Love-shy

by Lili Wilkinson

  BRADLEY: Except it wasn’t.

  ME: Wasn’t what?

  BRADLEY: The truth.

  ME: What? Of course it was the truth. The layout doesn’t change that.

  BRADLEY: I don’t care about the layout. You said I was gay!

  ME: So?

  BRADLEY: I’m not!

  ME: Are you sure?

  BRADLEY: Yes! I have a girlfriend!

  ME: So? Freddie Mercury had plenty of girlfriends. And Anthony Callea.

  BRADLEY: I’m. Not. Gay.

  ME: Why do you have such a problem with gay people?

  BRADLEY: I don’t. But I’m not one of them. And I had to explain that to my girlfriend. And my mother. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to politely decline this opportunity for another fifteen minutes of Penny Drummond fame.

  Verdict: Not loveshy.

  I spoke to another six boys after school, bringing my total number of interview subjects to eighteen, before sprinting to the local town hall for the Debating semifinal. Our topic was Should the Arts be Government Funded? and we were Negative. We won, of course, mostly because the other team didn’t seem to know what ‘the Arts’ actually meant, and kept talking about libraries and swimming pools.

  Hugh Forward asked me if I wanted to get an ice-cream afterwards and talk strategy for the final. I pointed out that the final was two weeks away and was a secret debate, and as we wouldn’t know the topic until an hour beforehand, there wasn’t much strategising that could be done at this stage. Anyway, I wanted to get home and check for new blog posts.

  As the train rattled its way homewards, I reviewed my findings. There were seventy-seven boys in the yearbook, and I knew that four had left at the end of last year, bringing it down to seventy-three. I had fifty-five left to interview. I was making good time, but felt a little concerned that I had not yet met a single boy who even warranted a yellow highlighter, let alone a green one. Still. There were plenty more to go.

  17:43

  The other day, my French teacher asked me to conjugate the verb être. When she spoke to me I could feel my face getting red. But I could do it, as long as I didn’t look at her while I was speaking. Teachers don’t call on me very often. I think I made her uncomfortable today. I do that to people. People don’t like it when you don’t make eye contact or smile when you talk. Usually a teacher only does it once, and then they leave me alone. Hopefully this one will have learned that now.

  Afterwards, I bought a lemonade from the vending machine and went and sat in an empty classroom. I realised that those words had been the first time I’d spoken aloud in four days. Je suis, tu es, elle est, ils sont. I am, you are, she is, they are. I was exhausted after that class. You get used to not speaking, your tongue becomes lazy. Then it becomes draining to just say a single word.

  I blinked. French. PEZZimist took French. French was an elective, and there was only one class this year. I’d written an article for the Gazette a few months ago about the dwindling popularity of language classes in our school, and called for the addition of Indonesian, Arabic and Japanese to the current offering of French, Italian and German. French was hardly an international language anymore, and what good would German be to someone hoping to work in international business in the Asia-Pacific region? I’d clipped out the article and slipped it under the principal’s door, just in case he hadn’t read it already, so probably next year things’d change.

  But that was all beside the point. The point was, PEZZimist took French.

  I pulled up the East Glendale website and clicked through to the Student Portal where all the timetables were. Fifth period tomorrow. I could just walk right in and find him.

  4

  EVEN THOUGH I’D AS GOOD as found PEZZimist, and I’d already discounted everyone in my English class, I interviewed them all anyway. After all, I needed a control group to compare PEZZimist to. And if nothing else, it was an interesting sociological insight into the mind of the Average Adolescent Male, which would be useful background information for my article.

  Rory Singh answered my questions in sleepy monosyllables, and James O’Keefe confirmed that rumour about him and Caitlin Reece in the photography lab. Andrew Rogers, Con Stingas and Luke Smith sniggered and stared at my breasts the whole time, but didn’t show any signs of actual loveshyness, just idiocy. I’d already interviewed Perry Chau, and Max Wendt showed me a photo on his phone of him and Arabella Sampson dancing at Arabella’s cousin’s eighteenth. Clayton Bell insisted that I interview him to prove I wasn’t homophobic, then badgered me to allocate more money from the SRC budget to the Gay–Straight Alliance. Peter Lange showed me a text message from the St Aloysius girl that combined fractal geometry, some filthy language and the first sixty-nine digits of pi.

  I turned my attention to the dorks in the front row. We were supposed to be working on our essays, but Mr Gerakis had slipped out of the classroom to do some photocopying, so I was free to talk to them.

  Youssef Saad was quite charming, making constant eye contact and smiling the whole time. He answered each question thoughtfully, with his head cocked on one side. Pink highlighter for him. Patrick Ryan had what appeared to be Weetbix stuck in his braces. I prayed he would be a pink highlighter, and luckily he told me that a girl from his Christian Youth Group had just accepted his invitation to go to the social. Florian Lehner was a bit twitchy, but informed me he had a girlfriend in Austria who he missed very much, but that they Skyped every day and that she would wait for him until he was old enough to move back to Austria without his parents. I looked at his wispy blond hair and nonexistent chin, and predicted that the Austrian girlfriend was probably as shallow as all the other girls in the world, and would not wait. Nonetheless, he was a pink highlighter.

  That only left one dork. Logan Esposito. He was somewhat of a puzzle, as he looked like a stoner, but got abnormally high marks and always sat up the front of the class. His T-shirt implied he was a fan of something called Mastodon which, if the horse skeletons and gothic font were anything to go by, was some kind of metal band. This didn’t really fit the loveshy mould of loving classical music and light opera.

  But as I was approaching Logan, Mr Gerakis returned and levelled a stern look in my direction. I went back to my seat and updated the yearbook. There were an awful lot of pink not-love-shy crosses. No green or yellow. This investigation wasn’t proceeding as I had planned.

  When the bell went for recess, Logan scurried away quickly, without speaking to the other dorks. I gathered my books and followed him. He put his books in his locker and rummaged in his bag until he produced a Kit-Kat. Ah. I’d read that low testosterone levels made loveshy boys more likely to crave sweets. This could be promising. Logan was not really bad-looking, now that I thought about it. He was tall and thin, with dark brown hair hanging just below his ears that would look quite nice if he bothered to wash it. He had bad skin, but he was a sixteen-year-old boy, so who could blame him? Although that Kit-Kat wasn’t going to help.

  LOGAN ESPOSITO

  Eye contact: Yes, but in a creepy, starey way.

  Overt signs of shyness: Extreme agitation.

  ME: So, Logan. Do you have a girlfriend?

  LOGAN: (STARES AT INTERVIEWER)

  ME: Logan? Are you okay?

  LOGAN: (SHAKES HEAD)

  ME: Do girls make you uncomfortable, Logan? Do you find talking to me difficult?

  LOGAN: (SHAKES HEAD)

  ME: In your own time, Logan. Just breathe.

  LOGAN: She … She …

  ME: She? Who? Are you wearing eyeliner?

  LOGAN: (DARK LOOK) She was my everything. She said she loved me. She made everything different. She held my hand and took me to places I’d only dreamed about. The scent of her skin, her hair, aroused me like—

  ME: Is this going somewhere?

  LOGAN: She said we’d be together forever. She said I was her One and Only. She said she’d never leave me. She whispered it into my ear when we lay naked together under the stars. And then �
��

  ME: And then?

  LOGAN: And then I found her making out with Jamal Zayd around the side of the canteen.

  ME: I’m very sorry for your loss.

  LOGAN: Everything is turned to ashes.

  ME: You seem to be enjoying that Kit-Kat.

  LOGAN: My soul’s fire is extinguished. I will never love again.

  ME: I’m sure you’ll perk up in a day or two.

  LOGAN: Do you think … Would you …

  ME: What is it?

  LOGAN: Would you mind if I smelled your hair?

  ME: Yes. I would mind.

  (INTERVIEW TERMINATED)

  Verdict: Not loveshy.

  Our SRC meeting was cancelled due to an outbreak of glandular fever, which meant we wouldn’t be able to reach quorum. I thought about writing an article about how the poor hygiene standards of secondary schools contribute to the spread of disease among the students – it could make a fascinating exposé for the Gazette. But I couldn’t stop thinking about PEZZimist, with only one hour to go until I got to meet him! I decided instead to kill time visiting the numerous other clubs and societies that met on a Friday lunchtime and tick some more names off the loveshy list – to be thorough.

  The Foreign Film Society was in the middle of watching Les Quatre Cents Coups, so I couldn’t interview any of them. I checked out the Fencing Ring, but things were looking a bit violent and I wanted to keep both my eyes. So I let myself into the Medical Ethics Society room and sat down next to a likely candidate.

  He was wearing a too-small brown argyle jumper that was pilling around the middle, and high-waisted jeans. On the right sort of person, his outfit would have screamed hipster-irony. But this was not the right kind of person. His hair looked like his mum cut it, his eyes were squinty, and his skin was riddled with acne. This was no hipster. This guy was a dork.

  SHAUN DAVIES

  Eye contact: Little.

  Overt signs of shyness: Fidgety,

  non-communicative.

  ME: What’s your name?

  SHAUN: (QUIETLY) Shaun. Davies.

  ME: So, Shaun. Do you think neonatal circumcision is a breach of children’s rights – namely the right to be free from physical intrusion and the right to choose in the future – therefore amounting to child abuse?

  SHAUN: (MUMBLES)

  ME: I can’t hear you.

  SHAUN: We’re supposed to be talking about medical futility.

  ME: I don’t care. Have you ever kissed a girl?

  SHAUN: (AGITATED) What? That’s none of your business. Jesus.

  ME: Does it make you feel uncomfortable to talk about girls?

  SHAUN: (TRIES TO IGNORE INTERVIEWER)

  ME: Does talking to me make you uncomfortable?

  SHAUN: Yes. Are you even a member of this club?

  ME: Are you uncomfortable because I’m a girl?

  SHAUN: Because you’re nosy. My love-life is none of your business.

  ME: I’m just trying to help you, Shaun. I can bring your condition to the attention of the world.

  SHAUN: I don’t want your help. I don’t need your help. Leave me alone.

  Verdict: Possibly loveshy.

  My first yellow-highlighter candidate! As I left the Medical Ethics Society meeting, I considered the possibility that Shaun Davies might be PEZZimist. He was certainly cagey. And he clearly didn’t want to talk to me. He could be PEZZimist. Maybe. But there were two girls in the Medical Ethics Society, and it wasn’t exactly a big group. So he must have to interact with them sometimes. Maybe I could talk to one of them. Ooh! Maybe one of them was the girl he liked, and that’s why he joined the Medical Ethics Society (because really, why else would you? What was the point of sitting around for an hour once a week discussing the pros and cons of euthanasia? It’s not as if any of those people were smart enough to ever become a real doctor, let alone sit on a real medical ethics committee, so it was all totally hypothetical). But neither of the girls had long hair, or were what I would call pretty, so that ruled out that theory.

  But still, Shaun Davies was my only lead so far. Until I went to check out PEZZimist’s French class, of course. I suppose that was the thing really. I had read PEZZimist’s blog posts. I knew he was smart. I knew he was … I don’t know … poetic (or melodramatic). And Shaun Davies just seemed too … ordinary. I mean, I knew PEZZimist was going to be a bit weird, but Shaun Davies didn’t seem weird enough. He was just a dork. He was my only lead, but I kind of hoped it wasn’t him.

  I found myself with fifteen minutes to kill before the bell rang for the end of lunch. I considered heading back to the library to stake out the loveshy computer again, but decided against it. Whoever PEZZimist was, he was pretty good at keeping his identity a secret. I’d nearly busted him the other day, and he was way too smart to return to the scene of his almost-outing. Instead I headed to the canteen to knock off another couple of interviews.

  Our school canteen smelled like tomato sauce, hot dogs, deodorant and Teenage Boy. The floor was sticky underfoot from spilled cans of soft drink, and that late into the lunch hour, I had to wade through piles of chip packets, sandwich crusts and empty bottles in order to find my way to a table. Not that there were any free tables today. They were all crammed with teenagers eating, talking, making out, fighting and throwing processed meat at the ceiling.

  I scanned the room. Trendy people, beautiful people, scary pierced people, stoned people, music geeks, theatre geeks, maths geeks and chess geeks. Cricket jocks, soccer jocks, basketball jocks, volleyball jocks and rowing jocks. White kids, Asian kids, Aboriginal kids, Indian kids and African kids.

  But no one looked loveshy. I didn’t even know where to start. If I were loveshy, I’d stay away from the canteen altogether. It was nerve-racking even for me to be standing in the doorway, and I was an extremely well adjusted, socially able person.

  ‘Penny!’

  It was amazing that someone with such a tiny voice could make herself heard over the hormone-induced roar.

  Rin was sitting near the vending machines with a bunch of other Asian girls and guys. She grinned and beckoned me over.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Sit with us,’ said Rin. The other girls looked surprised, but generally amenable to the idea. I pulled up a chair that had been kicked over at the next table, and sat down. I felt sort of luminous, among all that black hair and olive skin. I also felt the size of a house.

  Rin introduced me to everyone around the table. Cherry, Rebecca, Pieng, Stephanie … I did my best to remember each one by mentally applying mnemonics. Cherry was eating an apple, which was helpful. Rebecca, who had a sassy black bob and pink-framed glasses, was carefully poking holes in her rice with a pair of chopsticks. Rebecca-the-wrecker, I thought. Pieng-never-eats-a-thing. Stephanie-to-the-left-of-me. The boys were Lee (taller-than-a-tree), Charlie (he wore a brown shirt – so Charlie Brown) and Jie (Jie-Whiz).

  The girls each had a cute plastic lunchbox with compartments and a neat little groove for holding chopsticks, each decorated with Japanese cartoon characters. What remained of their lunches looked about a million times tastier than every cheese and vegemite sandwich I’d ever eaten. Rin offered me a red box of something called Pocky, which turned out to be a long, skinny pretzel dipped in chocolate. It was awesome.

  I eyed the three boys, and made a mental note to cross them off my list, due to the fact that they were engaged in various stages of foreplay with their respective girlfriends. The way this was going, I was going to need a new pink highlighter.

  ‘So what are you doing this weekend?’ Rin asked me.

  I shrugged and said something about homework. My mind was in another place altogether, thinking about Shaun Davies and PEZZimist and wondering if he was here, right now, in this room. Perhaps I should comment on his blog, instead of trapping him in French? But I didn’t want him to think I was stalking him. Our meeting had to seem more casual than that.

  The bell rang for fifth period, and the canteen erupted in
to a storm of pushed-back chairs and groans and more rubbish. I stood up, feeling a little tingly. This was it. I was about to meet PEZZimist.

  ‘See you in the lift,’ said Rin, smiling.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, not really listening. ‘See you.’

  I let myself into Ms Leroy’s French class about five minutes after the bell. I was supposed to be in Maths, but I could just lie and say that SRC had gone overtime.

  ‘It’s Penny, right?’ Ms Leroy gazed at me from the whiteboard. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Bonjour, madame,’ I said, using my entire French vocabulary all at once, and glanced at the class.

  Shaun Davies was there. Front row.

  My heart sank. PEZZimist was Shaun Davies.

  ‘Penny?’

  ‘Um,’ I turned back to Ms Leroy. ‘I was wondering if I could do a quick survey of your class, for the Gazette.’ Maybe there was another potential loveshy in the class. I looked around. There was Youssef Saad. And Bradley Wu. And Zach Hausen.

  ‘What kind of survey?’ asked Ms Leroy.

  ‘Er,’ I said. ‘About … ’ I scanned the walls for inspiration and saw a poster of the Eiffel Tower. Such a ridiculously phallic piece of architecture. ‘Condoms,’ I said. ‘Condom vending machines in the school toilets.’

  Ms Leroy frowned. ‘I’m sorry, Penny,’ she said. ‘But this is French class, not Human Biology.’

  ‘What if they gave their answers in French?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘We have important vocab to learn today.’

  ‘Okay then,’ I said, with one last desperate glance around the room. ‘Thanks.’

  I shut the classroom door behind me and stood in the empty corridor. Shaun Davies.

  I’d been checking PEZZimist’s blog all day to see if he made any mention of talking to me. If he was Shaun Davies, surely he’d mention it. As soon as I got home, I opened my laptop. As I waited for it to start up, I pulled out my pink highlighter and crossed off the two boys – Jacob Printz and Tigger Paulson – I’d spoken to at the basketball game I’d crashed, and Jack Horwicz, who I’d run into at the train station. Jack had thought I was trying ask him to the school social, and told me he had his sights set on Anya Pederson, and then tried to read me a poem he’d written her. Luckily I had a red pen with me so I could make some helpful suggestions about it, and point him in the direction of resources where he could expand his woefully limited vocabulary and brush up on iambic pentameter.