When the World was Flat (and we were in love)

by Ingrid Jonach

  The alcohol had given me a buzz. I put my hands up in the air and shouted made-up lyrics to the song that was booming through the sound system. The ground swayed to the music and I swayed too, hitting the polished floorboards with a thud.

  “Ouch,” I said, before breaking into peels of laughter.

  Jo grabbed my hands, but she also fell and we both rolled around on the floor of the gymnasium, laughing hysterically.

  Jackson finally pulled us to our feet. First Jo, who fell a second and third time before he propped her up against the bleachers, and then he turned his attention to my sorry self. “Come on, Lillie,” he shouted above the music, his hands around my wrists. “Up you get.”

  I laughed again as he lifted me. “Upsidaisy!”

  I threw my arms around his shoulders as I found my feet, and as I did, my eyes fell on a face in the background. Tom. He was leaning against the wall with his arms folded. His lips formed a hard line below his mask.

  I smiled and turned towards Jackson. I was about to close my eyes for our first kiss when he stepped backwards. He was shaking his head and motioning with his hands.

  “What?” I shouted above the music.

  It could have been the red lights, but his cheeks looked like they were flushed with embarrassment. His eyes shifted to Jo and Sylv.

  “What?” I asked again.

  “You. Me. Friends,” he shouted over the music, as if I was a child and he had to spell it out. I guess he did.

  My own cheeks began to burn like hotplates. It was hot. Too hot. I pushed through the throng, using my elbows as battering rams.

  “Watch it!”

  “Hey!”

  “Ow.”

  “Lillie!” Jackson called after me.

  I walked past Tom. Melissa was tugging on his hands, begging him to dance. It took me a while to find our pile of belongings in the shadows and I kicked the shins of a few canoodling couples before I found my new best friend, Johnny Walker.

  The fresh air swirled around me as I found my way into the quad and booked it to the Art Block, dodging a couple of teachers who were standing guard to make sure girls like Sylv were in the gymnasium and not in the bushes.

  I sat down on the stairs. Stupid, I thought as I unscrewed the lid on the bottle of whiskey and took a swig. Cough. Cough. Cough. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I had screwed up my friendship with Jackson and my… whatever it was… with Tom.

  I heard a footfall in the darkness and my mind automatically went to my killer. “Is someone there?” I asked.

  My answer was the distant sound of Michael Jackson singing “Thriller”.

  “Answer me!” I stood up, adrenaline rushing through my body like a flash flood in a storm water drain. “This. Is. It,” my blood shouted as it pulsed through my veins. The dreams had become reality. I was about to come face-to-face with the woman in the balaclava.

  My muscles twitched in anticipation. It could have been the alcohol, but I decided I was going to kick her ass. Of course, my self-defense training consisted of a kick to the groin, but in my imagination I had martial arts moves to rival Jackie Chan.

  I reached up to remove my mask, as a figure stepped forward into the circle of light.

  “Oh,” I whispered and my knees went weak.

  Tom caught me before I could hit the concrete and I rested my head against his chest before realizing that his body was as stiff as a board. “Are you drunk?” he asked.

  I gave him a small shove as I stepped backwards. “Who are you? Turnip?”

  “Lillie. This is not you.”

  I gave a short laugh. “You think you know me?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Right. From another dimension.”

  He nodded. “Right.”

  I squinted at him, suddenly sober. “I thought it was a hallucination.” I said. “The theory of everything. Parallel dimensions.”

  Tom shook his head. His fingers brushed my cheek, feather-light. I reached up to stroke his face in return.

  “How did you get the scar on your chin?” I suddenly asked.

  He chuckled, the sound making me smile, even though I had missed the joke. “An ice skating accident,” he said, his cool eyes warm for a change. “A friend of mine thought it would be fun to go ice skating on the lake.”

  “At Rose Hill?” I asked, feeling like I had heard this story.

  He nodded and rubbed his chin, his smile now sad. “We ended up having a fall.”

  “I have a pair of ice skates,” I said slowly. “They used to belong to Deb.”

  “I know.”

  A memory suddenly burst into my mind, like sunlight flooding into a house that had been boarded up for a decade. I could feel the ice skates under my feet, wobbly and ten sizes too big, but hands held me tight, leading me onto the ice with small steps.

  “Chicken,” a voice goaded good-naturedly. “You were the one who wanted to go ice skating.” The voice sounded young – a child – but the accent, a mix of British and something else, sounded like Tom.

  I looked up and saw a boy about eight or nine years old. He seemed to radiate in the light that bounced off the ice, giving him an angelic appearance. A red scarf was wrapped around his neck and above it, his smile beamed, showing off his perfect teeth.

  There was an innocence in his blue eyes, which sparkled like the lightest colored sapphires. An innocence that has long been lost, I thought as my mind returned to this dimension and the now grown-up Tom.

  “Who am I?” I whispered, wanting answers for the past six months, the past sixteen years. “Please, Tom. I want to know.”

  Tom reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a crumpled photo. “They say a picture tells a thousand words.”

  I took it from him, a lump forming in my throat. “The girl in the photo is dead,” he had said.

  I looked at the couple in the photo – first at Tom and then at his girlfriend – and as soon as I did, my chest tightened and my breath became short and sharp, like I had been kicked in the gut.

  My head swam, as memories bubbled to the surface, rising from the depths of my mind. The girl in the photo is alive, I thought, as I blinked at her high cheekbones, her pointy ears and her dark circles. She looked back at me with emerald eyes.

  I lifted my own emerald eyes to Tom. “The girl in the photo,” I whispered, “is me.”

  We startled as we heard voices at the top of the stairs. It was Jo and Jackson.

  “We thought you had been kidnapped,” Jackson said, looking at Tom pointedly.

  Tom grabbed the photo and crammed it into his pocket again, before storming up the stairs. He watched Jo warily as he passed, like she was a wild animal about to attack.

  “What is his deal?” Jo asked with a laugh.

  I ran to the grass, where I fell to my knees and threw up.

  That night I had a new dream.

  I was sitting on the steps outside the Art Block. “Is someone there?” I called out and, instead of Tom, I saw the woman in the balaclava.

  I dropped the bottle of whiskey and it smashed on the concrete as I stumbled down the stairs and into the stairwell. I was trapped. I whirled around and tried to pull off her balaclava again, but she turned her head. It was then that I saw the tattoo.

  “Jo?” I asked, but the laugh she gave was my own.

  The cold went through me and I heard someone who sounded like Tom shout, “No!” It was like the wail of a wild dog and I woke with the sound echoing in my ears.

  19

  The fallout from the Masquerade Ball was like a nuclear bomb had missed its target and hit our no-name school. The word on the street was that a few girls had turned up high and one of them had thrown up on Turnip.

  “Stupid stoners,” Sylv said, because we were in the firing line as a result. A teacher had found the empty bottle of whiskey near the Art Block and Turnip was on our scent like a bloodhound, despite the bunch of seniors who had arrived drunk.

  I could care less about Turnip. My mind was on
the photo I had seen last night. Maybe it had been Photoshopped. It would take two seconds to cut and paste my face onto–

  “Lillie.” Jo broke into my thoughts as she grabbed my arm and shook it like a shake ’n’ bake. “Turnip said if I ended up in his office again it would mean instant suspension.”

  “I think this will be instant expulsion,” Sylv said.

  Jo went as white as a sheet.

  “Should I give her a slap?” Sylv asked.

  I gave her a look.

  “What? Just trying to help.”

  Jo was barely breathing by the time Turnip decided to have a junior-senior sit-in in the gymnasium. The Dance Committee must have been at school since the crack of dawn cleaning it from top to bottom, but I could see gold glitter caught between the wooden floorboards, which I could guarantee would be there for the next decade.

  “We can sit here all day and all night if you want,” Turnip said, his voice booming over the PA system.

  “Bye-bye pop quiz,” Sylv whispered.

  Jo looked at her wide-eyed, as if speaking was akin to a confession.

  I frowned. A few weeks ago Jo would have been laughing at Turnip, asking if he was going to take our fingerprints. That being said, a few weeks ago she would not have brought a bottle of whiskey to school.

  As Turnip droned on, he stared through each and every student with those watery eyes. He seemed to stare at me for an hour and I stared back, like a deer caught in headlights.

  “I am warning you,” he continued as I shifted my gaze to the doorway, where a stray streamer hung like a forgotten cobweb. “I take underage drinking very seriously.”

  Jo let out a squeak that sounded like someone had stepped on a canary, and Melissa, who was sitting two rows in front, turned to look at her with narrowed eyes.

  I elbowed Sylv, who elbowed Jo.

  “Keep your trap shut, Jo,” Sylv hissed, but we knew Jo was as capable of keeping her trap shut as Melissa was of buying her clothes from Costco.

  I grimaced, as I thought about the pay-off. Jo would be expelled after using up her first and second strikes with Mr Bailey and Sylv would be pulled out of school by her parents. Jackson would probably be expelled too and his family would leave town, heading back to Minnesota or wherever they had been the past five years or so.

  The pay-off for me, though would be a cup of chamomile tea.

  “I will find out,” Turnip promised, holding up the empty bottle, like a warlord with a severed head. “And when I do…”

  Jo had gone green around the gills, reminding me of Lindsey Manning two seconds before she threw up in front of the class in fourth grade.

  I took a deep breath, but before I could confess I heard a male voice say, “Fine. You got me.”

  There was a murmur as Tom climbed to his feet. Melissa was tugging on his jacket and hissing at him to sit down.

  “What the hell is he doing?” I whispered.

  “Who cares?” Jo said gleefully. “He got us off the hook.”

  “That boy is either getting laid by one of us or he wants to lay one of us,” Sylv said, looking at me.

  I flushed, both with embarrassment and anger. This was not about being chivalrous, about picking up photos or tampons or bags. This was about continuing to mess with my mind and my emotions. First with his talk about parallel dimensions, and then with the photo. I clenched and unclenched my fists. “It was actually me,” I said, standing up.

  A ripple of laughter went through the gymnasium, but Turnip silenced it with a piercing look. Tom gave me a piercing look of his own that asked, “What the fuck?”

  I squared my jaw.

  We were both suspended for a week.

  Deb picked me up in the beat-up sedan. I could see her through the windshield, eyes closed, like she was harnessing her chi. Her cheeks were red, burning with emotion like mine did when I was put on the spot.

  “Did you bring a cup of chamomile tea?” I joked as I opened the door. “Or maybe a thermos?” I slumped into the passenger seat, the wooden beads of the seat-cover rattling like a den of snakes.

  Her eyes flew open and then homed in on me like a laser beam on a sniper rifle. They were emerald like mine and I wondered if mine flashed in the afternoon sunlight too. “This is not a joke, young lady,” she said, in a voice unlike my mother.

  I raised my eyebrows and laughed.

  She flinched, as if I had slapped her across the face. “You think this is funny?”

  I shook my head, pressing my lips together, but a giggle slipped out.

  Deb pumped the gas pedal as she turned the key in the ignition. The engine spluttered and roared. “You used to be such a good girl,” she said, as she pulled the rust-bucket into the turning circle. A couple of sophomores who were sneaking a cigarette at the side of the Main Building laughed at us as we passed.

  I used to be such a good girl. The words hung between us, spelling out what I had known for six months. I had changed and not like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. I was like an ice cube melting in a glass. I had become less, instead of more.

  “Is that him?” Deb asked, slowing down. “The boy who got you drunk?”

  I lifted my head and saw Tom walking towards his SUV, which was parked out of sight around the block, as usual. For one heart-stopping moment I thought Deb was going to pull over and give him an ear-bashing, but she flicked on the blinker and turned in the opposite direction towards our street, giving me an earful instead.

  “You are not only suspended,” she said, warming up to her role as judge, jury and executioner, “but grounded as well. That means no friends and especially no boys.”

  “Mom!” I was surprised when the word came out of my mouth.

  I could tell she was surprised too, I had been calling her Deb since third grade, but she tightened her lips. “Yes. I am your mother,” she said resolutely. “I am not your friend and I am not – what was it you called me the other day – a nutcase?”

  I looked out of the window, my cheeks flushed.

  “This is what you wanted, Lillie,” she continued. “You wanted me to ground you, lecture you, make you do the dishes.”

  “And, as they say, ‘Be careful what you wish for,’” I said dryly.

  We sat in silence until we reached our street. “Deb?” I said, unable to contain my curiosity.

  “What?”

  I hesitated. “How do you know William Windsor-Smith?”

  There was a sharp intake of air from my mother and the car slowed. “Where did you hear that name?” Her eyes were on the road, but she swallowed hard and blinked a few times, as if a bug had flown into her eye.

  “I know his son,” I said. I stopped short of saying he was the boy who supposedly got me drunk.

  “His son?” She turned to stare at me and drove past our house. “Shit,” she cursed, slamming on the brakes and shifting the car into reverse. The engine whined and the tire hit the curb, launching us onto the sidewalk.

  “Deb!”

  “I know! I know!” she shouted.

  We managed to get the car into the drive without a fatality, although Humpback Harding came out onto the street to supervise and gave us both a heart attack when she tapped on my window with her cane.

  “I thought you were that hooligan,” she complained when I opened the car door. “What was his name? The Murphy boy. You know, the one they arrested for the accident down at the train tracks.”

  “Jackson,” my mother said, frowning at me like her friends were Harvard Alumni, instead of a bunch of pot-smoking dropouts. “Jackson Murphy.”

  The girls came to see me after school, but my prison guard told them no visitors. I could hear a hint of a smile when Sylv gave her sass, but Deb was like an oak. A little lip from Sylv wasn’t going to make her bend the rules – rules that included no TV and no cell, though my cell was broken anyway.

  I waved to the girls through my bedroom window as they went. Jo walked backwards for half of the street, waving back at me. I knew she would
be feeling torn up that I had taken the rap, but I had less to lose.

  20

  I slept in the next morning. Partly because I had spent a sleepless night thinking about Tom, but mostly because I had no reason to get up early. I could have gotten used to being suspended.

  Deb slept in too. I could hear her cursing and banging around in the bathroom, getting ready for her shift at Tree of Life.

  A few minutes later she pushed open my bedroom door. Apparently there was no such thing as knocking when you were in home detention.

  “I finish at three and until then you’re housebound,” she said, pointing her finger at me, like a schoolmarm.

  “What if the house catches fire?” I asked lazily.

  She rolled her eyes and spun on her heel. A minute later I saw her coming back up the hallway, slinging a beaded handbag over her shoulder.

  “But I need vitamin D,” I called out to her. “They say rickets is a real risk.” “They” were two couch surfers who used to sunbathe in the nude in our backyard despite the complaints from our neighbors.

  “Fine,” Deb said, her keys rattling. “You can go into the backyard.”

  I smiled, even though there was no reason to smile about going into our backyard. I guessed I could take a few photos of the dead veggie patch or the mildew on the north side of house. At least it would keep my mind off Tom. Maybe.

  It was about an hour later that I rolled out of bed. I pulled on my knock-around jeans, which had a tear under the knee, and a white knitted hoodie with a stain on the front pocket. I scraped my hair back into a high ponytail, reminding myself that no one was going to see me today, tomorrow, or the day after that.

  “You have to love being housebound,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror.

  I poured a bowl of muesli and, like the delinquent I was, went into the lounge room and switched on the contraband TV. I flicked through the channels, pausing on a program about urban legends and then stopping on another about cloning.

  The presenter was talking about a bunch of scientists in Scotland who had cloned a sheep from a mammary gland and named it after Dolly Parton. I wondered how they could tell she was a clone as I scanned the flock of identical sheep on the screen. I guess if she had been human it would have been like having an identical twin – like the girl in the photo.