Yellow

Megan Jacobson grew up in Darwin and the far north coast of New South Wales, but now lives in Sydney, where she works in TV news production at the ABC. She has a degree in journalism and has worked as a question writer for TV game shows, and as an in-house script storyliner and script editor for several Australian television dramas. Her short stories have been published in the
Sydney Morning Herald
, aired on ABC radio, and appeared in the UTS writers' anthology
I can see my house from here
.
Yellow
is her first novel.

They would be pretty. Their eyes and lips and noses are arranged in all the proper places, in the proper proportions. They would be pretty, except for the furious expressions they're all wearing as they look at me.

I know this to be true: there is a special corner of hell that's called being a fourteen-year-old girl.

‘We need to have a Circle.'

My first reaction is panic. It's the feeling you get when a huge wave yawns over the horizon and you know it's going to break right on top of you. Lou's been chosen to represent the group. She stands there, her red hair cascading from a ponytail perched at the top of her head, her pale face pinched. She's staring at me with a silent intensity.

I'm supposed to reply.

The others in my group are behind her, watching on – Sasha and Tara are copying Lou's outraged expression. Cassie is laughing and playing with her blonde hair like it's the most entertaining thing she's seen all week. In all truth, it probably is – there's only so much time a person can spend applying lip gloss, stapling up school skirt hems and throwing orange peels at the year seveners before a distraction is needed.

This week I'm the distraction.

Most weeks I am.

Teenage girls have really short attention spans.

My mind races with things that I could have done and I check the buttons on my school shirt to make sure they're done up correctly. They are. Cassie says our polo shirts have to have two buttons done up, one undone. If all three buttons are done up then you're a nerd like the group that hangs out on the lawn near the art studio. They're called The Challenged Group, because apparently they're facially challenged, socially challenged and ‘anorexically challenged', a description Cassie came up with to describe anyone who dares be bigger than size ten. I'm lucky, I'm small, five foot two with my skin practically painted onto my bones. I don't mean to be skinny, I just grew like this.

I'm a speck.

A dot.

A grain of sand.

And everyone treats me this way.

Two buttons undone and you're a bit risqué. It means you might have a cheeky pash and dash at a party, but you have the decency to try to hide the hickeys. I am definitely not a two buttons down kind of girl.

Three buttons undone and you're like Willow Parker. Willow has hair like spilt coffee, parted low on one side, and it hangs over her face so you can only ever see one eye at a time. The only time she wears her hair up is when she has a particularly ripe hickey, and then she piles it all up into a messy bun and flaunts that hickey so it stares back at you almost as intently as the ‘screw you' expression she wears on her face. Cassie won't let any of us talk to her.

‘How does she expect us to respect her when she won't respect herself?' Cassie had asked. That's what three undone buttons means.

‘Are you going to join us or not?' Cassie asks, gesturing to the patch of grass where The Circle takes place. She's wearing a smile as big as a slice of melon. She's all golden good looks and a body that makes the boys gape on their bicycles, the kind of beauty that means she'll never be picked on in her life. Hers is a bored cruelty, wielded lightly and playfully; it's not a desperate battle for power like the others and I don't know whether this makes me hate her more or less. She gracefully folds herself down into a cross-legged seating position and pats the ground next to her. The others follow, Lou sitting at her regular spot on the other side of Cassie; Sasha and Tara making up the rest of the almost-circle. Eight hostile eyes wait for me to fill the empty space. I hold my breath like I would if I were bracing for a wipe-out, and I take my place beside them.

It's Lou's turn first. ‘You know why we've called The Circle, right?'

The reason was me. I had a fair idea it was coming. It had been days since anybody talked to me. I'd sit in the group but I'd be a million miles away from their conversations about the beach and boys, which Lip Smacker flavour was the best (Can't-Elope!) and which Spice Girl represented each of us. Cassie and I are both blonde, but she already called dibs on Baby Spice.

‘It's not just looks, it's your Spice Girl spirit animal, you know?' she'd told me while checking out her reflection in the compact mirror that Tara was holding up for her, twisting sections of her hair and clasping them with sparkly pink butterfly clips. Once perfected, she turned to me and cupped her chin in her hand like she was considering me very seriously. ‘Your vibe is definitely Scary, Kirra. I mean, look at your eyes. Scary is your spirit Spice Girl.'

She'd looked at me when she said that, but for the rest of the week I'd felt invisible. Actually, invisible isn't quite the right word. Invisible would mean that they weren't able to see me, and they could see me. The right word is
ignored
. I'd tried to jump into the conversations, trying to force my words to sound perky and confident like them, but whatever I said had been met with stony silence and pitiful gazes. After three or so humiliating seconds they'd turn back to each other and continue whatever it was they were talking about as though I hadn't even said anything at all. My words had left a stale, lumpy aftertaste in my mouth that made it hard for me to swallow. When this happens, you know a Circle is coming. A Circle is one of those torturous rituals that could only have been dreamed up by a mind as sadistic as a fascist dictator or a teenage girl. On second thoughts, even fascist dictators have their limits. It's like someone is killing you and you have to watch.

Lou clears her throat. ‘I'm going to begin the proceedings.'

We use language like that in The Circle. It's official business. As serious as year nine gets, really. Lou digs through her pink Billabong backpack and the plastic ornaments she's clipped onto the outside of her bag rattle like a drum roll.

Be cool, I tell myself. Don't let them smell the fear.

I stare out over their heads, over the rolling fields of our schoolyard and the duck pond that squats in the middle of the back oval, perfuming the air with fragrant notes of duck poo and algae. Ducks and geese waddle up to students with all the attitude of a teacher on lunch duty, hissing at them and stealing Vegemite sandwiches. The sun swims a lazy backstroke across the sky and wet-the-bed dandelions carpet the ground. Hell is a surprisingly picturesque place.

Sasha snaps her fingers at my face. ‘Are you even taking this seriously?'

My attention returns to four unimpressed faces. Lou has a notebook in her hand, laminated in sickly pink plastic film. On the cover there's a neat white label with
KIRRA
written on it.

My heart drops.

They've hated me before, but never enough to make a book for me.

Never this much.

Lou licks her index finger with an official air and opens the cover to reveal a list of my transgressions over the past few months.

Number one.
Kirra walks like she's got a pole stuck up her arse.

Written neatly.

I recognise Lou's loopy handwriting. Listed underneath is an inventory of times and places where my walking had been undesirable, written in different pens and different hands, smudged with melted icy pole and doodles in the margin. To illustrate the point, Tara had sketched an inky picture of me and the aforementioned pole. It was a good likeness. Tara always has been a bit of an artist.

Sasha chimes in, ‘Why can't you just walk normally?'

I never realised I even had a walking problem. In my whole fourteen years of existence I had been merrily putting one leg before the other without even realising I was doing it all horribly wrong. There's only one answer when you're in The Circle, if you ever want anybody to talk to you again.

‘I'm sorry.'

Cassie smiles sympathetically and places her perfectly manicured hand on my leg for added emphasis. ‘It's just that when most people in the school see us, it's not us sitting here in our group, it's when we're walking around.'

She pauses to see whether I'm following her logic. I nod. She smiles again and continues. ‘When you walk . . . the way that you walk . . . it makes us all look bad.'

Everybody else nods seriously.

‘I'll try to change?'

‘That's a good start,' says Cassie. ‘The social's tomorrow night, and we don't want you embarrassing us. Show us how you can walk normally.'

Everybody's just staring at me now. Cassie nods encouragingly. I stand up and hesitate. I have no idea what walking with a pole up one's arse, or not up one's arse, even looks like.

Giving it my most valiant attempt I walk to the bin and back, trying my hardest to walk free and easy, like my bum is the most pole-less posterior that's ever existed. It's the longest ten metres of my life. The group is appraising me like judges at a dog show. I'm acutely aware of how my joints seem stiff and unnatural. I don't know what to do with my arms; they hang by my side like dead things. What have I done with my arms all this time?

I return to the group and sit back down.

‘You'll have to work on it,' Lou tells me, her pale eyes the colour of toilet cleaner.

She returns to her list and passes it across to Sasha for transgression number two. That's the way The Circle goes. Everybody in The Circle has a turn at telling you what's wrong about you. You're not allowed to defend yourself, and you're not allowed to run away in tears. Tara learnt that the hard way when she was new and didn't know the rules. Failure to abide results in a further week-long silent treatment that festers so that when The Circle happens again, and it always happens again, there's a new gangrenous edge to it.

‘We're only doing it because we're your friends,' Cassie explained to me once. She looked so earnest when she told me that, all china-doll eyes and with her hands neatly folded together as they rested on top of the school desk. ‘We want you to be the best you possible, and if we don't tell you what you're doing wrong, who will?'

It made perfect sense. They only wanted to better me. If they didn't care about me, they wouldn't bother.

Right?

And then Cassie had unfolded her neat hands and reached them across to squeeze my shoulder. ‘I see so much potential in you, Kirra. I really do.'

And she took out her special blue glitter pen, the one with the feather attached to the end of it, and she drew a love heart on the back of my own unlovely hand.

Sasha's up next. She clears her throat and tosses her thick dark curls behind her shoulders. ‘Kirra, it's really awkward to have to bring this up, but it's something that's been quite concerning for all of us.'

Her suitably concerned brown eyes scan The Circle to meet everyone's gaze. She pauses for dramatic effect. ‘We're worried you might have lesbian tendencies.'

‘What?' The word jumps out of my throat without my asking it to, and I regret it almost immediately.

‘When we sit cross-legged, we've noticed that you look under the gap between our legs and our school skirts,' adds Tara. ‘You're perving on our underwear.'

On cue the other girls push down on the front of their skirts so the gaps disappear and the tartan fabric drapes close against their legs. I have a habit of keeping my eyes downcast, but I'm not looking up anyone's skirts. At the last Circle I was told that I widen my eyes on purpose to scare people, so I've been doing my best to make them as inconspicuous as possible lately. Which is hard. My eyes are about as inconspicuous as the sun on a scorching January day.

Like two suns.

Burning my gaze into anyone I look at.

My eyes are yellow.

I don't mean the whites of my eyes are yellow, the way very sick or very old people's eyes are. Where most people's eyes are brown or blue, or sometimes green, mine are yellow.

Technically they're hazel, you can see flecks of green and brown speckled in there, but mostly they're an amber yellow colour. Like cats' eyes. This wouldn't be so bad if they were a normal size, but they seem to take over far too much of my face's real estate. My chin is small and pointed, with a regular-sized nose and tan skin that stretches tight across slightly underfed cheekbones. A mass of yellow hair falls halfway down my back, the type that's not quite straight but not quite wavy either, so it just looks sort of knotted all the time. I keep it long because I like to use it as a curtain sometimes, when I want to hide from the world. Everything's small and un­remarkable about me, except for my eyes. My eyes scream out to the world when all of the rest of me wants to be quiet.

I hate them.

‘And you always want to drink at the water bubbler after Cassie, when everyone knows water bubblers retain the spit germs of the person who last used them. Do you want to swap spit with Cassie?'

Lou waits for me to answer her question.

‘No . . .'

Cassie shoots me daggers. ‘Why not? Are you saying there's something wrong with me?'