contact: Yes.

  Overt signs of shyness: Some reticence in answering questions.

  ME: Bradley, I was wondering if I could have a word.

  BRADLEY: I’m actually in the middle of something.

  ME: It’ll only take a minute. I just have a few questions.

  BRADLEY: Yeah, thanks all the same, Penny, but I remember what happened last time you just had a few questions.

  ME: Yes. What was that again?

  BRADLEY: Your little article on gay students at East Glendale?

  ME: Oh, of course. I remember. It was a lead feature, not a little article. It was on the front page.

  BRADLEY: I know it was on the front page. Do you know how I know? Because my girlfriend, my sister and my mother all read it.

  ME: That’s great! It’s awesome to see that people are reading my work. Very gratifying. Tell them thanks from me, and that I’m glad they liked it.

  BRADLEY: They didn’t like it.

  ME: What? Why? Was it the layout? Because I don’t have final sign-off on that. Tragically. I seriously can’t believe how frustrating it is working with these morons. They think just because it’s only a school paper, we don’t need to have any journalistic integrity. Or proofreaders. Don’t they remember that Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter’? Newspapers are the most fundamental expression of democracy! The voice of truth!