by Karen Healey
The prints of my family were tucked in my nightstand drawer. I didn’t want them on display.
Bethari was just sitting there, like a breathing statue, eyes fixed unwaveringly on my face.
“Uh,” I said. What did people talk about in the future? Well, school was standard. “What’s your specialty at Elisabeth Murdoch?”
The school was one for talented students, and everyone was supposed to have a specialty that they trained in. Marie’s had been biology, and she’d assured me that I’d love the training and attention from the specialty teacher.
“Journalism,” Bethari said, and pinched her mouth closed again, as if every word was costing her money.
I had no idea why Marie thought I’d be friends with this snobby, closed-off girl, but I hadn’t had high hopes to start with. Most friend setups, in my experience, turned out pretty badly. It was the people you met by accident who worked out.
I met Alex when she was the girl in the seat opposite me on the train, crying behind her tattered book.
I ignored her sniffs for a little while, and then I put my hand out flat in front of her, palm up. I didn’t touch her. That didn’t seem right, somehow.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
The girl lowered the book, and for the first time I saw what had been done to her face. She had a big purple bruise right up her jaw, and half hidden behind her tangled fringe, her left eyebrow had a cut that was crusted over with red-black blood.
The fresh marks stood out over a pattern of pale yellow-and-brown bruises, like the ones I built up over soccer season. Someone had been beating her for a long time.
“No,” she said. She was so direct about it, looking me straight in the eye, that I just let the next words spill out of my mouth.
“Who did that?” I asked.
“Foster parents,” she said. “Do you have any painkillers?”
I rummaged around in my backpack, fighting the sway of the car as we went under the West Gate Bridge, and found some ibuprofen. She swallowed two of the pills dry. When she tipped them into her mouth, her long sleeve rode back, and I saw the sores wrapped around her wrist, red and raw.
I gasped.
“Oh yeah,” she said, and looked absently at the marks. “They tied me up the first time I ran away.”
“Where are you going now?”
“Anywhere.”
“Come home with me,” I said. I was twelve years old, and I’d just started taking the train home from soccer practice by myself. I didn’t know what to do, or what to say in the face of something this awful. But I was horrified, by the cruelty, by her matter-of-fact reaction to it, and I wanted to fix it. “You can stay with us. My mum’s really nice.”
She looked me over, taking her time, assessing the threat, and happy to let me know she was doing it.
“Okay,” she said finally, and put the book on the seat beside her. “I’m Alex.”
“Tegan,” I said, and from then on—even though she didn’t stay with us long and went to live with a different, much better set of foster parents, even though we argued and teased each other a lot, even though she grew up and got political and hated soldiers and dragged me to rallies when I would much rather have been home with my guitar—we were friends.
I didn’t think things with Bethari would go so well.
“That’s a pretty headscarf,” I blurted, grasping for any topic at all.
But that, of all things, got a reaction. Bethari’s hand rose protectively to her head. “I wear this as a symbol of my faith,” she announced. “I’m Muslim.”
I nodded.
“And no matter what my mother said, I need to know right away. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Of course not,” I said.
She was still watching me, and I realized that she wasn’t being unfriendly. She was being careful.
“A hundred years ago,” she said, “not many of your people were very accepting of Islam.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s so good that that’s changed.”
Bethari’s eyebrow popped up.
“No, I mean it!” I said. “My boyfriend was Sunni Muslim. People always assumed stuff about him. They said things—he hated it. It was awful.”
“You had a Muslim boyfriend?” she asked, probably not meaning to sound so disbelieving. “What was his name?”
“Dalmar,” I said. “He’d just… he’d be so happy things are better now. I wish he could see it.” And then I had to stop and duck my head to hide the tears, my face burning with just how stupid I must look. Upset over a guy who had been dead for forty-six years, who’d had a long and successful political career, and who married a woman he’d described as “the true love of my life.”
A woman who wasn’t me.
Okay.
I totally lied to you about not looking up my friends and family. It was the first thing I did as soon as I knew how to use Koko. I searched for everything on record, and I regret that more than almost anything else.
I wish I had chosen to remember them as they had been.
It’s just hard, all right? It’s hard, even when they had really great lives, like Dalmar and Alex did. Because they had those great lives without me—and feeling that way is stupid and petty and gross, but it’s still hard.
It was much, much worse when I found out about Owen. But that’s not relevant, and I don’t want to talk about it.
But I’ll tell you the truth from now on. I really will.
“Were you with Dalmar long?” Bethari asked after a strained moment.
“One day.” I gulped.
“Oh.” In my peripheral vision, I could see her hands twisting, the first nervous motion she’d made. “Well, was he pretty?”
My head came up. She was smiling, looking as uncertain and uncomfortable as I did.
“Yes,” I said, and a great big bubble of laughter rose from my stomach and out my throat, shattering into high-pitched giggles. “He was so pretty!”
She blinked at me, but it was the kind of infectious laughter you can’t resist, and she started giggling, too. “I can’t believe you said kooshy,” she snorted. “That’s what people were saying when I was a ween.”
“A ween?” I cackled. “What’s a ween?”
“A child! A wee one!”
“A kid?”
“Kid!” she howled, and we collapsed on my bed. Every time one of us started to slow down, the other would whisper “kooshy!” or “ween!” and we’d be off again.
Finally, I sat up, wiping tears from my eyes. “You have to teach me some better slang.”
“I will, if you teach me yours,” Bethari said. “Hey, who’s that?”
I followed her eyes.
On the back of my door was a print of that famous picture of John and Yoko. She’s wearing a black top and blue jeans, lying on her back with one arm raised. He’s totally naked, and curled up around her like a comma to her exclamation mark. Her expression is calm, unsmiling. His is passionate as he presses a kiss to her cheekbone. Her eyes are open. His are closed. But they curve into each other; her arm is around his back, her hand just visible at his side; his leg is lifted over her body, his arm wrapped around her head. The photo emphasizes their differences and their connection.
John was murdered on the day that photo was taken, and Rolling Stone put it on the cover of their next issue.
After I died, I was on some covers, too.
“It’s John Lennon and Yoko Ono,” I said.
“Were they friends of yours, too?”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking. “No. John was in the Beatles. You know the Beatles?”
“Is that a… oh! A band, right?”
“Right,” I said, relieved.
“They had the song about the daydream believer?”
My relief vanished. “That was the Monkees. Totally different. Imitators put together to capitalize on the Beatles’ success—do people really not know about the Beatles anymore?”
Bethari shrugged. “How much
do you know about the music a hundred years before your time?”
I buffed my nails on my boring pants. “1927? That was the year of one of Stravinsky’s operas. Oedipus Rex, I think. It was the year The Jazz Singer was released, the first talking movie ever, and it was about music. Al Johnson? No, Jolson. And it was the year Funny Face first played in New York; it had opened in Philadelphia earlier, to terrible reviews, but the revised version ran on Broadway for two hundred and fifty shows.”
Bethari began to laugh again. “I think I can guess your specialty.”
“Music is universal,” I said. “And thank god. Um… about the journalism…”
“Don’t worry. Mami told me you’re under a lock clause. She made me sign one, too. I won’t ’cast a thing.” She sighed mockingly, her face suddenly alive with self-deprecation. “Kept away from the biggest scoop of my career. It’s so facebreaking.”
“Oooh,” I said. “New word.”
“Right! Let’s see. You don’t want to break your face—um, do something embarrassing or humiliating. If you break someone else’s face and they deserve it, that’s cool, but they’ll probably be angry, like, ‘That bazza broke my face. I’ll get him.’ And if people know something embarrassing about you, that’s facebreaking.”
“Like you not being able to scoop everyone with the Living Dead Girl because your mum said so,” I said, filing bazza away for later.
“Is that really what you call yourself?”
“God, no. I’m Tegan. Teeg.”
“Teeg,” Bethari said. “Okay. Tell me more about these Beatles, Teeg, and then I’ll give you the ontedy on everyone at Elisa M.”
“Ontedy?”
“Oh-en-tee-dee. News. Gossip.” She frowned. “And I think you could do with some education. Not everything has changed for the better.”
I rolled off the bed and snapped Koko open. “Sounds like a plan. Prepare yourself for a musical awakening.”
When Marie came in with a tray of sliced apples and carrot sticks, I was showing Bethari pictures of my family while we worked our way through the Red Album.
For the first time in a lifetime, I was truly happy.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hello, Goodbye
We gave Bethari a ride to school the next day.
“I was thinking,” she said, even before she scrambled into the car. “You should try out for stunt squad! I bet you’d make a great flyer.”
“For what?”
“The cheerleading team! I’m a flyer, too, but I’m a bit tall. You’d love it! It’s like your free running thing, only you do the tumbles in the air.”
I made a face. The tumbles she was talking about were the tricks everyone associated with parkour: big, flashy movements that I, unfortunately, didn’t have the strength or conditioning to pull off. I could fit through tiny gaps like no one’s business, but I wasn’t going to be doing spinning fan kicks anytime soon. “I’m a free runner mostly, not a tricker. Elisa M has cheerleading?”
“Elisa M has nearly everything,” Bethari said. “Except amazing boys and girls who want to experience all that I have to offer. For that, I go extracurricular.”
“Don’t screw the crew?” I asked.
“Good phrase! Yeah. You’re going to get lots of offers, you know. Have you seen the stuff about you on the tubes?”
Hurfest’s interview had turned me off tubecasts for a couple of days, but I’d peeked afterward. It had gone past politics now. There were people judging my fashion sense, rating my hotness level, and wondering if dating me would be necrophilia. “A little bit,” I admitted.
“Everyone loves you. Watch out for the famers.” She saw my expression and went on before I could ask. “People who sort of harvest celebrity by hanging out with people who are famous. Famous plus farmers, famers, see?”
“Got it. Not everyone loves me, though. There’s Australia for Australians, and—”
“Ugh, those drongles! Actually, that might be even a good thing, you know? Them ranting at someone coming back from the dead might just wake people up to how stupid the No Migrant policy is.”
She’d told me a little bit about the policy last night, among her other efforts to fill me in on some of today’s politics, but I hadn’t gotten it all straight in my head yet.
“So, it’s no migrants at all, right?”
“That’s right. Short-term visas only—study visas, or for, you know, holidays and stuff, if you’re rich enough to afford the air-fuel tax. No one gets residency, no one gets citizenship.”
“But people try to come anyway?” I asked. It seemed like in my time, every third story on the news was about the refugee crises and illegal immigration. Every second story had been about the climate. Bethari had shown me some of that stuff on the ’casts here, too, but it was quieter.
I’d assumed that was because the problems weren’t so bad.
“Oh, they try,” Bethari said. “Usually they get caught and stuck in one of the refugee camps in the North.”
“Like a detention center?”
“Like a camp,” Bethari said patiently. “Tents, shared toilet blocks, no unsupervised access to food or water. Surrounded by barbed wire and fully armed soldiers. They’re breaking Australian law by coming. So they end up in huge prisons.”
“I didn’t see anything about that on the tubes!”
Bethari shot a wary look at Zaneisha, who was impassively navigating behind a laden tram. “It’s on the media lockout list,” she said quietly. “A few years ago, a guard smuggled some footage out that showed the conditions in the camps, interviews with the residents, that kind of thing. Every ’caster who played it—and some of the ones who even linked to it—was subject to massive fines or voluntary shutdown for three months.” Her fingers made quote marks around voluntary.
It was hard to believe. “If it’s so bad, why do people still come?”
“Because Australia’s a land of opportunity,” she said flatly, and then sighed. “Because what they’re leaving is worse. The oceans are rising, and there’s less land to live on. Freshwater’s drying up, and people are fighting over it. It’s not great.”
“Oh,” I said. This wasn’t what I’d expected, not with the special toilets and timed showers. Surely people had done their best to prevent that kind of thing. I must have looked depressed, because Bethari nudged me.
“Don’t worry about that right now, though. Worry about the famers.”
“Gosh,” I said. “Thanks.”
Army secrecy must have worked, because no reporters were waiting for us outside Elisa M’s door. Elisa M’s honor code strictly prohibited recording or ’casting students without their permission, but it would be impossible to stop my fellow students from letting the world know that the Living Dead Girl was now one of their classmates, even if they couldn’t record me directly. Bethari had said the process would probably start about ten seconds after I walked in the door.
She was wrong. With Zaneisha in front of me, it took a whole twelve seconds after we entered the building before Bethari’s computer beeped at her.
“And we’re off,” she said, waving to a passing friend.
“I hate you,” I moaned, and tried not to notice the kids looking at me, looking away, and suddenly getting very interested in their computers.
It was stifling hot in the corridors, and Bethari had already warned me not to expect too much from the air-conditioning in the classrooms. Apparently schools statewide were held to a ninety-degree standard. By the time we hit the third floor, I was sweating in my white linen skirt and black tank top. Bethari had looped a patterned scarf around my hips to provide some color, but I really needed to go shopping.
Zaneisha indicated a seat in the back corner and stood directly behind me.
She wasn’t the only bodyguard in the room. The kids at this school were obviously rich, and some of them—or their parents—were important enough for around-the-clock security. Two men and someone whose gender I couldn’t pick traded glances and shallow no
ds with Zaneisha. Their charges ignored the byplay.
One of them, a tall boy in a red jumpsuit, detached from his group of friends and sauntered toward us. “Heeey. Tegan, right? What’s it like to be dead?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m alive.”
He smiled at me, perfect teeth flashing. Literally—they were inset with some sort of device that was blinking colored patterns at me.
“Go away, Soren,” Bethari said.
“I missed you last night, Bethi. The party wasn’t the same without you.” He turned to the group behind him. “It was no fun without Bethari, was it?”
They assured him that it wasn’t.
“It never is,” Bethari said. “But I don’t drink, and I don’t take breathers, and your bangers get a little rowdy for me.”
“Bangers?” I said.
“Parties,” she told me.
Soren turned his glittering smile back to me. “You should definitely come to the next one, Tegan. What’s your specialty?”
“Music.”
“Well, there you are,” Soren said triumphantly. “We always have music at my bangers.” He leaned in. “My specialty is journalism, like Bethi. You won’t mind if we ’cast our little occasion, will you, Tegan?”
“Is this a famer?” I asked Bethari, voice clear.
She grinned. “Soren is our best famer.”
Soren’s eyes went tight. “Maybe next time, then,” he said, and drifted back to his group. They giggled and whispered to one another.
I wondered what they could possibly say about me. I wasn’t rich. I had no famous relations. I was just some weird kid with awful hair and dull clothes, a celebrity for being dead.
I stared at my computer and tried not to mind.
Okay.
I know this is shallow, but in my time, I was really good-looking.