I Am Out With Lanterns

by Emily Gale

  ‘Like Peter Rabbit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. That sucks.’

  ‘The school would never get my shoes back because of health and safety. Mum would be furious. She’d tell them off for not doing anything about Gus and his gang. Then she’d take me to buy new shoes. And an ice cream.’

  ‘She sounds nice.’

  I remember now. As soon as the new shoes were crushing down on my feet, I felt like it was all my fault. I’d promise myself it wouldn’t happen again. Don’t take any bullshit, Milo.

  ‘Gus is in juvenile detention,’ says Juliet.

  ‘Seriously? How do you know?’

  ‘My mum works at the Magistrates’ Court.’

  ‘What did he get done for?’

  ‘Variety-pack crimes: car theft, assault with a weapon, aggravated burglary … I could tell you the whole list if you’re that interested.’

  ‘No, that’s fine. You seem to know a lot about it.’

  I hope Juliet doesn’t speak for a moment because I need to decide how I feel about this. Gus actually got punished. Is this what justice feels like? It’s not as good as I imagined.

  ‘So you really don’t remember Adie Ryan?’ says Juliet. I shrug. ‘That’s okay. You’ve forgotten a lot of stuff about school. I can tell.’

  I look up to my left. A cluster of bird-of-paradise flowers look like they’re all pretending not to be eavesdropping.

  ‘I’ll try to jog your memory,’ she says.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘But promise this goes no further.’

  ‘What goes no further?’

  ‘What I can do.’

  What she can do? I’m confused, but I nod. I have an unfunny feeling that I’ve been kidnapped and now I’m going to be tortured with information about the past.

  ‘Monday, fourth of February,’ she begins. ‘It’s the second Monday of Year One. Miss Brodie has drawn a giant “b” on the whiteboard and around it she draws a bee, a book, a bear and a ball. You put up your hand. “Miss Bwodie,” you say.’

  ‘Hey! I’ve had a speech therapist since then. I’d prefer you to tell this story without making fun of my voice.’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Milo, that’s how my memories … come out. They’re very accurate, but I didn’t mean it. Can I try again?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘So you say, “Miss Brodie, is that a picture of a dog? Because ‘dog’ actually begins with ‘d’. She tells you it’s a bear and carries on. “Miss Brodie, is that a circle?” you say. She tells you it’s a ball. “It looks like a circle,” you say again. Then she asks everyone to get out their books and copy what she’s done. You keep trying to tell Miss Brodie that the pictures don’t work. That the bear looks like a dog and the ball looks like a circle. It’s really bugging you. Why won’t she listen to you, right? She keeps replying that the pictures are fine and that you need to do your work or you won’t be allowed outside at recess. The fifth or sixth time you try to have the conversation, she gets stern and gives you a final warning.

  ‘Once Miss Brodie’s back is turned, while she’s squatting down to help Poppy and Scarlet on the back table, you get up and wipe the bear and the ball off the whiteboard. It just so happens that you use Miss Brodie’s white cardigan. A few kids giggle when you do this and Miss Brodie turns around to see what’s going on. She stands, silently, and waits for you to realise she’s seen what you’ve done, but you’re busy doing your own drawings by then. She asks you to look at her. You don’t. She raises her voice and asks again. You ignore her. “Look at me when I’m speaking to you, Milo,” she goes, angry now. The whole class is watching. Then you say, without looking up, and quite calmly, “Fuck off, Miss Brodie.”’

  ‘I did not!’ Wait. ‘Did I?’

  ‘You did.’ Juliet smiles. ‘Miss Brodie spoke to your mum in the playground after school. I was there for that too, because Jean was late.’

  ‘Who’s Jean?’

  ‘My mum.’

  ‘The lawyer.’

  ‘The horticulturalist. And Tracey’s not a lawyer; she’s a kind of assistant in the Family Courts.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I thought Juliet was quiet and shy, but she’s pretty loud up close. And I get the impression she’s not finished with me yet.

  ‘Did that story ring a bell?’

  ‘Not really. But I remember I once drew a bear and I was really happy with how it turned out.’

  She sighs. ‘That’s a start. What about the day in Year Four when all the boys faked it in four-square so that you stayed in king for the whole of recess, because they were in trouble with Mr Durham for leaving you out all the time?’

  ‘That was fake?’

  ‘No, sorry, got that wrong.’

  ‘But you said –’

  ‘Forget that. Um, what about … the second of December, when that man came into school barking like a dog and the teachers made us hide under the desks until the police came? And the Footy Day – shush, it’s here – the twelfth of August, when a kid in Year One found a bullet in his sausage sizzle? And remember that time you thought Ali had stolen your Pokémon cards? That was … March … um …’

  ‘Juliet! Stop! What are you doing? This is weird.’

  ‘But it’s all true.’

  ‘It’s crazy!’

  Juliet hangs her head.

  ‘I didn’t mean “crazy” … Juliet, are you crying? Please don’t cry.’

  ‘I’m not crying!’ she snaps. ‘I’m trying to show you that I remember everything about you!’

  What’s happening here? The cells are racing in my blood, doing faster circuits than I can cope with. Does she spy on me? See me when I think I’m alone? I want to get out, but I’m scared of Ben. I’m trapped. This is bad. ‘How can you know everything? Do you know what my room is like? Do you know where I go at the weekend? Stuff about my family?’

  ‘No! I don’t mean everything everything.’

  ‘You just said “everything”.’

  ‘I mean everything I’ve seen. I can’t remember it if I haven’t seen it. Obviously.’

  ‘Stuff you’ve seen. Okay, okay, I get it.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘I have a superior memory. That’s all it is.’

  ‘Memory. Good. Fine.’

  ‘Are you okay, Milo?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m good now.’ The world’s tipped the right way up again. My cells decelerate. The dizziness passes. The shouting between us has sunk into the walls of the pot. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. I don’t even care if Juliet thinks I’m being weird because she is not exactly a regular garden-variety human either. Definitely not.

  ‘It started when I was six. Nothing ever leaves me. I can’t control it. My head is full, all the time.’

  ‘I have those thoughts too. Not memories like yours. More like one annoying thought that won’t go away. Thoughts that circle, like a coin spinning around one of those …’

  ‘Spiral wishing wells.’

  ‘Yeah. Only, the coin or thought won’t drop into the hole. It keeps on spinning.’

  We’re quiet for a while.

  ‘I knew I was going to muck this up,’ she says eventually.

  ‘Muck what up?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m sorry for freaking you out, Milo. I had to know if you remembered Adie. She was in our class for two years.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’

  ‘So I’m the only one.’

  ‘But why? How can everyone have forgotten?’

  She presses her fingertip into a small imperfection in the clay wall and stares at it. ‘Adie was quiet. And she missed a lot of days. It was a long time ago. Most people’s memories aren’t simple. New memories replace old ones. Things get shoved out completely. People we knew well can become strangers over time.’

  ‘But not in your head, Juliet.’

  ‘No. Not in my head.’

  This is like walking through
a maze with hundreds of terrible people. Going to the toilet took nearly an hour and now I can’t find anyone. I head for the garden.

  Outside, in the dark, I have to blink a few times to adjust my eyes and work out where the boundaries are – that’s how big Luca’s garden is. It’s on a gentle slope that leads to flatter ground. I’ve never met anyone who has an actual hill in their garden.

  To the left is a pool with tall glass walls around it. There are Hall boys sitting with their feet in the pool, polluting it. Behind that is a small house. Like a spare or something. There’s a group in the middle of the lawn trying to make a human pyramid, and another in a circle passing a joint. I can’t see Milo, but over in the furthest, darkest corner I catch a bright pair of eyes. Adie. She’s leaning against a tree talking to Hari and Luca.

  I walk over, trying to talk my brain into this interaction. Just say hi. And then what? Then something funny. What’s funny? Quick, you’re nearly there.

  ‘Hey, anyone seen Milo?’ That is not what I meant by funny.

  ‘Saw him go out the front about an hour ago,’ says Adie. These are the first words between us since we went to the op shop. I half-worry that she doesn’t recognise me. I half-know that, if anything, I am too recognisable.

  ‘I guess he’d had enough. We don’t go to many parties. Kind of hate crowds. No offence, Luca.’

  Luca smiles, as if taking offence to that was literally the last thought in his head. In the back of my mind I’m thinking that it’s weird for Milo to leave without saying goodbye. Then again, I’ve been queuing for the toilet for half of the party – maybe he tried to find me but gave up. I check my phone. Dead, as usual.

  Adie’s drinking what looks like red wine from a plastic cup. Hari and Luca are draped around each other comfortably. I don’t know much about them as a couple – Hari doesn’t talk about Luca in that way, more like he’s a permanent fixture. She never complains about him, but she doesn’t rave about him either. As I look at them now, I wonder, Do they make sense? Luca seems too straight for Hari.

  I like the way I feel around Adie. Nervous, alert, alive. I picture her face on my bedroom wall, staring me down, day after day.

  ‘This music is dire. Let’s go and sort it out,’ Hari tells Luca, pulling him away by one finger.

  My heartbeat accelerates as they leave us. Adie sits at the base of the tree and sips her drink. She looks up and pats the space beside her.

  ‘I haven’t really seen you since …’

  ‘Oh, the op shop,’ she says, as if it’s the first time since then that she’s thought of me. Ouch.

  ‘Yeah. I saw your still life on the Art room wall. It’s good. Really good.’ I tear the blades of grass around my feet.

  ‘Thanks, Wren. Seriously. Thanks.’ When she says my name, I hear it in the pit of my stomach.

  ‘And I saw your dad’s portrait of you and the other girl on the gallery website – the shortlist. Who’s the other girl?’

  ‘My not-mother, Dara. She’s a bitch.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The music suddenly gets a lot better. Adie finishes what’s in her cup and reaches across me, grabs hold of a bottle, which she pours and then offers to me. I take a swig. It has a strange effect for liquid – like it’s sucking the existing moisture out of my mouth as it goes down my throat. I lick my lips and teeth.

  There’s a tug at my neck and I turn to find her holding up the long pendant I’m wearing.

  ‘Wossis-stone?’ she says, slurring.

  ‘Malachite.’

  Adie leans towards me, looking directly at my nose before squinting at the gem in her hand. I can’t believe I didn’t notice earlier. Adie is completely smashed.

  ‘I’m gonna call my cat Mmmm-malachite.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She smiles at me, dreamily, and rests her head on my shoulder. I take the plastic cup from her fingers and pour the contents onto the ground. The weight of her against me grows.

  ‘I’ve got a chair,’ she says. ‘An’ a cat. An’ a job.’

  ‘Right. Good.’

  ‘But I can’t remember her. I should. But I can’t. Help me, Wren.’

  She goes quiet. Her left hand rests on my thigh, her right arm hidden between us.

  ‘Adie?’ I say softly. She murmurs.

  I spy Hari standing on the patio, up at the house. I try to wave without moving Adie so I can ask Hari what she thinks I should do about this incredibly drunk and beautiful girl who I feel inexplicably drawn to. It’s nearly midnight. Dad said he was coming to collect me at one, but who knows when Adie is being picked up. If she is. Hari – too far away to see me, I guess – turns around and goes back inside. I look over at the pool, at the rowdy Hall boys.

  Adie’s head slips off my shoulder, and the next thing I know there’s warm vomit covering my lap.

  ‘Oh God, oh no,’ she says, and struggles to get up. She grabs my arm and the tree and hauls herself to her feet, then stumbles away. ‘I’m sosososo sorry.’ She runs in zigzags up towards the house.

  I can’t move.

  But I can’t stay here like this.

  I try to get up carefully, the weight and warmth of the puke against my legs, flinching as it travels down my dress and drops in clumps to the ground. How could so much vomit come out of one person that quickly? I look up towards the house, but Adie’s vanished, swallowed by the crowds. The smell hits me.

  This is like some terrible joke.

  Did you hear the one about the goth girl who gets puked on at a party?

  First, she takes out her phone and tries to call her dad. But wait, that’s right, her phone’s dead!

  Then she decides to leg it over the back fence.

  But as she’s dropping into the next-door garden, her dress gets caught on a nail!

  Yes, in this pristine garden with manicured lawns, she manages to find the one single mistake in it.

  I mean, I do.

  So here I am, in a total stranger’s pitch-black garden, wearing a slashed dress covered in vomit, with a dead phone and no allies in sight. There’s a great view of the city, but maybe I’ll enjoy that some other time when I don’t stink of the insides of the girl that I … [insert appropriate feelings word].

  There’s garden after garden ahead of me. I couldn’t work out my way home if I was out on the street, let alone through this.

  ‘Wren?’

  I spin around, clutching my ripped dress, to find Hari’s short blunt fringe and smoky eyes. ‘Thank God – I need help.’

  ‘Clearly. Where are you off to?’

  ‘I was trying to find my way home.’

  She laughs, but it’s not mean, and for the first time I smile too. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  I hold up my dead phone.

  ‘That’d be right. Come back over, I’ll fix you up. You’ll get eaten by labradors if you go that way.’

  ‘But I’m covered in sick and my dress is hanging off me.’

  ‘I only left you alone for ten minutes.’ I can see she’s trying not to laugh again. ‘Okay, listen, I’ll smuggle you to the pool house. There’s a shower. I can grab you some of Luca’s clothes.’

  Hari helps me back over the fence and shields me as we slink our way round the back of the pool house. I’m surprised she can bear to touch me; I reek. Once we’re out of sight, I start to believe that the potential scale of this disaster has been mostly averted. There’s a window big enough for me to slip into. Hari gives me a leg-up, which takes several tries because of our hysterical giggling.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I say, when I’m safely inside.

  ‘Any time.’

  ‘I’m hoping this won’t happen more than once, to be honest.’

  She puts her fingers over her lips and smiles. ‘Here, use my phone as a torch. I’ll run up to the house to get you some clothes. Leave this window open so I can pass them through. There’s towels and stuff in there.’

  ‘You’re amazing, Hari. Thank you.’

  After she walks away
into the shadows, I find the torch setting and shine it around to get my bearings. The blinds are drawn all across the garden side, but the noise of the party is unnervingly close. There’s a kitchen at one end, sofas in the middle section, and a bathroom on my right. I don’t want to get anything on these plush carpets, so I prop the phone on a shelf nearby to give me light and take off my things where I’m standing.

  I shiver, imagining how it would have felt to walk through that party of rich mouth-breathers while covered in spew. Hari just saved my life.

  Even though Dad’s ditched the coaching, I wake at five-o-five every morning. On the dot. It’s freaking me out. Today’s Sunday, the morning after the party. My mind goes over the process of getting out of bed and going down to the pool, but my body is a slab of meat.

  Five-o-six. I send Nate the video for Flare and smile to myself, picturing his reaction. I open Instagram and scroll through without taking in a single image, not tapping, not pausing, not giving a single shit. I do that until my phone goes dead and then I lie there.

  Five-fifteen.

  Monday night, the house has a different sort of charge because Pop’s coming for dinner. I love Pop, but I’m dreading it. Water polo training today was crushing. We had strength tests and I didn’t come out well. I don’t know what happened.

  I’ve got a tonne of homework, but I’m not even going to lie to myself about it getting done tonight. At my desk, phone in hand, chin on chest, I tap in and out of various apps. Nate’s added me to the Flare account. There’s over four hundred videos of girls on it. Some are hot. Some are funny. None of them give me a boner, to be honest. I double-tap them all for Nate’s benefit.

  I chuck the phone down, accidentally too close to Captain’s foot, and he darts off the desk to scurry under the bed. ‘Shit, sorry.’

  It’s not all bad. I’m supposed to meet Poppy later. Maybe that will shake me out of this. Then there’s my pre-dinner aperitif. Nate left me with half a joint last Friday, which I plan on smoking before Pop gets here, to take the edge off. It’s probably stale by now, but there’s no way I can face dinner without medication. I saw Mum taking a Xanax earlier.