Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  Eve and Meg had pooled their money and bought Sarah a cream silk blouse with the best shoulder pads. It had been on her wish list for weeks, and not only were the shoulder pads nice and square, but they also attached with Velcro, so they could be taken out when the blouse needed to be washed and wouldn’t lose their shape. Also laid out on Sarah’s bed were a new beach towel, the game Pictionary, a straw bag for the beach and some black Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses her mum had given her that morning. Her dad was back from a work trip tomorrow and said he would do something special with her then. Sarah didn’t mind her dad being away for the party; she knew he didn’t mean it but his voice was stern sometimes and he had a habit of scaring her friends.

  Sarah took in the loot flung across her bed just as the bell went, signalling more loot at the front door and for the girls to run down the stairs to welcome guests. Halfway there, Sarah saw a thick crack of lightning. It was February and, as always, ‘uncharacteristically’ humid for Sydney. A late-afternoon summer storm was building up a few kilometres away, making its way to Pymble. Sarah paused halfway down the stairs, looked out the window on the stairwell ledge and saw another fork of lightning whip across a grey and blue sky. That’s right, light travels faster than sound; that’s why you see a storm breaking before you hear it. Meg the science genius had told her that.

  Guests handed Sarah her presents at the door and were told to enjoy themselves by the pool. Rebecca arrived with Janice and whispered to Sarah to open her present now, as their mothers began chatting about the weather. It was Anaïs Anaïs perfume – extravagant, and her first scent. Sarah spritzed some on her wrists, rubbed them together and ran outside to join everyone in the pool. She was enjoying the fuss. She looked up and saw her mum and Mrs Thornton on the verandah upstairs, leaning on the railing, deep in conversation.

  Half the girls were already in the pool, jumping up and down on the spot, talking, swimming underwater. Two were on big blow-up bananas, having a race, their bodies leaning forwards over the yellow curves, their arms paddling frantically.

  A shadow moved across the pool in an instant, making it seem like someone had pushed the fast-forward button on the weather, and there was a crack and another crack and another. Hard, bullet-sized rain pelted the girls and the pool, causing the water to jump back at the sky and the girls on dry land, in bikinis, clutching wet sausage rolls and ham sandwiches, to scream. The girls in the pool screamed too. The two on the big bananas rolled off into the water as if they had been shot through the head.

  ‘Girls, girls, get out of the pool while there’s lightning,’ Amanda yelled over the upstairs balcony, her hands making a ‘move to the right’ motion. ‘Quickly, girls. OUT!’ They could get fat and diabetic at her party, Amanda thought, but she drew the line at electrocuted.

  The girls complied with the request and, after a flurry of overly dramatic activity, where some tried to save their towels from soaking beside the pool as though they were saving a toddler from drowning, eighteen girls in various states of dampness stood under the cabana roof. Some were readjusting bikini bottoms, some very uncasually crossing arms over stomachs, some sitting with their knees up to their chins on the decking floor, trying to look natural.

  Eyes darted around, taking in physical inventory. Meg and Eve sat on a wooden bench seat with Maria, who had a large, bright-red birthmark on the top of her thigh, discussing whether the rain would stop or they would be stuck like this until the taxis came to take them back to the boarding house. A few girls put their hands out the side of the cabana to feel the bullets. Some screamed and jumped up and down on the spot every time thunder arrived. The lightning and thunder was a great party game.

  A voice pushed through the damp limbs in the crowded cabana. ‘How can you have such a flat stomach?’ Somehow, Rebecca Thornton had skipped the awkward physical stages of early adolescence and had a body that was two parts lanky, slim, eleven-year-old boy and three parts pole-dancing woman. Her breasts were already full and round like perfect peaches. She had a tiny waist that curved into neat hips. Her legs stood firm, shapely and lean beneath high-cut pastel-pink, green-and purple-striped bikini bottoms. There was no excess flesh, no lumpy bits looking for a home. There were angles and there was softness in all the right places. There was no doubting that Rebecca had won the genetic lottery. Even her feet were perfect.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Rebecca replied with essential superficial modesty to the five or six girls standing in her circle. Rebecca brushed strands of her own blonde hair away from her eyes. ‘I wish I had your hair, Sophie.’

  All the girls in the group turned to admire Sophie’s hair and nodded as though it was the most obvious need in the cabana: appreciating Sophie’s hair. It was curly and unique. No other girl in the year had hair like that.

  ‘I wish I didn’t have my hair,’ Sophie countered, and the girls laughed.

  ‘Thanks for the perfume, Rebecca. I love it,’ Sarah said in a quick voice. She had a towel around her bottom half but felt the need to suck in her stomach as she spoke.

  ‘I have it too. Isn’t it beautiful?’

  As Sarah was debating whether Rebecca expected an answer, Trish Mercs made a break for it and ran onto the lawn in the thick rain over to the trestle tables to grab two bowls of soaking plain potato chips. Hands dived into the bowls on Trish’s return, and the tangle of girls laughed and ate the soggy scraps as if it was their last meal. Sarah went to grab a soggy chip and ended up with some wet salt on the ends of her fingertips.

  ‘Don’t you love this rain?’ Rebecca asked no one. Everyone looked out at the pool, at the little splashes making circles in the blue.

  Sarah had never thought about rain before in the sense of loving it or hating it. It was just there. She thought an adult might love rain; she’d heard her parents talk about how much they loved the sound of the ocean. It just sounded like a huge long swoosh to Sarah. ‘Yeah, it’s beautiful,’ Sarah said, and then she remembered something her mother said once on holidays. ‘I love hearing it on the roof when I go to sleep at night. It’s so comforting.’

  Under the cabana, Meg leant her goosebumps into Eve’s. Just enough pressure on the upper arm for Eve to not look at Meg but turn her attention to Sarah’s conversation instead.

  ‘And the thunder,’ Rebecca said. ‘I like being inside and knowing you’re safe and hearing thunder outside and wondering if somewhere, out there,’ – Rebecca’s eyes flicked past the cabana to the dangers of leafy Pymble – ‘the lightning is going to hit anything, anyone. It’s so random. That’s what’s scary. You never know where it’s going to hit.’

  ‘I know,’ Sarah said, making the ‘w’ on the word ‘know’ last for a disproportionately long time.

  Eve raised her eyebrows at Meg. Meg raised them back, and then, in the distance, past the pool and pavers, they could see Mrs Partridge waving her arms from the verandah with more gusto than an airport worker.

  ‘Girls! Girls!’ she yelled. Everyone in the cabana turned to face the voice. ‘Come inside and get dressed. We better get a move on, get you girls back to the boarding house.’

  Janice Thornton disappeared inside, and a handful of girls grabbed their towels and ran across the grass in the rain into the grey of the rumpus room.

  There was another huge crack. It seemed to be coming from under the earth this time, right below their bare, grass-flecked feet, and the tremor was travelling up their wet legs into their chests.

  ‘Shit, did you feel that?’ someone asked. ‘I’m getting out of here.’

  ‘If one of us gets electrocuted, all of us should get electrocuted,’ Rebecca yelled.

  She stuck out her hand, and Sarah grabbed it, and then Natalie grabbed Sarah’s hand and Alison grabbed Natalie’s hand.

  ‘C’mon,’ Sarah said to the remaining two. ‘C’mon, Meg, Eve, it’s us against the lightning.’

  Eve grabbed Alison’s hand and Meg, the last in line, grabbed Eve’s hand.

  The six girls ran hand in hand in a straight li
ne across the lawn towards the house, their heads tilted to the sky, their mouths open wide, their wet bodies pelted by hard rain, all screaming so hard and so high that Amanda ran back out onto the verandah, sure someone had been maimed on her watch. She looked down on the line of girls screaming and smiling in the rain, took a deep breath and walked back into the house, closing the sliding glass door with a thud. Back inside, she sighed to Jan, ‘You forget they’re still just little girls.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  There were a hundred different silences in the boarding house. There were communal ones that filled up a room after a mistress warned there would be no weekends out if girls continued to leave their dorm rooms like little four-year-old boys. ‘For goodness’ sake, take pride in yourselves and your belongings, girls,’ Mrs Dean was fond of yelling, shaking her head briskly to emphasise their slovenly failures. ‘We have standards … you are not a rugby team on tour.’ Another silence, cold and desperate, clung to the back of the new girl walking down the long hall to the bathroom, cursing her mother for buying her pink underpants. An angry one stood defiantly behind the eyes of the seventeen-year-old told she was being stripped of her head-boarder status because she exhibited un-Hetherington-like behaviour by partaking in a water fight with five boys after a cricket game. For six years, she had been a good girl every day, every single day, and in one moment everything got taken away.

  In her second year at Hetherington, Eve had become a skilled reader of silence. It was a gift as important as being a natural at maths or talented in English, and it served her best when it came to the most common type of silence in the boarding house: girl-fight. She just had to take one moment at the doorway, scan, breathe in, close her eyes and the silence would speak and tell her who was in, who was out, who had just finished crying, who was pretending everything was fine, who was the girl with the most cake.

  Boarding-house mistresses could never pick it. It would be right in front of their faces and they would march straight past and tuck in the corner of a bed sheet with a flourish reserved for silent movies. They would be talking, talking, talking to all the girls about not dawdling between the bells, skirt lengths and respecting property, as though they were surrounded by a room of human beings as content and uncomplicated as sea urchins in a rock pool. And the girls who were being crushed by the silence would be right next to them and they couldn’t see they were getting smaller, being swallowed by the silence.

  Eve wound her way past the ends of beds, some discarded shoes and open school bags towards her bunk to sort through the textbooks she had to read in the evening for homework and shot Sophie, the target, a look. Sophie was sitting up on her bed reading, her pose straight from an ad for literature week, trying to act as if everything was normal, that she wasn’t noticing every step and laugh and whisper in the room. Something had happened at Sarah’s party – Eve knew that much. She reviewed the events of the party: pool, thunder, the chocolate game that Meg won, eating pizza for dinner, Amanda telling the girls to make sure they all had their wet towels and own clothes when they left. She tried to focus in on Sophie. What did Sophie do? Eve came up with a big blank for probable cause.

  Meg had basketball practice after school on a Tuesday, so Eve wouldn’t be able to ask her until 6 pm. Sarah would know. Eve pictured Sarah on her way back from her last Tuesday class – geography – chatting to a few day girls before she walked into the boarding house and put her books away prior to afternoon tea. Sarah straddled the two worlds: due to the fact she lived in Sydney, she was part day girl, part boarder – always somewhere in between.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Eve asked Sarah as soon as she arrived.

  Sarah turned and did a vaguely discreet sweep of the room before answering. ‘Sophie?’ she asked, looking at Sophie and breathing in so dramatically that Eve thought for a second what would come out next could be life-changing. ‘It’s about what Natalie told me in English today. Sophie has been telling people Rebecca’s not a virgin, and Rebecca is really upset. She is a virgin and can’t believe Sophie would say that about her.’

  Eve cautioned Sarah to lower her voice. ‘Shhh. Okay, okay.’ Then she added, a little surprised, ‘God. Have you talked to Rebecca about it?’

  They moved from standing beside Eve’s chest of drawers to the bottom bunk in unison and sat down, stacking and restacking textbooks on the mattress as they exchanged information in whispers.

  ‘Yeah, she is really upset. She was crying after biology this morning. What if her mum hears about it? No one is talking to Sophie. I can’t believe I invited her to my party and then she says things about Rebecca.’

  ‘Why would she say that?’ Eve asked, thinking the furthest she had ever gone was a kiss goodbye on the lips that went a little too long with a French exchange student billeted with her parents for three months last year.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she is jealous.’

  Eve could understand why you would be jealous of Rebecca. She had seen her going home this afternoon. She’d stood inside the gate with her books on her hip and watched Rebecca walk to the bus stop in the afternoon sun. She knew she wasn’t the only one watching Rebecca; there was something about her that just drew you in, made you lost for a moment. ‘I didn’t even know they knew each other,’ Eve said, digesting that Sophie, with her curly hair just like an angel, would talk about Rebecca not being a virgin. Eve didn’t even know if Rebecca had a boyfriend. She didn’t know a lot about Rebecca. Then she had a thought. ‘Is Rebecca a virgin?’

  ‘Of course she is.’ Sarah put her hand on top of her pile of textbooks with a thud and leant in really close to Eve’s head to stress she was never to ask a question like that again.

  Eve hopped off the bed and turned to Sarah. She raised both hands, grabbed the edge of the top bunk, put her head between her two arms and said, ‘I got you. Okay.’

  ‘I need to see Mrs Dean,’ Sarah said, standing up next to Eve.

  ‘About this?’ Eve was shocked. She hadn’t thought Sarah would go that far. Eve had seen it first-hand: when you tell a teacher, it all just gets worse.

  ‘No, about my weekend out.’

  Sarah was having another weekend out. They were allowed a certain number each term, but Sarah always seemed to squeeze in an extra one or two. Sarah left, grabbing a quick look at Sophie before she disappeared behind some bunks.

  Sophie stayed on her bed for half an hour reading without turning a page. Eve smiled at her when she managed to catch her eye, and Sophie smiled back just before the bell rang for start of first study session. Eve debated going over to her but decided it was best to wait until Meg returned from practice. Girls began to file out of the dorm with books and pencil cases under their arms for study. It was so quiet that, in the distance, a coach could be heard yelling ‘harder, harder’, followed by the relentless thud of balls being bounced. Sophie was the last one out the door. She kept her eyes on the worn carpet at her feet, that bouncing growing louder. Eve noted that Rebecca had won this battle and wasn’t even here, in the boarding house; she was in her own kitchen, at home, probably having a honey crumpet and a Diet Coke.

  Eve may have studied Rebecca from afar, but she had only ever had one real conversation with her. A week before, after English, Rebecca had turned to Eve and started talking about how much extra homework they were being given this year compared with last year, when they were in Year Seven. When Eve looked at Rebecca, she did an inventory on herself; she always did. Eve became conscious that her eyes were not big enough, her skin too pink, that her socks were folded over too perfectly. When Eve looked at Rebecca, she wanted: wanted more; wanted better; wanted things little and big. Eve wanted to know how to get her fringe to stay high like that; she wanted to have a bigger mouth with straighter teeth; she wanted to know how to sit perfectly still when others were listening to you and not feel the need to jiggle your knee.

  ‘You’re doing it again, Eve, that weird thing with your knee,’ someone would point out. It never happened when people w
ere looking at her while she was playing the cello.

  Clutching her books to her side and dawdling to stay with Rebecca, Eve listened as the girl with the perfectly loose ponytail and askew navy ribbon in her hair asked her about how many hours of homework they had to do in the boarding house. ‘Two a night in Year Eight. It goes up each year,’ Eve replied, pleased with herself for knowing the answer.

  ‘Does Meg do extra?’ Rebecca asked. Everyone asked Eve a version of this question. Why was Meg so bright? What was her secret? Did she study more than everyone else? That was what they all wanted to know. How did Meg, who didn’t seem to be paying attention half the time in class, who had a father with calloused hands, have such a big brain?

  ‘Meg finishes before all of us.’

  ‘Does she help you and Sarah?’

  At the time, Eve didn’t pick it up, but later, when she grabbed her lunch from the boarding-house kitchen and walked to find the girls, she unwrapped her sandwich and said out loud to ham, cheese and tomato, ‘She knows I’m friends with Meg and Sarah.’

  ‘What?’ Meg said sitting on the ground, looking up at Eve and leaning against a bench seat.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Whaaaat? You can’t go “oh, nothing” when you mention my name.’

  ‘I was speaking to Rebecca Thornton today and I didn’t know she even knew that you and me and Sarah are friends. She’s a day girl and hangs around …’

  ‘Yeah, I know who she is. I’m not that socially retarded.’

  The year before, the girls had teased Meg and Eve for being inseparable or dependent or lesbians. It eventually became so normal to see the two of them together that the teasing stopped. Both early risers, their habit of crawling into bed with each other and whispering about the world until everyone woke up didn’t help. They spat the toothpaste out in unison into the sink at night and confided about odd-sized nipples and what they would do if they suddenly grew huge breasts. They wondered about the appealing-sounding ‘recreational studies’ at university while pulling strands of the other’s hair out of their mouths. They were a couple, and Sarah was their friend. She was used to being not quite there. Three was not a good number for girls.