Right. She’s still there.
“On that note, I’m gonna find me my hot chickster.”
I didn’t mean for Nate to catch my expression, but both out faces dropped at the same time. If he’s on the same wave-length as me, it’s you cannot go now.
“Oh, okay. Cool.”
“Huh, well have fun, Scout.”
I’m relieved. At least Nate and I didn’t settle for begging for Scout to stay, though I’m getting more and more curious about her attachment to Steph. Nate and I have to talk at some point in the future anyway.
She winks at us and leaves Nate standing in front of me. Of course, I happen to turn and face his crotch. Seeing that lump in his jeans flushes me with hot shame. I’ll break out in an all-out sweat in the next five seconds if I stay so close. Maybe I could reach out, and jerk him off here. Show the girls to stay away, even just for tonight, while I figure out what I want.
I scoot back and say, “Want to sit?” remembering I have to do something.
He looks back to his group. One guy is licking between his fingers, two just smile, and the other picks at his chair.
I’m ruined. They know, Nate knows, everyone knows.
“Outside?”
I nod and follow. I burn up seeing the same spot Nate and I sat at when I made that bet and gave him head. Thankfully, that memory must be too painful for him at the moment and we sit under a different gas heater at a different set of chairs.
The next amount of never-ending time is silent torture. We must look serious because no one drops in to chat, to offer a drink. There are no interruptions besides Nate and I trying to bury away from this tense moment without moving. Nate sits with his legs open, arms on either side of the chair, picking at the armrests. I keep my eyes down and follow every scratch, change of position, and noise he makes under my lashes where he can’t see me.
The gas heater is hot but I’m shivering regardless. The shiver is exactly like the one I have when I’m sick, like that time I had the flu and I’d shiver despite having no sheets on me and it being the middle of summer. This is a shiver that goes all the way to my bones, that feels like my skin is going to slip right off me and I’ll die right here.
From shame.
From confusion.
Why am I feeling so strongly? I’ve never cared before. And I shouldn’t. I don’t have feelings for Nate. He knew that, and didn’t ask me to go out exclusively.
I don’t owe him anything. Yet it feels the opposite.
After timing fifteen whole agonising minutes of silence and cutthroat tension, Nate dismisses me with a look I’ll never forget. Which is fitting, considering I cut his heart out.
Tonight, I didn’t just dress up as a whore for this party, I embodied one.
At the same time I think, Good, you slut, you deserved to be raped by Him, Nate says, “Click, click.”
It sounds like click, click forever.
I finally got to where I want to be. Public sex, exposed and stripped. I proved I wasn’t attached to Nate.
Is it everything you wanted it to be, Kalli? I don’t want to think about the answer to that but I feel it in my mind and in the shaken state of my body.
13
That night into that morning, I lie for hours, staring at the blackness of my ceiling. Thoughts don’t end and sleep won’t come.
How long will Nate be mad?
Is Scout hiding the fact she’s a lesbian? She’s never given an afterthought to female hook ups—at least not in gossip to me. Why is she so into this girl?
When I hear a noise, I jump out of bed since I’m doing nothing else anyway. It’s from the twins’ room. Wide awake, I pad down there. I need the distraction.
“Tris, baby,” I say, crawling into position near him. I plonk him between my legs and cuddle. “You okay?” I say, lips to his soft hair.
“I saw it again,” he whispers.
“Saw what?”
He dips his head back so he’s staring up from under my face. “Mummy drowning me.”
I clamp my lips to restrain the cry that is begging to escape. Since it won’t go, I rearrange my arms, holding his knees in close, and holding him so tight to my heart that no monsters can scare him.
“From the pool?”
I feel him nod.
“Tris, Mum … she’s different. She’s weird and crazy and mean sometimes, but she loves you and would never want to hurt you. You know Mum always wants you to have fun. That’s all she was trying to do.”
He starts whimpering. I flip him around and wipe the tears, then kiss both spots on his cheeks. Why give us so much feeling? Why must we love so hard and feel so damn low? He’s a child.
“Sorry I cried.”
“Hey, I’m not like Mum. I don’t expect sorry for how you feel, ‘kay? Cry if you need to.”
So he does, for a few minutes, until my soft lullabies stop his chest-stuttering sobs.
“I’m just scared to tell you something.”
“Don’t be, Tris. What is it?”
“I peed in the pool. I was so scared and—” He hangs his head. “—and … it happened!”
For my little brother, I hold it in. He cries and I hold him until his energy is spent and he can’t cry while he sleeps.
But me? My tears sting my eyes and my chest builds with the pressure holding it. I don’t trust myself to just let it out because it will be this big, loud thing that will involve me waking Mum and punching her in the face, even though she still hasn’t been out doing drugs yet. I have to give her credit for trying.
But. But friggin’ hell. Can’t she put her stupid antics aside and see she scared her son so much he pissed himself in the pool when he knows it’s wrong?
As I think, Not everyone is like you. Not everyone needs to be as crazy as you, I pause.
Think.
Isn’t that me in a nutshell?
The way Scout reacted, you’d think I fucked up. Sure it was wild, but I was at a party, and there was shit going on all around me. It wasn’t just me. But after seeing her, I wondered for the first time if I’d regret what I’d done. Seeing Nate’s body all drained of hope that I can’t … just no.
Scout had looked at me like she was saying Normal people don’t do that.
With Tris back asleep, I walk back down the hall to my room.
She’s right.
I fucked up. Normal people don’t see one of their most important relationships falling apart and accelerate it by knowing you’re doing something stupid but doing it anyway. I am my mother’s daughter. Seth, Tristan and I are the most important people to Mum and I swear she unintentionally targets us.
I don’t want to be like that, but I’m realising that’s what I am, too.
For a moment I consider tapping out a text to Nate, but what would I say? Sorry would just be a cop out. Begging would only make him push me further away.
I do all I can and flop into my outline from before, staring at the blackness of my ceiling once more.
And I think about all the ways I think I like him. Yeah, like that.
• • •
In the morning, I wake up and check my phone first thing, as usual. My heart pounds, waking me in a second when I see I have a text.
From Nate.
I take a breath, push my morning hair from my face, then lunge for an elastic band and shove it in a high-top bun to get it out of the way. Then, only after my body is about to combust with the adrenaline coursing through me do I allow myself to read his text:
Nate: Was going to tell you that I have a week-long shoot with one of my classes. I leave tomorrow.
14
By Wednesday night I have a neat pile of notebooks and papers on the right side of my desk, a huge stack of messy papers on the left, and my laptop somewhere in the middle under the pens and food wrappers and tissues and more paper. It’s surprising how much uni work I can get done when I force myself.
Until Wednesday night.
Monday I started the trend, Tuesday I thought I could continu
e it for the whole week but by tonight I burst. I throw back my chair, which topples to the floor, and stomp to my bed where I fist my hands and slam them into the mattress. One, three, five times and then I assess the outcome and decide things don’t look destroyed enough.
Standing in an open space, my arms are pinned straight by my side, my fingers wriggling and squeezing my thighs so I jerk in pain. I could smash my phone and my computer and it wouldn’t be enough. Then I see my violin case, the top closed but the latches unlocked, and I no longer want to smash everything.
I want to overpower it.
I storm up to my bookshelf and pull out a folder. Inside I leaf through the sheet music until I come across “Love the Way You Lie”, originally sung by Eminem and Rihanna. I remember when that was released. I’d stick in my earphones, go for a run and push myself harder than other times, running until my breaths turned into puffs, puffing until my chest felt like it was being squeezed off by a band, struggling to breathe until my throat felt funny and I had to stop off the sidewalk, lean over and wait for the nauseous feeling to subside.
When I play on my violin, I hack at it. I love this thing, but it’s my therapy when I can’t explain myself and boy, do I have a lot to say. Lost in the moment, I wonder why every note sounds hushed, strangled, until I see my bow has crossed the bridge and I’m playing over the hump in the little section where the sounds can’t echo through the violin. How the hell this happened, I don’t know. I’m a professional player, a qualified teacher.
I live and breathe this thing.
I put the violin and bow back in its case, close the top, and slide the case back in its resting place.
Then I sink on my bed, face in the concave of my palms, and feel heat rushing to my cheeks, my ears tingling and a tremble hurting me from deep inside. I almost cry, but it’s not sadness in me. It’s nothingness.
It’s Nate. Rather, me; my mistakes. Oh, how foresight would have been a nice gift to have. Why is it humans have to lose what they had in order to realise how important it was?
I drop my hands, crack my neck back and tell myself it’ll be fine. I’ve always composed myself before. Always been fine for my family.
I’ll be fine.
Not in the mood to play more, fed up with that desk, and ahead on current and projected course work, I lie back on the bed, hearing the springs creak under me in the afternoon quiet. Mum’s at work and the boys are at kindergarten.
I stare at the ceiling. It’s just as empty as it is when the darkness encompasses it when I can’t sleep at night. Because no matter the time of day my past, my mistakes, always hover above me there, twirling and swimming in circles like ghosts. Now, I watch these memories:
Picking at the crusts on my sandwich in the toilet block at lunchtimes. Feeling the bread harden, then hating myself when I had to throw out the hard bread. But secretly, I enjoyed the starving feeling. Walking, I’d be lost, like floating on clouds, hanging above flaming lava. Sleeping I’d wake up choking from a nightmare, heart pounding in my ears and tears behind my eyes that wouldn’t come. But feeling starving was a control I had. No matter when or where or why it happened, it could never be mistaken for anything other than real, crippling pain. I’d cry, sometimes, when I was that hungry.
I trace the cornices of the ceiling with my gaze, coming back to my body here, nineteen, not a gangly girl anymore.
Thinking back to me plastered against that hallway wall with people watching and hearing about Donovan stamping his name over my slutty image, me disintegrating my reputation further like with every crazy thing I do, I’m starting to feel the build up.
I don’t know what’s building up, but something is.
Something startles me, and I see it’s my phone, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Scout?” I answer warily into it.
“Der, Fred. Who else could it be ringing when my caller ID comes up?”
“Right,” I say. Of course it was her. I’d have known that if I weren’t in my own world. “I’m sorry I’ve been MIA. Just with—”
“I didn’t ring you to pull teeth and drag ‘sorrys’ from that potty mouth of yours.”
“Oh, okay.”
Scout, no matter my mood, can pick me right up and get me into giggles, like now.
“Keep me company, bitch.”
I shower, fix my face with some makeup and dress to hang at her parents’ house, since she’s staying there after helping her sister with homework.
I arrive there that evening. We both don’t have class the next day, she isn’t working at Target until noon, and her family are all busy doing their own things, so we make a box-set night of it.
Every step further, I wonder who’ll spill what they want to say first. I put my bag down; do I mention it during the silence? I sit on her bed, cross my legs and we exchange a “hello” glance; do I acknowledge the big, fat elephant now?
Building, building, building.
Is Scout a lesbian?
Am I totally crazy to do what I did?
Scout, unaware of my inner ramblings, goes to her collection. Her wall unit is taller than her standing, and she’s installed more shelves in it to deck it out to the max. There is an order of sorts. Charmed, The OC and more are in the middle. There’s Law & Order, CSI and others just above. She sits cross-legged at the bottom and goes through that section.
“Okay, tell me when to stop,” she says. “Breaking Bad, Revenge, Big Bang—”
“Okay, stop.”
“Seriously? I was hoping that was the only one you—”
“Are you a lesbian?”
It falls out. Old habits die hard, and right then, when she called out those names faster and faster, my blood pressure was rising until I had to choke out something to make her slow down.
I grab the ends of the bed and slink off, crawling up to her. She hasn’t moved, only her eyes following my path. I take her hands in mine and roll them over, all the while covering them with mine.
I try again.
“I’d never, ever treat you badly, or think lesser of you. I’d just be sad if you’d kept it all in, keeping your secret to the world, if that’s the case.
“So,” I say. “I’ve either made this our most awkward conversation yet—and that’s some feat—or that look is ‘how the hell is she reading my mind’.”
“I never lied,” Scout mumbles, chin to chest. Lifting her head up, she reaches for DVD cases and says, “So season one, two, three—”
“Scout, seriously.”
I place my hands on both her knees, hold my gaze on her eyes until she begrudgingly looks up.
“Oh, it’s cool. Nothing really to say. Why the sudden questions?”
Do I say it? I knew this moment would come but looking at her now, I feel like a predator. She’s unsure, mindlessly flicking through the shelf of DVDs, body angled away from me. And her voice. It’s like she’s a mouse hiding who’s trying to pretend the hissing cat isn’t standing right there.
I can, I figure. I can ease into it.
“It’s just that … well with Steph, and …”
Now it’s Scout’s turn to stare me down. She tips her head and stares at me at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Um, Kalli Perkins? Is she home?” Scout asks, waving inches from my face.
At first I’m confused, but then it hits. Why the hell is Kalli Perkins so shy all of a sudden? I suck in a breath, and another, and slowly let it all out. She watches me do this. Her expression deepens from plain confused to wrinkles between her eyebrows.
“No thanks to my own fault, I’ve spent the last two and a half days keeping to myself and shitty, but it got me wondering.” And I’d rather talk about you than me. “You bring her up in a way you’ve never done before. You’ve never gushed over your boyfriends. She seems perfect for you, considering how happy you are, except for … you know …” … the fact you say you’re straight.
“Well …” She lets out a pent-up gulp of air. “I’m gay.”
It’s gone. Her ver
y own release. If tension were a bird chained, a flock would be soaring from her body out into the world and now she can stretch and walk with tall shoulders. Now, I think I’m seeing Scout truly happy for the first time.
Look at the girl. She has this huge beam. Suddenly, she’s up, twirling around. Then she leaps into the air and curls up into a ball to let her mattress catch her. “It feels so good.”
“I know. I know!”
I follow her and launch onto the bed too, but stay in my superman-flight position and hit the bed full-force. If it’s possible, Scout grins wider and laughs harder.
Then she scoots away. “You don’t have to be like this with me, if you don’t feel comfortable. Or, crap, the kissing? Crap, it doesn’t matter. We can draw boundaries, and—”
“Shh.” I place my shh! finger to her lips. “You’re too awesome not to roll and jump and squeal with. It was always just fun when you’ve kissed me.”
“You don’t think I’m disgusting?”
“Scout,” I say.
Why would she think that? Scout has one of the kindest souls. It’s part of why I’m attracted to her. She has this lure that draws you in with her capacity to be so much fun, yet also willing to give so much time and care. Thinking about that, I realise I’m attracted to having her as my friend because I want to be more like her. Because I’m not like that.
My heart aches for Scout. She could have so much love in her life and she’s held back because of opinions? God, it hurts like someone has my heart in their grip.
“All right. Let me explain,” she says. “Those 5 feet, 10 inch blonde-haired, curvaceous Barbie-look-a-likes Dad slept with during those two affairs? One was a bulky Vin Diesel look-a-like named Chris, and the other was a just your plain-old-Joe-type guy. One night, I heard Mum and Dad arguing and hard as I try to forget it, when I’ve wanted to tell my family or you or anyone, I can only remember her saying, ‘You’re a stupid, embarrassing fag. You like dicks up your ass? You like to shit pancakes? You’re not a man. Men like women. Real men do their wives, not another man. I see you and have the urge to vomit.’”
Being Kalli Page 9
