Carmen looks at me wide-eyed for a fraction of a second before roaring with laughter. She grabs my arm. ‘Holy shit, you’re priceless.’ She wipes tears from her eyes – are they from laughter or is she crying?
When she finally stops laughing she nudges my side. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she says. ‘You always know how to make me laugh. Just like Luis.’
I gulp down my joy. Is it joy? It has a sour aftertaste.
‘I didn’t think you were old enough to get into a place like this,’ she says.
‘I only look like I’m twelve. I’m actually eighteen. Well, I just turned eighteen a few days ago.’
‘So you’re an Aquarius? That means you’re curious, imaginative, affectionate, frank and truthful.’
She looks at me and smiles. She doesn’t see how hard it is to hear her call me truthful.
‘But you have a habit of going off track,’ she continues, ‘and you need to be careful about getting addicted to things. Are you addicted to anything?’ There’s a playful edge to her voice.
I glance at the glass of coke in my hand, my fourth for the night. ‘I think I just got addicted to coke.’
‘So long as it’s the fizzy kind you’ll be okay.’
I open my mouth to ask something more about Luis. Some innocuous question that someone like me – someone who doesn’t know anything about Carmen and her brother – could easily ask. Something that will lead to Carmen telling me everything.
But I can’t. Because maybe I’m finally hearing – listening – to the way she still talks about Luis in the present tense. The way she flips out at the very idea of marking his death anniversary. That she clearly can’t admit he’s gone. And I can’t push that.
I can’t.
Instead, I ask her about Kari. ‘Are things okay?’
She presses her lips together tightly and I know I’ve asked the wrong thing. I throw verbal punches at myself, every bad word I can think of.
Carmen rubs her thumb and her forefinger together. She stares at her hand while she’s doing it. ‘She doesn’t get it,’ she says. ‘It’s like, if I’m not doing something the way she thinks I should then I’m not doing it right, you know? She doesn’t have any idea what it’s like.’
She looks at me. Like I’ve got answers. I don’t.
‘Have you ever lost anyone close to you?’ she asks.
I tuck my elbows into my sides and curl forward. I shake my head. ‘I mean, my dad ran out on us but . . . I’m fine about it now. And . . .’ I reach down deep and grab hold of every inch of courage I have, gather the edges together and drag it up and out of me. This is Carmen. She’s going to understand. ‘And I was really sick. When I was young. I was in hospital a lot and I got to know some of the other kids. A lot of them didn’t make it.’
‘It hurts like a bitch, doesn’t it?’ she says. ‘Rips your heart out every day you wake up and remember. Like that movie – Groundhog Day. My mum left us too.’
My throat aches. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I say.
‘About what?’
‘I’d like a star. For my balloon animal? I’d like a star. It’s not an animal but it would be cool. A shooting star. So I could make a wish.’
‘Me too,’ she says and squeezes her eyes shut. I wonder if she’s making her wish now, wishing for her brother, wishing he survived.
I close my eyes and wish for a world where both Luis and I could have lived, where I didn’t have a dodgy heart and where he’d decided not to get in the car that day. I wish that day had never happened – the day it had been raining and I was dying. Maybe then we could have been friends. Me and Luis and Carmen too. I squeeze my eyes tight and wish hard.
‘Looks like a good one,’ says Carmen and I open my eyes to find her watching me. ‘Don’t tell me or it won’t come true.’
I nod. ‘I won’t tell.’
She smiles. ‘Want to see something?’
I nod and she pulls out her phone. ‘I’ve got a photo here of my brother with that stupid balloon animal.’
Carmen unlocks her phone and starts swiping through pictures. I lean over her shoulder and wait with a strange calm. Like someone dropped a blanket over a fire and for a second it looks like the fire is out and if you didn’t know any better you wouldn’t even know there was a fire underneath. Until the blanket goes up in flames.
Then, boy, does it catch fire.
‘Here it is,’ she says and traps her bottom lip between her teeth, trying to hold back the joy she has in looking at a picture of her baby brother. I see him. She flicks and flicks and flicks through picture after picture and I see him at every age.
I see him.
I see Luis Castillejo.
And the fire becomes an explosion.
Luis Castillejo, you were just a boy. An ordinary boy.
You had smooth dark skin, brown eyes and black, black hair. When you were young you wore it long, flopping in your eyes, curling at the nape of your neck. When you were older you cut it short, just enough to rake your fingers through and ruffle.
You played tennis.
You stuck out your tongue.
You wore a Micky Mouse t-shirt when you were little. You wore it a lot.
You slung your arm around your sister, squinting your eyes against the sun. You went on bush walks and played beach cricket and rode an esky lid down a sand dune.
You laughed.
You loved.
You were loved.
You were the centre of your sister’s universe.
My heart pulses in my ears. She can hear it. Surely she can hear it.
‘What a cutie, huh?’ she says and even though she keeps her voice light, even though she smiles as she watches the screen, her finger slowly flicking through picture after picture, there is a crack, a crack in her voice, in her smile, in her universe. There is a crack and it is infinite.
Most of the photos are of Carmen and Luis together. They looked alike. My drawings haven’t been that far off. But I see now what I was getting wrong. It was his laughing eyes. Like he’d just pulled the funniest prank and you didn’t even know it yet. I’d been giving him sad eyes but they were happy. He was happy.
There’s a chance he wasn’t my donor, but he was still a boy who used to be here and now he’s not. And that could have been me.
‘Look at that,’ Carmen says and it’s a picture of Luis dressed as a teenage mutant ninja turtle. I don’t know which one but the bandana is red. ‘God, he loves Halloween. Every year we dress up, plan it months in advance. He picked out last year’s costume in January. Do you believe that? January. He picked out a costume for Cassian Andor from Rogue One.’
‘What did that look like?’
‘What?’ She’s only half paying attention to me. Her eyes never leave her phone.
‘The Cassian costume. Do you have a picture?’
She shakes her head but she smiles. Light and happy and dreamy. ‘He didn’t get to wear it,’ she says.
And then it dawns on me. What I’ve asked. Why he didn’t wear it. I do the maths, counting the months, and it breaks my heart.
I wait for her to tell me that he never will, but there’s this unspoken caveat to her words – I hear it in her sigh, in her eyes and in the smile she forces onto her lips. It is this: he didn’t get to wear it but he will. One day, he will.
All this time I’ve been imagining who Luis was. But in Carmen’s world, Luis Castillejo is still the dorky kid in the Mickey Mouse tee with ice-cream on his nose and a bandaid on his knee. He’s the kid who loved dressing up for Halloween and playing tennis and model cars and pulling funny faces. He will always be that kid. In his sister’s eyes.
He will never be the kid who gave his heart so someone like me could live. He will never be male, sixteen, car accident.
I don’t belong with Carmen Castillejo. I am an unwanted truth.
I stand. Her eyes wander up to me and she looks so much like I’ve just woken her from a dream. A really good dream.
‘I have
a curfew. I have to go.’
‘Oh,’ she says. She closes her eyes, scrunches them tight and then opens them again. I don’t know, maybe she expects to open her eyes and wake up somewhere else. Maybe she thinks she’s going to wake up and it will be Luis standing in front of her, not me.
‘It was good seeing you again.’ Somehow my voice is even. Somehow.
She smiles. Luis’ smile.
‘You too,’ she says as I turn my back on her.
Marlowe Jensen, you are the negative thought that surfaces the second a person’s head hits the pillow and keeps them awake all night. You are a three a.m. anxiety attack. You are the faceless monster that chases little girls and boys through their dreams.
Marlowe Jensen, you break hearts.
Hannah forces her hands into latex gloves and explains my last lot of results. ‘Good. Great. Super,’ she says.
I’m propped on the edge of the gurney, legs swinging over the side, as she lays out the usual sharp jabby things. She keeps looking sideways at me and nothing penetrates deeper than a Hannah sidelong stare. ‘But numbers are only half the story. How do you feel? Your mum says you’ve been taking some days off school.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Fine?’
‘Fine.’
She stares at me, daring me to stare shamelessly back, but
I look away, at my interwoven fingers in my lap.
‘Aye-yai-yai,’ she says. ‘You and your “fine”.’ She starts jabbing and sucking out blood and prodding and squeezing. ‘One of these days, Marlowe, you’ll say, “You know what, Hannah? I feel like crap.” And guess what? The world won’t end. No earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions or monkey flu outbreaks. You might even feel lighter. Better. You might surprise yourself.’ She bops the end of my nose with a finger; it’d be cute except for the latex gloves.
She fixes on me and waits. Waiting for an admission of crappiness.
I suppose I could tell her how crap I feel. Like, I could tell her that I can’t stop dreaming about Luis Castillejo. That’s pretty crap. How I keep getting texts from Carmen, but don’t know how to respond so I don’t. Extra crappy. How I can’t face school so I tell Mum I’m sick and don’t go – even though I know it terrifies her, that word ‘sick’ and what it could mean for me. That’s a whole new level of crap.
I wish Mum were here. She’s always good for taking over a conversation. But she left ages ago with Professor Kirmani to discuss my transition to the Alfred unit.
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Really.’
Jab.
‘How are you sleeping?’
‘Like a baby. Or not. Cos babies scream and cry and wake up all the time. So nothing like a baby.’
Poke.
‘And you’re eating well?’
‘Have you met my mother?’ Squeeze.
‘How about school? Is it too much?’
‘It’s the perfect amount of much.’
She dumps my bloods on the portable with enough force to make me flinch. ‘Well, something’s eating you. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes.’
Hannah regards me with hands on hips and I’m afraid she won’t let me go until I tell her something. She’ll probably test my bloods for ‘true feelings’ or ‘secrets’ or ‘reasons why Marlowe doesn’t deserve her second chance’.
‘Well?’ she says.
I know that talking helps. Sometimes. But only if you’re talking about things with answers and things that don’t seem so bad when you let them go, when they’re no longer trapped inside you. But big things, things that don’t have answers, that can’t be fixed or looked at in a better light – I don’t know if talking about those things helps.
And there’ll be no cutesy bopping of my nose when I admit I just barged into a random girl’s life because I thought her brother might be my donor even though I never heard back from Armando Castillejo. Because when you put it like that, it’s gross. It’s dirty and selfish now that I know how little Carmen has come to terms with her brother’s death. It’s maybe even a little bit life-destroying. Because if I tell Carmen who I am and why I wanted to get to know her and if I make her face up to her brother’s death, what does that achieve?
I was only going to make sure she was still smiling.
The morning after the gig, I woke up with this feeling like a heavy boot pressing down on my chest. And a knot of shame in my throat. All I could think about was Carmen. Carmen and the way she looked at Luis. How alive that love was.
Is.
I tried to bury it down deep, teasing Zan about Kari.
‘You like her,’ I said.
‘She invited me to this party next Thursday night. At her place.’
‘She is totally in love with you.’
‘You got invited too.’
‘I did?’
That’s when my phone buzzed. When I read the name on the screen, I almost dropped it.
‘What? Did Leo send you a dick pic?’
‘Carmen.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off my phone. I’d forgotten I’d given her my number.
Zan took my phone out of my hands and read out loud: ‘Cool running into you last night – see you at Kari’s party. Smiley face.’
Zan handed my phone back to me. ‘It’ll be fun.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, you should probably tell her your real name because it’s weird you’re keeping it secret, don’t you think? You said yourself he might not even be your donor so just tell her.’
‘Yeah,’ I said and threw my phone to the floor. ‘Totally fun.’
Maybe Carmen will get drunk again and show me more pictures of her dead brother and talk like he’s still alive, like he’s just on an extended holiday. It turns out I don’t need a congenital defect to wreck my heart. An electric smile and a phone full of pictures could have done the same job.
I look up and Hannah’s still waiting.
‘I’m fine,’ I tell her.
‘Marlowe . . .’
‘Really. I am. I’m sorry being fine isn’t good enough but that’s all I have.’
She holds my gaze for too long. It takes all of my strength not to look away. It’s Hannah who breaks first.
She pulls off her gloves, throwing them into the bin. Thunk. I slide off the gurney, straightening the neck of my dress. Sometimes it slips too low and you can see the beginning of my scar.
Hannah walks me out, one hand on my back.
I’m fine.
Fine.
Fine.
Fine. The chairs in the corridor are cold and hard but it feels like a good sort of penance so I sit up extra straight and embrace the discomfort.
‘You’ll wait here for your mum?’
I nod.
‘Fine,’ she says.
‘Fine.’
I stare straight ahead, even though she continues to watch me. I’m tired of being probed and prodded, like all of me is open for public comment. Some things are just for me. Some things should get to stay inside me.
I listen as Hannah’s shoes squeak down the corridor. She’ll find Mum and let her know that I’m ready and then we’ll go. I wish I were gone already. Don’t you just long for teleportation? Zap! I’m somewhere else. Or a tele-personality. Zap! I’m someone else.
The chairs groan as a couple sit down at the other end.
I try not to look at them. Mostly because I can hear sobbing.
I wonder how teleportation would actually work. Like, would it break you down into molecules and shoot those to wherever you want to be and put you back together again on the other side? Because if emails can work then teleportation can too. It’s basically the same thing. We’re pretty much just data. Just a bunch of DNA coding.
The woman at the end of the seats sniffs. ‘I don’t understand what it all means,’ she whispers.
You’d have to be careful that you were put back together again properly on the other side. And you wouldn’t want to end up in the same place at the same time as another person and get all mixed up with them.
&n
bsp; ‘It’s going to be okay, Laura.’
I glance at the couple. She’s all hunched up and red-eyed and he’s tall and puffed up like if he could only make himself big enough to wrap her up and keep her shielded from all the horrible stuff in the world he would.
Would the teleport machine recognise this heart as mine? What if it put all of me back together except my heart? It would be like, I’ve got this heart. Whose is it? Where does it go?
‘Let it all out,’ he tells her. She sags into his side, sobbing, gripping his shirt. He cries too, softly, into her hair.
Don’t let it out, I want to tell her. Hold onto the moments when you were smiling, happy, when forever seemed too far away to see the end of. Only let go of the moments like this. Of crying so hard there’s no longer any sound. Of being told you’re going to die by a doctor who can’t look you in the eye. Of having the worst moment of your life play out in public, on a hard, cold chair, with strangers walking by. And then dying. Or maybe thinking you’re going to die. And then not dying, despite the odds.
She cries and he holds her and she cries and cries and cries.
‘Ready?’ says Mum.
I jolt. ‘Yeah.’
‘I hear your numbers were good. And your blood pressure was a-okay.’ Mum slides her arm around my shoulders.
I nod.
‘Good,’ she says, so much cheer in her voice, pretending the couple aren’t there. ‘Because I have a little project for us. What say you to another protest outside the butcher shop?’ She grins in a way that means ‘little’ is not an appropriate word choice to describe what she has in mind.
‘Sure,’ I tell her because that’s what she wants to hear.
We walk away and I look back over my shoulder at the couple – two separate beings curled around each other, like they need every part of their bodies to be touching.
I remember Mum after Dad left. She would grab me or Pip any time we walked past and squeeze us tightly. Hold us until we’d almost lose consciousness. But she never talked about him. Just talked about animal rights and her plans to leave her job and open her own cruelty-free shop and all the protests she wanted us to take part in and why we were no longer allowed to eat wheat and sugar. And it was the same after I got sick. She didn’t talk about it, just the healthy things she was going to make me eat and why we needed to worry about the extinction of bees and why scratchy recycled toilet paper was necessary.
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