The Spite Game

by Anna Snoekstra

  “Your pinkie toes are all wonky,” I said.

  “Shut up,” she said, kicking my knee and leaving a red line on my skin.

  “Don’t, it’ll smear!”

  “Sorry,” she said, and lay back into the pillow.

  Staring up at the roof, she said quietly, “I missed you.”

  I didn’t reply.

  When I finished the second coat I blew on it, then put her foot down on the bed next to me.

  “Do you want to watch a movie?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Using only her palms, she pulled her computer onto her belly. “I’ve got The Dark Knight but I’ve already seen it. And The Sex and the City movie, but apparently that’s shit.”

  I watched her scroll down, stared at the careful way she touched the keys with her finger pads so as not to smudge her nails.

  “How about Cloverfield?”

  “Alright.”

  “Close the curtains,” she said.

  I got up and pulled the curtains shut, then lay down next to her on the bed. At first I felt uncomfortable, not being able to stop thinking about the last time I’d lain in this bed in the dark. After a while, I started to get drawn into the movie. I sank down into the pillows to watch the small screen as it rose and fell with Mel’s breath.

  It was a good film. We got up to the bit where they were in the tunnel and the camera switches to night vision, and you see all the spidery aliens around them. Mel and I both screamed, then we looked at each other and started to laugh.

  “That girl is a good actress,” she said about the screaming one.

  “She looks a bit like you,” I told her.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  Pushing the laptop onto the bed, she turned to look at me.

  “Do you think I’m going to be able to make it?”

  “As an actress?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I can’t imagine what I’ll do if it doesn’t happen.”

  “Why wouldn’t it happen?”

  “I dunno, you hear about it all the time. All these girls that want to be actors and they move to America and end up just being waitresses and stuff and then they get old and ugly but still think they’re going to make it and it ends up being really pathetic.”

  I stared into her beautiful face. “That won’t happen to you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled at me, then rolled onto her back again. “I’m going to start with theater anyway. That’s what you are meant to do. You start with theater in Europe and then some talent scout finds you and casts you in some shitty franchise movie, and then you get really famous but everyone remembers you started in theater so they know you are actually a serious actor.”

  I didn’t really know what to say, so I just shrugged. “Cool.”

  “So are you going to come and visit me in Europe?”

  I stared at her.

  “Dinner’s ready!” her mum called up the stairs.

  “I should probably go,” I said.

  “Why?” Mel whined. “I already told Mum you were staying for dinner.”

  “I don’t want to miss my bus.”

  “You’re not sleeping over?” she asked.

  I stood up, starting to get frustrated. I wanted to fix things, but this was starting to feel weird. It was too much like nothing had happened, but it had.

  “I have to go.”

  “Ava, don’t.”

  I turned to look at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really. I’ve been so sad without you as a friend. I really just want us to go back to the way things were. Do you think we can do that?”

  I had two choices. I could go back to being friendless. To hiding in the toilets at lunchtime, to going into every day like it was a battle, to wanting to die rather than go to school the next day. Or, I could believe her. I could believe her version of how things were and pretend it had all been some bad dream.

  “Come on,” she said, grinning. “It’ll be so much easier for you to get to school from here. Plus, we still have to watch the second half of the movie.”

  * * *

  I barely slept that night. I was too afraid I would wake up to another trick. I kept far away from Mel, lying on my side on the very edge of the bed, ready to jump out and run. The air conditioner whirred quietly. She said she always kept it on, because she liked sleeping with thick quilts, even in summer.

  Mel seemed to sleep soundly, tugging at the blanket as she rolled, and was breathing deeply. In the middle of the night, she turned toward me. Her hand fell onto my waist and stayed there. Her breathing didn’t seem as even in that moment, and I wondered if she was really asleep or if she was testing me, seeing how I would react. I tensed my muscles, staying perfectly and completely still, until eventually I must have fallen asleep too because the next thing I remembered was her alarm going off.

  “Errgh,” she said, “it’s too early.”

  I rolled over and stretched. “Not for me!”

  The morning sun was squeezing through the edges of her curtains. I hadn’t been tricked; I’d passed the test.

  “I wish I had different clothes,” I said, thinking about spending another day in the same thing I had on yesterday. I didn’t want to smell.

  “Are you asking to borrow some undies?”

  “No!”

  “You can,” she said, smiling at me and getting up. “It’s gross to wear the same pair two days in a row.”

  We walked to school side by side. At first we chatted about the movie, but as we got closer Mel got quieter. I kept talking, trying to draw her out. When we turned the corner onto the street the school was on she started to walk really fast.

  “I’m going to be late for homeroom,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to keep up. “The bell hasn’t rung yet and we’re almost there.”

  She kept rushing ahead, almost running. Once we got in front of the school, she turned on me.

  “Fuck off!” she spat.

  A few guys that were hanging out near the fence laughed loudly.

  “Psycho!” one yelled.

  By the time school ended, it had circulated. I had cornered Mel outside school that morning and begged her to be my friend again. But I didn’t withdraw back into myself again. No, that was over.

  I wasn’t numb anymore.

  34

  I remembered what I used to do when I lay in bed on a Saturday morning back at my old house. I would scratch at these small little mounds on my wall, where tiny star-shaped stickers had been painted over. I was slowly working through them, the ones that I had already scratched the paint off would glow at nighttime, but there was a whole galaxy left to uncover. I would imagine how the room would have looked when they’d put on the stars. No magazine cutouts on the walls, no clothes on the floor. A baby’s cot in the corner and the walls alight with stars. I liked that the house had history. That it had the ghosts of previous residents frozen inside it. I’d left part of myself there.

  The walls of the Lakeside Estate house were blank.

  I opened the lid of my old black laptop. First I opened Facebook, just from reflex. Six new messages, four new notifications. I knew what they’d say: fucking psycho, psycho freak, why are you such a psycho? I’d read them later. Instead, I went into Google. With one finger I typed the word into the search engine, one letter at a time: p, s, y, c, h, o. My computer whirred and the results appeared. Characteristics of a psychopath. I clicked on it.

  I scanned down until I reached the list.

  Lack of empathy.

  Pathological lying.

  Impulsivity.

  Parasitic lifestyle.

  Sexual promiscuity.

  Juvenile delinquency.

  Po
or behavioral controls.

  Cunning.

  Scanning the list, my response wasn’t what I’d thought it would be. I had worried so much about being a “psycho,” but maybe I shouldn’t have. I’d be happier if I was one, that was for sure. If I was a psycho, I’d do something to Mel. I’d get even. I’d been worrying so much that there was something terribly wrong with me. But maybe the thing that was wrong with me was the only thing that was right.

  I remembered the power I’d felt when we’d destroyed Mr. Bitto. If I could do it to him, a fully grown man, surely I could do it to Mel, who was only a simpering, shallow teenager. I just had to come up with a plan.

  Bea rushed into my room and I snapped my laptop shut.

  “Come with me!” she said, leaning in the door. She had the glowing look about her that I hadn’t seen in ages.

  “Where?”

  “Just outside, dummy—calm down. I know you’re a recluse these days.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Come on!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me up. We walked down the stairs together and outside.

  “Dah dah!” she said, opening her arms up to a crappy-looking car on the curb.

  “Yours?” I asked.

  “Yep!”

  “But how?”

  “Well, you might be spending all your time mooching around, but I’ve been job hunting. I got a job as a secretary, but it’s impossible by public transport so I got a loan.”

  I looked between the beat-up-looking car and her smiling face. “You could get a way better job than being a secretary.”

  “Yeah, I know—” she rolled her eyes “—but right now, this means freedom!”

  She walked over to the car and unlocked it.

  “Get in.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Anywhere, who cares?”

  I shrugged. She had a point. I got in the car next to her and we took off. She went through the gates and we were free. We rolled down the windows and the hot air felt cool as it made our hair dance. The main road was empty and she sped along it, probably going over the speed limit but I loved it.

  “Do you want to see somewhere weird?” she said.

  “Yeah!”

  Taking the next turn, she swung into a parking lot.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  I’d thought Lakeside Estate was an eyesore. I hadn’t expected this.

  We sat in silence for a second, looking at the large, gray shopping square. Or at least what was once a shopping square. All the shops were closed down; some with papered windows and all with doors locked with thick silver chains. The car park out front was completely empty except for our car.

  “Do you want to go exploring?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  Opening the door, I felt a wave of heat. It was way hotter here than it had been outside our house. Maybe the bitumen soaked up the week’s sun, and was now spitting it back out at us, its trespassers. We walked up toward the buildings, dwarfed by the huge empty space.

  “What happened here?” I asked Bea, and she shrugged.

  “Apparently businesses are closing down all over the place. I think this used to be the central hub when this was all farmland, but now there’s that mega mall half an hour away.”

  The shop windows were frosted with grime, but I could still see inside the ones that weren’t papered up. I tried to imagine what it would have looked like here before it closed. There was a hairdresser’s shop, where farmer’s wives would have come to get their hair done, a bakery next door. Their kids might have waited in there for their mums, blowing bubbles in their milkshakes.

  We walked past the fish-and-chips shop. If the kids were good, their mums would probably pick up fish-and-chips for dinner. Bea leaned forward, trying to see inside.

  “Do you remember when we used to have fish-and-chips for dinner?” Bea asked, and it was like she was reading my mind. Sister moments, we would call them. We hadn’t had one in a while.

  “Every Sunday night,” I said. “I miss that.”

  “Me too.”

  I remembered sitting in the car, the box wrapped in white paper on my knees. After a while it would burn my thighs, but I didn’t mind. That was a part of it. We’d park the car outside our house and I’d hand the box over to my mum, carefully, like there was a small animal asleep inside. There would be a pink rectangle left on my legs, still warm to touch, and it would take a full ten minutes to fade away. When we opened the box it was like pulling the wrapping off a present. We’d sit in front of the TV and eat and no one would even be thinking of the week to come.

  Bea and I kept walking.

  “It’s kind of sad here,” I said after a while.

  “Yeah.” Bea stared straight ahead. “I always wonder how long the shop owners waited here until they decided to shut it down. Like, if there were a few months where they all sat in their empty shops just waiting for their regulars, still fooling themselves with the notion of loyalty, the realization slowly sinking in.”

  I watched her profile as she spoke.

  “You’ve been here before?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “How’d you even find it?”

  “I’ve been going for walks with Chucky,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of time to kill. Sitting in that house alone all day job hunting is too depressing.”

  “Sorry,” I said, feeling like I might cry all of a sudden. She’d probably look forward to me coming home, and then I’d just lock myself in my room and ignore her.

  “Doesn’t matter now! A job and a car all in one day is pretty good!”

  “Yeah, no more wandering around this creepy place like a weirdo.”

  “Maybe just on weekends,” she said, then laughed.

  We kept walking, the silence between us comfortable now. I was surprised that there wasn’t more graffiti here. It was almost like someone pressed Pause and just let the elements take over. Like when they abandoned it they just left it to its own devices, like if they didn’t look at it then it wouldn’t exist anymore. But even if everyone wants you to be invisible, even if you want it too, that doesn’t make it happen. Somehow it just made you more conspicuous, because it felt so wrong that you existed at all. I ran my hand over the red bricks, feeling the warmth coming from inside them. It was like this place still had a pulse. It hadn’t given up yet.

  “Should we get out of here?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, what’s that?” She was looking at my leg. “Did you scratch yourself?”

  I looked down and noticed the red line on my knee. It was Mel’s nail polish. I hadn’t had a shower this morning. In fact, I was still wearing her underwear.

  “Yeah,” I said, putting my hand over it. For some reason I didn’t want Bea to know what it was. I looked around, and noticed a public toilet block.

  “I’ll be one sec!” I said, rushing toward it.

  “Yuck, Ava, that place will be rank!”

  I ignored her and went inside, scratching the nail polish off with my fingernail. She was right; the place was filthy. I didn’t care. I turned on the tap, but no water came out. Looking up at my reflection I saw my own shock. Written across the mirror in front of me was UGLY. The toilets were absolutely covered in graffiti. Scrawled in different handwriting and markers were phrases like ur a fuckn ugly sluzza, Ellie Stewert is a whore! Almost laughing, the image of the farmer’s wife and her cute kids disappeared from my mind. The writing was everywhere, one overlapping the other and sometimes almost frightening in some of its intensity. Words that felt like violence just in themselves.

  “Oh wow,” Bea said as she followed me in.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “This place is freaking me out.”

  We went to the supermarket and got some food, then made Mum dinner. It was the first night in the new hou
se that felt normal, like nothing had changed, like we were us again. But I wasn’t me. I was different. While we were walking down the aisles of the supermarket, an idea was forming in my head. When we were listening to music and chopping up vegetables, I was planning. While we sat around the table with our mum, laughing as she told us a funny story about a patient she’d had that day, half my mind was on tomorrow, imagining how Mel would react.

  35

  The note was folded into a neat square. It fit easily in my palm. I could put it into my backpack but I liked the feeling of it between my fingers. The softness of the paper. Knowing the secret folded inside gave me strange little tingles where its corners touched my skin.

  * * *

  “‘Dear Mel, I’ve always liked you—’” Mel began. I couldn’t see her face but I knew it was glowing.

  “What a Romeo!”

  “Shut up, Cass!”

  Their voices echoed around the change room. I sat on the closed toilet seat, still and silent, my knees up by my ears, my arms wrapped around my legs.

  “‘—I’ve always liked you but never known what to say,’” Mel continued. “‘I guess I’m your secret admirer. You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Just thought I should let you know.’”

  Silence. Then their laughter exploded like a pyramid of champagne flutes crashing to the ground.

  “That’s so tacky!”

  “It’s sweet!”

  “Holy fuck, I bet it’s some loser!”

  “I had science before this. Maybe they put it in then?” Mel said. “I sit next to Theodore.”

  She was half right.

  “He looooves you!”

  “Shut up!”

  The next day I heard a shriek from across the oval. It was coming from Cass. They had found my latest letter in Mel’s bag. They were all huddled together over it. A few minutes later Cass pretended to swoon and they all laughed. I looked carefully at Mel. She had a private little smile on her face. I imagined her in her bedroom, air-conditioning on full blast, holding the letter to her heart. Idiot.

  * * *

  “Another one!” Mel exclaimed. I was back in my spot on the toilet seat, waiting.

  “What, where?”