‘Actually, I have to go,’ I say. ‘My shift is nearly over and I have to get ready for school. But it was nice talking to you.’
‘Likewise,’ he says. ‘I hope we can do it again sometime.’
He smiles again and for a second he’s so blindingly attractive that I have to completely revise my initial assessment of him as ordinary looking. But then he dives away like a fish and the moment is gone.
I look after him contemplatively. I feel like I should thank him. At least ensuring that Jenny doesn’t get her teeth into my James Cardigan will give me something to do other than thinking about not thinking about Marie.
Step One of my battle plan for managing this disturbing potential Jenny/Cardy development involves judicious monitoring of any and all social media communications they might have. Both, to my satisfaction, are listed on Facebook as ‘single’ and, if I have my way, they’re going to stay that way (until, of course, Cardy’s relationship status changes to In A Relationship With Pearl Linford).
Disey and Shad both walk in on me Facestalking Cardy several times during Step One. They don’t say anything – clearly I have some kind of grief pass – but I can see them laughing on the inside. Useless, both of them. Neither of them ever gets it when it comes to boys. Which might be because they both a) are old and b) like girls, but you wouldn’t think it’d be that different.
One night, when I’m combing through Cardy’s wall to make sure he hasn’t been conducting illicit conversations with Jenny on any comment threads I’ve missed, I get a friend request. It’s from Finn. I check to see whether he still has his profile on public – he does – and click ‘ignore’.
I don’t think I would have had the guts to carry out Step Two if I wasn’t half out of my mind what with the extreme hatred of Jenny and the whole Marie situation. ‘Want to go for coffee after class?’ I ask Cardy bluntly as I flop down next to him in our after-school Extension English class on Wednesday.
‘Sure,’ he says.
I have thought about doing that so many times. Seriously, so many. Dating back to about Year Five. If I knew it would be so easy, I . . . probably still wouldn’t have done it, but it would have been comforting knowing it wouldn’t be that hard.
We walk into town together after class. ‘So how are you doing?’ he asks me.
‘I’m . . . coping,’ I say. ‘I think that’s the kindest way to put it.’
‘I know what you mean,’ he says.
I look up at him. The late afternoon sun is catching his hair and he looks so, so gorgeous. I wish I had the nerve to just take his hand. Or that I’d had the nerve to take his hand sometime in the past and now taking his hand was something I could just do whenever I wanted to because I was his girlfriend.
One day. One day he will realise that we’re meant to be together. Only that day never seems to be today.
‘Have you noticed,’ Cardy says, ‘how many black birds there are around here lately?’
I look up. There are seven black birds sitting on the phone wires above us. ‘I don’t know where they’ve come from, but it’s like they’re everywhere,’ I say.
‘They’re probably just crows or something, but don’t you think they’re creepy-looking? One got into my house the other day. I opened my bedroom door and it was just sitting on my bookshelf like the weirdest ornament ever.’
I shudder. ‘Ugh. Awful. And have you noticed the black cats? They’re suddenly everywhere too.’
‘One was having a staring competition with Finn in PE today. Or he was having a staring competition with it. I don’t know which way around that was going.’
‘Weird,’ I say.
We walk along in companionable silence for a bit. I’m busy thinking of something awesome to say that will make him fall in love with me immediately when he beats me to the punch. ‘So Jenny feels really bad about what happened the other day.’
They’ve been talking. About me. Oh, this cannot be good.
‘It was not my most shining moment ever,’ I say. ‘It was . . . I guess it was the straw that broke the camel’s back or whatever that saying is. But I still don’t know what she was doing there in the first place.’
‘Come on, Pearl. She was just trying to be supportive. You can’t expect her to mope around the place by herself until we all get over it.’
If I say what I actually think right now, I will come off looking like the world’s worst person. Probably because I am.
‘She really is a lovely person. I promise,’ he says.
‘We just . . . there’s something about her. She rubs me up completely the wrong – oh my God, Cardy, are you okay?’
‘Fine,’ he says, levering himself up.
‘Are you sure? You went down like you’d been shot – whoa.’ I manage to catch him as he falls down again the second he puts weight back on his left leg.
‘It’s okay,’ he says.
‘Um, it’s clearly not okay.’ I help him hop over to the nearest bench. ‘What is it? Knee? Ankle?’
‘Ankle,’ he says. ‘I must have stood on it wrong and twisted it or something – no, Pearl, really, that’s not necessary.’
But I’ve already got his shoe and sock off. ‘It’s not swelling,’ I say. ‘But – oh. Wow.’
There’s a giant red hole in the back of his ankle, right above the heel. I look at his shoe and there’s a hole in it, jagged but weirdly perfect. ‘Maybe you really did get shot,’ I say, showing him.
‘We would have heard it,’ he says.
His eyes are watering, so I quickly look back at his foot in case he’s one of those dudes that gets super sensitive when you see them cry. The wound is in kind of an odd spot on his foot for me to look at properly – I have to kneel between his legs and kind of crane my head as I bend his leg into a weird position and I can’t even begin to imagine what passers-by think is going on here.
His toenails are still orange and silver. My heart hurts.
‘I think I can see the – whatever it was,’ I say. ‘I might be able to try and take it out, but I don’t –’
‘I don’t care,’ he says. I look up at him again and he’s started to sweat with pain.
I know you’re supposed to leave things in the wound if someone gets stabbed or whatever on account of if you take it out there could be crazy blood loss, but Cardy is clearly in so much agony I feel like I have to try. I manage to get my fingernails around it and I pull, but it doesn’t move even a little and Cardy lets out such an inhuman shriek that I stop at once. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I say. ‘This is – I think you might have to go to hospital.’
‘My mum,’ he says. ‘She’s a nurse. She –’ His teeth are chattering. It’s weird, like he’s freezing or something.
I take off my school jumper and wrap it around his shoulders. He manages to pass his phone to me with shaking fingers and I call his mother. He’s all pale and sweaty, and by the time he’s hung up, his eyes have gone glassy. I think about trying to take whatever it is out again – if anything, the pain might snap him back to alertness – but I probably shouldn’t mess with it when medical professionals are on the way. ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ I say to him instead. ‘Talk to me. Come on.’
‘Thanks,’ he mumbles. ‘For staying with me. For – oh God.’
‘It’s okay,’ I say. I take his hand and lace his sweaty fingers through mine. ‘I’ll stay with you. I’ve got you. You’re going to be fine. It’s a flesh wound. I mean, sure, it hurts like hell now, but once they patch you up, you’ll be fine. And then you’ll be totes embarrassed and come crawling to me begging never to tell anyone about the day you screamed because I tried to pull a tiny rock out of your foot and – come on, Cardy, stay with me.’
Holy crap, this is getting scary. His eyes are rolling back in his head and sweat is literally running down his face now. I tap his cheek like they always do in old movies when someone’s fainted. ‘You’re okay, you’re okay,’ I say to him in what I hope is a reassuring tone. ‘Come on now. Get it together.’
/>
There’s a screech of tires behind me. ‘James?’ a tiny Indigenous woman I assume is his mother says, hurrying out of the car. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t even know,’ I explain to her. I drape Cardy’s arm over my shoulders and try to lever him to his feet but he’s heavy and he’s not even trying to help me. His mother goes around the other side and together, we half assist half drag him to the car. ‘We were walking along and then he just fell, and there’s a hole in the back of his shoe, and –’
I hand her his shoe and she takes it without even looking. ‘Thank you,’ she says, pressing me in a quick one-armed hug. And then before I can ask whether I can come with them to the hospital or whatever, she’s in the car and driving away.
Leaving me all alone on the side of the road, as seven black birds look down at me. Probably laughing.
Cardy isn’t in school the next day, but he is back on Friday, foot bandaged and on crutches. He’s kind of evasive when I ask him what happened, which I guess is to be assumed. Dudes have fragile egos, after all, and I did see him at kind of a low moment. I wonder if it would make any difference if I told him I would totally still go out with him and that I don’t care at all that pain pretty much makes him pass out.
I look across at Finn in Modern History. His dark hair is falling into his eyes, which means he can’t see me staring. I bet his ego isn’t fragile.
Through the window beyond him, I can see a black cat prowling nonchalantly across one of the garden beds. There is clearly some truth to that thing about them being bad luck. Since they’ve been prowling around, I’ve embarrassed myself by snapping in public twice and Cardy has ended up on the seriously injured list.
And then there’s Marie, whose absence is hanging across everything like an awful grey fog. It’s only been a week since the funeral, but it feels like a hundred years and a second all at once.
I stay up late again with my music and my feelings. Despite my two-day songwriting bender, I still haven’t managed to spew that week-long numbness out of my system. It’s like there’s a backlog or something . . . ugh, there’s no way to describe it that doesn’t sound gross. It’s 3am when I finally force myself to go to bed, so the 5am alarm when it comes is pretty much the worst thing in the world. My body’s on fire from the things Finn was doing to it in my dreams, and my head is absolutely pounding.
I groan and roll to try and get up and nearly break my neck.
I’m trapped. I can’t move. My legs are fine. My arms are fine. But my head will not move.
I touch my head experimentally. My hair is a mess. And – OMG, am I tied to my bed by my own hair?!
My curtains are open. I know I definitely closed them last night. And there is a black cat sitting on my windowsill staring at me.
‘Disey!’ I scream. ‘Disey!’
‘What, what, what – oh my God, Pearlie, what did you do to your hair?’ she exclaims.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. There is something icy inside of me, like a cold hand around my heart, and I think it’s fear. ‘I don’t know what happened.’
‘I – it’s okay, Pearlie, don’t cry. You’re all right. We’ll get you unstuck. But it might take awhile.’
‘Work. I’m supposed to be at work in an hour, and –’
‘Calm down. I’ll get Shad to call them. Just breathe. Stop panicking.’
Disey gets Shad and, once he’s called in sick for me, they both try to help me untangle myself. ‘I know you don’t want to hear this, Pearlie,’ Shad says, ‘but we might have to cut.’
‘No,’ I say. I’m not the vainest girl around, but I am deeply attached to my long hair. ‘Please. No.’
‘It’s okay,’ Disey says soothingly. ‘We’ll work it out.’
‘How on earth did you do this?’ Shad asked, picking at another knot with his fingernails. ‘This is crazy.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, because the only other possibilities are even crazier than ‘my hair accidentally tried to murder me’.
Something creepy is going on. Something terribly creepy is going on. Marie is dead and Cardy got ankle-shot and my Finn dreams are getting even more graphic and there are black cats and black birds everywhere and I think Finn was right about that horse being super weird and now I’m tied to my own bed by my hair and WHY DOES NOTHING MAKE SENSE?
It takes two hours for Disey and Shad to get me free, and even then, my hair is a disaster. It’s tangled and matted all the way down to my waist in tiny twists and knots. I look like some eight-year-old’s Barbie hair experiment gone wrong.
My face must be pretty accurately reflecting what I’m feeling because Disey, who is not normally that demonstrative, pulls me into a hug. ‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘It’s just one of those freak things. You know how the universe is supposed to be full of infinite possibilities? I guess this is one of those. Not probable – but possible.’
I sniff and nod. I like that explanation a lot more than the other insane-o ones currently bouncing around my brain, none of which make even the slightest bit of rational sense.
Someone was in here and they tied me to my bed using my own hair.
Don’t be stupid, Pearl. What would that possibly achieve? Did they just really want to cause you a minor inconvenience? Are they deeply emotionally involved in you missing your Saturday shift? Do they want to see what you’d look like with a different haircut?
I look over. The cat is gone, and I feel better at once.
I’m going to call Phil. She’ll know what to say. As soon as I stop looking like Medusa.
Disey sits me down in front of the mirror and begins to brush out my hair for me. If I had any hopes that this was a dream they are swiftly shattered. You know how you’re supposed to pinch yourself if you think you’re dreaming and if it hurts, you’re awake? Having half your hair prac-tically ripped out of your head does that trick a zillion times over.
‘I used to do this for Mum when I was your age,’ Disey says out of nowhere, when, eventually, my hair has begun to approach something like normalcy again. ‘Brush her hair, I mean.’
‘Really?’
Disey and Shad don’t talk about our mother much. And I don’t ask, because weird as it sounds, I’m not actually that interested, but it’s always kind of loaded and significant whenever she does come up.
‘I remember it really clearly,’ Disey says, ignoring my wince as she pulls another knot out. ‘It was when she was pregnant with you. Brushing out all her hair made her tired, so I used to do it for her every morning before I went to school. She told me that I had to do a hundred strokes, no more, no less, but I always lost count and she used to get cross at me. And then she used to moult like anything so I’d end up going to school with all this red hair all over my uniform. But when I complained about it, she gave me this look like I’d just kicked a puppy and said, “Paradise Linford, if you can’t do this one thing for your mother when I’ve spent the last seventeen years raising you, when will you begin to pay me back?”’
Disey’s voice trails off. ‘Wow,’ I say.
‘Mum was kind of a bitch.’
‘I figured.’ Reason #1 why I am not actually that interested in knowing much about my mother.
I think back to the school counsellor, who has tried to tell me I have abandonment issues on no less than seven occasions, then look at my sister’s face and think of my big strong brother, two people who have just spent hours and hours untying me from a freakish mess when they could have cut me free in seconds.
‘You’re the best, Dise,’ I say. ‘Really.’
My boss is pretty dirty at me on Sunday – unsurprisingly, given Dave’s illness situation, he couldn’t find anyone to cover for me during the Great Crazy Rapunzel Incident and had to do it himself. ‘I need to find someone new to work here if you’re going to start letting me down too,’ he grumbles.
Well, sor-RY, Your Majesty. ‘See that big guy – the one in Lane 3?’ I say instead.
‘Yeah, I see him.’
/> ‘His name’s Kel. He loves swimming. I reckon he’d be perfect. Maybe mention it to him when he leaves today . . .?’
‘Okay, I will. And you’re covering for Dave tomorrow, right?’
I very deliberately don’t sigh. ‘Yep.’
It starts to rain again as I drive home, making the roads dark and slippery and turning our front yard into a mudbath. The Hellbeast’s silver car is parked in the driveway. I accidentally-on-purpose splatter it with some extra mud as I walk by on my way to the back door. Petty, maybe, but satisfying.
‘Oh hey, Miss Pearlie!’
‘Hi, Helena,’ I say, taking off my shoes and dumping my wet pool stuff in the laundry. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m just great. And how are you?’
‘I’m all right.’
Her face takes on this sad expression that looks like I’ve just told her I’ve got a terminal illness. ‘It must be so hard for you at school right now, with that poor girl dying.’
‘Um, yeah, it’s not good,’ I say, putting the kettle on. ‘Where’s Shad?’
‘Oh, he’s still asleep – I let myself in,’ Helena replies, brandishing the key that Shad foolishly had given her a few months ago. ‘So are you doing all right, Miss Pearlie?’
‘I’ll be fine.’ I pour the boiling water into the teapot and try to think of a clever way to escape. Hammering out one of the rage songs I wrote feels like it’ll be a great way to relieve my frustration at my boss and at life and at everything.
‘And everyone else at school? How are they doing?’
How do you think? I want to say. ‘It’s been pretty hard on all of us, but we’re all coping.’
‘You were a real hero, going to search for her like that, Miss Pearlie.’
‘Not really.’
‘What made you think to go and look up at the stables?’
‘It was the last place I saw her.’
‘Do you think that maybe something – affected her?’
I blink. ‘Helena, what are you talking about?’
‘Was she drinking a lot?’ Helena asks, a look of wide-eyed concern on her face. ‘Or do you think there were drugs involved? Or something else? Do you think someone at the party had something to do with it?’
Valentine Page 7
