Bad Behaviour

by Rebecca Starford

  But still that doubt was niggling at me. How long would it be before she grew tired of it being just the two of us? It felt like disaster was always just around the corner, that at any moment Alexis would announce that she was going out somewhere without me, that she was staying over at a friend’s. That she would say: You’re not enough.

  There was also new friction at home. Ruby had been subdued at the news of our coupling, but I had promised it wouldn’t change anything about the house. But Ruby hadn’t been around as much, and was staying over at Joe’s more often. ‘You don’t want me here spoiling the romance,’ she once said, smiling faintly. But I knew it was more than that.

  After a while I noticed that Alexis and Ruby had stopped talking to one another altogether. If the three of us were in a room, they only communicated with each other through me.

  Despite my invitations, Ruby never ate dinner with us at the table or joined us downstairs to watch television. Whenever we rode home on the scooter and saw the light on upstairs, Alexis would clench her legs around me and sigh, ‘Great. Boob is home.’

  It had bothered me that they didn’t get along. Ruby, after all, was one of my closest friends. But I laughed with Alexis that night, and the next thing I knew I was rolling my eyes unencouraged, because other things had started to irritate me about living with Ruby, like how she never cleaned, how she didn’t drink, how there was always a war over using the ducted heating, and how whenever I wanted the house to ourselves Ruby was always, always there.

  Alexis and I planned a holiday away, for some time on our own. We headed to Sri Lanka for two weeks before Christmas, staying in a hut at the top of a hill overlooking a turquoise bay. Every day the sky was huge, the sun blazing through the tropical haze. Small red and yellow and blue boats were beached on the sand, and local children frolicked in the shallows.

  It should have been perfect. Except Alexis was distracted, checking Facebook at every internet café, or texting on her phone, which never seemed to stop chiming with some new message. At night she stayed up reading on the porch, only coming to bed when I was asleep. She never kissed me. I tried to ignore the growing panic fluttering in my chest until one afternoon, when we did start to fool around, she sat up and threw her hands to her face.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I just can’t. I’m sorry.’

  I pulled the sheet up around my shoulders. ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We went to dinner. I drank three Bacardi and limes, picking at my grilled barramundi. Alexis sat with a glass of wine, gazing off into the distance.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

  She rarely apologised for anything and I looked up. The restaurant behind her was fuzzy around the edges. She reached across to take my hand.

  ‘I just don’t think I can sleep with you until I sleep with someone else,’ she said.

  I put down my glass, stared at it. The table tilted.

  ‘What?’

  She sighed. There was something rigid in the line of her mouth now. ‘You know I don’t believe in monogamy, Bec,’ she said.

  The barramundi, the Bacardi—all of it was rising from my stomach, up my throat. I swallowed. ‘And you thought it would be a good idea to say all this now?’

  ‘I didn’t plan it,’ she snapped.

  We walked back to the hut along the sandy track. Laughter drifted up from the bars lining the beach. I drank more beer from the fridge, and went out to the porch. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this on my holiday,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘How selfish can you be?’

  Alexis didn’t look up from her book, just said: ‘It’s my holiday too.’

  Eventually I climbed into bed. I should have felt wounded, my heart ripped out. Instead I felt empty, like I would never feel any kind of wholeness again. As I lay there, the fan whirling and sweat gathering behind my knees, Mike popped into my head. Poor bloke. I started laughing. It sounded like canned laughter in my ears, on a loop, and I couldn’t stop, until Alexis poked her head around the door to ask what was so funny?

  It’s late. We’re all in bed, supposed to be reading. Portia and Sarah’s beds are empty. They’re out in the boiler room—they’ve been out there for hours, since prep. It’s just the two of them—no Ronnie, or Briohny, who is propped up in bed, scowling over the rest of the dorm.

  Finally curiosity gets the better of me and I throw back my doona. In the doorway leading to the side path I hear laughter, Sarah’s trilling the loudest.

  In the boiler room I’m struck by a flume of warm black smoke billowing from the firewood drum. Flames lick up high into the air, halfway to the ceiling. Dressed in a hoodie Portia stands near the drum, hopping from foot to foot. She’s holding a bottle and after taking a glug she wipes her mouth and passes it to Sarah.

  ‘Bec,’ she bellows. ‘Where have you been?’

  I glance at Sarah. Two cigarettes dangle from her mouth. ‘Looks like you’re having a good time,’ I say, swatting at the smoke.

  Sarah laughs, thrusting the bottle into the air. ‘Good times,’ she cries.

  ‘Maybe come back inside?’ I peer back around the doorway, down the path. ‘Miss Lacey will be up here soon for lights-out.’

  Portia rubs her eyes, belching. ‘Fair enough.’ She covers her hand with a sweater like it’s an oven mitt and begins dragging the drum towards the door, sparks spitting everywhere. She manoeuvres it to the edge of the path, where it flickers in the breeze.

  I watch as they each reach inside the drum and pull out burning logs. Portia brandishes hers almost ceremonially before arcing to hurl it into the night.

  Everyone has now come out to watch, oohing and ahhing at the fireworks. The logs tunnel through the air as if they were low-shooting stars. Portia and Sarah work their way through the drum until only a smouldering interior remains.

  ‘Isn’t it pretty,’ Sarah murmurs as Portia throws the last log. ‘They remind me of fireflies.’

  Something in Sarah’s voice makes me turn, but she’s ducked her head to rub at her eyes. ‘Bloody smoke,’ she says, though we both know she’s been crying.

  ~

  It hasn’t stopped raining all week. In class, I gaze morosely out the window at the bleak grey sky. There’s a crossie this afternoon; the course will be slippery and pocked with puddles. I don’t want to run—I need a nap, half an hour will do, just to get myself warm again. But there’s no way of getting out of it. My time card is collected at the finish line, and if it’s not logged I’ll get a detention.

  ‘What if instead of going down to line-up,’ Sarah says as we trudge back to the house after French, ‘we wait up near the utility track? The route comes by there, and when the pack runs past we can just join them. Cuts the crossie in half, doesn’t it?’

  So when everyone else heads down to the library, Sarah and I stay up in the house, making a show of relaxing on our beds. At a quarter past four, we scamper to the utility track, hiding in the bushes until the first girls and boys charge past and we slide down the embankment to join the back of the pack.

  We run together for about a kilometre before Sarah stops, lashing out at a stone. ‘What’s the point?’ she shouts.

  We walk on, not talking. More girls and boys run past, flicking up mud in their wake. The air is as thick as Monsieur Gerrard’s beef stew. I try to think of things to say, but nothing comes to mind. The silence isn’t so bad, anyway.

  At the fork in the track is a wire fence; the beginning of an overgrown path is just visible through the paddock.

  Sarah points. ‘I wonder where that leads?’ she says, taking in the large tree with the overhanging branch and the clusters of swamp heath springing from the verge.

  ‘To the road, I think. See? There’s a car.’

  We both watch the blur of white move between the trees before it disappears. I continue walking, about to call to Sarah, when I see her reach down to pluck a flower from a tall stem. She’s smiling.

  ~

  I wake that night to rustling at the other end of
the dorm. It’s dark, except for the slivers of moonlight through the windows, and I can just make out Sarah moving down the aisle.

  Sometime later the fluorescent lights come on. Miss Lacey stands in the doorway, Mr Connolly at her side. She marches towards Sarah’s empty bed and begins rifling through her drawers.

  ‘She’s at the nurse,’ I say. ‘She went after lights-out.’

  Miss Lacey starts away from the drawers and moves towards me. ‘She is not at the nurse, as you well know, Rebecca. She has run away. A driver phoned, after spotting her near Riverfield.’

  I sit up, cold leeching through my insides as I picture Sarah marching along the black and endless road, a lone car creeping along behind her.

  ‘I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘Do you honestly expect me to believe that?’ Miss Lacey says, clenching and unclenching her fists now, like she wants to hit me.

  ~

  The next morning no one knows what’s happened to Sarah. She hadn’t come back to bed, and she isn’t at breakfast either. ‘It’s like she’s vanished into thin air,’ Portia says. Even she sounds worried.

  Outside the chapel Miss Lacey draws us aside. ‘Sarah is safe,’ she announces. ‘She was found very early this morning, just past Riverfield, trying to hitch a ride to Melbourne. She’s going to spend a few days with her guardians in town before she comes back to school.’

  As everyone begins filing inside, exuberant after this good news, Miss Lacey draws me aside. ‘Bec,’ she murmurs, ‘I’m sorry about last night. I was just so worried. Anything could have happened to Sarah . . .’ She rests a hand on my shoulder, smiling—a real smile, one of sheer elation. She has such a pretty smile, and I feel the hard part of my insides collapse. I’m so tired of being angry with her.

  She peers down at me. ‘Can we have a truce?’

  I nod my head feebly. I don’t have the energy to say no. But there is still something urgent clawing at my insides. I’d thought giving in would feel more like relief.

  ~

  Sarah comes back to school different. Her bad skin has flared up again, dozens of pustules on her cheeks and forehead the size of Tic Tacs. She spends hours in the bathroom, dabbing her face with cotton wool soaked in cleanser. She walks every crossie and long run with grim determination. She never does her prep. Her bedside area is constantly failed; I don’t see her put clothes out for the wash.

  I wonder if something happened at her guardians’. Or perhaps her parents were mad at her for running away. But when I ask about her time in Melbourne, she just shrugs. ‘Smoked a bit,’ she says with a lopsided smile.

  One night, before bed, I find myself in the bathroom with her and Portia. While I brush my teeth Sarah wipes her face with her cleanser, the grey cotton buds piled beside the tap. No one is talking. Portia, I’ve noticed, has barely spoken to Sarah since she got back.

  ‘Eww,’ Portia suddenly cries, flicking a cotton bud on the floor. ‘Don’t put those near me. I don’t want to catch your acne.’

  In the mirror, I see Sarah’s jaw clench. I put my toothbrush down, edging towards the door, but I also want to stay: there’s a frisson in the air—something is about to go down.

  ‘Gross, gross, gross,’ Portia sighs. ‘Everyone is so gross. It makes me sick.’

  Sarah pats her face dry. Then she walks up to Portia and pokes her square in the chest. ‘You know what?’ she says. ‘I hate you.’

  Portia shrugs her off, but Sarah pokes again, harder this time. The two girls stand like that, locked in a menacing stare, until Sarah starts screaming.

  ‘I fucking hate you! I fucking hate you! I fucking hate you!’

  Portia edges away, but Sarah follows, pinning her between the bench and the wall. Then Sarah is laughing, an awful guffaw, tears streaming down her shiny cheeks. The commotion has brought girls running to the bathroom. ‘Oooh,’ says Briohny gleefully, starfished in the doorway. ‘Lovers’ tiff.’

  ~

  I’m still thinking about Sarah and Portia’s blow-up on the way back from dinner the following night. Simone and Lou flank me, but neither of them are talking and it’s eerily quiet. Fog trails along the ground, and from the road I can see the lights are out in the dorm.

  After fixing ourselves mugs of Milo, the three of us huddle together on Simone’s bed. Simone had been telling us a story at dinner about a boy she likes and I’m eager for her to continue. It’s so cold in the house that our breath comes out in white puffs. Stirring her mug, Simone looks to the window at the end of the aisle and her face freezes.

  ‘Someone’s at the window.’

  I glance at Lou and smirk. ‘Good one.’ It takes more than that to fool me. Even so, I twist so I’m facing the dark glass. I can’t see anything.

  But then a bang makes us all scream. I rush to my bedside table, rifling through the top drawer for my pocketknife. I’m not taking any chances—it might be some kind of sex-crazed maniac out there, coming to rape and murder us. We’re all facing the door, me with the knife raised like a samurai, when Kendall walks in.

  ‘Oh, thank God!’

  Kendall stops at the foot of her bed, frowning. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘We saw a man at the window,’ sobs Simone. ‘Didn’t you see him?’

  ‘No.’ Kendall pulls back her covers, about to climb in, but she hesitates. ‘Why don’t I take a look outside?’ she says. ‘You guys seem scared.’

  ‘Would you really?’

  I follow Kendall to the back door and watch her climb over the concrete partition and make her way into the bush. I can’t believe she is brave enough to go out there, that she’s doing this for us. Spindly trees, like bad spirits, stoop towards her. ‘Be careful,’ I murmur.

  Simone and Lou are still sitting on the edge of the bed, white-faced, when I return to the dorm. I’m hardly through the doorway before another, louder scream pierces the air. I spin around to face Kendall charging back inside, her face paler than ever, almost translucent. She thrusts a finger towards the window before scrambling under her covers.

  It’s all too much. I start screaming, ‘We’re going to die! We’re going to die!’ Lou cowers on the floor beside her bed and Simone starts thrashing her arms and legs against the mattress like she’s having some sort of fit.

  We carry on like this for another minute before Kendall throws back the doona with a loud, throaty laugh I’ve never heard before. ‘Your faces,’ she wheezes. ‘Oh, man. Thank you. That was priceless.’

  ‘What?’ I say, pushing the damp hair from my face.

  Kendall wipes her eyes. ‘There’s nothing out there, Bec. You must have imagined it.’

  ‘What—all three of us?’

  Before I know what I’m doing I leap off the bed and rush towards her. Kendall draws her knees up to her chin. I don’t know what to do now, so I grab the bed end and shake it. ‘You fucking bitch,’ I scream. ‘You stupid fucking bitch!’

  I stop, sagging over the rail. Kendall stares at me. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbles.

  I rub at my forehead, which has started tingling uncomfortably. ‘Not good enough. When I tell the others, you’ll fucking well regret that.’

  I stagger down the aisle. Simone and Lou have stopped crying, and have their hands raised to their mouths.

  ~

  At first no one believes us about the man. But when they see how shaky we are, they soon grow scared too, and after I’ve told them about Kendall’s trick, Sarah marches over and throws the towels hanging over her bed end on the floor. ‘One, two, three,’ she shouts, grinding them under her foot. ‘You dumb bitch.’

  When Miss Lacey comes on duty, I take her to Simone’s bed and make her sit where we sat. Next I escort her to the window and we peer into the darkness. ‘I’ve never been so scared in my life,’ I breathe against the glass.

  She turns to me, pursing her lips. Her eyes drift past me to Simone and Lou, sitting on the edge of their beds, then to the other girls lingering by the door.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bec,’ she says.
‘I don’t think there’s anyone out there.’

  I blink. ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘It’s not that . . .’

  ‘But you don’t believe me?’

  ‘Rebecca,’ she says, pushing her palms into her eyes, ‘I don’t know what else to say. There is no one out there. What you saw, if you did see anything at all, was a trick of the light. A shadow or a reflection. But no one is out there.’

  ‘I saw someone!’

  Miss Lacey sighs. ‘I’m sure you think you saw something, but I know from experience that you didn’t. The school’s boundaries are very well protected.’ She leans towards me. ‘Anyway, this isn’t the first time you’ve cried wolf about this sort of thing.’ She raises her eyebrows and I’m certain a smile twitches on her lips. ‘Try to get some rest tonight. You’re all very tired. This term is always tough, especially with the cold.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she take us seriously?’ I mutter after she’s gone.

  Portia looks up from her sketchpad and scoffs. ‘Too busy shagging the assistants.’

  ‘Stupid slut,’ I say.

  Portia blinks, before throwing back her head to laugh.

  ~

  It is only later, when I’ve changed into my pyjamas, that I hear voices and the tinny rattle of laughter. I wander through to the bathroom where Portia and Sarah are standing outside a steaming shower cubicle.

  A moment later Kendall steps out, wrapped in a white towel, and she eyes the girls as she moves to the sink. Her hair is gathered in an elaborate bun, but a few ringlets have come loose, sticking to her throat like tendrils of blood.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she says to the mirror.

  ‘Just your beauty,’ Portia says. ‘Your ravishing albino locks.’

  They’re on either side of her now, and before Kendall can say anything they’ve yanked the hem of her towel, pulling it clean off.

  ‘Hey!’

  But they’re gone. Out of the bathroom and through the back door, the towel fluttering like a matador’s cape. Kendall runs after them, her feet padding across the tiles. I follow, taking the side path to the front of the house, where I almost trip over naked Kendall crouched on the steps.