It Sounded Better in My Head

by Nina Kenwood

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  ‘Lucy, did you get into any course?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Teaching.’

  ‘Teaching?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Since when did you want to be a teacher?’

  ‘When I got my marks, I added teaching to my course preferences because…because it was something I might get into, something I might be good at. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to be.’

  ‘You always said you wanted to be a lawyer.’

  ‘That’s what I said, yes.’

  ‘But it wasn’t true?’

  ‘I thought it was true. It’s what my parents want. They are so mad at me right now. But I don’t think I ever wanted to be a lawyer. Especially after I did work experience at that law firm. Do you know what a lawyer does all day? Reads really detailed, boring contracts, mostly, and sits in meetings and has conference calls. And they do this for, like, ten or twelve hours a day.’

  ‘That does sound boring.’ All office jobs sound boring, when you really think about it. I did work experience at the office of my local council, and people seemed to spend their time reading emails, complaining about emails, worrying about finding space in the fridge for their lunch and getting excited about coffee.

  ‘And you have to wear a suit. Suit jackets look ridiculous on me,’ Lucy continues. Neither of us has ever worn a suit jacket, not that I know of, but I nod anyway.

  ‘It’s because you’ve got very delicate shoulders.’

  ‘I like little kids. And I’m small, so I won’t be intimidating to them.’

  ‘That’s important,’ I say. I have exactly zero idea about what is important. When I first started school, every teacher looked like a giant to me.

  ‘Oh god, I have no idea what I’m doing,’ Lucy says.

  ‘I mean, we’re young. We should have no idea what we want to do.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to study teaching now, so I hope I know.’

  ‘You do. You know. I’m the one who doesn’t.’

  I hug her, and she whimpers a little into my shoulder. I feel slightly dizzy, trying to comprehend the fact that Lucy, who never lies, lied about this. That she is going to be a teacher. I had already planned the gift I was going to give her when she graduated as a lawyer. I had planned our futures around the idea she would have much more money than me. I was going to be the creative one, the one struggling for money and living in the spare room of her beautiful house, and she was going to be the rich, cut-throat corporate sell-out who paid for our taxis and takeaway food, and was secretly jealous of my artistic struggles. Now the picture looks different. Now she’s going to inspire children and be deeply fulfilled, and I’ll just be directionless and unemployable.

  ‘I’m psycho. You’ll never trust me again after this,’ she says.

  I can feel her shaking. I want to hug her forever. ‘I still trust you,’ I say.

  ‘You shouldn’t.’

  ‘I’ll always, always, always trust you.’

  ‘What if I keep lying? What if I can’t stop?’

  ‘Then we’ll find a way to make you stop.’

  ‘I haven’t told Zach.’

  ‘We’ll tell him together.’

  ‘No, no, I have to do it on my own.’

  ‘We’ll make a plan of how to do it. Look, I’ll get a pen right now and we’ll write down what you can say. We’ll role play it. You know I do a good Zach impression.’

  ‘He’ll break up with me.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’ll never break up with you. He loves you.’

  ‘I knew I had to tell you both. I was going to do it on New Year’s Eve. But I couldn’t.’

  ‘Lucy, it’s okay. It’s none of our business what score you got, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, it is. I lied to you. That is unforgivable.’

  ‘Lucy, everything is going to be fine. Drink your tea. You’ll feel better.’

  Lucy holds the mug in her hands, half-heartedly raising it to her lips and pretending to drink, and I sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her, smiling encouragingly like I know how to fix everything.

  29

  Shiny Happy Party People

  I’m at a fluro party.

  Alex is wearing a neon yellow singlet and neon yellow sunglasses and he’s carrying a bright green water pistol and has neon yellow zinc stripes over his cheeks. Most of the girls are wearing hyper-coloured bikini tops, teeny, tiny denim shorts and wild eye makeup, with coloured hairspray and glitter and armfuls of fluro bracelets and glow-in-the-dark nail polish. Music is pumping, everyone looks drunk or high or overwhelmingly bright. It’s basically a rave party in somebody’s very expensive three-storey house, and I’m perched on the couch self-consciously yanking up my mother’s hot pink exercise top (the closest thing I could find to something fluro in my house) to stop my bra from showing.

  ‘Want me to zinc your face?’ Alex asks, holding up a stick of orange sunscreen.

  ‘Sure.’ I close my eyes and let him draw a stripe across each cheek. My skin will break out after this—it freaks out at unscented moisturiser let alone thick, coloured sludgy balm that has touched who knows how many other faces. This is the first concession I will make towards having fun tonight.

  ‘And your arms?’ he asks.

  I hold them out and he writes a word down my left arm and then my right one.

  I twist my head to look at them. On my left arm, GOOD. On my right arm, BAD. Lucy and I could spend weeks analysing what this means. I almost text her, but decide not to, because I’ve been texting her nonstop since she left my house this afternoon, and I think she needs a little bit of space. (I think this because she texted me and said, ‘I appreciate you worrying about me, but I’m okay and I just need some space right now.’)

  ‘Now me,’ Alex says, and I pause and then write LOVER and HATER on his arms.

  ‘We should get tattoos like this,’ Alex says, squirting his water pistol at a guy walking past, who sticks his finger up without missing a beat.

  I really hope he’s joking about the tattoos.

  I study Alex out of the corner of my eye. Maybe he’s on something. I need to stand directly in front of him and see if his pupils are dilated. Is he sweating? Yes, but it’s hot in here and pretty much everyone is sweating. Is his jaw moving strangely? I can’t tell from this angle.

  I’m not sure how I feel if he is. Mostly nervous, because if he’s high, he won’t be a very good safety net for me, and there’s no way I am surviving this party without a safety net. The other party was a Beginners party, maybe an Intermediate. This one is Advanced. I’m not ready for Advanced. I’ll never be ready for Advanced.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Alex says, and I follow him up a grand staircase. This is a rich person’s home, which adds to my discomfort. The music is much louder on the next floor, and all the furniture has been pushed to the sides of the room, so the big space in the middle can be used as a dance floor. The floor is polished concrete, and a huge rug has been rolled up and propped on its end in the corner. That rug is probably worth thousands of dollars. Maybe tens of thousands. I feel anxious just looking at it. I want to drape a sheet over it.

  People are shouting and jumping up and down in time to the music. The bass is turned up so loud you can hardly hear the music itself, just the deep, thrumming pounding, which is inside my chest immediately. One guy, covered in stripes of yellow zinc and pink glitter, is lying on the floor in the corner, banging his hands in time to the beat.

  I am in my own personal rainbow-coloured hell.

  I wish Zach and Lucy were here.

  ‘Let’s dance,’ Alex says. His water pistol has a strap and it’s hanging off his shoulder like he’s some weird neon action hero.

  The party was Alex’s idea, obviously. He said we needed to celebrate me getting into uni, into my first preference. I said sure, imagining an evening picnic. Maybe h
e would make food. Buy me a bunch of flowers. Get me a journal for taking notes during class. Create a special Spotify playlist of celebratory songs. Go on a long drive down the coast and stand on a cliff together, talking about our futures and looking at the sunset. In the space of about ten seconds, I had quite a romantic fantasy going.

  Instead, he’d said, ‘Come to my friend’s party, we’ll have fun.’ I said, ‘Okay, sure, sounds good,’ which means I absolutely don’t want to and I am annoyed you are even suggesting it. He doesn’t know me well enough to read that subtext.

  Then he said it’s a fluro party, as if that would mean something to me. I laughed, and then I panicked and googled ‘fluro party’ and then I pulled every single piece of clothing out of my wardrobe and onto the floor in a state of near hysteria. I wanted to call Lucy and beg her for help, but at that point she had already asked me for space and her crisis felt a little bigger than mine.

  And now here we are. Alex keeps introducing me to people, and I keep smiling and nodding and struggling to think of things to say. Alex is in a strange mood. He seems buoyant and happy in a false way, like he’s trying too hard. I thought going to a party with him would be easier than going to one alone, but it turns out it’s much harder, because now everything I do feels like it’s a reflection on him.

  My face must be betraying my anxiety because Alex takes a step closer and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear.

  ‘It’s not really dancing. It’s jumping. It’s fun, trust me.’

  Oh, jumping. Cool. We large-breasted girls love jumping.

  There are neon yellow and green jelly shots on a platter, and Alex sucks down two in a row before heading to the heaving mass of jumping bodies. I hover over the jelly shots before also grabbing one and sucking it down. It tastes like jelly with a burn. It’s much better than actually drinking alcohol, at least. It might be the only good thing about this party. That, and the cupcakes with fluro icing I saw downstairs.

  I’m ignoring the fact that my ears are already ringing from the music, and now that I’m in the crush of bodies, I feel overwhelmingly claustrophobic. The sound of the music gets into my mouth and rattles my teeth.

  This is fun, this is fun, this is fun, this is fun.

  This is how people have fun.

  I jump in time to the beat and close my eyes, which gives me a not entirely awful out of body and time experience, and for a moment I understand the appeal of letting your body go and thinking of absolutely nothing. The jelly shot is helping.

  I bump into someone who is very, very sweaty. Their sweat is on me now. That’s okay, I can handle that. Everything is hot and sticky in this room. I can feel the zinc running down my face. I probably have sweat marks on my top. I need to get to a bathroom and re-apply my concealer at some point.

  Someone puts their hands on my waist from behind, and I know it’s not Alex because I can see him in front of me, bopping around, grinning, spraying people with his water gun, having the time of his life. I twist around and try to see who is holding me, but before I can, the person is lifting me in the air, up and down, like I weigh nothing. (I do not weigh nothing.)

  I wriggle free, turning to see that it’s Owen Sinclair.

  ‘Wooooooo!’ he yells, waving his hands in the air. His eyes are wobbly and unfocused, and his hair is slick with sweat. This is the most unattractive he’s ever looked.

  I am filled with a deep sense that I do not want to be here. I definitely do not want Owen Sinclair lifting me up and down like I’m a toy.

  Then Alex appears.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he mouths—the music is too loud to hear words properly.

  ‘Not really,’ I mouth back.

  Alex leans closer to me. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I want to calmly give him a clear and detailed explanation of how I’m feeling, but that’s not quite what happens.

  ‘I hate this!’ I shout.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This whole thing.’

  I wave my hands vaguely and take a second to glare at Owen Sinclair, who gives me a thumbs up in return.

  ‘What happened?’ Alex says.

  My heart is racing, and I feel like I might cry, which would give me a one hundred per cent cry rate at parties.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I say in return. I walk down the stairs and out into the backyard. I find a chair to sit on and take in big gulps of air. My heart is still going a million miles an hour. Maybe it was the jelly shot. Maybe my body is having a reaction to alcohol.

  I hunch over, close my eyes and count to ten—one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten—and I feel a bit better, so I do it again. One-two-three-four—

  ‘What’s going on?’ Alex says, squatting next to me.

  I open my eyes. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ I say.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I knew it would be like this.’

  ‘Like what?’ He looks impatient.

  ‘Like this. All these awful people. I hate everyone here.’ I don’t even care that they’re his friends.

  ‘I shouldn’t have invited you,’ Alex says, in a tone that pisses me off.

  ‘No, you shouldn’t have. I thought this was supposed to be about celebrating me getting into uni.’

  ‘I thought it would be fun for both of us,’ he says.

  ‘Well, haven’t you heard, I’m not a fun person.’

  ‘Natalie.’ He sounds tired. Like I’m an exhausting, annoying toddler that he has to babysit.

  ‘Don’t treat me like I’m a burden,’ I say. My panic from before has turned into a hot anger.

  ‘Don’t treat me like I’m torturing you!’ he says, standing up.

  ‘Well I hate every second of being here,’ I say. I stand up as well, because I don’t like the feeling of him looking down at me.

  ‘Then go.’ Alex says.

  ‘Maybe this whole thing is a mistake,’ I say, because I’m not finished being angry.

  ‘Maybe it is,’ he says.

  ‘By whole thing, I mean us. Being together.’ There I am, being like Dad, unable to stop myself from hammering the point home.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Alex says.

  We are staring at each other, both of us breathing hard. Arguing with my parents, or even with Zach and Lucy, I know what direction they’ll go in, what they’re likely to say, the buttons they’ll push, the zigs and zags they’ll take. But Alex is different. The ways I am vulnerable are different, and I can’t predict what he might say.

  Also, even now, even when I’m super mad at him, I find him attractive. Which makes me even madder.

  I turn and start walking away.

  ‘Wait,’ he says, and I’ll give him credit for saying that, because it’s vitally important to my sense of self that when I storm away from a boy I like, he says ‘wait’.

  ‘No,’ I say, not turning around, which is what I always pictured myself doing in this scenario and I’m proud of myself for not even looking over my shoulder.

  30

  Meltdown

  I am holding my phone in my hand, about to call an Uber—on the verge of tears but too angry to be upset (that stage will come later, when I’m safe in bed)—when Lucy’s name pops up on my screen, calling me. Thank god. She’s exactly the person I need to talk to.

  ‘Natalie.’ Her voice is wobbly. It sounds strange.

  ‘Luce?’

  ‘Can you come and get me?’ She’s drunk. She’s slurring almost every word. I’ve seen Lucy drunk before, but the way she sounds now—it sends a little cold shiver down my spine.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you with Zach? Where’s Zach?’

  ‘I was with him. But I don’t know where he is now.’ She gives a small, pitiful sob. ‘Please, come and get me.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Please. I need you!’

  ‘I will, Lucy. Just tell me where you are and what’s going on.’

  ‘I don’t know where I a
m.’ (Snuffling crying noises.)

  ‘Can you go to Google Maps on your phone and see your current location?’

  ‘No!’ (Tearful hiccup.)

  ‘Lucy, please just do this one thing. The app is right there on your home screen. Just the suburb, even.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  There’s the sound of scrabbling around. A long silence. A clattering sound and some swearing. Then more silence. Finally, Lucy is back on the phone.

  ‘Brunswick.’

  ‘Okay, good. That’s a great start.’

  ‘Please come and get me.’ Every word is stretched a little bit too long.

  ‘Where in Brunswick?’

  ‘On a street.’

  ‘You need to give me a bit more.’

  ‘Come and get me, please!’ She’s yelling now, and I’m so panicked I almost drop the phone, but then she starts laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘I’ve lost my shoes!’

  ‘Okay, I’m coming. Lucy, I’m hanging up, but I’ll call you back soon, okay?’

  ‘I found my shoes!’

  ‘Great. Lucy? When you see me calling you, answer, okay?’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  I hang up and call Zach. It goes straight to voicemail. I call twice more, to be sure. I think about calling my mum, but it feels like a betrayal of Lucy to let a parent see her in this state. I’ll have to get a cab or an Uber, but I might need to drive around the streets looking for her. I cringe at the thought of how expensive it could get.

  I’m walking through the front yard of the fluro party house, deep in thought, and don’t notice until it’s too late that I’m about to walk into someone. I slam into their back, getting a mouthful of shiny black hair.

  ‘Ow.’ The person turns around and it’s Vanessa. Of course it’s Vanessa.

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ I duck my head and keep going. I must look distraught because Vanessa walks beside me as I hurry on.

  ‘Hey, are you okay?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine.’