HAVING ALL YOUR FANTASIES SHATTERED by a single grunt is not something I’d recommend as a great life experience.
Meko – she’s my best friend (who am I kidding? She’s my only friend!) – tried to cheer me up by reading me a couple of chapters of the latest mobile phone novel she’s been writing, but hearing about other people’s love lives, fictional or not, didn’t make me feel any better.
Poor old Meko. She was – is – so patient with me, listening to me rabbit on endlessly about my obsession with Jet Lucas when I knew she didn’t even like him. Not that she ever said so – she’s way too polite for that. It’s a Japanese thing. But once I got to know her, I could tell whether she liked someone or not without her having to say a word.
Actually, can I just point out something here? When I say that Meko is my only friend, I don’t want you to get the idea that I’ve turned into one of those sad and desperate lamos who have no friends. Not completely, anyway.
I mean, I used to have lots of friends – before. But then something happened. I think people became afraid of me – scared of offending me, or saying the wrong thing – and eventually they just stopped talking to me at all. Not totally, not like, ‘Oh no, there’s Luisa. Everybody hide!’ People still said, ‘Hey, move your butt,’ or ‘Can I borrow your History homework?’ – but no one really talked talked to me.
And I guess I stopped trying too. It’s almost like I lost the knack of it. How to be normal, you know? How to make jokes and talk about all the usual, everyday, unimportant stuff that kids talk about. Without that, I discovered, you become a bit of a freak, an outsider, an easy target.
But then, fortunately for me, Meko Takahashi turned up.
When they first announced last year that Motherwell High was going to get a real live exchange student from overseas, I thought it was a joke. I’m not sure how it works, but I would’ve thought that if you were going to send someone to live in Australia to learn about our culture, you’d want to send them somewhere vaguely nice, somewhere where they actually have culture – you know, like a private girls school in some leafy suburb. Not Motherwell High. Motherwell High is the kind of place you’d send someone if you were trying to punish them. But maybe the whole point of the exchange student program is to show kids from other countries that things could be a lot worse. They should be grateful they only have to spend one year in the Australian public education system – instead of thirteen like the rest of us poor suckers.
Not that Meko seemed to be aware she was part of a devious government plot to discourage ideas of future immigration. In fact, Meko seemed to think that everything in Australia was just fantastic. Or perhaps she was just being polite.
When Meko first arrived at Motherwell High, she bowed practically every time anyone spoke to her. Of course, some people took advantage of these unnaturally good manners, and would push in front of her when she was waiting in line at the tuckshop, saying sweetly, ‘You don’t mind if we go first, do you, Meko?’ And Meko would bow and domo arigato and Melissa and Shania (don’t worry, I’ll get to them!) would smirk and giggle like a couple of underweight Bratz dolls.
Some people went too far though. One day, behind the girls’ toilets, I heard Fabio Fallaccio explaining to Meko all the most disgusting swear words you can imagine and asking her how to say them in Japanese. Now there’s an international incident just waiting to happen! After that I decided I would take Meko under my wing and make sure she didn’t have a completely crap time in Australia.
Meko had a thing about Australian animals – especially koalas – but she’d only ever seen them in zoos, so when Mr McGregor organised a weekend camping trip for our year at Bendiwilli National Park, I persuaded Meko to come by promising real live bush koalas. We actually found one, and Meko was standing under its tree taking photos when the koala went to the toilet on her head.
Mr McGregor was worried that the animal might have a sexually transmitted disease (huh?), and he wasn’t sure whether being doused in koala urine was a good thing. That was the end of our camping trip – not to mention the end of Meko’s love affair with marsupials – and I thought it was also the end of our friendship.
But as we drove to the local hospital, Meko, oily green koala wee dripping from her hair, started to giggle uncontrollably, rocking backwards and forwards in her seat like some weird wind-up toy. I thought she’d become hysterical and was just about to slap her when she thrust her camera into my hand.
‘Quick, Ruisa,’ she gasped. ‘Take a photo to put on Facebook. My friends in Osaka, they never berieve that koara go to the bathroom in my hair. I terr them it weird Austrarian initiation custom.’ And she giggled so much I thought that maybe koala urine wasn’t the only kind we were going to have a close encounter with that day.
After that, we started hanging out. Meko has a crazy sense of humour – you’ve probably already guessed that from the koala wee incident – plus she’s really into wacky Japanese punk-pop bands and she speaks better Spanish than I do, but with a Japanese accent. At school, when we didn’t want anyone to know what we were talking about, we’d switch to Spanish:
| MEKO: | Encontré esta gran banda de punk en MySpace anoche. | |
| ME: | ¿Sí? ¿Cómo se llaman? | |
| MEKO: | ‘Totalitarian Tea Party’. | |
| ME: | ¡Qué guay! Voy a comprobar el álbum. | |
| MEKO: | Se me acaba de ocurrir algo, el sr. McGregor se parece a un Ewok. |
Then I discovered that Meko had a whole other life that no one at school knew anything about. On the weekends, she would dress up in these amazing outfits that made her look like a little Victorian doll – smocked dresses and frilled petticoats and a blonde ringleted wig. She looked incredible – fragile and kind of scary at the same time. The style, she said, was called ‘Goth-Rori’ (she still had trouble with her ls) – which is short for Gothic Lolita – and what they did once they were dressed up was called ‘cosplay’. All her friends back in Japan were into it too.
This was the reason, Meko told me, her father had wanted her to come to Australia. To get her away from all her weird friends who dressed up like old-fashioned china dolls. I have to say it seemed pretty harmless to me, and I couldn’t understand why her dad was so freaked out by it. I mean, if Meko was into Satanism or cannibalism you could understand it, but the Goth-Loli girls’ idea of a wild time was swapping sewing patterns and having afternoon tea.
What Meko’s dad hadn’t taken into account was that people like to dress weirdly all over the world. It took Meko about two weeks to find the local Goth-Loli girls – a group of homesick Japanese uni students who thought Meko was adorable and adopted her immediately. They would get together on Sunday afternoons at a cute little tea-shop in the city, and Meko would invite me along, even though I must have looked completely out of place in my tartan miniskirts and fedoras. Meko was a different person when she was all dressed up. She totally came to life and would chatter away in Japanese with the other girls while we drank cups of tea and ate little cakes, and afterwards the girls would promenade through the city arm-in-arm like some slightly creepy childhood dream where all your toys come to life in the middle of the night.
To be honest, I didn’t get the whole cosplay thing at first. I mean, everyone has their own style, but this was totally extreme and it wasn’t really something that you could make a part of your everyday look. For instance, I’m into a kind of punk thing. Not too much, not scary punk. Punk-chic, I call it – even though Dad says that’s a contradiction in terms. And while I can’t wear ripped fishnets and Docs to school, I pretty much wear them everywhere else.
But then Meko told me about life in Japan and I suddenly understood. Did you know that they have to go to school six days a week? They have lots of rules and regulations and everything is about working hard and being a success. Her dad, she told me, works eighty hours a week for a big corporation and she hardly ever saw him. So dressing up like a china doll was her escape, her way of taking a break from reality. You’d think her dad might have understood, but instead he sent her halfway round the world.