Please Don't Hug Me

by Kay Kerr

  I can still remember it, sometime around when your medication appeared in the cabinet, and you wouldn’t tell Mum and Dad where you had been, even when Dad yelled and Mum cried and they grounded you for a month. I knew you’d tell me. You always told me things. And when you recounted the adventures you’d had in the city with Amy and her friends it sounded like the most grown-up thing I’d ever heard. Eating at a 24-hour pancake place, watching the sun come up, climbing to the top of the Story Bridge to check out the view. I was in awe. I spent a lot of time being in awe of you. I kind of feel ripped-off about that, actually. I never got to experience the time when my big brother stopped being my big brother who can jump off roofs in rollerblades and started being a person who you might like to spend time with now and then. A friend.

  When you finished telling me all about that I remember I told you about my sessions with Dr Lim and you said something else that seemed small but was actually a big thing. You said my brain was a ‘limited edition’ and not to try to change it. And then you told me to get the hell out of your room. So I’m working on not trying to change it, Rudy, and I’m staying the hell out of your room.

  Love, Erin

  7 November

  Dear Rudy,

  You’re the first person I’m telling about this, and that’s only because I know you won’t tell anyone. If you were alive I don’t think I’d tell you. I just know you’d joke about it and I’d probably lose confidence. I’ve started a blog. It’s a little thing, almost nothing really, but it’s mine and I made it happen. I called it ‘Autie Girl’ so no one will know it’s me, and I made the background pink, and I published my first post. I wrote about hugging, about the rules I think there should be for hugging and how my worst days get even worse when people hug me. I wrote about your memorial, and all the hugging. I wrote 1000 words about hugging. I know that might sound strange to some people, but I thought maybe someone else like me might read it and it would sound like the most true thing of all for them. That’s why I started the blog. No one has read it yet, according to counter on the site. Maybe I haven’t tagged the right things, or maybe I need to share it on other platforms, but right now it’s my own little boat I’ve set out on the sea and I’m just happy it’s floating there. I’m doing something. I’m feeling it. I hope that means something.

  The problem is I used all my writing energy there so I don’t have a lot left for this letter. Please pretend I’ve told you something completely heartwarming and profound, okay?

  Love, Erin

  8 November

  Dear Rudy,

  Maybe it was different for your year level but in mine it seems like it is tolerable to be smart, it is better to be average, but the one thing you don’t want to do is try. Trying makes you a ‘try-hard’ and that is unacceptable. Exams are a tough time if you want to succeed, and today we started the most important exams of our high-school career. It’s a hard act to keep up—studying hard, pretending not to study, remembering what you have learnt, acting surprised when you get a good result, consoling those who obviously weren’t lying when they said they did poorly. That’s how it felt rocking up this morning, like all of the things I had to remember to say and do were pushing out the actual information I needed in my head for the exam. Luckily it was a written exam, which is my favourite type of assessment.

  I still periodically think back and cringe about our year-ten oral presentation on To Kill a Mockingbird, because public speaking always brings out the worst of my anxiety. I hate saying ‘my anxiety’ like it’s a pet or a friend because it is no friend of mine. Sure, it is a constant companion, but instead of offering love and support, it gives me a treasure chest of my own words and actions to obsess over and feel bad about. I can remember every single embarrassing, rude or terrible thing I have done in my life. Within minutes I can skip from feeling bad about calling Dee and the other girls sluts to realising I am a bad person because I threw a tantrum in grade four when I wasn’t allowed to sleep over at Dee’s house. I regularly worry her parents may still think of me as a disturbed child for that particular outburst.

  I knew exactly what I wanted to say that day, and even how I wanted to say it, right down to the nuances like pauses, smiles and eye contact. I rehearsed in front of my mirror before school, imagining a cheeky nod to Dee here, a pause for dramatic effect there. They were more ‘learned behaviours’ as Dr Lim would say.

  Unfortunately once I found myself at the whiteboard facing the class, all thoughts of planning or well-timed nods disappeared. I started my speech rapidly and quickened the pace until I don’t think anyone could understand what I was saying—it was just one giant word. I could feel the heat rising from my neck and burning into the apples of my cheeks as I reached the halfway mark. I knew I had reached halfway as I had written HALFWAY in giant letters on my palm cards, hoping it would give me courage for a strong finish. But just as I was starting to feel like maybe I wasn’t going to pass out from lack of oxygen, I fumbled, dropped my palm cards, and I froze. The obvious move would have been to bend down, pick them up and start from where I had left off—the cards were numbered after all, but that required a level of coordination I wasn’t able to muster. I thought I would tip forward and land on my face. What felt like thirty minutes passed before Ms Moore cleared her throat and asked if I was okay. I groped around picking up my cards and finished the final few lines. As I sat down to the halfhearted clapping of the class, who looked bored out of their brains, I hoped the content of my speech would make up for my dismal performance. It kind of did; I got a B. That’s not great for me and English, but I’d imagined getting a big fat F so a B felt like a win at the time.

  Is it fair to be marked on public speaking, anyway? The best speaker in a room doesn’t always have the best thing to say. I mean some people have phobias about that kind of thing or, you know, ASD.

  So today’s exam went fine, and even for those it didn’t, at least their humiliation was private. Dee and I finally got to talk after the exam and she told me she forgave me, but it still felt weird between us, like she was just someone I was talking to and not my best friend since grade three.

  ‘You must have spent heaps on that chocolate. That was pretty extra.’

  It didn’t sound like a compliment but she was smiling when she said it, so I know she meant it as a good thing. She said that her week hadn’t been good, but that the Top Deck and my card had made her feel better. She even told Jessica Rabbit to ‘get over it’, because they have called each other sluts before and they are still friends. Jessica Rabbit stopped pretending I was invisible and I think she really did get over it because she’s been perfectly normal to me the few times I’ve seen her between exams.

  Biology is my worst subject, but given that overall results are calculated across all your subjects, I know my results will be bumped up by my other subjects. I was finally being honest when I told Jessica Rabbit I hadn’t studied for the afternoon exam. She laughed like it was a hilarious joke, more than she’s ever laughed at any actual joke I’ve told.

  The exam wasn’t as terrible as I’d imagined—I remembered a fair amount from our classes and the textbook. Thankfully, that’s something of a skill of mine.

  This afternoon I had a session with Dr Lim and I told her about how my cringe list became a cringe skin for a while but now it’s just a list again, and how I was getting better at turning bad feelings into laughing. She said I was ‘making progress’ and to keep writing and laughing at bad feelings and blogging and not calling anyone a slut. I’m wondering if my progress is because of what happened to you, or in spite of it, or just something that would have happened naturally anyway.

  I’ve probably got to stop thinking of this parallel story here, the one where you’re still alive and things are different, and comparing it to my life. You’re not, and things are how they are. Thinking and wondering and imagining it only makes the reality more painful. If I imagined a different alternative, like one that was much worse for some reason, reality would
start to look much better in comparison. It’s all relative, I guess. But I still miss you, whatever the comparison.

  Love, Erin

  10 November

  Dear Rudy,

  I know I said I was going to stop imagining what life would be like if you were still around, but it’s hard to do that when I’m hitting all these milestones that you either hit or didn’t hit, and I’m thinking about how differently things went down for you. Today there was a small moment that was like a really big one and it almost felt like you were there. I’ve never thought that before, not even a little bit. I filled out a form online. See, that sounds like nothing right? But it wasn’t just a form at all—it was my university application. I applied to study creative writing at a university in Brisbane, and I think my results should be good enough to get in, as long as I don’t stuff up my remaining exams. I don’t think I will, but anything is possible. I know it seems a bit silly that I wrote one blog post that no one has even read and all of a sudden I think I’m a writer, but that’s not really it at all. I’ve written all of these letters to you, and I write essays at school, and writing helps me to iron out my brain wires and gives me calm moments. I don’t know, I just want to learn more about writing, and to be surrounded by people who want to learn more about it too. It’s one of those things that seems so completely obvious to me I’m wondering how I didn’t think of it earlier.

  Talking— trying to say how I feel on the spot—doesn’t really work for me, not very often, anyway. When I’m writing though, I have time to let the words drop down into their place and form a path that takes me where I need to go. And if I make a mistake, I can change the words so they mean what I want them to mean, instead of having the stress of apologies and miscommunications to clean up because I said the wrong thing. You helped me get here, in a truly awful way that I would absolutely change with every fibre of my being if I could. Still, I’m going to take that silver-lining lemonade and enjoy it, because what else can I do?

  Everyone at school seems excited about the freedom that will come from finishing exams, like there are so many different options for them to choose from. For me, university has always felt like my only choice. Even when I didn’t know what I would study, it still felt that way. It’s not that anyone is forcing me to go, it’s just I have always wanted to go. Once I decide on something it feels like the only thing. I like to be in the process of learning, and university is so much bigger than high school. I will still have a schedule to follow, goals to achieve, structure and a definite end date, but I won’t have to do science or PE or religion. It just seems like a good fit.

  Mum said she was proud of me, and Dad said it was a ‘good step towards my future’. They both seemed happy in their faces and their words. I called Dee after I’d entered my application to tell her my good news. She said I should work for NASA, which I think was a joke. I remembered to ask how her day had been.

  ‘It’s been okay. Mum is onto me about doing my application, but I just don’t think my results are going to be good enough,’ she said. She hesitated before telling me that backpacking around Europe is all she can think about. Even the mention of Europe made my heart race and my words feel tangled in my throat. But I told her to do it, because I would hate anyone to tell me not to do the thing that is all I can think about. I’m trying to be a better friend and part of that is not wishing Dee would be the Dee that best supports me. That probably sounds simple to you—you were so good at knowing what other people needed. I think my brain can be such a mess sometimes that it takes up all of my focus. I don’t mean to be selfish, but there isn’t always room to think about what other people might be going through. But I’m working on making room.

  Love, Erin

  16 November

  Dear Rudy,

  Sometimes the moments that are meant to feel big don’t feel like anything at all. Today was our last day of school and it was raining, so I guess that was something. Ollie and Dad wished me good luck this morning, and Mum drove me to school. She parked and came in to watch the assembly, just like she did for yours. Having a parent at school is weird, isn’t it. I’d told Dad not to worry about taking the day off work, because a graduation assembly doesn’t feel to me like anything worth taking time off work for. It’s not like in the movies with caps and gowns and keynote speeches. It was just an assembly in the morning and then we got to leave.

  I thought about how we’d all looked five years earlier, when our parents brought us to our first day. Our uniforms were all too big and our hats too stiff. My shoes were straight out of the box, without a single mark or scuff. Some of us were new and shiny too. Others had marks and scuffs already. My limited-edition brain doesn’t seem like such a big mark anymore, not after everything else that’s happened.

  ‘We did it, Brain, we made it. Can you believe it?’ Dee said. She was beaming. She always knows exactly how to handle big life moments. She gets things right. I told her it hardly felt real, because that seemed like a thing to say. The other students and our parents lined the footpath at the entrance to make a tunnel for us to walk through. I guess it was our chance to say goodbye to our friends in other year levels. I didn’t know any of them, not really. People were crying, even teachers were crying. Why were our teachers crying? I wasn’t crying, but I knew I wouldn’t be. I put on my sunglasses and hoped it looked like I’d had to do that because I was crying.

  Maybe I was struggling to absorb the enormity of the moment, but it just didn’t feel like a big moment. Not like when you died. In that moment I’d felt as though I was watching a tsunami racing to shore, and there was nothing left to do but wait for it to hit me. I’d been frozen by the sense of grief to come. Graduation felt more like I was watching a movie about a large wave rushing to shore, but I wasn’t emotionally invested enough in any of the characters to worry about what might happen to them. It felt like the kind of movie I’d switch off before the end.

  Mum was crying, actually, when I walked past her in the tunnel. She was crying hard. Her shoulders were bouncing and she’d wrapped her arms around herself in a hug. I don’t know if it was about me, or you, or her. But something had got to her. I’d hoped to comfort her, but she had stopped by the time I found her afterwards, and neither of us could say much on the drive home. There’s not much to say about anything today. I’m like a zoo animal released into the wild, completely unprepared for life outside my secure enclosure. I know the wild is supposed to be the better choice for me, for anyone, but I’m used to the daily feed and the zookeepers, who make sure I’m safe. I like the four walls, or I like what I know, anyway. There isn’t a great survival rate for released animals, and I completely understand why.

  The rest of the year level went to the pier after school to jump into the water in their uniforms. Dee asked me if I minded that she went. I said I didn’t, because I didn’t. I just didn’t want to go myself.

  I went to my appointment with Dr Lim instead. We talked about Schoolies and when she asked me whether I was looking forward to it, I couldn’t answer. It was something to do with the small things feeling big, and the big things not feeling like anything at all. It’s something to do with the calm moments that happen at Robins but not with my school friends. It’s something to do with you and Mum and Dad and Ollie and Aggie and Dee and even Mitch. It’s something to do with brain wires and cringe lists and nicknames and being in the moment and tracing the lines. It’s something— I just can’t figure out how to say it. Maybe you know what it is.

  Love, Erin

  16 November

  Dear Rudy,

  Second letter for the day! Someone read my blog, and they even left a comment. Well, actually three people have read it, but one person commented and I’m so excited I just had to tell you.

  They only wrote four words, but they were the most perfect four words I’ve ever read: ‘Same, same, omfg same.’ Isn’t that incredible? There is someone who feels the same, same, same as me. I’ve got to go and write a new post.

  T
hank you, love you.

  Erin

  17 November

  Dear Rudy,

  Did you like the parties you went to in high school? Like, really did you like them? After last night, I wonder if anyone actually does. And if there is someone out there who does, it definitely isn’t me. Parties have always felt like a weird study in anthropology to me, like there should be scientists in the bushes making notes on clipboards about what happens when kids get drunk and hang out together. The mix of freedom, alcohol and fear leads to some wild goings-on. The graduation afterparty was like some kind of Pagan fire ritual.

  Jessica Rabbit was the obvious choice to host our end-of-year celebration, as she had laid-back parents and an older sister who could buy booze and a parent-free house with a pool. She got some of the guys to light a bonfire in the backyard and she put fold-up camping chairs around it. A party with a purpose has a different feeling to a party for no other reason than drinking, and graduation party was a pre-schoolies bender. Dee’s mum dropped us there and we were right on time, which I guess is early in party terms. The night was cooler than usual for this time of year and strangely tense. I’m not sure if it was as simple as the approaching storm, or as metaphorical as a sign of big changes to come, but the air was so thick I thought I might pass out, and that was before I’d had even one vodka and lemonade. I will never smoke, but sometimes, like last night, I wished I had taken to smoking ciggies because at least it would have given me something to do. While I was drinking my drink I noticed Mitch was there, and I wasn’t sure why he would come. He said high-school parties were shit, and we hadn’t spoken since I told him he was dumped at your memorial. We ignored each other. I drank another two drinks very quickly.