‘And I thought to myself, That’s Mira. I should say hi, but I couldn’t be bothered, because the train was about to arrive at the station, and I don’t really know her that well, and we’re not really friends, and I wasn’t in the mood. So the train pulls in to Parliament, and this girl and I both get off, and I see that it isn’t actually Mira.’
She looked at us to make sure we were keeping up, then ploughed on.
‘So I thought, Okay, right, well, she’s not Mira, no drama, catching the escalator up from the platform, la-di-da, and then this girl comes down the opposite escalator, going down to the platform I’d just come up from, and it was actually Mira.’
Hattie shook her head as if she still couldn’t quite believe the craziness of the coincidence.
‘And I stared at her, because it was so strange, and she saw me and waved and said hi, but we were on opposite escalators, so we couldn’t talk or anything. But how weird is that? I’d been staring at the girl on the train, thinking about Mira, and then I get off the train and see Mira on the opposite escalator from me. I mean, what are the chances of that happening? It was completely bizarre. I kind of think maybe I should call her or something. But it’s not like we were ever really good friends or anything. But … so … yeah, how big a coincidence is that? It was crazy. I feel like it must mean something, but I don’t know what.’
I looked at Anouk, straight at her across the circle of our friends.
‘Remember that weird thing with that photo you sent me last year?’ I said to her.
Anouk looked at me but didn’t answer. She wasn’t going to join in. I realised that we were never going to be friends again; we’d gone too far along the not-friends road.
But then she nodded, and said, ‘Yeah, that was weird,’ and she grinned. ‘MC was saying that she wanted to change her Facebook photo,’ she went on, saying my name out loud for the first time in weeks, ‘so I sent her through – as a joke – this photo of me from when I was a little kid, for her to use as her profile pic.’
I wanted to interrupt here, take up the thread of the story, but I decided that I’d leave it for her, the whole story, a gift from me to her.
‘So MC is kind of laughing, and saying she’d use the photo, whatever’ – and she looked at me and grinned again, a genuine, real grin, not a half-smile, not an avoiding of eyes – ‘but then she looked at the photo, properly, and she saw …’
And here she left the space for me to fill in what had come next. A gift from her to me. A story we could tell together.
I took up the conversation thread.
‘… in the background of the photo,’ I said, ‘standing behind Anouk, just as clear as you like, was my grandy, but this photo was from years earlier, when we didn’t even know each other – me and Anouk, not me and Grandy, duh. And I said to Anouk, Where was that photo taken? because I thought, okay, it’s probably not that strange, we all live in the same city, there’s a fair chance Grandy would have been in the same park as Anouk at some stage, but then …’
And I handed back to Anouk.
‘… well, yeah, the thing about that photo was that it wasn’t taken here, at a park here, it was taken when we went to Canada to see some of Mum’s family …’
‘… and when I asked Grandpa about the time he and Grandy went to Canada, he said, Oh, yes, that was a special treat. Grandy and I had never been overseas together before. And so the thing is, what were the chances of Grandy being in the park at the same time as Anouk, in Canada …’
‘… and it’s not like we go to Canada every year or anything – we maybe go once every five years or something, to see Dad’s family …’
‘… and for you to send me a photo, the one photo that has my grandy standing in it. And it’s not like Grandy’s standing staring at Anouk,’ I explained to everyone. ‘She’s walking through the shot, looking at something completely different, but you can totally tell it’s her …’
‘… and I mean, I don’t even know what made me decide to send a photo of myself for MC’s Facebook page …’
‘… and so yeah, I mean, that was pretty freaky.’
‘I don’t know what it means,’ Anouk added, ‘but yeah, it definitely means something.’
And we grinned at each other, and I thought to myself, Maybe this is what it meant. This story. Here. Now. In front of everyone. Us. Going back to being friends.
Maybe that was what that photo had been about.
A gift from Grandy to Anouk and me, all these years later.
And then, three more weeks later
31st July
Better. Meet worse.
Chapter 18
It’s possible to dress like a Melbourne train seat. And it only costs you thirty-eight dollars for the privilege.
Not that the fabric they use on Melbourne’s train seats is particularly attractive. In fact, it’s garish. ‘Ugly’ is another word that springs to mind. There’s absolutely no reason you’d want to wear it.
Except for the fact that if you do, and then you go and sit on the train, it’s all kinds of hilarious. Thirty-eight bucks’ worth of serious belly laugh.
Yumi had stumbled across the T-shirt online a week or so earlier and ordered one, and on this particular mid-winter day in Melbourne, she’d decided that it needed an outing. On the train, of course. There was no point wearing it otherwise.
We walked down to the station – me, Liv and Yumi, all rugged up in our coats and jeans. We waited on the platform for the train into the city to arrive. Then we got on board, settled ourselves down, and Yumi took off her coat.
The three of us started laughing right away at the ridiculousness of it. Liv and I started taking shots – it was irresistible: Yumi staring deadpan at the camera, looking like she hadn’t even noticed she was wearing a train seat cover as a T-shirt.
Liv and I posted shots on Insta and Snapchat, and behind us we could hear other people on the train laughing as they started taking photos of Yumi too. Yumi tilted her face at people’s phones, wearing a wry smile, her T-shirt blending in perfectly with her surroundings.
#MelbourneTrainSeatFashionista
The likes started coming in pretty much immediately, the shares and comments, the distinctive notification ding of Insta lighting up my phone each time someone new reacted.
I posted the pics on Facebook as well, spreading the love. And it was as I was watching the likes and comments amass that I noticed something that chilled me far more than the nine-degree weather outside.
A friend of Harley’s had shared something he’d seen on Buzzfeed – a still from a video of Emma Watson. The caption read: ‘17 Celebrities Who Hate All Things Anouk.’
I stared at Emma Watson. My chest felt crystalline, like my lungs had turned glassy and breakable.
Hate All Things Anouk.
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down.
Anouk was a super-common name in Norway. Every second person was probably called Anouk there. Emma Watson was probably making some movie in Norway, and this link had gone viral from there.
Nothing to do with me.
Besides, if my videos had been going to go viral (as if), it would have happened way back in June – not now, six weeks down the track.
I didn’t click on the link. Not there in front of Liv and Yumi.
I’d check once I got home, but it wouldn’t be anything to do with me. It was a coincidence. They weren’t my videos.
Settle down, guilty conscience. Settle down.
My stomach churned for the entire rest of the trip into the city, but I couldn’t get off the train and come home early, because our whole plan had been to catch the train into the city, then catch the train back out, Yumi in her glorious train-seat fashion for the entire trip. If I’d got off early, it would have seemed strange.
And all the way walking home from the train station, Liv and Yumi were with me, talking, laughing, checking out Insta and Snapchat, seeing how many people were liking the photos of Yumi in her train-seat
T-shirt.
My glass lungs were having trouble drawing in air. A smile was frozen onto my face, and a fake laugh kept coming out of my mouth as Liv and Yumi showed me the comments that were coming up, and who’d shared what.
I needed to check Buzzfeed.
When we got to my place, I peeled off to go inside.
‘What are you doing?’ Yumi asked.
‘Come to mine,’ Liv said, dragging on my arm to bring me past my house and over to hers.
I shook my head. ‘Can’t,’ I said. ‘Mum said she needed me to do a couple of things at home. I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘But I haven’t finished laughing yet,’ Yumi said.
I shook my head. ‘The laughs are officially over,’ I said, wondering if that was truer than I’d meant it to be.
‘I’m not catching the tram tomorrow,’ Liv said. ‘Mum’s got a whole lot of stuff she has to take to the shop, so she said she’d drive me. You want a lift?’
I shook my head, barely even registering what she’d said. Now that I was so close to home, I couldn’t focus on anything except clicking this Buzzfeed link. I needed to confirm it was a different Anouk before I’d be able to catch my breath properly.
I walked in the back door to see Seth sitting at the kitchen bench.
You see that? Seth was at our place. Again.
He seemed to have been around a lot over the past six weeks; often I’d get home from school of an afternoon and there he’d be, hanging in our lounge room, with that handsome face of his still as handsome as ever.
This particular afternoon, he was sitting at the kitchen bench, with maple syrup and cut-up lemons and icing sugar, and Harley next to him mixing up some pancake batter.
‘Feel like a pancake?’ Seth asked me.
So many reasons for a girl to hang and stay. So I hung and stayed.
I ate a maple-syruped pancake while I scrolled through my Facebook feed looking for the link I’d seen earlier that afternoon, only half-listening to Seth and Harley’s banter.
And then I found her. Emma Watson.
‘17 Celebrities who Hate All Things Anouk.’
I put my headphones in to drown out their voices, and clicked on the link. The page opened. And there they were – mine. All the rants I’d done about Anouk, the night of her party. Josh Hutcherson, the Queen of England, Jon Snow, Taylor Swift, ranting, ‘Fook you Anouk, you fooking fook.’ Justin Bieber calling her a sook. Kylie Jenner, Liam Hemsworth, Kendall Jenner.
All of them, all of me, swearing their heads off at Anouk.
It was worse than I could ever have imagined.
I left my pancake half eaten, and ran upstairs to my bedroom to delete agirlwalksintoaschool from Tumblr.
Chapter 19
There was a fair chance that some of my friends might have seen the Buzzfeed link – although maybe not, because it was a friend of Harley’s who’d had it on his page, not a friend of mine.
But either way, without agirlwalksintoaschool on Tumblr, no one would be able to link it back to me.
All those things I’d written back in Year 9 – the moments when I’d been annoyed with Liv, pissed off with Yumi, angry at Anouk; the times when Hattie had given me the shits – had gone with the click of the delete button on my Tumblr dashboard yesterday. My rant about Anouk after Jed’s party, from months back? Gone. All the stupid things I hadn’t even remembered being annoyed about back in Year 9, those bytes of bitching? They’d been dragged out of the woods of millions of gig of data and thrown onto the scrap heap. Set fire to. All the evidence disposed of.
Regardless, I felt jittery that next morning. I’d barely been able to sleep, instead going over and over in my head all the different ways people might find the Buzzfeed article; what they’d say today at school; how Anouk would be about it; whether any of them would pick me as the one who’d started it.
I needed to be as normal as possible today.
Mum came into the kitchen in a pair of black pants, black heels and a white shirt, a colourful scarf tied at her neck.
If I was being normal, I’d have commented on the fact that she was all dressed up – much more dressed up than she normally was to work at Maude’s shop.
I needed to practise being normal. Get in the swing of it. So I said, ‘You look nice. Hot date?’ and instantly regretted it, because the words ‘hot’ and ‘date’ then morphed inside my head to ‘Tinder’ and then to ‘home invasion’ and, yeah, even though it had been ages ago, I was still kind of scarred by it.
Mum smiled at me. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to school.’
I looked at her, then took my schoolbag off my shoulder and passed it over to her. ‘Here you go,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome.’
Normal.
She laughed. ‘Sometimes the highlight of my day is making banana smoothies and crumpets for your afternoon tea,’ she said. ‘And Harley doesn’t need me – not now that he’s at uni. It’s good working at the shop with Maude, but it’s only a couple of days a week, and I’ve realised I need a bit more in my life.’
I smiled at her. ‘Making smoothies is important work.’
She laughed. ‘That’s true. But I’ve become pretty good at making them over the years, and I think I’m ready for a new challenge.’
‘That’s great, Mum. Seriously. But if you change your mind,’ I said, hitching my bag back onto my shoulder, about to head out the door, all the worry, all the dread still top of my mind despite me trying to sound normal, ‘I don’t mind staying home while you do my classes.’
‘MC,’ Mum said, stopping me. ‘It’s been tough the past few months, hasn’t it?’
I looked at her.
‘The past year, actually,’ she corrected herself. ‘It’ll be a year in September, you know, since Dad moved out,’ she added.
I knew exactly the day he’d moved out – September nineteenth, two weeks after my birthday.
I remembered thinking that good things always happened in threes. I’d turned sixteen on a Saturday. The following weekend, Mum, me, Liv and Prue had gone up the country to Daylesford for a girls-only couple of days. And then the following Saturday – the third Saturday in a row; good things happen in threes – Dad had called me and Harley into his study, because he had something he wanted to talk to us about. Mum had been in there too, waiting for us.
The way my luck had been going at the time, I’d honestly thought it wasn’t out of the question that he was going to announce he’d booked us a trip to Disneyland. Of course, I was too old for Disney, but I gallantly decided that I was prepared to make an exception and go and have the most awesome time ever; do the old man a favour.
Shows how much I knew.
‘Anyway,’ Mum went on, rubbing down her white shirt and adjusting her scarf, ‘I know I haven’t been a great mum since he moved out. I kind of got myself into a bad mindset, thinking about Dad all the time, feeling angry that he had a new girlfriend – even feeling annoyed with you, every time you went over to see him, which I know isn’t reasonable. I mean, he’s your dad. Of course you want to see him.’
If I was honest, I had to admit I’d spent the past year blaming her for Dad leaving – thinking that if she’d been more like Tosca, younger, prettier, less naggy all the time, Dad wouldn’t have moved out.
I thought about how much of the break-up I’d lain at her feet; the resentment I’d felt towards her about pretty much everything.
But it hadn’t really been Mum’s fault. It hadn’t really been any of ours. Not even Dad’s.
Dad had moved out because he’d met someone else and fallen in love with her. It was just bad luck that he’d met someone new when he already had a wife and kids.
The last ebb of anger drained out of me.
I thought about the videos I’d posted the night of Anouk’s party. My Tumblr diary. Everything I’d spewed out online, and deleted last night. I felt like I’d been angry for months now and suddenly I realised that I didn’t need to be. Everyone had shi
t times. It was just life.
My bag was still hoicked up onto my shoulder. I hadn’t had a proper conversation with Mum in months. It hadn’t always been like this; I’d used to adore her. I’d thought she was smart and pretty and funny. But then I’d got older, and everything had changed.
‘It’s great that you’re going back to school,’ I said. ‘What are you going to study?’
‘I’m going to business school,’ she said. ‘To retrain. I’ll be learning some computer stuff – Powerpoint, Excel, that type of thing. It goes for a month, full-time, every day. And then I’m going to get myself a job.’
‘Good on you. That’s great.’
‘And the other thing I wanted to tell you,’ Mum went on, ‘is that … I hope you don’t mind, I know it might sound weird, or insensitive, and I don’t mean it that way, but … I’ve decided I’m going to have a party, celebrating Dad leaving. Well, not exactly celebrating that he’s gone – I still miss him; I feel jealous that he’s found someone else, if I’m completely honest; that he’s happy with someone else – but it’s coming up to a year and I feel like I need to move on. So I’m going to have a party and celebrate the fact that I’ve got two beautiful kids, and I’ve got fantastic friends, and I have some great memories from my time spent with Dad. I thought maybe I’d have the party on the eighteenth of September, a year to the day, which is seven weeks away, and I wondered if you wanted to invite Liv and Yumi, and the three of you could serve drinks?’
Dad moving out had been one of the worst things to ever happen to me, and Mum wanted to celebrate? But I could see what she meant. She wanted to mark a line in the sand that signified we were moving on, still as a family, but a family in a different form. An ‘X’ marking the spot in the calendar where the new normal would properly start.
I looked at her. ‘That’s a good idea, Mum,’ I finally said.
‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling back, looking relaxed and happy for the first time in ages. ‘I think it is.’
My Life as a Hashtag Page 14
