‘She was fully going for it, flicking her hair and touching her face and belting out the high notes with her shitty singing voice. And as soon as she saw me she turned her radio down and went sooo red! She just acted like it never happened. I would have died from embarrassment. So cringe. It was hilarious, Brain, you should have seen her singing, like she was trying to be sexy in a music video clip or something.’
When Dee gets on a roll like that I feel like she should have her own talk show or something. She has so many opinions about things that to me don’t even seem important enough to think about. She has ‘hot takes’. You know Pointy Kathy; you said she was hot once. She’s like Taylor Swift’s blonder, taller, snootier sister. Her nickname is pretty self-explanatory. Everything about her is pointy—her knees, her elbows, her fingers, her chin, her nose, her words. The hard angles are so sharp she can cut you with a single look. I suppose she is quite pretty, that face where everything seems to have a purpose and is placed just so. Not like me. I am rounded, uneven and lumpy, like a jumbled mix of features pulled from a lucky dip. Chubby cheeks here, a rounded nose there; no consideration to how the overall picture comes together. I think you got the good parts of each of our parents, and I got the leftovers. Ollie got a mix of both, but sometimes I think he looks nothing like any of us and perhaps he was dropped into our family by aliens or something. But I wouldn’t trade my insides for Pointy Kathy’s outsides, no way. Not even with all of my challenges. She’s like a drug-detection dog that can pick up a whiff of insecurity a mile away, she always has been. She’ll uncover those insecurities and make you pay for daring to try to hide them at all. The first time I was in her sights it was because I didn’t wear makeup or shave my legs. I didn’t know I was supposed to. I know now.
Dee is so excited about formal, and she wants to talk about it almost as much as she wants to talk about Schoolies. Today was no different. She couldn’t wait to get started.
‘So, is Mitch excited? Is he all sorted with a suit and everything? Because I can send him some links if he’s having trouble.’
Mitch would definitely not take fashion tips from Dee, but I stopped myself before I mentioned that fact.
‘Oh yeah, he’s pumped,’ I said to Dee.
This isn’t technically true. He says he is looking forward to it in words, but his eyes say not. I just chose to tell Dee about the words rather than the real truth. I know you don’t like him, Rudy, so I’ve been trying not to mention him, but I’m writing to you about everything so it’s just something you’ll have to deal with. I don’t think it’s a bad relationship like you say. I think it’s just that maybe I’m bad at it, so I’m working on it. Just pretend I’m talking about someone else when you read his name, because I want to write about everything that’s going on. I need to. Dr Lim says I need to process. She says it is how we can work through what has happened and move forward as a family.
Dee is going to formal with Skyscraper Simon, you know him because he’s Damo’s younger brother, and just like Damo was the tallest guy in your year level, Skyscraper Simon is the tallest guy in ours. He has already booked them a limo and ordered a wrist corsage for Dee. It is sweet how excited about it he is, in this dorky, lanky kind of way. He talks to Dee about it every day after home class, she says. They are going to look incredible together and I feel a little happy/sad to think about it. Melancholy I guess is the word for that feeling. Or maybe bittersweet. Neither of those really fit. Sometimes I think we need more words in our language to describe feelings. There are so many names for things, like how somewhere you go for food can be a cafe or a restaurant or a diner or a shop or a bistro or an eatery or a cafeteria or a food hall. But it is so difficult to find a word that is just right for describing how I’m feeling.
Remember how Skyscraper Simon was my friend in year eight and nine? We used to see bands and movies together, but Mitch doesn’t think guys can want to be just friends with me, which is funny because he’s the only guy who has ever wanted to be anything else. I stopped replying to Simon’s texts when Mitch and I got together, which felt like the right thing at the time but now it feels like maybe it wasn’t.
It was hard to shake the happy/sad feeling, like it’s hard to shake pretty much any feeling that takes over my body, but I tried to get as excited as Dee was telling me about her latest styling idea.
‘I was thinking of getting like a sleek kind of Blake Lively style knotted up-do—I’ll send you the pics—and then wearing big statement earrings. I’d have to ditch the necklace, and I really liked that gold one I sent you last week. I don’t know, maybe I’ll pretend I’m a celebrity stylist, get both and decide on the night.’
There’s so much more to formal for a girl. You just had to buy a suit and brush your hair, and I don’t even think you did that. You just shoved it in a man-bun. I was trying to listen to what Dee was saying and listen to Mrs Wallis at the same time because she was saying something about what would be on the final exam. I didn’t catch it all, but I heard ‘Marxism’ and ‘communism’ so I think I’m all over it. I’ve really enjoyed this topic, China in a historical context, and I’ve done plenty of extra reading. I’ll probably end up emailing Dee my notes, because she is not all over it at all.
Dee is passionate about magazines like Vogue and she has a good eye for fashion stuff. I don’t really know what to say when she talks about it, so when the bell rang I was the first out the door. By lunch I only had three things on my cringe list:
An embarrassingly incorrect answer in history because I wasn’t paying proper attention
Not saying hi to a girl who had been my friend in year eight
A clumsy stumble in front of my entire home group.
These moments are now on the highlights reel that plays as I’m trying to fall asleep at night.
Just like when you were at school here, and probably until the end of time, the biggest group sits in the quadrangle. I sit with them because Dee does, but I don’t know if I’d call them my friends. If it is Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, they catch up on all the gossip from the weekend, and Thursday and Friday they plan what to do the next. Every week it’s the same. It’s another one of those rules. We also talk about Schoolies every day, of course. I have certain comments and conversations prepared in my head, so I don’t freeze and forget how to talk if someone asks for my input. I can shuffle them around and amend them to fit, depending on who is talking and what they want to know. I find it’s best to ask people questions, because everyone seems to like talking about themselves the most. It’s something I’ve always done, I think, as a way of coping in social situations.
I’m glad you always say how much better things are after high school, Rudy, because if this is the best time of my life, well, I think that would be awful. Some days I love it here, because I have a class I like and I know the rules and Dee will say something that makes me think she understands. Other days I hate it, like any time I have to use one of my scripted dialogue bits, or if I know the answer in class but someone else puts their hand up before I’ve worked up the courage to, and sometimes I swing back and forth between the two feelings so many times neither of them feels real.