by Fiona Wood
“And PS, ‘Hol,’ my parents are both women,” says Lou.
“Two women?” says Holly. “You have two mothers?”
“My mother is Maggie, and my other mother is Biff. It’s Elizabeth, but she’s always been called Biff, since her little brother couldn’t pronounce it. He said ‘Liffabiff.’”
“That is gross. Do you even know who your father is?”
“He’s my uncle James. Biff’s brother. The one who couldn’t pronounce her name.”
“That’s freaking incest,” says Holly.
“Wow, you really are almost as stupid as you look. He is not related to my mum. He was their donor. It means I’m biologically related to Biff as well as to Mum, that’s all.”
“That’s sick.”
“No, it’s bloody not, now shut up,” I say.
“Of course you’d defend them,” Holly says. “What were you two doing in the bathroom?” She really doesn’t want to take no for an answer on this one.
“You guys freaked me out so much I can’t go in there by myself anymore. Lou stands guard for me,” says Annie.
“Against?”
“Maisy and the charcoal man, of course. Who do you think, you idiot?” says Annie, putting a pillow over her head and pulling the duvet up over that.
I need some more sleep before I can figure out how I’ll ever be able to make amends to Michael.
tuesday 27 november
We get permission to go on a hike together. Just the two of us. How?
They’re so relieved that Michael didn’t go and die on them that they’ve bent the rules? Or maybe Michael’s parents have asked them to be lenient. Perhaps they saw his eye tic. Or maybe my mothers asked. Or Merill put in a good word for us.
We go up to Snow Gum Flat, the scene of the infamous party that neither of us went to. We take a picnic. We take our time.
We stretch out between the springy grass and the sky’s endlessness. Touch the crisp petals of the everlasting daisies. Hear only birds and swooping dragonflies. Here, only us. Eat. Doze. Read.
Michael says, you know the snow gums?
I know them.
They have to survive such harsh conditions, such extremes of weather, bits of them die. And they are able to grow new wood around the old dead wood. That’s how they get to be such strange and beautiful shapes. They are hardier and more complicated than, say, the messmate or peppermint eucalypts farther down the mountain, which are protected by a softer climate.
Thank you. That’s a lovely way to think about it, I say.
We look at each other.
I was talking about myself, he says. I was being resilient in the wake of Sibylla’s public repudiation, and the ridicule that followed it.
We start laughing. We laugh at our respective self-involvement.
I want to be the snow gum, I say. You need a taller metaphor for your mending heart damage.
My heart will recover; I take the long view.
He picks something up from the grass. It’s a dead dragonfly.
Would you like this?
I would love it, I say.
He hands it over, and I tip it gently into a specimen jar from my backpack. Dragonflies are hands down on my Top Ten list of the most beautiful things in the universe.
I know I’ll keep it forever and, looking at it, remember this day. A day on which I felt hope and contentment, and knew sadness was in retreat. A day on which my smile remembered how to work without needing specific instructions. On this day, I will remember, the future woke up, stretched out, and opened its arms to me again. And it felt quite possible to come out of the room of one-day-at-a-time.
I need to cry, because feeling good means I’m taking a step away from you, Fred.
I can cry in front of Michael. I trust him, and so would you.
They’re exactly how I imagined fairy wings when I was a kid, I say.
I’m talking about the dragonfly, but Michael knows that is not what’s making me cry.
I decide it has to be a letter fairly bristling with nine-letter words.
I read it out.
Dear Michael,
Conceding the hideosity of my barbarism and cruelty, I haltingly importune you, seeking your acquittal in the aftermath of my abhorrent offending and nefarious puerility, expiating my far from guiltless maladroit encounter with dastardly, dangerous Holly.
My execrable fatuosity perplexes your cleverest judgement with its incaution.
Pardoning processes, peaceable gallantry will exonerate my harrowing heartsore, providing consoling innocence, steadying stressful suspicion, rewriting poisonous and tarnished theatrics of toolheads and numskulls.
Primitive, offensive, brainless bullyboys will be abandoned with sharpness, like a pocketful of spiraling, pixelated pilchards.
Following this guiltiest grievance, may we again find nobleness, plentiful gleamiest pleasance, suspended tenuously in the habitable continuum, the indulgent firmament of genuinely wonderful compadres?
I reimagine a friendship of unfailing tomorrows that reunifies, reprieves, and offers sanctuary, salvaging a shattered, sleepless simpleton (me) from indignant rejection, and nurturing the sublimely unequaled nonpareil (I know they mean the same thing, but that gets redundant into the mix) faultless (you).
Ihopethis hyperbole is providing fantasies of cordially consoling comebacks.
Harrowing horsehair suffering of which my stupidity is deserving will I hope be suspended by lunchtime (it gets itchy).
Look pityingly on my unhappier prospects, pronounce reparable my immediate lowliness, and comradely accolades will be bashfully enshrined once again.
We will luxuriate entranced in a merriness evergreen, eschewing senseless secrecies, validated, vivacious, and nevermore woebegone.
Fettucine.
Treasures.
That completes my chronicle.
Yours, ultracool, heedfully wrangling vitriolic wildfires better in future,
SibyllaXX
(Naturally, plentiful spoonfuls of sparkiest nectarine and tamarillo sherberts will be my offering, if your simpatico surmounts my shabbiest desertion.)
I risk looking up.
He is smiling. “You had me at hideosity.”
“I took the liberty of a few spelling cheats.”
He nods gravely. “That’s okay.”
I hand his letter to me back to him, resealed in an envelope with his name on the outside. “I didn’t read it.”
“You can if you like; it’s nothing you don’t already know,” he says. “And you already heard some edited highlights.”
I shake my head. “Nuh-uh—it’s the one thing I could do to show you I’m your friend.”
“I know you’re my friend, Sibylla.”
I’m floating.
The absence of pain is powerful.
So now if I can just catch up on some work, and figure out where the hell I am with Ben, everything is shaping up kind of okay for the end of term. Because finally, it’s countdown time—the last ten days. What I’ve been hanging out for since day one. It gives me a pang, though, not the spike of joy I would have thought. Seriously, if I’m getting nostalgic…
Annie is becoming obsessed with our impending astronomical event, the lunar eclipse.
Someone made the mistake of showing her Melancholia, a great movie in which a planet, Melancholia, may or may not be on a collision course with planet Earth. Spoiler alert: Turns out it is on a collision course, and in the last scene Melancholia hits Earth, and it’s a giant blinding ka-boom, good night, folks. We were crowded around a Mac in Bennett House watching it, and at the end everyone sat in complete stunned silence for a while.
The kid in the film makes a simple instrument to measure and monitor the planet Melancholia’s position relative to Earth: a circular wire loop on the end of a stick will, when you look through the loop, show if the planet is getting smaller (farther away) or larger (closer) relative to the circumference of the loop.
So Annie has made her o
wn wire loop-on-stick measuring instrument and is worrying nonstop that the moon is going to crash into Earth.
We have all at different times now during the course of the day reminded her that Melancholia is a movie. It’s fiction. There is no such planet as Melancholia. The moon is not about to crash into Earth. And so on.
But this is the girl who thought—no doubt secretly still thinks—that dinosaurs are mythological, so it’s no stretch for her to think we are bullshitting her about the possibility of the moon being dangerous.
“They thought Melancholia wouldn’t crash in the movie, too, for a while, then it did. So how do you know that the moon isn’t going to crash?” How can you argue when a fictional narrative is offered as evidence?
And she still doesn’t get what literally means, which doesn’t augur well for her future—or current—study of English. When she came back from the exeat weekend with a new haircut, for instance, she told anyone who’d listen, “I literally look like a piece of shit.” We tried to explain that this would mean she was like a big brown baguette-shaped thing, with no face or arms or legs. And she looked at us as if we were crazy as we became more and more hysterical and she became increasingly annoyed. “Are you girls on drugs? What does a baguette have to do with anything?”
“Nothing,” said Vincent. “They just don’t want to say it would mean you’d look like a giant crap.”
“You stay out of it. You’re disgusting,” Annie said. “I wish I could go home now. You literally all make me sick.”
“No,” Lou started explaining, “we don’t ‘literally’ make you sick—if we did you’d have a temperature, or be vomiting…”
Annie’s alarm is growing as her wire loop appears to indicate that the moon is indeed coming closer to Earth, that is to say: looking bigger relative to the circumference of the wire loop.
Michael takes her aside during Elevensies, and as Annie eats two nervous lemon slices, he explains the whole cycle of the moon to her, with diagrams, which is really kind and more involved with a human he doesn’t know very well than he would usually get.
He told her that at the moment the moon looks fourteen percent bigger, shines about thirty percent more brightly than usual, but even when it is as close as it ever gets, it’s still about two hundred and forty thousand miles from the earth.
“Since when are you so nice to people like Annie?” I ask him. Still privately feeling a rush of relief that he is here. He is safe. Thank you, universe.
He looks at me. “Good question. I technically am not. I did that because Louisa told me Annie was worrying herself into a state of insomnia, which meant Louisa was not really able to sleep, because she is the one in whom Annie can confide her fears.”
“Lou and Annie are friends?”
“Perhaps not ‘friends,’ but Louisa is… sympathetic.”
She’s nice enough to take the time to talk properly to Annie, and notice when she’s freaking out about planet crashes and bathroom ghosts. I used to be that person. But this term I got transplanted into the zone where you just talk to Annie to laugh at her.
sunday 2 december
The lunar eclipse, finally.
Sibylla and I are the last ones out, standing in the alien orange moonlight.
There is a line for the telescopes, an orderly procession of nerd-wonder. My name’s on the list, too. I want to see the shadow moving away from the moon’s surface. There is plenty of time.
The non–science fiends are happy enough to stand around, looking with their naked eyes, and passing around several pairs of binoculars.
Holly is so cold, and snuggling up to people. The girlie shit she carries on with annoys me. Truly, if you are cold: get a jacket.
The moon is slowly being obscured by the earth’s shadow as the light dims and the stab of each star’s light brightens.
As the night darkens further, and everyone else is busy gluing their awe to the sky with ooohs and wows, I see Holly tipping her face up toward Ben’s.
In the lunar eclipse we, the earth, obscure what is right before our eyes, the moon.
Lou and I almost miss it; we were cleaning up the Bennett kitchen after some cake-eating. It’s not worth leaving even one sticky fork in the house kitchens; the ants up here are intrepid. They must have read all the school PR material—they make the most of opportunities, take initiative, they are leaders, they work cooperatively together as a group, they enjoy the architect-designed facilities.
Lou and I are sharing a pair of really strong binoculars. Soon she’s got a turn booked at the Meade telescope on the oval with the other math nerds. They haven’t been overstating things—this is totally awesome. The moon is glowing red-orange, and it’s like we’re standing on a new planet. I feel a rush of trust and hopefulness that I’ll be able to figure stuff out. It’s as though I am exhaling properly for the first time in a couple of weeks. Against everything I thought, I have almost survived my time in the wilderness.
I glance around to find Ben, and the first thing I see is Michael enjoying prime telescope time. He and Mr. Epstein are yapping away together in astro-science heaven. Michael comes over to tell us he saw the Copernicus crater, and that the eclipse makes the moon look like someone’s taken a fuzzy-edged bite out of it. As the shadow slips farther from the face of the gleaming moon, the light level lifts slightly and I see Ben—I lift my hand to wave him over, but in the half-light and the crowd, he doesn’t see me. He’s standing next to Holly, tilting his head down toward her.
Jealousy bites; it can make you totally paranoid.
Holly smiles up at Ben. They’re just talking. But still I feel a little ping of disappointment—I should have been the one standing next to him.
One moment before I wake up at 2 AM, I know it for certain. I know it in the adrenaline rush. I know it in the heartache.
Jealousy bites; it can make you totally paranoid.
Holly smiled up at Ben. They were just talking. Only, as she stepped away from him, she let go of his hand.
Somehow that peripheral picture was there burned into my brain, even though I didn’t register it at the time.
Nay, we must think men are not gods.
I catch Ben right before breakfast. And, call me cheap, but I use Holly’s trick on him. Unfair? Sure, only I don’t care about fairness right now.
“She told you? Why would she do that?” He has the grace to look ashamed somewhere in there with the incredulity at Holly giving the game away. “I don’t know what was going on. It was stupid. How come she told you?”
“You agreed not to tell me?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You two have so much in common, what with deciding to tell me stuff, or not tell me stuff, assessing my failings as a girlfriend…”
“Okay, fine, get snarky, but can we get over it then? Move on?”
“And she kissed you, right?”
“Definitely.”
“And you kissed her back.” I say it firmly, rhetorically, as though I know it to be true, and wait for the blow.
“She told you that? Gee… gotta say, I’m surprised.”
“Not as much as I am.”
“No, I guess not.” He won’t meet my eye, and it’s just as well, because there’s no way I’m letting him see what a sucker punch he has landed.
If I could breathe enough to scream right now, the sound would be gulped down in one mouthful by a black hole of disappointment. I turn away.
He says, “It meant nothing. You know you just have to say the word, Sib.”
The word is good-bye.
“What? Nothing happened! Who told you?” Holly’s eyes are sparkling. I know the look. She’s the center of attention. Just the two of us here, but her being at the center is important.
“Who told me ‘nothing’?”
“I mean—it meant nothing, it was a little eclipse kiss. Little slip of the tongue.”
She’s making jokes about it? Really?
Seeing as how I already know it’s true, I am no
t quite sure why I want to press it, burning, into my flesh. Mark the betrayal, I suppose. Mark its significance. Make her say the words. “You kissed my boyfriend?”
“Didn’t you kind of just tell him you didn’t want him anymore? He’s basically semi-available, isn’t he?”
“He reported our conversation to you, and you thought it was a good time to make a move on him? What else has happened?”
But I realize I don’t want to know.
It’s time to stop calling this girl a friend.
“It’s not like you even really appreciate him, Sib. Be honest.”
Be honest? I’m shaking with the honesty of this moment. “Okay. I might not deserve it, but I need a better friend than you. And I feel sorry for you.”
I look at her. If I say another word, I’ll cry.
It’s past time to walk away.
I turn from her, thankful that we have a day of assessment tasks and no one will be in the mood for chitchat; no one will notice that I am walking around with a knife handle sticking out between my shoulder blades.
The Mount Fairweather experience culminates in the solo hike. Survival, self-reliance, and new life skills allow each student to take on this significant individual challenge. The “solo” is frequently cited as the high point of the term.
I’m doing it. I hope I don’t regret changing my mind.
I pick the closest possible site. If something drastic happens I can run back to school in a couple of hours. I choose the teacher food-drop-off option. I choose the walkie-talkie plus backup-sat-phone option. I am as un-solo as it is possible to be on the solo. But I will be alone, away from Holly and Ben, and as much as I want not to do it, I have to do it. “I’m calling the shots now,” trying-to-be-brave me tells wimpy me.
I’ve brought up a piece of fresh salmon for my dinner. Four minutes on the first side, two on the second. The bliss of not having it overcooked by Priscilla. I eat it with an avocado and tomato and red onion salad, and a fresh roll with lots of butter.