PrologueJonah
In my fifteen years of fighting with Sadie Shaw, we only had six ceasefires.
The first five, we broke.
Ceasefire #1 – Second year undergradThirteen years ago
Our unit chair for Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature made two pedagogical decisions that Future Jonah, who would go on to teach classes of his own, would find utterly fascinating in their sadism:
1) Group work was the best possible way to assess individual students’ understanding of the libertine novel.
2) Pairing the two students who, over the year and a half they’d known each other, had spent every seminar passionately disagreeing with each other would lead to excellent results.1
‘Truce, Fisher,’ nineteen-year-old Sadie said, long red hair spilling over her shoulders as she marched across the seminar room towards me. ‘The grade we get on this assessment is more important to me than the fact I can’t stand you.’
She held out her hand for me to shake.
I looked at it.
‘Well?’ she demanded.
‘…Fine. Truce, Shaw,’ I said. ‘Our grade is the most important thing.’
I shook her hand. Her skin was soft against mine, the way I had imagined it might be, but her grip was secure, assertive, assured.
Mine wasn’t.
I loved arguing with Sadie in seminars. Everything I could think of, she always had an answer to – sometimes a completely unexpected one – and it was entirely, utterly thrilling.
This was our fourth semester of undergraduate Lit Studies at Eastern Sydney University. Every semester, I made sure we were in the same seminars,2because I liked arguing with her so much. Every week, I looked forward to the hours we spent together: to those productive, fruitful, generative debates; to the way our commitment to one-upping each other made us both better students; to the glint in her eyes as she turned her gaze on me across the room; to whatever it was she would say next.
Before I started undergrad, I had been determined not to follow in my father’s footsteps. I had no desire to do what my brother Elias was doing, to try to become the sequel to Professor Christian Fisher, Eminent(ly Unbearable) Scholar. Yes, I loved reading. Yes, I loved learning. Yes, I was even going to do my degree at ESU, where my dad worked – but that was as far as I was going to go.Under no circumstances would I become an academic, not if it meant becoming someone like him.
Arguing with Sadie had changed my mind about everything I’d imagined for my future.
But she didn’t feel the way I did. At all.
Sadie Shaw couldn’tstandme.
That’s probably why I was the one who broke the first ceasefire, by picking a fight about what theoretical framework we should use to examineLes Liaisons Dangereuses.It was incredibly immature of me, but it was far easier to make myself unlikeable than to try and understand why the girl I’d been psyching myself up to ask to be my date to my sister Fiona’s farce of a wedding hated me so much.3
Ceasefire #2 – Graduation (undergrad)Ten years ago
Because we were both compulsive overachievers, we each did a double bachelor’s degree4and then an Honours year. By the time we graduated, Sadie and I had been arguing with each other for five years.
Tensions had ratcheted up between us after that first broken ceasefire,5and they ratcheted up even further in our Honours year.What had been a simple classroom rivalry turned into an all-out battle for supremacy, because now there was something towin.
Sadie and I never said it out loud, but we clearly had the same idea. We were both going to get first-class honours – that went without saying – but whichever one of us got the higher overall grade and won the University Medal for Outstanding Academic Performance in Literary Studies would also be the winner of… well, us.
But there was to be no winner, no loser, no satisfying conclusion that would let us both walk away and bury our feud as the youthful hostilities of two people too competitive for their own good, because we got the exact same score – across coursework, across our theses, across everything – making us the first ever dual University Medallists.
‘Can we be civil today, please?’ I murmured to Sadie, as we followed the student procession into the graduation hall. Everyone else was ordered alphabetically to receive their degrees, but because we’d won the medal, we had to be beside each other, right near the back. ‘I’d rather not have a screaming argument with you in front of my parents.’
‘Oh, damn,’ Sadie said. ‘I’ll have to take that off my schedule. I had it pencilled in for about two thirds of the way through the ceremony.’
I looked at her.
I had buried my crush a long time ago, but there were still times – usually when that long, wild red hair of hers was loose the way it was that day, vibrant against the crisp black lines of her robes and mortarboard – that I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful she was.
