The Best Thing (5 page)

The Lewises are okay, too. They don’t make as much noise as the Wilkinsons, but you can tell they’re
joined.
They all run together on the same track instead of four different ones, all going along when Josh’s playing hockey or Ambra’s in the swimming sports. I’d be lucky to get Mum to the school once a year on Prize Night, and Dad—well, you don’t want to know, do you, Dad? I only mention kids at school every now and again, but when I do you switch on the lectures about being an individual (a good little train running alone down the line) and not being led by the crowd. God, if only there
was
a crowd to be led by! There is
no-one,
honestly. I can say without anyone contradicting me,
I have no friends at school
any more. I used to have friends. I used to have a boyfriend there, even. I used to love getting up and going to school. Every evening I’d be on the phone with someone, organising for the weekend. I went out every Friday and Saturday night for nearly a whole year.

And the years before that, school was different. There were gang-like groups, but they didn’t have much power, and they didn’t have decisive leaders like Donna-and-Lisa or James Li. New people came and changed the whole mood of the school, and other people left, like (most importantly) Natalie Begley, who was my friend and went to London with her dad. And there
were also a few sensible people like Russell Daice—small, clever and very good at dissolving disagreements, so sure of himself, but so nice about it, that no-one could put him down. People like him were an antidote to all the jocks, but now there’s no resistance, and the jocks and the victimisers charge around doing what they please. Everything is likely to slip out of control there at any moment—last year some classes came so close to rioting it wasn’t funny, though I pretended it was at the time.

I was pretty sure I was happy, last year—I’d never hung around with such a lot of people, felt so popular. It was hard keeping up the pace, but it was exciting being there when rules (spoken and unspoken), sometimes real
laws,
were being breached. I didn’t actually lead any break-ins, but I went for joy-rides in a few stolen cars, and picked up a few ‘bargains’ from the shops around King Street with Lisa. It was terrifying, but at least I felt awake; I wasn’t waiting for something to happen, as it’d felt like for all my life up until then.

Well, now it’s all shot to pieces, isn’t it? I’d rather be in a coma than in this state of fearful
super-
awareness all the time, watching the shreds of everything I had last year fall through my fingers. Sometimes, when things are really black, Pug seems like a kind of consolation prize for having lost everything else in the bomb blast.
Here, have this unemployed bruiser,
someone said, and tossed him to me.

But I dropped the bomb myself, didn’t I? Can’t blame anyone else. I opened the bomb-bay doors (my mouth) and pressed the release button and, plop!, the bomb (the words) landed right in Lisa’s lap. Then she took it to school and laid it in the middle of the playground and detonated it. Blammo! Everything I’d had at that place was gone.

I
hate
that girl. She’s
evil
for doing that. (I’m crying; I can’t believe I’d let them make me cry. It must be PMS. It’s about that time, I think. It must be.) But I should’ve known I’d get it wrong. After four years sitting quietly with Natalie in a corner of the yard, of course everyone knew I was pretending when I started
cutting loose with Donna and Lisa. Now I figure they all saw through me. They just sat around waiting for me to blow it, and it was only a matter of time before I did. Nobody told me that if something stupid happens to you, like getting pregnant, you
don’t
tell your best friend, if she’s a ‘best friend’ like Lisa. I should’ve been able to see that—if I hadn’t been pretending, if I hadn’t wanted friends so badly that she wheedled the story out of me, if I hadn’t been trying to impress her with how experienced I was, if I’d bloody well
thought about it
! I mean, I knew that Lisa, underneath the dizzy surface she uses, is a really hard person, really judgemental. Sometimes she turns on the charm and sometimes she turns on the freezer. I remember (it hurts) how she tried to keep the charm going when I started telling her. Suddenly we were both acting. We weren’t best friends any more—some security wall, like they have in banks, had shot up between us. On one side she was staring, her eyes hard with dislike, her brain whirring; on the other side I was spitting it out, gobbet after gobbet, the stuff of juicy gossip.

I managed to stop myself before I named Brenner. I managed to not say a few things when she turned on me and asked. I stopped and sat perfectly still, biting my lips closed.

Then suddenly she remembered she had to go home ‘to help her mum’. And as she was going I said ‘This is just between us, right, Lisa?’ as fiercely as I could, but it was too late. ‘Sure,’ she said, and looked away. She was already freezing over. ‘See you later.’

Yeah well,
see
you later, but we haven’t
spoken
to each other since. I thought it’d die down over Christmas, but this year is worse than ever. The looks I get! That awful feeling when anyone who finds themselves near you immediately starts inching away. It’s foul! I keep my head down and work, trying to focus my panicking brain, come home, collapse on the bed, and when I wake up do homework, watch TV, try not to think about the next
day unless the next day’s Saturday or Sunday. Weekend memories keep me strong for the first couple of days before desperation for the
next
weekend takes over. Sometimes on a Friday I think I’m really going to crack up. There’s a really wild feeling at our school on Friday—everybody’s stirred up and practically partying already. Fridays I can’t tell whether people are going to leave me alone or come on extra strong to counteract their boredom. I mean, Mondays I
know
Brenner’ll be in a foul mood and Lisa’ll be hung over and Donna freezer-faced and powermongery, but Fridays I just
can’t tell.
All day I have to watch my back, and when I get home … the relief, the freedom—it’s dizzying.

We went to the clinic, Mum and I. Outside, after the counselling, a clutch of people flaunted aborted-foetus placards. One caught my eye and mourned,
’Don’t
kill your baby!’

‘Take no notice,’ Mum said when we got out of earshot. ‘A person’s entitled to a choice.’

I thought about the person inside me, who next week wouldn’t even exist.
No, not person. Not baby.
Growth, to be excised, like a fibroid. Humungous anxiety, to be removed. Or so I thought, before I’d opened the bomb bay.

I jig school at lunchtime to go to Pug’s. It’s too easy; I just wait until the teacher on yard duty’s up the other end and walk out. I’m trembling with my own daring, ducking home to change. I’m just so
sure
someone will see me and ask where I’m going, and dob me in to Mum and Dad. But I make it over there okay. Pug is out, but one of the other guys, Joe, lets me in. I go upstairs, lie on Pug’s bed and wait.

When he gets back he looks at me all cold and alien from training. ‘What’s happened?’

I don’t mean to whisper, but that’s how it comes out. ‘Nothing.’ Then I try again and say in a proper voice, ‘Nothing’s happened.’

He sits down next to me. ‘You don’t look too good.’

‘It’s the light through the leaves. All green.’

‘No,
sad,
not sick. What’s eatin’ ya?’ He takes my hands.

And I just go to pieces. Him saying ‘sad’ is what does it. Yes, I
am
sad; yes, something
is
eating me. God knows what—everything! I cry and lie and say it’s all the sneaking around.

‘But do you really have to be sneaky?’ says Pug, lying down next to me. ‘I mean, we’re goin’ together, aren’t we? Are we?’

‘I guess … I guess we are.’ It’s the first time I’ve actually said it.

‘I’m not seeing any other girl. Haven’t since a while before I met you; you know all about that. And you’re not sneakin’ round behind some other bloke’s back, or anything. It’s just your parents.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, you could tell your parents.’

Sure I could. You’d be delighted, wouldn’t you, parents dear?
What an oaf,
you’d say to each other in your room that night. Where’d she get
him?

‘What, they’d reckon I wasn’t good enough for you?’ His face is right up close to mine, our noses touching. His eyes are just a blurry sparkle.

Aagh. Yeah, they would reckon that, but that’s not the problem. It’s something about
me,
and what
I’d
reckon. Eventually I just say, ‘Yes, something like that.’

After sparkling for a long time, he says, ‘They’d be right, you know.’ His voice is really hushed, as if he’s telling me some terrible secret.

He’s dead serious. He’s so serious and so close that my throat shuts off and I don’t breathe for a few seconds. I nearly say
I love you
—which I vowed I’d never say to anyone again! Instead I nod and stick out my tongue like a snake’s to touch his nose. ‘Wrong side of the tracks, boy,’ I laugh. A leftover tear sneaks across into my other eye.

‘I am. I am,’ he insists. ‘Is that okay with you?’

‘What d’you mean? I was just joking, you idiot.’

He shakes his head. ‘Yeah, well, I reckon one day you’re not gunna joke about it.’

I move my head back to see him better. ‘What are you on about?’ I say uncomfortably.

He watches my mouth, speaks carefully. ‘I just reckon, you know, someone like you … you’ll, you know, move on and that.’

‘“Like me”? What’s that?’

‘Well … smart enough to stay in school. There’s that. And, well, your mum and dad, both working. With office jobs and that, I mean.’

‘My dad’s a salesman. An insurance salesman. That’s not exactly high class, is it?’

‘Higher than a car mechanic, like my dad. Higher than unemployed, like me. He’d wear a suit to work, wouldn’t he?’

‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘You’re judging
me
by who my
parents
are. When it’s about you and me, here in this room.’

‘No.’ He lies on his back. ‘This is nice, but it’s not everything.’

‘It’s everything we need to think about now.’

He stares at the festoons of dust on the ceiling rose. ‘I’m not talkin’ about now. I’m talkin’ about later on.’

‘Why? What’s wrong with now, that you have to go glooming on about the future?’ Says I, the one who was just crying my eyes out about
everything.

‘Nothing,’ he says quickly, and faces me again. ‘Nothing, except … I don’t want it to finish.’

‘It’s
not
finishing!’

‘But it will.’ Finally his eyes meet mine and stay.

I can’t bluster any more. ‘Maybe,’ I say in a low voice.

He looks sad, and satisfied in a way. I feel as if he’s tortured a confession out of me, but I’m not sure how much I’ve given away.

‘But
now
,’ I insist, my hands pressing his back.

‘Yeah? Now?’

‘Now I love you,’ I say to his chest.

‘Okay.’ He begins to smile, to pull me closer. ‘Let’s forget about later on, then.’

‘Let’s.’ I laugh with relief.

At three weeks the embryonic cells are beginning to differentiate themselves. The first stages of a rudimentary brain are a swelling at one end; the embryo’s outermost cells are early nerves. Inside, bones, muscles, blood vessels, organs and a simple intestinal tube are beginning to form.

‘Coming to the shops with us tomorrow night?’ says Mum over Wednesday dinner. ‘I thought we could go on to Pasha’s afterwards.’

‘Working late tomorrow. Sorry.’

Mum puts on a groan. ‘We hardly ever see you.’

Dad: ‘Gotta be done.’

‘I didn’t drag you up by your bootstraps just so you’d disappear from our lives.’ She’s looking at me, winking, when Dad’s knife crashes onto his plate.

‘Bloody hell!’ he roars. ‘What a thing to say! And in front of Mel, too. Whatever I’ve done—’

‘It was just a joke, Dave—’ she mutters, startled.

‘Whatever I’ve achieved I’ve achieved by the sweat of my own bloody brow, not because
you
—’

‘It was a
joke
, for crying out loud!
Mel
knows it’s not true,
I
know it’s not true,
you
know—’

‘—not because of
anything
you did!’ He finishes and they stare at each other.

‘Hey, calm down, you guys.’ My voice sounds insultingly mild and weak.

But Mum’s picked up on something. ‘Well,
moral
support doesn’t count for anything, I guess?’ she says rather coldly.

Dad goes back to his dinner.

‘Or
practical
support, I suppose? Like, four years of being on the night shift with Mel? That wasn’t of any assistance to you?’

After a nasty pause, Dad rolls his eyes. ‘Yeah, right, Jan, you’ve been a saint. Now drop it.’ I’ve never heard him be rude to Mum like this.

‘
You
brought it up, remember.’ She stands up. Her eyes are filling with tears. She stacks my empty plate on hers, then snatches Dad’s from under his nose.

‘Hey, I’m not finished!’

‘If you want to eat, you can make your own bloody tea!’ She takes the plates out, leaving Dad looking stupid with his knife and fork in his hands. He glances at me, as if to check whether I noticed.

‘You’ve really hurt her.’ There’s surprise in my voice, as if I hadn’t thought it was possible.

‘Huh! She put the boot in first!’

‘She asked you out. That’s what happened
first
.’

He stares at me as if I were a piece of furniture that decided to sit up and talk. ‘Bloody women!’ he mutters, putting down his cutlery. He gets up and goes over to the television.

‘Bloody men!’ I retort in a boofhead voice just before he switches on.