The First Third

by Will Kostakis

‘The dickhead,’ Hayley snapped. ‘What sort of heartless monster stands someone up?’

  The wound was still fresh, but for some reason, I laughed.

  She smiled at me and I smiled back.

  ‘You want coffee?’ Sticks asked.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said, hopping up on the counter stool beside his.

  ‘And none for you either, Lucas.’ Mrs P was spending her Wednesday off with a paperback crime thriller.

  Sticks spun around on his stool. ‘But –’

  She looked at him sternly over her reading glasses.

  It was a battle he wouldn’t win. He spun back. ‘Fine.’

  Every P was home for the day. Damo was working out in his bedroom, dropping his weights on the floor above us at the end of each set. Mr P was in his man cave, shouting incoherently at the footy telecast. Mrs P was on the lounge behind us. Her book was open but she made no attempt to read it.

  ‘Bill,’ she said, ‘when are we setting your mother up with my brother? He’s dying to meet her.’

  ‘I think that’s a slight exaggeration,’ Sticks told me, loud enough for his mum to hear.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, yes, but he is keen.’

  ‘Is he though, or are you just lying to make it happen?’

  ‘I would never.’

  ‘You’re too late anyway. Bill’s already set her up with someone. Jaw like an anvil.’

  ‘Oh, I love those,’ Mrs P said.

  Sticks spun around to face her again. ‘Dad doesn’t have one. Are you saying you settled, Mum?’

  She ignored him. ‘Bill, tell me. What’s this guy like?’

  ‘Well, his name is John, he’s a stockbroker and,’ I turned around for effect, ‘he stood Mum up last night.’

  Mr P screamed obscenities at the TV in the study. It was pretty perfect timing.

  ‘No!’ Mrs P gasped. ‘Your poor mum.’

  ‘Mm.’

  She was single and I was giving up on playing matchmaker. Mrs P saw it as an opportunity to swoop in.

  ‘What’s your mother doing on Friday?’ she asked.

  ‘Um.’

  Mrs P was dangerously direct. It wasn’t that she was persuasive – she wasn’t. She just didn’t give anybody much time to object. It was how Mum ended up on four different Parents and Friends’ Association sub-committees.

  ‘Seven o’clock,’ she said. ‘Yes, we’ll do dinner. Bill, you bring your mum and we’ll ask Shaun over. Dress nice, but it’ll be casual. We’ll have a barbecue and beers.’

  Sticks threw his arms in the air. ‘Piss up!’

  ‘For the adults,’ Mrs P clarified.

  ‘I’m eighteen.’

  ‘Not right before exams you’re not,’ she said.

  ‘But –’

  ‘No. And just be thankful I’m ignoring that.’ She pointed at the wall-mounted TV opposite her. Sticks had been playing video games when I arrived. His current session was paused.

  ‘I’m a visual learner,’ he said.

  She rolled her eyes and stood up. ‘Just make sure she doesn’t drive here, Bill. Coopers is the best Cupid I know.’ She waved the book on her way out. ‘I’m going to finish this in my room. Ta-ta!’

  We spun back to face the kitchen-side of the room. We weren’t alone long. Damo appeared in a pair of boardies.

  ‘How are we, gents?’ he asked.

  He was drenched. He looked like one of the Guys of the Month in the calendars Mum’s friend Diane always bought her for Christmas.

  ‘Put it away,’ his brother said.

  Damo gave him the finger, opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. He leaned against the kitchen counter and smirked. ‘So,’ he said, ‘your date the other night didn’t show?’

  I elbowed Sticks. ‘Thanks for telling him that.’

  ‘Sorry, I actually talk to my brother,’ he said.

  Damo was still smirking when he said that it was nothing to be ashamed of. That it happened to everyone.

  ‘She’s a mum.’

  ‘What?’ Sticks asked.

  ‘Hayley has a son.’

  Damo lost it. ‘A cougar and a mum? Wow, you really can pick ’em, can’t you?’

  ‘Maria wasn’t a cougar, she was in her mid-twenties,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, my point exactly. She was in her mid-twenties. You can’t even vote.’

  I sensed that we were on the precipice of a lengthy debate over what did and did not constitute a cougar, so I steered the conversation back.

  ‘Hayley’s son’s name is Rory. He’s almost three.’

  ‘How could you not know?’ Sticks asked.

  ‘I thought he was her younger brother.’

  Damo sipped his drink and smacked his lips together. ‘You gonna see her again?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Because you can’t just suddenly not like her. She had a kid when you asked her out,’ he said.

  ‘But I didn’t know.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Mr P caught the tail-end of the conversation as he entered the room. ‘What’s this? Hi, Bill.’

  ‘Hey.’

  Damo was all too happy to fill his dad in. ‘Bill had a thing for this chick and now that he’s found out she’s a mum, he wants to drop her. He’s a terrible person.’

  ‘She’s a mum? How could you not know?’ Mr P asked.

  ‘She’s nineteen,’ I said.

  ‘But didn’t you see any stretch marks?’ Damo asked.

  ‘We never actually . . .’ I trailed off.

  ‘Oh, they didn’t do anything,’ Mr P said, helping himself to a beer out of the fridge. ‘That’s okay then, he can drop her.’

  ‘Um.’ Sticks was fidgeting. ‘As a feminist, can I just object to the use of “drop her”?’

  ‘You’re a feminist now?’ This appeared to puzzle Mr P. ‘But you don’t like girls.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I can’t support women’s rights,’ Sticks said seriously. ‘When we use terms that demean and diminish women, we’re othering them.’

  Damo blinked. ‘Where’s that from?’

  So I wasn’t the only one who thought it reeked of direct quote.

  ‘It’s from a book, but it’s true, though,’ Sticks said. ‘I mean, I’m not exactly mainstream, how would you feel if someone called me a poof or made fun of how I walked?’

  Damo didn’t have to think. ‘I’d deck ’em.’

  ‘Exactly. You think there’s nothing wrong with dropping a girl, some people think there’s nothing wrong with calling me a poof.’

  ‘Who calls you a poof?’ Mr P asked.

  ‘Seriously, who?’ Damo added.

  Sticks sighed. ‘I’m speaking generally.’

  Damo pulled back. ‘Right, okay. I’m gonna go finish my session, but if anyone ever calls you that, you ring me.’

  ‘I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about –’

  His older brother was pointing at him. ‘You ring me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good.’ Damo slapped his dad’s back on the way out.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mr P said, returning back to the subject of Hayley, ‘if the girl’s good value and he likes her, Bill should go for it, kid or no kid. If it’s too messy or scary, that’s fine too. There’s nothing wrong with having another friend.’

  Sticks tried it out. ‘A Greek, a cripple and a teen mum walk into a bar. Ha! It works.’

  ‘But it mightn’t,’ his dad added. ‘Sometimes these things don’t. You just go your separate ways. Just don’t . . . drop her.’

  Sticks nodded. ‘There we go.’

  Mr P tapped his bottle against his forehead and saluted. ‘Right, I’ll leave you blokes.’

  He shut the door to his man cave and soon enough we heard him yelling at the TV again.

  ‘Nobody calls you a poof, right?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  ‘You know if they do, I –’

  ‘I had sex on Sunday.’

  We had learnt about sex
in Year Four. Damo told his younger brother, and Sticks then demonstrated it with an onion ring and a fry at Ash Robison’s tenth birthday party. I’d imagined that when the time came and one of us finally had it, there would be fanfare. But there was no fanfare. Sticks just traced the brim of his empty coffee cup.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I had sex.’

  I got that. ‘Who with?’

  ‘This guy you don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t really know him either,’ he said. ‘There’s this app for my phone. All the guys that are near you pop up and you can chat to them. The expectation is that you’re on it to do stuff.’

  Sticks had hooked up with guys at parties, but they never did anything serious. I’d expected that the I-had-sex conversation would come after the there’s-this-guy-I-like confession and the this-is-so-and-so introduction.

  He’d always said he wanted it to mean something.

  But instead he’d downloaded an app, where there was an expectation . . .

  ‘You know you don’t have to do that, right?’

  ‘Says the able-bodied hetero kid,’ Sticks said. ‘If you think you have to jump through hoops to find someone – then my hoops are spinning. And they’re on fire.’

  Sticks was like baking paper, nothing ever stuck to him. But in an instant, he’d become fragile. He wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  I tried propping him up. ‘You’ll find someone. You’re a great guy.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’ll never know what it’s like. The difference between someone finding you attractive, and someone pitying you and never wanting to touch you, is the difference between sitting down and standing up. And when you can barely get a guy to kiss you, let alone do anything else, it really starts to mess with you.’

  He blinked hard. He was tearing up.

  ‘Joel and I spoke a bit. He wanted to meet and I had the place to myself. If I left the back gate open, he could come right into the guest room. I’d be on the bed and if I didn’t get up, he’d never have to know anything was wrong.’

  ‘Sticks . . .’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I hid my crutches in the cupboard. I didn’t have to call myself Sticks. I was Lucas. I miss being Lucas, Bill. I miss not having to try so hard to make people okay with me.’

  He took a staggered breath.

  ‘Joel’s eighteen. He goes to uni and he’s really funny and impossibly handsome. Perfect catch material, half-naked in my guest room.’

  He angrily wiped at his eyes. He hardly ever cried in front of me, and when he did, he was always pissed off at himself for doing it.

  ‘He was buttoning up his shirt afterwards and he asked if I wanted to go grab coffee up the road. Like, right then. I wanted to, so much, but I knew if I got up, it’d freak him out. So, I said he’d misunderstood what we were, that I only wanted a random fling.’

  He was staring down at a chip in the countertop. He started to scratch it.

  ‘Joel looked at me like I’d just hit him across the face. He grabbed his stuff and left. I still have his number in my phone. And every time I look at it, I’m reminded that I’ll never see him again. But yay for not being a virgin! Woo!’

  ‘Lucas!’ Damo called from upstairs.

  He cleared his throat and shouted, ‘What?’

  ‘Have you been on my computer?’

  ‘No!’ he yelled indignantly. He turned to me, nodded and mimed, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come here, then!’

  He wiped his eyes with his palms, sniffed one last time and hopped off the stool.

  He wasn’t even halfway up the stairs before he and Damo started arguing.

  I took a deep breath and let it all sink in. For weeks now, it had been all about me. Maria, Yiayia getting sick, Melbourne, the bucket list, Flippant, Hayley, it was all me. He’d just occupied a corner of my life, making jokes and giving advice, and I’d never given anything back. And he’d been suffering, quietly.

  I rested my head on my hand and my gaze wandered over the kitchen counter. To his phone. He’d left his phone. The phone with Joel’s number.

  If there was ever a time to give something back, it was then. I snatched it up and scrolled through his contacts to ‘J’.

  I saved Joel’s number into my mobile.

  And while I was at it, I changed Sticks to Lucas.

  I didn’t message Joel until I was on my way home. Hey, it’s Lucas. This is my new number. I had sent it before I realised that it didn’t really warrant a reply. Did you wanna grab that coffee tomorrow arvo?

  I knew I had a couple of hours to kill between school and the Flippant semi-final. I figured I could meet up with Joel then, somewhere out of the way.

  Yes, I was meddling and the bucket list had proven that I wasn’t particularly good at meddling, but Lucas was never going to find someone who accepted him as he was if he never had the guts to show anyone who he was.

  Joel didn’t reply right away. I was in my bedroom, rehearsing my Flippant routine when he did. I thought you didn’t want anything serious.

  It’s complicated. I hated saying it, but it was true. Please?

  Okay. He wasn’t giving me much to work with, but the less impersonation, the better.

  Mum knocked on my door. She didn’t wait for me to say, ‘Come in.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Practising a speech for school,’ I lied.

  ‘Yiayia’s getting discharged tomorrow,’ she said. ‘You guys are meeting me at her place after school.’

  ‘I have plans.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Mum said flatly.

  She went to close the door and I stopped her. ‘Mrs P wants us over for dinner on Friday night.’

  ‘All right. Remind me.’

  She shut the door.

  That threw a spanner in the works. I quickly messaged Joel. Can you do breakfast?

  I told Joel to meet me at McKenzie’s, a café on the other side of campus that Lucas’s bus route didn’t go near. It was a popular after-school hangout until Buckley’s put the kibosh on that. When we were in uniform, we were ambassadors for the school, and apparently that meant we weren’t allowed to eat in public.

  It was five minutes past eight and I was the only person in the café. The waiter was hopeful, but I kept saying that tap water was fine. After all, I didn’t have a job.

  Eventually, a guy stepped in. He looked about our age. He wore a sweater vest and had his hair coiffed back. He sat down a couple of tables over.

  There was no way to be sure whether he was Joel or not. Lucas hadn’t given me a description, but I’d told him to meet me at eight, so I figured it was worth a shot.

  ‘Joel?’ I asked when I was close enough.

  He looked up from his menu. ‘Yeah?’

  I dropped my bag down and sat opposite him. ‘Hi, I’m Bill, Lucas’s mate.’

  Nope, still couldn’t pull off ‘mate’. I cringed inwardly.

  Joel furrowed his brow. ‘Where’s Lucas?’

  I didn’t know how to broach the subject, so I just jumped straight to the point. ‘Lucas hasn’t changed his number. That’s mine you’ve got. He told me about you guys.’

  Joel didn’t unfurrow his brow. ‘Wait, that was you texting me?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, he doesn’t want something serious?’

  I hesitated. ‘No, he does. It’s just complicated.’

  Joel scrunched his face up. ‘I hate when people say that.’

  He was preaching to the choir. ‘I know, right? But it’s kind of the only word for this.’

  Joel wasn’t buying it. He pushed his chair out and stood up. ‘Honestly, if he can’t talk to me himself, I . . . Nothing’s ever too complicated.’ He pulled down his vest a smidge. ‘You either want to spend time with someone or you don’t.’

  ‘Wait,’ I urged him, pulling my phone out. I was looking for a photo. I found one and angled the screen up at him. Lucas was in
the frame, grinning, weight on his crutches.

  ‘Oh, what happened?’

  ‘Look at it closer.’

  Joel squinted down at the screen. After a moment, he noticed something was off, something slight. ‘Oh.’

  I pulled the phone away and he slowly sat back down.

  ‘Lucas has cerebral palsy,’ I explained. ‘He was afraid to tell you, thinking you’d freak out and never want to see him again.’

  Another, ‘Oh.’

  ‘Now, I didn’t tell him I came to see you, so if it is too complicated for you, he’ll never know. He’ll just go on thinking you were the one that got away.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But if you want to give it a shot, we’re throwing a dinner party at his place at eight o’clock tomorrow night and I reckon he’d like you to be there.’ I checked the time on my phone. I had twenty minutes before first period. ‘I need to go.’

  I stood up and Joel caught his breath. Something had clicked and I didn’t know what until he asked, ‘So, Lucas goes to high school with you?’

  I was in the Buckley’s uniform. Lucas probably hadn’t told him he was still in school.

  ‘Year Twelve!’ I blurted. ‘He’s eighteen.’

  Joel nodded slowly. ‘Okay.’

  I couldn’t tell if it was a deal breaker or not. I picked up my bag. ‘Right, well, see you tomorrow, hopefully.’

  I was walking away when I realised I’d just pitched Lucas as a disabled high-school kid. I turned back.

  ‘He really is the greatest guy you will ever meet,’ I said. ‘Sure, you’ll have to walk a little slower when you’re with him and stairs are a total bitch, but he is one in a million.’

  I couldn’t concentrate all day. I was concerned I wasn’t persuasive enough with Joel, I was nervous about that night’s Flippant semi-final, and Mum was messaging me all the things Yiayia was saying now that she was back home (‘What? You no come vacuum one time?’).

  As soon as we were dismissed, I caught the bus to her place. She’d wedged the front door open to let a breeze in. Crossing over the threshold, I could already hear the Greek channel blaring. I followed the sound of the foreign-language news telecast through to the living room.

  Yiayia was wrapped in her robe on the recliner lounge chair. She turned away from the TV.

  Her face cracked into a warm smile.