My Life as a Hashtag

by Gabrielle Williams

  ‘Why spank you,’ she said, then gathered it up on one side and tied it into a knot at her thigh so that all the pleats concertinaed like a half-open accordion. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, looking down at the knotted pleats.

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘Well, spank you two times.’ She grinned.

  I sighed.

  ‘The top’s BOY, though,’ I added.

  BOY. Better on You. A little something my friends and I made up. My clothes are always BOY. Or more specifically, BOL: Better on Liv. Liv doesn’t seem to care about what she’s wearing, what she looks like, whether something fits or not. She can probably afford to be like that because everything looks Better on Liv. She’s like a coathanger, angular and wiry, with cropped hair and eyes that look directly at you, pierce you, then crinkle up in a naughty smile.

  Which was how she managed to get away with wearing a tartan skirt that was long and misshapen and circa Battle of Hastings. And my T-shirt.

  She pulled my shirt out from her stomach to look upside-down at the print of Bambi on the front of it. ‘Maybe I should keep it,’ she said, patting Bambi possessively back against her body. ‘Seeing as it looks so good on me.’

  ‘Huh,’ I grunted, then shifted so that I was sitting up cross-legged, leaning against my bedhead.

  ‘Dad’s got a girlfriend,’ I said, holding up my nails as if that explained everything. ‘We went and got a manicure together today. Which is kind of weird now that I say it like that, but I didn’t realise she was his girlfriend at the time.’

  Liv kneeled up and stuck flat one of the magazine pages on my wall that had folded up at the corner.

  ‘When did you figure out she was his girlfriend?’ she asked.

  I sighed. ‘When your mum and Maude and my mum made a big deal about my nails.’

  Liv raised her eyebrows. ‘Nails don’t mean she’s his girlfriend.’

  ‘I know, but … I don’t know. I think they’re right. I think she is.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ Liv asked, dragging my laptop up off the floor, pulling it onto her lap and flipping it open. Typing in my password.

  ‘Tosca,’ I said. ‘She’s Dad’s PA.’

  I looked over Liv’s shoulder as she logged into my Facebook account, went to Dad’s profile; scrolled down.

  It was strange. I’d never thought to have a look at Dad’s Facebook. It turned out he had two hundred and seventy-three friends, which is probably not bad for an old guy. I guess. I mean, who knows. Liv scrolled down through all the familiar and unfamiliar faces Dad was friends with.

  And then we saw her. Tosca. With her hair looping in crazy corkscrews, and her eyes crinkled in a smile, looking up at whoever was taking the photo.

  ‘Is that her?’ Liv asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Well, she’s nice, I guess,’ I said. Liv clicked on Tosca’s profile, and we went through her photos: parties she’d been at, in dark rooms with twinkly lights and crowds of people, her arms around girlfriends, grinning at the camera. ‘At least, that’s what I thought until I found out she was shtupping my dad. Now I’m not sure what I think of her.’

  The photos on Tosca’s page could have been of me and Liv and Yumi and Anouk and everyone.

  She could have been a friend of mine. Could have been at any one of our parties.

  She could have been someone I’d hang out with. If I was, like, twenty-four or something, and not sixteen.

  ‘But, it’s kind of pretty bad,’ I went on, not sure how much to say, how to express it, ‘because, you know, Mum, it’s pretty bad for her. She’s pretty cut up.’

  Mum’s face had changed in that moment when I’d said Tosca’s name. It had literally seemed to harden around her mouth and her eyes, as if she’d never truly laugh again.

  Liv kept scrolling down through Tosca’s friends. ‘She looks young,’ she finally said.

  ‘Yeah, she’s, I don’t know, twenty-something. Maybe?’

  Liv whistled. ‘Score: your dad, I guess.’

  I didn’t answer. Yes, of course it was a score for Dad. Tosca was young and gorgeous and looked like exactly the sort of person you’d want to be friends with. Tosca was a game-changer.

  Score indeed.

  And then we saw, slotted in among all her other photos, a shot of Tosca and my dad. They were laughing at something, coats on, collars up, his arm resting along the back of her chair, a perfect, matching pair.

  Something about the photo seemed familiar. I looked closer.

  It had been taken at Grandpa’s house, in the backyard, the wisteria above their heads leafless and bony, like a skeleton grasping at the pergola.

  The wisteria at Grandpa’s had gone through its whole big-purple-pendant-flowers phase and was now at the shedding-leaves stage; it definitely wasn’t skeletal. It hadn’t been skeletal since last winter.

  The photo of Dad and Tosca had been taken deep in winter. Last year.

  At Grandpa’s.

  Back before Dad had moved out.

  I felt my eyes sting. Somehow, that made everything so much worse. Like Grandpa had been in on it. Like it was definite that there were two sides now, Dad’s side and Mum’s side, and Grandpa was staunchly on Dad’s side.

  I wanted to be on both sides. I didn’t want to have to choose.

  I leant back against my pillows and looked up at the ceiling. The flowers of my mobile dangled limply, like they needed water. Like they could barely be bothered hanging from the hook.

  I stood up on my bed and unhooked it.

  It seemed stupid to hold on to old memories when a few streets away, Dad was busy making new ones.

  #

  Liv was still wearing my Bambi T-shirt and her op-shop tartan skirt knotted at the thigh when we got round to Yumi’s place later that arvo.

  There was a party on at Jed’s that night, and a few of us were going to get ready over at Yumi’s.

  Jed’s.

  Jed’s.

  And once more for good luck.

  Jed’s.

  Jed has these blue, blue eyes and cheeks that look like someone’s slapped him over his bad behaviour. Because he’s bad. That’s for sure.

  It’s one of the things I like about him.

  Liked.

  He has this party trick that always gets a reaction. If he’s over at someone’s house and he sees that they’ve got a fishbowl, he always checks out the fridge to see if there’s a carrot in there. Then he grabs a knife and slices a length of carrot – you hardly even notice he’s doing it; he’s chatting away while he’s slicing – and he puts the rest of the carrot back in the fridge, and you keep on talking. A bit later, when he finds himself next to the fishbowl, he starts talking about the fish, saying how pretty they are, how much he loves fish, how much he really, really loves fish, how fish are one of his favourite things … and then he plunges his hand into the bowl, water splashing out onto the floor, and he pulls out a sliver of orange – the carrot he cut earlier in the night. He holds it up above his mouth for a second, making it wriggle like it’s alive, and then he drops it into his mouth, crunching down on it, freaking out anyone who’s standing close.

  Not me, because I’ve seen him do it a few times; I’m used to it. But if you’re not used to it, you’re guaranteed to think he’s just taken a goldfish out of the bowl and chowed down on it. The crunch of the carrot makes it especially convincing.

  It’s pretty funny. In a very bad way.

  So yeah, Jed.

  A couple of weeks earlier, Jed had posted a video of his dog, the Gun, on Facebook. The Gun’s mouth was moving exactly like a human being’s, and he was saying, ‘The olds aren’t in Melbourne on the sixteenth, so Jed and I thought some of you bee-atches – that’s a female dog, so it’s totally legit for me to say that – might want to come round and sniff some butt. What? That’s what dogs do for good times. BYO humans. Party in the doghouse!’

  The last couple of times I’d seen Jed at parties, he’d
made some pretty serious moves on me. But I figured there was no way I could ever kiss him, because there were complications.

  Anouk-sized complications.

  A quick explanation – something you’ll need for later on: over summer, Anouk had been up at Merimbula with her folks, and Jed had been up at Merimbula with his folks, and they’d hooked up a couple of times. Nothing had happened between them since they’d come back to Melbourne, but Anouk had put the word out that she liked him. She’d written his name all over her schoolbooks; she’d love-hearted his initials on her iPad cover. So he was now pretty much off limits to all of us – to any of Anouk’s friends.

  Because, you know, sisters before misters.

  The last time I’d seen Jed was at a party at Emile’s. It was late in the night and Jed had his arm resting on the wall above my head. He’d looked into my eyes and stepped in closer, so he was only a pout away.

  I had thought my chest might explode all over him.

  Which would have made things awkward.

  And then Hattie had come and dragged me by the arm over to everyone else because she was having a Snapchat emergency – ‘And if you’re not in the pics, it’s like you weren’t even here, and so, yeah, I need you over here’ – and while she was all Snapchat emergency-ing, I knew that the real reason she’d dragged me away was as a warning to step away from the cute guy.

  To let me know that Anouk wasn’t happy.

  So, I’d stepped away. Because who wanted to be the person to kiss the guy Anouk liked and then have to deal with the fallout the next day? Bags not.

  Hattie and Anouk are super-tight.

  Me, Liv and Yumi are super-tight.

  Other girls in our group are super-tight.

  And like a Venn diagram, all our super-tight smaller groups overlap into one gigantic group of solidarity and general party good times and, like I said before, sisters before misters.

  So, on that particular night, we were going over to sniff some butts at Jed’s (just saying, that’s specifically what the Gun invited us over for), but I wouldn’t be able to kiss Jed even if he wanted to kiss me, because Anouk still had first dibs on him. Even all these months on from Merimbula.

  Liv and I walked in the back door at Yumi’s. Wilder was slouched on the couch, watching something on TV – as usual. He held his hand up in a lazy wave – as usual. But things were vaguely off-kilter with Wilder these days. He was still the same towards me, I was still the same towards him, but there was a Harley-shaped hole in the room now, and I didn’t know why. All I knew was that Harley and Wilder weren’t hanging out anymore.

  Seventeen years of friendship – since they were kids together at kinder – gone. Like it hadn’t even mattered.

  I’d asked Harley a few times what was the matter, but he’d acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about; said he was busy, that uni was full-on, that everything was cool between him and Wilder, he was just doing other stuff and didn’t have time to go round there anymore.

  The most words I seemed to get out of Harley these days were it’s fine, nothing, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and that was on a good day – mostly he’d just stalk off to his bedroom or out of the house without replying to me, a pissed-off tilt to his shoulders.

  I’d thought of asking Wilder what the problem was – what had gone wrong – but Yumi had already tried, and he’d reacted the same way that Harley had – nothing had happened, everything was fine – and if that was what he was telling his own sister, it was a fairly safe bet that he’d tell me the same thing.

  So I didn’t ask.

  Liv and I went and stood behind the couch to see what Wilder was watching. There was a brawl going on in a riverside bar, fairy lights reflected in the water. Some chick smashed a guitar over someone else’s head. People were being thrown in the river. Men were corkscrewing down to the ground after being punched; women had their hands up to their faces in horror. A band played on a podium, and as the fighting became more hectic the conductor got the musicians to change the tempo to something a little more pacy to match the action on the dancefloor.

  Clearly it was a comedy. I’m not saying it was funny. I’m just saying it was meant to be.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, leaning forward over the back of the couch.

  ‘Roman Holiday,’ Wilder said.

  Liv climbed over the back of the couch and sat down beside him. I went and sat down on the couch arm next to Liv.

  ‘What number?’ Liv asked.

  ‘Fifty-seven.’

  Audrey Hepburn was the chick with the guitar, smashing the guy on the head; I recognised her now. It looked like there were these dark, spy-type guys trying to kidnap her, and these other two guys trying to stop her from being kidnapped.

  I texted Yumi. ‘On couch. Come down.’

  Audrey Hepburn and this dark-haired dude were running along the river, but one of the spy-guys was around the corner, waiting for them. He punched the dark-haired guy in the face – ‘in the kisser’ is, I’m certain, what would have been written in the script; it was the fifties, after all. The spy-guy tried to grab Audrey Hepburn but she punched him, and before he could do anything more, she jumped into the river with the dark-haired dude and they swam away.

  Yumi came downstairs in her trackpants and a holey T-shirt. She sat on the floor on front of Wilder and Liv, leaning back against the couch. Looking at her profile, with Wilder’s profile behind her, I was struck by how like Wilder Yumi was – a girl version. She was finer, smaller, but she had the same dark hair, same amber eyes, same tsunami coolness. The only difference was the girlness of her, and the smudged freckle under her eye resembling a tear, which always made her look slightly sad, even when she was laughing her head off.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘Roman Holiday,’ Liv said.

  ‘Fifty-seven,’ I added.

  Anouk came in the back door, looking down at her phone, a wolf hat jammed on the top of her head.

  ‘Nice hat,’ Liv said.

  ‘Why, spanks,’ Anouk said, glancing up from under the brim of the wolf ’s toothy jaws, her big doe-eyes looking unworried by the fact that a gigantic wolf had her entire head engulfed in his mouth.

  ‘You remind me of someone,’ Liv said, frowning.

  Anouk raised an eyebrow, knowing that whatever was going to come next was going to be sarcastic.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Liv went on, clicking her fingers as if she were trying to conjure the name out of the air in front of her, ‘hold on a sec, I’ve nearly got it. It’s … it’s … hang on, it’s coming … I know! It’s Little Red Riding Hood. Post-eating.’

  ‘Excusay moi,’ Anouk said, ‘but if you knew anything, you’d know Little Red Riding Hood wasn’t actually eaten by the wolf – the grandma was. So if I look like anyone, it’s a half-chewed granny.’

  Liv laughed.

  ‘Watching a movie here,’ Wilder said. ‘Trying to.’

  Anouk sat on my knee and gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she said to me, then she glanced over at Liv. ‘Remind me why I hang out with you?’

  ‘Because I’m irresistible,’ Liv said, cocking a shoulder and putting on her version of Irresistible Face.

  ‘And because, through her, you get to hang out with me,’ Yumi added from her spot on the floor.

  ‘True,’ Anouk said, wriggling into position on the couch between Liv and me, her arm still slung over my shoulder. ‘All excellent reasons.’

  Hattie came in the back door, still in her basketball gear, her face still flushed. ‘Omigod, I’m so wrecked,’ she said, plonking herself down on the ground next to Yumi. ‘I’m not even sure I can be bothered going tonight.’

  Of course she was going tonight; as if she wasn’t going tonight.

  ‘You should have seen the other team, they were psycho bitches. Look at this scratch one of them gave me.’ She held her arm out so everyone could admire the long red divot down the inside of her wrist. ‘I fe
lt like saying to them, Hello, it’s just a game, no one’s going to die if the ball doesn’t go in the basket. Although of course because they were such heinous bitches, there was no way we were going to let them win. So that was satisfying. What’s this, anyway?’

  ‘Gregory Peck,’ Wilder said, nodding towards the dark-haired guy on the screen, ‘is a news reporter, but Audrey Hepburn doesn’t know it. She’s a princess who’s run away because she’s sick of being a princess. They met by accident, he realised she’s a big story, that he can make five grand out of her, so he’s spent the day taking her around Rome while his mate has been taking secret photos of her. But now some government agents have found her and are trying to take her back to the palace.’

  Audrey and Gregory sat shivering under a bridge in their wet clothes. Gregory put his arm around Audrey to keep her warm. And then they looked at each other, the music swelled (like music always does in old movies), and they kissed.

  ‘So he’s just in it for the money?’ Liv checked. ‘The news story? Is that right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But he’s kissing her anyway.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  Spoiler alert. In the end, Gregory Peck decides not to write the story, not to collect five thousand dollars, not to pass Go, because he’s fallen in love with Audrey, and she’s fallen in love with him. But they can’t be together because she’s a princess, and he’s not a prince.

  Apparently these sorts of things were very strict in the fifties. You love him? You’re one of the most powerful women in the kingdom? Sorry, you still can’t marry him, because he’s not a prince.

  By this stage, all us girls were crying on the couch and floor. Well, not Liv of course, because she’s a hard-arse, but the rest of us were face-wet-with-tears sobbing.

  Wilder looked at us and grinned. ‘Omigod,’ he said, ‘I didn’t realise you girls were such romantics.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re not crying,’ Hattie said. ‘Is your heart made of stone? Is there actually a real live person in there, or are you some kind of robot with a battery where your heart should be?’

  Wilder doesn’t wreck me. I told you that already. But he definitely wrecks Hattie. She always saves a little glitter in her eyes for when she looks at him.