Yellow (21 page)

Our school hall is a red-brick thing. The insides are all wooden, and the ceiling's so high that the rumour goes a janitor fell off the ladder and broke his neck once while trying to change a light bulb. I'm leaning against the outside wall, enjoying the heat of the bricks against my back while everyone mills about the quadrangle, waiting for the ceremony to start, and I keep a watch out for Mum. My heart catches when I see her. Her face is scrubbed pink and her hair is brushed fluffy and clipped back with a tortoise shell comb, and her dress has the clean lines of a garment freshly ironed. She walks slowly. Deliberately. The clip clop of her heels announcing her arrival. Only her hands betray her nervousness; they ball by her sides and fiddle with the metal clasp of her handbag. Some kids are throwing her sidelong glances as they recognise her from the social, and a couple of them stumble around, pretending to be drunk. Mum keeps her spine straight. She keeps her chin tilted upwards, and she doesn't flinch when they sling unkind words behind her back. She just keeps her gaze forward and her eyes search for me. My mother might be tiny, she might not even be able to unscrew a tight jam-jar lid, but right here, right now, she is the strongest person I know, and when she finally sees me her smile is so brave you wouldn't know that she was struggling.

‘You sure you're okay that Lark will be here?' I ask her nervously. She nods.

‘You can check my handbag, I don't have any eggs.'

She sticks her tongue out at me and I roll my eyes and smile back, then we all start to make our way inside.

It's stuffy inside the hall, despite the chill in the air. A few hundred teenagers seeping hormones, body odour and the occasional fart will do that to a space. My stomach's twisting into every knot you'd learn in boy scouts, but Willow grips my fingers and shoots me an encouraging look. The principal begins the presentation. We start out with the sports awards, and the quick, strong athletes of the school bound up to the stage to receive their certificates. Nobody's embarrassed to stand up in front of the crowd for bashing somebody's head in at rugby. Nobody's even embarrassed to be called up at assembly to face punishment for skipping school, or smoking cigarettes behind the drama hall. If anything, it's a badge of honour. It's only for doing well at school that assembly becomes a shameful thing. It's typical of our country; our heroes are Ned Kelly, who was an outlaw who stole horses and shot at policemen, and our unofficial national anthem, ‘Waltzing Matilda', is about a homeless man who steals sheep and then drowns himself when he's caught, so that he doesn't have to deal with the consequences.

‘And the year nine swimming champion is Noah Willis,' beams the principal. Noah stands up, all gangly arms and legs and freckles. The crowd cheers him as he takes his certificate. That's the final category for sports, we're onto the academic awards now.

Shit.

‘To begin the academic presentation, I'd like to call up onto stage Kirra Barley, for outstanding achievement in English.'

All of my instincts are telling me to stay seated, to pretend I was too sick to go to school today. My face burns as Willow jabs her elbow into me.

‘Don't miser the smarts, little one. Own this.'

With my hair hanging over my eyes, I walk to the stage. Cassie, Lou, Sasha and Tara start cackling as I walk past them, making it clear that they're laughing at me, but it's not like the way that Willow and I laugh, I realise. There isn't any joy in it, they're just stretching their mouths open and making sounds. They're not actually happy. I ignore them and climb the stairs to shake the principal's hand, and then I take my place in the line beside Noah where we're meant to stand until the ceremony is up.

I look to the crowd and see my mother, her eye hidden behind the cardboard casing of a disposable camera that she's furiously clicking away at. And I look to find my father in the crowd, all hulking and sun-bleached, but at this moment he's not looking at me. Instead, he's looking across the room at Mum. Her brushed hair. Her clean dress. Her steady posture. He's not looking at her like he wants to be back with her, not even a pact with a ghost could make that happen, but there's a different kind of love in his eyes which I don't think ever really went away. I see the boy who carried my mother home in his arms after she lay broken on the quadrangle. I see the boy who wants her to be well. Then he looks back over to me where I'm standing on the stage, and he throws me his trademark crooked, toothy grin, and he waves at me, and he pulls a goofy face, and I can't help it. It's physically impossible to not smile back.

Noah leans close to me as they're presenting the science award. Our shoulders are touching and it's making my stomach turn fizzy. His lips are so close that I can feel his breath as he whispers into my ear. ‘You're not such an idiot anymore.'

I turn to face him, and he's grinning at me, that smile that's full and lovely, and I can see constellations in his freckles and a whole universe in his eyes, and my heart feels like it's strapped to a rocket ship as I grin back until the principal dismisses us and the claps of the audience roar around us.

Mum and I are walking home together afterwards. She musses up my hair where it turns up in a cowlick.

‘I was so proud to see you up on that stage, babygirl. You were always such a shy little thing, it's lovely to see you getting a bit more confidence.'

I bite my lip and hug my cardigan tighter as the breeze flirts with our hems.

‘I'm still shy,' I admit, pulling the sleeves over my hands, ‘and I might always be, I don't know, but I think you can be shy and still feel okay about yourself at the same time.'

It wasn't my shyness that made me doubt myself, I know this now. It was my loneliness. Loneliness is the thing that sucks all the real confidence from you. And I think of who told me that all those months ago.

Boogie.

I wonder how I'd be if it weren't for Willow, and Mrs Thomas, and now my mum and Lark. If I was still all alone. If I never came to believe in myself and I never had anyone there to tell me I was good enough, or even just
enough
. The thought of it makes me shiver, and Mum puts her arm around me, thinking that I'm just cold.

That night I sneak out the front door again. The full moon lights up the street – the kind of moon that's chosen to show all of herself, and for the first time in months I jog down the street, ignoring the Bakers' dog as it snarls against the wire fence. I jog as the bridge rattles underneath my feet, and don't stop even when I have to negotiate the branches through the bush track.

Boogie's there when I pick up the phone. I scrape my shoes against the side of the booth while I choose my words.

‘What you did, that was so many shades of messed up,' I tell him. He sounds dejected when he finally replies, his voice is flatter than a shadow.

‘
I know.
Don't you think I already hate myself enough?'

I curl the cord around my fingers as I think of what to say next. ‘But I'm not going to make you stay where you are all alone.'

I look over to the tree stump next to the booth – the stump of the tree that Boogie had hung from. We learnt in school that you can tell the age of a tree by counting the number of rings in the wood. Boogie will always be fourteen and six months. He's trapped in time. If he were a chopped-down tree, he'd always be fourteen rings, while I get to grow and stretch my branches out, and become so much bigger than he ever got. My heart breaks for him. It shatters into a thousand different shards and scatters all over the floor of the phone booth.

‘I can still talk to you over the phone. I'll come back and tell you what it's like to be fifteen, and sixteen, and twenty-one, and forty,' I say. ‘I'll always come back, if you want me to, you don't have to be all by yourself. I can start off by telling you what it's like to be fourteen and eleven months?'

I can almost hear his smile through the phone. ‘I've never been fourteen and eleven months,' he whispers.

I tell him about Mum, and how she's getting better, and how when she smiles now, she glows.

Boogie's crying.

‘Kirra . . . Can you . . . can you tell her I'm sorry?' he sobs. ‘For the way I treated her, and for the way I treated you? I don't know why I did it.'

His voice is all scratched up. ‘Nobody wants to be the bad guy, you know? But sometimes . . . sometimes the pain is so overwhelming that you forget who you are, and when the fog clears and you look down you find that you're the one wearing the black cape, and you don't know how the hell that happened.'

I look up to the sky, and it's so dark, but there are also stars, and they're like pin pricks of light. Millions of tiny spaces where the light still wriggles through. I try to focus on them.

‘Just please don't try to kill me again.'

When Boogie speaks there isn't any colour in his voice. Colour needs light to exist.

‘I understand if you hate me. I can understand why everyone always hated me, you know? I taught them how to do it, 'cos I hated myself and they just copied. Except Judy. She never copied anyone, so I went ahead and forced her to believe it and I forced her to hate me. Then I did it with you, too. I'm so sorry, Kirra.'

I cradle the receiver into my face and look over at the scrub where the shadow of a possum slopes along a branch.

‘I'll tell her that you're sorry,' I whisper. ‘And Boogie . . . I forgive you.'

Boogie's cries sound so jagged that they must be cutting him right up. Then the sobs turn strangled as his breathing gets quicker and then the line sounds like a storm's mucking with the reception.

‘Are you okay?' I ask him. His voice is crackling when he answers.

‘I don't think I'm going to be around to hear about being fifteen . . .' he croaks. ‘I feel strange, Kirra. I'm scared. I feel like there's something pulling me away . . .'

And I listen on the line until his breathing becomes fainter and fainter.

‘Boogie?' I call out to him, but he doesn't reply.

‘Boogie!' I scream.

He's not at the phone box anymore.

I hang up the receiver and I look up to the moon, which stares back at me, with her yellow, puffed-out chest. I pull my cardigan tight around myself and shiver. The stars wink down at me and I close my eyes to make a wish.

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight.

I wish I may, I wish I might,

Have the wish I wish tonight.

I wish that wherever Boogie is, he's okay.

Winter's properly set in, but the heat hasn't exactly left, it's just sort of wandered into the next room – you're still vaguely aware of its presence even if it isn't sitting right beside you any longer. I'm in maths and Willow isn't here. She'd been sent to the principal's office during sex education in PE last period. Somebody made a crack about whores and Willow stood up so suddenly that the chair she'd been sitting on cartwheeled backwards, crashing into the desk behind, and she'd threatened to break his face. It didn't go down well.

So right now I'm sitting by myself, my hair a knotted curtain around my face, and Mr Bryant is asking about the surface area of a cylinder.

Silence.

‘Kirra?' he asks.

Shit.

Everyone's looking at me and I hate eyes. I can understand why stares are used as deadly super powers in the comic books and the mythologies. Medusa with her glare that turns people to stone. Cyclops and his eye energy beams in the X-Men comics.

I look up at the teacher and wish with all the force of my big, yellow, alien eyes that he won't make me say anything. But this is maths class. My yellow eyes have no power here.

‘I don't have all day,' Mr Bryant sighs, exasperated. I take a breath.

‘Ummm, A=2πrh+2πr2?' I peep.

‘Correct,' he replies, and I wait to hear the fall out, but there's just the swoosh of pages being turned, the groaning metal as kids shift in their seats and the squeak of chalk as Mr Bryant turns back around to write on the blackboard.

Somehow, Cassie and the others have stopped heckling me. The whips of Willow's comebacks are too much bother, but it's more than that. I think of what Willow told me all that time ago – people can only make you feel bad about yourself if you give them permission. I don't let Cassie have the power to dictate how I feel about myself anymore. I've withdrawn my permission, changed the locks and reset my pass code. She can't pierce through my skin to claw away at my insides these days, and she can sense that. If she does say anything, her words just drift down weightlessly around me now, like the ash that falls from the sky every November when the sugarcane farmers burn their crops. I dust her words from my shoulders.

Willow's waiting for me in the hallway when the bell rings.

‘I think the principal had been cryogenically frozen in the fifties and they've only just thawed him. K, I am so angry.'

Noah's slouching past and he overhears. A blush flames like a bushfire across my cheek and I can almost hear it crackle. He doesn't meet my eyes, and instead he shifts the weight of his bag on his shoulder and turns his freckles to face Willow.

‘Willow Parker . . . 
angry
? That's so unlike you.' It's sar­castic, but not in a mean way. He's got deadpan down pat.

‘Quit with the sass, Willis,' snaps Willow. ‘I have had it up to here with your gender today. Do you know what the principal said to me? He told me that young ladies shouldn't threaten violence, and that if I was going to continue with my hostile attitude then maybe the school environment wasn't for me and I should think about leaving once I have my year ten certificate. Then he had the hide to tell me that he might be able to get me a position as an office assistant at his friend's business, if I pull my socks up.
An office assistant.
That's basically nineties speak for a secretary. I swear, I wish I could get my hands on whatever killed the dinosaurs and use it on him, because he obviously is one. A principalsaurus.'

‘A Velo-
CRAP
-tor?' offers Noah. Willow's scowl cracks and a small smile wriggles out from her angry face.

‘Freckles, for that crap-tastic pun I'll let you join my feminist gang. Kirra and I are blowing this popsicle stand for the afternoon to practise our roaring elsewhere. Because we are women and we roar. Wanna come?'

This is news to me.

‘We are?'

‘Yes, to South Beach. Chop chop, my lovely little starlings.' And she turns to skip towards the back oval, out to where the track snakes its way through the bush. I'm left with Noah and the silence between us is aching. No, not just aching, it's sharper than that. It's painful little stabs like the air is made of knives. I look where Noah's looking and so we're both standing there, looking intently at his scuffed sneakers.

‘Practising roars sounds better than geography with Mr Gobstopper,' he says, the words tumbling down towards his shoes. ‘He's more powerful than a sleeping tablet.'

‘I think we're maybe too harsh on him,' I reply, peeking up at Noah through my eyelashes. ‘It must be hard to know that the school could replace your job with an atlas.' He looks up, finally, and something like a smile twitches at his pensive mouth.

‘You guys head over to the sand dunes and I'll meet you there in a sec, yeah?' he tells me, then without giving me a chance to reply he races off in the direction of the canteen. I watch him slice through the hallway, a loping sort of grace, and I sort of wish he was always facing away from me, so that I could look at him whenever I wanted to, and I could look at him without feeling embarrassed.

Willow is hurling roars up against the sky when Noah scrambles the dunes to meet us at the top. Under his arms are a couple of flattened cardboard boxes bandaged with gaffer tape.

‘Nice roaring.'

‘Thanks. Kirra says she's roaring on the inside. What have you got there, mister?'

Noah holds out the boxes and Willow takes one from him and examines the makeshift toboggan. It's not quite jealousy that's punching its evil little fists into my heart this time. It's envy. The way they can be so comfortable around each other. Whenever I speak to Noah it's so uncomfortable, it's like all my words are wearing six-inch heels, and not in a sexy way. My words totter out from my throat all pinched and pained and stumbling.

‘The gaffer tape's to stop the friction, so we can slide down faster,' Noah explains. Willow sits down on a piece of flattened cardboard but she doesn't slide down. She just sits there with the wind blowing back her coffee hair and she wears the sky like it's a giant cape fanning wide and blue behind her.

‘You know what, Freckles, you give the Y chromosome a good name,' she tells him. ‘Not like the principalsaurus. I mean,
me
, an
office assistant
. Pfft. I'm going to study law one day, when I get out of here, and I'll be a hot-shot criminal barrister in the city.'

Noah shoots her a wry look.

‘You? A barrister? Ha!'

Her eyes glint and become the colour of gunmetal. Everything about her turns hard.

‘Do
not
define me by my gender or my socio-economic status, Noah Willis. Do not tell me who I am and do not tell me who society thinks I am and then put me in that box and expect me to stay there. Because, I swear to God, I will climb the hell out of that box and I will take that box you've just put me in and I will use that box to smash your face in until you're nothing more than a freckly, bloodied pulp. You got that, sweet cheeks?'

Noah looks red in those small spaces of unfreckled skin.

‘Shit, Willow. I didn't mean it like that. I mean, if anyone's not made for boxes it's you. I just meant, like, law is all about defending the rules, and like, you break the rules more than anyone I know. You hate rules.'

Willow sighs and lies down and grabs fistfuls of sand, which keep slipping through that space between her fingers. She's forgiven him.

‘I don't hate rules. I hate rules that make no sense. Being a barrister isn't about defending rules, it's about defending justice. I want to fight for that. I believe in justice.'

Then she tips her chin up at the sky.

‘Rooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!'

Noah joins in.

‘Rooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!'

Willow reaches her arm across and bats at me to join in.

‘Rawr?'

‘You need to work on that,' she tells me. Once we're done filling the sky with sound she brushes herself off and examines the piece of flattened cardboard she was just lying on. ‘Speaking of boxes . . .'

And then she runs and jumps off the edge of the dune. She slices through the slope, sharp and quick and whooping, and behind her she cuts a gash in the sand like aeroplanes do with their vapour trails in the sky sometimes. She leaves her mark.

Noah and I are alone.

It feels like there's a mallet at my chest.

Be cool, Kirra.

I am anything but cool.

I don't know what to say, I don't know what to do, but he leans against me so our shoulders touch, and I don't understand how my shoulders can grow so many nerve endings whenever Noah's next to me, because that's all I can focus on, and I don't understand how my mum used to wear shoulder pads when she was young in the 80s because she'd be missing out on so much of the zinging that's happening right now. And then he touches my hand.

It's a quiet touch. My palm is open and he just moves his fingers over to it, gently, like if touches were whispers. We're not looking at each other, he just starts to follow the lines of my palm with his thumb. I've never felt so attached to my hand like I am right now. I've never been so glad that just underneath my skin are strings of veins and nerve endings that branch out and connect to all of me, like strands of fairy lights that Noah's touch just lit up. Right now, all of me, all that I am, is the feeling of Noah's skin against my skin. Nothing else exists.

I am alight.

I watch and follow his thumbnail etching the creases of my palm, and it's like all of the lines in my hand are a hundred different roads branching out, and he's following each of them, one by one.

‘So what are you going to be one day?' he asks me, directing his words at my hand. I want to close my fists to catch them, but instead I glance over to him and the wind is making his sandy hair dance against his brow.

God, he is lovely.

‘You'll laugh,' I say, and I look down at our hands too, and I peek up at him and then look away, taking tiny sips of his face. I look down at his thumb tracing my life line all the way down to my wrist.

‘I won't laugh. I promise.'

Noah's finger is still at the spot where my life line ends, and I hope he can't feel my pulse through my wrist, because it's drumming.

‘I sort of want to make a difference,' I tell him, finally. It sounds so ridiculous, saying this out loud.

Me.

The speck.

The dot.

The grain of sand.

But I know that I want to leave behind footprints so much bigger than the soles of my size six Dunlops. Noah doesn't laugh. He waits for me to go on, so I do.

‘I was thinking maybe politics, or something like that,' I admit. ‘I just kind of want to speak up for people who are never listened to, you know?' Then I look over to him and he's doing that sort of smile that scrunches up his face and makes his freckles bump.

‘You promised you wouldn't laugh!'

‘I'm not laughing, you idiot. I'm smiling, because you'll be perfect at it.'

Then he lets go of my hand to lean over and scoop out a periwinkle shell from where it's half buried in the sand by his knee. He offers it to me, his bottom lip disappearing under his adorably only-slightly-crooked teeth.

‘Here. I know it's not a great big conch shell like in
Lord of the Flies
, but we can pretend it is.'

I take it from him, rolling the weight of it in my hand. Somewhere inside my heart something sprouts, and from it a smile blooms. I don't know how women go crazy for diamonds like they do, because nothing in this world right now is more precious than a periwinkle shell. I hold it against the sky and watch it spiral as I turn it, then I put it in my pocket where I can keep it safe. We sit there, watching the foam crash on sand. I think of the shell, and of being the person who has everyone's attention.

‘I don't know if I'll be able to do it, though,' I confess. ‘Going into politics, I mean. I'd really have to get used to people looking at me.'

Noah takes my hand properly now, and presses the map of his palm against mine. I think of our love lines and our life lines pressing against each other. Aligned. We catch eyes, and I can't look away.

‘Kirra, you should already be used to it. I mean, I've never been looking anywhere else.'

He blushes but he keeps staring into my eyes, and he's not looking at the size of them or the yellowness of them. He's seeing the person I am inside of them, and he's looking at me like I'm really worth looking at.

There's a moment, I discover. That moment just after you know that someone's about to kiss you and just before they do. Time gets fuzzier. It stretches and contracts so it's both a blink and an eternity. It's like the space between words in the kind of book that makes you stop and just rest the pages on your chest from the truth of it, or in that winged space in between the notes of a song. It's a space that sits shoulder to shoulder between lovely things, and those lovely things make the nothingness of the space fat and full with thingness. In between Noah's eyes making a promise, and his lips touching mine, I live an eternity wrapped inside a blink, and then he kisses me and time stops existing altogether.