Please Don't Hug Me

by Kay Kerr

  I hope Mum will make me something else to wear now that formal is over, because I liked all the time we spent together not talking in her sewing room. Mum is good to talk to, but she’s good to not talk to and just be with as well. Maybe that’s true for everyone’s mum, but it is especially true for ours. When she talks she tries to teach me, or say what I want to hear, or build me up and make me confident or something. It’s really nice, but it’s so focused on me that I don’t get a sense of her at all. When we don’t talk I can feel her more, how she worries for all of us, how she cares so much, how she wishes things were different.

  I wish you’d been here for formal. I reckon we would have managed to get at least one nice photo together. Mum would have put it on the wall in the hallway or in a frame beside her bed. I’m crap at photos, I always look slightly alarmed, but when it’s you and me, you tell me jokes under your breath so I’m laughing as the photo is taken. That always works.

  Mitch said suits are for ‘suits’, which I think means people who work in an office, so we found him something to wear at the op shop instead. I had my hair teased and my eyelashes curled and my cheeks rouged and my lips painted and my nails done. It was a lot of work for just one night and I felt like a bit of a plucked chicken at the end, looking very different and a little too exposed.

  Remember that time when we were supposed to be leaving for Dreamworld at 9.15 am to make it there by the time it opened at 10 am and no one was ready and I banged my head against the wall so hard I got a bruise? That’s how I feel about being on time. It makes me anxious, if anxious also means mad and unsettled. So when I arrived home from all my getting-ready appointments to a seemingly empty house I could feel my mind starting to swirl.

  I heard Dad’s voice from the back room: ‘Mitch called, he’s running late. But you’ve got another visitor.’

  My other visitor was Aggie. She was sitting on the side of my bed flipping through an old magazine and looking more at home in my room than I think I ever have. My room likes her, I think.

  She got up real close to my hair to inspect the work. ‘This looks great. Are there like a million bobby pins in there?’

  There were probably closer to fifty, but I didn’t say that. When people exaggerate, they don’t really like to be corrected. That is something I’ve learned. I should remember to tell Dr Lim about that ‘learned behaviour’.

  I thanked Aggie for coming over. It was nice to have someone to help me get ready. She said she’d wanted to ‘see how my whole look came together’, which was nice. She helped me put on my dress because it had to go over my head, so she stood on the bed and jumped up and down to wiggle it on. She clapped her hands when it was done. She is like Oliver when he is happy—it comes out of her so easily.

  She pulled something out of her bag as she said, ‘I made you something I thought might go with your dress.’ It was a long, colourful woven necklace. Aggie kept saying I didn’t have to wear it if I didn’t want to, but it was beautiful and I wanted to put it on straight away. She took an end in each hand and did it up behind my neck.

  I didn’t say anything. I’m terrible at saying how I feel if it’s emotional. The feeling gets trapped inside me, but I hope she understood how much I loved it. I hoped it would give me some of her sparkle, even just for the night.

  I don’t think she meant to be pointy when she looked around and said, ‘So where’s your man? I was looking forward to meeting him and drilling him a little about making sure you have a good night.’ But it felt that way because he wasn’t there.

  I made excuses and wished I didn’t have to. Forty minutes later, and fifteen minutes after we were supposed to arrive at the pre-formal party, which was six kilometres away, Mitch finally arrived. His hair, usually straightened and pushed back in a barber cut, was sweaty and curly and I caught a whiff of bourbon. He said he couldn’t pick up my flowers because he was over the limit, and I wondered if there were even flowers to begin with. Probably not.

  I said it wasn’t a big deal, even though it was, and I usually don’t lie. I guess I was embarrassed for Mitch that Aggie saw him like that. She stuck her hand out to Mitch and shook his, saying, ‘Doesn’t Erin look beautiful?’

  He agreed I did. He spoke slowly, like a monkey who had just learned to talk. His eyes were sort of doing their own thing, not really keeping up with one another or anyone else, like a pug dog. Aggie snorted a laugh and disguised it as a cough. That made me laugh, but I didn’t disguise it as anything else.

  I had thought Mitch was the right guy for me. He asked me out, we like the same music, we see movies together, laugh at the same jokes and he lives five minutes away from me. He drives a nice car and girls seem to agree that he is good looking. Up until formal night I had just one picture of the two of us together—drunk, smiling, our bodies entwined. We look happy. I have spent the last year and a half trying to recreate that display of happiness, from a photograph taken before we were officially together, but I’ve never really got there. Least of all on formal night. I guess with what happened with you, Rudy, he was a constant in my life just when I needed someone. But I’m seeing things more clearly now.

  When Mum got home with Ollie she used her expensive SD camera for one of the two times a year she gets it out. She told us to ‘smile and say formal’. Mitch leant down as if he was about to scoop me up in his arms, but I hissed at him not to even try. Then Oliver stood beside me for a sibling photo, with his arms down straight along his sides and a goofy grin on his cherub face. You were a ghost between us.

  Aggie said she’d stay with Oliver until Mum and Dad got back, and I was surprised that they said yes. She said she was meant to be rehearsing one of her new songs before her gig in town on the weekend, but she could do that with an audience of one. Oliver said he had plenty of toys that could watch too, and I kind of wanted to be staying with them.

  Because of the time, I rushed everyone to the car, shuffling in the high heels I should have practised wearing more before the big day. If we were in a cartoon, squiggly stench lines would have surrounded Mitch, as his bourbon breath filled the car with a burning, flammable kind of smell. I never want to smell that smell again. I counted the broken lines in the centre of the road as we cruised along, and reached 215 by the time we arrived at Pointy Kathy’s waterfront house. Dad let Mitch and me out at the driveway.

  As far as social anxiety goes, entering a crowded party full of strangers is right up there. I’d say it’s the second hardest, after public speaking. The list goes:

  Public speaking (especially giving a speech in class)

  Walking into a crowded party of strangers

  Shopping centres, in case I run into someone I know and don’t want to talk to, or worse someone I DON’T KNOW talks to me

  Having to call the doctor’s to make an appointment or a restaurant to order takeaway food

  Church, when we used to go, and the small talk while we waited for the priest to start the service.

  I tried to compose my thoughts at the front door, and I couldn’t even bring myself to look at Mitch. There was nothing I could do about him by then, so it was easier to pretend he wasn’t there at all. I knocked but no one answered. The door was ajar so I assumed that meant we could let ourselves in. Through the house that was as big as any I’d ever been in, I could hear the party out in the garden.

  We walked slowly down the hall, past the framed family photos and artwork on the walls. Pointy Kathy’s family looked beautiful, but their sad eyes said they were not quite as happy as their smiles suggested. When Mitch and I arrived out the back on the deck I was overwhelmed. It wasn’t just the extravagance of the home, it was the humming of the crowd and the energy it was emitting—the sensory overload shook my bones. Mitch disappeared, to the toilet, I think, but whatever he said to me before he walked away did not have a chance to enter my brain.

  I became part of the buzzing as soon as I walked out there, but at the same time I felt removed, like I had exited my body and floated to the ro
oftop to watch the goings on. I’ve always had a problem with disassociation and, inversely, ‘living in the moment’. If I could choose a superpower it would be invisibility, or maybe flying, so that I could grab that bird’s-eye view. I watched as girls were hugging, mothers were crying, and siblings looked bored. I felt numb. Then I was the one hugging people, smiling, laughing and being that ‘high school girl having the night of her life’ character that seemed to be expected. I don’t know how many times I wished Aggie had been there instead of Mitch. I didn’t let myself think of you at all.

  Dee grabbed me as soon as she saw me, and squealed with excitement like a little kid. ‘Can you believe it? We’re here. It’s happening. You look beautiful Erin, your Mum smashed it. The colour of your dress is so right now.’

  I struggled to process what she was saying because I was still trying to process the crowd and the noise and the smell of food and Mitch being drunk before he even got here. Dee has learnt by now that I’m not being rude when this happens, and she pulled me to an open space on the lawn so I’d be able to focus.

  ‘It’s a lot, isn’t it. It’ll be better once we get on our way,’ she said. I appreciate so much that she knows to do this. And then Pointy Kathy called her to come and be in a photo, and Dee pulled me along with her. Mitch reappeared from inside the house and shuffled around with the other boyfriends and partners. Some of them he knew from other parties or whatever he did in his life before me. As we stood on the balcony smiling and standing tall, I thought of the news story I had seen recently about a balcony collapsing at a pre-formal event just like this, not too long ago and not too far away. I was feeling very weird.

  After the photo I noticed my parents had made their way into the party. Mum was talking to Dee’s mum, and Dad was sipping slowly from a green bottle of beer. They stay in each other’s orbit at big functions like this, not interacting with each other but never straying too far away. I wonder if that’s what love is, doing your own thing in orbit with another person doing theirs. Mitch was winning friends with his hip flask, offering it to every pretty girl. He and I weren’t even in the same universe.

  ‘The limos are here,’ someone shouted from inside the house. I said goodbye to Mum and Dad, who told me to ‘stay safe’ as if I was the one driving, and I made my way out. Mitch and I were in a limo on our own; I’d been home sick from school on the day the girls organised their groups. I saw Dee and Skyscraper Simon laughing as they popped their heads up out of their sunroof, two cars ahead. I wanted to do a Freaky Friday body-switch with Dee and live out her night instead of the one I was having.

  Mitch kept drinking for the whole drive, and I caught up on some world news on my phone. When I told him ‘things aren’t looking so good in Greece’, he told me how he’d played Danny in his high school musical Grease, which was completely off topic and also something I already knew. See what I mean? Light-years away.

  In what I guess was an attempt to make us feel like movie stars for a night, there was a red carpet from the drop-off point into the foyer, where our photos were taken for the yearbook with our home class. I stood at the back in our photo, and I think I was looking away as the flash went off.

  It was unnerving to see our teachers dressed up, like when someone with really thick glasses suddenly switches to contact lenses and you realise how different their eyes are. The hotel was not as fancy as I thought it would be. It had ugly patterned carpet like a cinema and tacky red draping. I guess I needed some air or some quiet or something because I found myself in the bathroom. Dee was there. She was leaning into the mirror reapplying her pink lipstick—she was a vision in lemon yellow, like Belle from Beauty and the Beast, but with more style. I told her exactly that, because I didn’t want to keep that nice thought inside.

  She said, ‘Thanks, Brain. You too. Are you having fun?’

  I didn’t want to be honest and I didn’t want to lie. I said, ‘Sort of,’ which is barely an answer at all. I told her how Mitch was drunk and I asked how things were going with Simon. She had the biggest smile I’ve seen on her face when she said, ‘Amazing. He made a playlist for the limo drive, with a mix of his favourite songs and mine. It was perfect.’

  Her story twisted my gut like a corkscrew. I felt like I wasn’t in anyone’s orbit. Somehow I’d made some wrong choices while I was trying to avoid making any choices at all. It was hard even to fake a smile, and I had to will myself not to have an outburst right there at formal. I wanted to feel happy for Dee, but I couldn’t feel past my own stuff, so I hugged her and went to find our table.

  I wanted to cry and eat donuts, but being at formal was like being stuck on a boat with no way off. I passed Skyscraper Simon, and gave an awkward smile before looking down at the floor. I really do struggle with eye contact; it feels as though I am letting people see straight through my pupils and into my soul. People think hugging or kissing is personal, but eye contact has always felt more intimate to me.

  Mitch was still in the foyer, staring at Jessica Rabbit’s breasts as she swigged from his flask. He didn’t look as cool as his face seemed to say he felt. He just looked pathetic.

  Jessica Rabbit saw me and said, ‘Oh, hey, Erin, it’s not what it looks like,’ in her deep, talking-to-a-guy voice. Mitch took a long drink without looking at me. He hoped I was jealous, I think. I told her it looked like Mitch was giving her a swig from his flask. She laughed and said, ‘Don’t yell at him. I was the one who twisted his arm.’

  Ugh. The likelihood of me yelling at Mitch was right up there with the chance of pigs flying, which is a saying I like because it means something is never going to happen and it also makes me think of pigs with wings. When I am truly angry it is hard to string together two words, let alone at any significant volume. My mind ticks over, swilling around, boiling and percolating. My teeth clench, my face goes red, from embarrassment rather than rage, and I tend to keep my eyes closed for longer than is socially acceptable. The old ‘if I can’t see you, you can’t see me’ idea from childhood still applies. I certainly wouldn’t be yelling at anyone, especially not Mitch or Jessica Rabbit.

  Mitch whispered in my ear not to worry—he was here with me. I started laughing and it took a really long time to stop. It wasn’t the kind of laughing you do at a joke though; it was the kind you do when nothing makes sense.

  Sitting at our table was better: I could read the menu, watch our table buddies and act as though the night with Mitch was going better than it really was. The principal made a speech I think she’d hoped would inspire us, like she was Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, but it was full of clichés like ‘Your time is now’ and ‘You’re only young once’. Dinner was an alternating drop of chicken and steak. Biting into the chicken was like trying to chew the rubber off the end of my pencil. Were the other tables really enjoying the food, or were they pretending as much as I was? It was difficult to tell.

  Finally the music started. Time for dancing. I jumped to my feet at the same time as eight of my nine table companions but, of course, not Mitch. He said, ‘The music is crap.’ I said it was retro and that I wanted him to do one thing for me. I guess he didn’t see it that way.

  ‘Are you kidding me? One thing? I finished work early, losing nearly a hundred bucks pay, I bought this suit and I came along to a dinner with a bunch of kids when I could have done something good tonight like go to the Valley.’

  That summed it up pretty well really. Mitch thought he was doing more for me than he actually was and that I should be thankful. I know I can be unsure of how to be in this relationship, but I knew right then I should get away from him and start doing what I wanted to do. He was making Aggie’s Charlie look like a catch. I moved towards the dance floor to Nutbush and Macarena my troubles away.

  I squeezed my body through the crowd into the middle of the throng. It was dark and sweaty and nobody was looking at me. Everybody was in their own little bubble. I was hidden and I was safe. I could have stayed there all night. Dr Lim should start prescribing ‘The T
ime Warp’ as a treatment, I swear. There is something so comforting about organised group dancing like that—knowing the moves and knowing you can’t make a fool of yourself, because everyone else is already making fools of themselves doing exactly the same thing. I felt part of something for a minute, and it was good. I entirely understand why people love line dancing. They have it sorted. Group dances are big in a lot of the BBC period dramas on TV as well, although the moves are vastly different to the gyrating hips of Steps’ ‘5, 6, 7, 8’. Whoever came up with the concept of just making up the moves as you went had it all wrong.

  I came back to sit at the table and Mitch was talking with Skyscraper Simon, who told me I looked nice. I wanted to say the same back, but Mitch interrupted by announcing he was going for a piss, and as he pushed his chair out from the table it dragged the skirt of my dress. There was a tearing sound and when I looked down I could see the skirt had detached from the bodice right around my hip. I was frozen with anger—it had been right there waiting for a moment to come to the surface. Of course Mitch ripped my dress, of course he did. Because he was a shitty formal date and things just had to keep getting worse.

  He went from apologetic to annoyed at me for being upset in about three seconds flat. ‘I’m sorry, babe. I mean it’s just about time to go so no one is going to notice. Nothing is hanging out. Fuck, it was an accident, okay!’

  Simon offered me his jacket and Mitch said I was his date, thanks very much, and acted like he was planning to give me his jacket all along. His breath still stank, and his jacket smelled like BO, and I couldn’t wear it for another second so I dropped it and ran to the bathroom, hissing at Mitch, ‘Don’t follow me.’