I just didn’t think Jarrod would be up for that kind of adventure. He seemed so content where he was.
When Ben and I were hanging out, we spent Sundays’ worth of time away from school riding on some of Melbourne’s most hilarious train lines; we’d go to the end of the Craigieburn, the Frankston and the Belgrave lines and we’d get off and walk around wherever we had ended up and pretend we lived there and make up silly backstories for all the people who actually did. Ben thought my games were hilarious.
‘You’re so quirky!’ he’d say. We talked about getting the V/Line to Bendigo, to Ballarat – you know, for fun. (Once I mentioned getting the bus up to Merimbula on the holidays, but he wasn’t really in for bus travel.)
But my favourite train ride so far was the Tuesday afternoon that I caught the V/Line. I was doing something partly brave, mostly stupid, that I knew I could get into a lot of trouble for. I didn’t regret it, not one bit.
At night I’d study a little, waiting for Jarrod to come by. I tried to arrange it to coincide with the time Clover was supposed to go to bed, so I could go in and kiss her while she was all bath-soft and pyjama-cuddly, then dash right out with a ‘Won’t be late!’ to my mum.
The nights were beautiful and the sun was setting later and later. We cavorted in t-shirts until we were too goosebumpy to bear it.
I knew that my mother didn’t really want me to be going out at night, particularly going out at night in a car and with a boy. Even though Jarrod had totally charmed and schmoozed her and she seemed to love him nearly as much as she loved me. Or was it that she loved him almost as much as I loved him? Did I love him?
I wanted to love him because I was worried that his parents didn’t.
We’d driven out to his place one afternoon a few weeks earlier, because he thought his parents were going to be out. But they were home, and Jarrod had to help his dad fix a big light to the roof of a massive red ute. They were going spotlighting later that night. I wasn’t invited.
The Foreman house was close to the road, an ugly and shabby 70s brick thing. Soulless and cold. I sat on the concrete steps out the front of the house and watched them work. Jarrod was the absolute spit of his dad.
The screen door behind me banged and his mother came out. She was a wiry, sad-looking woman.
I stood up. ‘Hi. I’m Adelaide.’
Her mouth curved so far down at the sides. ‘Hello,’ she said, barely looking at me. ‘Pete? Phone.’ Jarrod’s dad disappeared back into the house, wiping his hands on his shirt.
His mum watched a moment as Jarrod jumped up on the ute tray, holding a spanner. ‘Wait for your father. You’ll wreck something,’ she said.
I saw him stiffen. My heart went out to him.
‘And so you’re Libby Longley’s daughter? The one that dropped out of school? Guess it makes sense you’d spend time with this one. Watch he doesn’t pull you down more.’
It was my turn to freeze. What did that mean?
I felt a hand in mine, a squeeze of my fingers, and I let Jarrod lead me past his mother and through the house and into his room. I sat on the bed and couldn’t think of anything to say.
He took a hoodie out of a drawer, pulled it on. I watched him rub his face. Then after a moment he turned around. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
We left without a word to anyone. I hadn’t been back to his place, and we hadn’t talked about it since.
We had better things to talk about and we grew closer and closer. I never felt like I had to free myself, I never got bored.
I loved that it felt like he’d saved up a bunch of theories and strange thoughts to share just with me. Whenever we talked it was like starting mid-conversation.
Jarrod once said, ‘I like to think about what I would do if I could go back in time. Like, what would you tell people? Do you think you would like to shock them – tell ’em about September 11 and stuff like that? Or would you keep them in the dark?’
I had said I didn’t know. ‘But what about the future?’
‘Yeah, I like Back to the Future.’ He often avoided the future.
Some nights we drove out of town on the main road and then turned around and drove back in again, stopping for an ice-cream at the highway petrol station. I liked to pretend it was an all-night American diner on some cross-country route.
‘I don’t know what goes on in your brain,’ Jarrod said, as he jumped on his empty Big M carton, which popped with a bang.
‘Doesn’t it make you feel like we’re going somewhere?’ I asked.
‘We’re out on the highway in some shit servo. This isn’t one of my greatest dreams,’ he said.
‘I dunno, there’s just something about it. Makes me happy.’ I wasn’t going to let up. What were his dreams?
He came and sat on the edge of the car bonnet with me. I’d gotten in trouble for sitting too heavily on it already. ‘You’ll dint her!’ he’d whined. So now I just perched on the very front, on top of the grill.
‘Being with you makes me pretty happy,’ he said.
Bubbly liquid joy surged in me. There’s probably a scientific word for that feeling. Or they might have one in German, or maybe Japanese.
Then we made out for ages. Times like these, who cared about the future?
Then – and I didn’t quite know how it happened – it was November and coursework had finished and exams were unavoidable.
The historical society was musty, airless and hot. I wandered about asking everyone if I could help them with anything. I changed the header image on the website. I felt unhitched and prowly. I dusted the newly updated display. Hungry, bored, itchy.
I must have been annoying everyone, because Grandad sent me home, making a big point of me being ‘on leave’ from the historical society for my own private swot vac.
I had options for exams. I could go up to Melbourne with the other distance ed people who were in actual striking distance of the city, or I could sit them alongside the year twelves at the local school. I chose this, thinking of solidarity or, for some reason, that it would create a semblance of fun.
Mum kept ducking her head into my room and asking unhelpfully, ‘How’s the study going?’
I’d hold up whatever book I had lying in front of me. ‘Good,’ I’d say each time.
Sometimes she was more useful and would bring me coffee or some biscuits. One time she sat on my bed and drank coffee with me, after I’d reassured her repeatedly that she wasn’t interrupting, that I was due for a little study break.
‘Are you feeling good about the exams?’
‘Can’t say I feel good about them.’
‘But are you glad you’re sitting them at all?’
This was an interesting one. I leaned back and ate a choc chip bikkie in a way I hoped came across as thoughtful. It is, of course, possible that I just looked like the Cookie Monster. ‘I think so.’ I brushed crumbs from my chest (Mum calls hers her shelf). ‘I mean, this way I am getting it over and done with so I don’t have to go back later.’
‘Aha!’ said Mum, looking smug. ‘I was right!’
I rolled my eyes. Eloquently.
‘I just know how tough it was when I didn’t finish. Just seems like a waste of your time to get so far and then fall at the last bar, the last gate—’ She looked up into the air for a moment, maybe pondering horse-riding metaphors.
‘But look at you now, Mama. What a success.’ It came out sounding glib, which I really hadn’t meant it to. So I lunged and kissed her sloppily on the face until she squirmed and swore at me. I laughed, she said something along the lines of ‘I’ll let you get back to it’, and I returned to the books trying not to sigh.
She left my room and it could only have been six minutes before I heard her swear loudly.
‘What?’ I called out.
‘What?’ I repeated.
I c
lacked in my thongs down the hall. ‘What’s wrong?’
Mum sighed, and fidgeted. ‘It’s okay. Well.’ She let a long breath out, which whistled through her teeth.
‘What is it?’
‘Ears is dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yes.’
We went out onto the back verandah, where the rabbit hutch was kept raised on two big bluestone blocks. Ears was a limp fluffball in the straw, clearly no longer living.
‘What do you think killed him?’ I asked.
Mum opened the door and picked him up. He lay in her butterflied hands. ‘I don’t know. He looks fine. Except, you know, dead. A bunny heart attack or aneurism, maybe?’
‘Shouldn’t we get Cloves?’
‘Do you think she should see him?’
‘Don’t you think so?’
In the end we did let her see him. Mum sat her down first to talk to her and I stood against the stove and didn’t say anything. I felt absolutely terrible.
Clover looked particularly tiny sitting at the kitchen table, her chubsy legs hardly reaching halfway to the floor. You could tell she realised this was significant and it reflected in the expression on her face.
If I could have brought Ears back to life right there and then I would have.
‘Sweet pea,’ Mum started gently. ‘You remember how we’ve talked about how when people and our animal friends get old that they die and aren’t around anymore? Ears died today.’
‘Okay.’ Clover looked around. ‘But Ears is not very old.’
‘No.’ Mum nodded. ‘Maybe Ears got a little bit sick. Sometimes pets can get sick and then they die. It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? And it’s okay to feel sad.’
‘Can he come back alive?’
‘No, he can’t come back, honeykins.’
‘We can have a funeral for Ears,’ I said.
‘That’s a very good idea, Adelaide,’ said Mum, as if we hadn’t rehearsed it. ‘At a funeral we can say goodbye to Ears and then we bury him in the ground. It’s a nice thing to do.’
‘Okay,’ said Clover.
We allowed ourselves to feel sad about Ears the whole evening. Mum taught me to make a self-saucing chocolate pudding (so easy!) and let Clover and me crack open the ice-cream. We toasted Ears with our spoons.
I decided it wouldn’t be fitting to study anymore that day, exams be damned. Instead I read some books to Clover and had a little nap as she went to sleep.
I watched some TV with Mum, who was a big fan of the police procedural drama.
I sent a text to Mia, though she didn’t respond for a couple of hours and even then she just wrote: HOW THE EFF AM I GOING TO GET THROUGH THIS I WISH I WOULD JUST DIE NOW.
Jarrod came by and we rode our bikes out into the darkness on this moonless night, along every street of Emyvale, trying to ride holding hands. It was both harder and easier than I thought. Harder because I wobbled and going around corners was a little hairy. Easier because it just felt so damn good, like I was in a music video clip or a cheesy montage in a film.
I looked at all the houses and wondered who lived inside each one and whether I would recognise them if I saw them on the street. Would I remember the man who was putting the rubbish out at 11 pm on Buckley Street if I saw him at the supermarket? Would he remember me? We were cycling pretty fast. I hardly stayed in one place long enough to be remembered.
Then the exams were happening. Or about to happen. The day seemed to come upon us so quickly I didn’t have time to be nervous.
My morning brain was cheerful. I’d had this idea we would all get up super early and crash on in together before the first one. Instead, everyone was super tense and wouldn’t agree to meet. But when I got to school everyone was milling around anyway.
I tried to be chill and chatty. ‘Mia says she spewed up from stress last night. Jen? Jen?’
Jenny hissed through clenched teeth, ‘I just need to be by myself.’
I moved away from her, towards the door to the gym. Through it I could see rectangles of white on top of tables organised in rows.
My first exam was English. I turned the paper over when the adjudicator told me and by the end of the allocated reading time I was feeling an awful sinking feeling. Here were the nerves. I wished I had done those practice exams I’d printed out.
The teachers looked solemn, and when they announced we could pick up our pens, I picked mine up robotically but just sat there, staring at the paper.
Once it was over I could barely remember what I’d just written. I’d tried to scribble through the questions. I knew I’d filled the pages, but it was horrible to think what I might have filled them with.
Phewsies! Not so bad! Mia texted later.
All I could send back was
The others seemed relieved. They milled about laughing and acting kind of pleased with themselves. I put my head down, spoke to no one and got the hell out of there.
Mum wanted to know how it had gone, and what it was like and did I feel good about it. It took all of my patience, and remembering just how much I loved her, to not scream in her face.
‘I’m glad it’s over,’ was all I said.
But I thought about how it could have been, would have been, if I hadn’t been talked into finishing school. Would I still be here? Where else could I have been?
I wished, sort of, that I was one of those people who kept a diary or a journal or whatever – so I could remember what I’d been thinking and feeling so I could check if I was actually doing what it was I wanted.
I barely slept that next night. My overnight brain was telling me, You shouldn’t have run away, you shouldn’t have left, you’ve made a terrible mistake …
Australian history found me clawing for the right answers. I wrote furiously, ideas tripping over one another. I forgot quotes, I chose the wrong essay question to answer.
I wished I hadn’t watched an entire season of 30 Rock the night before my revolutions exam. I should have watched Marie Antoinette or Doctor Zhivago instead.
I developed a superstition and slept with my textbooks under my pillow the night before the legal studies exam and then let osmosis do its work – I tried to let my pen guide me. Afterwards, this felt like a complete misjudgement.
Messages pinged from Mia all week, but I couldn’t look at them.
When my grandparents asked me how this exam went, or that particular one – and they did, they asked constantly – I shrugged, I smiled, I grimaced, and the whole time I felt like I was playing a role, acting the part, telling them what they wanted to hear.
During the literature exam I spouted the most revolting hyperbole onto the page that I was ashamed of myself.
I had a feeling in the pit of myself, right in my stomach, the place where I usually kept my jam doughnuts and guilt. A hard apricot stone sitting in there scratching at me. I should have prepared better. I think I care about this.
The post-exam party was at Daniel’s place and the year twelves of Emyvale were totally up for party-making. They were ready. to. cut. loose.
Me and Jarrod hung back a little. I was feeling my outsider status pretty keenly. I guessed he felt the same. But there was still something in me, some twisty, sticky cobwebs waiting to be shaken out.
Sam was out of his tree with excitement, pinballing from person to person, gripping a bottle in each hand.
‘How’d you go?’ I asked.
‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s over and I don’t really want to think about it.’ He took me by the shoulders. ‘Are you going to have a good time tonight?’ He shook me and I let myself go limp and loose as he shouted, ‘I am going to have a good time tonight. Are you?’
‘Yes!’ I shouted. I half believed myself.
And soon we were – or at least I was. Throwing my arms around people I barely knew, like we’d been th
rough something together. Everyone shouting things like, ‘It’s over!’ and ‘We’re free!’ and I wondered what they felt like they were free to do now.
I knew I was free to dance wildly with Emma and Jen there on Daniel’s parents’ concrete patio. Free to plant sloppy kisses on Jarrod’s cheek in the hope it would wipe the seriousness from his face.
Jen pashed a guy – one of the randoms who’d turned up (he was a cousin of Dan’s, or one of Dan’s cousin’s friends) who was hilarious and cute – but after ten minutes down the side of the house with him, she lurched back into the garden to find me. ‘Yeah, I’m definitely a lesbian,’ she announced in a whisper. ‘But don’t tell anyone. Not yet.’
She and I lay on the grass talking and she was loosey-goosey and being open and honest, and it was wonderful.
‘I can’t believe you chose to come back to this shithole,’ she said, shaking her head from side to side. ‘Hey, if you do this, all the stars blur and bleed and every one of them is a shooting star. Oh my god, I never see shooting stars! Quick, make a kajillion wishes. But what I’m saying, what I’m saying, is you had such an amazing opportunity up in Melbourne, they really were all working for you so that you could really make something of yourself. You’re so lucky.’
‘It so didn’t feel like that, though,’ I said. ‘I was working for them, to keep this standard they had set, keep this name they had established so people would spend sixty grand a year for their kids to go there. I don’t want to get into this.’ I shook my head a few times, emphatically, which made me dizzy but the stars did all look like shooting stars. But they weren’t. It reminded me of something Mum always said about how you shouldn’t wish on satellites. But I don’t think that’s an original Libby Longley concept.
I felt terribly about Jenny. Guilty. I reached for her hand, and entwined my fingers in hers. ‘But I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasted my opportunity. You should have had it – you’re smarter than me. And you work so much harder and I’m a lazy fool.’
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