Ballad for a Mad Girl Read online

  And neither, it seems, am I.

  ‘Let’s just get it over with,’ Kenzie mutters as if it’s both our names, not just mine, written across the first panel.

  Aarghchgh! whatever that means, is written in brilliant red texta, along with a crude drawing of a stick figure, a noose around its neck. Underneath the figure: Grace Foley choked. Behind the Perspex, three Sacred Heart students have staked their claim and perfected their poses: one crouches and rocks in the foetal position while the other two re-enact Munch’s The Scream, their school ties knotted around their throats. As Kenzie and I pass, they double over, laughing.

  The next panel has just one word: TRAITOR. No pictures and nothing on the other side, which in itself is unsettling. The word is written on our side, a punishment reserved for the worst kind of loser or the most heinous of crimes—committing an act that improves the standing of Sacred Heart, including hanging out with them, having unconsecrated relationships or letting them beat us at anything.

  Kenzie puts her arm across my shoulders. I want to shrug it all off, stick out my chin, strut. Make like it’s yesterday’s news. But I can’t. There were only a few Swampies at the quarry on Saturday night—already it’s clear that the story arrived at school long before I did, and it’s only gathering dirt.

  ‘Did you hear what happened on Saturday night?’

  ‘Noah Wentz broke the pipe record. Grace Foley choked.’

  ‘Foley freaked.’

  By the time we reach the end of the wall, Amber and Pete have caught up to us. Having them beside me makes me feel better until Pete opens his mouth.

  ‘Have you seen the video?’

  Kenzie growls, ‘Not now, Pete.’

  Amber digs her elbow into his ribs.

  ‘What video?’ I stop. We’re a minute’s walk from homeroom. I could just turn and go. I should. Just go.

  ‘Well.’ Pete hesitates. ‘There’s more than one, including mine. I honestly thought you set it all up, Grace. I thought it was a joke.’ He hands me my phone.

  I peek at the screen. There are more notifications than I’d usually get in six months. ‘Maybe it was,’ I say, feeling queasy.

  A couple of younger kids barge around the corner and skitter out of our way. One hisses, ‘Loser.’

  Pete blushes. ‘I don’t know what to say. Sorry?’

  Amber steps in. ‘Pete, if you send that video to anyone else, I will end you. It’s bad enough that the Hearts have posted it all over the place.’

  I groan and cover my face.

  ‘Like I said, I thought it was one of her pranks,’ Pete says.

  ‘She doesn’t remember what happened,’ Kenzie says quietly. ‘Watch the video, Grace. Maybe it’ll all come back to you.’

  I check the time on my phone. It’s burning a hole in my pocket with all those messages and notifications. ‘We’re going to be late.’ On cue, the bell rings. ‘I’ll see you guys at recess.’

  Amber and I share homeroom. As we walk, I can tell she wants to ask me a million questions, but she says nothing until we reach the door. ‘There’s a GIF,’ she says. ‘It’s pretty funny. I shared it, but that was before I knew…’ She shrugs. ‘That’s why I was so hard on Pete.’

  I see it now. The only way out of this is to go along with it. ‘It was a joke, Amber,’ I say dryly. ‘It was an act, okay? You know I like to keep everyone guessing. Between us?’ Which means it’ll be all over school by lunchtime.

  She buttons her lips and opens the door. ‘That was pretty risky,’ she says admiringly. ‘To hand Noah the record like that.’ She touches her mouth when she says his name.

  I make it to nine o’clock before I decide that today absolutely qualifies as a pyjamas and shame day. After homeroom, I sign out and leave via the teachers’ car park to avoid the wall. Fifteen minutes of scorn and scandal is enough.

  ‘Did you hear? Grace lost her nerve.’

  ‘Gummer lost a hundred bucks.’

  ‘Grace Foley lost her record.’

  All this stuff about losing, and nobody could tell that I was only worried about losing my mind.

  *

  The GIF is funny, or it would be funny if it wasn’t a close up of me. I’m screaming, on loop, lit up like a silent movie star, all pale face and gaping mouth. The caption reads: I see dead people. Original. It looks like I’m acting. Overacting, even. I watch it fifteen times but it doesn’t show me anything. The zoom is out of focus and behind me it’s dark; I can’t see anything below my chest.

  When I’ve had enough, I slam down my laptop screen and pace. Waldorf and Statler are pink and white aliens at the bottom of their tank, glowing, as if they’re radioactive. ‘Should I look? Guys? What do you think?’

  The videos are even easier to find—three pop straight up on Facebook. Over four hundred comments on the first. I find Pete’s and click Play.

  The video begins as I’m coming out of the back bend. So far, so good. The finish is shaky, but I already knew that. Behind me the sky is clear, shot through with stars; the cars’ headlights beam straight at the pipe. I think of the time I lost out there, unable to see, not knowing that fifty people could see me as clearly as if I was performing under a spotlight on a stage.

  It happens just like Kenzie said: I run, I stop, I falter and regain my balance. Finally, I straddle the pipe and start screaming, seemingly for no reason. There’s no mist; nobody throws anything. The video zooms. It slips out of focus for a second and, when my face fills the frame, I’m muttering—that’s when I remember finding her name, but my hands are out of the frame.

  When it zooms out again, Wentz is coming for me. He’s crawling, calling, holding out his hand, but I’m in another place. I appear to convulse and slip sideways. My eyes roll back.

  In the corner of my room, Statler moves across the floor of the tank the way only an axolotl can move—as if he’s moonwalking, all the time in the world. I know I could watch him for an hour and he’d only make it halfway. But what if his reality is different? What if, for him, it’s only a few seconds’ journey and he’s moving at the speed of light? The tiny tank is his universe. Just because I can’t see it—I’m not experiencing it—does that make his reality unreal?

  I look back at the screen. Pete’s video doesn’t show what happened to me. This is like trying to decide which half of myself to keep: the sane half that accepts proof when I see it, or the crazy half that wants evidence that I’m not going mad.

  I replay the moment when I convulsed and almost fell. Wentz’s hand is outstretched, but he’s still too far away to help. I slip. Rewind. Wentz is calling out, waving, trying to get my attention. Rewind. Play. He reaches for my hand. I convulse, slip. Rewind. Play. Out goes his hand, he waves, I slip. Rewind. I slip, recover…Wait.

  Rewind. Play. I slip. No, I’m hit. Near my ribs there’s a ripple, an indentation in my white T-shirt, and even now I suck breath as if something unseen has knocked the wind out of me. Like it did on the pipe.

  Rewind. Wentz is too far away. No matter how many times I go back, he won’t reach me in time.

  Rewind. I was wrong—it’s not a convulsion. I’m hit, I slip, and then it seems as if I’m…tugged in the opposite direction. Like a puppet.

  Over the next two hours, I watch three more videos. None is as clear as Pete’s. In a way, they’re worse: I get a playback of the Hearts’ commentary and they think it’s all pretty funny, making fun of the funny girl.

  This time the joke’s on me.

  Swanston Primary, Grade Three. The first day. We were allowed to sit next to whoever we wanted for the first term but the seat next to me stayed empty. I didn’t know anyone—I’d gone to a separate, smaller Junior Primary. I was a farm kid who sometimes played with other farm kids, and my brother was my best friend; I spoke the language of trees and dogs and cattle, not kids with glitter hair ties and brand-name sneakers. I spent recess and lunch wandering around the yard without making eye contact or speaking a word, waiting to be invited to join in the other kids’
games.

  It didn’t go so well. I wondered why the girls were all in pairs, arms linked, as if their twin might be claimed if they let go.

  I remember feeling scruffy, different, bad-tempered. I don’t remember noticing if there was anybody else like me. I stared at my feet and wished the day away.

  My memory of the second day might not be so strong if it wasn’t for Amber Richardson. Ten minutes into lunch, I looked up from my feet. I heard laughter. A crowd of kids had clustered around the bench nearest to the girls’ toilets, and one boy was honking like the old goose who guarded our front dam. I stood on tiptoe, trying to see past them all, so much taller than me, with jostling bodies and mean elbows. I pushed my way to the front to find one girl sitting on the bench, crying, and two older girls barricading the toilet door.

  Amber was skinny and limp-looking. Her freckles were pale orange against the hot pink of her face, and her knees were pressed together, ankles apart, toes turned in. The honking boy had picked up a stick; he was trying to lift her skirt, and I realised—with equal parts horror and fascination—that there was a slow drip coming from underneath her dress, and a puddle on the ground.

  Before I could think, I stepped forward and put my foot on the stick, snapping it in half. I picked up both pieces and handed them to her. Honker gave me a dead arm for my trouble, but the crowd broke up, Amber scuttled into the toilets, and I wandered off.

  Kenzie was the first friend I found.

  I remember her standing in the classroom doorway wearing hand-me-down clothes, looking as if she might puke on the carpet; I remember offering the seat next to me. I can still picture the way she sat—so still, so serene—but her hands were shaking. I shared my lunch because she’d forgotten hers.

  Kenzie says she found me. She swears it happened when she had to switch classes to even up the numbers, and our teacher pointed to the only spare seat.

  That’s Kenzie—always oversimplifying. She thinks I overdramatise everything. I guess it doesn’t matter whose memory is real.

  Kenzie and I stalked the playground in the second week, scooping up loose classmates. Pete Testa was first. He only had six rotten front teeth but he managed to tell us a long story, punctuated with bubbles of spit—something about Milo in his milk bottles and honey on his dummy. And although Pete was funny-looking, even then he was popular. But he still hung around with us.

  Gummer was always by himself. Spookily quiet, a head taller than the next-biggest kid, he didn’t seem to mind being alone, curled up inside the tunnel in the playground, reading his retro magazines. When we asked him to join us, he didn’t even look up—it took him a full week to make up his mind.

  Amber was last. She trailed behind us for the first few weeks. It was months before the others stopped calling her names, but she put up with it. Me, not so much. I defended her with fists and foul language—Kenzie, with her sweet voice and calm control.

  We were the leftovers. Only it didn’t feel that way. It felt like we chose each other carefully, to make sure all our odd shapes fitted together.

  Kenzie and I had big dreams until we realised how small our lives really were. We’d lie on my bed and talk for hours about getting out of Swamptown—moving three hundred kilometres to the city, opening a cool wine bar with mismatched chairs and couches, the walls papered with the pages of Gummer’s magazines. Our friends would come. We’d rent apartments in a building called Oasis or Nirvana with a fifty-metre pool, a gym and a rooftop garden; we’d spend our nights apartment-hopping, reclining on balconies, drinking cocktails and passing plates of fancy food. Kenzie would wear the fifties-style dresses and bright lipsticks she likes. I’d swan about, an androgynous artistic type, wearing shifts made from sacks and waving my expressive hands. Sometimes the wallpaper would change or we’d add a couple of rich boyfriends, but the dream remained the same. And we’d giggle and sigh and fall asleep smiling because everything is possible when you’re twelve.

  Now when we lie on my bed we talk about Mitchell being too shy to do anything but kiss Kenzie. If we do revisit the old fantasies, things have changed: Kenzie and Mitch share an apartment and I’m living next door (with a connecting hallway, but the thought of popping in and finding them playing Mr and Mrs Stow makes the dream fizzle out like a wet sparkler).

  We talk about Amber making some arcane bargain with the devil last year and trading in her loyalty for popularity—or I talk about it, and Kenzie tells me she loves me a little bit less when I judge.

  Pete wants to drop out of school because his folks think he’s only good for making pizza, but he’s the one with the best chance of getting in with the in-crowd and out of this town. Everybody likes Pete. He scores laughs without trying. I think it has more to do with his expressiveness than his execution—he cracks himself up. It’s contagious, like listening to a baby giggle. I’ll spend months planning a prank, but Pete will do something unexpected, off the cuff, and everyone loses it.

  Gummer’s real name is Oliver Gomersall. He was Oli back in primary school, and for a while we called him Wally—he used to wear thick, black, lenseless frames because he read a psychological survey that showed how those who wear glasses are seen to be more intelligent. Later, he read that people who wore glasses without lenses were mocking hipsters. Then he discovered that people who genuinely needed glasses privately mocked those who wore glasses without lenses, so he threw them away. He thinks everything through, from every angle. He reads a lot, mostly books about true crime and conspiracy theories. Now everyone calls him Gummer; now he needs glasses but he refuses to wear them. He’s kind of complicated. And these days Gummer is stoned all the time, tuned out to a life the rest of us can only dream about. His parents own the biggest station this side of Swanston—he could ditch school or switch schools if he wanted, but he doesn’t seem to want anything. Apart from the Ford he drives, you’d think Gummer was homeless, the way he survives on free meals and couches.

  And now when Kenzie and I are alone enough to really talk, it’s all about the here and now and what is instead of what could be. Sometimes I want us to go back to being twelve and start over, to not let that dream slip through our fingers.

  I sometimes wonder if dreams are like dandelion seeds: once you blow them off they take root somewhere else, with somebody who still believes.

  Kenzie phones me late, after Mitchell has taken her home. She’s stopped calling me when she’s with him. Lately she calls less and less.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me.’ She pauses. ‘Kenzie.’

  ‘Well, I know that.’

  ‘Then don’t say hello with a question mark,’ she says. ‘I wanted to know how you are. You left without telling me today.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I’m scared. I’m not feeling like myself. I have this awful sense that I’m suddenly carrying the weight of a thousand terrible histories and my hands are not my hands; they’re shaking and the veins are moving like worms under my skin. ‘How are you?’

  ‘You’re lying. I’m coming over.’

  ‘No, don’t do that.’

  ‘Then tell me the truth.’

  ‘I’m cold. My chest feels weird.’

  ‘Is it tight? Can you breathe?’

  ‘In, out, right? In and out.’

  ‘Grace, you’re scaring me!’

  I don’t know where my next words come from. ‘My heart is a room with an unwelcome visitor.’

  ‘Stop it! It’s not funny!’

  ‘It’s not meant to be. I’m so tired, Kenzie. I’m going to sleep now.’ I hang up.

  My phone rings another four times, then the house phone downstairs starts up.

  Dad comes upstairs. ‘She’s here, Kenzie. She’s fine.’ He leaves the door open.

  I roll onto my side. In my chest it feels like there are no ribs between my heart and my skin. I’m all shakes and jitters, but when I place my palm over the space where my heart should be there’s the barest beat, so slow it’s as if I’m hypothermic. Amber once said a panic attack
made you feel as if you were going to die, but I just feel as if my bones are put together all wrong, and somebody else is breathing for me.

  My heart is a room with an unwelcome visitor?

  The heart is meat and gristle. That’s all it is. Meat and gristle. Breathe. Breathe. I can’t keep my eyes open; I’m conscious of a hole—a deep black nothing on the other side—and if I close my eyes I might fall in.

  Morning is normal. Dad’s truck is idling in the driveway. He and Cody are talking in the kitchen, a friendly conversation, something Dad and I never have.

  ‘Grace!’ Dad yells.

  I drag myself out of bed and stumble to the top of the stairs. Diesel is curled up on the bottom step. He’s never mastered stairs; until we moved here he’d never seen them. He watches me go up like I’m ascending to a heaven not for the likes of him—wistfully, with a touch of indignation. I’m sure he thinks it can only be done on two legs. He’s probably practising in private.

  He raises his head and pricks his ears.

  ‘I’m up,’ I call. My eyes are gritty and my skin feels clammy.

  ‘Get ready for school. It’s late. Your brother said he’ll drive you.’

  Great. Cody never stops talking. He puts every single thought into words; apparently he has a lot of them, but I need to be alone with mine. I toy with the idea of pulling another sickie, but there’s a Biology test today and this time I studied for it. I need a decent mark to pull up the indecent ones.

  I wipe beads of sweat from my upper lip. Maybe I’m sick. A virus. High temperatures can cause hallucinations and convulsions.