Girl Saves Boy (18 page)

‘Next year you’re going to university, Al. And I would have gone wherever I would have gone. You know we wouldn’t have stayed friends. Our lives are going in different directions. It doesn’t make much difference that mine will end.’

‘Bullshit. So this is a friendship of convenience is what you’re basically saying?’ he spat, his eyes red.

I shook my head. ‘No. I’m just dying, Al. I’m going to fight it, but the odds aren’t good. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up—I’m going to try, okay?’

‘Fuck,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘Let’s just talk about this, all right? Relax.’

‘You’re kidding me, right?’ he said. ‘This is a sick joke.’ Tears dripped down his face and he snorted a short, unfunny laugh.

I shook my head. I’d hardly ever seen Al cry.

We sat there in silence for about half an hour. I scrawled pointless sums in my
Maths for Living
textbook. When there is nothing to do and no future to plan, time is both achingly slow and speed-of-light fast.

‘Have you told True?’ Al finally asked. ‘Have you told Jewel?’

‘True, no. Jewel, yes.’

‘How did she take it?’ Al asked.

I looked at the ground then up again. ‘Like you. Only then she stormed off.’

Al nodded but didn’t look at me. ‘You know me, and you know I’ll be there for you, but you don’t know her that well, so you don’t know what’s going to happen.’

I nodded, sighed, rubbed my eyes. ‘I’m an idiot.’

Al took off his school tie and stuffed it into his bag. ‘I don’t know how to help you, Duck. I don’t know how to help myself. I don’t think me talking to Jewel would be the wisest move, either. I wish I could. I wish you weren’t dying. In a parallel universe, maybe I’d have red hair and you wouldn’t be sick and True would like me.’ He grinned for a second, but it was forced. ‘Maybe things would be okay and we’d plan Schoolies—go away to Surfers Paradise for a week or two and party and get plastered and sleep on the beach.’

‘We wouldn’t go to Schoolies, not even in an altered reality. That’s just not our style.’

Al nodded. ‘You’re right. We’re party poopers.’

I rubbed my eyes again. ‘In this alternate reality, my mum would still be around.’ I said it like a wish, and I regretted it immediately.

‘I don’t want to sound corny or clichéd or anything,’ Al said, his voice slow, pausing between words as if he had to pronounce exactly the right ones, ‘but maybe she’s waiting for you. You must have wondered at some point, about that.’

I nodded. ‘I wish I knew what was on the other side,’ I said.

‘“The other side.” You sound like that guy who can speak to the dead. You know, he walks around a room full of people, says, “I can feel a Bob over here.” And then one of fifty people leaps up and says, “I have a third cousin called Bob who died!” It’s obviously a load of crap. No basis in science.’ Al shook his head. Then he exhaled sharply. ‘Sorry, I’m being stupid. It’s all a bit much.’

I nodded. ‘You reckon there’s a heaven?’

He shrugged. ‘There could be. It isn’t the most logical thing in the world, but, as George Michael said, you gotta have faith. Maybe it’s not too late to take the Jehovah’s Witnesses up on their offer of everlasting salvation.’

I smiled. ‘I think there’s a limit. One hundred and something thousand maximum membership, but they’re still convinced that if they rally hard enough there’ll be spots left. Maybe people get kicked out. Maybe God auditions everyone for heaven. I don’t know if I’d make the cut.’

‘You’re a good person.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if I am. And even if I am, whether that’s enough.’

‘You should start learning tap. God might like it if you danced for him. Or made some cocktails…’

‘Somehow I don’t see that working.’

‘Who knows?’ Al shrugged. ‘Maybe you’ll get reincarnated as an antelope or something.’

‘You believe in that?’

‘I’m believing in anything and everything right now, Sacha,’ Al said. ‘The walls are falling down around me. It’ll be all right for you, when you’re gone. Maybe the time in between won’t be the greatest, but it doesn’t just end for us. For your dad, for True, for me. Even Jewel.’

‘She hates me.’

Al laughed. ‘Sounds like somebody I know.’ The joke fell flat, and we were swallowed by silence again.

‘The time between now and then is going to be horrible, you know,’ I said. ‘Everyone will be feeling sorry for you and True and Dad. I just get the sense that when people have a terminal disease everyone starts grieving even before they’re gone.’

‘I reckon it’d be cool to go to your own funeral,’ said Al. ‘Watch everyone crying for you. See who really cares.’

‘Who’s the emo now?’ I said it in a joking tone, but neither of us laughed or even cracked a smile.

‘This is shit, Duck,’ said Al. He rubbed his forehead with his hands. When he looked at me again, he wasn’t crying, but his eyes were shiny with unshed tears.

‘You think I don’t already know that?’ I replied. ‘It would’ve been better if she hadn’t found me that night. A few more minutes, and it would have been done with.’

‘What? Your life?’ Al snorted again. ‘Do you think your dad, or anyone, could have lived with themselves? There’s nothing admirable in suicide.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’ The second time I said it, my voice faltered.

The best things about autumn
The promise of first term ending and two weeks of nothing
but school-free bliss
That single day when all the trees are filled with gold and
orange and yellow leaves yet to fall
Running through piles of leaves that have been laboriously
raked, and tossing them everywhere in a matter of moments

On Monday evening, there was a knock at the door and I heard Dad answer. I guessed it was Mr Carr, dropping by to visit Dad, so I was surprised when True appeared in the doorway of my room.

I was sitting in bed. The TV was on with the sound blaring but I wasn’t watching it. True walked in and turned off the TV in the middle of a noisy ad for a car dealership.

She sat on the end of my bed and looked down at her hands in her lap.

‘I spoke to your dad,’ she said.

‘I told him not to tell you,’ I said. My throat felt dry. ‘I was going to. I was working up to it.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, shaking her head.

She tipped her chin upwards and blinked repeatedly, as if she was trying to stop herself from crying.

‘I’m so sorry, Sacha,’ she said. ‘Bad things shouldn’t happen to good people.’

‘Shit, don’t cry.’ I laughed weakly.

‘I should have known.’ She looked over at me, her mouth a grim line.

‘You can hypnotise people,’ I joked. ‘But being psychic is a totally separate thing.’

She smiled, her eyes shiny with tears. ‘You know I’m going to be there for you, right? Right till the end.’

‘I know. I know.’ I bit down hard on my lip to hold back the tears.

True reached over and grasped my hand. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan and forced a smile.

‘I need some space,’ I said. ‘Sorry, that’s such a lame expression, I know. It’s not that I’m not glad you’re here, but it’s all a bit overwhelming right now. I’m sorry.’

True nodded and let go of my hand. ‘Stop saying sorry; it isn’t your fault. I understand. Take care of yourself, Sacha.’

Then she left.

This is what I thought about late on Monday night, when my dad didn’t question my disappearance on Sunday evening, when I hadn’t seen Jewel all day, when Al and I had sat by the lake and he’d made me promise just to wait, in case Death decided to pass me by. (He didn’t understand that the waiting was probably worse than the dying, and I’d rather get it over and done with, but I promised just the same.)

I thought of lying next to Jewel and kissing her, and the million other things I’d ruined, that I couldn’t have again.

I thought of Little Al, child prodigy, and his frailty that I’d never seen before.

I thought of True Grisham kissing a boy, and the look on Al’s face.

The unexpected things.

I thought of death—my mother’s, Jewel’s brother’s, True’s father’s, my own—and I wondered, again, about the possibility of an afterlife, about what insect I’d be reincarnated as, why everyone always thinks they were Cleopatra or Julius Caesar or Hitler or Napoleon in a past life, not accepting that they’re ordinary now, and they were almost definitely ordinary then and will be in an afterlife.

I thought of my dad and I thought of Mr Carr, and I thought of the futility of continuing to go to school, and I let myself wonder for a split-second about the possibility of survival.

I thought about Jewel again. I thought about what I wanted to do before I died and I drew a blank. I stared at the same spot on the ceiling for seven hours, and, sometime around five in the morning, I fell asleep.

Jewel

I spent all of Monday curled up in my room, drawing harsh sketches of my lamp, my jewellery box, my own reflection, in unforgiving charcoal. By the end of the day, my fingers were black and I had smudges all over my face from rubbing at my eyes. I fell asleep with my sketchbook still in my hands, a blunt line of black across a fresh page that, when I woke up, stared at me with more indignation than a line should.

On Tuesday morning Rachel met me in the kitchen with an empty bottle of wine in her hand and pushed a plate of burnt toast across the bench towards me. Neither of us spoke, and I only raised my eyes to meet hers once or twice. I couldn’t eat, so I stood up and grabbed my schoolbag.

‘I’ll be late,’ I muttered.

Not that either of us ever cared about that.

I started off with good intentions: I caught the bus and stared out the window and pretended I didn’t hear when people tried to speak to me. I walked towards my homeroom, but two minutes before class began, I walked out of the hall and hid in the last stall in the girls’ toilets and tried to push everything out of my mind. I rolled down my socks and plaited my hair and read every engraving on the walls of the stall—phone numbers and pledges of undying love and profanity. According to past girls’ visits to this stall, Mrs Ford was a dyke, Lucy was a slut and Skye, who’d been long gone (‘1998’ was scrawled beside that message), was allegedly something even I wouldn’t say out loud.

I spent two hours sitting in that stall (I even scrawled my own ironic message in the back of the door: ‘Magic Happens’). After the cleaners came in at lunch and I nearly choked to death on the stench of bleach, I escaped outside. I took in as much oxygen as I could, nonchalantly slipping through the crowd, and made my way towards the portables where True worked on the school newspaper at lunchtime.

The Venetian blinds were closed and the door was locked. The portable where the Audio-Visual team met was open, and a small and draughty office connected it to the newspaper portable. The AV nerds blushed with surprise when I knocked on the door.

‘I need to see True Grisham,’ I explained. ‘To do with the newspaper.’

A freckled boy smiled. ‘Sure. She’s right through there.’

I smiled back and opened the door to the adjoining office.

In the other classroom, True and Al were talking. But instead of stepping inside, I stood in the office, frozen, and listened. I felt like Nancy Drew or some kind of Peeping Tom. Al being there had caught me off guard.

True was sitting on a desk, clicking through something on her laptop, her hair cast over one shoulder and her back to me. Little Al sat on a wheelie chair, watching her. Neither of them had noticed me hovering just inside the doorway to the connecting room. If Al looked a little to the left, he’d see me.

‘You know, on Saturday, at the fair,’ murmured Little Al. ‘Who was that guy you were with?’

‘What guy?’ asked True. I could hear her fingers clicking across the keyboard.

‘I saw you kissing him,’ Little Al said. ‘I just want to know who he his.’

The typing stopped abruptly. ‘He’s just someone I know. I have friends other than Sacha, Michael.’

‘I thought you weren’t going to go out with anyone,’ said Little Al. ‘I thought you were focusing on your career and everything, and that relationships would come later.’

‘It’s my life,’ snapped True. ‘Anyway, shouldn’t we be a bit more concerned about Sacha?’

My breathing was noisy. I didn’t know whether to shuffle back into the other classroom, or step in and talk to them. I stood paralysed with indecision.

‘Our concern isn’t going to do anything, True,’ said Little Al. ‘He’s dying. What can we do about it?’

‘You’re the fucking science genius; go and cure cancer,’ spat True, pushing her hair back from her face.

‘Oh, my God,’ murmured Little Al, taking a deep breath.

‘What?’

‘I’ve never heard you swear before.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how to deal with this.’

‘You were with him when he was sick the first time…’

‘I was a kid. We were both kids. When you’re ten years old, you don’t really understand the magnitude of it. And besides, childhood leukaemia has high survival rates.’

‘If it’s got such high survival rates, then why is he going to die?’

‘Some have to die. Otherwise they’d be perfect survival rates.’ True turned away from her computer screen and looked at Al.

‘I’m going to miss him,’ said Al. He reached over and grasped True’s hand, staring at it instead of her.

‘We’re all going to,’ True murmured in response, and removed her hand from his. ‘But think: he could’ve been gone last Saturday. We got to keep him a little longer.’

Little Al gave a stifled laugh and looked up at the ceiling, possibly trying to hold back tears. ‘Thanks to Jewel.’

‘He really stuffed that one up, didn’t he?’ said True.

‘He’ll win her back,’ said Little Al.

‘Are you sure you’re talking about Sacha?’ asked True. ‘He’s a bit too passive to win a girl back. The most he’s ever won was the Grade 3 colouring-in championships. He got to regionals.’

Little Al laughed again.

Neither of them spoke for a while, and I tried to stop breathing, at least for another ten minutes. I agonised over what to do. Keep eavesdropping? Leave? What if they noticed me?