Take Three Girls

‘Okay if I go shopping with Tash this week? We need to start looking for formal dresses.’

My mother, cutting up fruit, points to her earbuds, and shakes her head. She is talking to her friend, Viv. ‘The reason you don’t know her name is because she’s the next big thing. She did Simon and Lucy’s – you know, massive budget – it’s stunning and Vogue Living’s doing a feature on it. You’re welcome.’ My mother, the resident style know-it-all.

My father is on another call, standing at the middle set of French doors looking out over the garden, my mother glancing towards him about every two seconds.

Charlie is head-deep in Brian Jacques, one elbow on the table, making his way through three Weet-Bix in a puddle of milk.

Clare is stirring porridge – Monday breakfast – and scrolling through world news headlines on Twitter.

I try to connect the islands. ‘Anyone have any ideas about the formal? I’m on the organising committee.’

‘Here’s an idea, tell the Brains Trust to keep their tongues inside their mouths for photographs, they look like a possie of B-grade porn stars on Facebook.’ The Brains Trust is my friends. Clare’s life is full of timesaving abbreviations. She slices a banana on her porridge, tops it with maple syrup, sits down and opens the newspaper to the op-ed page. Year 12 means keeping up with the state of the world every day so no issues-based question in an English exam will ever catch you uninformed.

I’m eating toasted sourdough with peanut butter, and making a bagel for my lunch. Skills. ‘Is that better or worse than looking like A-grade porn stars?’

‘Don’t say porn in front of a child,’ says Charlie, not looking up from his book. He’s ten, and he plays the kid card like a champ.

‘Good point, darling.’ My mother sits down next to Charlie and drops a kiss on the side of his head. They look so . . . Instagramable, his hair streaky blond, hers sleek and dark. Genes divide up hardcore in this family: Clare is like our mother, blue eyes, dark brown hair; Charlie and I have our dad’s blond hair and grey eyes.

My father is winding up his call, sounding very peppy. ‘No, great – totally. Absolutely. Soon, for sure. Cheers, buddy.’

Okay. This is new, and I don’t like the sound of it. ‘Is there a particular reason why?’

My mother doesn’t answer. She’s hardly eaten any of her fruit and yoghurt, but she stands up and follows my father out of the kitchen. I pick up the pace on lunch prep, keen to be out of the house before they start arguing, and try to remember exactly when he last worked.

Walking the three blocks from River Place, where I live, to St Hilda’s, where I learn, I’m chewing over last night’s PSST post and worrying about Bec – a member of the Brains Trust – whose name was on their shitty list. Way to start the week. PSST is like a slime monster that feeds on lies and nastiness. Every time it lifts its arm to drag another victim down it gets stronger.

I get to school just after Bec has arrived. She is tragically holding up a ‘Disorderly Friendship Foundation’ brochure that someone has slipped into her locker. Three Year 11s are staring at her from the other side of the corridor, whispering. I give them the death stare and they slink off.

‘I know. You’re just a skinny Minnie, Becs. It’s not a crime.’ I give her a hug.

Lola arrives and throws her bag down. ‘Hey, at least you were top of the list.’

That’s enough to get the tears flowing. Trouble is, in our group Bec is the peacemaker, the diplomat, the smoother; she’s the one who knows exactly what to say at times like this.

Tash emerges from the door of our homeroom, right next to the lockers. It’s out of character for her to have arrived at school before the rest of us. ‘Ady! Have you opened your locker?’

Tash has a huge smile as I unlock it. We four have each other’s combinations, naturally. I spy a square box, tied with Délicieux patisserie’s signature satin ribbon. Inside is one perfect coffee éclair – my favourite – and a note, To sweet Ady, love Rupe X

‘Thank you, Tashie – you sneaky cupid.’ Tash and Rupert both come in on the Brighton train. Rupe goes to Basildon.

We share the perfect éclair in four luscious bites, with me getting the dark chocolate coffee bean, then cluster around Bec to give her some more love before the first bell.

How horrible for the girls on that list who do have eating disorders, to have PSST make a joke about your sickness. Jessie Ong was in fricken hospital last term.

The gravel path crunches underfoot as Bec, Lola, Tash and I head for Wellness; early bulbs are green spiking from the cold earth and the air is scented with daphne. How can PSST even exist in our shiny shiny world? It’s not like nastiness is a new invention. It’s just floated closer to the surface lately. Scum will do that. Mean stuff spreads so fast. One click. Post. Send. Share. Online bullying = sometimes-suicides, so all the private schools have strategies for dealing with it. At St Hilda’s, it’s Wellness classes. We greeted the idea with genuine enthusiasm. Why not? Everyone loves the chance to slack off.

The classes are being held in the Oak Parlour in the ‘old building’, as we call it. Framed sepia photos show actual cows grazing on the riverbank, with the old building – then, a freshly built Victorian tower mansion – in the distance. These days, a handful of architect-designed hubs populate the sprawling, beautifully landscaped campus. And there are a few blocks of luxe suburbia between school and the river, including my street.

The old building smell reminds me of being in awe and in junior school. In recent years there’s an added layer of let-me-out-of-here.

I trail a finger along the hand-blocked wallpaper, strictly forbidden, but I can’t resist touching the delicately raised surface of the bronze-painted fleurs-de-lis.

What was once a formal sitting room, with its ceiling of some arcadia or other, and stained-glass windows, is today the land of the Wellness. We sit in the moss-green corduroy beanbags, which I will forever associate with meditation and sex ed, also held in this room. No friends allowed to sit together, so Dr Malik separates me and Tash by swapping her with quiet boarder, Kate Turner, who is doing some strange finger-tapping on her leg and looking at the ground, so she doesn’t notice Tash push her tongue behind her lower lip like a chimp. Wellness abounds.

Malik has the dubious honour of being the best-looking male teacher at school. Small puddle, of course – a girls’ school staffroom. People think he looks like an older Dev Patel. You have to really squint to see it, in my opinion. But, then, I’ve got my own handsome boy.

Malik is happily wittering on, overview blah blah, identity blah blah, more things that unite us than divide us; when we find common ground we find mutual respect; the better we know each other the more we’ll look out for each other. And various other all-very-well-in-theory principles that basically bullshit-out in practice. The bonds of girl friendship can be tight to the point of strangulation, and no one’s going to start trippy skipping from group to group. Teachers don’t get the most basic stuff sometimes.

‘Okay, girls, I’m going to ask you to sort yourselves into groups of three according to thumb length,’ Malik says, as though it’s a fun thing to do.

Lola gives me a solidarity eye-roll as we move about the room, hand to hand with girls we routinely ignore.

Tash is standing next to me and compares thumbs with swimteam girl Clem Banks, whose thumb is longer than hers, but Tash says, ‘Back off.’

Clem Banks looks at her as though she will, as though she doesn’t care either way, but then she stops and says, ‘You back off.’

‘They look about the same to me,’ says Bec. ‘Maybe you’d be happier with another group, Clem?’

Dr Malik senses the stand off. ‘Do you need to take a more careful look at your thumbs, girls?’

‘Oh, fine.’ Tash stomps off and continues thumb measuring with other people.

Kate Turner is already standing next to me; both of us have distinctly long thumbs.

So I end up with those two, Kate Turner and Clem Banks, who is so scowly she’s already got permanent frowners. We are the longest-thumb group. Makes sense, when you think about it – a cellist’s hands, a swimmer’s hands and a tall girl’s hands. But so what? Malik tells us to note our groups for future reference. It reminds me of a kindergarten icebreaker, but at sixteen we’re frozen deeper than he knows.

So it’s the same old. They can try stuff like this, and we’ll go along with it, but nothing really changes. I zone out again as we resettle in our beanbags. Is it like this for everyone – that school and family are balloons that blow up and shrink? Sometimes school is everything, and I hardly notice what’s going on at home. Other times, like now, family seems to be blowing up. Plus there’s the whole Rupert question.

Whatever was happening at breakfast this morning is connected to last night’s parental altercation. Traditionally there’s been a pattern in my family life: fight, fight, settle, fun; fight, fight, settle, fun. Lately, it’s all fight, fight, very little settle and even less fun.

I went into Clare’s room. She was studying with earbuds in, as always. Mozart is her preferred study music. Classic dweeb. ‘Did you hear that?’ I asked.

She rolled her eyes, which lit on her noticeboard. Picking up a pen, she crossed one more day off her calendar. Countdown till she escapes to university. The other thing on her noticeboard is a huge printout of her goal ATAR score: 99.75, the mark she figures will get her a full academic and residential scholarship to study medicine at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. She put the earbud back in. ‘Some of us have work to do.’

She’s turned herself into a study machine for Year 12. She’s more like a hard drive than a sister. I went looking for Charlie instead.

Charlie is the family’s emotional barometer. When things get tense here he buries himself deeper in his books, and spends more time at the Coopers’, our neighbours over the back fence. Sure enough when I checked his bedroom he wasn’t there. But I did see Snozphant, his most precious stuffed toy, hiding under his pillow, even though he has declared himself ‘over’ stuffed toys and officially retired them to the highest shelf in his wardrobe.

Clare’s ready to bail and Charlie is more like a Cooper than a Rosenthal these days, so that just leaves me to figure out what’s happening. I’m going to need some after-school time in my wardrobe. Just thinking about that space calms me down. Not that I’d say that out loud. It’s more of a clothes archive than a wardrobe, anyway: a room adjoining my bedroom, lined with shelves, drawers and hanging racks, designed by me. My sewing and cutting table is under the window, and stretches to the middle of the room. I collect clothes. I dream up and make clothes. I refurbish clothes. I repurpose clothes. I love clothes – truly love them. I care for, nurture, praise, pat, wash and iron, and appreciate them. I celebrate them. And when I’m stressed, I smell my clothes. If you can tell me a more calming smell than washed and sunshine-dried cotton, I probably won’t believe it. If you cannot understand the comfort of burying your face in kitten-soft cashmere washed in eucalyptus wool mix, we will probably never be friends.

At the end of our first Wellness class Malik tells us to write Wellness journal entries whenever we want. We can show him or not. He encourages us to be truthful, to use the entries as an opportunity to take our emotional temperature. He adds that there’ll be no judging of anything we share in Wellness class discussions. Ha ha. He doesn’t know us very well.

PSST

Guess what slut put on a show at Jonno’s party? Nice pic, huh?

sufferingsuffragette: if a guy did that you’d applaud

hungryjackoff: I did applaud her #uptightbitch

Feminightmare: #neanderthal

hungryjackoff: #fuckinguptightbitch

b@rnieboy: you grls need a good fuck is all give me yr numbers

skateordie: wtf?? i apologise for these dickheads. they are not representative of my gender

b@rnieboy: because u r gay

skateordie: great comeback #predictableloser

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