“You alright?” a guy said, coming up to me.
“Yep.”
Evan was talking, using his hands too much. Theodore wasn’t saying anything, just taking him in with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Are you sure? You kind of look like you might faint.”
I turned to the guy, ready to snap at him to go away, but he was looking at me with real concern. He had glasses on, and he sort of looked like a dad.
“Really, I’m okay. But thank you.”
“Good,” he said. Then, “This is all pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
Theodore was talking now, shaking his head. Evan’s palms went up, and I could read his lips. C’mon, man. I opened the camera on my phone screen, my finger so clammy I could barely do it.
“It’s so great when people actually stand up and say enough is enough, don’t you think?”
I turned to the guy, and he smiled at me, waiting for an answer.
“Yeah, it’s great.”
“And so peaceful, that’s the most important thing. I mean, maybe I’m stuck in the seventies, but I honestly think it’s the only way to make a change.”
“Yep.”
I turned back to Evan and Theodore, but they were gone. No!
I started walking forward, eyes sweeping across the people sitting cross-legged on the ground, the placards, the tents. I couldn’t see them. They were gone, totally gone. I wanted to cry. That stupid man! I should have just told him to go away.
I tried to take a breath, to think. They couldn’t just disappear. I closed my eyes, breathed in, then out, then whirled around again. There. There they were. Coming out of a tent. Evan’s hand in his pocket. He caught my eye and gave a minute shrug. Then strode toward me.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “He wouldn’t do it out here in the open. But I got it.”
“Really?” I wanted to kiss him.
“Yep, a hundred bucks.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“He was so strange about it,” he said. “He wouldn’t give it to me at first. Kept saying that he didn’t actually sell it direct. I was trying to figure what it actually was, you know? I asked him if it was good stuff and he looked at me like I was some creep and said he’d never used it. Said it’s not like I have to, or something like that.”
“Hey, mate!”
We both looked up. Theodore was there, walking toward us. He was looking at me. Straight at me, an unreadable expression on his face.
“One more thing,” he said, stopping a few meters short of us.
Evan stepped toward him. Theodore looked at me again, then turned so his back was to me. Fuck. He knew. I could just hear what he said.
“Don’t use it all at once, alright? I forgot to say. There’s enough for like five in there.”
Theodore turned to look at me again, then walked back over to his friends. If it were a cartoon, my mouth would be hanging open, hitting the floor with shock. He didn’t remember. He didn’t even recognize me.
12
The baggy was green and white. It had pictures of bubbles around the brand name, and the top was folded and stuck down with a piece of clear tape. It was made from that thin, plastic waterproof paper, and was about half the size of my hand.
“We’ve got to try it,” I said, eventually, as we walked up the hill.
“Really?” Evan asked.
We’d gotten the bus back in silence. There was too much going on in my head, all too muddled and twisted to say out loud.
“Yeah. If we’re going to know what to do. Take it to the police or just to the Dean, we need to know what it actually is.”
He looked at me. “I’m up for it. Sounds fun! Like a Lucky Dip.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Honestly? I’d say it’s that ADD drug—what’s it called?”
“Can’t remember. Why would it be that?”
“Apparently heaps of students use it to study. It just makes you really focused and awake.”
“Oh,” I said, slightly disappointed. I’d been imagining something more damning. Cocaine maybe, or speed.
“But apparently it’s fun just to take too, makes you talk a mile a minute.”
“When should we do it?”
“Why not now?”
“What if it really is just washing-up powder?” I asked. “Will we die?”
“I doubt it. I think it’d just make us feel sick.”
“That’d be pretty funny,” I said, and even I could hear how fake my voice sounded.
Honestly, I was scared. Not because it was an epically dumb thing to do. No, I was scared of what I might do, what I might say if I started talking a mile a minute like he’d said. I was afraid of what I might tell him.
* * *
In the end we decided do it at Evan’s house, after dinner. Not his real house, it was too possible that Aiden would come home and catch us acting strangely. No, we’d go to the half-built house that he sometimes slept in midway down the hill.
I had dinner with Bea, half listened to her talking about Aiden. She was smitten, she’d decided. He was the one. When I told her I was going to go hang out with Evan she grinned at me.
“If you marry him and I marry Aiden, then that means you’ll be my daughter in-law.”
So she did know about Aiden.
“That’s just weird,” I said. “Plus, it’s really not like that.”
“Yeah, right.”
I was surprised sometimes at how little Bea understood me. She thought she knew me better than anyone, that was clear, but really she had absolutely no idea. I often wondered how she would react if she did know. If I sat her down one day and told her all my truths. I don’t know what she’d say, but I know her eyes would be different when she looked at me.
* * *
The living room to Evan’s hideout house was identical to my own in layout. The carpet hadn’t been put down, so the floor was unsanded pine floorboards, which were incredibly dirty. I guess it was the lack of glass in the window; everything was grimy with old dust. It smelled of rot.
Evan was already there. He’d opened up his sleeping bag and put it on the floor like a picnic mat. He was sipping on a can of beer, and he offered me another, but I shook my head. He’d filled a jug with water and brought a little portable stereo, which was now quietly playing the sounds of a woman’s soaring voice.
“Is this Florence and the Machine?” I asked.
“Yeah, you don’t like it?” he asked. “I thought this would be your kind of thing.”
I wasn’t completely sure if he was making fun of me or being serious, so I kept looking around the room.
“Is that a candle?” I asked.
“You’re very perceptive,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down.”
I didn’t.
“Why do you have a candle?”
It was a thick cream-colored one, like a church candle.
“What? You think I’m trying to get you high and then seduce you?”
I glared at him. “Maybe.”
He glared back, incredulous. “It’s about to get dark, you idiot. It’s not like the lights work here.”
I looked up. There wasn’t even a light bulb in the socket.
“Oh,” I said, and sat down feeling completely ridiculous. “Sorry.”
“So you brought it, right?”
“Yep.”
I took the packet from my pocket and showed him. He got his lighter out and began flicking it next to the candlewick. “I’m kind of excited about this. We can do drugs and still feel holier-than-thou.”
I put the edge of my fingernail underneath the sticky tape and pulled it off, then opened the packet carefully. Gingerly, I put my nose toward it and sniffed, expecting a sharp chemical smell, but the scent was barely there.
“Doesn’t smell like laundry powder,” I said. “Doesn’t really smell like anything.”
“How should we do this?” he asked.
“I don’t know. We could eat it? Like sherbet.”
“Why don’t we snort it? That seems more realistic.”
He stood up, and I followed him into the kitchen. Even though it was the same shape as mine, it was even less recognizable than the living room. There were no skirting boards, and holes in the wall that I hoped were for wiring, not mice. There were empty caverns where the fridge and the dishwasher were meant to go and they were filled with dried-up leaves, perhaps caught from drafts that had swept through the glassless windows over the years. The countertops were finished though, with the same shiny fake marble as ours. Evan tipped out some of the powder onto it.
“Not all of it!” I said.
“I’m not. Geez, you’d be no fun to party with.”
“Shut up.”
He took his wallet out of his back pocket, and withdrew his driving license. Carefully, he separated the powder into two and then attempted to create two thin lines. I took his wallet and looked inside.
“I wish you had a fifty. That would seem way more glam.”
“Spent all my dough on this stuff!” he said.
“Oh yeah.” I withdrew a five. “I really will pay you back. I’m starting next week at Nancy’s.”
“No stress,” he said. “Are you ready?”
My heart pulsed. “This is sort of exciting!”
My fears of exposure were starting to dissipate. Instead, I wondered if it was going to be like in the movies. Whether, in just a few minutes, we’d be dancing around the estate with huge pupils. I wondered if everything would seem beautiful and nice and maybe I actually would want to have sex with Evan.
“Ladies first.”
I carefully rolled the five into a tube. If the kitchen hadn’t been so dark and grimy, I might have felt like a rock star.
“Whatever you do, don’t sneeze,” he said.
“Shut up.”
I’d never done this before, but I’d seen it in the movies enough times to know what to do. I put the tube just inside my left nostril, put a finger over the right one, then sniffed. The powder shot up my nose and down the back of my throat, burning the whole way. I spun on the spot and started coughing. The taste was unbearable; it was choking me. I heard a tsk sound and turned to see Evan hand me a can of beer.
I took it from him and chugged, letting the cold liquid wash down the claggy acidic feeling.
“You didn’t even do the whole line,” he said.
“Yeah, well you can have the rest of mine if you like. That was horrible.”
I passed him the note, then sniffed again and rubbed my nose. It still felt like it was burning.
“Your turn,” I said. “That better not have been fucking detergent.”
He leaned down and put the note to his nose. I couldn’t really see what he was doing, only the back of his head, but I heard the loud snorting noise. He looked at me, and smiled triumphantly, but his eyes looked all shiny and he held out his hand for his beer.
“Nasty, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice sounding weak. He was holding in a cough, I could tell.
“Can you feel anything?” I asked as we went and sat down on the sleeping bag in the living room.
“Maybe a bit,” he said. “You?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, hugging my knees. Really I was just feeling tired.
He took a sip of his beer and then passed it to me. “So that guy,” he started, “he really did seem like a prick.”
“Yeah, he is.”
He was looking at me carefully, like he was debating on whether to say something.
“What? Spit it out,” I said. I was feeling a little bit nauseous, although I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining it.
“I was bullied too, you know,” he said. “These guys at school. They would say this awful stuff about my mum, and kept calling my dad a pedo, even though that doesn’t even make sense since they were the same age when he got her pregnant.”
“That sucks,” I said.
“Yeah, it was shit. They were always tripping me up and threatening to bash me after school and stuff. Anyway, what I mean is. I get it.”
“I wasn’t bullied,” I said. “That’s not what happened.”
“Oh,” he said. Then, “Really?”
“Yeah, it wasn’t like that. They were my friends, really.”
“The people who played the trick on you?”
“Yeah. I mean I hated them. I still hate them—they ruined my life. But it wasn’t a bullying thing.”
“Do you want to tell me?” he asked, and without even thinking I shook my head. I was feeling dizzy by then. Light-headed.
“One day?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, then sank down so my head was on the floor. “Are you feeling anything yet?”
“Nah,” he said.
I closed my eyes. The light from the candle was spinning around too fast.
“I don’t think it’s working,” I said.
“You’re slurring,” he said, the words running together.
“So are you.”
I’m not sure exactly what happened then. I remember wanting to tell him the room was spinning, but I’m not sure if I actually managed to say it out loud. I think I remember his hands touching my hair softly. It’d felt nice. I think I might have moved closer to him, to get the warmth from his body, but I’m only guessing.
What I do remember was waking up. It was almost pitch-black. Just the faintest glow of the streetlight accentuating the edges of things. I felt like I had swallowed sand. My mouth and throat were painfully dry. I tried to move my tongue, but I couldn’t. It was glued to the bottom of my mouth. I rolled over, and my stomach cramped with the movement. Reaching out, I felt something next to me. I ran my hand over it. It was warm, its surface a rough material.
Evan groaned and my breath caught in my throat. I’d forgotten he was there. I was touching his leg.
“You okay?” I said, but it sounded weird. I could barely remember where we were, or why on earth we were there. It was then that I noticed how freezing cold I was. I was shaking all over.
I remembered the candle, and wondered when it had gone out. Rubbing my hand back up his leg, I found his jean pocket, the lighter a hard rectangle inside it. It took me a while to get it out. My fingers were clumsy. Finally, when I did, I squeezed down to light it. After three attempts, it worked. I leaned toward the candle, but it was gone. It had melted all the way to nothing, so it was just a hard white puddle, the silver disk that held the wick in place had risen to the top. My thumb quivered, and the lighter went out. I grabbed the jug of water and started drinking. The sandy feeling was still there, but the water released my tongue.
Switching the lighter again, I held it toward Evan’s face. His eyes were open, and he was looking at me. He was still sitting where he had been, propped up against the wall. He’d had more than me, I remembered, plus the beers.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Some water?” he croaked.
I passed him the jug, and he drank directly from it as I had. In the flickering shadow from the lighter I could see his Adam’s apple flinch with each swallow. Finally, he put the jug down and rubbed a hand over his mouth.
“That fucking prick,” he said.
I just stared at him, my head still woozy and slow.
“That was Rohypnol, or something like it. The dickhead is making roofies.”
13
We were okay, I’m sure you’ll be glad to know. Well, I was okay, clearly, since I’m sitting here right now. But Evan was fine too. I sent a letter to the Dean of the school with all the information I had, plus what was left of the powde
r. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like that wasn’t enough. So I called the police and left an anonymous message explaining what Theodore was doing, and telling them where he hid his stash.
The City Square campsite was on the news the next day. The police raided it. I wonder if you were one of them? I remember watching the news, my limbs still heavy and slow, and seeing the video of the cops coming to clear the people away in a long black line. I saw him, only for a flash, but I was sure it was him. The nice man with glasses who kept trying to talk to me that day. There was blood on his face. Really, I was looking for Theodore, but if he’d stuck it out until then, I didn’t see him.
By the time I was well enough to go and check, Theodore’s room was empty. All his stuff was gone. I don’t know if the police got to him, or if he was just expelled. All I was sure of was that it had worked. I had ruined him, just like I had set out to do. He would never know it was me that had done it, but it didn’t matter.
For the first time in years, I felt good. I’d like to be able to tell you that it was only because I had done something good, put a stop to the horrible thing Theodore had been doing. But that wasn’t all it was. I had righted a wrong, put a piece of myself back together. The feeling was addictive.
Part 3
IMPULSIVITY
2008
14
None of this is the point though, is it? You won’t want to hear about how I took down another entitled asshole who didn’t even see women as people. They are a dime a dozen, right? No, you’ll only want to know what I did, and why I did it. My crime and my motive. My mind has taken me down a tangent. Maybe because I like that story better than the other. I like the story where I’m the hero, where good and bad are clearly defined and I’m on the right side for once. What happened next wasn’t so simple. But really, there is no point telling you about that yet. There’s no point in you hearing about my revenge, if I haven’t told you the cause. I do have a cause, trust me. It may have been a long time ago now, but it is not something I’ll ever forget.
The Spite Game Page 7