“In my bag again, right down at the bottom.”
“Does that mean he sneaked in here?”
“Whatever, read it!” Cass’s squeak.
“Gee, calm down.”
“Shut up!”
“Shut up, listen. ‘Dear Mel, I watch you smile and it’s like an electric surge straight to my heart—’”
“Wow!”
“Shut up!”
“‘I want to talk to you.’” Mel’s voice was serious now. “‘Somewhere we can be private. Meet me behind the school tonight at 8pm.’”
“Fuck. I don’t know Mel—that sounds creepy.” I knew Saanvi would be against it.
“But it’s Theodore—it has to be!” And I knew Cass would be on my side.
“Don’t go!”
“Shut up—it’s romantic!”
I had to hold back my laughter.
* * *
Part of me had thought about sticking around school. Waiting until night fell and Mel came out to wait for her secret admirer. It would be hilarious. But it was almost better not to wait. Just to be at home hanging out with Bea and watching television, knowing she was out there in the dark.
When I fell asleep that night my dreams were violent. I was hitting Mel with a bat and she was screaming for help and I was laughing. Enjoying the sound of her bones crackling with each blow.
I woke up in a cold sweat. I tried to calm myself. Breathed in and out deeply. If I really was a psychopath, I wouldn’t feel guilty about what I was doing. Mel probably didn’t even show up. If she did, Cass and Saanvi would have accompanied her; it would have all been a big fun joke. I remembered when we had run around the estate in the dark, making ghost noises and trying to scare each other. I wanted to cry. Instead I got up.
For the first time since we’d moved in, there was a glimmer of dawn as I walked down the hill through Lakeside Estate. The sky was graphite rather than the impenetrable black that I was used to. I could see the edges of window frames, the detail of grass and cement and brick. The air didn’t have the same bite to it.
They hadn’t made any progress on the half-built houses. Some were so close, just missing glass in the windows and doors in the door frames. I wondered if it made my mother sad, to see all this wasted potential.
Through a glassless window I saw a movement. I froze, primed to run. But I was a psychopath now, and psychopaths didn’t feel fear. So I took a step closer. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and shone the light into the square. It lit up a book, some scrunched-up food wrappers, then, the corner of something bigger. The light traced up the folds of fabric until it reached the top. It was a sleeping bag. A full one. The person inside it stared up at me. Then I was running. Running out the gates to the bus stop.
It wasn’t until I boarded the bus that I realized I knew that face. It wasn’t some drifter or homeless man or crazed murderer watching and waiting. It was the boy from across the road. Evan.
* * *
In science class Mel looked sad. She must have gone last night after all. Other people might not have noticed the change in her. But I’d studied the back of her shoulders all year. The set of them today, as the teacher mumbled about atoms or whatever, told me she’d spent last night waiting alone in the dark.
After class, when she bent to put her books in her bag, she caught my eye.
“Wait,” she mouthed.
“See ya,” Theodore said.
“Bye,” she called after him.
After everyone else was gone, she turned to me. “What are you doing tonight?” she asked.
* * *
“So, what do you think?” she asked me later, as we sat on her bed. The notes were spread out all around us, my left-handed scrawlings of sweet nothings.
I shrugged, and pretended to have a closer look at the most recent letter, the one that asked her to meet at the school yard at night. Since I’d gotten there she’d kept telling me she had a secret. We’d had dinner with her parents and then she’d pulled me upstairs, saying she was ready to tell me and made me swear I would never tell another living soul, saying I was the only one she trusted. I knew there was no point in calling her out, asking her about why she would be so awful to me at school and so overly nice to me here. I was playing my own game now, and she was the one who didn’t know the rules.
I pretended to read them as she’d changed into the gray marle men’s T-shirt she always wore to bed, its cotton overstretched and saggy.
“It’s definitely a guy,” I said after I’d finished the final letter.
“Obviously. The handwriting is too terrible to be a girl’s.”
“Do you think it’s Theodore?”
“Dunno. Want one?” she asked, holding out a bowl of miniature green pears. “They’re organic.”
I picked one out and took a bite; the sweet juicy flavor exploded in my mouth. I wiped my chin and smiled at her.
“They’re awesome, aren’t they? So much better than the usual supermarket shit. You know the pesticides can give you a hairy chest? And give men man-boobs.”
“Isn’t that chicken?” I said, only half listening as I pretended to be fascinated by the contents of the most recent note. She looked at it over my shoulder.
“The weirdest thing,” she said, leaning close, mouth full. “I swear he was there watching me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There was someone in the shadows. I saw them.”
“What about Cass and Saanvi—didn’t they come with you?”
Mel rolled her eyes and took another bite. I could hear her chewing, the wet squishing sounds inside her mouth. Sometimes I found her revolting.
“I pretended I wasn’t going to go. They were going to be too annoying about it. You’re the only one I’ve told.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you get things that they just don’t understand.”
She was looking at me closely, trying to see if her games were working.
“What do they think you’re doing tonight?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“Pfft, who cares? I’m sick of them. Are you staying over?”
“Maybe,” I said, then took another bite of my pear. The juice squelched out of it, running over my chin and down my neck. She leaned forward and licked it up, her tiny cat tongue rasping up my throat.
“Please stay,” she said, close enough so her sweet breath tickled my cheek.
I wanted to run. I couldn’t bear for it to happen again, to be hurt again. But psychopaths don’t get hurt; they dish out the pain. If I was really a psychopath, I would be able to stay.
So instead I shrugged and said, “You’re not going to tell me that you need to practice kissing, are you?”
“Fuck off,” she said, “I learned how to kiss in primary school.”
Her voice was confident, but as she turned to put the core of her pear back in the bowl I saw the uncertainty flicker over her face.
“Fine. But can I borrow a T-shirt to wear to bed?” I asked. The corners of her lips twitched and I knew what she would say.
“No, you’ll get it all gross and sweaty.” She stared at me, waiting. Expecting a side glance, a quiver of the mouth, a question in the eyes. I wasn’t going to give them to her.
“Fine,” I said.
I got under the covers and pushed the notes onto the floor. I watched as she stared at them, floating like embers onto the cream carpet. They were important to her, it was clear then. But she soon looked back to me when I began to take off my clothes. I dropped piece by piece down on top of the notes, stripped right down to nothing. The feeling of my bare skin against her bedsheets was weird. I wanted to laugh. But I didn’t. I just stared at her. It was her that looked rattled then, but not for long. I should have known that. She sat down on the quilt next to me.
“Let’s see,” she said, and pull
ed the quilt down. Every part of me wanted to shrink away, to cover myself, but I forced my muscles to remain rigid as she surveyed my flesh. We watched as my nipples hardened.
“Are you cold, or turned on?”
“Cold.”
She raised a leg over me, like she was mounting a horse, and sat down on my hips.
“You’re really beautiful, you know?”
It sounded like she’d heard it in the love scene of some bad rom-com. I tried to think of how a psychopath would respond, but my mouth had gone too dry.
“Promise me you’ll come to Europe with me.”
She looked down at me like I was everything, so I nodded. She took the T-shirt off then, pulled it over her head and shook her hair, swapping from the hero to the heroine in whatever movie she was performing in her head. Still, it was cool to see her naked. I only had a moment to take it in, dark nipples, tan lines, a mole just above her belly button, before she pressed her warm flesh over mine. She kissed me and the moment was exquisite. Perfect. Her skin so soft, her mouth hard and wet. She made a little sound, a girlish whimper. She was still acting. I wanted her to stop.
I pushed my fingers into her underwear and felt her body shake and twitch against me. The moan she made then wasn’t for anyone; it was real. Her fingers were in my hair, her teeth bit onto my shoulder, but still in the back of my mind was tomorrow. As I moved her underwear aside and pushed my fingers in harder, right down to my knuckles, finding the right spot with my thumb and rubbing against it lightly, I thought of all the times she’d made me cry.
“Fuck, Ava,” she kept whispering, “fuck.”
As she copied what I was doing, pushing my thighs open, as the tremble began going through my own body, as her fingers poked and dipped and I felt something different, something bigger than I’d ever felt when I’d tried this on my own, I was still thinking of how I’d get even. As her hand clapped over my mouth to stop me from making a sound, as the pleasure crashed onto me in waves, I was imagining her reaction when she realized I had won.
36
I didn’t give her a chance this time. Once we reached the end of her street the next morning, I let her walk ahead. I went toward the back entrance of the school, let her have the front. I kept my head down, my eyes glued to my feet as I walked from class to class. I kept as far away from her as possible during the soccer match on the oval in PE. Still, I knew it would happen. Like throwing a ball into the air: no matter how high it went, it was going to come back down. I was just waiting for it.
After PE ended I saw the way they were looking at me in the change room, side glances and stifled giggles. I rubbed a hand over my back, half expecting there to be a sign saying Kick Me. They were only slightly more original. I didn’t notice until science class, when I went to pull out my textbook. Everything was covered in slime and bits of eggshell. They must have put eggs in my bag during PE, and as I’d walked to class they’d broken up into bits. I raised my hand and asked to go to the bathroom, where I took the contents from my bag, bit by bit, and tried to wipe the slime off with wet toilet paper. It had already soaked into the edges of the pages though. They’d stink soon enough. I went back to class and sat staring at the back of Mel’s head, seething.
As I walked out of class the laughter started. At first it wasn’t loud enough to make me think it was at me. But, as I walked down the corridor the laughter became stronger.
“Hey, psycho,” Theodore called, and I turned, as if to my name, “you’re fucking filthy.”
He was grinning, so proud of himself. If he was involved I knew it must be bad.
“You actually make me want to puke, you know?”
Mel appeared, face swathed in fake concern.
“Theo!” She slapped his arm. “Don’t be mean.”
She walked up to me, slipped her hair over her shoulder so that the people by the lockers could see her clearly and held something out to me. It took me a moment to realize it was a tampon. She was holding it between her thumb and forefinger by the end of its string, so it dangled in front of my nose. The smile on her face was one I knew well now, the smile that said she’d won. She hadn’t.
“Psycho!” someone called after me. It was meant as an insult, but the word only gave me a feeling of power.
When I got into a bathroom stall I took my skirt off. It was red pen ink, it didn’t even look like blood. She must have snapped her red pen in half, then put the ink on my chair while I’d been trying to get the egg out of my bag. I sat on the toilet seat in my underwear and took out a paper and pen.
Dear Mel, I want you. Every time I watch you walking home from school, I’m waiting to make my move. I watched you last night. I was outside your window. I want to fuck you so bad, I want to make you scream. From your admiring admirer.
* * *
The next day, Mel didn’t come to school. During lunchtime I sneaked around to her house and put another letter in her mailbox, just a note folded in half with her name on the front in my terrible left-handed scrawl.
Dear Mel, why won’t you reply to me? I know you love me. You are torturing me, so soon I will be torturing you. I’m going to make you scream. I’m going to make you bleed. SOON.
37
By the end of the week, people were talking. Some said Mel had been talent scouted at the shops, and was now being primed for the catwalk in Milan. Others said that she had glandular fever. There was only a week until the final exams, and then all this would be over. School would end, and I would have played the last hand. I would have won.
It was in the final PE class when it finally came out. Saanvi and Cass were whispering in the corner of the change room, heads bent close together.
“Oi, slut!” Veronica Britson called to Saanvi from across the room.
“What?”
“Ha, you answered!” squealed Veronica.
“Ha ha, yeah, good one.”
“Where’s Mel? I’ve been hearing the weirdest shit about her.”
Saanvi and Cass looked at each other.
“She said it was okay,” said Saanvi.
“Yeah, I know, but...” Cass trailed off.
Saanvi lowered her voice, knowing full well that everyone in the room was listening. “She’s being stalked.”
“What?” squeaked Veronica.
“Yep. Some creepy guy is in love with her and has been sending her weird letters.”
“That’s awful! Poor Mel.”
“He’s been following her home too.”
“The guy says he’s got a gun! He’s just waiting for his chance to kidnap her,” added Cass.
“Fuck!” said Veronica.
“I know,” Cass breathed.
“Don’t tell anyone though, alright?” said Saanvi. Veronica nodded solemnly. Everyone else in the change room quickly looked away.
* * *
I thought that would be the end of it. The last day of classes came and went. No one gave me a hard time. Mel wasn’t there. It was over. I had made it out alive.
It was on a Sunday night, the night before exam week, when my mum called me downstairs. I had been trying to study, and starting to comprehend just how behind I was in almost every class. I had my science textbook turned back to the beginning of the semester and I was desperately trying to teach myself the entire syllabus.
“Ava!” she called again. “Come down here.”
Throwing down my pen, I ran down the stairs into the living room.
“What?” I said, irritated.
“Don’t you know that girl?”
I looked over at the television. It was A Current Affair. The made-up woman in an electric-blue pantsuit was talking into the camera. Behind her, there was an image of Mel, with the headline in big bold letters: STALKED.
“What the fuck?”
“Ava!”
“Sorry.”
&n
bsp; “And now to Tracey Mingum with this exclusive report. And a warning, some viewers might find this content distressing.”
The word exclusive came over the screen, and then cut to Mel, sitting in her room and staring out the window.
“At first I thought it might be a boy from school, you know? Someone who really liked me.” Mel’s voice sounded tinny in voice-over.
The screen cut to her walking down the empty school corridor.
“At first the letters were really nice. So I guess that’s why I didn’t tell my parents.”
The screen cut to Mel looking straight into the camera.
“Then what happened?” a sad-sounding female voice said from behind the camera.
Mel looked down at her hands, and I peered closer, trying to figure out if she was acting.
“The notes started getting...violent. The things they said—” she sniffed “—it was horrible. I’ve never been so scared.”
The image cut to Mel walking down her street, then turning to look over her shoulder.
“‘I’m going to make you scream,’” she read aloud, her voice crackling. “‘I’m going to make you bleed.’”
The video cut back to Mel looking straight into the camera, tears streaking her face.
“I used to have dreams, you know? And now I feel so lost.”
“What were your dreams?”
“I was going to go to Europe, be an actress. But now I’m too afraid to even leave my house!”
I wanted to feel indignant, to tell my mum to turn it off. That’s what a psychopath would probably do. Instead, I felt something clawing and gnashing inside me. Something that was getting bigger and bigger with every second.
* * *
I stared at the back of her head as she huddled over her test. I hadn’t expected her to show up. I didn’t think any of us had. When she entered the gym the room had gone silent. The whole of year twelve was in that room; that was three hundred desks, three hundred stressed-out, gossiping seventeen-year-olds and still... Not a sound.
It was halfway through; the tick of the clock was amplified like a clichéd nightmare. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t stop staring at the back of her head, feeling cold. A psychopath would be glad; a psychopath would be happy to hurt her. Those words, when I wrote them they’d meant nothing. But when I heard Mel read them aloud on the show, they sounded so different. So violent and horrible. I didn’t know how they could have come from me. The noxious taste was in my mouth again, spinning my stomach, clogging my throat. A whisper rumbled through the crowd. I turned to look out the big windows. Two uniformed police officers were walking with the principal through the quad.
The Spite Game Page 19