Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  The little table in the entranceway that was usually hidden by flyers and scarves and whatever else got thrown on the pile, had been cleared off and pulled out from the wall a little. I couldn’t pass it without noticing, which was obviously the point because there was a card on it with my name written on the envelope in big letters.

  I didn’t want it to be my birthday anymore. I didn’t want to open this card. By myself.

  But I did open it. It would have been kind of difficult to say that I hadn’t seen it.

  Fifty dollar notes fluttered to the floor when I pulled the card out. That was my present. Money they didn’t even have.

  The card said Happy Birthday on the front, and in between the two words Dad had added a little arrow pointing to a ‘16th’ written in pen above. This was a tradition that had been going on since I was one. Emma and I always, always got a card with our birthday age on it. Dad kept them in a shoebox, all in order, marching up the years. Of course, every shop has cards with ‘You are 1’ on them, which must have been what started Dad’s nostalgic habit, but then, he found that some ages were tricky to find. Like, for example, nobody much cares about ninth birthdays. But Dad had always managed to find a card with the right age on it, no matter how tricky the year.

  Until now. And the thing is, sixteen is definitely not one of those a tricky ages to find on a card.

  My phone was blinking at me before I even got out of bed the next day. I had kind of expected that after leaving Dell’s house the way I had the night before. I’d thought maybe if I left it until today I would know what to do about it. I didn’t though. Should I apologise? Or was it too late for that?

  As I read Dell’s eight messages, I couldn’t seem to feel what I thought I should. If I was really honest, I didn’t feel much. There was this part of me that knew that I had hurt him, and that cared, in the way you care when you hear about an earthquake that kills thousands of people, but they’re all far away, and you don’t know any of them. Only this was Dell who was hurt. He was five blocks away. And I had been the one to hurt him.

  There was one more message that wasn’t from Dell. I didn’t recognise the number, but I knew exactly who it was from. SEE YOU AT THE CAFÉ TODAY. It wasn’t a question. It was one thing to happen to meet and talk but I wasn’t sure I liked him looking me up. I was certain I didn’t like him telling me what to do.

  I didn’t respond to any of the messages. In fact, I dropped my phone on my bed before I left. I didn’t need it reminding me of things I would rather not think about. I decided right then that I was simply not going to think about things that just made me feel bad. I’d had enough of it.

  Big, wet snowflakes were falling when I walked out the door. First snowfalls always put me in a good mood. After the last of the autumn leaves turn to mush and there isn’t a colour left outside, the first snow fall makes everything pretty again. And quiet. Any chaos stops and everyone gets lost in the newness of it all. It doesn’t last of course. Second, third, fourth snowfalls start to bring their own chaos – car accidents, old people falling on the ice, landslides that block the roads. Sleety, ugly, messy snowfalls. It doesn’t take everyone long to tire of it all.

  But first snowfalls are magic. As I waited for the bus, I looked up, watching the flakes fall in a curtain through the streetlamp that lit the winter, still-dark morning. It was so beautiful.

  The weather had changed and something was shifting in my mood as well. For once, I didn’t feel tired. If I just kept watching the snow and let any thoughts of Dell or Emma fall away, I almost felt happy. I’d forgotten what that felt like.

  ‘So, did you like it?’ Tracey asked. I almost asked ‘like what?’ before I remembered the little box she had slipped into my pocket the day before. Shit. I’d forgotten all about it. I had to think fast.

  ‘It was really late by the time I got home,’ I lied. ‘I wanted to save it for when I wasn’t so tired.’ Like opening a present would have been so tiring. It was a terrible lie.

  ‘Oh, I know the file is massive. My mom kept saying that I didn’t have to put every picture people gave me on the memory stick, but I thought you could just delete the ones you don’t want.’

  ‘Every picture?’ She was assuming I had actually opened the present.

  ‘Well, not the ones of when you were really little obviously. I’ll add those ones in when your mom has the time to get them to me. I wanted you to have your whole life in your hand.’

  ‘Lunch time. We’ll look at them on my laptop together,’ I said. And I actually meant it. For the first time in ages I felt like I could make it through a day.

  Three classes. Three whole classes. And I have to say, even though I had missed more classes than I had attended lately, I seemed to know more about what was going on in them than a lot of people. I surprised myself as much as my teachers by actually putting up my hand to be part of the classes too. In fact, in math the teacher actually said ‘We’ve heard from you a lot, Jane. Someone else?’ I don’t think that I had ever heard that.

  I kept my word and met Tracey at lunch. Just the two of us went to Joe’s Diner and Tracey insisted on buying me actual lunch – not just a plate of fries.

  When I opened up the file on the memory stick (I had to go into the toilet to take the paper off the box, so she wouldn’t know I hadn’t even opened it yet) I almost cried. In a happy/sad way. Tracey had organised files of pictures from every year of my life. Up until age seven they all just had a note saying ‘Coming soon’, but every other file had hundreds of pictures. I didn’t even know that many pictures had even been taken of me.

  Most of them were ones that she and her family had taken. Tracey’s mom is one of those people who always seems to have a camera in her hand. So there were a lot of pictures of Tracey and me, but she had also scanned class photos, and gathered pictures from everyone in Verwood it seemed.

  It was strange seeing them. It was like looking at someone else’s life. Pictures of me camping. Pictures of me playing basketball (that only lasted one season – I was hopeless at it), pictures of me and my pet rabbit (he had lasted a bit longer), pictures of Emma trying to teach me to do a spin at the ice rink (she is as natural on ice as she is on a dance floor).

  As Tracey and I scanned through the files, of course I recognised the people, and I remembered most of the things we were doing, but every picture was still a surprise.

  I’ve heard that we change memories every time we play them out in our heads. So, like if you remember a favourite time hundreds of times – the memory might not be what actually happened in the first place. Maybe you remember it way better. But what about if you forget altogether? What if you don’t play them out in your head for years? It was like I was seeing my very own life for the first time. Each memory the pictures brought up was brand new.

  My mind had been on a loop that couldn’t see past three years ago. Like it was one of my dad’s old records that he liked to play, that would get stuck on one song because the groove was deeper on that one or something. I had forgotten there were other songs.

  ‘Thank you, Tracey.’ I gave her the biggest hug before she went back to school, and it kind of felt good to get one back.

  For once I had asked Tracey if she wanted to skip class with me. She’d hesitated before saying no. She doesn’t like to miss school; it makes her worry too much about getting caught. It’s one of the reasons I stopped asking her a long time ago. She would go with me, but only if we went to hang out by the river, or stayed on small roads. Even then, she jumped every time she saw a car that she thought she recognised. It had become annoying. At the time I had felt like, what was the point in skipping class if you were not going to enjoy yourself?

  But then, that was before I stopped enjoying myself too, more because I was never going to ‘get caught’. Let’s face it, everyone knew, but didn’t care. I mean, it had to be fairly obvious that I wasn’t there most of the time.

  Today though, it was different. I had money in my pocket, and I was going
to enjoy every minute of spending it. I knew exactly what I wanted to buy.

  There were only two places in Kendal that sold cameras. Neither one seemed very happy to see me. I guess they don’t have a lot of teenagers shopping for big ticket items in the middle of a school day. Plus, I had gotten used to trying my best to make sure people in the stores didn’t notice me, so I was kind of crap about trying to get them to help me.

  There were about ten cameras in my price range and I couldn’t tell the difference between any of them. I didn’t exactly want to waste Mom and Dad’s money either. I may not have been super happy about how they had basically forgotten my birthday, and maybe if it had been the day before I would have just blown the money to spite them, but today there was ten centimetres of snow covering all those resentments. I was ready for a new start, and I wanted to make the most of the money. It was either that or use it to pay one of the bills marked urgent that kept coming in the door.

  So it wasn’t because Farley had practically ordered me to meet him that I went to the café. And I was going to make sure that he knew that.

  He was sitting at the same table he had been at the first day he had sat me down there. Only this time there were quite a few customers, so his books were under his feet, and there was a couple sharing his table. A tiny message passed through my brain to say it might not be appropriate to say too much, but then I ignored it.

  ‘Farley Johnston, let’s get this straight. Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t presume that just because I have an appropriate conversation with you once, that I will drop everything and come running when you tell me to. I won’t. I am actually supposed to be at school right now.’ I’d meant to stop at the first bit. And say it not quite as loudly. The woman frowned at me. I’d probably interfered with her Positive Energy or something.

  ‘But you aren’t at school; you’re here,’ he said cheerfully, and he handed me a paper bag before I could qualify my presence.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Sit down, ‘he said, adding, ‘Please. Not an order, an invitation. Just to clarify.’

  ‘Thanks for sharing your table,’ the man said before he took their empty plates to the counter, and the woman put her coat on.

  ‘My table is your table. Any time.’ Was he always this cheesy?

  I sat though. Only because I was curious about the bag. Maybe I had been right in the beginning, and these were the motivational, self-help books he had been gearing up to sell me in some elaborate sales pitch.

  ‘So, what is this?’ I asked again, with a little more sarcasm, now that the frowning lady had left.

  ‘Happy Birthday.’

  ‘What, you’re a mind reader now? How do you know it’s my birthday?’ It was getting harder to be negative though. First Tracey’s pictures and now this. I didn’t know if I’d ever met someone as happy as Farley always seemed to be.

  ‘I’m not that new age. Social media. I assume you want people to know the info on your page?’

  I’d never quite understood what those privacy settings meant. I opened the bag to find a sketch pad, a bunch of pencils – art pencils, all with different numbers, and a box of pastels.

  In a way I wanted to take out a pencil, to open the pastels and savour the colours. But this other part of me, the part that made my stomach feel queasy, wanted to throw the bag at Farley.

  ‘You don’t seem to think your art is art. Maybe some artist tools will change your mind.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ I wasn’t saying it because it was the socially polite thing to say. My parents had spent most of my childhood trying to channel me into some sort of ‘interest’. Maybe it was because they couldn’t understand how one daughter could be so sure of what she loved, and one so not interested in anything. They had done their best in encouraging me.

  But it had always felt like so much pressure. There wasn’t anything that I was good at like Emma was good at dancing. No matter how many different classes they enrolled me in. At least the cancer had put a stop to that. Mom didn’t hand me flyers and community centre programmes anymore.

  Drawing was different. It hadn’t felt like an interest I had to ‘pursue’. It had just been something I started to do. And it was private, not something I wanted to share with anyone. Farley was ruining that. I didn’t want him to be some teacher, or mentor, or something.

  But if that was the case, why was I sitting here? I’d specifically come here to ask him to help me choose a camera, hadn’t I? Or was that just an excuse to see him?

  I was suddenly aware of how close we were sitting. Close enough to recognise the shampoo he’d used this morning, and to see each shade of purple on the stripey hoodie I’d never seen him without. Close enough that if I just shifted a centimetre or two our knees would touch. I kind of wanted to shift that centimetre closer.

  I shoved the thought away. Why hadn’t I brought my phone with me? Dell was probably still worrying. I couldn’t reassure him that we were okay even if I wanted to now. I didn’t even know if we were okay. Had I broken up with him? Did I want to?

  ‘Hey, earth to Jane,’ Farley said. ‘It’s a little token. A thanks for being the first interesting person I have met here sort of thing.’

  I couldn’t stop my heart from doing a little skip at that. When I looked up at him, into those sincere eyes, with the little laugh lines – I knew he meant what he said, even though I knew he was wrong. It was all just a little too sunshine-and-lightish.

  ‘I’m not interesting.’

  But for maybe the first time ever, I felt like I might want to be.

  ‘So, you haven’t used a camera at all? Not even the one supplied on every phone for two generations?’ Farley was looking at me like I had just told him I didn’t know how to tell time.

  ‘I’m not completely clueless, but honestly, photography has not been at the top of my priority list. It’s not like I’ve had anything I want to remember in my life.’ We were outside the store where I had just spent nearly all of my money on a camera that had more buttons and controlly-bits than most cars. I didn’t have a clue how to just ‘snap a few pictures’, as Farley had just suggested.

  ‘It’s all about perspective. You just need the right view to see something magical. There is magic and beauty everywhere, all of the time.’ He took the camera from me and took what looked like a bunch of random shots, glancing at the screen after each one he took.

  ‘Come here. See what I mean?’ He pulled me closer so I could see the photo he’d taken of our footprints in the snow. We’d had to wade through snow up to our ankles to get to the shop. It had been falling too fast for anyone to bother shovelling yet, though it had stopped during the hour it took Farley to ask nearly a million questions before I finally picked a camera. If I’d just had the photo in front of me, I would have guessed the faint trail of footsteps was on the top of Mount Everest or something. The shadow from the tree across the road marched eerily across our human trail.

  ‘Cool picture,’ I conceded. ‘I wouldn’t mind being shown how to take shots like that, but you are seriously going to have to curb all that positive thinking shit if I’m going to spend this much time with you. It’s just weird.’

  ‘Tell, you what. Give me an afternoon and see if I don’t shift your perspective even just slightly left of pessimism.’

  I hate to admit it, but Farley did kind of show me magic that day. He had the weather on his side though. First, the magic snow fall, and then the sun splitting the clouds apart to reveal a blanket of sparkles everywhere. We could have been in the dingiest city in the world and it would have seemed enchanted on that day.

  But it wasn’t just the weather, and the excitement of having a new toy to play with all afternoon. It was Farley, and it was me, and it was Farley and me together. I can’t even really put my finger on what was so great about it. It was just that whenever he talked, I had the perfect thing to say back to him and everything he said seemed to be exactly what I had wanted to hear for ages, only I didn’t k
now it because no one had ever talked to me like Farley did. If you don’t know what that feels like, you really have to find someone you can be with like that. I guess it is kind of like magic.

  We weren’t even doing anything I hadn’t done most days for ages; just wandering aimlessly around Kendal. Somehow, with the camera and with Farley, it was just … fun. I would take a few pictures and then flick through them with Farley looking over my shoulder, and then he would point out where I could have centred things better, or adjusted the aperture, to better deal with the dazzling light. The more pictures I took, the more I wanted to take. It was like drawing, only faster.

  I didn’t even notice that my feet were going numb from walking around in the snow, wearing runners, until I turned the camera on Farley and saw that his feet were even less appropriately protected from the cold. Birkenstocks and socks aren’t great winter footwear, even if the socks were thick wool ones.

  ‘I know there’s probably a dress code for hippies, but come on, sandals in the winter?’

  ‘As far as I know, the hippie dress code was dropped years ago. No mandatory peace sign t-shirts anymore either. But remember, I haven’t got a mother to teach me the basics.’

  ‘Well, don’t look at me for how to dress. Everyone has been trying to improve my fashion sense for years. It isn’t working.’ I unzipped my coat and held out my arms for emphasis. I was wearing what I pretty much wore for as much of the time as I could get away with – plain jeans and a plain grey hoodie. Not a label to be seen. Hair barely brushed, in a loose pony tail and not one bit of makeup. I guess I could blame my appearance apathy on Emma’s illness, like I blamed most of my faults; but really, I had never much cared.