I finally go back to school and it’s not the big deal I thought it would be. The thing about the Balmoral prison schedule is that you have to keep marching to each class at the appropriate time and sit still and not talk and wear the regimental uniform of the regimented and that leaves no time for drifting, no time for wandering off in your head and slipping off the face of the earth.
By lunch it’s apparent that spring has sprung at least for one day and there is actual blue sky and swords of sunlight piercing the atmosphere. Instead of skulking in the quad like we did last term we bleed out onto the oval and you couldn’t make grass this green in a factory.
Our year level loll about in small groups, sunbaking, gossiping, filming each other, making daisy-chain headpieces and other childish pastimes, I kid you not, and exams and final assessments are so many weeks away and not a bother at all and the official memorialising is over which means we can be sad on our own timetable now.
In a satellite city clump by the trees are Audrey and Petra and Brooke and the other boarders. Chloe wants me to shake hands make up with Petra, but I won’t. Milla, Claire, Lisbeth and the good girls sprawl near the goal posts, Sarah poses next door, Marley is asleep, Ally sings to herself.
Bochen and Cherry and Mercury and some other international students have pooled their food and laid out a picnic and there is unspoken respect between Bochen and Cherry and me now because those girls are wilder than you’d imagine.
Somewhere in the middle, pretending she is nowhere in particular at all, Chloe is sunk like a happy stone in the grass.
We made it. We survived.
There’s still a Yin-shaped gap in the world, there always will be. A Yin-shape in the clouds, in a passing shadow, in the shape of a tree.
She’s here, I know, or if she’s not, I’m going to pretend hard that she is. Here in my head, not easily forgotten. Wherever she is, I hope she has the curly hair of her dreams, the hair she always wanted instead of the straight hair she got. I hope she lives out every career she ever considered, I hope she gets to play clarinet all day long, hell, I hope there are only hot available clarinet players in her village.
Nothing will ever be the same, but I allow the sun to sink into my body, let myself be optimistic for a change.
I weave my way from the tap near the tennis courts, through the scattered girls, my filled-up water bottle in my hand. How easy it would be to pop the top off it and sweep my arm like a powerful wizard drawing an arc of magic, shooting surprise splashes of cold water over these relaxed bodies, these brave girls.
Making us scream, making us feel more alive.