My Life as a Hashtag

by Gabrielle Williams

  ‘Liv and Mason, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,’ I sang.

  Because I’m nothing if not immature.

  ‘If I ignore you, you’ll go away, right?’ she said to me.

  I shook my head. ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Well, in that case …’ And she sat on me.

  When we got there, Emile was on his lonesome. Just him and about a hundred kids all waiting to take their turns on the skate ramp.

  No Jed.

  Sigh.

  Emile works down there at the skate park each Sunday, helping out when someone needs a hand, giving advice, explaining protocols to kids who are new to the ramp, demonstrating basic tricks for them, making sure everyone has a turn. He’s a close-to-pro skateboarder, who figures he might as well get paid to hang out and do tricks.

  When he saw Yumi, Emile dumped the kids like so many hot potatoes and came over to hang with us.

  Ah, love.

  Yumi wanted to land a tre flip, which means you bring your legs up, and the board comes with you, and then the board flips and lands back on the ground and your feet land on top of it and you keep going.

  Very cool, if you can do it.

  Very hard to nail, from the looks of it.

  Yumi kept repeating the same movements over and over, popping the ollie, jumping off the board, landing too soon, stumbling, kicking the board, muttering to herself, not getting it, but nearly.

  Emile stepped onto his board like it was a part of him, his knockabout old skater shoes hanging off the edge. He skated over to Yumi, telling her in his soft Moroccan accent, ‘You need to have your back foot, your toes, hanging off the outside edge of the board so your foot kind of grabs it, so you can spin it three-sixty, and then your front foot is just going to be in normal kickflip position or whatever kind of feels comfortable.’

  Then he kicked and flipped the board and landed and skated back to where Yumi stood watching him, chewing on her thumbnail.

  And—

  All kind of boring.

  Liv had her phone out, and I took mine out, and we were both going through our feeds, the grinding of wheels against pavement creating white noise, blocking out the rest of the world. And that’s when I noticed it. Not a thing, but an absence.

  Nothing was coming through from Anouk.

  I scrolled back up, but couldn’t find any of her posts. It was like she’d gone offline. But Anouk would never go offline. She was the one, of any of my friends, who was always picking up her phone, checking Facebook, Insta, Snapchat, almost like a nervous habit; as if her hand literally needed something to hold on to in order to feel useful.

  I remembered seeing her Insta posts on Yumi’s phone that morning. But when I scrolled back, I couldn’t find them.

  Maybe she’d deleted her pics. Maybe she’d decided she didn’t want to post about last night. I wondered if she was okay. About me. And Jed. And me and Jed.

  I watched Yumi pulling her knees up, trying to flip her board, failing, looking pissed off, trying again.

  I sent Anouk a peace offering: the photo I’d taken of her and Hattie on the tram going to Jed’s party, both their hands held up in bunny ears, the universal sign for peace. My post of the photo, a peace sign from me to her.

  I put it on Facebook. Tagged Hattie. Went to tag Anouk.

  But there was no link to Anouk.

  I looked at the photo, frowning.

  My phone had been playing up a bit lately – sometimes it wouldn’t ring, but then a message would come through that someone had just been trying to call. Texts were going missing. My battery was running flat really quickly. I definitely had a problem with my phone. Maybe that was why Anouk wasn’t coming up.

  But then I looked over Liv’s shoulder to check what was coming through for her. Put my hand on her screen and scrolled through her Facebook feed.

  And there it was. Stuff from Anouk. Photos. Comments. Likes. Everything exactly as you’d expect.

  Just not to me.

  ‘Omigod,’ I said, my face flushing. ‘Anouk’s blocked me.’

  Chapter 5

  All that night, I couldn’t get comfortable in bed. My arms got in the way. My legs felt itchy on the inside. My chest felt the weight of the doona against it. My shoulders felt the chill of the air.

  Whereas the night before, at Yumi’s, I’d slept the weighty bliss of the freshly kissed, that following night my mind flapped and hopped like a bird looking to nest, but finding nowhere safe.

  I wanted to not-think about Anouk. I wanted to not-think about the next morning, walking into school, plonking myself down in the group on the quad and seeing how Anouk would react to me.

  My mind kept circling, the word ‘blocked, blocked, blocked’ rotating inside my skull, bumping up against my very bones, making my head ache. How long did she expect someone not to kiss Jed if he wasn’t into her? It was ridiculous to expect a person – say, for example, me – to not kiss Jed just because she still liked him. Also, what about the way Jed had been making a play for me over the past month or something? Every time we’d been at a party, he was always talking to me, making cute comments, leaning his arm against the wall next to my head and looking straight into me. It wasn’t up to Anouk who Jed kissed. Jed had a say in it too. And so did I. I could kiss whoever I liked. I was single. Jed was single. We were both single. You can’t actually dibs a person and expect them to be yours for the rest of your life, especially when you’re NOT ACTUALLY WITH THEM.

  I was going to pretend I hadn’t realised she’d blocked me.

  I was going to walk into school the next morning and act like everything was completely normal.

  I was going to say ‘hi’. Not notice that she was kind of shitty.

  Ignore, ignore, ignore.

  It would be fine. Things always seemed worse at night. Something about the darkness seemed to illuminate everything you didn’t want to think about.

  Blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked.

  It didn’t help that Jed hadn’t liked any of my Insta shots all day. Hadn’t responded to my post where I’d recorded new words to go with the photo I had of the Gun, saying, ‘Great party – my voice is feeling husky today,’ – which, you have to admit, was a pretty good dog pun.

  I’d even poked him, which, I don’t know, who even pokes these days? But it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  At three o’clock in the morning, I had full poke regret.

  It had made me seem too keen. So, I picked up my phone and unpoked him. And instantly had unpoke regret. If he’d seen my poke, then noticed that I’d unpoked him, it would look bad. But maybe he hadn’t seen my poke and that was why he hadn’t poked back.

  I shouldn’t have poked him in the first place.

  I remembered he’d said he needed a new phone on Saturday night. That it was always dying. Maybe it really had died, for good this time, and he wasn’t able to see any of my posts.

  His folks needed to get him a new phone so I wouldn’t have to go through all this angst.

  Also, I’d been with him plenty of times when he’d taken his phone out and scrolled through a screen filled with icons: text messages and missed calls and What’sApp and Insta notifications and whatever. He often had his phone switched to silent. He wasn’t a phone-checker. He was one of those non-phone-checker types.

  But he and Emile had posted all those shots after everyone had left. And surely, if you have a party, you want to see what everyone posts about it afterwards. Even a non-phone-checker wants to see the verdict of their own party.

  His phone must have died. That was the only answer.

  My mind flopped back to Anouk. Then flipped back to Jed. It even fluttered around Emile for a while, thinking back to how he’d been that day at the skate park. Had he seemed slightly uncomfortable? Had Jed said something to him after I’d left the party, and now Emile had to go through that awkward phase of having his girlfriend’s friend liking his friend and his friend not lik
ing her back?

  Although I already knew Jed wasn’t the puppy-dog keen type. It’s not like I would have expected him to call me the next day and be slobbering all over me. He wasn’t that type of guy.

  But he could have poked me back.

  Except no one poked anymore. It had been a bad move on my part. Why had I poked him? I shouldn’t have poked him.

  At least my post with the Gun had been cute, funny. How hard would it have been to put a simple ‘haha’ comment underneath it? Although maybe it was a bit copycat-ish. He’d used the Gun to invite everyone to the party, and then I’d used the Gun to say thanks. Maybe he’d thought it didn’t make sense.

  I picked up my phone and deleted the post with the Gun on it. Then regretted it. I should have left it up there. It was cute. It was funny. I should have left it.

  And then, how about Anouk blocking me?

  Which brought my flapping mind circling back to the beginning again, cawing and squawking over the juicy worms that were crawling inside my brain.

  #

  There was no milk for breakfast on Monday morning. Also no bread to make a sandwich; and only Pizza Shapes, which I don’t like, for my snack, and one cruddy apple.

  Not only had Mum given up on the whole cooking business since Dad had moved out; she also seemed to have forgotten the whole shopping idea as well.

  ‘There’s literally nothing to eat,’ I said to her as I slammed the fridge door shut.

  Harley came into the kitchen, looked in the fridge, then went back out.

  ‘Get some money out of my wallet, run to the milk bar and grab some milk and bread,’ Mum said, towel-drying her hair, ‘then I’ll pick stuff up from the supermarket on my way home from work tonight. Or Harley can. Harley,’ she called after him, ‘can you go up the street and get some stuff?’

  No answer.

  Mum works every Monday and Thursday at Maude’s homewares shop. The rest of the week, she’s entirely and utterly free to do whatever else it is she does with her days. Which evidently no longer included the shopping.

  ‘Why is it so hard to get things, you know, bought around this house?’ I stewed. ‘Besides, I can’t go to the milk bar, because if I do I’m going to miss the tram, and then I’ll be late for school.’

  Magic words, those. As soon as I’d said them out loud I recognised them for the gold they were. I went over to Mum’s bag and fished out her wallet.

  ‘So long as you know that when you get sent a late notice for me from school this morning,’ I called back at her from the front door, ‘it’s all your fault …’

  And I slammed the door shut.

  Getting to school late was the perfect plan, because it meant that I wouldn’t have to suffer through that initial walk of shame up to the quad and have everyone notice that Anouk wasn’t talking to me.

  I sent Liv a text saying I wouldn’t be able to catch the tram with her. Then I took my good old time walking to the milk bar, wandered the aisles (admittedly that only took up a minute or so; it’s a small milk bar), stood at the fridge trying to decide what sort of milk I should be getting (did we normally have low-fat or normal – who knew?), got sugary white bread because Mum never bought it but if I was buying I was going to get the stuff that was bad for me, bought myself a pack of Twisties for my snack (ditto on the bad stuff), then took my good old time wandering back home again.

  Sat and ate my breakfast.

  Scrolled through my phone. Checked that Anouk had really, definitely, absolutely blocked me. Yep. Nothing there.

  I figured if I could get through today, everything would be fine. She couldn’t hold a grudge forever.

  It’d only last a day or two, I said to myself.

  Fly away, little birdie who knew nothing. Fly away. Little did I know that today was only the start of everything getting very, very much worse.

  #

  As I sat down with everyone in the quad at morning break, Anouk slid her eyes over at me for the first time that day. She made sure I saw her seeing me, then she turned away, so that I was a hundred per cent sure that I was being ignored.

  She’d noticed me all right, though. She’d made an extra-special point of noticing me, of registering my presence, of looking straight at me, and then she’d deliberately turned away from me, making sure I was crystal clear that I was being ignored.

  Maybe ‘shunned’ is a better description.

  A lumpen Twistie snagged in my throat. I’d known this snub was coming, but it still managed to clamp my gullet in like a gym-bag with its strings drawn tight.

  It wasn’t until we were walking into the last class of the day, English with Mr Yumi, that I was able to say anything to her. It was as if everyone had made a silent pact to position themselves between us, through every break of the day, every class we shared, making it geographically impossible for me to talk to her until now.

  I touched her on the elbow as we walked through the door, just lightly, as if she was an invalid, and said to her, ‘Hey, I know you’re probably a bit annoyed that I was with Jed at the party. But, you know …’ And I left it at that, because honestly, I wasn’t sure what to say next. She just needed to join the dots, and the dots were obvious; they were like gigantic black circles in front of her face. She couldn’t miss the dots.

  She turned to me, her feet solid in the doorway. I realised that saying something to her at exactly the moment that we would create a bottleneck of rubberneckers had been a bad move. I tried to pull her towards me, out of the way of the door, but she stood firm.

  ‘I couldn’t give a shit that you were with Jed,’ she said, the words blowing harsh against my face. ‘If you think that’s what this is about, then you’re more pathetic than I realised.’

  I blinked at her.

  ‘You know what, MC? If you’re so desperate to be with him, go for it. Go paint his nails. So cute.’ Sarcasm, ladies and gentlemen, is alive and well. ‘But the fact that you deliberately stopped him jumping in the pool with me – in my UNDERWEAR, by the way, in case you hadn’t noticed … the fact that you didn’t come in too … well, if that’s the kind of friend you are, MC, I can do without you as a friend.’

  Mr Yumi, sensing a problem, uttered a stern, ‘Girls!’ to get us to move out of the doorway.

  ‘I didn’t stop him,’ I hissed, keeping my voice quiet in the utterly useless hope that no one would notice what was going on. ‘Besides, he’s the one who asked me to paint his nails. Not the other way around.’

  Okay, the nail thing had been my idea, but that kind of detail wasn’t going to help matters.

  ‘And then,’ she said, her books held against her chest like a war shield, ‘because you’re a prize bitch—’

  ‘Annick. MC,’ Mr Yumi called over from his desk. ‘Girls. I’m about to start class.’

  But Anouk went on, because everyone was listening now: ‘—it’s only once I get out of the pool that you decide, Oh yeah,’ – and here she put on a simpering imitation of what was definitely not my voice – ‘maybe I will go for a swim with you after all, Jed. Now that Anouk’s gone inside, a swim sounds like a really fun idea. You want Jed? You can fucking have him.’ The brutality in her voice for those last words was a stark contrast to the limpness when she’d imitated me.

  ‘Annick!’ Mr Yumi said. ‘Desk. Now. One more word and I’ll send you to the principal’s office.’

  ‘That’s not how it was,’ I said. ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘MC, I said that’s enough,’ Mr Yumi said.

  ‘Every time we’ve gone to a party lately,’ Anouk went on, not even caring that Mr Yumi had now come over and was standing over the two of us, ‘you’ve been all over him like a rash. It’s embarrassing. I feel embarrassed for you. Everyone’s laughing behind your back. I’m the only one who’s game to say it to your face.’

  ‘Okay, Annick,’ Mr Yumi said. ‘I told you one more word. Principal. Now.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ I said. ‘He’s been—’

  ‘One more word, MC,’ barked
Mr Yumi. ‘I’m serious. Maybe the two of you could sort this out in Mrs Willis’s office.’

  I went over and sat down at my desk. Slammed my books down. The last place I wanted to be was sitting out the front of Mrs Willis’s office with Anouk, just the two of us.

  Anouk left, slamming the door.

  I sat through the entire class not hearing a single word Mr Yumi said. I didn’t even feel like calling him Mr Yumi anymore. Not even inside my head.

  Mr Martin.

  I was going to call him Mr Martin from now on, for the rest of my life. Even when I went over to Yumi’s place, I’d call him Mr Martin. Formal. Distant. I’d never forgive him for not letting me say what I’d wanted to say.

  For leaving Anouk with the last word.

  I felt the weight of all that Anouk-ness on my shoulders. I was amazed at how heavy it was. It crowded out everything else.

  She’s only one person, I told myself as I sat through English. There was still Liv and Yumi and Hattie and everyone else I could talk to; I didn’t have to worry about Anouk.

  Fuck Anouk.

  Fook Anouk.

  Go have a sook.

  I played over, like a gif, the moment she’d looked at me and said, Thanks, friend. Loop. Thanks, friend. Loop. Thanks, friend. Then I shook it up a bit, by replaying the moment just before, in front of everyone in class, when she’d said, You’ve been all over him like a rash. It’s embarrassing. I feel embarrassed for you.

  Over and over, on repeat.

  Thanks, friend. Embarrassed for you. Thanks, friend. Embarrassed for you.

  Thanks, friend.

  Embarrassed for you.

  #

  ‘I can’t believe she said I’m the one who’s been all over Jed,’ I said to Liv on the tram on the way home.

  Liv ran her hand through her hair as if to push it off her face, even though when your hair is as short as Liv’s, you hardly need to worry about it falling into your eyes.

  ‘I mean, seriously,’ I went on, ‘he’s the one who’s been all over me, not the other way around. In fact – and this is what really pisses me off – at all the other parties, when I could have kissed him, I always walked away. Because I didn’t want to HURT HER FEELINGS. And now she’s acting like I’m the bitch who’s been trying to get onto him all this time. And making out like I was flirting by painting his fingernails, which was nothing – just, you know, mucking around. I mean, if anything, I’m embarrassed for her, not the other way round. Jed and I were sitting out by the pool, on our own, and then she comes out and sits with us, and says, Let’s have a swim. I don’t feel bad at all. Who does that, comes over when two people are on their own outside, obviously kind of having a nice time by themselves? Who does that? No one, that’s who. You know what? Bad luck. Bad luck that she liked him. It’s over, move on, go have a sook.’