‘We’ve got a bit on today. Luke’s just arrived and Olivia’s daughter Maeve is keeping us all busy, but I’m sure we will see each other soon,’ I say in my own Netflix voice, trying to maintain a vagueness I am not well versed in.
‘Fair enough, fair enough. Your mum must be thrilled having everyone back. We’ll see you all tonight at the Kingstons’ do anyway, yeah?’
‘Yeah. See you then.’
Martin turns and heads inside, duck-footed and slow. This kind of chit-chat is clearly neither a problem nor of much importance to him, and yet it has derailed the rest of my afternoon. How dare he. I am cursing him for being such an annoying interruption, at the same time acknowledging that his maintaining light conversation for a few short moments was not necessarily a direct attack on my emotional and mental wellbeing. At least not an intentional one. I had forgotten, or failed to acknowledge in the first place, that one of our scheduled neighbourhood festivities might be the time I am most likely to encounter Fran. And, more specifically, that the street party is tonight.
Another birthday party is brought to mind – my own, at our house, when I turned thirteen. It felt as though I had no choice, because the other girls from school all had birthday parties at their homes when they turned thirteen, some of them old faces and some new, and they did not ask meifI was having one, only when. It was a tricky time, feeling everything, knowing nothing, and looking to the wrong people to fill in the blanks. There was rarely a moment I did not feel as though I was half a step behind, flailing in their wake. It would be years before I understood that I did not enjoy being celebrated in this kind of way. Spending time with friends is a lovely idea, in theory, but actually beingfriendswould be a good starting point. Also, everyone’s eyes need to be focused on something else, together – eyes pointed at me, especially in great numbers, is unbearable in practice. There are parts of this memory I revisit more than others, but I do my best now to recall the entire scene.
Six girls from my class came along, and I can only remember the names of four, mostly because of the bloody footprints they left through my adolescence or that I would later tread through theirs. The two that remain unnamed got out unscathed. Dad hung silver balloons and streamers around the deck and Mum set the most beautiful table of blues and whites that I had ever seen. If the party had ended there, with Mum and Dad busy making my quiet world beautiful, and the balloons and streamers and the blue hydrangeas and the white daisies, and me getting to sit in silence watching it all come together, my heart would have been full. The moments that came before the main event – my favourite. Much like at Poppy’s pool party, the chasm between what I was expected to enjoy and what I actually did was hard to comprehend, and so I believed if I squashed myself into the discomfort of expectations enough times, they would become more enjoyable. Is that not what ‘fake it ’til you make it’ means? Apparently, some people do not take this phrase so literally. Meanwhile, I never made it past faking it.
Inviting Fran to the party had not felt like a choice either, but for other reasons entirely. If a day was to be about me, and what I wanted, Fran would be there. And if I wanted anyone around, it was Fran. A day without his company could not possibly contain all of what made me who I was. He was the fragment of enjoyment amidst all of the expectation; he was the streamers and balloons and hydrangeas and daisies. If he’d had any reservations about being the only boy at a high tea otherwise filled with thirteen-year-old girls, he never mentioned it. But I don’t think he did. I think we felt the same.
The girls arrived in ones and twos, and although I was wearing my new lace dress, and Mum had not braided my hair this time but curled it, and the clock said 10 a.m. just like the invitations, I did not feel ready. Breaths caught shallow in my throat, too buoyant to go all the way down, and I thought about dying, just a little. It was the same feeling I had outside home class every morning at school, as I worked to steel myself for the onslaught of the day. Death was always the ace up my sleeve if things got too hard, the freedom of the possibility removing any need for the grim eventuality of something so drastic. Poppy and Mara, who had allowed me to stay in their group, but only just, always arrived at class before me, and having to infiltrate their conversations felt like trying to establish friendship for the first time, every single day, despite having known each other for so long. It was better if one of the two was away, then the other would rush over to me and act far more familiar than they otherwise would, because they needed someone to stand in for the role of friend. It just did not get any more comfortable, in all my years of schooling, not even a little bit. That terror and ache from my first day of kindergarten stayed with me until graduation. Nobody ever wanted to hear that, though. Those making it want to quickly forget the struggles of the faking-it folk. We muddy the waters they seek to keep clear.
When Fran arrived, I ran to the door and considered grabbing his hand and continuing right on through it and away. If I had asked him, he too would have fled the party and come with me to our tree, where we could have laughed about the girls in lace dresses sipping tea on my deck. We could have watched them from afar like twitchers in our bird hide. Instead, I opened the door to see him in his best buttoned shirt, flowers from the garden in his hand, and I knew it had been a mistake to ask him to come.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said, smile wide and flowers extended in my direction.
I wanted to eat them. I wanted to tear out my hairclips and rip off my dress and beat my chest and turn so wild I might hit the boundary of our friendship. It felt unknowable in a way that truly scared me. I knew the boundary out there on the deck – if I liked the wrong band or even the wrong member of the right band, if I wore my hair the wrong way, if I had the wrong kind of drink bottle, if I acted too childishly, if I ever mentioned mermaids again, I would find myself beyond it, alone. The girls ran a tight ship and there were many who would have been happy to be my replacement. ‘We don’t hang out with Nora anymore,’ they might say, and people would try to guess exactly where I had gone wrong.
‘There are a lot of girls here,’ I replied.
‘I know.’
‘They might not be that nice,’ I said.
‘That’s okay.’
Dad appeared beside me and welcomed Fran in, holding the door wide so he could walk around me. I did not take the flowers. Fran brought them outside to the deck and placed them on the table instead. Never have twelve eyeballs stared harder.
‘This is Fran – he’s our neighbour and a great friend to our Nora,’ Mum announced, and the eyes were not yet satiated.
‘You never told us Fran was aboy,’ Nicola, a new and named addition to the group, announced, placing her chin in her hands on the table, her eyes flashing danger and glee.
‘Was I meant to specify that?’
Mum laughed as she unwrapped the last platter from its clingfilm and left us to it. My parents were far more interested in ‘leaving me to it’ than I would have liked. The ‘it’ was never clear, but a guardian would almost always have helped, especially at parties. I started eating sandwiches to fill the silence and could not seem to find a way to stop.
‘Mara kissed a boy on her street last holidays,’ Poppy announced, eyes darting from Fran to me and back again, a smirk crossing her symmetrical face.
By this stage, with her two ear piercings in each ear, Poppy tended to set the tone for the maturing group, and I did not like the one she was setting for this day at all. The twelve eyes bored deeper still.
‘Have you two kissed?’ Nicola asked, obviously deciding Poppy’s masterful subtlety might mean a missed opportunity.
‘No,’ I replied, trying to keep my voice neutral in a way that neither offended Fran nor made it seem as though it was something I thought about.
‘Would you?’ Poppy asked, taking her first bite of a cupcake, and looking as though the unfolding situation was just as delicious.
My brain was not moving fast enough. It could never move fast enough. Anxiety spilled like oil and I could not fathom how to pull myself out clean.
‘If Nora wanted to,’ Fran replied, as though it was as easy a question to answer as whether he wanted another glass of Coke.
Giggles filled the space, and my cheeks went red. I remember feeling as though I was embarrassed, but not unhappy he had said it. It dawned on me in that moment that I would have been upset if he had answered any differently. If those feelings had existed prior, I had paid them no attention until then.
‘Well, come on then, it is her birthday,’ Mara added, feeling braver in the pack than she ever was alone.
The eyes looked and I wanted to gouge each one of them out with a skewer from the fruit kebabs topped with watermelon stars. It was my fucking birthday and they were feasting on my carcass like a pack of glittery hyenas. I decided it was time to seize back some of this collective energy, and I pushed down the shame their laughter had caused to spring in my chest.
