by H. S. Valley
‘Not in front of our daughter, Te Maro, she’ll be scarred for life if she has to listen to her fathers fight,’ he scolds as I go to the next table to get the aioli. He’s still frowning at me when I hand him his roll a minute later. Doesn’t say thank you. Dick. Dunno what I expected.
‘We need to fill out the parenting diary Van Mill gave us.’ I take a sip of my tea. It’s the perfect temperature. ‘Should we do it now?’
‘I’m eating. We’ve got Stats first; we can do it in class. Mr Russell won’t mind so long as we get his work done first.’
I moan in utter horror. I wish it were possible to do four classes a day of just magic stuff. Unfortunately, for some reason the school expects us to get a normal education as well, so we have to simultaneously work towards our International Certificate of Magical Proficiency and National Certificate of Educational Achievement. ‘Did you have to remind me? How has magic not found a way to do maths for us yet?’ I take a large, reckless bite of my roll.
‘They have. It’s called a calculator, Te Maro; this is what I mean by neglected. You don’t have basic things.’ He smiles at me when I glare at him. ‘Fortunately, you seem to have some natural ability with making me breakfast; you’ve got the meat to bun to condiment ratio nearly perfect.’
Meggan makes a gurgly sound and Elliott bounces her a little on his knee again, smiling serenely down at her golden dome where it pokes out of the blanket. If I didn’t know better – that he’s still a selfish, spoilt wanker – I’d swear he was enjoying this whole parenting thing.
‘I’m so glad I could serve you to your liking.’
‘I said nearly perfect, you could still do with some practice.’
‘Get bent.’
‘Already am,’ he says, like it’s no big deal, and the cold self-doubt that lives in my gut does its little dance of Tim, you’re a coward. ‘Well, half-bent. As is Blake, obviously, if you’re into that. Maybe you could steal him off your girlfriend and exact your revenge that way?’
I won’t let him bait me so easily into revealing anything unnecessarily. Not because he’s going to judge, just because I don’t have the spoons to even think about all that right now. However, I still, completely accidentally, picture myself successfully seducing Blake, even though I’d rather punch him. He’s tall, and annoyingly good-looking, and if he’d never stolen my girlfriend I might’ve even forgiven him for being a Minder. I’ve seen him shirtless once, and if I hadn’t already had a strong feeling I was not entirely straight, that would’ve been all the evidence I needed.
‘No thanks,’ I deadpan. ‘He’s not really my type.’
‘Lucky you,’ Elliott says, and that’s it – he just sits there talking to the egg and eating his breakfast while I spiral into my thoughts.
Thoughts about Blake, and Lizzie, and then the familiar list of all the people I thought I just really liked as friends, until everything clicked into place last year. I don’t know how long Elliott’s known he was into guys, or what form his self-discovery took, but he’s making it look easy when it really isn’t. Or it hasn’t been, for me. Which seems really quite unfair. But hey, maybe this assignment won’t be completely useless. Maybe I’ll find out whatever Elliott’s secret is and at least one part of my life will start to make sense.
CHAPTER 5
PACIFIER
That night, my head barely touches the pillow and I’m asleep. The day dissolves into memory and my subconscious plays with the remains. I dream, and Sam is there, somewhere in the background, laughing and patting me on the back. Playing a saxophone. Play-fighting. Shoving me. Shaking me awake.
‘Tim, th’f’ck,’ he moans, too close, above me in the dark. ‘Dickhead’s here. Tell him to bugger off, w’ you?’
‘Who?’ I ask, too soon, as Elliott’s voice comes through the door, a wailing egg-baby quickly drowning him out. ‘Oh,’ I say.
‘Hurry up and get rid of him,’ Sam grumbles, falling back into bed and wrapping himself in his blankets again.
I find my piece of smoky quartz and fill the room with dim silver light. The floor is like ice. My pyjamas are old and a bit ratty and the button’s missing on the fly. Ugh. I want a jumper, but I want Elliott gone more.
The handle squeaks as it turns. ‘What?’ I hiss at him through the gap, reluctant to open the door fully.
‘She won’t stop crying and I’ve tried everything,’ he hisses back. ‘What did you do last night?’ He says it like I’m hiding some sort of secret from him, like there’s a fake-egg-baby conspiracy and he’s at the losing end of it. He looks tired and harassed and, worse, determined. I let him in. Sam’s going to kill me.
The second they’re inside, though, the wailing stops. The egg coos, then burbles. We stand there, frozen, waiting. The chill is creeping up my ankles.
‘Well. I guess that did it,’ Elliott whispers. He looks awkward and relieved, and he nods a thank you and turns to go. By the time he’s touching the doorknob, she’s started to grizzle. The door opens and she lets out a wahh and he closes it again. She coos.
I curse internally; despite the lack of sleep and the slow brain activity, her preferences are clear. Fine. I’ll be night-dad and he can be day-dad. He can get one of those front-pack baby carrier things to cart her around in and I’ll get a new best friend, because Sam might really, actually kill me. Or move out, or possibly both.
Elliott pads back across the floor towards me and I notice that he’s barefoot and unjumpered as well. He must be freezing. Desperate.
‘Leave her with me,’ I say, trying to sound like I’m OK with it. Like it’s not a giant pain in the arse. Like he doesn’t owe me so much.
He doesn’t even say anything, just nods dumbly and places her in the little purple crib. ‘I like what you did there, with the cushioning stuff. It’s good.’ He nods again. ‘Right,’ he says, and turns, padding back across the floor.
He has his hand on the door again when she squawks, cries, then whimpers, and I hope like hell he’s not just going to leave me like this as she winds up for a big one.
He doesn’t, and once he’s back beside me, she falls silent again. And my brain is like peanut butter and I’m confused and I’m cold and I’m tired and as the seconds tick by and she still doesn’t cry, I manage to think about what that means. And then the real dread sets in.
‘She hates us,’ I say.
‘She hates us individually. Apparently standing next to each other in the freezing darkness of your shitty bedroom, she’s OK with us.’
‘Our baby is a sadist,’ I agree.
‘All babies are sadists,’ comes a muffled voice from Sam’s bed, filtered through layers of down and wool. ‘Get over it.’
It’s too cold. I pull the covers back and get into bed again, leaving Elliott standing in the middle of the room. I fluff my pillows and avoid looking at him. Maybe if I draw it out long enough, Meggan will fall asleep and he’ll never have to get between my sheets.
‘What are you doing?’ he hisses at me eventually. Apparently he hasn’t caught on.
‘I’m going back to sleep,’ I whisper. ‘What are you doing? You can’t stand there all night.’ I punctuate my words with a hopefully-not-too-inviting sweep of the covers on the other side of the bed, next to the wall. I need him to stay if she’s going to sleep. If I’m going to sleep. I suddenly feel very thankful for whoever decided the seniors deserved bigger beds. If we were still in singles I don’t think I’d have it in me to share with anyone, let alone him.
‘You want me to get in your bed?’
‘I want her to not cry and for all of us to be asleep. I don’t mind if you’d rather share with Sam.’
A muffled expletive and a middle finger emerges from the pile on the other side of the room.
‘Looks like that’s not an option. Get in.’
‘Te Maro …’
‘Just –’ I sigh. I’m too tired for this. ‘Please, Elliott, don’t make this harder than it needs to be.’
I feel the bed dip,
down by my knee, and the rustle of fabric. ‘Heaven forbid getting in bed with you makes things hard,’ he whispers. A shift of weight to the other side and the bounce of a body settling. The covers twitch away from me as he wriggles under them.
‘Don’t make it weird,’ I tell him, and roll away towards Meggan’s cot and my best friend and the part of my life that isn’t entirely mental.
I breathe deep and focus on happy memories like the school counsellor taught me, replaying summers with my cousins in Wellington: driving aimlessly around the city, a few beers, movies, games around the kitchen table. Christmases with Nana, pudding and custard, cups of tea at just the right temperature … I’m almost calm when he moves behind me and something brushes my arse and my happy thoughts go elsewhere.
Excellent. Now I want to have a wank and I can’t because Elliott’s in my bed. Thinking about it too hard doesn’t help, because it reminds me of the last time I was in a bed with someone, and then I’m sad because it was Lizzie and she’s left me.
That said, if she ever found out I was sharing a bed with someone else so soon, even innocently, it’d probably wipe that fake sympathy off her face. Maybe this wasn’t the worst idea. Maybe I should Instagram it. Ha.
I go back to thoughts of food and family and presents and summer and ignore the boy in my bed. Nothing else touches me ’til morning.
‘You three look a little worse for wear,’ Silvia says at breakfast, connections sparking behind her eyes as she ponders how we’ve all managed to appear in the dining hall at exactly the same time. Three men and an egg-baby. Definitely a situation, definitely not comedy.
‘Someone brought us a baby in the middle of the night and then decided to sleep over,’ Sam grumbles.
‘Elliott, presumably?’
‘No, it was someone else that neither of us have a baby with, a very strange man,’ I say, and I know I’m being that sarcastic, dickish version of myself but I can’t bring myself to give even half a shit because I just spent the night in bed with my nemesis and it’s a genuine surprise I didn’t wake up with daggers in my back. ‘Elliott is merely a coincidence.’
‘Pardon me, I’m merely nothing.’
‘Sorry, my bad, Elliott is nothing.’
He takes a breath to mansplain himself, catches the fact (admirably) that I’m taking the piss and sits down instead, holding his hands out for the devil-egg. I hand it over and start making us a breakfast we can’t spill on a baby, because that’s apparently what I do now.
Silvia hands their egg over to Sam and watches me out of the corner of her eye while she explains what she’s decided to name it. Something about a swan and Greek mythology that I absolutely cannot follow this early in the morning. Sam nods distractedly at her as the rest of our friends drift in. They’re just as quiet and tired-looking as I am, and equally puzzled at Elliott’s appearance at our table. No-one says anything, though, which is a relief. Meggan and ‘Leda’ and the other eggs burble happily at each other, all their families together, sharing breakfast. A week ago I would’ve declared Elliott sitting with us to be a weird nightmare – cheese-induced, crazy even to think about it. Now I have to live with the fact that the first time I shared a bed with a half-decent-looking guy it was him, Sam was there as well, and I didn’t even get off. And tonight, that damn egg is hideously likely to perform the same cursed charade. Which means sharing a bed with Elliott is something I’ll just have to get used to. And the worst thing is, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it should.
CHAPTER 6
JESUS I WAS EVIL
The next morning isn’t much different. I wake again to a sense of being cheated by life and the dubious pleasure of seeing Elliott lying on his back, tenting my winter-weight duvet. It’s almost impressive, but only if I think about it, and I’m not going to do that before coffee. Tea isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Sam disappeared sometime in the night when Leda wouldn’t settle, and I can take a guess he and Silvia dealt with that together. I’ve no idea how he circumvented the cameras in the girls’ corridor, but it’s not like I have a girlfriend to visit anymore, so who cares?
He and Silvia show up to breakfast hand-in-hand looking slightly more in love than normal, which suggests more than just baby care. If their shameless PDA wasn’t enough to confirm it, Silvia’s roommate looking positively livid certainly does. Manaia’s a friend of Elliott’s, and is sitting over at his usual table, intermittently glaring at Silvia and reading the paper. I wonder if any of that glaring is for Elliott and the fact he’s abandoned her for Meggan. I look away before she catches me and focus on our breakfast.
Elliott holds the baby, I wrap sausages in a soft bread roll, adding, apparently, ‘just the right amount of mustard’, and we go through the whole thing again: taking the baby to classes, juggling her and my bag, books and laptop. Ruling a straight line becomes impossible. We pass her back and forth so much she grizzles all the way through Food Tech. It gets to the point where I start designing makeshift papooses in my head, while Elliott takes over chopping all of the vegetables under the dubious eye of an apparently baby-phobic Mrs Graham. She disapproves of ‘such an interfering sort of assignment’ that ‘distracts you from the importance of your academic studies’. I act extra-parental to rile her up because it’s not like we had a choice about whether to do the damn thing or not. It’s care for the egg or miss out on four whole NCEA credits, and no-one wants the shame of failing Life Skills, even if it does mean writing a daily journal about a fake egg. It’s better than answering endless workbook questions about actual human babies.
Elliott gives me a weird look when I mention acting enthusiastically parental, looking up from the wok with his eyebrow cocked and an air of mild disgust. I’m leaning next to him with my back against the bench to shield Meggan from any potential splattering. He’s already insisted it isn’t necessary because he ‘doesn’t splatter, thank you very much’, but I don’t want to be the reason we don’t ‘demonstrate daily care routines for a vulnerable individual’, because I have a feeling he’d never let it go. I step in closer as he tosses the cup of frozen corn kernels in, so that we’re side to side, touching. I whisper how maybe talking about playdates with Leda or something might piss Graham off a bit, if he fancies having some fun at her expense? It’s not something I’d normally want to do; maybe Mum was right and he brings out the worst in me.
‘How is having to look after your friends’ egg as well as Meggan,’ he hisses in my ear, ‘going to inconvenience our Food Tech teacher?’
‘We don’t have to do it –’ I take a breath, pretending I didn’t phrase it like that when I’m pressed up against his side. He’s warm and he smells like expensive cologne and I’m an idiot, obviously, but at least that’s a nice, normal feeling I can use to ground myself. ‘It’s just that she’s being a bit of a dick about the eggs, and it’s unfair. If anyone was going to be a dickhead about this whole thing, I would’ve thought it would be you.’
He stops stirring and gapes at me. ‘When have I ever been a dickhead to you specifically? Name one time.’
One time? Really?
‘You guys were all shits from the day you arrived. You got us banned from the squash courts in the first month and then spent every weekend after that complaining there was nothing to do.’
‘That was not my fault.’ He scowls at me.
‘You seemed to think it was pretty funny at the time.’
‘I was thirteen, it was the first time I’d been away from home, and I didn’t know anyone. Manaia was the first person to talk to me, so I stuck with her.’ He throws in our sliced courgette and gives the wok a particularly violent flick to mix it in. ‘Cooper, Kane and Tim were a bit much sometimes, but at least they didn’t treat me like I should be ashamed of being from Auckland. You guys have no idea how insular you are.’
‘How could we have been insular when no-one else knew anyone either?’
Elliott looks to the ceiling like I’m being unbelievably dense, which is somethi
ng Lizzie used to do when I was about to get something explained to me in great detail.
‘Every time someone asked where I was from,’ he starts, ‘and I said Auckland, they made this face. Like “oh, one of you lot”. We didn’t get included in anything social and people laughed at us when we got homesick or cold or confused about something. Like our feelings were less valid because we’d grown up in a big city. Like we weren’t real New Zealanders.’ He looks at me like I might have been one of those people, and honestly, I might’ve been and just never considered it a sin.
I don’t even remember talking to him directly back then – there’s just a vague, nebulous feeling of hostility. It’s not a great feeling, knowing he remembers it vividly and I don’t. It’s making me question all of my own thirteen-year-old-boy behaviour, which is surprisingly uncomfortable. Especially considering he’s probably right – he was someone I hadn’t really thought of as a whole person at the time. A caricature of perceived evil, and evil didn’t have feelings. The rivalry of Auckland vs. Everyone Else is ingrained, I guess. Doesn’t mean it’s right, though, and it’s starting to sound pretty one-sided, the more he goes on.
‘And it’s ridiculous to blame a child for where they grew up or what their parents are like, or what bloody continent their magic came from, because they don’t exactly get a choice in that. Just like I didn’t get a choice in whether I came to this bloody school after the International Magical Education Council showed up at my door and told my parents I’d be in terrible danger if I didn’t fulfill my legacy. So, yes, when I had to decide between one bunch of people who were fun and liked me, and a horde of other kids who hated me for no good reason, it wasn’t much of a choice.’