Selling the Drama

by Theresa Smith

  He paused at the door, keeping his back to her. "I'm going to get ready for school."

  "I rang Mum and she said we could stay home."

  "You shouldn't have done that. There was no reason for her to know about this. I'm not staying home, and neither are you. Get ready so we can head back." His voice was firm, authorative, and it gave her an uneasy feeling like no other. It was as though between having a shower and then coming out into the kitchen, he had erected a wall, a barrier that he had no intention of letting her penetrate.

  "Mum is really worried. She-"

  "Will get over it." He turned then, staring at her across the kitchen, a determined expression fixed upon his face. "She will have a busy day at work, get home frazzled, mention it at dinner, and then be satisfied when I assure her that I'm fine. That you're fine. That we're all just fine." He paused for a moment, as though weighing up his next words carefully before delivery. "There are some things that I am not going to talk about. Not with you, not with your parents, not with anyone. I've already said too much to you."

  He left the kitchen then, Charlotte remaining by the sink, the contrast of his moods leaving her reeling. The specifics of Toby's former family life were still unknown to her. After finding out that his father had murdered his mother after a long history of domestic abuse, she had not wanted to know more. 'More', and all that it encompassed, seemed too big for her to behold, coming from a household that was the very definition of normal, where no one ever really lost their temper and the most an argument would become is a parody of sarcastic remarks with a possible slammed door if it was a really serious fight. Charlotte could not help but wonder if her mother even knew the real story of Toby's life. Certainly, she would know the details of his parent's deaths. The police would have informed her on that. But what came before? Who really knew any of those details, except for Toby, and none of them had ever pressed him, sensitivity to his situation winning out over gruesome curiosity. Yet, when Charlotte pictured him vomiting on the street, the shock of what he had done registering within him, the look of fear, that very real look within his eyes as he stood in the shower, she knew with certainty that Toby had witnessed more than the occasional display of violence over the course of his life. There was terror within him that was untouchable, and if his sudden switch from distress to command was anything to go by, he intended on keeping it that way. Charlotte didn't know much about the human mind, but she was pretty sure that no matter how hard you tried to forget something bad, no matter how hard you wanted to purge it from your memory, burying it was probably not the way to go about it.

  Toby reappeared in the kitchen doorway, a fresh uniform in place. He looked at her with a raise of his eyebrows. "Are you ready? You haven't even moved!" His tone was vastly altered, lightly mocking, a smile playing about his lips.

  She stared at him, searching his face, yet he was giving her nothing. "Yeah, I'm all good to go." She forced a smile back at him as she pushed herself off the sink. She didn't even bother to ask him if he was alright. He would only lie to her and say that he was fine. She paused beside him in the doorway, looking up into his face, her eyes connecting with his.

  "You can trust me, you know?"

  Toby stared back down at her, and there was something in his gaze, a momentary shift that Charlotte caught, but then lost. He leaned down, his lips brushing her ear. "You don't want my nightmares. Believe me, I don't even want them. It's not about trust, Charlotte. Just leave it alone." Threading his fingers with hers, he tugged on her hand and pulled her out into the hallway, grabbing both of their school bags on the way out the front door.

  Dear Charlotte,

  Thanks so much for the little care package, it brightened up my day. I really am okay now, I promise. I don't think about it as much. Well, at least not all day every day. I can keep it in now and I guess that's about all I can hope for at this stage. I miss Dermott. He calls me from time to time, throws out the suggestion that he might come over here to see me, to stay for a while, but I haven't encouraged him. I'll wait and see if he really does want to come or if it's just something he's saying because he thinks it's what I want to hear from him.

  I have a job. A real job, not just a tending bar until all hours of the night type of job (although I do still have one of those as well, but I figure being busy is a good thing for me right now). I have taken on a job managing a craft store, a little coffee shop type of arts and craft outfit. A friend of mine has left for a year in Canada and wanted someone to take care of the place for her. I was happy to oblige and it gives me a whole new project to focus on. She's told me to put some of my jewellery into the shop to sell, she seems to think it will do well. I have enclosed a necklace I made especially for you. Let me know what you think and if your friends comment on it or not.

  So, tall dark and handsome came through for you in the end? I have to say, I wasn't holding out much hope. He seemed to be resisting you without fail for a very long time there. Ah well, it's testimony to your devotion that you waited him out. I may visit at Christmas and finally get to meet this young man you can't seem to stop going on about. Your mum seems quite taken with him also. I wish she had the confidence in me that she gives to you, maybe then I could live my life without her breathing down my neck and analysing my every move. Seriously, you would think that Ma and Pa left me to her in their will as well as half of their house.

  My baby would have been born today if I had not listened to Dermott. Nobody knows that but me, and now you. Maybe I'm not as well as I would like to think I am. But I'll get there in the end. You know me. Not much gets me down, just the occasional blip.

  Love and big sloppy kisses,

  Jenna xoxox.

  Charlotte folded the letter, tucking it into her bra strap. She sat in silence, staring out of her open window, a strange feeling of emptiness born out of deep sadness nestled within her. A knock on her door startled her. Turning, she saw her mother hovering in the doorway.

  "Did you get a letter from Jenna?"

  "You know I did. You saw it on the hall table."

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Eventually, Iris asked, "Is she good?"

  "She's great." Charlotte gave her mother an easy smile along with the answer she knew Iris was wanting to hear. The answer that gave absolution. Permission to ignore.

  "Good. What's Toby up to?"

  "Studying." Another answer that was expected.

  To tell Iris the truth was impossible. To open her mouth up and say that Jenna was depressed and falling apart at the seams, that Toby was brooding in a silence so thick he wouldn't even unlock his door for her. To stand up and say those things; it was an impossibility. Because Iris did not want to hear such things. She wanted a smile and a nod, a lie delivered smoothly, so she could walk away satisfied that she had done her parental duty for the night. Charlotte knew this, better than anyone else, because she had tried in the past to give Iris more, but Iris didn't want more. She wanted less, so little that Charlotte now deliberately gave her nothing at all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After thirteen years of practicing gymnastics almost every day, Charlotte had made the significant decision to scale back on account of an increasing commitment to her final year of school. The one discipline she simply couldn't part with though, was acrobatics. She loved it. Thrived on it, particularly the ribbons; the twirling artistry of it. It required a lot of total body strength, more than most people would realise, and there were times after a particularly lengthy session, when she had continued long past the time she should have, that she wore the pain of going overboard for days after. This never bothered her overmuch, the pleasure she drew from the sport far outweighing the pain of endurance. When she had first started up with acro, vanity had been her main motivation. She stuck with it though for reasons beyond this, and while she had no particular designs on running away with a circus, she still nursed a secret ambition of having a greater audience. One day. Maybe. Unlikely, but there was no harm in secret dreams. />
  Charlotte had joked to Toby not long ago that perhaps she could pay her way through uni by working as pole dancer in a strip club. He had been quick to reply that she had better be making good money at it because she would need it to cover his bail for all the times he was bound to be arrested for punching the shit out of any guy who so much as glanced at her tits on display. That Toby could joke about this was quite profound as far as Charlotte was concerned. After exposing all of the broken pieces of himself to her, he had promptly reeled them all back in, locking that vulnerability away until Charlotte gave up on trying to get him to talk about anything other than what was happening in the here and now.

  Iris had spent about half an hour of her precious time talking to Toby about the importance of facing your demons and learning to control your anger, insisting that he go and see a counsellor of some sort in order to help him live his life to its full potential. Charlotte could pin point the very moment he tuned Iris out; it was about thirty seconds after he shot Charlotte a look that spoke volumes about how grateful he was she had outed him to her mother. The thing with Iris though, was that she was essentially a starter but not a finisher, so when she insisted Toby see a counsellor, she left it to him to organise it all, considering her work with him as done, and neglected to follow through on ensuring he actually did go and see someone. Given Toby's reluctance to talk about anything deep whatsoever, Charlotte was surprised to find out that he did indeed go and see someone, but only once. He pronounced the entire concept of therapy as bullshit and shut down any further comments about the topic. Iris never asked him about it at all. Royce seemed completely absent from the entire event, leading Charlotte to believe that her mother had decided on handling it herself, which of course meant not at all.

  While there were definite perks to having parents that pretty much treated you like an adult and left you to your own devices, there were times when Charlotte thought a little meddling might not go astray. Perhaps Toby may have gotten a greater reaction if he had actually killed Damian as opposed to just beating the shit out of him. Hard to tell though, with Iris and Royce. It had taken her mother nearly an entire week to approach the topic with Toby in the first place.

  There did however, as the months slipped by, appear to be a change taking place within Toby. He did not get into any more fights, although if truth be told, Charlotte was pretty sure that had more to do with fear amongst the general populace at school rather than any efforts at control on Toby's part. That aside, he was a lot less moody, and appeared happier in general. To a certain degree, Charlotte put that down to their own relationship, and this was not out of conceit. He made her happy, and she was completely without doubt that she did the same for him. Maybe, in the end, his way of dealing with things was best for him.

  For someone who liked to hide his inner self away, he was surprisingly expressive about his feelings towards her. Charlotte found it hard to articulate the same back to him, not because she did not feel the same way, but because he always seemed to beat her to it, and it seemed to her incredibly lame to just say something back to someone all the time. She loved him with a fierceness that had taken some getting used to and there were times when telling him she loved him seemed not entirely enough, so instead, she said nothing at all. She figured he got the message pretty clearly anyway. She had always been more of an action girl, preferring to demonstrate her feelings in preference to declaring them, and so far, he had made no protestations about her frequent demonstrations.

  Charlotte towelled off her workout sweat and pulled on a t-shirt and shorts over her gym suit. Toby loved to come and watch her workouts but they tended to clash with his many trainings for the three different football teams he played for. They had also quickly realised that it was a waste of time for Charlotte to train after his practices just so he could watch her spinning in the air with very little clothes on, so Charlotte now coincided her training with his own, always finishing earlier so she could get in a good ten minutes of watching him on the field, which never failed to put her in a good mood at the end of each day. Her father had bought an old car - emphasis on the old, which translated to no air-conditioning - for them to share. After almost an hour parked in the sun, it was a furnace that could not even be cooled by driving with all of the windows down. Charlotte was glad to be able to park under a tree at the oval where Toby was training.

  She was the only spectator today, which was not all that unusual. Parents rolled up for the games each week, but they were all a bit too old at seventeen and eighteen for parental audiences at training as well. There were often other girlfriends or younger players who liked to watch the older guys practice, but never a real crowd of any sort, more like a half a dozen people on a busy afternoon, tops. Charlotte sat on the bottom seat of the spectator stand, flinching as she stretched her legs out in front of her, rolling her shoulders as the familiar ache began to set in. She might need to take tomorrow off, the pain in her shoulder feeling just that small step beyond stretched, more akin to injury. Toby spotted her and gave her a quick wave which she returned with a smile.

  He was not the only one who had spotted her though, and Charlotte cringed as Pervy Porter looked over in her direction. Adopting what he probably thought was a casual manner, yet Charlotte knew was anything but, he wandered over to her, taking a seat right beside her, despite the emptiness of the stands and the complete lack of a need for him to even be sitting down during training. His nearness made her skin crawl, as did his every manner. She'd had enough creeps perving and trying to feel her up to last a lifetime, but she had always been able to put an end to their unwanted attentions. Even though sometimes that end had taken a nasty little turn - as had been the case with Damian, but he had been the only one so far who had ever hurt her on account of being rejected; most just resorted to jeering words knowing it was never going to happen before moving on.

  Porter was an entirely different matter altogether. For a start, he was a teacher, not one of hers thankfully, she had stopped doing HPE back in year ten, but still, he was at her school in a professional capacity, and he was also her boyfriend's football coach for the interschool team. Another fact about him that gave her cause for concern was that he was a man. An adult male who, if she had to hazard a guess, was probably in his late twenties. Her unease at his attentions was closely linked to both of these factors and she did not feel at all comfortable with her ability to hold off his interest. One could not merely tell a teacher to fuck off because he was creeping you out. Likewise, his age intimidated her. He was no teenage boy who could be dispensed with in the usual manner. The complications were clear. He was very clever too, or perhaps insidious was a more apt description. He was not overly obvious, was discreet with his targeting of her, picking his times and places quite well, such as now, an opportunity he obviously had no intention of passing up. Charlotte could not help but wonder if he had become a teacher purely for the opportunity to get his rocks off by perving on teenage girls.

  "Hello, Charlotte."

  She refused look at him, returning his greeting with a lacklustre enthusiasm.

  "Been working out again?"

  She swallowed back the taste of bile, keeping her gaze trained on Toby. "Yes. Training more than working out."

  "Right, my mistake. Toby mentioned you competed in gymnastics. Acro, that's what I believe he told me your discipline was. Nice."

  She felt her stomach turn over. He was pumping Toby for information about her. He really was a stalking creep. She reached up and grabbed at her shoulder, the tension she was feeling at his nearness making her already tense muscles lock up even further.

  "You must let me know when you next compete. I'd love to come and watch."

  Charlotte bit back the response she really wanted to make and remained wordless. Five more minutes. Fuck it, she would just go wait in the car, heat be damned. She would rather fry than endure another minute of this. His hand came to rest at the back of her neck, squeezing lightly, working at the muscles, moving acr
oss to her shoulder with the same massaging motions.

  "You must get sore; gymnastics is a demanding sport. I used to coach it, back when I was at uni. I could help you, if you wanted. One on one; it really is the best way to learn." As he spoke, in that smooth tone he always adopted, he continued to work at her shoulder and neck, his hand insistent.

  Sweat prickled her palms and her underarms; her stomach churned and clenched, nausea shifting within. She wanted to tell him to stop touching her, to get his hand off her and to never dare put it on her again. She wanted to get up, walk away knowing she had put him in his place, confident that he would not approach her again. Instead, she sat frozen, on the verge of passing out from the fear he was generating, gripping the seat either side of her so hard her hands were stinging. This was how you ended up molested, Charlotte thought, by people like him who knew exactly what they were doing and how to get away with it.

  He removed his hand then, leaning closer to her ear. "Think about it. You and I would make a great team. There are a lot of things I could teach you, Charlotte." He stood, jogging back out to the field for a post training debrief.

  Charlotte closed her eyes briefly, trying to quell the rising tide of vomit that was working its way up her throat. This was bad. This was in over your head kind of bad. Opening her eyes, she stood, waiting impatiently for Toby to finish up. Porter was talking to him, had his hand on Toby's shoulder as he leaned in, demonstrating some move with his free hand. He could make things difficult for Toby, if she did anything about this. He could kick him off the team for a start, make some bogus excuse as to why he had done it. Fortunately, Toby did not study HPE either, so at least he had no grade that would suffer at Porter's hands; despite loving sport, he'd had to compromise when making his subject selections, too many other choices that worked in with what he wanted to do in the long run winning out. As Charlotte watched Toby walk towards her, laughing with his fellow team mates, she knew, with a certainty born out of experience, that there was no way she could not tell him about this. Fall out be damned. He'd be furious if he found out later, and with an uneasy realisation, Charlotte had to acknowledge that the idea of Toby being disappointed in her lack of action initiated a greater sense of trepidation than any possibility of further proposition from Porter could have.