Translation: you got home late from the pub, potentially in an awful state. I know you’re hiding your hangover. Don’t slack off today or you’ll be in trouble.
I usually answer the surface question, but you have a habit of calling her on what she really means. We need that. There’s less fighting going on lately, without you here, but less candidness too. If there’s one thing Mum won’t talk about it’s the whole blow up. You know. Do you mind talking about it? Or reading about it, to be correct. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t bought a carrot since. We’ll probably laugh about it one day, when things are normal again.
So, needless to say, we planted flowers and a few herbs and some tomatoes in the garden this morning, but definitely no carrots. Maybe you’ll be home in time to enjoy the cosmos. They’re my favourite flowers, and it’s not just because they look exactly like the pink flower emoji. The bees love them, and I love the bees. Dad ended up spraying everyone with the hose and it was a sickeningly wholesome family time. We need more of those I think, after everything.
Mum still calls Dee if I’m having a bad day or a bad week, or if I can’t seem to come out of my head after an outburst. I think they talk about me on the phone, and Mum always feels better and Dee always comes over with hot cinnamon donuts from Donut King. Dee says she can tell how I’ve been going by how tight her jeans feel, I guess because donuts make her put on weight. She knows about calorie-counting, but that’s not really her thing. I had to delete my calorie app because it was making me too obsessed. When I started weighing the butter for my toast in the mornings I knew I’d gone too far. We’ve eaten a lot of donuts since—you know. It’s almost been a year and it will be my biggest donut-eating year ever. I’m not really keeping track, but I’d estimate a twenty to thirty per cent increase on last year. I’ve got to start having better days, Dee says, so she will fit into her formal dress. I know that’s not really why she wants me to have better days, and that she’d bring me donuts every day for the rest of the year if she needed to. I want to have better days too, for Mum and for Dee and everyone around me.
I know you like to say Dee should ‘talk less and think more’, but I also know you actually really like her and she has been a good friend to me this past year. She’s mostly been a good friend since she transferred from Sydney and sat next to me in Miss Bell’s grade three class right at the front.
Do you remember her back then? She was so cute and tiny. Sydney is only 915.6 kilometres from Brisbane, and then it’s another 29 kilometres out here to us on the bay at Cleveland, but it may as well have been the other side of the world for how exotic Dee seemed to everyone. She had two earrings in each ear and wore a hair wrap all year round, even when she wasn’t on holidays. Other girls liked Dee because of her four earrings and her hair wrap, but I liked her because she smiles with her eyes and says what she means and she laughs like a Disney villain. Her laugh gets away from itself and makes me laugh, even when I’m so far inside my own head I forget how to walk properly. Last Monday I walked into my locker on the way to home room and spilled my coffee all down the front of my uniform. Dee laughed so hard she said she peed her pants a little. She was bent over and laughing so much Mr Sharp sent her to the principal’s office for ‘disrupting the class’.
I questioned how laughing could be considered a disruption, especially when class hadn’t even started, and he sent me to the office too. I think Mr Sharp wishes I were you, or more like you. He is not kind. He always says you were funny in class, and I know I’m not funny. Well, I’m funny like ‘what’s that funny smell?’ not funny like ‘haha good joke, you’re so funny’. I wish I was better at telling when someone is joking—it’s hard when their face is the same as when they are being honest. When I try to make a joke and keep my face the same as when I’m being honest, people don’t realise I’m joking and they get upset by my jokes. I’m still trying to get the hang of it. I think it’s less to do with my delivery and more to do with who I am to begin with.
Do you remember when Dee started bringing me donuts when things got hard at the start of high school? My head was in a funny, foggy way and the principal had promised Mum I’d be in home room with Dee but then she put me in a completely different home room instead. When I got there I realised and I got pretty upset, and screamed at my home-room teacher that she didn’t know anything, and my wrists did circles and the Jessicas stared. Ms Wright tried to call the roll and I wouldn’t sit down, and she looked at me like she was scared of me, and that made me more upset. I remember thinking for once it would be nice to have someone look at me like they understood when I was having an outburst, instead of like I was a new species of animal, potentially dangerous and definitely not to be approached.
If I ever see someone having an outburst I’m going to look at them like I understand even if I don’t really. It was a bad day that first day of school, an outburst-in-front-of-everyone, meltdown-and-shutdown kind of day. Dee brought the donuts after school and we ate them lying on the trampoline. I don’t even know where you were. Ollie was inside with Mum. After that I tried to get through each day doing less than ten bad things.
I started calling it my cringe list. I try not to think about the list, but I can’t help seeing all of the things play over in my head like a movie. It hurts my stomach and makes me want to be sick. I think that’s why the donuts are so good; they push those horrible sick feelings down and fill my stomach with something else.
Now the teachers let me lie on the top bunk in sick bay and stare at the ceiling until I feel better, and if it’s a really bad day they call Mum and send me home. Sometimes with her, and sometimes with you. I preferred it when it was you. Here, it’s the same as ever. Dad finds an important job to do in the garage and Mum makes peppermint tea and calls Dee. Sometimes Mum says she has ‘had enough’ and yells and cries and sits on the back deck until Dee gets here. Other times she strokes my back or reads to me in bed. Usually Narnia or Harry Potter books because they are home for me, and also an escape. I know you think it’s because she loves me more or something like that. It isn’t; she doesn’t. I’m just more work.
Before the carrot incident, you never seemed too bothered by anything, even when you’d been in trouble or got hurt or when you were really sad. Words bounced off you like they meant nothing. I think maybe Mum and Dad just figured you were fine, so they left you to it. It was easier not to ask. Their guilt about that could drown us all. I think you are fine though, I don’t think there’s as much to read between the lines as they are finding. Time has given them too much perspective.
Anyway, Rudy, my hand is starting to cramp so I’m going to go to bed. I can’t promise I will do this every day, but I’ll try my best because ‘consistency is key’, or so I’m told. And if it doesn’t work I might have to try my hand at volleying vegetables through the window. (That was a joke. I thought it might work better without my face in the equation. What do you think?)
Miss you.
Love, Erin
15 August
Dear Rudy,
I’m getting the feeling you’re not planning on replying any time soon and I’m pissed off. That was some really big stuff I wrote in those last two letters, about my job and my life. Stuff I haven’t even spoken to Mum about, some of it. You kind of owe me a response here, bro. Not to pressure you or anything, but I’ve done a lot of listening to you in my seventeen years of life, and not a lot of talking in return. I’ve logged my hours, so now I’m cashing in. Remember how good I was at listening when you dropped out of TAFE and Dad was so mad about it and Mum couldn’t stop crying about how she ‘wanted more for you’? You told me everything in one big go, and I was so happy you felt like you could. I hope these letters make you feel happy too, but more than that I hope you reply.