‘The same kind as us,’ Fran replies. He is now leaning back against the tree instead of on me, his eyes closed.
‘But they don’t know about scary things at that age.’
‘Of course they do.’
I think about it for a little while. All kinds of things cornered me in the dark rooms of my dreams when I was small. Did Jamie plant that fear, or only embody it that one time? Fran would have the answer, or at least a perspective that would help me form my own. I can’t ask him, though; I am not sure if I ever told him that story. He would be the only one I would have considered disclosing it to, the only one I could trust. If I did, we are no longer close enough for me to trace over it again, and if I did not, we may never be again. There was a time, though, when things were exactly how they were supposed to be.
The kissing continued for a long time after that first time. We kissed in my bedroom and Fran’s bedroom and in the park and most of all, we kissed in our tree. I remember kissing in the winter months, rugged up in jumpers and beanies, and kissing all through the summer, when we were sweaty, and sunburnt, and the mosquitoes were out. It did not go further than kissing – I don’t think either of us was ready for that. I had heard stories of a couple of people in my grade doing the thing, and I was scared of it. I could not imagine a time I would ever be ready, entirely sure it was not for me. That made our kissing feel rare; I have never again had a kiss that did not feel like pressure for something more.
It was a part of life that kept me functioning, as much as sleep, and learning new things, and animals, and movement, and the increasingly difficult task of remembering to eat. Kissing Fran replaced talking to Fran as a way for me to verify that there was something unbreakable between us, a thread of energy and light and hope. It got to the point faster than talking ever could. It coloured everything we did, everything I did, even outside of being with him. I had synced up my body and mind, for what felt like the first time in my life. And lucky timing, because I was also, by that point, experiencing the utter hell of getting my period and all the hormonal fluctuations and sensory horrors that came with that.
And I remember when the kissing stopped. I can see it clearly now, the way I am starting to see everything more clearly – the dust settling, the mist dissipating – my diagnosis plus time and rest is hindsight on steroids. That sacred, shared space we had built was buried under an avalanche – one conversation, entirely mishandled by me. I would laugh at the memory of my very autistic misstep if the outcome had not been quite so emotionally devastating. It was the end of summer, and school was due to go back in a matter of weeks, or perhaps days. While summer was always my favourite season as a kid, this transition at the end of the school holidays was my least favourite time of year. Starting a new grade, with a new teacher, and a whole new set of rules to navigate – there was never enough time to prepare, not even if the Christmas holidays had stretched out for a year. My sleep would start to break, and I would find something new to pick – my skin or my eyebrows or my scalp. I was going into Year Nine by that point, and Fran into Year Eight at his school.
We did not talk about it, but Fran must have noticed this change, even if he missed the picking, and I think my anxiety spread to him, only he seemed to let it build around us, and more particularly, what our kissing might have meant. He brought it up one afternoon, in our tree, just before it was time to go in for the night. My legs were across his lap and I was looking up, watching the light dancing through the leaves.
‘Have you ever thought about, you know, having a proper boyfriend?’ he asked.
To me it was a purely hypothetical question, and I was not yet well practised enough to temper my immediate, knee-jerk, no-thought response. Impulsiveness, when paired with brutal honesty, was a dangerous brew. With Fran, I had thought I did not need to moderate myself, had assumed he would always understand exactly what I meant, that whatever thread existed between us communicated everything and more than made up for the times my clumsy words left gaping chasms for wrong implications to take shape.
‘Yeah, I don’t want one,’ I replied.
‘Oh.’
I felt Fran’s body go rigid, his hurt only decipherable to me at that stage as unhappiness, and I sat up, internally frantic but outwardly still. It was chaos in my mind, as I turned every dial and knob like a radio, desperate to tune back in to his frequency and figure out what mistake I had made.
‘Did you mean us?’ I blurted out, panicked.
‘Well, maybe.’
‘Do you want that? To have a girlfriend?’
‘I would like to, one day.’
‘So what, you . . . you think you’ll get married one day too?’ I was quickly starting to reach a frenzied state, disbelieving, sickened.
I wanted to get to the point, to know how far down the road he was thinking, because all I could feel was pressure, pressure, PRESSURE.
‘I think so, yeah.’
‘And kids?’
‘I mean . . .’ He laughed, looking at me as though I was being absurd, which did not help. ‘I’m thirteen. I’m not really thinking about that, Nora. But maybe, one day. It might be cool.’
It was hard to comprehend why at the time, though I do understand more now, that those fairly normative hopes and dreams felt like an intimate rejection, especially when I sensed Fran was talking specifically about his simple, adolescent hopes with me. And that is what it was, what he had that I was lacking: hope. He was not asking me to sign an unbreakable contract. He wanted us to ‘go steady’, as they might say in an old movie; to call each other girlfriend and boyfriend. That was it. But all I knew, all I felt in that moment, was fear. I mean, I was thirteen. Thirteen-year-olds do not know shit. But I already knew I was struggling, that more expectations could not be the answer. I did not imagine my life in five years’ time, I did not imagine a wedding or a baby or a white house in a lane of white houses. I did not imagine growing old at all, only assumed I would not be one of those who made it that far. I had thought Fran was with me in my spurning of all those ideas, even if he planned to live to old age, and he was betraying me by hinting that he wanted a part of any of it.
‘I don’t want to be your girlfriend,’ is what I said.
Behind that, of course – what I assumed he understood, and what I should have added – was ‘you are the most important person in my life, and I want to continue to build on our closeness and share everything together and be there for one another and chase our dreams together, but I do not want to be forced into someone else’s idea of what that might look like. I want to stay autonomous, and free, but I want to stay autonomous and free right next to you in this tree.’
I do not know why I did not say that, other than the fact I was thirteen and, as previously mentioned, did not know shit. I had no concept of who I was as a person, so how could I imagine being anything to anyone else at some imagined point in the future? I had yet to understand which parts of me were even real and which were imposed by outside forces.
Fran nodded; I can still picture his face, darkened with embarrassment. I remember feeling puzzled that he did not lean across to continue kissing me, because I definitely had not said I did not want us to kiss anymore. He untangled himself from me, climbed down and started back towards his house.
‘Wait, where are you going?’ I called, and what I really meant was, ‘Come back.’
My brain was overfilling with stress and I was left gasping as the waterline rose. Saying the wrong thing had caused this, and therefore it felt only logical to now say as little as possible to try and salvage the situation.
‘It’s all good, Nora. I understand,’ he replied, though it was not all good and he clearly did not understand at all. I didn’t understand. It was un-understandable – static and dead air.
