My Favourite Flower is the Pansy
by Clementine Darcy

My favourite flower is the pansy, because there are singing pansies in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, my favourite Disney movie, based on one of my favourite books. And because they are used as a love potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is my favourite Shakespearean play.

And they look like little monkeys.

And because we had them in our garden growing up, and Soph made them into garlands and wreaths, and pretended we were faerie queens.

She was Ginger, and I was Honeysuckle, and there was more magic in the world than we could ever imagine, and that was just the way we liked it.

I like pansies because . . .

May I talk about Friday now?

I can’t write about flowers when all I have is Friday on my mind, and how it was a complete disaster.

You knew it would be, didn’t you? You could not, however, have possibly imagined the extent of the catastrophe.

After my little meltdown, I went to my room and put on my new black dress.

I heard Sophie get home while I was getting ready. ‘Wow, little sis,’ she said when I came downstairs. She even put her textbook down, and she stood up to check me out. Soph was wearing beige linen pants and a plaid shirt tied at her waist. She looked like Audrey Hepburn. And you know what? I felt a bit Holly Golightly myself, in my swanky dress, with my hair back in a bun and a slick of mascara on my eyelashes.

Sophie dropped me at the restaurant, with a ‘good luck’ and a hug.

She felt all bones and angles.

Nobody else was there yet, so I took Fred’s book from my handbag.

I was immersed in a really exciting scene, about Queen Victoria battling a giant octopus, when Sam walked in.

I had to admit, he did – objectively speaking – look hot. He was wearing a black pinstriped shirt, expensive-looking jeans and designer sneakers. And Chels was right. He did look older. More mature. He looked seventeen.

I suddenly felt childish. And naive.

‘Hey, Clem,’ he said casually, as if he said it all the time. As if we were friends. And then he smiled, and it looked . . . practised. As if he smiled like that often, at girls, and he knew the effect it had. His smile was big and white and dazzling. He looked like a male model: all teeth and shiny hair.

‘Whatcha readin’?’ he asked and I showed him the book.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Deep.’

I didn’t know how to respond to that.

He looked me up and down. ‘I love your dress. You look really pretty.’

‘Thanks,’ I said uncertainly. ‘You look . . . nice, too?’

‘You’re really different from those other two, aren’t you?’ He fixed his eyes on mine. It wasn’t like when Fred looked in my eyes.

‘In, um, what way?’ I asked.

‘You’re just deeper,’ he said, leaning in close. Too close. ‘You’re deeper, and that makes you more beautiful . . .’

I was just wondering, through my shock, which cheesy boy band he’d stolen that line from when he reached over and put his hand on my knee.

And that made me angry.

Who did he think he was, touching me like that, without invitation or permission? He might be hot, he might be popular and older, but I never said he could touch my leg!

‘Get your—’ I began, but before I could add hand off my leg, you creepy pervert, the door swung open and there, staring at me in absolute horror, were Brent, Todd, Cleo and . . . Chelsea-Grace.

Chelsea-Grace, in her gorgeous, flower-printed dress. Chelsea-Grace, looking at me as though I had just run over her puppy.

‘Clem?’ she said quietly. ‘What’s—’

‘Hey, isn’t she meant to be with me?’ Brent looked furiously at Sam.

‘I’m not with anybody,’ I retorted, suddenly conscious that Sam still had his hand on my knee. That boy had serious nerve. I tried to slap it away, but he grabbed my hand before I could. Which looked – revoltingly – even more incriminating.

‘That’s not what it looks like!’ Chels marched towards us, her arms crossed. Sam turned from me and found himself eye-level with Chelsea-Grace’s chest. He smirked and raised an eyebrow.

And then he slid his hand a bit further up, to my inner thigh.

‘Get OFF me,’ I snarled and wrenched myself out of his grip, my heart racing.

‘What is happening?’ gasped Chelsea-Grace. ‘It’s . . . it’s not . . .’

‘Chels, nothing happened!’ I said. ‘We were only talking. And then he—’

‘Talking about how good your fat thigh felt?’ Chelsea-Grace spat.

She didn’t say she was sorry. She didn’t say she hadn’t intended to be mean. Instead, she added, ‘You think it’s absolutely fine for my boyfriend to touch your thigh?’

‘Chelsea-Grace. Honey.’ Sam stood up. ‘I hate to break it to you, but you’re not my girlfriend. Maybe you had a chance tonight – especially in that dress – but the way you’re acting now makes me really glad you’re not. Because I can just walk straight out of here without feeling guilty.’

Then Sam turned to me. ‘I like your fat thighs.’ He winked and, still staring straight at me, he said, ‘Come on, dudes. Let’s get out of here.’

As they were leaving, I heard him say to Brent, ‘Don’t look at me like that, man. You know you would have done the same thing.’

And then we were alone. 3CD. Cleo with her blonde hair twisted into little coils, and her butterfly top showing off her muscular torso; Chelsea-Grace in her sexy, low-cut dress, her brown hair streaked with copper and scrunched into messy waves; and me, in my Holly Golightly dress, the one I had felt so confident in an hour ago. Now, I felt ugly.

I felt ugly and ashamed.

‘I really didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘He just put his—’

Chelsea-Grace buried her face her hands. They were shaking. ‘Clem, no,’ she said, her voice cracking. She looked up at me, and her face was streaked with tears. They made silvery snail tracks through her mineral foundation. Her eyes were red. ‘I know what I saw. Why would you do that?’ Her voice had risen. People were starting to look. A table of Burnie High girls held their chopsticks halfway to their mouths as they gawked at us.

‘I promise, Chels,’ I said, trying to take her hand. She yanked it away.

‘I don’t believe you!’ she cried. ‘I can’t believe you. This is . . . this has been happening for a while, hasn’t it?’

‘What? Me and Sam? No! I never even talked to him before tonight!’

‘No!’ Chelsea-Grace shook her head. ‘This. Us.’ She paused for a moment and looked me straight in the eye. ‘The end of 3CD.’

My head was swimming. I tried to say ‘no’, but no sound would come from my mouth. The other people in the restaurant faded into the background and, for a moment, it felt as though Chelsea-Grace and Cleo and I were standing in a bubble that held only us.

It wasn’t a good bubble, though, like the one we’d been in for the past few years. It was a sad bubble.

It was a bubble that was about to break.

‘We’ve seen it coming, Clementine.’ Cleo stepped forward and put her arm around Chelsea-Grace’s shoulder. ‘We’re your friends, and of course we noticed when you started going through some traumatic stuff at home. That’s gone on for ages now, though, and you’re still . . . different.’

‘Different?’ I felt very small as they looked down on me. ‘I’m not—’

I don’t think running is the right sport for me,’ Cleo mocked. Next to her, Chelsea-Grace had her face in her hands again. ‘I don’t want to go to the concert with you. I’m just going to spend the whole lunch hour outside somewhere and not even tell you where I’m going. You are different, Clem. You’re . . .’ Cleo sighed. ‘You’re not like us. You’re—’

I knew what she was trying to say. You’re plain and daggy, and we’re skinny and cool.

‘Don’t,’ Chels interrupted, shaking her head. ‘Don’t, Cleo. Please leave it.’ She looked just past my shoulder. ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore, Clementine. Cleo, I think we should just go.’

Cleo nodded. ‘Yeah.’

And then they went. Just like that.

I watched them walk away, through the door and into the car park, and I thought, again, how right they looked together.

I knew it then.

3CD had shattered.

I turned and looked around the restaurant. The other diners were either staring at me or making a good show of pretending they weren’t.

I noticed my face was wet. I was crying.

I was crying for the past two-and-a-bit years; for the best friends I’d ever had; and for a future that was big and dark and scary without them in it.

I wanted to yell, What are you looking at? to all the staring people, but I couldn’t. I’d lost my voice. I’d lost my dignity, too, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. I knew I should be feeling humiliated. I couldn’t bring myself to care.

All I cared about was that tomorrow, I wouldn’t be going around to Cleo’s house with Chelsea-Grace, and watching stupid movies and talking about the dumb stuff they liked. I might have thought it was boring before, but now it was all I wanted to do.

All I cared about was that on Monday morning, when I arrived at school, there wouldn’t be any gossiping next to the lockers before first period, or games of cards at lunchtime. I knew the rest of the girls wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore, either. They were more Chelsea-Grace and Cleo’s friends than they were mine.

Of course, I thought, there was a possibility that this wasn’t permanent.

I might wake up to a text tomorrow from Chelsea-Grace saying she’d forgiven me.

I might arrive at school on Monday and find them both standing next to my locker, waiting to fold me up in a big 3CD group hug.

This might just be a blip. A dip in the continuing line-graph that was our friendship.

But something told me that it wasn’t. Something told me this was much bigger than Sam putting his hand on my thigh. There’d been something rotten in the state of 3CD long before that had happened. Knowing this made me feel as if I was falling into a big, deep well with no bottom. As if I was being carried away by the wind.

It made me terrified.

I rubbed at the tears on my face. I blew my nose and I ignored the still-staring people. I pulled the elastic from my hair and let it fall limply down. I retrieved the hoodie I’d rolled up and stuffed in my handbag to put on after the movie as a shield against the cold night air.

I wasn’t Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s anymore.

I was Patricia Neal’s character, Emily Eustace Failenson. Abandoned by the only real friends I’d ever had. Alone and miserable.

All I could think to do was go to my big brother and ask him – like the last time, in primary school, with Leah Parker – to make it all better again.