The Boy/Friend

by R. M. Corbet

  At the end of the first set they brought out the food. There was a wild stampede, then the next moment it was all gone. Simon fought hard for some small sausage rolls. They were cold and soggy, but I was too starving to care.

  I followed him back out through the foyer. There were no chairs or tables, so we sat on the floor. I kicked off my high heels and massaged my feet. It felt good to be able to hear myself think.

  ‘Did Shauna ring you?’ I said abruptly.

  ‘A couple of times.’

  ‘She likes to get her own way.’

  ‘She can be quite persuasive.’ He smiled.

  I asked Simon what he meant, but he wouldn’t say any more. I wanted to ask him if they had gone out: Had they been to the movies? For dinner, maybe? Was he being a gentleman – the kind who doesn’t kiss and tell?

  Would I sound too snoopy? Would it sound like I cared? What exactly had Simon and Shauna done?

  Persuasive in what way?

  It shouldn’t have upset me so much, but it did. It left a big hole that was hard to avoid. We couldn’t talk about movies, for instance, if he and Shauna had been there, done that. What other things couldn’t we talk about, if Simon had done them with Shauna?

  The band came back on to play their next set, so we drifted back in to watch them. After more fast and loud pop hits, they suddenly switched to a slow cheesy waltz. The stage lights went off and they turned on the mirror ball. The lights started spinning across the roof and the walls. Everyone was dancing cheek-to-cheek.

  ‘Do you know how to waltz?’

  ‘I can learn.’

  Simon took my hand in his. Then he put his other hand on my hip, so I copied him. He obviously knew what he was doing, so I let him lead me, one step at a time. Our bodies came steadily closer, until we were pressing together. I could smell the spiked punch on his breath. He smelt like a boy who I might like to kiss, except for the hole left by Shauna.

  The song stopped. We both took a step back and smiled. All around, couples were swaying and smooching. Now was the right time. The right time was now.

  This was the twenty-first century, after all.

  I looked at Simon. He looked at me. And in that moment, our destiny was sealed.

  ‘Want to go see if there’s any more food?’

  ‘Cold sausage rolls? Sure, why not,’ I replied.

  We found a few olives, some stale bits of cheese and some bread crusts that hadn’t been eaten. We wandered. We mingled. We even tried dancing. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.

  Then it was all over. The band finished playing. They turned on the lights. We exited out into the street. There were couples holding hands and others who were much more entangled. Bianca was pushed up against a wall with her man. Alison was riding hers, piggyback style. Shauna would have been in her element.

  Simon was charming and gracious to the end. He took me home in a taxi. He walked me to the door and told me what a nice night he’d had. He said we should do something else sometime soon. I looked at him. He looked at me. The taxi was waiting.

  He gave me a peck on the cheek.

  Was it him or me? Or was it Shauna, I wondered?

  I closed the door and listened to the taxi drive off. I kicked off my shoes and I padded upstairs. I closed my bedroom door softly behind me. With the light out, I walked to the window and opened it. The cool midnight air on my face felt refreshing. I could hear the night sounds of the city.

  Was I sad or relieved that the big night was over? The truth was, I couldn’t quite say. It was disappointing how it had fizzled out there at the end. There was no sense in trying to analyse it, though. It was chemistry. Instinct. A pure gut-reaction.

  Simon was not the right guy.

  My window looked down on the street below. All round me the city was buzzing. The right guy was out there. The right guy was waiting. Not a fairytale prince. Not rich or famous. Not a love-at-first-sight guy. Not a tall, handsome stranger.

  Well, not a stranger, at least.

  I knelt by my bedside, dragged out my wooden box of secrets and treasures, turned the key in the lock and opened the lid. Piece by piece, I sorted all of those items into two groups: a large pile, which I then returned to the box; and a small pile, which I placed one by one on the window ledge. Along with the unscrunched movie ticket, there was a carved stone elephant (with a broken trunk), a Scrabble letter M (worth three points), a very large fishhook (for catching a shark?), and my favourite, a small brass barometer, mounted on wood, for predicting the weather, from stormy to dry (broken, with the needle set permanently on change).

  These were the most precious things in my collection.

  These were the things Lou had given me.

  spark

  ELLA WAS HIDDEN AWAY IN her bedroom, in the cluttered space beneath her mezzanine bed, folding small squares of bright-coloured paper to make tiny origami birds. I thanked her for the loan of her red velvet dress and returned her collection of essential oils.

  She picked up the dress and gave it a sniff.

  ‘Maude! You harlot!’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Patchouli and rosewood. Smells like you had a wild night.’

  ‘Not wild, exactly. It was unexpectedly illuminating, though.’

  ‘Illuminating? Really?’ Ella finished the pink-and-black bird she was folding and gave it to me.

  ‘For my collection?’

  ‘If you like.’

  She made a pot of green tea and together we went out to sit in the sun. The green tea still tasted like grass, but it was beginning to grow on me. Ella explained how her ex-boyfriend, the cellist, had been secretly married with kids. Her slasher-movie composer friend had stolen her laptop. Her poet was dyslexic. Her webcam artist worked for an insurance company. Her death-metal frontman was afraid of the dark. And her sculptor had turned out to be gay.

  ‘I’ve learned to expect the unexpected,’ she said.

  Emboldened by Ella’s openness, I decided to throw caution to the wind.

  ‘Simon was a nice guy. We got along fine. But something was missing.’

  ‘No spark?’

  ‘It felt like there was somebody else.’

  ‘Someone for him?’

  ‘Or maybe for me?’

  ‘And who might that someone else be?’ Ella smiled.

  ‘I’ve been so blind!’

  ‘It was only a matter of time till you saw it.’

  ‘But now there’s that girl. Have I left it too late?’

  ‘You mean the blonde that he’s got in his band? I wouldn’t worry too much about her.’

  ‘Her name is Jill. She’s actually quite sweet. And if Lou wants to date her, what can I do?’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s not going to happen.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I hear things. I see things.’

  ‘What things?’

  Ella smiled at me with bright X-ray eyes. ‘Like you said, Jill is a sweet girl. She’s sugar and spice and everything nice. She might have a pure heart. She might make great cupcakes. But clearly, she’s not Louie’s type.’

  ‘How do you know she’s not his type?’

  ‘There’s no spark. It’s not going to happen.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s too late to say how I feel?’

  ‘He’s out there. Go tell him,’ said Ella.

  Lou and Miles were out in the studio choosing a poster for the Funky Junk’s first gig. There were two different stencil designs, spray-painted in black onto A3 white paper. Miles liked the one that showed a band of soldiers hoisting an anarchist flag on top of a large pile of trash. Lou preferred the one of a mongrel dog team pulling a giant tuba on a snow-sled. They were arguing about which was better, which was more eye-catching and which was more punk rock.

  Miles held them both up for me to see.

  ‘What about you, Maude? Which one do you like?’

  I thought the dog-sled was cute, more upbeat and more original. But I didn’t w
ant to say so just right then, because Lou was ignoring me.

  ‘Tricky. How many posters are you doing?’

  ‘There aren’t any posters,’ said Miles. ‘We stencil them.’

  ‘Straight onto the walls?’

  ‘Saves on paper.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Sounds a bit drastic.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Lou. ‘We’re not going to stencil your fence.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t call the cops then.’ I grinned.

  Miles shook his head at us both. ‘I need a break from this. Maude, you can take it from here if you like.’

  First Ella. Now Miles. Was Lou’s entire family in on it?

  Miles left and Lou did his best to look busy, while I did my best to look interested. He picked up a can of red spray paint and started to shake it.

  ‘How was the dance?’ he asked, casually.

  ‘It was good.’

  ‘You had fun?’

  ‘Sure. I guess.’

  ‘What was the guy’s name again?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Does it?’

  ‘His name was Simon. And no, it doesn’t matter.’

  Lou stopped shaking the can. It wasn’t fair he got to ask all the questions. There were questions I wanted to ask about Jill.

  He laid down the stencil, sprayed red paint across it, then peeled off the print underneath.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘It looks good.’

  ‘Not too angry?’

  ‘Red isn’t angry. It’s passionate.’

  ‘Like the red dress you borrowed from Ella?’

  How did he even know about that?

  Instead of reacting, I knelt down beside him.

  ‘Last night, I finally worked something out.’

  Lou stopped and looked at me. ‘Really? Like what?’

  Before I could answer, the door of the barn opened. In walked Miles with the other girl from the junk orchestra – the wild one who made Jill look innocent.

  ‘Great news!’ said Miles. ‘Ivy’s got us a radio slot!’

  Everything about Ivy meant business. The way she walked and the way she talked. The way she held up the dog-sled poster. The way she knew what she thought.

  ‘Radical! This is the one!’

  Miles showed her the poster of soldiers hoisting the flag.

  ‘Too clichéd,’ said Ivy dismissively.

  Ivy’s brother was a DJ. It didn’t matter that his show was on late, on a station no one had heard of. It didn’t matter that he and Ivy hadn’t spoken in months. It didn’t matter that he was ‘a bit of a creep’.

  ‘A free promo is still a free promo,’ she said.

  Something had changed in the way Lou was acting. I didn’t like how he was nodding so much. I didn’t like how fast Ivy was talking, in her loud husky voice with her loud husky laugh. I didn’t like how she smelt of cigarettes. I didn’t like how Lou was smiling.

  ‘What do you think if we did them in red?’

  ‘Radical.’

  The three of them started planning the radio show and what tunes to record for the demo. With Ivy talking fast, and Lou and Miles nodding and grinning like fools, I said goodbye and crept out the door.

  Jill wasn’t Lou’s type. There was no spark.

  But Ivy was Danger: High Voltage.

  hooking up

  IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS. Less than forty-eight hours after the boys’ school dance, our school announced its own midwinter ball.

  Just when you thought you’d survived the whole business; just when you thought it was safe to hang up your glass slippers and make soup out of your pumpkin carriage, now this? I’d already been through hell and back. Now I had to do it all over again!

  The poster for the midwinter ball was pinned neatly to the class noticeboard, right beside the reminder that today was Vaccination Day. There were no clever stencils of dog-sleds or tubas, but the effect was just as dramatic. The Number One source of trauma and pain, side by side with Number Two.

  The boys’ school dance, it soon emerged, had been a trial run at best. A pale imitation. A half-baked rehearsal. A mud-fight. A hoedown. A barn dance for hicks. Our ball, by contrast, was to be a civilised affair. An enchanted evening. A gala event.

  Because it was about us, not them.

  The general response was immediate panic. There were rumours of infected needles, asthma, eczema, coma, and a lack of available boys. Girls who were afraid of being left on the shelf. Fears of injection and rejection.

  They made us wait until late in the day. They dragged us out of our classes, marched us like prisoners down a long corridor, then told us to line up outside the big hall. While we waited they handed out pieces of paper with the names of the diseases they were giving us: diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, cervical cancer.

  Try to stay calm, Maude McNaughton.

  We waited as they called us in, two by two. It felt like Noah’s Ark. All around us, the floodwaters of anxiety were rising. I went through and the nurse beckoned me over. She asked what I had done on the weekend, which seemed fairly inappropriate at the time. I spared her the story about discovering I was head over heels in love with my best friend, and tried hard to look anywhere else as she jabbed me in both shoulders and slowly injected the cold liquid. I felt like a helpless fly, trapped by a spider. Poisoned and then left to die a slow death.

  So much for calm, Maude McNaughton.

  After that, I went over to a little fenced-off area to sit around waiting in case of allergic reactions. There were girls softly crying and holding their shoulders. Bianca was shivering and hugging herself. Shauna had thrown up. Alison had fainted.

  It was like some kind of zombie nightmare.

  In the midst of the suffering, Phoebe sat quietly reading the information brochure. She had no noticeable symptoms. In fact, she almost looked happy.

  ‘Are you going to be okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m going to be fine.’

  ‘I meant about finding a date for the ball.’

  ‘Maybe not so great,’ I admitted.

  Phoebe gave me her most probing look. ‘What about—’

  ‘I told you. He’s not my boyfriend.’

  Phoebe was right. I needed a date and Lou was my best option. Considering his lack of enthusiasm for all things civilised, his scruffy appearance and recent collaborations with band members of the female persuasion, though, he was no option at all.

  Which meant I had one major problem, like everyone else: who to invite to the ball?

  I sat out the rest of the day in a trance, desperately waiting for the home bell to go. I was feeling more achey and anxious with each passing minute about what would happen when school finally ended.

  At the sound of the bell, I leapt up off my chair. First out of the classroom, I threw my books in my locker, grabbed my school bag and ran. Not to the bus stop with everyone else. I ran in the opposite direction, until I was safely out of earshot. This was too urgent to send a text message, so I dialled and waited.

  ‘Hi. This is Simon. I can’t take your call right now . . .’

  ‘Hi Simon! This is Maude. Can you call me, the first chance you get?’

  I counted to ten, then I counted to fifty. I checked my watch, then I redialled.

  ‘Hi. This is Simon. I can’t take your call right now . . .’

  ‘Hi! It’s Maude again. Just making sure that you got my last message. It’s 3.30. Could you ring me as soon as you get this? It’s kind of important.’

  I sat at the bus stop, watching the traffic. I let two buses go by. I played four games of Snake on my phone, and in each game my snake tail was shorter when I carked it.

  ‘Hi. This is Simon. I can’t take your call right now . . .’

  ‘Simon. It’s 3.55 and I’m still waiting for you to call. I just counted six black SUVs, all driven by nervous mothers. Are they nervous because of the armoured vehicle they’re driving, or did their husbands buy them a
n armoured vehicle because they’re so nervous? Anyway, I’m going to go count some more now. Ring me? Please? It’s Maude and it’s kind of, well, you know, important.’

  I hung up and caught the next bus. I sat down alone in a seat at the front, staring out the window and trying to be patient.

  ‘Hi. This is Simon. I can’t take your call right now . . .’

  ‘Simon! It’s Maude. Where are you? I hope you’re okay. I’m on the bus and I feel kind of foggy. Cloudy or foggy or maybe just misty. I’m not sure. We had our shots at school today. I think maybe they gave me a fatal dose by mistake. How come you’re not on the bus? Where are you? I need to ask you a favour. It’s not a big favour. Or maybe it is. I’m not sure. I guess it depends what you think. Call me as soon as you get this, okay? It’s Maude. Maude McNaughton.’

  I sat zombie-like all the way home, thinking zombie-like thoughts. I got off the bus and limped zombie-like down my street, until I got to our front gate.

  ‘Hi. This is Simon. I can’t take your call right now . . .’

  ‘Simon. I’m at home now. It’s after five and I can’t seem to reach you. I’m calling to make sure you’re okay. I’m not okay. I may have diphtheria, in fact. It’s either diphtheria or whooping cough or else a combination of the two. Whooping cough is a funny name for something that’s not funny. Maybe they were trying to cheer people up before they died. I don’t know if I will die or not. I don’t know which one will kill me first. Diphtheria sounds worse. It sounds fairly fatal. Not as fatal as creeping-inevitable-death syndrome, or horrific-black-lung-ooze-disease, but serious nevertheless. I need you to ring me, before I slide into unconsciousness. It’s urgent and extremely important. It’s a matter of life and death.’

  By six o’clock I was in bed and a wreck. Both shoulders were bruised and tender. I had a fever. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t eat dinner. But when my phone rang, I jumped up to get it.

  ‘Maude?’ said a boy’s voice.

  ‘Simon?’

  ‘Guess again.’

  My finger hovered above the off button. ‘Do I know you?’