When the World was Flat (and we were in love) (15 page)

 

The next morning I walked to school without Jo. In my mind, I saw her running as if from the Grim Reaper, or from the woman in the balaclava.

By the time I got to the quad, my stomach was like a front loader on a spin cycle. Jo was the kind of girl who packed extra underwear and socks for camp. She was the girl who did her homework on a Friday night instead of waiting until Monday morning like the rest of us. She was Old Faithful. But lately…

I was halfway to my locker when I heard the rumors – not about me and Jackson, but about Jo.

“Oh my God. Did you hear what happened?”

“That girl Joanne–”

“Josephine.”

“Whatever. She shagged that teacher.”

“Which teacher?”

“Mr Bailey.”

“Eww.”

“I heard it was a threesome with that skank Sylvia.”

“I heard that too. Gross.”

“Double gross.”

“Triple gross.”

I met Sylv at my locker. “This is BS,” I said.

“You can say the word bullshit, Lillie. We are not two year-olds,” Sylv said, snapping her gum.

“Fine. This is bullshit,” I said, but then I remembered how Jo had been running yesterday. “Right?” I asked, clutching my stomach as its contents started to spin again.

“Of course,” Sylv said. “As if you would catch me dead in a threesome with Jo and Mr Bailey.” She laughed at her own joke, but stopped when she saw me put a hand to my head and close my eyes. “Wake up, Lillie. You know they talk shit in this stupid town.”

I leaned against my locker. “Should we call Jo?” I asked and then answered my own question by reaching into my bag. “Damn,” I said, as I remembered my cell was broken.

But Sylv was dialing her own cell with fingernails coated in liquid paper and red hearts, drawn on with a marker. “Voicemail,” she told me. “Hey biatch. Rumor is you got lucky yesterday. Hit me back.” She hung up. “We have to pay her a visit. Stat.”

I was used to flying under the radar in Green Grove, but these last few weeks it was like a flashing neon sign had been strapped to my head. My nerves tickled my insides and gave me the giggles, as we walked down corridors lined with spectators.

Jackson fell into step long enough to ask, “Is Jo OK?”

I shook my head, unable to speak in case I burst out laughing from sheer adrenaline.

Melissa crowed like a rooster as we passed her locker. I was about to speed up, but then I saw Tom. He was leaning against the next locker with his arms folded across his chest.

My giggles dissolved like sugar in coffee. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he explained the theory of everything. I wanted to ask him if it was related to my nightmares or my mixed up memories. But he was as disconnected as an unplugged TV. It was the dead-behind-the-eyes look from his first day and it made me think that I had hallucinated last Saturday after all.

Sylv grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the driveway. By the time we reached the road she had made up her mind that the rumors were complete crap. “Jo is too frigid,” she said.

“Shut up!” I said, suddenly erupting like a volcano. “This is your mess!”

Sylv looked at me with wide eyes. “How?”

“You called her a man.”

“I said she looked like a man,” Sylv corrected, like it was a compliment by comparison.

“Well, you might have noticed that Jo cut and colored her hair after that and started reading about twenty books a day instead of her standard ten.” I sighed at my own realization. “She was doing it for Mr Bailey.”

“She was doing it for Mr Bailey alright,” Sylv said with a grin, but she stopped smiling when I turned and stalked down the street.

“Grow up, Sylv.”

 

Mr Green nearly slammed the door in our faces when we got to his house.

“You!” he said, looking thinner than I remembered. The dark circles under his eyes were worse than my own. I wondered if it was because of the cancer or his daughter, or a bit of both. “I should string the pair of you up. I know you have something to do with this!”

“Good to see you too, Dave,” Sylv said brazenly.

“Can we talk to Jo?” I asked. “Please?”

Mr Green sighed heavily and shook his head. “Sorry, Pipsqueak. She locked herself in her room last night. No dinner, no breakfast and I would reckon no lunch too. The school called…” he trailed off and then sighed again. “Yeah. OK. Give it a shot.”

We stayed for about an hour, talking to her bedroom door. I even got on my hands and knees and pleaded through the gap between the wood and the carpet. I could hear the sound of a nose being blown. It was muffled, like she was buried underneath three duvets and a pile of pillows.

Mr Green made us coffee afterwards, unable to hold a grudge. I wanted to ask about his health, but thought it would be out of line in front of Sylv. Plus, I could see the answer for myself from the state of the house, which looked like a bomb had hit it, followed by an asteroid.

“You girls have gotta watch out for each other,” he said as we sat around the kitchen table, which was covered in magazines, bills and old coffee mugs. “Keep your eye on the ball.”

He looked at me when he said this and I flushed. My ball had been bouncing between Tom, Melissa and Jackson these last couple of months and Jo had kind of been dropped. Well, Deb did like to remind me that my first word had been “Lillie”. It was all about me. Me. Me. Me.

Me and Tom, I corrected myself, swirling my mug between my two hands and watching the grains of instant coffee float up.

 

When I got home I curled up on the lounge under a hemp blanket and put on a musical. Deb had driven to the state park to meet up with a group of fire dancers, which meant I had the house to myself.

I chose
Chicago
. Jo had been in love with Richard Gere since we had watched a rerun of
Pretty Woman
in sixth grade. It was like her prayers had been answered when he signed up to do a musical.

As he belted out
“Give ‘em the old Razzle-Dazzle”
I looked at him with a nagging thought in the back of my mind. He looked like someone I knew. By the time he finished his tap dance I had worked out who. Mr Bailey. Yep. The same eyes. The same gray wavy hair. They could have been twins.

I hunted through the cushions for the remote and turned off the TV. As the house sank into silence, I thought I heard a sound on the porch. I sat up straight and waited for a knock, but instead I heard the front door creak open.

“Deb?” I jumped to my feet and looked down the hallway, but the front door was closed, deadbolted.

 

I was murdered in the lounge room in my dreams that night. The killer pushed open the front door with a creak and came down the hallway towards me. Richard Gere-slash-Mr Bailey had finished his tap dance and was befuddling Amos on the stand when the woman in the balaclava walked through the doorway.

I ran into the kitchen and heard her laugh as she followed, as if we were kids playing hide and seek.

I grabbed a knife from the counter. For the first time I had a weapon, even if it was a bread knife.

The woman in the balaclava laughed again and I recognized it as my own laughter.

“Is this a dream?” I asked.

She smiled, her emerald eyes crinkling behind her balaclava. “All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream,” she said cryptically before she grabbed me by the throat.

I dropped the knife as I fell against the counter, the cold washing over me.

 

18

 

The rumors continued the following day.

The three top picks were: 1. Jo was pregnant; 2. Mr Bailey was in jail; and 3. Jo had been given top marks in return for lap dances, as if Jo were the lap dancing type.

Jo was absent, of course. Mr Bailey too, which sparked another rumor that they had hit the road, moving from state to state, from motel to motel like Humbert Humbert and Lolita.

Tom was at school, but continued to treat me like the Invisible Girl. I was a social pariah anyway. Sylv too. We would have given out a few slaps if not for Turnip, who patrolled the corridors like a prison warden with a clipboard instead of a gun. We had to be on our best behavior after his word of warning, especially Sylv, who was going to be pulled out of school by her parents if she ended up on the wrong side of Turnip's law again.

We decided to go to the Masquerade Ball that night. We both needed a pick-me-up.

“Plus, I told Brandon he would be getting lucky tonight,” Sylv said.

“I thought it was Simon,” I said.

Sylv shrugged. “I got bored of Simon.”

 

We got ready for the ball at my house, but the mood was like getting ready for a funeral.

Sylv was wearing a long red sparkling dress, but she made up for the modest hemline with a plunging V-neck that required double-sided tape to hold in her girls and a pair of red stilettos, which promised a sprained ankle by the end of the night.

My dress was kind of like a smock or a tunic, or even a caftan. It was made from a dusty pink fabric with three-quarter length sleeves and a square neckline. It was from another era. Or another dimension, I thought with a shiver.

I knew my feet would freeze in my sandals, so I pulled on a pair of worn-out cowboy boots. They were the color of toffee, reminding me of Jo joking about eating my hair after Sylv had made it look like caramel. Poor Jo.

Sylv curled our hair and then begged to do my make-up. “Come on, Lillie.”

I shook my head. “My mask will be on in any case.” My mask was pink and I had glued a tiny white bow to the top right-hand corner. Sylv had added horns to her mask, which she had coated in red glitter.

“Please?” Sylv pleaded, taking a swipe at me with her mascara and then with her eyeliner, until I gave in. It was either that or lose an eye.

I studied my reflection afterwards to make sure I was more model-esque than stripper-esque. I definitely looked different. Thanks to her concealer there were no dark circles underneath my eyes, which had been rimmed with brown eyeliner and pink eye shadow. Sylv had smudged the eye shadow along the top and bottom lids before sweeping white eye shadow along my brow bone.

My emerald eyes came and went as I fluttered eyelashes as long as falsies above painted cheeks. It seemed a shame to put on my mask.

 

“Enjoy,” Deb called out as we climbed out of the beat-up sedan she had been driving since our camper van broke down. It had belonged to a couch surfer who had stayed with us for a week last January, but I guess it belonged to us now.

“Holy Mary,” Sylv said as we stepped into the gymnasium.

“Mother of God,” I concurred, once my eyes had adjusted to the thousands of fairy lights that had been strung around the gymnasium and the ton of balloons that were floating above us. I heard a few popping over the drumming of the music, probably pulled down and stomped on by the skaters.

Our eyes were not on the decorations though. Jo was walking across the basketball court towards the bathroom. At least, I thought it was Jo, but the Jo I knew wore flats, not killer heels decorated with metal studs. She was dressed completely in black as expected, but her LBD was drawing dirty looks from other girls and a few wolf whistles from the boys.

We followed her into the bathroom, which was filled with girls standing at the sinks, fixing their make-up and bitching about each other. The cubicles were empty though and we spotted her walking into one at the far end.

“Hey,” a senior complained, as I pushed past. I put my hand out as Jo closed the door, pushing against the painted wood.

“Please, Jo,” I begged.

There was a short stand-off before she relented.

As I closed the door behind me, I heard one of the girls at the sink mutter, “Lesbians,” before Sylv threatened to take them to the showers and show them a real-life lesbian. Yep. She liked to play up the rumor that she had kissed at least one girl in her sixteen years. She had started a rumor last year specifically about her and Melissa.

I was face to face with Jo, both of us wearing masks. I pushed mine up, but she continued to look at me through her eyeholes. Her lips formed a tight line below her mask which had been decorated with black satin and lace, but then I saw them wobble as she burst into tears. She dropped her shoulder bag on the floor and flung her arms around me, burying her face into my neck.

“Sorry,” she choked. “I screwed up.”

I gave her a tight squeeze, wringing her like a dishrag before putting at least two feet between us again. Jo was hardly a touchy-feely girl and I also liked my personal space.

“I should be the one apologizing,” I said.

An argument followed about who was sorrier, and so on and so forth. Jo pushed up her mask, revealing cheeks that were streaked with mascara. They were also as red as two tomatoes, as was her nose.

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” she said incredulously, but her eyes flitted to her shoulder bag. My eyes followed and we both dived for it at the same time. There was a tussle, the zipper cutting into my hand as the shoulder bag was pulled back and forth.

I spotted the neck of a whiskey bottle. “Jo,” I moaned.

She suddenly let go and my back hit the door with a thud, the shoulder bag landing like a wrecking ball against my stomach.

“Like you can talk,” she said. “Miss Irresponsible. You slapped Melissa, remember?”

I raised my eyebrows. “You went Goth,” I threw back.

Jo frowned. “You got detention.”

“You started wearing more make-up than Sylv.”

“You got arrested.”

My blood boiled. “And you got it on with a teacher.” As soon as the words fell out of my mouth I wanted to catch them and cram them back in. Jo looked like she was choking on them too, her eyes bulging before she burst into tears again.

I followed suit. “Sorry,” I blubbered.

Jo shook her head and sagged against the wall of the cubicle. “I was such a dunce, Lillie. I asked him for help with my homework and then I threw myself at him.”