Under Rose-Tainted Skies

by Louise Gornall

  ‘Norah?’

  ‘Mom.’ I’m hoarse.

  ‘What’s wrong with your voice? Are you crying?’

  ‘No. No,’ I assure her. Words are sandpaper scratching layers off my throat.

  Suck it up.

  I don’t want her to worry. I want her to get well and come home. I don’t reach for scissors when she’s around to talk to, don’t end up bleeding and passing out on the bathroom floor in a flood of tears. ‘I just have a bit of a sore throat.’

  ‘Could be allergies. Have you had the windows open?’

  God. I miss my mom.

  My body unfurls, and it’s a wonder my bones don’t creak. Muscles I didn’t know I had are protesting about being mashed against the ground for hours.

  I hoist my butt up. Blood is glue; the sponge between my legs is stuck to my skin. I don’t peel it off because the cut will only start pouring again, and the last thing I want to do is deal with it.

  I slump downstairs, take the last step twice, and collapse in Mom’s recliner. The sponge stays. I’ll rinse it off later but will never stop seeing it soaked in my blood.

  Mom asks me about schoolwork. Even in the midst of her car-crash trauma, she’s remembered my Macbeth assignment is due tomorrow. The ball shape my body is in tucks up a little tighter. I wish I could tell her that it’s been sent back and I’m just waiting on my grade. But I can’t. I couldn’t write my own name right now, let alone one thousand five hundred words. I force a hum, which she seems to take as a good sign because she doesn’t push further. Why would she? I’m a great student; all my assignments are in early, never late. Not until now. I’m grateful when the conversation moves on and she starts talking to me about a TV show that she’s watching. I pull the knitted blanket off the back of the chair, drape it across my body, and sigh with relief when she finally mentions that she’s coming home.

  I sleep away Sunday in a sorry attempt to forget about the angry sting that radiates down my thigh.

  It’s Monday, the beginning of a new week. A fresh start. A clean slate. The chance to do everything I didn’t get to do on Friday . . .

  Or not.

  I don’t remember the last time I felt this bad.

  Wait.

  Yes, I do.

  It was the day after the last time I found solace in scissors.

  Instead of embracing productivity, I act like a slug, dragging my butt around the house, trying to bury myself in a black oversize sweater. I’m in mourning mode. I make the couch my bed and fry my brain with daytime TV. Misery covers everything in a thick layer of lead, making even the simplest task heavy and hard work, so I just don’t bother doing stuff. On the plus side, I’ve become a pro at not looking out of the windows, having been transformed from diligent watcher to barely-able-to-hold-my-own-head-up bystander in a single slice.

  Dr Reeves phones the house around lunchtime. At first I let the machine pick it up, but then she starts muttering about maybe, possibly, probably moving her last client’s appointment to Tuesday morning and signing off early to come over and check on me.

  Hell. No.

  That would be the worst. I look like I just woke up from a decade of being dead; smell a little like I have too. There is nothing invisible about my illness right now. She cannot see me.

  I roll off the couch, crawl over to the phone, and call back.

  Faking perky is easy. I make up some BS about keeping my brain busy with homework and go all Stepford-Wives-excited over a cheese soufflé I just cooked up. Both lies, but she’s blissfully reassured within ten minutes, and I resume living like a mannequin on the couch.

  On the third morning, I wake up, open my eyes and snarl at the ceiling. An orchestra of blackbirds is fine-tuning their vocal cords right outside the window. I turn my head, snarl at them too. They’re lucky I lost interest in archery before I could buy a bow and arrow. Stretching sleep from my limbs, I roll over and look at the clock above the fireplace. It’s 11.00 a.m. Wow. I’ve really got to move. I don’t want to – depression is a cold concrete slab crushing my chest – but Mom is due home today. The room needs airing, and I have to make myself look less like the living dead. She can’t know how badly I’ve been regressing.

  There was a time, back when my friends stopped calling, that I exchanged words for grunts and lived in my pyjamas. I spent so long coddled in soft cotton, it’s a wonder it didn’t fuse to my skin. Pants were reintroduced into my routine at about the same time I stopped looking for control in a pair of nail scissors.

  Still, I lie on the couch for another ten minutes, snuggling up to my blankets and listening to the sound of my stomach growling. It must think my throat’s been slit. I’m starving, but my insides have been too tight, too sore, to eat anything. It’s like recovering from a stomach bug. My internal organs feel delicate, like they’ve been bashed around. That’s accompanied by a soft swish of uncertainty, but if I don’t eat, my periods will stop. I don’t want that to happen again. That’s when Mom first called Dr Reeves and, besides making an appointment, she recommended these rancid shakes that I had to spend a week forcing down my throat.

  Petulance makes cleaning up last a century longer than it should. I stomp around with a piece of toast hanging from my mouth. Drag away one chunk of bedding at a time, back to my room, which has been sandblasted with sunlight and transformed into an oven. I tuck in the corners of my duvet with malcontent and beat my pillows to a pulp before laying them neatly back on my bed. A couple of bats fly out of my closet when I open the doors. It’s a cave in there. In total contrast to the rest of the room, it’s colder than a morgue, too out of reach for the sun to touch. I loathe every frozen fibre as I pull on jeans and a skinny sweater.

  The mumbling of cuss words starts as I make my way downstairs, but I stop dead in my tracks when someone knocks on the door. They knock again.

  ‘Mom.’ I figure it has to be her. I hope she hasn’t been knocking long. Maybe I should have left the bolt off the door. I ski across the laminate in my socks, undo the lock, face exploding into a smile.

  But it’s not my mom.

  ‘You don’t go to Cardinal.’ Luke. I automatically take a step back and cower behind the sleeve of my sweater.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you went to the same school as me, but you don’t.’ He doesn’t sound angry, which I can’t make sense of, because now he knows I lied to him. ‘I’m guessing you didn’t have a cold the other day either.’ Twice. Now he knows I lied to him twice. ‘That was French you were speaking to me, right?’

  ‘Did you . . . check up on me?’ My teeth tear at skin on the side of my thumb.

  ‘No.’ He holds up his hands like I just fired warning shots. ‘Of course not. Not at all. See, I made friends with this guy called Simon.’ The dude from the party, the one with the horn-rimmed glasses who drives a Nissan. I knew his name was Simon. I hold off on sharing this revelation. Now is probably not the time to be awarding myself Brownie points. ‘He remembers you.’

  ‘Erm . . .’ I’m speechless because I’ve been caught lying, obviously, but also a little bit because I’ve been remembered by somebody other than my mom.

  ‘He says he remembers you collapsing in class.’

  I clear my throat, stare at my feet and make my big toes touch. ‘Busted?’ I’m hoping I look as adorkable as he did when I found out he was faking knowing French.

  ‘Cute.’ He smirks. ‘Simon said that was four years ago.’

  ‘It’s more like three years, ten months, and eight days ago,’ I correct. Because that helps.

  ‘So it’s all true?’

  I nod. Bite down on the side of my mouth until the sting brings tears to my eyes.

  ‘Okay,’ Luke says at last, but something else is on his mind. He starts fidgeting, shifting his weight from leg to leg and looking anywhere, everywhere, but at me.

  ‘What?’ I push as gently as possible.

  ‘Are you sick?’ he asks after a thousand awkward years have hobbled on by. Of all the way
s I imagined my crazy coming to light, this wasn’t one of them. ‘I mean, you don’t have to answer that. I just have this hunch—’

  ‘Yes,’ I interject. ‘But I’m almost a hundred per cent certain it’s not what you’re thinking.’ Mental health is usually the last place people go when they think about someone being sick. That, and, well, I’m a tall skinny blonde with baby-blue doe eyes and have what my grandma used to call the sweetest smile.

  I’ve heard You don’t look mentally ill at least a half a dozen times in the past four years, a couple of those times from my former friends. I blame the media, stereotyping ‘mentally ill’ and calling every murderer since Manson crazy. People always seem to be expecting wide eyes and a kitchen knife dripping with blood.

  ‘And what is it exactly that you think I’m thinking?’ he asks, and I have to catch myself from crashing to the floor. People rarely challenge me. Or maybe they would if I let people get close enough to try. His eyes slim to slits as he watches me. Suddenly I have no idea what is happening in his head.

  ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘You think maybe I could come in?’ He’s wearing boots today. No mismatched laces to melt my mind. I picture us sitting, drinking coffee, me being normal and not doing anything to embarrass myself. Mom would freak, in the best kind of way, if she came home to find me chatting with a boy. ‘I don’t have to,’ Luke says when the silence starts to stretch.

  ‘No,’ I squeak, then push my fingers to my lips and feel my cheeks being swallowed by fire. ‘I mean, yes, you can come in.’

  My hand is shaking. I can barely keep Luke’s coffee in the cup as I take it over to the table. ‘You’re so nervous,’ he says when I set it down on the mat in front of him.

  I shrink back inside my sweater. If he sees me squirm, he doesn’t mention it – doesn’t rush to rescind this line of conversation either. He still has those eyes, narrow and inquisitive, fixed on me. I wonder for a second if he’s been taking how-to-study-your-subject lessons from Dr Reeves.

  I sit opposite him, feet on the chair, knees up to my neck, trying to shrink myself down as much as possible.

  ‘I’m sorry I lied to you,’ I say, desperately seeking to squash the suffocating silence.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.’

  I think maybe I want to tell him something, but I’m not sure what. There’s a pulse in my tongue. It feels kind of eager and unpredictable, like if I start speaking I won’t know when to stop.

  I peek over my knee, look him in the eye, and he smiles a smile that could wipe winter out of existence.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I ask.

  He keeps me speared with his stare, but in my peripheral vision I see his fingers twitch and dance around on the tabletop. He’s bouncing a leg too. The vibration races through the floor. Nerves. Panic. Neon pink. I’d recognize it from a thousand light years away. Not on the same scale as mine, not even close, but I’m startled by it for a second. Sometimes I get so focused on how abnormal my reactions are, I forget a little panic is okay in certain situations.

  ‘Honestly?’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘At first I thought you were cute . . .’ He grins. I duck back behind my knees, but not from fear. I’m blushing, heating up the Earth’s atmosphere by a thousand degrees and trying to stifle a giggle with the sleeve of my sweater.

  ‘At first?’ I question, lift my gaze enough to watch his mouth move. It’ll be a while before I can look him in the eye again.

  ‘I mean, I still think you’re cute, obviously, but . . . I don’t know. I’m intrigued. Curious about you. And . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I wasn’t lying when I said I was awkward.’

  ‘You threw a party and a hundred people showed up.’ I don’t know a huge amount about high school parties or, as the kids on The Hub call them, partays. They’re another one of those things that didn’t happen until after I got sick. Still, I’m pretty sure a full house means you’re one of the popular kids. And I don’t suppose there’s much call for awkward among the elite.

  ‘Yeah . . . and I ended up over here, talking to you.’ As if on cue, the fresh slit on my thigh smarts. ‘I guess I have a tendency to gravitate towards people on a different wavelength,’ he says with a shrug.

  ‘You think I’m weird,’ I reply, because my special skills include sweeping away the words of a sentence and finding a brand-new meaning buried beneath them.

  ‘That’s not what I said.’ He’s adamant. And now I’m curious.

  ‘But what if . . . what if I am weird?’

  He thinks about the possibility, and I scratch, scratch, scratch the nape of my neck.

  ‘Have you ever eaten a cream-cheese-and-apple-sauce sandwich with mayonnaise?’

  I throw up a little bit in my mouth before shaking my head. I’m not sure where this is going, but I find myself leaning forward. ‘Have you?’

  ‘All the time. It’s, like, my favourite kind of sandwich in the world. Everyone who knows about it tells me it’s weird.’

  ‘It’s not,’ I say, defending him. The thought of him feeling even a little like me makes my heart hurt. Turns out, he doesn’t need any reassurance from me.

  ‘I totally agree. And you know what I realized?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When people say “weird”, what they really mean is “different”. And difference has never been a bad thing.’

  He’s smart. I like smart almost as much as I like funny.

  ‘I think you’ll be disappointed when you figure out what’s going on with me.’ It’s not that I want to rain all over his friendship parade. I don’t. I just have this overwhelming urge to warn him that I can be hella frustrating to be around. It’s not meant to sound maudlin. I’m not interested in him tuning up the world’s smallest violin to play me a sad song. Fact of the matter is, people who depend on the level of perfection that I do are tiring. It takes some getting used to, and it won’t ease up until I do.

  He shakes his head at me and laughs lightly. ‘Are you always this pessimistic?’

  ‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’

  My words hang in the air like smog, so thick it’s a wonder we’re both still breathing.

  ‘Norah, I just want to be your friend. Will you let me be that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His smile sets my kitchen on fire.

  ‘Okay.’ He stands, slaps his thighs and fishes a tangled wad of keys from his pocket. ‘I gotta get back to school. My free period is almost over, but can I leave you my number?’ he asks, already heading for the notepad on the fridge.

  I can see what’s happening, but I don’t believe it.

  A boy is writing down his number on my fridge. I swallow down girlish squeals and wait for him to finish. The first boy’s phone number I’ve ever been given is being written, on my fridge, right now. And there is no one around to tell. I kind of want to open the door and scream it to the street. But I won’t. Who would have thought a bunch of digits could bring this much excitement?

  We stroll towards the door in silence. ‘Chat later?’ Luke says, stepping out on to the porch. He holds out his hand. ‘Are we still not shaking?’

  I stare at his outstretched palm. I want to take hold of it, feel his skin against mine, but I’m already wondering when he last washed his hands. It’s not fair of me to make assumptions, but I can’t stop it. OCD destroys any romantic notions pressed flesh has to offer.

  Deep breath. ‘Maybe . . . maybe next time you come by, I can tell you why?’ Wait . . . what? Was that me? Did I just say that? It sounded like me, but that’s not something I would say. I touch my throat. I’ve no idea why – checking to see if it’s still warm, maybe.

  ‘Yeah?’ He looks . . . excited.

  I solidify, can feel butterflies beating their wings against my ribcage.

  It’s not too late to take it back.

  But I don’t want to.

  This is ne
w.

  And a little unnerving.

  Over his shoulder I see a yellow taxi pull up. Mom is sitting in the back, her eyes stretched wide open, trying to swallow the sight of a boy standing on our porch. I can’t decide if what I smell is exhaust fumes or her burning curiosity. It’s a wonder her face isn’t pressed against the glass.

  ‘Talk later, Neighbour.’ Luke sprints off down the driveway, hops over the boxwood bush as Mom climbs out of the cab. The slam of the car door echoes around Triangle Crescent.

  Rachael Dean, aka Mom, is about as subtle as the Titanic. Not even a car accident can shake her spirit. Her bright red hair has been pulled into space buns on the sides of her head, and she’s dressed like science fiction threw up on her. Cosmic print everywhere. She eyeballs me, scurries towards the house like she’s being dragged by a Great Dane, her jaw trailing on the ground behind her. She looks well. Really well. The giant knot that’s been in my shoulders for over a week unravels and my arms suddenly feel ten feet too long.

  ‘Norah Jane Dean.’ Mom is so excited. I’m really looking forward to showing her his phone number, just as soon as my muscles come unstuck. ‘Is that Party Boy?’ Mom asks. I nod. ‘He’s cute,’ she exclaims, turning around to wave at Luke as he pulls his car out on to the road. He waves back, then drives away.

  ‘You okay?’ Mom asks, nudging my shoulder. ‘You’re looking a little pale.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I reply, falling into her chest and wrapping her in a bear hug. I think.

  Dear Luke . . .

  I hit the delete button for the eleventy-billionth time. What is he, my lawyer? Nobody writes ‘Dear Anybody’ in a message unless they’re paying a ton for a Mr Somebody to read it.

  Luke . . .

  And that’s about as good as it gets for almost five hours.

  I lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to balance Luke’s phone number on the tip of my nose. Every time I exhale, it floats away, and turns trying to catch it into a game.