Beautiful Mess

by Claire Christian

  ‘Go then,’ I say, watching her bite her teeth together and scrunch up her face, kind of pained. She breathes out quickly. ‘I don’t think I love my mum.’

  When I open my mouth she promptly puts her hand over it, so I poke my tongue out and lick the palm of her hand and she pulls back, repulsed and laughing.

  ‘Go,’ she says.

  I take a deep breath. ‘You are the first girl I’ve ever had in my bedroom.’

  Ava’s head tilts and she takes a breath in preparation to speak but I shake my head. She smiles, and I watch her eyes dance all over my face.

  The silence lasts a little too long so I whack her on the knee and she says, ‘I once sneezed so hard I pooed my pants.’

  The laughter erupts out of my mouth like an explosion, tears streaming down my face. I hold up five fingers as a hint for her to tell me how old she was.

  ‘It was last week.’ She pauses, and then she cracks up laughing. ‘I’m kidding. I’m kidding.’ She lies back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. ‘I was in Grade 1. At school. My dad had to come pick me up.’ She glances at me and I laugh more as I lie down on my side next to her.

  ‘Annie once walked in on me masturbating,’ I say. It was just before she left. I didn’t think anyone was at home and I had my headphones in. It was completely horrifying for both of us and we’ve never ever talked about it.

  Ava shakes her head. ‘Your family really need to learn how to knock.’ She gets it out quick while I put my finger to her mouth to ‘shh’ her and we fall apart giggling. Like, pain in my stomach, I can’t breathe giggling.

  Finally Ava sits up, leans all her weight on her elbows and looks at me seriously. ‘That bruise,’ she says, ‘the one on my cheek that day? I wasn’t dumb.’ She pauses. ‘Lincoln Waititi did that.’

  She sits up and puts both her hands over my mouth so I really can’t speak and she just stares at me and I stare at her. I cant believe she’s kept this a secret.

  I’m angry. She still talks to him. How dare he. He wanders around at school like a fucking macho dickhead and everyone fawns over him. I’m furious. I can feel my neck start to get really hot and I grab her hands from my mouth.

  ‘You need to tell someone,’ I say. Her wrists still in my hands.

  ‘Shh. You promised.’

  ‘But he’s not—we’re not meant to hit each other.’

  ‘We got in a fight,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘It was an accident. I pushed him and he pushed me back and I fell and hit my face.’ We don’t say anything. I let go of her hands and she crosses her legs, facing away from me.

  ‘He pushed you?’ I mutter, staring at the back of her head.

  ‘He didn’t mean it.’

  ‘He pushed you. He meant it.’

  She doesn’t say anything. This is massive. I don’t know what I’m meant to say or what I’m meant to do.

  Slowly Ava nods. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And I’m the only one who knows?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah.’ She turns around to face me, but keeps her knees close to her chest. ‘He’s—’ She pauses. ‘Sad.’

  ‘Fuck, Ava. What a dick. I’m so—’ and she interrupts me.

  ‘Don’t.’

  I just stare at her for a moment as she leans her chin on her knees. ‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

  ‘No. Yes. I don’t know, I’m not myself, I don’t feel like myself,’ she fires in one quick breath. ‘Your turn.’

  I take a really deep breath. I’m assuming that’s her biggest secret. It’s only fair for me to tell her mine. ‘We moved because of me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t okay.’ She unfolds her hands and crosses her legs, watching me, ‘All through school I got picked on. Because I was tall or cause my mums were gay or my sister was smart. In Year 7, I got really sad and I wrote this story about a sad moon during an eclipse and some kids found it, copied it and stuck it up all over the school. It was just small things. Stupid shit. But lots of stupid shit. All of the time.’

  ‘That’s really awful. I didn’t—’

  I cut her off. If I’m going to tell her, I’m going to tell her all of it. ‘They made a website.’

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘Www dot we hate Gideon dot com filled with all this hateful shit. They’d take secret photos of me at school and post comments and—’

  ‘Oh, Gideon, that’s so fucked.’ She puts her hand on my knee, only this time she doesn’t move it.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It all blew up. My parents were furious and so they went to town on the school. They found out it was this one group of kids doing it all. Their parents dug in and said it was all just fun, which only made my parents even crazier and the school handled it really badly. Then one night someone spray-painted the words fag house on our garage.’ I pause because Ava has her hand over her mouth, mortified. ‘The next day Annie took a baseball bat to school and fully raged out.’

  Ava starts to giggle but quickly stops herself. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. That part is funny now. She was so angry she knocked out one of the kids’ teeth. Their parents wanted to sue. So we moved.’

  Ava says nothing but I can see on her face that she’s trying to process what I’ve just said.

  ‘I keep a lot of stuff in.’

  ‘No shit,’ she says. ‘But your poems?’

  ‘That’s not me. Or it is. But that feels like a different person. Kind of.’ I pause. Ava doesn’t say anything. ‘It’s just my brain—I get real bad anxiety. And I’m a bit—’

  She cuts me off, nodding slowly. ‘Yeah.’

  But I keep going: ‘And I’m in a bit of dark moment right now, but it’s okay. I’m on medication.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s just—my brain.’

  ‘Is like Kelly’s brain.’

  ‘I guess.’ I lie down on my side, and Ava doesn’t move. I listen to us both breathing. Eventually she crawls over and lies down facing me so we’re lying nose to nose.

  After a while I speak. ‘Gideon, I think you’re amazing.’

  He closes his eyes. I see him swallow. Then a single tear runs down his cheek. Three quick, sharp intakes of breath and then that’s it. He just sobs, large, heavy, painful sobs. He rolls over away from me and cries into the pillow. I put my arm under his and rest it on his chest and I hug him. I’m the big spoon. I hug him hard. I can feel his whole body heaving as he tries to catch his breath between his sobs. Neither of us says anything. We just lie there. Then he moves and he places his hand on mine, pulling it closer into him, tucking it right in at the middle of his chest, and intertwines his fingers with mine.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he finally says.

  ‘Don’t—’

  He cuts me off. ‘No. I’m sorry, you don’t need to deal with my shit—’ ‘You’ve been dealing with mine,’ I say, and it’s true.

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  I cut him off. ‘I just think that maybe we’re meant to.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Deal with each other’s shit,’ I say.

  ‘You and me?’ Gideon asks.

  We lie there squished so closely together and we talk in whispers.

  ‘No. Everyone,’ I murmur.

  Gideon rolls over so he’s flat on his back. He doesn’t let go of my hand and he doesn’t look at me.

  ‘There’s so many people around me who don’t let me help them,’ I say. ‘My dad, Lincoln. Even Kelly. She’d tell me it was a bad day after her bad days, you know? I’d get a text to say her parents had taken her to hospital again or I’d just wake up and she’d be in my bed because she’d run away again. Or she’d go silent and I wouldn’t hear from her or she’d just send me sad-face emojis. But we never really talked about it. Not really.’

  Gideon takes a deep breath; I can tell he’s thinking about what to say. ‘She probably didn’t want to worry you.’

  ‘I wish she had. There was this whole part of her l
ife, this whole part of her brain, that I didn’t know about. I just think that maybe—’

  ‘You can’t do anything, Ava.’ He knows what I was going to say. How does he do that?

  ‘You don’t know that.’ There has to have been something that I could’ve done, even something small. There has to have been.

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ he says. And of all people he does know. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’ He turns his head and looks at me. His eyes are still glazed but they look a different colour, a lighter brown maybe. Like the tears have washed some of the colour away.

  I try to pull my hand away but he holds my wrist with both his hands and runs his fingers over mine, like he’s studying them.

  ‘Except this. You can do this,’ he says. ‘Be here.’

  I can’t help it, the valve between my thoughts and tears is so worn down that I don’t think I have any control over them anymore. Fat tears drop onto my cheeks. I feel them before I even know what’s happening and I just let them fall. I pull my hand and Gideon rolls over to face me.

  ‘Hey? Hey, what’s—?’ he says, looking at me.

  ‘You.’

  ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘You,’ I interrupt. ‘You being sad. I just hate that. I hate that your brain does that to you.’

  ‘I don’t want to make you cry. Ever.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘Yeah. I know. I know, Ava,’ he whispers.

  I believe him. Sometimes I think he knows more about how I feel than I even do.

  ‘I hate that there’s nothing I can do,’ I sob.

  ‘Ava.’ He pauses and just watches me try to catch my breath. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  He says this with complete certainty.

  I nod and I cry and he wraps his arm around me and he squeezes me and I cry. I cry because I don’t want him to go anywhere and I’m so desperately worried about anything happening to him and I want to believe him. I want to believe that he’s telling the truth. I cry because while I feel all of these things for him, a part of me still wishes he was her.

  ‘Hey. Hey? Look at me,’ Gideon says as he tucks my hair behind my ear and traces my jaw with his thumb until he gets to my chin. With his finger and thumb he lifts my face. So gently. I don’t say anything. He wipes my cheek with his thumb, drawing a half-circle on my cheek.

  ‘Hey, I have to ask you something?’

  ‘What?’ I mutter.

  ‘Are you getting snot all over my pillow?’

  My face cracks a smile and I wipe my nose with the back of my hand.

  Gideon sits up and clambers over and I can hear his steps on the wooden floorboards as he dashes to the bathroom. He returns ten seconds later with a toilet roll, throws it at me and sits on the edge of the bed near my feet.

  I sit up and blow my nose and watch Gideon. He’s looking at the floor, his elbows leaning on his knees and his hands lined up perfectly. I wish I could read his mind.

  ‘Ava, are you going out tonight?’ Dad asks.

  I shake my head and he looks genuinely surprised. ‘Well, do you want to do something?’ He pauses. ‘Hang out?’ This dorky smile cracks his face and it makes me laugh.

  ‘Yeah.’

  After an intense conversation about our options we settle on staying in and watching a movie. We compromise. I’ll choose what we’re eating and Dad chooses the movie. We’ll end up watching some shit action thing with a war because he loves them, but I don’t care, he seems genuinely excited to spend time with me.

  Dad walks in with pizza and a plastic bag filled with confectionery and throws me a mint envelope.

  ‘Who keeps sending you letters?’

  ‘Gideon.’

  ‘The poet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s very romantic,’ Dad smiles, and I scoff, shaking my head. I can feel my cheeks flush.

  ‘We’re just friends.’ He doesn’t look convinced. ‘He doesn’t have a phone…or the internet. So we write letters. It’s very innocent.’ Dad mutters something to himself as he walks into the kitchen and I throw a cushion at him.

  I open the envelope and an A4 page with the words Make Magic in big biro bubble letters takes up the whole thing with a tiny weird sketch of Ricky’s kangaroo tattoo at the bottom. The drawing is so bad. I crack up laughing. There’s a tiny ripped note and all it says is:

  History was boring today so I made you this.

  P.S. Kangaroos are hard to draw.

  Dad walks back into the living room staring at me with this weird look. ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Nothing.’ He smiles. ‘I want to meet him.’

  ‘I think you’ll like him. He’s very…’ I try to find the right word. ‘Different. He’s cool. He makes me laugh.’

  ‘I can see that.’ I tell him about Ricky’s tattoo and he looks repulsed. ‘That’s disgusting. Why would he send that to you? You don’t need a reminder of that on your wall.’ He smiles.

  ‘He’s a good guy, Dad.’ I pause. ‘He’s been a really good friend.’ And I stuff a piece of pizza in my mouth in the same way that I stuff down any thoughts that Gideon could be anything else.

  Another boring day at school. Another boring lecture about the future. I can’t decide—is it so tedious lately because we’re close to the end and I’m just over it? Or is something else going on?

  I’ve had a plan about my future since Year 9. Do well. Get into uni. Study writing. Move away. Start my life. Be happy. Simple. It’s always been my lifeline when things were shit, this miraculous concept that one day it would stop being shit because I wouldn’t have to go to school anymore and I could do what I wanted, where I wanted and hell, I’d even get to be the kind of guy I wanted to be. It was going to be so awesome. But now it’s actually right around the corner, so close I can see it, I don’t find it as exciting anymore. I think I’m terrified. What if the plan doesn’t work? Worse still, what if I change my mind?

  *

  There’s a letter from Ava on the kitchen bench when I get home. I rip it open and a small sketch of a kangaroo floats to the floor with the words: better than yours. I laugh. It is better than mine.

  Gideon,

  It’s just after midnight and I can’t sleep so I thought I would write you a letter. If you were a normal person with a phone I would’ve sent you a photo of me pulling a stupid face, hoping you’d be awake. If you were awake you would reply and then we could talk about stupid shit until I finally felt tired. But you don’t, so now I just need to talk to myself knowing that you’ll read it. Letters are weird.

  We’ve been looking at memoirs in English and we have to write this personal reflective essay about a life lesson we’ve learnt and want to share. I had been finding it really fucking tricky to decide what I wanted to write about but your picture helped me decide. I’m going to write about Ricky, about his dickhead policy and about, well, making your life magic. I feel like that’s one life lesson I can write about. So thank you for your help…in more ways than one. Like this weekend for example, thank you for that in advance, you’re a good guy, Gideon. Like, really. I even said that to my dad. He wants to meet you, by the way…he called you a renaissance man. I don’t know what that means. I hope it isn’t a bad thing.

  Love Ava

  I smile and feel the weird flip that my stomach does when anything to do with Ava Spirini occurs. I would never tell Ava how I felt about her. I would never want to ruin it. Besides, there is no chance that a girl like her would even slightly be interested in a guy like me. We are friends and that’s how it is going to stay. I am well practised at ignoring my feelings. Robbie would agree: telling Ava how I feel about her is not a safe risk. No one wins. I’d put her in a position where she’d have to awkwardly tell me she likes me as a friend and then there’d be no chance of ever getting back to the way things are now. And I like things the way they are now. I like being Ava’s friend. When I see her tomorrow she’s going to need me to be her friend.

  Tomorrow is Kelly’s birthday.

/>   Her plan had been to ignore it, but I convinced her to hang out, that I could help. If only by making sure she wasn’t on her own. My plan is to buy an enormous assortment of ridiculous snacks. I’ve selected a range of movies that are not about death or suicide or best friends, which was more difficult than I thought it would be. And I have prepared another list of lighthearted topics in case things start to head into murky territory.

  Tomorrow I’m going to be the best goddamn friend she’s ever had.

  Gideon and I are giggling about something stupid in the movie when there’s a knock at the door and I pause the TV. I took a bit of convincing to hang out with him today; I had planned on sleeping all day and waiting for it to be over. Then I thought if I was going to feel like shit, I may as well do it with Gideon.

  I throw a handful of Skittles at him as I trudge to the door and whip it open and Lincoln is standing there with a can of rum and Coke in his hand. I swallow hard; it’s not even midday.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why.’ He’s unsteady on his feet and he clutches at the door frame.

  ‘You haven’t said anything to me in weeks and then you just show up and think that everything will be back to normal? Go home, Lincoln.’ I begin to shut the door but he pushes it back open.

  ‘I thought we could hang out,’ he slurs and takes a step past me into the house.

  ‘I don’t want to hang out.’

  Gideon stands up from the couch. Lincoln looks at him and snorts. ‘What, so you get a new boyfriend—’

  ‘He’s a friend,’ I spit, ‘and it’s none of your business.’

  Lincoln is seething. I don’t care, I’m so mad at him. Gideon is frozen.

  ‘It’s her birthday.’ My words sit heavy in the air.

  Lincoln turns to face me. ‘Special day, yeah? I thought we could celebrate.’ He grabs my face with both his hands and kisses me hard on the mouth and I push him away with all of my strength. He looks at me, stunned, as I push him towards the door once again: ‘I don’t want to celebrate her birthday with you.’