Loolah. That was the name of the little girl whose bedroom this was.
Holly put her baby-blue fingernails in her mouth and chewed. She knew what she had to do next. She couldn’t put it off any longer.
She walked out of the pink bedroom and faced the bathroom door at the other end of the hallway. The wall tiles would be blue, with some pink feature panels, and the sink, bath and toilet would be white. The floor tiles would be a deep burgundy red, and there would be a fern in a pot on the edge of the bath. She’d put a million bucks on it. And she knew exactly what the face in the mirror over the sink would look like.
A wave of clamminess washed over her. There would be no going back once she’d seen herself. But she had to know.
She walked slowly down the hallway to the bathroom then over to the sink and stared into the mirror.
Sure enough, an unfamiliar face blinked back at her, but it was also completely and utterly familiar. The eyes were grey, rimmed with black eyeliner, the long lashes slathered in mascara. There was a flush of pink on the cheeks. The mouth was neat, the hair messy: blonde, blacktipped, the fringe falling down over her eyes. The nose was long, but somehow it seemed to be the ideal length for the face. The cheekbones were angular, cutting in diagonally from the tops of her ears. The jaw was square, strong. The eyebrows winged up, as if this girl was permanently quizzical. The left ear was pierced up the flank with six keepers and one hoop, the right with one silver stud.
A phone started ringing down the hall in the parents’ bedroom. Also in the kitchen downstairs. And on the hallway table, under the owl lamp. She knew exactly where each phone was. Had sat talking for hours on each of them.
Holly didn’t move, transfixed by the mirror. She heard a click, and then the voice of a woman, older, echoing through the house – ‘You’ve called the Byrne residence. We’re not home at the moment. Please leave a message …’ – followed by a beep to let the caller know the tape was lined up and ready to record.
Byrne. That was the surname of this girl. Of this body she now found herself in. Trinity Byrne.
Except her name was Holly Fitzgerald and today was her fortieth birthday.
But no. It wasn’t. She was this girl. Trinity Byrne.
And seriously, what the actual hell.
5.07 pm
Holly knelt on the floor of the yellow bedroom flipping through the photo albums that she’d pulled out of the bookcase, trying to grasp her place in this world.
There was a photo of her with her arm slung over the shoulder of another girl: Susie Sioux, that was this girl’s name. There was a photo of Lewis, skateboard in hand, looking like he might tease you or kiss you, hadn’t decided yet. There was a girl wearing a full-length pink rabbit outfit crouched in the front yard of a house – April. Sometimes they called her Aprilmayjune.
Last year they’d cut class, Susie Sioux and Aprilmayjune and Trinity, to go to the cinema and see Big Wednesday. The lights went down, the film started: lots of underwater footage, as you might expect from a surf movie. But as the intro rolled on, Aprilmayjune had whispered, ‘I don’t think this is Big Wednesday,’ and then the iconic theme music started up and a shark attacked the skindivers and it clicked that they were in Jaws 2, and the three of them burst out laughing, sneaking out and running into the right cinema, proceeding to giggle uncontrollably at inappropriate moments all through Big Wednesday, one of them remembering the whole wrong-cinema thing, trying to suppress a laugh, and setting the others off like dominoes.
Holly turned the page onto another photo of Aprilmayjune; in this one she was laughing her head off as she lay on the lap of some guy, more guys piled on top of her. In another, a boy was shimmying up a pole and reaching out to the camera, a cigarette between his teeth. There was a photo of a girl with a can of shaving cream, spraying a foam love heart on a bathroom mirror around the name ‘David’. Girls piled on the bed in this crazy yellow bedroom. A girl and a guy kissing, a hand held up to the camera to give them some privacy. A group, maybe twenty in total, lying on the beach, bodies brown, bathers brief, cigarettes between fingers. A guy leaning out a car window, hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun.
Booze. Houses. Parties. Gardens. Cars.
Holly remembered it all. She’d been at all these places. These were her friends: Susie Sioux and April and Lewis and Heather and Jennifer and Amy, Robbie and Kevin and Eric and Scott. All these names that came to her without any prompting.
She heard a noise and looked up to see Lewis standing in the doorway, two plates in his hand. She’d forgotten all about him.
‘I have jam,’ he said, holding up one plate, ‘or peanut butter,’ and he held up the other plate. ‘But not together.’ And he swooshed the plates over each other, back and forth, like a magician. ‘Because I still can’t get my head around the whole peanut-butter-and-jelly thing. Separate. Always gotta be separate.’
He looked over her shoulder at the photo album lying open on the floor. There was a picture of the two of them, Trinity and Lewis, at a park, her sitting on a skateboard laughing at something happening to her right, him standing behind looking down at her.
He squatted, put the plates on the floor, and dragged the album towards him. Grinned. ‘That’s when I’d just arrived from Oz, yeah?’ He picked up a piece of toast with jam and shoved it in his mouth.
Holly clicked her fingers. ‘Australia,’ she said.
‘Yeah. What?’ he asked.
‘You’re Australian.’
He shook his head at her. ‘Trin, what’s going on?’ he said. ‘You reckon your hair isn’t yours. You don’t know which one’s your house. A guy tries to put you in his car. You suddenly remember I’m from Australia. I don’t get it.’
Holly chewed on her bottom lip, a habit, she could tell, of this girl she now was. ‘Well …’ The word peeled slowly out of her mouth as her brain swung between two options: tell him the truth, or stall for time. She thought back over the past half-hour or so, all the things she didn’t understand, the hands, legs, hair, body that wasn’t hers. She looked over at Lewis: what was she trying to say? What even was the truth? Stalling for time seemed the better option. ‘It’s just that sometimes I can really hear it in your voice.’ She picked up a piece of toast with peanut butter and tore off a crust, then put it into her mouth.
‘On top of all that,’ Lewis went on, ‘you still haven’t told me who that guy was, and why he was trying to put you in his car. He was literally carrying you. You’re acting like it didn’t happen.’
Looking at the curve of his neck, the line of his jaw, the length of his eyelashes, Holly felt a sting of how beautiful life was when you were young and had your entire future in front of you. She wondered about his relationship with Trinity. Were they just friends? He lived next door, she knew that much. But everything else was still blurred, frustratingly out of reach.
She looked away from him, suddenly conscious of how much she didn’t know about this life she was in.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ she finally said. ‘I don’t know why I was lying on the footpath. I don’t remember anything until when I woke up.’
Lewis stared at her. ‘“Footpath”?’
‘Yes. Out the front.’
‘“Footpath”?’ he repeated. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. What’s your point?’
‘Since when do you call it a footpath? I don’t think there’s an American alive who even knows what a footpath is.’
Holly looked away from him, down at her hands. Trinity’s hands. No, her hands. She was Trinity Byrne, and this was her house, and these were her hands. She brought her thumbnail up to her mouth and chewed it again.
‘Well, that’s what you call it, isn’t it?’ she said, her thumb acting as a barrier, keeping her safe from his questions. ‘In Australia? I was trying to be, you know, Australian. I was joking. It was a joke.’
‘I call it a sidewalk,’ he said. ‘Because that’s what it’s called over here.’
He stared at
her, obviously about to say more, but then the front door downstairs opened, and a voice called, ‘Hi hon, you home?’
Holly felt her entire body run hot and then cold and then flare hot again. It was her mum. Her mom. Trinity’s mom.
She stood up, the photo albums, the footpath conversation, the toast, all of it forgotten, and ran out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the kitchen where she stopped in her tracks, her hands gripping the doorjamb as she stared at the woman unpacking a brown paper bag of groceries.
The woman was wearing a blue nurse’s uniform, a belt cinched at the waist. Beside her was a little girl of nine or ten rummaging inside another bag of groceries before taking out what she’d been looking for – a packet of biscuits. She tore open the packaging and slotted one into her mouth.
Trinity’s mom and her little sister, Loolah.
Holly felt like she was all metal, and this mother and sister were all magnet. She walked over to them, wanted to be close to them, to hug them, but then she was overcome by her own fakery. She wasn’t really this person; she wasn’t meant to be here. She took a step back.
‘How’s your day been?’ the mom said, a throwaway comment, casual, relaxed, like standing here together in this kitchen wasn’t even a big deal.
Holly was unable to put together even the simplest answer, not so much as the word ‘good’.
‘Did anyone do anything for your birthday?’ the little girl, Loolah, asked through her biscuit-chomping. Then she added, ‘Oh, hey Lewis,’ with a half-raised hand.
Holly stared at her. ‘My birthday?’ she said sharply.
The mom stopped unpacking. Loolah stared back at Holly. Holly could feel Lewis at her back, his energy focused on her.
‘Yeah,’ Loolah repeated. ‘Your birthday. Sixteen. Today. What? Weirdo.’
Holly opened her mouth, but her brain was whirring, processing this new information. She felt paralysed. So it was this body’s birthday today as well.
‘Trinity,’ the mom said, the name snapping Holly out of her unsteadiness. ‘Are you all right?’
Holly looked around the kitchen. Loolah was still staring at her. So were the mom and Lewis. She looked away from them, willing them to stop, wanting to convince them that everything was normal here. This is me, I’m your daughter, your sister, your friend, everything’s as it’s supposed to be. She picked up the just-opened packet of biscuits and turned to Lewis. ‘Biscuit?’
The silence in the kitchen got heavier, if that was even possible.
And then Holly realised. ‘Cookie,’ she corrected.
She turned away, still avoiding the three sets of eyes. And that’s when she noticed the newspaper sitting on the breakfast bench. Los Angeles Times, said the gothic masthead.
She’d figured out already that she was somewhere in America, what with all the cars, the accents, the cookies. But...okay, so Los Angeles. The date – 29 February 1980 –was written underneath the masthead in small type, like it barely mattered. Like it was the most banal of information.
The packet of biscuits slipped from her grasp, landing on the bench beside the newspaper.
Holly was born on 29 February 1980.
29 February 1980 was Trinity’s sixteenth birthday.
Somehow, she’d been dropped into the life of a whole other leap-year baby.
Oh, and one more thing: Holly had been born in Los Angeles.
Mind.
Officially.
Blown.
5.52 pm
‘I don’t get what’s going on,’ Lewis said as he departed through the front doorway, shaking his head back at Holly. ‘Maybe that guy did something. You should tell your mom what happened. In case you’ve been, I don’t know, something?’
It seemed strange that he was using ‘mom’, instead of the Australian ‘mum’. But he used ‘sidewalk’ instead of ‘footpath’. He’d obviously been here long enough to instinctively use Americanisms, but not so long that he’d lost his accent.
‘Something’s not right,’ he added.
No shit, Sherlock.
Personally, Holly thought she’d been handling the situation fantastically well so far, all things considered. But he had a point. Things were definitely not right. Maybe now was the time for that old chestnut: the truth. Now that she knew a bit more about what was going on.
She ran through the truth inside her head to hear how it would sound.
You know what, Lewis, you’re totally correct. Something’s definitely not right. For some inexplicable reason I’ve woken up to find myself in the body of a sixteen-year-old girl, who happens to be a leap-year baby like me. That woman in the kitchen who’s supposed to be my mum? Wait, my ‘mom’. And that little girl? Never seen either of them before in my life. Of course peanut butter doesn’t go with jelly. And by the way, we both know it’s ‘jam’ not ‘jelly’. And that guy who you say was trying to put me in his car? Maybe he’s a friend, maybe he was trying to help, maybe he’s a bad guy. I don’t know anything about him. Oh, and one other thing: I come from the future. From 2020.
Yeah, she didn’t need to go terribly far down the track of truth to know it wasn’t an option.
But he was right. She needed to tell the mom something – come up with some kind of alibi that would excuse all the wrong-footed things she kept saying. Calling cookies biscuits, that type of thing. Because she couldn’t imagine it getting any easier. She couldn’t just slot into a stranger’s life and not trip up.
(It wasn’t even worth getting into the ‘why’ of what was going on, at the moment. Better to deal with the ‘is’ of it and make the best of the situation.)
Holly shut the door behind Lewis and went back into the kitchen. The mom was stirring a pot on the cooktop. (Which, by the way, smelt delicious. Holly realised she was starving.) She watched the mom for a moment, gathering up her courage, then – trying for nonchalance, no big deal – said, ‘Something happened this afternoon.’
The mom turned and looked at her, the wooden spoon still stirring. ‘Hm?’
‘I’m not sure what, exactly,’ Holly went on. ‘All I know is, I woke up and I was lying on the foot— sidewalk out the front and Lewis was standing over me, and he said some guy had been trying to put me into his car.’
The mom stopped stirring. ‘What do you mean, some guy was trying to put you in his car?’ she asked.
Holly put her hands up in the universal symbol of ‘don’t panic’. ‘It’s fine. I’m fine,’ she added. ‘It’s just … that’s what Lewis said.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘The guy? I don’t know.’
‘What sort of car was he driving?’
‘I don’t know.’
The mom frowned. ‘Okay, let’s start at the beginning. What happened?’
‘I don’t know.’
The mom shook her head and sighed. Not a gentle, calming sigh – an exasperated, what-the-fuck sigh. ‘All right, well, can you at least tell me where you were headed?’ she asked, her mouth a grim line. ‘You’re grounded, in case you’ve forgotten.’
‘Grounded?’
‘Yes. Last week. Or don’t you know that either?’ There was a definite tinge of sarcasm in the mom’s voice now.
There’d been a rat-a-tat of bony knuckles on the front door. Trinity, upstairs in her bedroom, heard footsteps below, then indistinct talking for a moment before Mom called for her to come downstairs. Mrs Glickman was standing on the front porch, looking smug and self-satisfied. Righteous. Trinity knew exactly what this was all about.
‘Mrs Glickman says she picked you up hitchhiking earlier today,’ Mom said. ‘But I told her you’d never hitchhike – would you?’ Trinity glared at Mrs Glickman in response, and the old lady pressed her hands against her own chest. ‘I just felt like you needed to know,’ she said to Trinity’s mom. ‘She’ll get herself in all sorts of trouble if she’s not careful.’
Yes, being grounded last week did ring bells.
But as an aside, victim-blame much? Sure, yes,
okay, hitchhiking wasn’t the ideal mode of public transport. But still, ‘she’ll get herself in all sorts of trouble’ seemed all kinds of wrong.
‘So, where were you off to this afternoon?’ the mom repeated.
‘I don’t remember.’
‘If I hear that you were heading to the Greek …’ The unfinished sentence held a threat of serious consequences.
Holly frowned. ‘Greek restaurant?’
‘You’re hilarious. No. The Greek Theatre. Sound familiar?’ Again with the sarcasm.
Trinity had argued that morning, ‘But they’re our friends! They’re helping us with our band, and we’ve already organised to go meet them this afternoon.’
‘Trinity,’ Mom said, ‘I know nothing about these guys apart from that you met them at a gig. And they’re so much older than you girls. It’s not appropriate to hang out with them like groupies.’
Fury rose in Trinity’s chest. ‘You know what’s not appropriate? Ruining my plans today. On my actual birthday. What about the party tomorrow night? I suppose I can’t go to that either? I’m sixteen years old now. Today. It’s official. You can’t tell me what to do anymore.’
Yes, Holly had to admit that the Greek did sound familiar.
‘No, I definitely wasn’t going there,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ Although she wouldn’t have sworn on the Bible to the fact.
‘All right then. If you weren’t going there, where were you going?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Trinity,’ the mom said, sounding tired all of a sudden, ‘I’m worried that I should be calling the police, but I don’t even know what I’d tell them. I’m making a special dinner for your birthday, I’ve bought all this beautiful food that you like, but of course here we are, fighting. As per usual.’
Holly took a step backwards, like she’d been slapped. It was the ‘as per usual’ that did her in. Her Grannie Aileen had used the phrase on a regular basis. Not to Holly, and not usually within Holly’s hearing, but Holly always knew her mum was on the other end of the phone when ‘as per usual’ was hissed near the end of the conversation.
It's Not You, It's Me Page 2