Girl Saves Boy (2 page)
The girl sat back on her heels, scraping wet hair from her face. Her mouth hung open, gasping for air. She stared at me.
Feeling incredibly vulnerable on my back on the bank, I rolled onto my side. My water-logged jeans and T-shirt clung to me like a five year old to its mother on the first day of school. Except this five year old was as heavy as lead.
I heard a car door slam, a shouted argument, and a night bird’s call. I listened to civilisation, or more accurately outer suburbia, continuing as it always had, completely unaware that a life had almost been lost.
I stared up at the girl. She was soaked too, her long caramel-coloured hair dripping with water. In the moonlight I could see that her eyes were two different colours—the left, sharp electric blue, and the right, deep brown—and that she had full lips, a small, sharp nose and perfectly curved cheeks.
The only thought in my head was that she was stunning.
‘What the hell were you doing?’ she demanded. ‘You almost drowned. God knows what would have happened if I hadn’t been here.’
Woozy, and having swallowed more polluted rainwater than was sensible or hygienic, I couldn’t remember why exactly I had been in the lake. I couldn’t fathom why this strange and beautiful girl would take it upon herself to save me, either. I felt like a damsel in distress. Mostly, I felt like a complete and total idiot—an incredibly lucky complete and total idiot.
I rested my head back against the ground. It was uncomfortable, but it was better than the world spinning every time I tried to look around.
She pushed my hair out of my eyes. ‘Sorry. I called triple 0 on my mobile. Ambulance is on its way. I’m…wondering what you were doing swimming in a lake at the park at this time of night with your clothes on. Remember the little boy ten years ago who drowned here?’
‘What?’
‘Sorry. Just trying to make small talk. Keep you conscious. It’s…it’s what I used to do when my mum overdosed and I had to wait with her for the ambulance.’
‘What’s your name?’ I managed to ask.
‘I’m Jewel. As in gemstone, or the singer. Jewel Valentine. You?’
I coughed again, emptying my lungs of the remaining micro-organisms I had unwittingly consumed but that would probably be a delicacy in some Eastern European country.
Jewel frowned.
‘Sorry. Sacha Thomas. Nice to meet you, Jewel-as-in-gemstone.’
‘Lovely to make your acquaintance, Sacha. Are you going to thank me?’
‘Yeah. Thanks. You know, for saving my life and all.’
‘My pleasure,’ replied Jewel. ‘I often go for a night jog in the park and save teenage boys from drowning in the lake.’
Even though I was struggling to keep my eyes open, I managed some weak humour: ‘You get off on performing CPR on vulnerable young boys?’
She grinned. ‘Each to their own.’
I smiled back, but only for a second, because my head was so clouded and heavy, and every expression made it ache.
‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ I murmured.
‘Oh, shit. Hope you don’t get hypothermia.’ She picked up a battered leather jacket that I’d thought was a rock.
She helped me lean forward a bit and slipped the jacket around me. It fitted, so I figured we must be around the same size, and it was comfortable and warm.
Jewel held my hand in both of hers and rubbed my palm with her thumbs, trying to warm me up.
‘They should be here any second now,’ she reassured me.
‘What are you doing out here?’ I asked.
She hesitated a moment. ‘Isn’t that a question you should answer?’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘I came out here to think. I like the quiet in the middle of the night. I’m one of those classic loner types who will end up assassinating someone.’
‘My mum used to have a joke about thinking,’ I said, staring up to the sky and tracing imaginary dot-to-dot with the stars. ‘I’d say something like “I’ve been thinking…” and she’d say “I warned you about that, didn’t I?”’
‘Did she die?’ whispered Jewel.
‘Yeah. How’d you guess?’
‘You said “used to”. Past tense.’
‘You’re observant. She might’ve stopped making that joke, though. It got old fast.’
‘When did it happen?’ she asked, ‘God, sorry I’m so insensitive. You don’t have to answer that.’
‘It’s fine. It was last year.’ I was shivering. I wasn’t sure whether it was from cold or something else.
She nodded and I closed my eyes a moment. When I reopened them Jewel Valentine was gone, and instead a young male paramedic leant over me, shining a torch into my eyes and asking me what year it was.
‘Year of the Ox?’ I offered.
Hospital Signs:
Please Do Not Pick the Flowers
Wash Your Hands
Turn Off Mobile Phones and Radio Transceivers Now
Please Keep It Down—Our Patients Need Rest
Keep Out! Falling Fruit May Cause Injury
That evening in the hospital, after Jewel had rescued me, the first person to visit me (besides my father) was Little Al.
Little Al’s real name is Michael Mitchell. He dislike the alliteration—it sounds too much like Eminem or Marilyn Monroe or an
Afterburn
theatrical wrestler. Imagine the white trash screaming as the presenter yells: ‘Michael “The Man” Mitchell faces off The Undertaker!’
The ‘Little’ in Al’s nickname makes sense as soon as you see him. Though Little Al does not look, or act, like any kind of wrestler, he is six foot two, thin but not sickly like I am. Kind of scrawny if you saw him wearing board shorts down the beach, but he holds himself in such a way that you know he doesn’t care. Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through having such a tall best friend—as if I intend to make myself seem even
smaller
—at a measly five feet six inches I look like a dwarf even without Al’s help.
Al is short for Albert, as in Einstein, a name I christened him with, because for as long as I’ve known him (all the way back to our first day of Year 7, when he decided to adopt me as his sidekick) he’s been obsessed with Chemistry. I’m talking about the Bunsen burners and chemical reaction type Chemistry, not speed dating and romance, although Al would try to convince you otherwise, being the smooth operator he thinks he is.
Staying after class every day, he didn’t have me convinced for long that he was down in the Science lab only because he had a huge crush on Mrs Ford. Even though Mrs Ford was a bit of a babe. Once I saw her leaving school on the back of a motorbike.
I feel proud that Al uses the name I gave him rather than the one his parents chose. He has a sharp sense of humour and dishwater-blond hair, and he always dresses to impress, wearing suit jackets to school and buttoned shirts on weekends. He has freckles across the bridge of his nose and a lopsided grin, which counteracts every other aspect of his appearance and makes him look like a five year old, not a guy who did university-level Chemistry at thirteen—God knows what stuff he’s doing now, the year we’re both finishing high school…
Al ducked his head as he came through the doorway of my ward in the hospital, and folded himself into a seat. Even sitting, he was a towering presence.
‘Duck, my friend, how’s life treating you?’ he asked. Duck was a nickname that dated back to my time on the Year 8 cricket squad, which lasted only two lunch periods before I was kicked off the team.
‘Obviously not well. Death’s knocking, Al,’ I replied dryly, sitting up. ‘What about you? What have you been up to?’
‘The usual. Solving infinity. Accepting Nobel Prizes. Same same. What’s the deal with the hospital bed and all? They letting you go home tonight?’ He smiled and fiddled with his tie.
‘They’re keeping me in tonight for observation,’ I explained. ‘I know it’s Saturday but I’m going to have to pass on the partying you probably have planned. You know, after you solve infinity.’
Little Al drummed his fingers on the wooden arm of the chair. ‘Believe me, Duck, they’ll need to keep you in far longer to make any sense of you.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘You’re the love child of Freud and Paris Hilton. Maybe you ought to help them out.’
‘Hey, maybe I just got my mother’s good looks.’ Al shrugged.
I opened my mouth to speak but my friend True Grisham made a sudden appearance, whirling into the room and slamming the door behind her.
‘Michael,’ she greeted Al crisply—she was the only person, including Al’s parents, who ever called him by his real name.
‘True.’ Al flashed a grin. ‘You’re just in time for strip poker.’
She tapped her foot and glared at me. ‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’
She had her Betty Boop laptop bag strung over her shoulder and her hair was loose, her sparkly ladybug bun clip drooping miserably amidst her long blonde hair.
An old man in a bed diagonally opposite me waved feebly to Al. ‘Deal me a hand if this lady’s playing.’
Even wearing her usual ballet flats, True Grisham is very tall—not quite as tall as Little Al, but close enough that the yearbook committee at our school named them our year’s dream couple. Except True would never give any boy the time of day, least of all Al. Her whole world revolved around her ambition to become a journalist—a successful one. She had a plan, too detailed for me to remember, but the gist of it was that she wanted to travel the world and write for the major newspapers. At the moment, she is getting the best possible marks at school so she can get into Journalism at a good uni, all the while building up her portfolio with pieces in local newspapers and magazines. She is very committed and always busy. I don’t think she ever sleeps.
My friendship with True went back further than my friendship with Al. On the first day of Grade 3 at my new school she recruited me as one of her sub-editors for the first-ever magazine produced there. Needless to say, in spite of eight-year-old True’s dedication, we released only three issues and could never sell our print run of twenty-five, even at the meagre price of fifty cents.
After that True went on to bigger and better things—editing our school newspaper, a column in our local newspaper, the occasional article in small print-run magazines—and, even though I realised during Grade 3 that I would never go on to a career in journalism, due to a total lack of spelling ability, she had remained my good friend well into this last year of school.
True would fulfil her dreams for sure—she was intelligent and ruthless and impossible to distract. True was bullet-proof and fearless. True was a constant in my life, especially now, when I didn’t have many.
‘Your dad calls me, tells me you’re in the hospital and are refusing to talk to him,’ she went on, picking lint off her pink cardigan and frowning at me. ‘I think…well, you know what I think…’ She sighed and leant against the end of my bed. ‘What’s going on, Sacha? Be honest with me, okay? Did you do this deliberately?’
‘I think you’re disturbing Moira.’ I pointed towards the old lady dozing off in the bed beside me. ‘She’s recovering from a knee reconstruction, you know.’
‘Not everything is a joke, Sacha,’ said True.
‘I wasn’t joking. She really is.’
True pulled across the curtain beside my bed and the smile fell from Al’s face.
‘Jason told me you fell in the lake when you were out walking,’ he said. ‘You didn’t do this on purpose, did you?’
‘Mr Carr?’ I asked. ‘He’s here? And since when are you two on a first-name basis?’
True glared at Al. ‘It isn’t even possible to fall into the lake. It’s about six inches deep and the size of a baby’s paddling pool.’
Al ignored her. ‘I’ve met him at your place a few times. He always tells me to call him Jason. Most teachers want you to call them by their first name if you know them outside school.’
‘Yeah,’ I retorted, ‘if they want to be up on child sex charges.’
‘Why didn’t you talk to me, Sacha?’ asked True, sitting on the bed by my feet. ‘Fair enough you didn’t tell
him
’—she frowned in Al’s direction—‘but you can trust
me
.’
Instead of responding, I just stared at my hands. I listened to the machines whirring and nurses chattering and, in the distance, TV ads selling mobile screensavers. In the hospital, my past felt uncomfortably close. Elsewhere, it could be kept at arm’s length, but here, like at the cemetery and walking past our old house, things I’d rather forget breathed down my neck.
The stench of bleach and sickness brought it all back to the front of my consciousness, to the place I’d been trying to keep it from for so long. Those years of tests, chemo, endless drugs and sleepless nights that swallowed up my childhood, and that time last year, just a few weeks before Mum’s death, when it was her turn to be confined to a hospital bed. Except I survived my leukaemia. She died of a self-inflicted illness.
I guess that’s how she would have preferred it to be. Mother dies; son lives. How I wish it could’ve been the other way around.
True frowned at Al again and turned back to me. ‘Who found you?’ she asked.
‘A girl,’ I replied. ‘Jewel Valentine.’
‘Was she hot?’ asked Al.
‘Michael!’ cried True. ‘Is there anything else you think about, other than chemical formulae and sex?’
‘Sorry,’ Al murmured.
‘Did you say Jewel Valentine?’ True asked. She looked thoughtful for a second, then sighed. ‘I really think you should speak to your dad.’
‘You’re not the first to say so.’
‘Sacha, Sacha, Sacha.’ She shook her head. ‘What are we going to do with you?’
‘Burying me alive seems attractive right now,’ I remarked. ‘Anyone got a shovel?’
I love last words in the same way I love opening lines. Not quite the same way Miles Halter loves them. I love the last words of criminals before they are executed. They often try to be witty, remarking to shooting squads that they haven’t got all day, or they insist on their innocence, which makes you comprehend the finality of the death penalty. How many times has it been proved that someone else was the murderer, long after the death of a blameless man or woman caught in a terrible situation? I love the last words of poets and writers and playwrights who say something magical in a suicide note, or gasp something about love on their deathbed. Or people who are true to their profession to their last breath—like a grammarian, or one of those freaks with word technicality obsessions who spurts in his final moments on earth something like ‘I am dying; or I am about to die—either is correct.’ I’m not sure if that’s what the quote was exactly, and it doesn’t matter; it’s just the idea that I care about.