Girl Saves Boy (6 page)

‘Not at all, Mum,’ Al said. ‘I’m not friends with True.’

She looked him over sceptically then turned to me. ‘Would you like a beer, hon? We won’t tell anybody.’ She winked.

‘I’m on medication, but thanks anyway,’ I said.

‘Are you staying for tea?’ asked Sal. ‘Mason’s gone for Chinese and I’m cooking up some extra rice.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Dad might need me back at home though…’

‘Okay, Mum, we’re gonna go now.’ Al steered me out of the room.

‘You look after your dad, Sacha,’ his mum called after us. ‘You two can come for dinner whenever you like.’

‘They
still
think I’m sleeping with True,’ Al said when we were out in the hall.

I laughed. ‘In your dreams.’

Little Al paused outside the door to his room. ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.’

I shook my head and followed him in. As I sat down on his bed, I bent to look underneath for a tennis ball. I found one—painted to represent a neuron for some school project (or, knowing Little Al, just for fun)—and lay back on the bed, tossing it at the ceiling. I could hear his family thundering in other rooms of the house, yelling and arguing and laughing.

I realised how much I missed noise—there’s a certain kind of quiet that perpetually haunts my house. I don’t think it ever existed at Al’s.

Al sat on the wheelie chair by his desk and spun and spun and spun. Set up on his desk was a DNA model made of Paddle Pop sticks and Styrofoam balls.

I stopped throwing the ball at the ceiling and turned my head and looked at him. He paused. ‘What?’

‘Why would they think you were sleeping with True? She never comes to your house.’

Al shrugged. ‘They’ve seen the yearbook.’ He sighed. ‘They see something like that “dream couple” label and never let me live it down.’

‘But you do like her?’

‘You know I do.’ He held his hand to his forehead and sighed dramatically. ‘Oh, the woes of unrequited love.’

‘I wonder why she’s like that?’ I returned to throwing the ball at the ceiling.

‘Women,’ said Al, putting on a David Attenborough voice. ‘A perplexing species.’ Then he added, in his ordinary voice, ‘I think she hates me.’

I shook my head. ‘No she doesn’t. Why don’t you just talk to her, Al? Ask her out. It’s not a big deal.’

Al laughed and shook his head right back at me. ‘You know she doesn’t like me.’

‘She didn’t like you when we were
thirteen
. It’s been five years. She’s probably just waiting for you to ask her out.’

‘You know that’s not her style,’ said Al.

I stopped tossing the ball again and sat up. ‘Sometimes, you just have to take risks, okay? What happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow?’ I asked.

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.’