Girl Saves Boy Read online

  I feel proud that Al uses the name I gave him rather than the one his parents chose. He has a sharp sense of humour and dishwater-blond hair, and he always dresses to impress, wearing suit jackets to school and buttoned shirts on weekends. He has freckles across the bridge of his nose and a lopsided grin, which counteracts every other aspect of his appearance and makes him look like a five year old, not a guy who did university-level Chemistry at thirteen—God knows what stuff he’s doing now, the year we’re both finishing high school…

  Al ducked his head as he came through the doorway of my ward in the hospital, and folded himself into a seat. Even sitting, he was a towering presence.

  ‘Duck, my friend, how’s life treating you?’ he asked. Duck was a nickname that dated back to my time on the Year 8 cricket squad, which lasted only two lunch periods before I was kicked off the team.

  ‘Obviously not well. Death’s knocking, Al,’ I replied dryly, sitting up. ‘What about you? What have you been up to?’

  ‘The usual. Solving infinity. Accepting Nobel Prizes. Same same. What’s the deal with the hospital bed and all? They letting you go home tonight?’ He smiled and fiddled with his tie.

  ‘They’re keeping me in tonight for observation,’ I explained. ‘I know it’s Saturday but I’m going to have to pass on the partying you probably have planned. You know, after you solve infinity.’

  Little Al drummed his fingers on the wooden arm of the chair. ‘Believe me, Duck, they’ll need to keep you in far longer to make any sense of you.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘You’re the love child of Freud and Paris Hilton. Maybe you ought to help them out.’

  ‘Hey, maybe I just got my mother’s good looks.’ Al shrugged.

  I opened my mouth to speak but my friend True Grisham made a sudden appearance, whirling into the room and slamming the door behind her.

  ‘Michael,’ she greeted Al crisply—she was the only person, including Al’s parents, who ever called him by his real name.

  ‘True.’ Al flashed a grin. ‘You’re just in time for strip poker.’

  She tapped her foot and glared at me. ‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’

  She had her Betty Boop laptop bag strung over her shoulder and her hair was loose, her sparkly ladybug bun clip drooping miserably amidst her long blonde hair.

  An old man in a bed diagonally opposite me waved feebly to Al. ‘Deal me a hand if this lady’s playing.’

  Even wearing her usual ballet flats, True Grisham is very tall—not quite as tall as Little Al, but close enough that the yearbook committee at our school named them our year’s dream couple. Except True would never give any boy the time of day, least of all Al. Her whole world revolved around her ambition to become a journalist—a successful one. She had a plan, too detailed for me to remember, but the gist of it was that she wanted to travel the world and write for the major newspapers. At the moment, she is getting the best possible marks at school so she can get into Journalism at a good uni, all the while building up her portfolio with pieces in local newspapers and magazines. She is very committed and always busy. I don’t think she ever sleeps.

  My friendship with True went back further than my friendship with Al. On the first day of Grade 3 at my new school she recruited me as one of her sub-editors for the first-ever magazine produced there. Needless to say, in spite of eight-year-old True’s dedication, we released only three issues and could never sell our print run of twenty-five, even at the meagre price of fifty cents.

  After that True went on to bigger and better things—editing our school newspaper, a column in our local newspaper, the occasional article in small print-run magazines—and, even though I realised during Grade 3 that I would never go on to a career in journalism, due to a total lack of spelling ability, she had remained my good friend well into this last year of school.

  True would fulfil her dreams for sure—she was intelligent and ruthless and impossible to distract. True was bullet-proof and fearless. True was a constant in my life, especially now, when I didn’t have many.

  ‘Your dad calls me, tells me you’re in the hospital and are refusing to talk to him,’ she went on, picking lint off her pink cardigan and frowning at me. ‘I think…well, you know what I think…’ She sighed and leant against the end of my bed. ‘What’s going on, Sacha? Be honest with me, okay? Did you do this deliberately?’

  ‘I think you’re disturbing Moira.’ I pointed towards the old lady dozing off in the bed beside me. ‘She’s recovering from a knee reconstruction, you know.’

  ‘Not everything is a joke, Sacha,’ said True.

  ‘I wasn’t joking. She really is.’

  True pulled across the curtain beside my bed and the smile fell from Al’s face.

  ‘Jason told me you fell in the lake when you were out walking,’ he said. ‘You didn’t do this on purpose, did you?’

  ‘Mr Carr?’ I asked. ‘He’s here? And since when are you two on a first-name basis?’

  True glared at Al. ‘It isn’t even possible to fall into the lake. It’s about six inches deep and the size of a baby’s paddling pool.’

  Al ignored her. ‘I’ve met him at your place a few times. He always tells me to call him Jason. Most teachers want you to call them by their first name if you know them outside school.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I retorted, ‘if they want to be up on child sex charges.’

  ‘Why didn’t you talk to me, Sacha?’ asked True, sitting on the bed by my feet. ‘Fair enough you didn’t tell him’—she frowned in Al’s direction—‘but you can trust me.’

  Instead of responding, I just stared at my hands. I listened to the machines whirring and nurses chattering and, in the distance, TV ads selling mobile screensavers. In the hospital, my past felt uncomfortably close. Elsewhere, it could be kept at arm’s length, but here, like at the cemetery and walking past our old house, things I’d rather forget breathed down my neck.

  The stench of bleach and sickness brought it all back to the front of my consciousness, to the place I’d been trying to keep it from for so long. Those years of tests, chemo, endless drugs and sleepless nights that swallowed up my childhood, and that time last year, just a few weeks before Mum’s death, when it was her turn to be confined to a hospital bed. Except I survived my leukaemia. She died of a self-inflicted illness.

  I guess that’s how she would have preferred it to be. Mother dies; son lives. How I wish it could’ve been the other way around.

  True frowned at Al again and turned back to me. ‘Who found you?’ she asked.

  ‘A girl,’ I replied. ‘Jewel Valentine.’

  ‘Was she hot?’ asked Al.

  ‘Michael!’ cried True. ‘Is there anything else you think about, other than chemical formulae and sex?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Al murmured.

  ‘Did you say Jewel Valentine?’ True asked. She looked thoughtful for a second, then sighed. ‘I really think you should speak to your dad.’

  ‘You’re not the first to say so.’

  ‘Sacha, Sacha, Sacha.’ She shook her head. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

  ‘Burying me alive seems attractive right now,’ I remarked. ‘Anyone got a shovel?’

  Jewel

  I love last words in the same way I love opening lines. Not quite the same way Miles Halter loves them. I love the last words of criminals before they are executed. They often try to be witty, remarking to shooting squads that they haven’t got all day, or they insist on their innocence, which makes you comprehend the finality of the death penalty. How many times has it been proved that someone else was the murderer, long after the death of a blameless man or woman caught in a terrible situation? I love the last words of poets and writers and playwrights who say something magical in a suicide note, or gasp something about love on their deathbed. Or people who are true to their profession to their last breath—like a grammarian, or one of those freaks with word technicality obsessions who spurts in his final moments on earth something like �
�I am dying; or I am about to die—either is correct.’ I’m not sure if that’s what the quote was exactly, and it doesn’t matter; it’s just the idea that I care about.

  I love art and the freedom it offers, and I love last words for the way they provoke my mind—I could drift on a train of thought for years, if there was no need to eat and drink and go to school.

  I wish they recorded the last words of ordinary people—you can’t find any of those on the internet or in libraries. How unimportant you seem if you don’t do something that society values, if you never grow up and have the chance, or if you aren’t ever given the opportunities others receive, then your last words have no significance.

  I came back home to Rachel—Mum, sorry—because I had no one else left, because I hadn’t finished school yet, because I didn’t want to live on my own. I’d just turned eighteen but I was still treated like a child. I was too stubborn to keep a job for long—I couldn’t even work part time in a greengrocer’s— and art was the only thing that mattered to me.

  Now that I was back in the suburbs, I just wanted to disappear far away—to a cramped apartment in a dreary part of London, perhaps—and be a struggling artist, sitting with my charcoal and my canvas in the doorways of abandoned houses, drawing. Or in New York City, sleeping on the couches of talented but as yet undiscovered playwrights, drinking coffee all night and speaking rubbish and getting high.

  I wanted to run away from this suburb I’d lived in as a young child, which still haunted me with memories, the happy ones hurting me more than the sad ones. But I couldn’t go back to my grandparents. The years living with them on a farm outside a town in rural Victoria were now only bittersweet memories.

  My room hadn’t changed while I’d been away, but my mother had. After ten years without her (phone calls were a rarity near the end), it was so strange to call her Mum. When I’d left, she was still ‘Mummy’. She had been plump and had worn aprons and scrunched up her nose when she was concentrating on something. She’d had rosy cheeks and brown curls and got flustered easily.

  After ten years Mummy had become Rachel, small and gaunt, falling-out brown curls, sallow-faced, always on the verge of tears, it seemed. What had once been a pretty sort of fragility had become instability.

  I looked like my father—my sleek dark hair and olive complexion came from him—but the different-coloured eyes were my own personal curse. Everyone felt like pointing them out, whispering to each other.

  In ten years I’d changed too, from a bright eight year old with too much energy and a fondness for crayons to an anti-social and friendless eighteen year old who drew in charcoal and any sharpened pencil.

  I was once Jewel Valentine, her whole future ahead of her, each eye a different-coloured diamond, each day starting with vigour for life, like every child. Then I became Jewel Valentine, disenchanted, lonely, victim of the Curse of the Beautiful but Strange.

  I knew how I looked—it didn’t have any positive influence on the way I felt about myself. I was five feet and two inches tall, but my height wasn’t the part that mattered, wasn’t the part that bothered me. It was how sharp my features were, the fact that my eyes were so striking, the way my hair fell.

  It was these things that drew people in, but it was my personality that pushed them away. I wished they hadn’t noticed me in the first place. I was alone by choice, but I hadn’t counted on that causing me to feel lonely.

  One thing that always annoyed my teachers, back when I was living with Grandma and Grandpa, was my lack of involvement. I didn’t want to join teams. I didn’t want to take up basketball or robotics or join the anime club. Also (and teachers never say it, but you know they want to), I’d never had a boyfriend. It wasn’t as if I was gay, either; I hadn’t had a girlfriend. (It was kind of trendy and edgy then to say you were gay, or bisexual, or any of those other words people use to let you know that their sexual desires and the types of people they are attracted to aren’t the norm.) I think it would have made Mrs F happy if she had walked in the front gates of the school one day and seen me locking tonsils with someone of any gender in my year. I probably should have done that. Just to find out. Just to get them off my back.

  Nothing scared teachers at that school more than a potential teenaged sociopath. They thought I was going to walk in to school one day with a loaded gun and kill a bunch of Year 10s and say it was because I didn’t like Monday.

  Actually, I kind of hated Wednesday, like it was there to intentionally piss me off, sidling in between Tuesday and Thursday, mocking me with its innate Wednesday-ness.

  But where would I have got a loaded gun from anyway? I lived a bit out in the country, so I could have got a rifle off a farmer, but that’s not the weapon of choice in killing sprees, from what I’ve seen of late-night true-crime shows (the ones that always claim to have new and damning evidence, but never do).

  Their second biggest fear was that I was going to kill myself. They asked me a few times whether I was having ‘urges’ (clearly they weren’t talking about the sexual kind, because that would have been freaky and they don’t tend to continue Sex Education past Year 10—though before then they deliver it liberally: for five years they brought the same nurse in, and she gave the same speech, and we watched the same bad ’80s video, and we had the same awkward Q & A), which, literally translated, means: ‘Been writing emo poetry, Jewel?

  Tried to slit your wrists, Jewel? Thinking about trying to OD on your grandfather’s arthritis medicine, Jewel?’ I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was an attention-seeker, I don’t know. I wasn’t going to kill myself— that would have destroyed my grandparents and pushed my mother over the edge (perhaps into a killing spree of her own) and, besides, I still held hope for my future as a bum in London or New York.

  I love last words. I wonder what mine would be, as I lay in a gutter, grey-haired and derelict in London or New York. I wonder what the last words of that boy that I saved would have been if I hadn’t been walking past the lake that night, if I hadn’t saved his life.

  SACHA

  From the moment I woke up the following Monday morning, the stolen garden gnomes on my shelf accosted me with their mocking cheery smiles and flamboyant red hats.

  That girl Jewel hadn’t let me be, and now not even inanimate objects would give me a break.

  Every noise seemed magnified. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and the sound of my eyelashes rustling was almost deafening. Slivers of light poured through the slats in the blinds, patterning the beige carpet of my room. The sun was especially bright, and the surround sound was fifty decibels higher than it should have been. The world was in high definition, but I just wanted to turn the TV show off.

  There was a clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen (the cupboard beneath the stove was a mess of aluminium frying pans and oven dishes that we rarely used, and that Dad was always accidentally knocking everywhere). I slumped out of bed.

  Across the hall in the bathroom, I splashed my face with water, avoiding my own reflection, instead admiring the mould growing around the drain. Cleaning was my job—not that Dad had ever assigned me chores, but if I didn’t clean the bathroom semi-regularly a whole army of bacteria would grow in there and eat us when we attempted to shower.

  Even a year after my mother had died, I still expected to see her in the kitchen. I still got that sickening crunch in my stomach when it was just Dad there. And don’t get me wrong, I love my father. But she was gone. Even in the house she never lived in I expected to see her when I woke up in the morning, chirping ‘Rise and shine’.

  But there was only Dad, with too tight a smile, knocking the pots everywhere, turning a dipping egg into a hardboiled one, the way my mother never did.

  ‘Hey.’ I hovered in the doorway, massaging my neck. I always slept at bad angles.

  Dad looked up. ‘Good morning, Sacha.’ He found the toaster and slammed it on the bench. ‘It’s gonna have to be Vegemite on toast today, buddy.’ His T-shirt was splattered with paint. There was a wo
rk in progress, as always.

  ‘You haven’t called me that for years,’ I said, sitting down on a stool at the bench.

  He brought the tub of butter over, and I pushed the bread down.

  Dad inhaled sharply. ‘I think you should stay home from school today. We have a lot of stuff to talk about. Especially about the lake on Saturday.’

  ‘I have to go. This is an important year. You wouldn’t believe the pressure the teachers are putting on us,’ I said, then jumped to another train of thought. ‘Do you think many people die from sticking a knife in a toaster?’

  ‘Are you trying to change the subject?’

  I stepped away from the toaster and poured myself a glass of water. ‘Yeah. You know I can’t hang around here all day, Dad.’ I didn’t look at him as I spoke.

  ‘Sacha.’ Dad sighed. He massaged his temples. ‘You’re sick. Again. We need to figure out what we’re going to do. We need to talk about this. You’re going back into hospital in a couple of weeks, and you’re not going to be able to keep up with your schoolwork.’

  I gulped back a handful of painkillers and the glass of water. I put the glass in the sink and turned to Dad. ‘Why are you being like this?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he replied. It looked as if new lines had appeared on his forehead overnight.

  ‘Why are you suddenly so concerned?’

  ‘You have cancer, Sach,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of a big deal.’

  ‘I know,’ I snapped. ‘Of course I know. I remember being sick. I know I’m sick now. But why are you being like this? You’ve been emotionally detached my whole life—off with the fairies, painting and crap, never even noticing half of what’s going on around you. You didn’t even notice when Mum was dying. But now you’re so concerned about me? Where did this come from? Why are you being like this?’ I glared at him.

  ‘It’s just you and me, now, okay? We’re going to work everything out,’ he said, looking down at the Vegemite jar. ‘Helen’s death was a tragedy, I know and I’m sorry, but now we need to sort this out.’