Take Three Girls

by Cath Crowley

  ‘Stu texted me. He wants to meet.’

  ‘I hope you told him to fuck off.’

  I don’t say anything.

  ‘Clem,’ Kate says warningly.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s just for closure.’

  She’s quiet and I know she’s thinking about Ben. I have a flash of him rowing. Feel again the silent warmth of his leg against mine on the rock.

  ‘Ben rang me.’

  ‘I know. He told me he was going to.’ Kate frowns.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s my best friend, so don’t play him.’

  ‘I’m not going to play him. I like him.’

  ‘Good,’ Kate says.

  ‘Great,’ I shout. Then we laugh.

  *

  The laundromat windows are so fogged up that at first I don’t see Stu. I feel a bit relieved – maybe I don’t have to do this – but then I see him over by the powder dispenser. When I push the door open I am assailed by laundry smells: filter lint, damp socks, eucalyptus wool wash. I’ll associate these smells with Stu forever now.

  He tips the powder into the washer and shoves the coins in. He hasn’t seen me yet. His face is moody/bored/beautiful. He’s set up at the table, the local paper is open and the brown paper bag with the egg-and-bacon toastie is waiting for us.

  I clear my throat.

  When Stu sees me he looks so happy I could forget everything. Except I can’t.

  ‘Where have you been?’ He steps forward to kiss me and I step back.

  He tries again and I dodge him.

  He pauses, reaches past me for the brown paper bag and takes a half of toastie out. He bites into it and watches me.

  ‘Are you mad at me?’

  I nod, once.

  ‘Want to tell me why?’

  I feel so anxious. My stomach in knots. I also feel angry. Hurt. Embarrassed.

  He searches my face. Then has another bite of his sandwich.

  I start, ‘The other night, at the Blue House, I looked at your phone.’

  There is a pause and then his shoulders drop a little.

  ‘Zaftig,’ he says, like he’s telling me off.

  ‘I saw your messages, and your pictures.’

  ‘Okay.’ He looks uncomfortable but not terribly. Not as much as I wanted him to. And he only looks that way for a second before shoring up.

  He points his toastie at me. ‘We never said we were exclusive.’

  ‘I didn’t think we had to say it.’

  ‘See, that’s ’cause you’re young.’ He finishes eating and wipes his hands on his jeans. Then he tries to hug me but I push his shoulder, hard.

  ‘Easy!’ He’s half-laughing.

  ‘I thought you liked me,’ I say.

  ‘I do like you. I like a lot of girls.’ He smiles. ‘I’m nineteen. I live in the moment. What – did you think we were going to get married?’

  ‘No.’ I can feel my face burning, because what did I think?

  I thought I was special.

  Stu dips his head, and I imagine he thinks he’s being gentlemanly. ‘I apologise,’ he says, straight-faced. ‘We should have had a conversation about it.’

  I stare at him and feel myself go hard-boiled.

  ‘Zaftig –’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  Stu sniffs and clucks his tongue. ‘Fine. You’re upset.’

  I get his scarf out of my bag and hand it over.

  ‘Why thank you,’ he says, acting charmed.

  ‘It’s got snot on it.’

  He nods, smiling, sarcastic. ‘Great.’

  I stare at him and he doesn’t look so beautiful. He looks petulant and douchey. I stare until his mask cracks and then I take a mental picture – CLICK – I get the shimmer of regret, the bead of recognition of shady behaviour. Then I take my half of the toastie, bite into it and leave.

  Thursday 1 September

  I want the map of my life to be drawn by me, but the truth is, everyone writes on it. It’s not just my map. My personal geography is connected to your personal geography. We’re all intersecting.

  Later, after I’ve finished Years 11 and 12, I can go to Iceland. After I’ve done my science degree, I can study music the way I want to study it. I know I’m lying. I won’t go to Iceland, but it makes me feel better to tell myself I’ll go back and live that other life.

  This is what I need to tell Oliver.

  I’ll explain that my parents need me.

  I’ll explain that at some point in the future I will go to Iceland, but it can’t be now. At this moment on my map I have to be here, at St Hilda’s, using the scholarship that I hope I haven’t lost the chance to get.

  It makes sense in my head, but when I phone to tell him, the words won’t come.

  He starts talking, telling me again that he’s sure we’re going to win. ‘No pressure because if we don’t win it doesn’t matter. But, Kate, I think we might. I mean, I think it’s possible.’

  All things are possible. And all things aren’t.

  My thoughts aren’t entirely making sense.

  It’s been a long week. I’ve spent it worrying about Ady and staying up late trying to work out who runs PSST. Because when I saw how hurt Ady was after the last post, I decided enough is enough. The people running it are going down if it’s the last thing I do.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ Oliver says.

  ‘I want to crack PSST. I hate it when there’s a problem I can’t solve.’

  ‘You’ve been strange all week. Tell me,’ he says.

  It all comes out – not in any logical order. Just out: that I can’t do the audition because my parents need me and I messed up the date of the scholarship exam and I know I’m a disappointment. ‘I’m a total fuck-up.’

  He doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t disagree.

  ‘I’ve ruined it for you,’ I say.

  He still doesn’t speak. I can hear him swivelling on his chair. I wish I’d told him in person and not on the phone, so I could explain this better.

  Finally he speaks. ‘Can I use the looping tracks?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  I offer him half the entry fee, and he says, ‘Thank you.’

  And then, in a formal way that breaks my heart, he says, ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘He didn’t yell,’ I say to Iris, who wants to know why I’m so upset. She puts her arms around my shoulders and I start crying.

  ‘What did he say?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ I tell her. ‘He asked if he could use the looping tracks.’

  ‘Did you want him to yell?’

  I wonder if I did. I wonder if what I really wanted was for Oliver to make me feel so bad that I chose the audition.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ Iris says, and she takes out her books and thumps them with her fist. ‘Let’s cram.’

  Her advice is to focus on the scholarship, if that’s my choice, and it is my choice, so I cram. I cram till my eyes feel like they’re bleeding. I drink so much caffeine I jump every time someone closes a door in the boarding house.

  Iris is coffee jumpy, too. Every time there’s a knock at the door she looks worried. Eventually she cracks and tells me she had a fight with Clem on Monday. ‘She didn’t say anything?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me what it was about.’

  ‘I did something awful,’ she admits, but that’s all she’ll say. She goes back to the books, and I do, too.

  Around midnight we call time and get ready for bed.

  ‘Will you have a coffee with me before the exam?’ she asks. ‘For luck?’

  ‘It’s on me,’ I tell her. ‘It’s the least I can do.’

  ‘You’re the smartest person I know,’ Iris says. ‘You’ll make it.’

  We turn off the light eventually. I can’t sleep, though, and Iris can’t either.

  ‘Usually you sleep no matter what.’

  ‘I feel bad about Clem,’ she says. ‘And I’m nervous.’

  ‘You’ll get a scholarship. You’ve wor
ked so hard.’

  ‘Did you read that quote, from the Wellness sheet?’ Iris never mentions Wellness. She thinks it’s a waste of time. ‘The one about getting lost and shaking off the shackles that remind you who you are?’

  ‘Do you want to talk?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Iris says. ‘I’m just tired.’

  We lie here awake, in the dark.

  Thursday 1 September

  MCA is in West Melbourne; it’s a government school, no fees, but entry is by audition for the performance students and folio presentation for the visual arts students. You do the standard curriculum, too, but it fits around the arts stuff, which gets more priority than in a regular school.

  This, miraculously, could make moving schools a good thing. And it’s Max’s school. She’s about to graduate at the end of next term, which is basically ninety percent exams, so it’s not like we’d cross paths much – and that’s better when you’re going out with someone, we agree.

  Oh my god, please let me get in.

  The school itself is a six-storey brutalist building from the early 1970s. So. Cool. It looks more like an office block than a school, to be honest, but over the road there’s a shady park where students go to lie on the grass and stare at the sky, eat lunch, commune with nature and get inspired to new heights of artiness, presumably, before returning to the brute.

  Art studio time is designed with integration between disciplines, so there’d be a chance for me to work on set and costume design with theatre arts students, and do some filmmaking as well as printmaking and photography. I tumble out of the folio presentation interview happy-drunk like an over-pollinated bee into a world of bigger possibility, brimming with all the next things I might do.

  ‘They liked my power pocket dress, too.’ It’s a perfectly simple dress completely covered in different sized pockets. You don’t even need a bag at all when you wear it. It’s actually hyper-convenient. You do need to remember which pocket you’ve put your Myki card into, though. But that’s another story, from another day – Tuesday, actually – involving two very rude tram inspectors. I did find it, eventually.

  Max slips her hand into mine. ‘Of course they liked it. It’s genius.’

  ‘I didn’t even need to explain the context of women and not enough pockets; they were all aha, very witty, empowering about it.’ Their response merged ‘flattering’ and ‘just as well’, seeing as I only last week found out about the feminist implications of the tragic absence of pockets in women’s clothes – from Clare, natch.

  ‘They said they’d let me know within a few days. What if I don’t get in?’

  ‘You were in there for quite a while.’ Max is smiling. ‘I take that as a good sign.’

  Friday 2 September

  I wake exhausted because I studied late and then I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Frances Carter, how she walked into the auditorium that day, all wire and certainty. I lay in bed listening to her music – the beauty and strangeness of it. At least we don’t have orchestra this morning, so I don’t have to see Oliver.

  I cram in as much study as I can between classes. Iris and I look over notes at lunch, and we study at night. She spends time catching me up when she should be going over her own work, and I want Clem to see this side of her. The side that doesn’t say I told you so, but sits with you late at night and explains the calculus problem you don’t understand and calmly reassures you that you’re doing the right thing, when every part of you screams that you’re not.

  *

  Our study plan is to work till midnight, then go to bed so we have at least seven hours sleep. It’s about quarter to midnight and we’re finishing up a practice exam on our computers, when there’s a hesitant knock on the door.

  I stop the clock and Iris answers it. We both stare at Oliver in disbelief. My eyes cannot comprehend that he is here, in the boarding house.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Please invite me in. I’m scared senseless I’ll get caught.’

  ‘God, yes, sorry, yes.’ I pull him inside. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘I used the portal. Came across school grounds in the dark. You’ve been very brave doing that all this time.’

  ‘He needs to go or we’re both expelled,’ Iris says.

  ‘Can we have two minutes alone? Go to the bathroom and when you come back, he’ll be gone.’

  ‘I don’t need to go to the bathroom. I need to do my practice exam.’

  Oliver is holding my hand now. I’m not sure when he picked it up, but I know that neither of us is letting go till he says what he came to say.

  ‘Please, Iris,’ Oliver says, and she makes a big deal of putting on her dressing-gown and leaving.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ she says, which is so incredibly nice of her. I didn’t think she’d give us two.

  As soon as she’s gone, Oliver kisses me. A full-on, fantastic kiss. A kiss that makes me wish Iris weren’t such a stickler for time and we were in his bedroom and the kiss could lead to other things.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says after. ‘I needed to do that first. I should have done that before. Earlier. The other day. When you told me. Because, the truth is, I might win because of our work, our song. I wouldn’t have had a real chance without you, hard as that is for me to admit. And you’re not a total fuck-up. Not even close. I’ve met some fuck-ups and you’re nothing like them. In fact, when it comes to fucking up, you’re a complete amateur.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. And I get the whole parent thing. I completely understand. I got all worked up because I like you. I really like you.’

  ‘It’s mutual.’

  ‘Excellent. That’s really very excellent. Look. I’ve got a speech here ready, and I feel I need to read it to you, but I wanted to say all that before so you know that, whatever you decide, I’m still with you.’

  He takes out the paper and starts reading. ‘But you have to decide, Kate. You have to decide. I wasn’t angry because you chose the scholarship exam. I was angry because you seemed to be waiting for me to convince you to choose music. I spoke to Frances Carter that day she came. And she said it wasn’t easy to choose music. She had other choices. The arts are a bitch, they don’t pay, she said. People think you should do something sensible. I told her about my mum in the orchestra and she was impressed because that hardly ever happens. But I want to take a risk. I think you want to take a risk, too. But you can’t wait for someone to tell you to take a risk. That’s the nature of risks: you have to decide to take them.

  ‘So, to conclude: I really hope you choose the Iceland audition, but that’s entirely up to you. And if you change your mind – I mean, at the last minute – I’ve taken the liberty of mapping out a clear flight path from here to the audition. I’ll show you.’

  He goes to Iris’s computer and I sit next to him, a part of me knowing I might need that flight path. I’m thinking about the kiss and risks and Frances Carter, when the screen comes alive and we’re looking at Iris’s emails. Oliver’s about to open Safari, but I catch sight of the subject line of the latest one. The sender is PSST. The subject Gfed is Now Following You.

  Oliver lets out a long low whistle.

  I motion for him to move and lean against the door in case Iris comes back. Why is Iris getting emails from PSST? I type quickly and do a search for other emails, hoping to find proof that it’s not her. A heap of PSST emails come up.

  ‘She’s got something to do with it,’ Oliver says.

  ‘She wouldn’t do that,’ I say, thinking about all the terrible things that have been posted. About Ady. About me. About her sister.

  I can’t read any further because there’s a loud rap on the door.

  ‘Under the bed,’ I whisper to Oliver.

  When he’s hidden, I open the door, yawning.

  ‘Library,’ Old Joy says. ‘No phones. Leave it all here.’

  She keeps walking and knocking. Angela from next door tells me there’s a boy on the floor. ‘When we’re in the librar
y they’ll check the rooms.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Oliver says from under the bed.

  Angela looks at me and seems impressed. ‘We need to get him to the stairs,’ she says, and grabs a blanket off my bed. ‘Get between us,’ she tells Oliver, and together we walk, huddled around Oliver, all of us covered in the blanket.

  I can barely breathe because I’m expecting Old Joy to jump out of a doorway at any second. Some girls notice the extra boy feet between us, but there’s a code, so they all look out for us, and somehow we get him to the stairs.

  ‘Think about Saturday,’ he says. ‘Find your flight path.’

  He gives me the blanket. And he’s gone.

  Iris stands next to me in the library, so I can’t let Clem know what I’ve discovered. I don’t have my phone, so there’s nothing I can do except give Clem looks that she clearly can’t decipher.

  In hindsight, I guess it’s not unbelievable that it’s Iris. She hates the popular crowd. She knew about Ady because I told her. She’s good technically, and she’s a great listener. I still can’t believe it, though. Those posts were so awful.

  I look over at her, moving her feet around in the cold, and try to see that meanness in her. She looks over at me and smiles.

  Who are you? I think.

  Friday 2 September

  It’s just past midnight and I’m lying in bed listening to Jinx – she’s snoring in spite of her nose peg (we thought it might help). I’m contemplating throwing things at her, or just smothering her with a pillow, when someone bangs on the door and hisses, ‘Old Joy’s on the beat.’

  I sit up and switch on my lamp.

  Jinx bolts upright and whips off her nose peg. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She listens for a moment and her eyes go wide. ‘It’s a round-up!’

  She jumps out of bed and pulls her jumper and trackies on. She shoves her feet into slipper-socks. I put my dressing-gown on and open the door. Girls are whizzing past, faces rippling with excitement. Jinx and I slip into the stream.

  I grab Lainie’s arm. ‘Where are we supposed to be going?’

  ‘Library.’

  Jinx spills as we trot. ‘Last year there was a bomb threat – they took it seriously because, you know, the world. Turned out to be a lame Bazza trying to get back at his ex.’