Wildlife

by Fiona Wood

  “It’s optional. But, yeah, I’m going totally gangsta.”

  She laughed.

  “I feel like I’m sending you back to the Stone Age.”

  “You might as well be.” I gave my cell phone a hammy kiss. “Farewell, my heart, my life.”

  “No texting for nine weeks! Your thumbs might drop off.”

  “They’ll get axing exercise.”

  “Known as ‘chopping’ in some circles, I believe.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Promise you’ll write lots of letters?”

  “It’s compulsory. But I would anyway. And everyone says the Letter Home is all that stops you going crazy on the solo overnight hike.”

  She cast a doubtful eye over my bags and the surrounding mess. “You don’t want some help?”

  “I’m supposed to be self-sufficient for the whole term or your money back, so I think I’ll be okay.”

  “Have you packed undies?”

  “Mum!”

  She laughed as she went out the door. “Just saying.”

  There have been certain trips on which I’ve forgotten certain essential items. But no big deal, right? You can always supplement when you get there. Anyway, this time there was a list.

  Leonie came over to me—he always gets anxious when there’s luggage out—it usually means the nice man from the doggy kennel is about to pick him up. I gave him a reassuring back scratch, feeling a bit guilty to be offering last-minute affection. I take him for granted these days, i.e., ignore him heaps.

  He wagged his stumpy tail agreeably. Dogs are lovely—they don’t even know the meaning of grudge. Twelve years ago, Leonie was the most beautiful name I could imagine. A mixture of my friend Leah and pony. Mom asked if I knew it was usually a girl’s name and our puppy was a boy. I pretended I knew, to maintain my four-year-old dignity. I was pretty sure Leonie wouldn’t care either way. In the spirit of male solidarity, my dad has always called him Leo.

  Before burying my phone in a pair of thick socks to pack it—conveniently not thinking about the contract signed in good faith pledging not to bring phones to camp—I texted Michael: Skype?

  Michael, my oldest friend, my strangest friend. He prefers Skype to phone because he says the role of voice in conversation accounts for fifty percent or less of communicating. He also counts Skype as a social outing, which means he’s off the hook for organizing an actual social outing. He was there by the time I got to my desk.

  “Are you jet-lagged?” I asked.

  “A little.”

  “How was Rome?”

  “Ancient.”

  “What did you watch on the plane?” I give Michael pop-culture viewing suggestions for long flights.

  “Friday Night Lights. You were right.”

  “So, the billboard went up.”

  “I saw it.”

  “Large, isn’t it?”

  “Extra extra large. Livin’ large.”

  “Livin’ large. At least it’ll be down by the time we get back.”

  “They’ve captured an authentic Sibylla look, though.”

  “It’s the unfocused gaze, because I’m wishing to be somewhere else.”

  “Which obviously translates nicely into…” He was casting about for the desired message of the ad.

  “I smell good, I guess.”

  “You nailed it. Will you do any more of this ‘work’?”

  “I was only allowed to do this because it was Beeb. You can imagine the lecture—my mother is still fifty percent horrified. And speaking of horror—I’ve said I’ll go to Laura’s party tonight.”

  “Celebrity life begins. Don’t you want to go?”

  “Yes/no.”

  “Because it will be good/bad?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He nodded.

  “What are you reading?”

  He smiled apologetically and held up Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Of course he’s reading Thoreau as we head into the wilderness: he’s Michael.

  “Michael, you rock.”

  His eyes shine. “Sibylla, you—tall tree.”

  “I can’t ask you what I should wear, so I guess I’m just here sharing some nervousness.”

  “I hope it turns out to be more good/bad than bad/good. Here, have some Thoreau.” He found a page in the book and read to me, “‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’”

  “Hmmm, so if I substitute party for woods… I’m already feeling less ambivalent about it.”

  He smiled, said good-bye, and left, so it was just me on the screen holding up my good-bye hand and contemplating the most immediate essential fact of life: what to wear.

  I finished packing and had time to try on five or six variations of “very casual” for the party. A last-minute invitee can’t look like she’s tried too hard.

  That party is how I came to kiss Ben Capaldi, the most popular boy in our grade, someone I never thought even had me on his map. What am I talking about? I know I was never on his map. I was never in the same room as his map.

  Maps were on my brain because I’d been worrying about getting lost, aware that I have no sense of direction and was about to be in the zero-landmark, everything-looks-the-same-to-a-city-girl, no-buildings, no-signposts, map-dependent… wilderness.

  sunday 7 october

  All packed. Every item ticked.

  Ask sadness, How about staying here, sadness?

  I know. Dumb question.

  Sadness packed.

  Bags zipped.

  Compose reassuring demeanor for last dinner at home before camp.

  Small smile.

  Parties are uncomfortable events for me. I do want to get invited. If I’m not invited, I feel sad, and it is horrible hearing befores and afters you’ve had nothing to do with. Smiling and pretending dog-eared experience is enough. But when I am invited to a party, I straightaway start dreading it.

  As soon as I’m confronted with shrieking, giggling, drinking, loud music, random hookups, uninhibited dancing—I feel glum. I don’t have fun. I’m not “fun.” I’m serious. I’m responsible. I worry about my friends getting drunk, getting their drinks spiked, getting hurt, getting messy, getting used, getting pregnant, getting sexually transmitted diseases, and drowning in their own vomit.

  On top of that I never know what to wear.

  And I don’t like drinking, but I have to pretend to drink, so I at least appear to be “fun,” and to be having “fun.”

  I used to like dancing until a boy—Billy Gardiner—told me I looked like a spastic tarantula. So now I can only dance if it’s crowded enough and dark enough that nobody can see me.

  So a typical party for me usually involves trying unsuccessfully to talk to people who are drunk, hanging around the food, speaking to the parents, visiting the bathroom, hoping that by the time I come out more people I know have arrived, not dancing, finding a kitchen or garden through-road position to prop so I get passing traffic conversation, and later on patrolling to check that my friends are okay to get home. Holly says I’m more like a party monitor than a guest.

  But post-billboard, the script for this party ran differently. For starters, some people looked at me rather than around me when I arrived.

  After Holly’s “hiiiiiiieee mwah mwah,” she pulled me into a huddle with Gab and Ava, and started making a big deal out of the billboard thing. Usually it would make me uncomfortable being the center of attention, but because I’d told Holly everything and she’d had three cranberry vodkas, it was more like she was the center of attention, which suited us both just fine.

  Hours later when Ben Capaldi, apparently off his face, staggered into focal range and said (to me!), “Your pulchritude defies belief,” I was—speechless. I may have lifted one sober eyebrow. I’ve perfected the one-eyebrow lift in the mirror, never in a million years thinking I’d get to use
it in a social situation. I smiled and turned away. I could not think of one thing to say. But as my heart flipped like a hooked fish, I was wondering if a girl like me had ever turned away from a boy like Ben.

  Was it wrong to feel a little thrill when I caught his look of surprise? This handsome boy? This boy the whole world loves? It might have looked like muscle-flexing on my part, turning away like that, but it was unadorned panic. A when-in-doubt-stick-your-head-in-the-sand move. Nice work.

  And he thought I didn’t know what pulchritude meant? Naturally. It’s not like he would have noticed me in the Same Latin Class for the Last Three Years. Dud compliment anyway. It’s such an ugly word for beauty. Besides which, he’s the pulchritudinous one. He is the walking definition of boy beauty.

  And I have now kissed that definition.

  There is no hope of sleeping tonight. My wakey-dial is stuck up on super alert. I’m freaked out about going to camp in the morning, and I’ve got the kiss footage on a loop. I hate this. I want a more obedient brain. I want the brain that says okay when I say it’s bedtime. Now, brain, sit! Roll over! Play dead. My brain says, get stuffed, I’m having fun. Tonight it is like one of those lab rats that can’t stop going back for cocaine even though it needs the food.

  Hmmm, food. An excursion into the parental worst-kept-secret dark chocolate stash, in the fridge, is definitely warranted. With a freezing-cold glass of milk.

  1:47 AM. Brain still disobeying owner. It happened. It can’t have been a dream: I haven’t been to sleep. How did it happen? A yelp of disbelief makes its way up from my solar plexus to the pillow I jam against my face.

  Holly almost certainly had something to do with it. She is the keen social engineer who has been trying to persuade me since year eight that I need a man in my life. (Defense strategy: eye roll, say no, thank you, no way, never, not even interested, before you get scorned, rejected, ignored, not asked.)

  No more than an hour after turning away, of ignoring him, of accidentally appearing to be unimpressed, I was kissing him.

  Sibylla Quinn and Benjamin Capaldi?

  You have got to be kidding.

  Sib and Ben?

  Surely not.

  Heads turned. He tasted of beer and smiles and popularity, smelled of freshly danced sweat, and didn’t seem to realize it was the first time I’d kissed anyone. At least, he didn’t mention it.

  So the earth must be spinning off its axis by now, plummeting headlong toward a new universe, oceans sloshing and spilling, ice caps sliding, trees uprooted, because somehow I’ve stepped over the line to stand with the popular girls. Only I haven’t. The line must have moved without me realizing. It’s disconcerting. And so was the way people looked at me post–kissing Ben. The look said you? Then it reassessed me. Shuffled the deck. And it was as though a different backing track started playing. I walked into the party with something like a la-di-da, but by the time I left it was more of a ba-boom-chucka-boom-chucka.

  A text erupts from my phone, which is packed inside a boot. Holly. Unless it’s—it couldn’t be—Ben? I dig it out, heart jerking, and remember: Ben doesn’t even have my number. Of course it’s Holly: biaaatch, are you in bed with him?

  Me: you are a freak.

  Holly: as if you don’t love him.

  Me: don’t.

  Holly: then you’re crazier than I thought, and that is lots crazy.

  Me: go to sleep.

  Holly: perchance to…

  Me: perchance to shut up.

  monday 8 october, 4 am

  No news is not good news.

  I know it.

  Anything might have happened, and the only true fact of life is death.

  It is brief. But it is nonetheless a third journal entry.

  The end.

  Sex education used to be called the Facts of Life. It’s kind of appropriate, the stern, newscaster tone, the headline vibe. It does loom large; it is some kind of major event on the horizon.

  If you read the statistics—our house is full of them—heaps of kids have sex super early, like early high school, but in my little middle-class world there are plenty of kids, a lot more than half, who haven’t done the deed at sixteen, or even seventeen. I know that for an anecdotal fact. (I’m obviously one of them.)

  Despite that, at sixteen, whether you have, or have not, had sex can sometimes feel like the Great Divide. It’s not like friends who used to be close are gone, it’s just that they’ve migrated to another country.

  No matter how much you tell yourself that nothing’s changed, it has. You worry that all your dumb old secrets are about to be whispered on someone else’s pillow, or to be superseded by somebody else’s better secrets.

  Just as wide as the gulf between “have had sex” and “haven’t had sex” is the gulf between my fantasy life and my real life, fantasy boys and real boys.

  Until last night, when I kissed my fantasy boy. That was a particularly disturbing, worlds-colliding event.

  It’s very frustrating, and seems illogical, that you can know everything there is to know about sex of all persuasions, variations, and deviations, in theory, and yet still know zero if you haven’t done it. It. IT.

  Being a virgin makes me feel inexperienced, childish, gauche, uncool.

  It is honest to god like I’m sitting at the little kids’ table on Christmas Day, while other girls my age are over there sipping from champagne flutes and using the good cutlery.

  Add to that the pressure to act like it’s cool… no big deal… my choice…

  And that’s me, and I’m not even a very peer-group person.

  My virginity does not feel like some wondrous thing I will one day bestow on a lucky boy; it’s more in the realm of something I need to get rid of, like my braces were, before real life can begin.

  But annoyingly enough, while I am dead keen to cross “sex” off my to-do list, I don’t feel at all ready to remove anything other than a top-layer garment in front of a boy. That is the reason why, before I’m even properly awake, the challenge, and probable impossibility, of fully clothed sex with Ben Capaldi is occupying my thoughts.

  What is it going to be like seeing him today? My lips still tender, chin scratched. It had to be a casual hookup, right? A party thing? Please, party-fling fairy, oh, please visit and tell me what face to put on this morning. Friendly but distant? Casual hello hug? Ignore him before he ignores me?

  What was I thinking? We’re going to be in the wilderness together for nine weeks.

  monday 8 october, 5 am

  If you don’t want to write about feelings, you can write about facts, Lou.

  I met Fred last year.

  Our mutual friend Dan Cereill introduced us.

  We saw a movie, ate boysenberry ice-cream cones, kissed, arranged to meet again.

  I invited him to our year nine social at the end of term three.

  It was a surprise.

  I was not looking for a boyfriend.

  We had five perfect months together.

  He died in a cycling accident. He was dead at the scene, could not be resuscitated, is believed to have died instantly of head injuries.

  There was a funeral.

  There was scattering of ash.

  I did not go back to school when the school year started. I was a basket case. Everything shut down.

  This term I was to be part of a wonderful new French exchange program for government schools.

  My three friends, Dan, Estelle, and Janie, are part of a wonderful new French exchange program.

  When it came down to it, I couldn’t leave Fred.

  I decided to stay in the same country as Fred.

  I did not put it that way to anyone else but Dan.

  It might have sounded a bit crazy, but it was what I needed to do.

  Dan couldn’t wait to leave the city that killed Fred.

  We understood perfectly well that each other’s positions sprang from the same place. The place where the floor falls out from under you and nothing can ever be th
e same.

  I have seen a psychiatrist called Esther, who specializes in teenagers and grief, twice a week since Fred died.

  I don’t sleep well.

  I don’t wake well.

  I have done distance education from home for the first three terms this year. My results have been excellent.

  Today I am starting at a new school, in fourth term.

  I don’t have to tell people about Fred unless I choose to do so.

  This school is a private school called Crowthorne Grammar that sends its students away for a whole term in year ten. They/we go to an outdoor education campus called Mount Fairweather for a whole term to discover the real meaning of, to experience, independence and leadership.

  It is a campus in the mountains.

  This cushy campus promises to provide an authentic, rugged outdoors experience… resilience… core values… practical skills for… cocurricular… living… blah… educational adventure… foster… blah… connect… blah… challenge.

  A quarter of the year ten class is at Mount Fairweather at any given time. I am part of the quarter who will be enjoying the camp experience during fourth term.

  There will be lots of wonderful activities in which I will participate, including but not limited to hiking, cross-country running, group and solo camping, rappelling, canoeing, horseback riding, and environmental studies in situ.

  Classes will run in a five-day week from Thursday to Monday. Inclusive. Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be our weekends, so we can have the run of the wilderness without us bothering weekend hikers/campers, or weekend hikers/campers bothering us.

  It will be good for me. That’s an order.

  Good to make a new start.

  Good to get out of the house.

  Good to meet new people.

  Good to breathe some new air.

  Good to be getting fit.

  Good to have access to a fine counselor.

  So good I cannot fucking believe my luck.