The Anti-Cool Girl

by Rosie Waterland

  When the stream finally receded, the manager was the first to snap out of our shared trance. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked, as he motioned me over. ‘Yes, thank you,’ I replied, as I held my head high and walked slowly over to the counter with an air of importance (evidently, Drunk Brain had decided the only way out of this was to maintain my dignity by acting well above my station), all the while leaving wet footprints in my wake. ‘I’d like to purchase these, please,’ I said with a head toss. All three of them continued to stare at me. It was like I was a crazy person with a bomb and nobody wanted to do anything that would make me nervous.

  Everything was a little anti-climactic after that; I just paid for my crumpets and Fanta and sashayed out of there. I didn’t look back, but I’m certain the three of them stood there in shocked silence for at least another minute. Then they had to decide who was taking care of that puddle. I wet my pants in Coles, and didn’t leave until I had bought my crumpets.

  Less than two years later, my uncle and aunt asked me to leave their home. I always wondered if they’d somehow discovered I had wet my pants at the local supermarket.

  My uncle and aunt, Ben and Natasha, were crazy wealthy. They lived in a huge mansion that was like a museum – it was very clean and there was lots of expensive art that you weren’t allowed to touch. Everything was white and open plan. Spilling a drink on the carpet was considered an emergency on par with a natural disaster. My uncle would spring into action with about ten different products, all the while swearing and making me feel like I’d caused thousands of dollars worth of damage with one glass of Coke. Come to think of it, given the cost of everything in their home, I probably had.

  I had lived with Ben and Natasha for a little while when I was a kid, but when I went to live with them permanently at fourteen, they sent me straight to boarding school. So, for three years, I was living with them without really living with them. All I really knew was that I wasn’t allowed to put posters on my wall, and they had a dog they loved more than me. His name was Hamish, he was a West Highland white terrier, and as a rich couple with no kids, they treated him like their one true son and heir.

  I fucking hated that dog. And rightfully so – he was awful. He wasn’t friendly. He wasn’t affectionate. I think he’s the only dog I’ve met in my entire life who didn’t like to hug. He used to bite little kids, then Ben and Natasha would get angry with the kids for ‘provoking’ him. He walked around with a sense of entitlement that pissed me off – it reminded me of the boys at boarding school. It was like he knew I didn’t belong. Whenever he looked at me, I just imagined him thinking, ‘Ugh, you’re that Houso kid who belongs to my dad’s drunk sister. Why are you here taking up my place on the couch, you commoner?’

  Hamish was walked three times a day and given gourmet meals. In fact, I often got a smaller portion than everyone else at dinner ‘so that Hamish wouldn’t feel left out’. ‘I’ll fucking leave your stupid face out,’ I used to think, as Ben and Natasha each chomped down on two chorizo sausages, and I looked at my second one sitting in Hamish’s bowl.

  He was basically just an all-round smug piece of shit on four legs, and I hated that my new parents always seemed more excited about having him around than me. I got back at him in small, secret ways, though. When I spilled drinks on the carpet while I was home alone, I would cover it in the cleaning powder and then say Hamish had done a shit. Or when I was meant to take him to the park, I would walk him just far enough down the road to see the park, then I would turn around and drag him home. Ours was a fairly disturbing – although in my opinion equal – sibling rivalry.

  But mostly I was at boarding school, so I could handle the uncomfortable life I had at the museum house with the shitty excuse for a dog. Just when I felt like I couldn’t handle another second at school, I got to go home for the holidays. Then, just when I felt like I couldn’t handle another second in a home that wasn’t really mine, I got to go back to school. Until, of course, I finished high school, which meant living at home permanently.

  In the three years I’d spent living at the College, the bullying I’d experienced had taken a lot out of me. When I finally escaped that situation and had time to decompress, the depression, anxiety and PTSD started. I mostly relied on Josh to get me through it, but that didn’t stop Ben and Natasha from wondering what the hell had happened to the promising young bookworm they’d sent to boarding school three years earlier. I was withdrawn, quiet, weird. I’d stay at Josh’s for days at a time. I dropped out of university after a month. They never knew that I had tried to kill myself, but they did see I was depressed, and they paid for me to go to therapy, which was incredibly generous of them.

  I think they thought that throwing money at the problem was going to fix it, but it wasn’t that easy. My first suicide attempt after boarding school was only the beginning of the long and difficult journey of dealing with my childhood trauma, and I was not easy to deal with during that journey. By the time Josh and I broke up, Ben and Natasha were married and had two kids of their own, and were itching to live life as a family. A family that didn’t include the weird, withdrawn niece who dropped out of uni and hid in her room all the time. I was the odd one out. The ‘spot the random’. They had promised to be my parents, but I could feel them pulling away.

  I first realised they were frustrated when Natasha approached me about my therapy one day. ‘So, Rosie,’ she asked. ‘How much longer do you think you’ll be going to the psychiatrist for?’

  ‘Um, I don’t know,’ I replied hesitantly. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’

  ‘It’s really expensive, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘And you’ve been going for two years now. Isn’t it time to start winding it up?’

  I stood in silence, a little gobsmacked. Was she telling me I had to give up therapy? Was she telling me they were sick of paying for it?

  ‘We help you pay for drama school. We pay for all your psychiatrist sessions. You live here for free. It’s a lot, you know.’

  After that conversation, I freaked out. I wanted to be what they wanted, happy and together and successful and perfect. But I couldn’t do it. I tried, but I just couldn’t do it. The memories and the thoughts would always come back. The knife under the door. Dad in the back of the paddy wagon. Grandpa screaming. I couldn’t get my brain to do what I wanted it to do, and even though I knew it frustrated Ben and Natasha that I was so different from what they had hoped for, I just didn’t feel I could control it.

  The more I felt them pushing me away, the more anxious I became. I started trying to be a cool kid with the wrong kinds of people. Every weekend involved getting wasted, and often fucking some guy in a bathroom. I just so badly wanted to feel wanted, I would hook up with whoever would take me. I got home one night in the middle of winter and realised I had forgotten my key, but rather than wake up Ben and get in trouble, I slept on the doorstep, under the doormat for warmth. I had a bunch of friends stay over while Ben and Natasha and the kids were away, and a few days later Natasha noticed that money was missing from one of the girls’ moneyboxes. Those were the kinds of ‘cool kids’ I was hanging out with.

  The hard partying was making my depression and anxiety worse. I had a job and went to drama school, but when I was at home I just hid in my room, crying and sleeping, staring at the walls, watching hours of TV then having no memory of what I’d seen. I had fallen into a cycle of binging and purging and starving myself, so I was hiding food and vomit all over my room. I started having panic attacks in class. I was falling to pieces without Josh.

  And Ben and Natasha had no freaking clue what was going on. I feel for them, I really do. I was severely depressed, and can’t have been easy to live with. To them, I think it just seemed like I was a belligerent, self-destructive twenty-year-old, with no gratitude for everything they’d done for me.

  The last straw was when I got my period all over an expensive pair of Natasha’s undies. When you’re constantly fighting
thoughts of suicide, you hardly think about doing washing, so I snuck into Natasha’s wardrobe one day and took a pair of her knickers. And of course, when you’ve borrowed someone else’s knickers, the universe decides to unexpectedly give you your period so you get blood all over them. I freaked out. These were nice, expensive undies. And I had wrecked them. There’s no way the stains were going to wash out. So, I hid them in my room and hoped that Natasha would forget she’d ever owned them.

  She didn’t forget.

  I came home from work late one night and found an envelope taped to my bedroom door. Inside was a letter from Ben, about five pages long, listing all the things that he and Natasha were pissed off at me about. All the things I had been doing wrong. All the ways in which I was selfish and awful to live with. Staying out late. Being withdrawn. Not doing my dishes. Never talking to them. Sleeping all day. Taking Natasha’s undies and staining them with period blood.

  The letter was fair. Everything he said in it was true. He may not have taken the time to try and understand the causes of my behaviour, but everything he said was accurate, and that sent me into a total meltdown. I don’t think I said one word to either of them for the next two weeks. I could feel my second set of parents slipping away, and one wrong move was going to destroy everything. I figured if I could just stay out of their way and try not to fuck anything up, I wouldn’t piss them off again and they wouldn’t ask me to go.

  Then they asked me to go.

  I was in my room after drama school one night. Door closed as usual. Ben came and knocked on the door, which he never, ever did. I answered it, and he stood in the doorway almost like my room was not really part of the house, and he felt awkward coming in.

  ‘Look, Rosie, we need to talk about your living arrangements,’ he said.

  My heart sank. This was it. I’d ruined everything.

  ‘You know that we’re moving out to renovate soon,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’ I replied, hoping that he was about to tell me we’d just be moving house for a while.

  ‘Well, I just thought you should know that Natasha and the girls and I won’t be taking you with us, so you’re going to have to organise somewhere else to live.’

  Natasha and the girls. I had always hoped I was one of the girls.

  ‘Oh. Okay,’ I replied. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘We can help you financially while you get on your feet, but you should know that this is going to be a permanent thing. When the house is done, we don’t plan on having a room for you here.’

  ‘Oh.’ I could feel the toxic butterflies awakening.

  ‘So, you should probably start looking for something as soon as possible,’ he said.

  ‘Okay.’

  He walked away. I shut the door and went and sat on my bed, in shock. I’d come to live with them when I was fourteen and I was now twenty. That’s almost seven years, a longer consecutive period of time than I’d ever lived with my mum. I considered Ben and Natasha my family, and I’d just been told that they considered me nothing more than a person who lived in their house and soon no longer would.

  I packed a bag and left the house about five minutes after that conversation. I never spent another night there. I went to stay with Rhiannon, sleeping on her couch. A few weeks later, we drove to Ben and Natasha’s to pick up my stuff. They had dumped everything on the porch and used my doona to cover it all from the rain. It smelled like it had been out there for a while.

  I never heard from them again. They never called to check if I was okay. They never called to see where I had ended up. It was like I had never been a part of their lives. I bet Hamish was fucking thrilled.

  I spent the next year couch-hopping. I stayed with Rhiannon for a while, I stayed with Mum for a while, I stayed with friends for a while. I was lost and alone, and had nowhere to go. I knew what I needed. I needed another boy to save me.

  You will end up in a mental institution.

  When a guy wearing nothing but a bedsheet as a toga pushes in front of you in the dinner line so he can get better dibs on the custard, you know you’ve hit rock bottom.

  I was twenty-four, and I was in a mental institution. Pretty much nailing life.

  It all began when I found the boy. The perfect, funny, good-looking boy. My year-long destructive partying phase was over, and I was looking for a distraction that was more permanent. I didn’t want to just have sex in club toilets or do a line of coke to make the thoughts go away – that high never lasted long enough. What I needed was another Josh. I needed another boy to make me feel loved.

  Of course, what I really needed was to learn how to love myself. To learn how to survive on my own and to actually face the pain and trauma from my past. But I had been through too much for one damn year, so when Luka told me he loved me, that he wanted to marry me and have my babies, I gladly let myself be enveloped by it. If only I’d known that less than two years later, I’d be hustling in a dinner line at a mental home. And I don’t even like custard.

  Luka and I met at the movies. We both worked there with a bunch of other uni students and creative people, making popcorn and cleaning out the slushie machines. After couch-hopping for what seemed like an eternity, I moved into a share-house in Chippendale with a few other cinema staff. On my first night there, Luka stayed over, and he kissed me. ‘So, um, I kind of like you,’ he said, in his charmingly geeky way. ‘I kind of like you too,’ I replied, and we kissed again.

  It would have been the perfect romantic moment if Luka hadn’t already had a girlfriend. Kissing him that night was probably one of the worst things I’ve ever done, but I was so desperate to be loved that my usual moral compass was pointing only towards him. He had left every girl he’d ever been with for another, and in the back of my mind that worried me, but he promised me that I was different. He’d cheated on or lied to all those girls because he was confused or didn’t care about them, but he knew he wanted to be with me. He could see a future with me. I was the girl he loved. And I believed him. He said every exact thing that I’d ever wanted to hear from a guy. I was intoxicated from the second he said ‘family’ and kissed me on the nose.

  I was smart enough to know that I shouldn’t be getting into any kind of relationship. After relying on Josh, then relying on drugs and random sex, it was time that I learned how to rely on myself. I was also smart enough to know that any guy who cheats on someone else to be with you is eventually going to cheat on you to be with someone else. But the lure of a warm hug from a man who could make me forget my problems was too tempting to let go, even if he was an arsehole.

  And, although I didn’t realise it at the time, an arsehole was exactly what I needed. My desperation to be loved needed to come up against someone so selfish and shitty that it would force me into total meltdown. I needed a disaster to push me down to rock bottom, so that I could finally learn how to claw my own way out and build my own life.

  Luka was that disaster.

  The first warning sign was that he said he loved me after a week, which, believe me, is never, ever true. Someone telling you they love you when you’ve only been dating a week is like someone telling you they like Two and a Half Men when they’ve only seen the opening credits. It’s a very big – and very misguided – call to make. There is just a whole lot more horrible shit coming that you couldn’t possibly anticipate from only seeing the fun beginning. You only really know if love is there once you’ve waded through the mess and are still interested in sticking around.

  Other warning signs came thick and fast. We had to keep our relationship a secret for the first few months, because he didn’t want anyone to know that he’d left his previous girlfriend to be with me. When I eventually snapped and told people, he said I was selfish, and I had to promise to give him one head job a day forever to get him to stay with me. It was my suggestion, and although half-joking, I was still only half-joking. That’s how fucking desperate I was. He wasn’t interested in hearing about my family or my background because it made him
‘uncomfortable’. He seemed exasperated by my anxiety and depression. He would often belittle me in front of his friends.

  Basically, Luka was just a young, selfish guy. He could be very sweet, but he always cared about his needs first, and since he had cheated on someone to be with me, I was just waiting for him to betray me in the same way. I had picked a saviour who was guaranteed to abandon me. Subconsciously I must have known things needed to explode, and he was the perfect dynamite.

  After the first few months, when I could tell that his interest in me was waning, I panicked. I couldn’t handle losing yet another promise of a family. And just like when I felt my mum pull away, and when I felt Josh pull away, and when I felt my aunt and uncle pull away, my body went into battle mode.

  My mental health began to deteriorate pretty rapidly. I was cutting myself. My eating disorder was out of control and I was gaining a lot of weight. If Luka didn’t text me back after ten minutes, I became convinced he was with another girl. I was having constant panic attacks and I expected him to drop everything to help me fix the problem. I took to spending hours sitting in my wardrobe, because even the open space of my bedroom made me nervous. I attempted suicide two more times, all because Luka wouldn’t answer the phone or would leave my house after an argument. I just couldn’t face the pain of being alone and having the thoughts and memories come back.

  I was falling apart, and Luka realised a lot quicker than Josh had that he didn’t want any part of it. But just like with all his previous girlfriends, he was too scared to leave me until he’d found someone else. He said he wasn’t sure if he loved me anymore and that he needed to take a break. I naïvely took that to mean, ‘I definitely love you, I just need some time to remember that.’ What he actually meant was, ‘I definitely don’t love you anymore, but there’s this girl at work that I like and I want to see how that goes before I completely cut you loose.’