by Thalia Lark
Then suddenly Lori’s voice appeared along with several sets of hurried footsteps. My chest constricted with the thought of how crowded it was getting out there, and my heart started pounding in my chest. Perhaps I wasn’t quite as in shock as I’d previously thought. In any case, any thoughts of crawling out of the cupboard and admitting I was there were abruptly driven firmly from my mind.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Lori, is Julianne down there?’
‘No, I just came up to look for her.’
‘Yeah, we tried to get her to sing but then she yanked her arm from mine and stormed off.’ Courtney, sounding resentful, but even her voice was tinged with apprehension. ‘Is she up here? Why does everyone look so worried?’
‘Don’t worry, everything’s fine. You go back downstairs now girls. Please keep this quiet. No, not you Lori, you stay here.’ Reluctant footsteps dwindled slowly downstairs, and then the teacher spoke again. ‘Lori, can you go get the principal?’
‘The principal? Why? What’s happened? Is she okay?’ Lori was starting to sound frightened. ‘She looked really upset about the singing. She’s alright, isn’t she?’
‘Come on, I’ll go down with you,’ one of the staff suddenly said. ‘We’ll go fetch the principal, Jen. You and Mrs Carroll check all the rooms in the building. I’m sure she can’t have gotten far.’
‘She was halfway up a bloody fence last time.’ Miss Wheaton’s voice was low and angry, and I felt my whole body stiffen uncomfortably. Retreating footsteps sounded, doors opened and closed, and after a tense minute or so, a disconcerted voice from just outside the door to the cupboard broke out.
‘Miss Wheaton?’
Hurrying footsteps, and a sigh of relief mingled with trepidation, then a very gentle knock on the door. ‘Juli? Are you in there?’
My body stiffened, and my eyes locked on the floor as the doorknob turned and a crack of light appeared. I squinted my eyes closed and turned my head to the wall; it was blindingly bright outside the cupboard.
‘She’s here. Can you meet the others on their way over and let them know? I’ll look after her.’
‘Sure.’
The door inched open as more footsteps retreated down the corridor.
‘Juli?’ Miss Wheaton crept inside the now well-lit cupboard, pushing the bucket aside with her foot before kneeling on the dusty floor in front of me. ‘Are you alright?’
My face burned with humiliation as the reality of finding me hiding in the broom cupboard suddenly occurred to me. At least trying to escape over a fence had been somewhat dramatic. This was just embarrassing. Nevertheless, I nodded to assure her I was fine, averting my eyes from her face as they stung with shameful tears.
‘Will you come out and just down the hall to my office? There’s no one else there, I promise.’
I started pulling myself up, my teeth gritted behind tight lips. She gripped my forearm and helped me up, then ushered me gently out of the cupboard and down the corridor. I glared at the ground with mortification as I walked, until we reached her office and she lowered me onto the couch, kneeling on the floor beside me.
‘Can I see your hand?’ She picked up my right hand and held it up to the light so she could examine the wounds. ‘Did you cut it on the glass?’
I nodded.
‘Did you hurt yourself anywhere else?’
I shook my head and felt a pang of guilt as Miss Wheaton’s whole frame visibly relaxed. I was partly astounded and partly in denial that she could really have been that worried about me. Even my mother had never worried about me that much – not even when I fell out of the jacaranda tree at the end of the drive and knocked myself unconscious – let alone a teacher I’d only known for a few weeks.
‘These don’t look too deep. We’ll get the nurse to wash and dress them in a moment.’ Miss Wheaton returned to the drawer of her desk and found a square piece of gauze from a first aid kit, which she placed over my knuckles to stop the bleeding, although the flow of blood had ebbed from me clutching it to my chest in the cupboard. ‘This will do for now. Tell me if it hurts. There may be a few shards of glass left in there.’
At that moment the principal, dressed in a white button-down and a matching sky-blue jacket and pencil skirt, appeared in the doorway looking harried. Relief crossed her features as she saw me sitting on the couch, and she entered the room, followed closely by the nurse Mrs Donovan. I wasn’t so numb now, and shifted in discomfort as the room slowly filled with adults. Thankfully, none of the other students appeared. I couldn’t bring myself to apologise for what I’d done, so I just frowned at the floor while Miss Wheaton and the principal spoke in hushed tones. I probably could have made out what they were saying, but I either couldn’t be bothered or didn’t really want to. I jiggled one knee up and down agitatedly until, after what felt like several hours, Miss Wheaton knelt next to me again.
‘How are you feeling now?’ she asked, resting a hand on the arm of the couch.
I stared at her fingers as I shrugged. Other than the occasional throb in my right hand and a bit of a headache, there was nothing wrong with me physically. ‘Fine.’
‘We’ll take you down to the sickbay and you can stay there for the night with Mrs Donovan, okay? She’ll keep an eye on you and you can take some time out from the other students.’
I nodded, then before I could stop myself, my lips twitched into speech. ‘Am I going to be expelled?’
‘Don’t worry about that now.’ Miss Wheaton smiled kindly when I looked up and met her eyes. ‘We’ll contact your mother tonight and let her know what’s happened, then when you’re feeling a bit better tomorrow she and the principal and you can have a chat together about what’s going to happen from here, okay?’
I nodded, realising suddenly how much I’d actually come to like St Peter’s, and feeling a huge wrench of remorse at the thought that I might not be able to stay.
Mrs Donovan took me down to the sickbay and showed me to the small private room built into the larger infirmary with a single bed with white sheets and a doona folded at the end. She washed the cuts on my knuckles, placed a thin gauze over the top of them, and wrapped a bandage around my hand. Then she asked me where my pyjamas were in my room, and after I’d told her, she rang up to Miss Wheaton’s office and asked her to bring them down. I didn’t see Miss Wheaton arrive, but suddenly Mrs Donovan came in carrying a bundle of familiar fabric, and she left me to strip off my blood-stained T-shirt and jeans and pull my pyjamas on.
There was a small night-light in the corner of the room, so when Mrs Donovan told me to get some sleep and pulled the door to, a faint glow enveloped the room. It was comforting, just like it had been the first night I’d slept in the dorm. I kicked off the sheets and curled up on my side in a foetal position. I looked up at the clock on the wall and saw that it was already nine.
As if on cue, hundreds of muffled footsteps and chattering voices started making their way down the corridor outside and up the stairs of the girls’ dormitory complex. I held my fists under my chin and listened to them and tried not to think about what was going to happen to me. If I was expelled, I’d be forced to return to Warrabeela. Mum would be so mad she’d probably lock me in my room for the next four years. No doubt the cattle would already be on the market by now, so I’d be forced to get a job in town, because there was no way I was going to be allowed to return to the local high school in Warrabeela.
I wasn’t all that confident that they’d let me stay at St Peter’s, but if they did, I had to remind myself that the consequences would probably be more severe than staying was worth. I envisioned months of detentions, suspension from classes, no recreational activities or trips into the city on weekends, at the very least. Even worse, I imagined the kind of impact this would have on the friendships I had formed. Maybe they’d pretend to be understanding, but I could picture the uncertainty Lori and Emma would now feel when they were in my presence. Harvey would surely give me up as a hopeless case, and Alex…Alex
would hear about what happened, no doubt, and when she did, all hope of any friendship with her would be obliterated. It shouldn’t have bothered me this much. I mean, I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I’d survived without friends for fourteen and a half years after all.
It surprised me though, how important these people had become to me in only a few short weeks. Maybe horses and the Australian outback and time to myself just wasn’t enough anymore. On the other hand, though, maybe the endless opportunities for camaraderie here were what had driven my mind to breaking point. Maybe it was for the best that I return home to Warrabeela. These conflicted and unsettling thoughts flickered through my mind until eventually I fell asleep.
A strange rustling roused me just a few hours later. I dragged my swollen eyes open, bright lights slowly fading and bringing my focus to the darkness around me. It took me a moment to remember I was in the sickbay. I struggled out of the white sheets twisted around my legs, starting and nearly crying out in shock as a dark silhouette suddenly loomed over me. A hand came down on my mouth and a whisper trailed to my ears, almost too quiet to make out.
‘Shh, it’s only me.’
I relaxed at the familiar voice, pulling myself to a sitting position beside my pillow as Alex crawled onto the mattress next to me, her long limbs seeming difficult to coordinate. She turned around and settled alongside me with crossed legs, the mattress sighing with the weight of us both. I raised my right hand, forgetting the bandages around my knuckles, to rub my eyes sleepily.
‘Keep quiet though. Donovan’s in the next room.’
I nodded, wiping my left hand down my face and pushing my hair off my forehead. I glanced across at her, waiting until my eyes came into full focus and I could make out her features in the dim glow of the night-light.
‘You afraid of the dark?’ She nodded her head towards the light.
I shook my head. ‘It was there before I got here.’
She paused, then tucked her hair behind one ear. ‘I was going to come see you after the party – you know, just to make sure you were alright. But Donovan was standing at the door and wouldn’t let me past.’
I smiled a little at the thought. It was stuffy in this little room, I realised, particularly with two bodies in it now. Alex seemingly had the same thought, because her eyes brightened in the dim glow as a small smile tugged one corner of her mouth up and she asked: ‘Do you want some fresh air?’
‘I think I’m in enough trouble already.’
‘We won’t be caught if we’re quiet. And I know a really good place we can go. Come on, just let me show you. We’ll come straight back if you don’t like it.’ She looked at me imploringly, clasping her hands together in front of her.
I narrowed my eyes suspiciously, but then reasoned with myself. How much more trouble could I really get in? Besides, I could be as quiet as a mouse when I wanted, and Alex was right in saying a little fresh air would do me good. I looked up at the clock, which said one-thirty-five. Surely nobody would be awake at this hour to hear us. ‘Fine, but I can’t be caught.’
She climbed off the bed and I followed, slipping to the floor silently and ghosting after her. She led us out of the sickbay and up the stairs to the second floor, then rather than stopping there, she trailed up the next flight of stairs to where the twelfth-grade girls’ dormitories were. Several ajar doors lined the wall on our left, offering nothing but silent darkness beyond. Alex glanced over her shoulder to ensure I was following before making her way silently to the end of the corridor, her feet barely touching the carpet. I held my breath as we passed the open dorms.
Alex paused outside the door at the end of the hall, and I wondered vaguely whether she was leading us to another broom cupboard. If so, I had a mind to turn back to the sickbay. She turned the knob slowly and opened the door about a foot, squeezing inside and beckoning me in. I entered the darkness beyond and she closed the door behind us again. I could feel the heat from her body, and shivered as her arm brushed my neck unintentionally.
‘You can’t open the door more than that,’ she whispered, her breath close enough to tickle my face. ‘It creaks.’ Then she groped in the darkness and found my wrist, pulling me to the side. ‘Careful of the stairs.’ We ascended a steep and narrow flight of stairs before reaching a trap door over our heads. Alex must have been moving with a hand above her head to feel for it, because she pulled me to a hasty stop just before I hit it with the top of my head. She pushed it up and over as silently as she could. It fell open with a very soft thump and a ray of moonlight hit our faces, as well as a mouthful of dust. I smothered my mouth with my hand to muffle the coughs.
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’
There were piles of bags and empty suitcases covering nearly the whole room, with an aisle left cleared down the middle. Thankfully, it led straight to the ajar window set in the side of the gabled roof. I felt my stomach drop in anticipation, shaking me abruptly from the rundown state of worry I’d been harbouring… Surely she wouldn’t.
‘Come on.’ She ushered me forward and grinned.
We crept towards the window and she pushed it open, turning to smile at me before climbing out and disappearing down the side of the building. I followed without hesitation, finding Alex standing a metre below the window on a two by ten ledge, a flat portion of the building’s roof that seemed designed just for us. The ledge was bathed with moonlight and had an unobstructed view of the sky, which was cloudless and teeming with stars and a full moon. I took a deep breath of the cool, clear air and sat down on the rough surface beside Alex.
She sighed and crossed her legs underneath her, resting her back against the tiled wall below the window. ‘It’s easier to talk up here,’ she said, her voice a more natural volume. ‘Plus, this is the freshest air available in the whole of the city.’
I nodded in agreement, taking long, deep breaths of the night air.
‘And luckily there’s a possum that’s been sighted in the attic a few times, so if you ever make too much noise scampering across the floor, you can blame it on him.’
That brought a smile to my face, but I couldn’t quite make it reach my eyes.
Alex inhaled slowly before turning her head to look at me and softening her voice, her grey eyes solemn in the moon’s soft radiance. ‘Do you want to talk about what happened?’
I shrugged.
‘They’re not going to expel you, are they?’
‘Dunno.’ I paused, and then continued unreservedly. ‘When I asked Miss Wheaton last night, she just said: “Don’t worry about that now”.’
Alex took a deep breath and wrapped her arms around her bare legs. ‘I’m sure they won’t.’
‘Still, if she’d been confident that they wouldn’t, she would have said “no”, not “don’t worry about that now”.’ I sighed, shaking my head and frowning into the distance. ‘It’s my own fault. I should have gone and beaten up a pillow or something, instead of a freaking mirror.’
‘You don’t want to leave, do you?’
The furrows in my brow deepened. ‘No. I like it here…now.’ I shrugged one shoulder resignedly. ‘I mean, this is the first time I’ve had real friends, you know?’
‘What about your friends back home?’
‘Didn’t really have any. The only person close to a friend I had was the boy at school who I punched hard enough to knock out a tooth. I wasn’t really high on people’s lists of BFFs after that. Besides, I don’t think I could move back in with Mum now. She’s just…’ I shrugged, leaning my head back against the bricks and loosely interlacing my fingers around my shins.
Alex sidled a little closer to me so her upper arm was brushing against mine. ‘Just what?’ she asked, her tone low as she frowned a little and tucked her feet in.
I exhaled through my nose in defeat, shaking my head slowly. ‘I don’t know. It’s like…it’s like she doesn’t really live on this planet. She’s got a whole different world of her own, you know? And it’s so different to this world
that neither of us can see what the other sees.’ I shrugged. ‘It gets pretty frustrating for us both. I even heard her contemplating with my dad once when I was little whether they should put me into foster care.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. I think that was shortly after I scratched a rock around the bonnet of Mum’s car.’ I glanced up at the sky. ‘I was mad at her for something. Can’t remember what now.’
‘Do you reckon she’d still look after you if you had to go home now?’
I shrugged. ‘I honestly couldn’t say. She’s going to be so fucking mad if I’m expelled because of this.’ I laughed humourlessly. ‘If she doesn’t have a nervous breakdown or something, she’ll do something rash and end up in jail.’
‘What about your dad? Can’t you go stay with him?’
‘He lives in Melbourne now with his girlfriend.’ I pushed back my shoulders and frowned. ‘It doesn’t matter. I can always just find myself a job in Warrabeela. Most kids leave school at my age there anyway.’ A moment of silence passed between us and a cool breeze swept past, drying the back of my clammy neck.
Alex leaned back against the brick wall beside me and gazed skywards, seemingly deep in thought. ‘Hmm,’ she finally said.
I glanced sideways at her. ‘What?’
‘I was just thinking how nice it is to hear you say all that.’
‘What do you mean?’
She smiled and looked across at me, shrugging one shoulder lightly with her head to one side and her hazel eyes glinting in the moonlight. ‘I like that you trust me.’
My brows drew together and I looked away irritably. An objection to her statement lingered on my tongue for a brief moment before I realised that neither she nor I would fall for that one anymore. ‘Whatever,’ I said, my tone petulant.
She grinned and dug an elbow into my side, forcing a smile onto my face as I dodged sideways. Then she settled back into her previous position and pulled my hand away from my knee, resting it on her thigh and playing with my fingers inattentively. ‘Come on,’ she said, seemingly realising I’d reached my limits of emotional disclosure. ‘Choose a game.’
