‘Okay, perve,’ Poppy said, laughing.
Mara handed the phone to Nicola, who stopped laughing when she started scrolling through the page.
‘I’m a six?’ she said, no joy in her voice.
‘Yeah, but only because of your acne. You’ll be a ten by the time that clears up,’ Poppy remarked, as though this was helpful.
‘But how am I a six when Nora is an eight? That hardly seems right,’ Nicola replied.
‘What?’ I was not catching on quick enough, so Poppy snatched the phone and handed it over to me.
The post was called ‘Crestbright Bangas’, and the tagline read: ‘ranking the best and worst our fine mountain has to offer’, followed by some random punctuation symbols. Underneath were dozens and dozens of photos of girls in our school, across all grades, some taken from our yearbook class photos, and others from social media. I felt my unease rise until I found the image of me, and clicked to open it up.
‘Nora Byrne: 8. Mid, but weird enough she could be freaky in bed. Give her a go, lads, and report back.’
It was the kind of egregious behaviour that should have elicited a strong response, but instead I sat there, feeling nothing. I handed the phone back to Poppy.
‘Eight is good, babe,’ she said, as though this should be reassuring to me.
‘We should report them to the school, it’s gross,’ Nicola said. ‘They’ve called a few girls “unrapable”. That’s really disgusting.’
Mara nodded her head in agreement. I continued to say and do nothing.
‘It’s just a joke – and it’s anonymous anyway, so how would they figure out who started it?’ Poppy asked.
‘I’m sure they could link it to someone’s email or their other accounts,’ Mara replied. ‘The guys most likely to have made it are dumb enough not to have covered their digital tracks.’
And still I sat, saying and doing nothing. When the bell rang for fifth period, the girls got up but I remained where I was.
‘You okay?’ Poppy asked. ‘We have double English, your favourite. Come on.’
I did not look at her, or the others, or anywhere. My eyes were unfocused and my mind was running through the types of birds that visited our school: ibis, kookaburra, pigeon, magpie, peewee, butcherbird, noisy miner, blue-faced honeyeater, sparrow, house sparrow. A faraway voice said something about getting the guidance officer, and they must have done, because Mrs Walsh was soon sitting beside me, the girls gone.
‘How about we go and have a chat in my office,’ she said, her hand on my shoulder.
When I stood up, I had to rush to the closest bin so I could be sick, but nothing really came out. Nausea of the mind. Then I let her lead me across the grounds to her office, connected to the library, but I did not muster much chat once I was there. Because I was not there, not really. Eventually, she called Elsie, who came and picked me up, and I did not return to school for two whole weeks. Glandular fever, our GP eventually diagnosed, based on nothing more tangible than my lack of energy. Emotional disconnect was hardly a symptom anyone could identify at that time, least of all me. A virus, on the other hand, was an excuse to spend a fortnight in bed, and gave Mum an acceptable label to facilitate this. She cared for me like she had when I was small, and I relished every fresh cup of tea and plate of toast, as though they were the answer and the cure.
10
22 December
The only thing I can think to do when I wake is drive. My head is pounding and I am afraid to lie here in bed too long, pickling in sour thoughts. Getting out of this house is essential; I am on the run. There is a road I need to take, and it is best in the morning light. I take Dad’s car because it is older, of less sentimental and literal value, plus I know where he hangs the keys. Driving, for me, is a way of coming home to myself. There are several key components to that – air-conditioning set to twenty degrees, favourite song on a loop, windows all the way up to seal me inside the cabin with only myself for company. I can stretch to fill more of the space than another person ever could. I will stop somewhere for a drink to take the rest of the way; this gives the journey outward purpose, but it already has everything it needs. Of course, little treats are never unwelcome. Little treats might actually be the meaning of life. Iced coffees and caramel slices and post-mix Coke – what else are we here for? Being in motion with all of these elements working in harmony is the closest to bliss I have found alone thus far. It is no wonder I failed in Melbourne; I didn’t even have a car I could borrow. Buckled in and with my song cued up on repeat, I breathe. Here we go.
The drive-through place does not do the best coffee but it does the best at keeping me in my car, so as not to break the flow. The small amount of small talk needed to order my latte and gluten-free muffin rattles my nerves and I fear I may cry, but the teenager at the window does not seem to notice or mind. He says, ‘Enjoy your drive,’ as though he knows, as though he too might need to drive his way back to himself every now and again. I reply, ‘You too,’ and immediately want to die. But the sky is blue and the muffin is warm and I don’t have to talk to another person all day if I don’t want to, so I claim this as a victory and steer my way to the road that crosses the ridge. The muffin helps with my reflux, and I devour it in a few frenzied bites. This road makes me lose my stomach at the same point every time – ocean on one side, rolling farmlands on the other. It is hard to keep my mind on the wheel, but there is enough to go round, and there is no one around.
It makes no sense how I could both drive for the entire day like this and come home with more energy than I left with, but not be able to walk upstairs to the kitchen and prepare myself a meal. Nothing about how I work makes any sense to anyone, although the recent diagnoses have some thoughts about that. It is just hard to merge that information with twenty-one years of viewing myself in one particular way. I am lazy, I am selfish, I am stubborn, I am rude. I do these thingstoother people; I make their lives harder just to have my own way. Of course, I know more now, I understand why things are hard for me, and how much harder they are for other people with brains like mine who have higher needs or do not hold the same privileges I do. I know, I know, I know. But that is not how Ifeel. Because no matter how many colourful infographics I see, or funny TikTok videos I watch, or shared experiences I consume, I will always be working against the original wiring of my brain, the default of being at fault. And I am tired. I am bone-tired, and twenty-one (already a burden to my parents, and frightened, etc).
Dr Montague says it takes people at least a year to ‘process and integrate’ the new version of themselves into their psyche, and as it has only been a month, officially, I am trying to be kind. But it is hard to be kind, because of the aforementioned reasons. My brain literally does not know how. And every video out there aimed at teaching people to ‘rewire your brain!’ makes me want to violently assault someone, so really I am out of options. I try not to think about Fran and last night, because I am barely coping without having to process that titbit of unfortunate information. If I let my brain really run free, it will eat itself alive. And what happened after, which I seem to want to frame as something that happened, and not something I chose to do, remains altogether separate to my other recollections of the night. I have sectioned it off, a bad dream, a different person. But it was me; that is the uncomfortable truth.
Dr Montague is not going to be impressed with my decision to engage in random sex with an almost stranger as a way to avoid regulating my own feelings of hurt and rejection. Or perhaps that is projection, perhaps I have positioned her as a stand-in for Elsie and the issues I could never discuss with my mother, due to the mother issues I am now all too aware I possess. I suppose I do not even have to tell her, though I know I will, confession still a default to absolve me of my sins, and professional psychology the perfect realm to enact this ritual.
And then a baby cow appears in the corner of my eye, and I pull over in a wild, cinematic kind of way. Stones go flying and I am thrown back into my seat with the force of this choice. The calf, brown and fluffy, with eyelashes people would probably rip out of its head for themselves if they could, is unperturbed by my vehicular dramatics. She blinks and continues to watch me. I turn off my music, but I do not have the capacity to open my car door, or even my window, to say hello. This is not one of those days. This is a ‘sit in my car and observe the beauty of this cow until I am full to bursting and must move on’ kind of day. She seems to know it, and she bends down to get herself some grass. Perhaps she is enjoying the human view, or perhaps she knows the value she brings to our visual landscape just by existing. She eats her grass and I sip my coffee. My breathing slows. I feel the acidity levels in my body start to drop. Not everything is bad and not everyone is awful. I even try to summon some semblance of positivity around Fran being in a relationship with a person who is not me, but that is overcooking things. At least I gave it a go there for a second, Rome wasn’t built in a day and so on. Eventually, the baby cow senses it is time for us both to move on, and she initiates the transition because she knows I will not. My pummelled heart thanks her, and I start my engine and my song once more.
While I busied my nearly fifteen-year-old self finding new ways to dislike my changing body, Fran found himself his first proper girlfriend. They were in school together; they shared friends and interests. It was normal; I felt violent. I hated Emma more than I had ever hated anyone, and certainly far more than she deserved. It was not because she was pretty or athletic or tall in the way I wanted to be, though she was all those things. It was how she showed up for him so easily, all the time. She wrote him letters in beautiful curly handwriting and baked him cupcakes and remembered every single thing she was supposed to remember, like his mum’s birthday and the anniversary of his nana’s death. And even back then, I think I knew I could not give that much of my energy away and still be the version of myself that was acceptable to the world. Watching someone else do it so effortlessly was more than I could bear.
One afternoon when I was lying in my bed, and I could hear them playing frisbee in Fran’s yard, her laughing and telling stories and being confident in who she was and the sound of her voice, I prayed to a God I didn’t really believe in that Emma would die. I spent quite some time visualising ways it might happen.
Did you hear? There was a car crash – or an accident at the waterfall – truly awful, a tragedy in every sense of the word. Upon hearing the news, from Mum or via text from someone at school, I shed tears at the thought of a life lost so young. Someone my age, unimaginable. And once those tears had dried, I knew what I had to do. Of course I had to be there for my friend. I would dress myself in cut-off denim shorts and my pink op-shop rabbit-hair cardigan, because he once said he likes how it feels, and I would rush to be by his side. I would tell him how heartbroken I was, for him, for her, for everyone lucky enough to know and love her. And I would be there for him, until he realised it had always been me.
