precipice noun: a situation of great
peril
Alyce puts the video in the machine and we sit on her couch. The rest of the class is at Susan’s party but I’m happy. Alyce takes a drink and it goes down the wrong way. She’s burping bubbles everywhere and spitting Coke all over me. It’s hilarious. I’m laughing and whacking her on the back and it’s great. There’s no place I’d rather be than here, about to watch The Terminator. It’s just the sort of film that Jane would have picked.
All of a sudden I feel homesick. I shouldn’t be here. It’s not right to watch this film and laugh and eat popcorn without her.
‘What’s wrong?’ Alyce asks, watching the rain clouds move into my eyes.
‘I guess I miss Jane.’
‘She’ll be back.’
It’s something that I’ve known all along, but somehow I like the sound of the words when they’re said aloud. I hope that Jane is happy without me too. I hope she’s got someone to sit on her bus with like I do now. Alyce has saved me a seat all week without asking. I’ll catch the bus on Monday and she will be there again. It will be nice to be able to predict something.
I wish I could talk to Alyce about Martin. I feel so bad about what I said. I want to ask her how I can fix things. I know what she’ll say already, though. I know what I have to do.
‘There’s a million puzzles in the world, Alyce,’ Mum always said to me whenever I talked to her about school, ‘and every piece has a spot.’ By the time I turned twelve I’d stopped talking to her about it. I’d worked out that there were more than a million puzzles in the world and I didn’t like those odds.
School always made me feel strange. I was sure that if you turned everyone upside down and emptied them out, the things that would fall out of me would be different from everyone else. Maybe nothing would fall out at all.
Hanging out with Gracie doesn’t change that exactly, but she has this way of making me feel like it doesn’t matter. I can say what I want to her. I can relax.
‘Dare you to put that whole packet of lollies in your mouth, Alyce. Come on, I dare you,’ she says. So I do.
I think if I had a kid I’d tell them to just make their own puzzle, make it whatever shape they want.
Who do you sit next to on the bus, Jane? I text on my way home. I figure it’s about time I asked.
What bus? You’re crazy, Faltrain, that’s why I miss you.
I waited for her after the match today. I figured she’d show up at the ground like she always does. She didn’t.
I don’t like the ground when it’s quiet. There’s too much room to think. All this space reminds me of Mum and how on Sunday afternoons she’d sit on the couch reading. Her eyes were on the words but then you’d get up a bit closer and see that she was sort of looking through the print. It was like she was seeing something on the other side. Something no one else could.
I’d touch her arm and she’d blink a bit and then look at me like we were meeting for the first time. I keep dreaming about that look. It’s what made me wake up all those years ago, feeling like I wanted to be sick.
Gracie has gone to Alyce’s for the afternoon. I come home from a movie and he is there when I walk in.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask as he laughs at my surprise.
‘Waiting for you and Gracie of course,’ he says, like nothing has changed.
We eat dinner, say things like, ‘Pass the salt’ and ‘This meat is delicious’. The light is fading outside and we sit in shadow until Gracie comes home and switches on the light.
I flick on the light and just for a minute they don’t look like Mum or Dad at all. They look like two people I’ve never met before. The scariest thing is that they look like they’ve never met each other. For a minute I feel like I’m in one of those dreams where I’m hanging on to the edge of a steep cliff. One finger at a time is curling away from the edge. It’s so real I can actually feel the fear circling through my chest and then down to my toes. And in this dream, I can’t fly.
They smile and the strangeness passes. Dad hugs me so tightly that it’s hard to breathe. Mum turns on the telly and the room fills with other people’s sounds. There is a strange feeling, like if we don’t open the windows we’ll all suffocate. I’m too scared to sleep tonight, because the edge of that cliff doesn’t seem all that far away.
I don’t know if I can go back to him. Those threads that hold Gracie and me were woven tightly around Bill too but he broke them. How do I know they can be spun again? How do I know they’ll be one, spun the same length, the same colour, running from our hearts to his? And what happens to Gracie if we try, and realise that there’s nothing connecting us at all?