For the first time in weeks, I sleep okay, although I think that maybe it’s because I’m exhausted. I wake just after 8.00 and, for a few moments, everything is perfect. Calm. And then it starts: the monitoring of every thought, every emotion, every reaction, like my mind has embarked on some meticulous cataloguing of everything going on inside my head.
I get out of bed, grab a sedative and swallow it in the kitchen with some juice. Breakfast next, as that stillness closes over me. Unlike the sleeping pill, it doesn’t make me feel drowsy or heavy about my body. These can keep me going. It’ll be no problem to last until the psychiatrist.
Something clanks outside – the clothesline spinning. Through the kitchen window, I see Mum hanging up laundry. She should be at work. But, of course, she stayed home to watch me. Does she think I’m that fragile? I feel resentful but it flattens out into a peculiar resignation. I came in here yesterday telling her and Dad I was sick and needed a doctor. What else is she going to think?
Mum babies me outrageously throughout the day. She makes me sandwiches, cutting them into quarters, and regularly comes into my bedroom – where I work on the book report for To Kill a Mockingbird and then on my Jean Razor story – to ask if I want something to drink.
I start my Legal essay and while I’m sure everybody’s writing practical alternatives, mine becomes a story where criminals who are found guilty go through a second trial that questions their worth to society, and sentences them to execution if it’s decided they contribute nothing valuable. If this is the piece that’s used for the Boland, I’m not sure what they’ll think of it – or me. My left hand’s cramping from writing so much and I haven’t thought about the anxiousness once. I still have my Social Studies essay about improving the world to go, but that can wait.
I go down into the garage and play some pool. Mum comes into the garage and asks me if I want an orange juice. I tell her I’m okay.
‘Do you want to go to school tomorrow?’ she asks.
I don’t even need to think about it. ‘Sure.’
Mum hugs me. ‘Please don’t worry,’ she says, tearfully. ‘You have a house to live in, you have parents who love you, you never have to want for anything – you’ve got nothing to worry about.’
‘Okay, okay.’
She’s no sooner left when there’s a knock at the garage door: Ash, his school bag slung over his shoulder.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Thought I’d check how you are. You don’t look so bad.’
Two streams of reality take off. One stream is me with Ash, chatting the way we’d always chat. The second stream is a tension that crawls over me, tightening in my shoulders and chest. It’s not severe but it’s there, and I worry that something will happen in front of Ash, that this will return. Then where do I run? I took the first sedative around 8.00am, and it’s now 4.00pm. I’d be due another one. Dr Searcy said three a day, or as needed, and it’s needed now.
Ash eyes me from the end of the table as he racks up the balls.
‘I took something for it,’ I say. ‘I might grab a drink. You want something?’
‘Sure. Whatever.’
I grab another sedative from my bedroom and dry swallow it, then pour two orange juices and carry them into the garage. Ash has set up the balls and breaks as I enter. The balls scatter across the table and a striped one goes in. I set the orange juices down on a wardrobe in the corner of the garage where Dad keeps his tools.
‘So, everything’s okay?’ Ash says. ‘We were a bit worried when you disappeared.’ He plays a rebound off the bank and pockets it.
‘You and Riley?’
‘Riley’s fused to Felicia now. I meant Gabriella. When I came back, she was worried.’
‘My head was hurting. I didn’t know where you were, so I came home.’ The lie slides right out of my mouth. But then something else clicks. ‘When you came back? From…?’
Ash holds out his arms in celebration, the way a soccer player might appeal to the crowd after kicking a goal. He thrusts his hips forward once.
‘You and Rachel… again? Is that why you apologised to her?’
‘Hey, I resent that.’
‘So, you’re boyfriend-girlfriend now?’
‘Firstly, it wasn’t Rachel. I apologised to her because…’ Ash shrugs and plays his shot.
‘Because you were sorry.’
Ash rolls his eyes. ‘Because I didn’t want to walk around with her constantly angry at me.’
He plays his next shot, commanding the table. Usually, Ash is too unfocused to be consistently good. But now he’s pocketing them from everywhere.
‘So, you weren’t even sincere about the apology?’ I ask.
‘Of course I was sincere. How dare you accuse me of not being sincere. That apology was sincere. Right from the bottom of my heart.’
‘Okay, well, that’s something.’
‘Sincerity – what a weapon.’
I’m feeling better again – maybe the sedative, maybe this conversation distracting me, or maybe a combination of both.
Ash finally misses a shot and I lean over the table, lining up the three ball in the corner pocket – a long shot across the length of the table, but the way I’ve been playing today, it should be no problem.
‘If not Rachel–’ I say.
‘Deanne.’
I shank the shot. The white ball comes off the edge of my cue and spirals into the corner, that sound of a mishit – like a plank of wood that snaps – sharp in the garage.
‘Deanne?’ I say. ‘Little Deanne? Nerdy Deanne?’
‘Nerdy Deanne is hot – did you see her that night?’
‘So, are you a couple?’
Ash splutters. ‘Yeah. Right. But she’s wild under that nerdiness. She kept seeing us filling those Coke bottles, so she pulled me up in the garage and asked what I was drinking. Then she wants to go out front for a smoke. Then she grabs my hand and pulls me down to those houses at the end of the street.’
Ash and Deanne. That’s who was on the veranda.
‘It seriously happened like that?’ I say.
‘We went out front to have a smoke, I told her she looked good, I was sincere and the best thing is, she’s happy to leave it at that. Everybody wants to ride the legend.’
‘You’re a legend now?’
‘Not me but my cock,’ Ash says deadpan. ‘Don’t tell Riley, though. He talks. I don’t want to embarrass Deanne – it’s nobody’s business. You know what’ll happen if it gets out?’
‘Sure,’ I say.
He’s right. That high school grapevine will blow it up.
We chat and play for the next couple of hours, me able to enjoy something I used to do all the time with him. Mum invites Ash to stay for dinner and heaps steaks on his plates, with mashed potatoes and vegetables. Ash eats it all uncomplainingly.
‘See?’ Mum says in her stilted English. ‘You should eat like Ash.’ She tousles his hair. ‘None of this too much-too much.’ She says to Ash with a sense of martyrdom. ‘They tell me I give them too much, him and Stephanie.’
‘You should give them more,’ Ash says.
Mum gives me a smug, victorious look.
Once dinner is done, Ash says he should be going, so I walk him to the corner and we have a smoke there. It makes me dizzy; it’s the first one I’ve had since the party.
‘So, you’re coming to school tomorrow?’ he says.
‘You’ve been out there recently.’
‘Out there?’
‘Like you’re always distracted.’
How much do I tell him? It’s awkward; he knows it, too. We don’t share like this; guys just don’t. It’s so unfamiliar that it’s scary.
‘You finally going through puberty?’ he jokes.
‘Ha. Ha.’
Ash finishes his cigarette, taking one long drag that burns what’s remaining to the filter. He flicks it away and blows out a stream of smoke as he looks sidelong at me. If you want to talk, I think he’s going to say to me. Or, I know there’s something you’re not telling me. But teenagers don’t talk like that. It only happens on the TV soaps.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Ash says.
‘See ya.’
Ash heads off down into his street and I make my way back home.