by Cath Crowley
She pushes up her glasses. ‘Gracie, what if I asked you to choose between Jane and me. Who would you pick?’
‘That’s a dumb question. I like you both.’
‘No, really. Pick one of us.’
‘I can’t, Alyce, and I have to tell you, you’re ruining a great friendship moment here.’
‘So if you can’t choose between Jane and me, how could Kally ever choose between you and Annabelle?’
‘She’s good,’ Jane says. ‘She’s better than me at pulling you into line.’
Alyce is right. I know I’ve lied to people before and I don’t exactly have strong legs to stand on in my argument. I know choices aren’t clear-cut. ‘It doesn’t make me feel any better that Kally and Dan kept secrets,’ I say. It doesn’t make it hurt any less.
Alyce and Jane fall asleep and I think for ages about everything that happened tonight. I know what I should do, but I’m not ready to do it yet.
I get up after a while. ‘I think we had more sleep in the year you were born than now,’ Mum says, sitting on the couch with Dad. They don’t ask me what happened and I don’t tell. I will, but for now, I want to spend some time between them. I want to feel their warmth on either side of me, while I fall asleep.
JANE
I get up for a drink of water in the middle of the night. I walk past the lounge and see the three Faltrains, asleep next to each other on the couch, the light of a late-night nature documentary flickering over them from the TV.
My GPS starts working again, just like that. I like Corelli a lot. But I need to go home next year. I need to spend some time with my family. I want to study journalism with Mum there to argue about media monopolies. I want to go to Orientation Days with my brothers’ step-by-step guides to fun in my back pocket. I want Dad to cook me breakfasts.
And when I’m ready to leave them I will. And maybe I can come back and Corelli will be here and he won’t have found home with another girl. But that’s the tricky thing. Home shifts. You can’t pin it down on a map. So I know that when I leave I’ll have to say goodbye to him. And so my decision, even though it’s the right one, really kind of hurts.
54
GRACIE
I dreamt about Annabelle and Martin last night. To shake off the image of them holding hands I had to run around the block twenty times after I woke up.
‘Feeling any better?’ Mum asks, when I walk back in.
‘Not really.’
‘Are you ready to talk about it now?’
‘Martin likes Annabelle. They’ve been dating since he got back. Kally and Dan knew.’ She opens her mouth and then closes it. She puts in some toast, waits until it’s done and butters it before she says anything.
‘There’s nothing I can say that will make that hurt less.’ She puts the toast between us and takes a piece. ‘You have to give it time.’
‘That’s what I’m doing. I can’t face any of them, not Kally or Dan or Martin or Annabelle.’
‘You might feel differently in a little while.’
‘A hundred years could go by and I won’t be okay about Martin liking Annabelle.’
‘In a hundred years you’ll be dead, Gracie,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to give you a little perspective.’
The only perspective I want is the shrinking type, where the humiliation of last night gets smaller and smaller as I walk away.
It’s early afternoon when Kally knocks on my door.
‘Can we talk?’
‘I don’t have a whole lot to say.’ I know what Alyce told me last night makes sense. Thanks to Mum’s cheery thought, I know I’ll be dead in a hundred years. But I’m so hurt every time I think about Martin lying to me. ‘You’ve known for months. He was there on the steps that night and you flatout lied to me.’
‘I wanted to tell you but Annie asked me to wait.’
‘Annie asked,’ I say. ‘I should have known I couldn’t be friends with someone who was loyal to her. Was she laughing at me as she kissed Martin? She’s stolen every boy I’ve ever dated.’
‘Which is only two at the last count,’ Kally says. ‘And you’re dating Dan, an ex-boyfriend of hers.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Why, because you don’t like him as much? He’s really hurt, by the way. You might want to call him.’
This is getting all twisted around, now. It sounds like I’ve done something wrong. ‘I do care about Dan, a lot. But I didn’t turn him against Annabelle.’ I try to shift things up the right way again so I can see them clearly.
‘You can’t actually think it happened like that. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but Martin and Annabelle really like each other. They’re going away on a road trip at the end of the year.’
When Kally arrived five minutes ago I was only a little mad and mostly hurt, the words dripping out of me like a slow leak of petrol from a car. But she just dropped a match.
I actually feel my heart burning. A road trip? He was going away again and he wasn’t even going to tell me? Okay, I’m mad. I would have liked a little heads up on the fact that my ex-boyfriend was running off into the sunset with Annabelle Orion. ‘I hope you have a lot of hats because I’m not helping you with your stupid bet anymore.’
She looks like I do in Maths, when I’m waiting for a new idea to settle in. ‘Annabelle was right. Gracie Faltrain is the only person who matters in your world. She hates you because of the things you did in Year 6. I know you know that because I heard it in your voice the night we got lost. You sounded sorry, though. I told Annabelle that she was wrong about you. But I was the one who was wrong.’
‘I was a kid in Year 6.’
‘Yeah, well, you’re not a kid anymore,’ she says, and flips me the bird as she walks away.
That fire’s left a mess inside me that I can’t sweep away. I did know about Annabelle’s dad. And I did do awful things to her in Year 6. The class made an Easter piñata, a huge papier-mâché egg full of lollies and chocolate that hung from the ceiling for a month, waiting for us to break it. The day before the holidays we took turns beating it with sticks until it cracked. Everything tumbled out. The teacher picked up the biggest thing from the floor: a golden egg filled with Smarties. ‘We’ll save this for Annabelle,’ she said.
I thought it was so unfair. And every day of the week that Annabelle came back I did something bad to her. Quiet things. Like putting glue in her desk or making a tiny rip in a picture that she’d drawn.
Jane stopped me in the end. ‘Enough’s enough, Faltrain. I’ll buy you a Smartie egg if you care so much about it.’ I did all those things to her after she lost her dad. I did all those things to her and I convinced myself she deserved them.
‘Does that mean I have to give her Martin?’ I ask Mum, crying because everything is upside down.
‘Gracie, love,’ she says. ‘I know this hurts, but Martin doesn’t belong to you. He belongs to himself. Even when he was with you, he belonged to himself.’
‘That’s awful,’ I say, hiccupping. ‘That means that you can never really know if people are going to stay with you.’
She thinks for a long time. ‘No, you don’t. But if you treat people with love, most of the time they do stay. Or if they go for a while, they come back.’
‘And if they don’t? Martin’s mum wouldn’t have come back if I hadn’t looked for her. Annabelle’s dad definitely isn’t coming back.’
‘That’s life,’ she says. ‘And so you live with it.’ I hiccup again. ‘You take the hiccups with the downs.’ She giggles at her own joke. I start to giggle. Like Jane says, sometimes the best laughs are the ones you have when your life’s going down the toilet.
Mum smooths my hair. ‘Martin’s had a hard life, Gracie. I don’t know whether you’ve ever really thought about how it would feel if I abandoned you. I know you think you’ve thought about it, but really let it sink in.’
I close my eyes and think of Martin that day, really think, for the first time. I cry, then. Not the hiccupping
tears that were falling from me a little while ago. Now I cry the real thing.
55
JANE
I walk over to Corelli’s house this afternoon.
‘Is Faltrain okay?’ he asks.
‘Sort of. She’s hurt.’
‘When she’s playing in the World Cup she’ll look back on last night and laugh.’
‘She won’t ever laugh about Martin loving Annabelle.’
‘She will if we tickle her,’ he says. And then I laugh. We both laugh so long it hurts.
I haven’t met anyone like Corelli. I get up in the morning and I look forward to seeing him. ‘I like the way you yodel on the high notes in a Britney song,’ I say. ‘I like how you put pineapple on my pizza when you think it’s a crime. I like the way you help Faltrain in Food Tech when you know her cooking is a crime.’
He smiles. ‘You’re going back to England at the end of the year, aren’t you?’
If I tell him the truth I won’t get my kiss but I have to be honest. ‘I’d love to stay with you, but I want to study journalism in England. I want to live with my parents for a while.’
‘I get it. Most of the reason I like you is that you’re the sort of person who goes her own way. So, do you think you’ll ever come this way again?’
‘Aspetta,’ I say, with the accent his dad taught me.
‘Aspetti,’ he corrects me. ‘I can’t believe “be patient” is the only thing you can say in Italian. It’s not exactly your best quality.’
‘I can say “amico”, too.’
‘You’re butchering a beautiful language. But yeah, I can be your friend.’
From the look on his face I can tell I’m not going to have the chance to use the other Italian word I know: bacio.
‘I’m going to miss you, Corelli.’
He smiles. ‘I’m going to really miss you too.’
56
ALYCE
‘There are two messages on the machine for you,’ Mum tells me when I come home from Gracie’s on Saturday morning. Before I press the red button I say over and over: ‘Please be from Andrew and Brett. Please be from Andrew and Brett.’ I feel like my ears are blocked at the moment and even yelling would be better than the silence.
At Gracie’s last night, before I slept, I thought about what she said. ‘Fix what you can and live with the rest.’ I’ve never had to live with my mistakes before. I was too busy ruling my pages neatly and sitting quietly at school to make any mistakes that could hurt people.
‘Message one,’ the machine says. ‘We’d like to talk to Alyce Fuller, regarding her application. She’s been short-listed for the Young United Nations Program.’
‘Message two: Hi, hon, it’s Janet. I got a call from New York. They think you’ve been working with us for a year. Was that a typing error?’
*
‘Everything I’ve done this year has been a lie,’ I say to Roberta.
‘Not everything. The way you’ve worked with those kids hasn’t been a lie.’
‘It started out as one.’
‘It’s where you end up that counts, take it from an old woman who can’t control her bladder and needs her hearing aids turned up to screaming level. You’ve got a lot of stupid mistakes ahead, Alyce. You can be as smart as you like, you’ll still end up making them.’
‘I don’t know what to do about my application.’
‘You do,’ she says. ‘There are two choices. You don’t have enough backbone yet to go either way, that’s all.’
I walk around after I leave her house. I think about all the mistakes I’ve made this year. In the middle of those thoughts about mistakes, I think about the things I’ve done right. I like talking with Roberta and making her cups of tea. I like teaching Foster how to solve a problem in Maths. I like seeing him pretend not to care when he gets something right. I like that the neighbourhood house has an under-12 soccer team now. I like arguing with Tracy over which actor made the best Mr Darcy. I like that she’s promised to straighten my hair for the dance. Of course, I don’t have anyone to go to the dance with, anymore, but I’m trying to dwell on the positive.
Roberta’s right. I have two choices when it comes to the United Nations. I had two choices when it came to Andrew and Brett. I didn’t make a choice between them because I couldn’t decide which one would make me happier. That’s the thing, I suppose. You do what you think is right and you take the risk.
Janet’s hanging out some washing when I arrive at the centre. ‘It’s not often you get a sunny day in winter,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d give the dryer a rest.’
I hand her a tea towel and a peg. ‘It wasn’t a typing error.’
‘I didn’t think so. You’re not the sort of kid who makes them.’ She doesn’t say I’m not the sort of kid to lie, either and I’m grateful. What sort of person lies, anyway? A person who wants things they can’t have? A person who’s scared? A person who’s been picked on all their life and wants to change that in the final year of high school?
‘Did you tell them?’ I ask.
‘You’ve worked hard for the little time you’ve been here. Foster’s mum said he’s agreed to accept the help the school have been offering for years. That’s because of you and Andrew. So, I’ve been thinking. My memory’s not what it used to be. I can’t quite think when you started but it feels like years ago.’
I look across to the kids training with Andrew. I think about how hard it was to be honest with him this year, to be honest with anyone here. If I get into the program I want it to be because of who I am, not who I pretended to be. I started at the centre to add a line to my application but I had it all confused. I want to go to New York to help people. I don’t want to help people so I can go to New York. ‘Thank you. But I’m going to tell them the truth. I’ll keep volunteering here, while I’m at university. I could tutor Foster. I’d miss him if I left.’
‘You’re not giving up on the UN because you’re afraid, are you? Or because of any other reason?’ She looks towards Andrew.
‘I’m not sure he and I are even friends anymore.’ I’m not staying for him. I’m staying for me. I think I could like the person I’m going to be next year when I’m not at school and I don’t have the shadow of the old me hanging around. ‘I’m putting the UN on hold,’ I tell Janet. ‘I’m excited about starting university next year.’
‘It’s an exciting time.’ She looks up. ‘You think it’s going to rain?’
‘I don’t think so. They’re stratus clouds. They get their name from the Latin word that means to spread out.’ I hold my arms like wings to show her.
For the rest of this year I plan on being Alyce, I think, as I walk across the field. I stand next to Andrew even though it’s uncomfortable. This is who I am. I think too much, I wear glasses and skirts that don’t always sit right, I’m scared a lot of the time and I like making up long sentences that are grammatically correct. I lied to my boyfriend because I wanted to kiss someone else; I lied on my application to a world institution that I respect above all others, except, possibly, Amnesty. This is Alyce Fuller. Take me or leave me. I notice that Andrew hasn’t shaved today. Please take me.
‘Are you angry?’ I ask after the kids have gone.
‘I was, for a second. But I can’t exactly have a go at you for lying.’
‘I got mixed up. You were so mean last year and when Brett asked me out I felt good about myself again. But I always liked you.’ I feel red spreading up my neck. ‘I couldn’t control myself.’
‘Welcome to my world. I’ve been out of control for years,’ he says, and laughs. ‘When everyone walked away this year, you stayed. I like coaching. That Foster’s got a mouth on him but he picks things up quick. Delia’s a little Faltrain and there’s even a little Corelli in there, too. I’ll fix that, though. I figure I owe you at least one stuff-up.’
‘I’m not going to the UN. I’ll study law here, if I’m accepted.’
‘They’ll take you. You’re so smart I don’t get half the st
uff you say.’ He picks up his bag. ‘I’m catching up with the guys. It’s good to be talking to Knight again. So, I’ll see you around?’
‘Wait. I forgot to give you something.’
‘What?’ he asks.
‘It’s not here.’
‘Well, can I come and get it tomorrow? I’m late.’
‘It’s behind that tree over there.’
He looks at me like I’m crazy but he follows, away from the old people staring at us through the window. ‘I don’t see it,’ he says. Get a backbone, get a backbone, get a backbone. Is this what Brett went through before he kissed me? My heart is out of control. The birds are crowding at my throat. ‘Alyce? You look weird.’
I kiss him before I think any more about it. I kiss him and think of a hundred kites, of the sun appearing from behind clouds, of birds swooping.
‘I’m glad I looked behind the tree,’ he says.
‘You should look behind there tomorrow, too.’ And I neaten my hair as we walk across the park.
57
GRACIE
The holidays pass slowly. Dan and Kally and Annabelle are away at Kally’s house in the country. And yes, I know it’s not a giant conspiracy to go somewhere and talk about me. I know they’ve been planning it since the start of the year, but it still hurts. Everything hurts. It’s like a shower on sunburn every day.
‘I hate that I’m not clearly in the right or clearly in the wrong,’ I say to Dad. ‘It’s usually one or the other for me.’
He turns down his latest documentary. ‘That’s what separates us from the animals, baby. Why don’t you call Martin and give him a chance to explain?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Seven years of friendship is worth a little hurt pride. Just think about it.’
All I do over the holidays is think about it. And the longer I leave talking to them all, the easier it seems to just walk away.
Term Three
16 July—30 September