My Life as a Hashtag

by Gabrielle Williams

  I stared at her. Then at Dad.

  ‘I thought you said pizza,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no,’ Tosca said. ‘That’s my fault. Sorry. I just thought ... there’s this great little Thai place around the corner, and I thought … but I can organise pizza if you’d rather that.’

  ‘Thai’s great,’ Dad said. ‘Pizza. Thai. It’s all the same thing.’

  It definitely wasn’t. There is no need to explain to anyone, not a single living person, that there is a definite difference between pizza and Thai.

  The fact was, I didn’t even like pizza that much.

  I preferred Thai.

  But he’d said pizza.

  He’d. Said. Pizza.

  I put the two plates away, and got two bowls out instead.

  Two bowls. One for me. One for Dad.

  Dad got out a third bowl and put it beside our two. ‘What about Tosca?’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ Tosca said, shaking her head, her earrings jingling. ‘No. It’s nice for you guys to enjoy the new house together on your first night, just the two of you.’

  Yes. I agreed.

  ‘I can’t expect you to turn up with food,’ Dad said, opening the cupboard (that I’d packed) and pulling out a couple of wine glasses (that I’d unpacked), ‘and then not invite you to stay. You have to stay. You can help us warm the new house. The more the merrier.’

  I looked at the two of them. Standing in Dad’s pretty little house with all his new stuff.

  The only remnant of his old life, in the entire house, was stupid old me.

  Chapter 7

  Two weeks later, Liv and I were over at Yumi’s place. Wilder was sitting at the kitchen table, trawling through Tinder, swiping right, swiping left, swiping right.

  The three of us looked over his shoulder. Yumi rested her arm on his back to better see the yes-please-swipe-rights and the sorry-you’re-definitely-lefts he was scrolling through.

  There was Rachel, standing in the kitchen wearing one of those masks you can buy from the newsagent, a gold cardboard masquerade mask. Twenty-eight years old, apparently, although it was hard to tell with the mask on. Eight kilometres away; active two weeks ago. ‘Not looking for anything serious, but definitely happy for something fun.’

  Wilder swiped right.

  ‘Twenty-eight?’ Yumi said. ‘You don’t think she’s a little old for you?’

  ‘I’ve gone flexi on my age limits. I’m seeing what’s out there.’

  Sue, twenty-two, was four kilometres away, active one day ago, with pink hair, green nails. ‘Not even sure I should be on Tinder. I don’t want a fling, so if that’s what you’re after, I’m not your girl.’

  He swiped right.

  ‘Hang on,’ Yumi said to him. ‘Rachel wants nothing serious, and Sue’s not interested in a fling? You ever heard the term “mixed messages”?’

  Wilder shrugged. ‘I’m in a right-swipe kind of mood,’ he said.

  There was a girl riding a photoshopped unicorn; a girl with rainbow-coloured hair; a girl wearing a hamburger outfit, whose ‘About’ section read, ‘I don’t have avian flu.’

  Right swipe, right swipe, right swipe.

  ‘The girl in the hamburger suit is cute,’ Yumi said.

  ‘She’s definitely the best so far,’ I agreed.

  ‘And she doesn’t have avian flu,’ Liv said. ‘Which has got to be a bonus.’

  And then the next face scrolled up: Julie, thirty-five, six kilometres away, active one day ago. A woman who I knew for a fact wasn’t thirty-five, more like forty-something, with a glass of wine in her hand and a hopeful smile on her face, wearing a gold silk shirt with a couple of long silver chains dangling down her cleavage.

  Mum.

  I felt Wilder hesitate for the smallest second, his finger hovering over the screen, not sure what to do. Because, of course, Wilder knew exactly who she was. I could almost hear the cogs in his brain turning over as he thought to himself, Hang on a sec, that’s Harley’s mum, and then a clunk as the next thought dropped into his head of, and MC’s mum, and then, whirr-click, the clincher of, so do I swipe right or do I swipe left?

  There’s no easy way to move past a person on Tinder. You have to either right-swipe for ‘like’, or left-swipe for ‘no thanks’. That’s how it works. And while Wilder hesitated, me, Yumi and Liv were all left staring at Mum’s face.

  ‘Left swipe,’ I said, stepping back from him. ‘Jesus. Put us all out of our misery. Left swipe. Left, left, left.’

  I walked out of the kitchen, Yumi and Liv coming up behind me, the two of them putting their arms around my shoulders as we walked up the stairs to Yumi’s bedroom.

  None of us saying a word.

  I flopped down on Yumi’s bed and put my arm over my eyes, shaking my head. I knew they were both watching me. Their stillness filled the room with noise, as they tried to think of the best thing to say.

  I took my arm away from my eyes and looked over at them. Yumi was leaning against her desk, watching me, her hands resting on the desktop. Liv was sitting on Yumi’s desk chair – yep – watching me.

  ‘Let’s make a pact,’ I said, putting my hands up in surrender, ‘that we never mention this ever again.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Yumi.

  ‘Ever.’

  ‘For sure,’ said Liv.

  Yumi hunkered down and took an album out of its sleeve, laid it on the turntable, lifted the needle and placed it on the outer edge of the grooves. She handed the cover to me, giving me something to do, something to occupy my eyes, occupy my brain, then started flicking through her collection, working out which one she’d put on next.

  That’s the thing with records. You have to change them every half-hour or so, because that’s how long a side lasts. It’s kind of annoying, but also kind of nice. Every twenty minutes, you have to think about what you want to listen to next, instead of all the songs blurring into one another, which is what happens when I listen on my phone.

  The album cover Yumi had passed to me was Tom Waits. I wouldn’t even know who Tom Waits was, except that Yumi has four of his albums, each of them with ‘Lucy Blue’ written in the top right-hand corner in neat, sixteen-year-old-girl writing. Purple biro.

  Lucy Blue. Yumi’s mum, before she married Yumi’s dad.

  She would have been about my age, our age, when she signed her name on the album, marking it as hers.

  And now she’s not even around anymore.

  Just like that. Dead.

  I watched Yumi flip the cover of the album she was considering playing next and study the song list, chewing on the inside of her mouth as we listened to Tom’s gravelly voice.

  ‘Thirty-five,’ I finally said, shaking my head. ‘Apparently she’s thirty-five. News to me.’

  And suddenly all three of us were laughing, tears rolling down our faces.

  ‘Okay,’ I managed to get out, shaking my head, still laughing, ‘that’s probably the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me. Ever. In my life.’

  ‘No way,’ Liv said, a broad grin on her face. ‘You’ve had way more embarrassing things happen than that.’

  ‘Name one.’

  She glanced over at me, grinning. ‘Welllll …’ She scratched her eyebrow. ‘Hang on a minute; just give me a sec …’

  ‘Exactly. Definitely the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened. In my entire life.’

  We started laughing again.

  ‘It’s just me and Wilder and Liv,’ Yumi pointed out. ‘It’s not that embarrassing.’

  ‘It’s not you guys I care about. It’s me. Having to see that. That’s the type of thing that can traumatise a person forever. I can never scrub my eyes clean.’

  ‘Poor Wilder,’ Yumi said, jumping up to sit cross-legged on top of her desk and grinning at me. ‘That’d be the first time he’s broken into a sweat over a girl in a long time.’

  ‘I don’t ever want to go home again,’ I said, ‘and face my mum knowing this. I mean, seriously. Gross.’
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  ‘I guess that’s what parents do when they split up,’ Yumi finally said.

  ‘Yeah. I guess.’

  And suddenly I realised it wasn’t funny at all. Dad had a new house. He had Tosca.

  Mum had Tinder.

  In order for Dad to have the life he wanted, Mum had to have a life she didn’t want. We all did. Me and Mum and Harley.

  It was like a cosmic seesaw.

  Dad’s up required all of our downs.

  Chapter 8

  It was one of those late-autumn, coming-up-to-winter weekends where the weather had decided it’d had enough of us hanging around outside and was all: Don’t even think about bothering me again for at least a good few months.

  Occasionally it would rattle the windows, to warn you against venturing out. Or shake the tops of the trees at you like a fist.

  I had a bagful of homework to do, but I wasn’t in the mood.

  I looked out my window at Liv’s house. Liv lives next door. I told you that already.

  It would have been perfect if Liv’s bedroom faced my house. But her parents weren’t prepared to give up their double bedroom with walk-in robes and ensuite so that Liv and I could face each other in the mornings and wave hello.

  Sometimes you had to wonder what the good of parents were.

  I texted Liv. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey,’ she texted back.

  ‘Whatcha doing?’

  ‘Yumi’s over. We’re doing homework.’

  ‘Srsly?’ I texted.

  ‘Where’s my sarcastic-face emoji. Must invent one. No. As if. Come over.’

  Liv’s bedroom has a museum-type quality to it: there are butterflies and bugs pinned in ruler-straight lines all along her walls, twenty, maybe thirty of them, the common and Latin name written under each. She also has an old cabinet that belonged to her grandma with shallow, flat drawers that pull out to reveal yet more neatly arranged butterflies.

  Lately, she’d been going to a pest-control place and buying even more bugs – bags of bugs for twenty bucks a pop. A lot of them had been crushed or damaged from the extermination process, but there were usually a few perfect ones Liv could use from each bag, for her art folio. First she sketched gigantic fine-ink drawings of them; then she carefully pinned multiple real teeny bugs on top of the sketches, giving them a sort of weird, 3D, crawling, buggy feel.

  But while the top half of Liv’s bedroom is geometric-precise – her pinned bugs, her intricate sketches painstakingly crafted – the bottom half is always a disaster zone.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I said to her as I noticed my denim skirt on her floor, where it lay among the T-shirts, skirts, shoes, boots, bags, wet towels, cups and plates all left where they’d fallen, ‘I also don’t see the point in putting things in the wardrobe only to take them back out and put them back on, but when the clothes are actually mine, I think it would be reasonable to not dump them on your floor.’

  ‘And you came over why?’ Liv said. ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Hey, omigod,’ Yumi interjected, holding up a cute little bag. ‘Mine!’

  Liv looked from one to other of us with sarcastic eyes. That’s the only way I can describe them – sarcastic eyes. Like everything that was about to come out of her mouth was going to be heavily sarcastic and we’d better be ready for it.

  ‘Here I am,’ she said, ‘leaving all your things out on my floor to remind you to take them back, making my room all messy in self-sacrifice, being a most excellent friend, and this is the thanks I get: a whole lot of criticism. A whole lot of blah blah blah.’

  ‘That’s mine too,’ Yumi said, picking up a jumper that was hanging off the back of Liv’s door. ‘I forgot you had that.’

  ‘Feel free to thank me whenever,’ Liv said.

  ‘Thank you?’ I said. ‘We should be arresting you.’

  Liv shook her head sadly. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘that’s why I shouldn’t be friends with you anymore.’

  I felt myself wincing as if pinched, and saw (but maybe I was wrong) a slight pulling-in of Liv’s mouth as she realised too late what she’d said.

  It had been six weeks now, and Anouk still hadn’t uttered a word in my general direction. Not a word. Friendship. Over.

  And – not that I wanted to dwell – Jed had been all over Facebook, Insta, Snapchat, without throwing me a single bone. Nothing. Not a poke, a like, a comment, a chat, a text, a this, a that, a whatever. Complete radio silence.

  Not a bone from Jed. Not a word from Anouk.

  There was a new royal family featuring on the covers of New Idea and Woman’s Day: Jed, King of All Bastards, and Anouk, Queen of the Grudge. As it had turned out, they would have been the perfect couple after all.

  Yesterday, at lunchtime, I’d asked if anyone wanted a Twistie, offered the pack around (I was eating a lot of shit, because, well, why wouldn’t I – who cared?), and when I’d passed it in Anouk’s direction, she’d stared straight ahead as if I were invisible, her cheeks sucked in with pissed-off-ness.

  Bitch.

  I’d stopped complaining about her to Liv on the tram-ride home each afternoon from school, but only because when I bitched about her it made Liv go all monosyllabic on me, and Liv’s normally way too opinionated for one-word answers. Plus, it was grotesquely boring – listening to myself, even I felt bored; I’d heard it all before, a million times over the past weeks. There was nothing new to add. So now I said nothing, and a little sliver of awkwardness had wedged itself between me and Liv.

  Between me and Yumi, too. Yumi was like Switzerland – neutral. Whenever I complained about Anouk, she’d go all ‘hmm’, and it bugged me that she didn’t say instead, Yeah, she’s a class-A bitch. Sometimes I even had the unsettling feeling that she thought I was being slightly unreasonable but didn’t want to say anything because she didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

  I hated Anouk for the monosyllables. And for Switzerland.

  So when Liv said, that day in her bedroom, You see, that’s why I shouldn’t be friends with you anymore, it had felt a lot more pointy and sharp than it would have before Jed’s party.

  I picked up a pair of hoop earrings that I hadn’t even realised were missing and said, ‘These are mine too.’

  Not that I cared about the earrings. But I wanted to put a new sentence into the air, to take over from the one that was hanging over all our heads.

  ‘Exactly,’ Liv said, implicitly agreeing with me to pretend not to notice the weirdness. ‘I’m exactly awesome for leaving all your stuff out.’ And she picked up her phone and started scrolling through whatever, as she waited for us to thank her for her human kindness.

  Then she said, ‘Ooh,’ almost a gasp, like she hadn’t meant to make a noise, and put her phone down again. Yumi and I both looked over at her.

  ‘What?’ Yumi said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Liv said.

  ‘You can’t “ooh” and then not tell us,’ I said, grabbing her phone and tapping her password in, but not getting all the numbers out because Liv had grabbed it back from me.

  I stared at her.

  I wasn’t her parent. She didn’t have secrets from me.

  I picked up my own phone and started scrolling through my feed to see what she’d oohed about. But there was nothing there. Then I heard a small intake of breath from Yumi, over at her phone. Whatever it was, Liv and Yumi both had it, but it hadn’t come through to me.

  I looked from Liv to Yumi, then back to Liv. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  Even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

  Liv shook her head as if she didn’t want to say – or maybe as if it wasn’t really that big a deal. Then, realising she pretty much had to show me, she held her phone up, screen facing me, waving it so that my eyes couldn’t get a good grip on it at first, and she said, ‘It’s … um … just Anouk sent through a thing, that her mum’s away in a few weeks’ time and she’s going to have a … some people over.’

  I felt my mouth filling with Anoukness, my eyes p
ricking with tears.

  ‘Awesome,’ I said, sarcasm front and centre. ‘Par-tay!’

  ‘Hardly a party,’ Liv said.

  ‘You’ll be invited, MC,’ Yumi said at the same time, putting her phone face-down on the bed. ‘For sure. Won’t she, Liv? Anouk’s probably forgotten she’s blocked you. She probably thinks, right this moment, that you’ve got your invite.’

  ‘Definitely,’ Liv said. ‘You’ll definitely be invited. There’s no way you wouldn’t be.’

  And that, right there, felt like one of the saddest things that had ever happened to me.

  Liv only ever had three modes: rude, sarcastic or smart-arse.

  Out of everything, I didn’t think I could bear it if Liv turned all supportive on me.

  Chapter 9

  I didn’t stay at Liv’s. I didn’t want to be there with her and Yumi and the invite from Anouk on two out of three phones. So I said homework called and went back home.

  I had never made excuses to leave my friends before. Add that to the list of things I hated Anouk for.

  I sat back down at my desk and looked out my window, over towards Liv’s house, where her and Yumi were probably talking about the party. The sky was grey, but the wind had dropped, like it was trying not to annoy me now that I hadn’t been invited to Anouk’s.

  My textbooks were open in front of me, I was logged on to the school portal, but every word was floating off the page and screen, unable to be pinned down.

  Mum came to my door. ‘I’ve had the best idea ever,’ she said, leaning against the doorframe.

  I turned to look at her. Best Idea Ever was exactly what I needed.

  ‘I was thinking it might be nice,’ Mum said, looking down at her fingernails, as if the world’s smallest script was written on her cuticles, ‘if we had a mother–daughter afternoon. I thought maybe I’d book us in to that place around the corner – you know, that place, what’s it called …’ She looked away from her nails, up at the ceiling, out the window. ‘Where you can get waxing and whatever … Brazilian Butterfly. What do you think?’

  I blinked at her.

  ‘We can go there, get our bits zhooshed …’