Girl Saves Boy Read online

  Al said, ‘It won’t matter. I’ll be dead.’

  I sighed. ‘Okay then, what if the world ended tomorrow?’

  Al paused his spinning for a moment, and tilted his head. ‘Um, then we’ll all be dead. It won’t matter then, either,’ he said.

  ‘Oh God.’ I slumped back down. ‘You just don’t get it. The point I’m trying to make—the point you’re deliberately ignoring—is that tomorrow it might all go away. You have to do what you want and take what you want now.’

  Al laughed, but this time it wasn’t genuine. ‘When did you go all Eckhart Tolle on me?’

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and held my head in my hands and sighed.

  Al added, ‘I think you need to take your own advice.’

  ‘It’s a lot easier to give advice than listen to it,’ I mumbled into my hands.

  ‘I reckon you’re in with a chance with this Jewel,’ said Al. ‘She’s a bit of all right.’

  ‘It sounds kind of demeaning when you talk like that,’ I said, looking up.

  Al snorted. ‘Sacha, you do know my family, right?’

  ‘I was serious about what I said before though,’ I said.

  Al stretched his arms above his head and reached for the ceiling. He nearly touched it. Then he sat on his hands. ‘There’s more to life than this whole going out business, you know.’

  ‘I never thought I’d hear that from you, Al,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘I know.’

  ‘What if True died?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ asked Al, the smile dropping from his face. ‘Is she dying? Is she sick?’

  ‘No, no, no. Not to my knowledge, anyway.’ I gave Al a look. ‘I’m being hypothetical.’

  ‘Honestly, what is up with you this afternoon?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Next you’ll be dressing in black and listening to emo music.’

  I smiled. ‘That’s a funny image.’

  Al nodded, grinning. ‘Yeah, you and Draco Malfoy.’

  We laughed. Then we fell silent again.

  ‘I’d feel like shit if she died,’ Al said, after a moment. ‘But she’s not going to. Even if she did, it wouldn’t make a difference whether we were going out or not. I’d probably feel worse if we were.’

  ‘You’d regret it though,’ I said. ‘Not asking her out.’

  ‘Have you seen the looks she gives me?’ asked Al.

  ‘They’re not that bad,’ I said. ‘She gives me nasty glares as well, you know. Her face is pretty much permanently like that.’

  ‘I don’t think True’s really that special,’ said Al, shrugging.

  I gave him a disbelieving stare.

  He frowned. Then he said very quickly, ‘Okay, I think she’s fantastic. But, God, she’s never going to think of me that way.’

  ‘I really think you should just go for it,’ I said.

  ‘I really think you should just mind your own business,’ retorted Al.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ I said, holding up my hand to silence him. ‘You pretty much decimated all of your pride with regard to True when we were thirteen. It’s not like there’s anything left to lose.’

  ‘We’ll probably end up going to different universities at the end of this year, anyway,’ said Al. ‘There’s no point even asking her.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘But you should ask her. It goes badly, in a couple of months’ time you’ll never have to see each other again. If you don’t ask her, you’ll both go off to your different universities, and I guarantee you’ll regret that you didn’t ask her out. Then a few decades pass and you die a lonely old man.’

  ‘You didn’t need to add that last bit.’

  I nodded. ‘Point taken.’

  ‘But seriously,’ said Al. ‘When did you turn into Emma?’

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘Emma. From the book by Jane Austen. Of the same name. Emma.’ Al’s face reddened as he explained.

  ‘You read that?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Al. ‘Course not. My sister read it.’

  ‘Someone in your family reads?’

  ‘It’s been known to happen,’ said Al. ‘Anyway, what are you going to do at the end of this year? Are you going to go to university with me, or with True?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not going to university.’

  ‘Where are you going then?’

  ‘I…I don’t know.’

  Al gave me a dubious look. ‘You have to go somewhere, Duck. Haven’t you got any plans at all?’

  ‘Let’s not talk about this now, hey?’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ said Al. ‘Should we get away from the whole deep and meaningful thing right now, and play kick-to-kick or something? God, you’re such a girl, you know that.’

  ‘Only on Tuesdays,’ I said.

  ‘You could always be a drag queen,’ said Al, a look of utter seriousness on his face.

  ‘I won’t rule it out,’ I said dryly.

  ‘So what do you wanna do now, then?’ Al grinned again. ‘Did I tell you Mason bought the new Halo? It’s a bit faulty and the colours are off because he got it off these pirates at the markets— not actual pirates, ha, that’d be funny, but you know those ones that—’

  ‘Um, Al?’ I interrupted.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I actually do have stuff to do at home,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna have to go, if that’s all right.’

  ‘But what about dinner?’ he asked. ‘The food’s on the way.’

  ‘I’d better have dinner with Dad,’ I said. ‘He’s in a bit of a state at the moment.’ That was sort of true.

  Al nodded slowly. ‘All right. I’ll drop you home.’

  He grabbed his keys in the kitchen, and when we were out in the driveway, before we got to the car, he touched my shoulder and I paused.

  ‘You know you can talk to me, right? About what happened on Saturday.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I groaned. ‘Everyone has said that, Al. It’s okay. I’m fine.’

  ‘I mean it,’ he said, and his voice was thick with concern.

  I felt sick: sick of myself mainly, for reasons that were unclear. ‘Thanks,’ I managed.

  I trust Al. I trust True. I trust my dad, even though I’m pissed off at him and Mr Carr. But I’m not ready to talk to them yet. I don’t know whether I will ever be ready to talk to them. I dodn’t know if it would help.

  Sometimes I argue with myself in my head, a sure sign of insanity, I bet. One voice says: There’s nothing worse than keeping it to yourself—tell someone! Tell anyone!

  The other voice is calmer, sounds more like me. Because of this, I trust it. It says: They don’t need to know. Protect them from having to know about you being sick. They don’t have to pity you, they don’t have to lie awake and worry at night. You’ll be okay. You can handle it on your own.

  I know that both the voices are just me. But still, I listen to them. I delude myself that they’ll tell me something I don’t already know.

  Dad knows, he knows I’m sick because he takes me in for the tests, and he cried in his room last week when we found out it’s back and it’s worse.

  Every time he tries to bring it up, tries to talk to me about it, I leave the room. I can’t do it. There are a lot of things we don’t talk about in my house. The quiet. Mr Carr. My mother.

  I’m just not ready to talk about it, okay?

  Jewel

  Everyone says that people don’t change, but that’s a lie.

  Her hair was wound up in a bun on her head, not a single blonde hair out of place. When she moved, her hair shimmered in the light. When she brought her hand up against her head to smooth her hair that was already impossibly smoothed— maybe she did this nervously, though her expression didn’t seem to suggest nervousness—I noticed her fingernails shone a soft pink, with perfect white half-moons on the end of each nail.

  Do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking, People this perfect do not exist. People this perfect live in magazines and on TV.

  She
’d become thin and tall—unbelievably tall. She must have been almost six foot. Her face was angular and sharp, and her skin was completely clear and a shade darker than pale.

  We walked through the dining room, and True motioned for me to sit. She went into the kitchen and made tea. She didn’t yell out to me in conversation while she prepared it—perfect people don’t yell, do they?—so I just waited at the dining table and ran my finger over the patterns in the tablecloth until she returned with two cups of tea and a plate of biscuits. She left again, and brought back sugar and a little jug of milk.

  Honestly, who has milk in a little jug like that outside a cereal commercial?

  I was sitting at the head of the table. True sat on the chair nearest me. She crossed her legs neatly at the ankle, and we each put sugar and milk in our tea.

  ‘Mum—I mean, Geraldine—is out,’ explained True.

  It was unbelievable. How unlikely a coincidence was that? How had I not remembered True mentioning her mum at school? I suppose we were both very young, and Geraldine would still have been working full-time back then. We hadn’t ever been to each other’s house—True was in after-school care most days, and my mother had me in ballet or swimming or some other activity every afternoon. None of those lasted very long. We’d been best friends, but only within the confines of the school playground. Anyway, going to people’s houses and having people over was never something I did. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted to keep people at a distance, even back then. Maybe, no matter what had happened, I would still have ended up the social reject that I am.

  When she was a little girl, True Grisham did not sit up straight like she was now, or purse her thin lips like she was perpetually put out, or wear a pink cashmere cardigan without a speck of lint on it.

  Little-girl True Grisham climbed trees and had dirt under her fingernails and constantly wrote in a black spiral-bound notebook. Both of us did. We had been kind of going through a Harriett-the-Spy phase.

  True Grisham had changed, but I wasn’t sure whether or not I had as well.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, after a while. We’d just been sitting there, and I’d been slurping my tea and trying not to spill biscuit crumbs all over the floor, while True had been focusing intently on the wallpaper.

  ‘Hmm?’ True murmured. ‘What happened when?’

  ‘After I left.’

  True smiled. ‘I can’t remember being young all that well, Jewel.’ She sighed. ‘My father died of heart failure. I decided to become a journalist. My mother is semi-retired, as you know. She told me she’d met you. That’s about it.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about your dad. I, um, don’t know where my dad is. I just came back because my grandparents died.’

  True nodded and smiled sadly. ‘I’m sorry, too, Jewel.’

  ‘Did you miss me?’ I asked, then said, ‘Sorry. That’s a really weird question—’

  ‘It’s okay. I did.’

  ‘What happened with friends and high school and things?’

  ‘Well, the year after you left a new kid came to our school. I’ve never been all that good with people, so he’s pretty much my only friend. Sacha Thomas’—she paused and noticed my expression—‘Yes, that Sacha Thomas. I’m the school newspaper editor as well this year, so I haven’t had much spare time for friends anyway.’

  ‘What are you doing next year?’

  ‘I’m going to university,’ she said. ‘Hopefully get a place at a uni in the city. I’ve got two I want to get into, then back-ups. What about you?’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘Um, I don’t know.’

  True nodded a few times, and then sipped at her tea. ‘I…I feel terrible for what’s happened to you, Jewel.’

  ‘Could we not talk about that?’

  She nodded again.

  We were quiet a moment, until she said, ‘You’ve changed, you know? I half-expected you’d still be a little kid. I knew you’d grown up, of course, God, but I couldn’t imagine it.’

  ‘I was about to say the same about you,’ I said.

  ‘All the important things about me are the same, Jewel,’ True replied. ‘And I’m sure all the important things inside you are the same as well. But, yes, I’m different. I’ve grown up, and you have too.’ She wasn’t looking at me, and she licked her lips. Was she nervous?

  I looked True over. ‘You could belong in an ad about teeth-whitener. One of those brush-on ones, you know them?’

  ‘It’s not about the way people look,’ she said, shaking her head, a small smile on her lips. ‘And besides, you look like you should be playing bass in a punk band.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Did I tell you how I’m way hardcore now?’

  She laughed and shook her head again. I laughed too. I ate another biscuit. I felt electric with nervous energy.

  ‘Pink is still my favourite colour.’ True smiled properly now. ‘You know, if you want reassurance that I’m still the same person.’

  ‘I’d be happier if you still liked colouring books and dressing up Baby Born.’

  ‘Baby Born is creepy,’ said True. ‘And I hate the fact that there are way more white babies than black babies. That’s statistically incorrect, as well as racist. And there are way more girls than boys. What’s with that?’

  ‘We should write up a petition.’

  She nodded. ‘Agreed.’ With each passing second, True seemed more and more like the little-girl True I had known.

  ‘I expected you’d become something to do with writing, you know,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah. But not a journalist. I didn’t think you’d get into factual writing. Something that deals less with the concrete facts. Like a poet or a novelist.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe one day.’ She smiled again. ‘What about you? Any creative endeavours?’

  ‘Obviously the drawing.’ I held up my sketchbook, and then brought out the drawing of Geraldine. ‘Hey, could you give this to your mum?’

  True took it and looked at it. Her brow furrowed as she inhaled sharply and stared at it. Then she handed it back to me and looked down at the embroidery on the tablecloth.

  ‘I think you should give it to her the next time you see her,’ said True. ‘I think it’ll be better if you give it to her directly.’ She smiled at me and looked down again, tracing her finger over the embroidery. I sensed that she was going to say something else, so I concentrated on putting the sketch back in my sketchbook.

  Then True looked up, looked directly at me. I tried not to look away from her. She didn’t blink.

  ‘That’s amazing, Jewel. Really amazing.’

  I’m not good at taking compliments, so I just murmured ‘Thank you’ and concentrated on my sketchbook.

  We sat and talked for a little while longer and, though it was a stilted and awkward conversation, it was still nice.

  I left when the sun was starting to go down. Geraldine hadn’t come home yet.

  ‘I’ll see you at school,’ True said at the door. ‘Look after yourself.’

  I caught a bus to the other side of the suburb, and walked home from the bus stop with an overpowering sense of déjà vu catching me at every corner, and an intense longing for my childhood washing over me in waves.

  When I turned into my street, I stopped, because I saw Sacha Thomas standing outside my house.

  He was halfway down the tree-lined avenue, on the footpath outside our low fence—he was cradling a garden gnome. The light dipped through the trees, the afternoon sun flushing gold across the smooth nature-strips.

  Sacha Thomas, standing on the footpath outside my house, holding a garden gnome.

  It was like one of those weird dreams you have before waking and nothing makes sense and you very often cut people up and make them into soup.

  Or is that just me?

  Sacha Thomas—the same boy I dragged from the lake and resuscitated; the same boy True Grisham told me had been her only friend in the years since I’d left; the same
boy who liked me, according to the ridiculously tall one, Little Al (not that I take seriously what ridiculously tall strangers say to me in regards to people whose lives I’ve saved, but it is worth noting all the same).

  It was creepy, but it was also intriguing.

  Instead of storming over there and demanding to know what he was doing, I watched him. Which made me a creep, I guess, but I was kind of beyond that. For the past decade I’d taken it upon myself to make people feel uncomfortable.

  He was so thin that a drawing of a stick figure probably would have been an accurate portrait of him, and so short—taller than me, naturally, but that was no accomplishment—that I understood why I’d thought he was younger than me the other night by the lake.

  Then he glanced at me (he had the sort of face that old poets would have written sonnets about, if he’d been alive in Elizabethan times and the apprentice of a gay bard), caught my gaze for a moment, and dropped the gnome.

  He stepped back quickly, looked down. The gnome had broken into chunks of ceramic and danced out across the footpath. I cringed at the noise. He looked at me, and bit his bottom lip. He looked like a wounded bird. He looked like a wounded bird that had just smashed somebody’s garden gnome. My garden gnome. Or at least my family’s garden gnome.

  Not that there was much family left.

  I started walking towards him, and I saw him swallow. Then he knelt to pick up the gnome. One, two, three, four pieces. He stood up, clutching them, avoiding eye contact with me.

  When I stopped in front of him, he looked at me through his fringe. His hair was light blond and thin.

  ‘Is this yours?’ he asked.

  He held the pieces of gnome out and our fingers touched for a second. His hands were clammy.

  ‘Was,’ I said, ‘I guess.’ I nodded towards the house. ‘That’s my place.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ he said, looking at my faux-sandstone House of Painful Memories. ‘Sorry ’bout the gnome.’

  There were tiny bits that had fallen off the larger chunks of ceramic and were now littering the footpath. Not worth gluing back together.

  Our rubbish bin was still out on the curb after the rubbish collection that morning. I stepped over to it and dropped the gnome inside.