She stares for a while and then takes the flyer from my hands. ‘The Hollows are playing at a place called Laundry tonight,’ she says, scribbling her phone number on the paper. ‘Henry’ll be there, and if you’re really sorry, you’ll come anyway.’
She gives me back the flyer, kisses me on the cheek, swings her leg back over her bike and cycles off before I’ve got time to think of an excuse and say no. I can hear her shouting, ‘Thank God you’re back,’ as she pedals away.
I tell Rose about Lola and Hiroko as we leave the car park. Lola’s on vocals and guitar. Hiroko plays the glockenspiel and some other percussion instruments I can’t name. They do some covers but mostly they write their own songs. As I talk I can see the two of them in class, passing notes with lyrics written on them while the teacher isn’t looking.
I put the flyer in my pocket. I miss Lola, and I want her to forgive me, but there’s no way I’m going to Laundry tonight. Life’s depressing enough without seeing Henry and Amy kissing.
‘Speaking of old school friends,’ Rose says. ‘I bumped into Sophia the other day – your friend Henry’s mum? It was good timing too. I’d just found out that the job I got you at the hospital fell through, and when I mentioned it to her she offered you a job at Howling Books instead.’
Rose is speaking quickly, so it takes me a while to absorb what she’s saying, and then think about what it means. Working next to Henry for eight awkward hours every day. Even if we work different shifts, there’ll be no avoiding him. He’s always in the bookstore. He sleeps in the bookstore. He’ll be lying on the fiction couch talking constantly about Amy.
‘No,’ I say.
‘No?’
‘No,’ I say again, more forcefully. ‘Thanks but no thanks. Tell Sophia I found another job.’
‘Have you found another job?’
‘Obviously not.’
‘Then you’re taking this one. You start at ten, tomorrow morning. Sophia said she was looking for someone with people and computer skills, and that describes you perfectly.’
‘I no longer have people skills.’
‘This is true, but I chose not to share that with her. I didn’t share anything else, either. They don’t know about Cal. They don’t know you failed Year 12. They think you’re taking a year off before university. All they need is someone to catalogue the stock and create a database. You can do that, right?’
I can do it, I admit. I just don’t want to do it.
I don’t want to explain the humiliating situation with Henry, but since I don’t have a choice I tell her about liking him, about the last night of the world, Amy, the letter, my declaration of love, his ignoring my declaration of love. Any other human would understand why I couldn’t take that job.
‘You’ll just have to get over it.’
But Rose is not like any other human.
‘You want to hide. You want to be miserable, but that’s not happening. You’re taking the job at Howling Books. You’re not spending even one day lying on your bed staring at the ceiling.’ She parks the car opposite the warehouse. I get out and slam the door.
I’m more determined with every bag that I take inside that I’m not working with Henry. ‘It will be deeply, deeply annoying. It will be humiliating.’
‘It’ll be life,’ Rose says. ‘And you have to jump back in sometime.’
‘I’d rather clean toilets. Let me clean toilets. I beg you. Let me look for a job cleaning toilets.’ I start shoving cans onto shelves.
‘You still like him,’ Rose says, passing them to me.
‘I don’t still like him. I don’t like anyone.’
Maybe some people have loads of sex to help them get over their grief, but I went the opposite way. I broke up with Joel. I haven’t kissed anyone since the funeral. I don’t want to kiss anyone. I don’t want to see anyone kiss anyone. I definitely don’t want to see Henry kiss Amy.
‘This is my condition for you living here,’ Rose says, her voice running under my thoughts. ‘You get up every morning; you go to work. You either do that, or I enrol you in Year 12 again. You’re eighteen, so you can decide what to do. You can stay here and do what I say or you can move out.’
I put the last can on the shelf.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rose says into the quiet. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound that brutal. We’re all just so fucking worried about you.’
I go into the bathroom and shut the door because it’s the only door to shut. I stand looking at myself in the mirror. I’m someone I recognise but don’t. I cut off my long hair about a week after the funeral. It was a strange night. The thing I remember most about it is the sky. I hadn’t seen one like it before. Flat and starless, as though the world had become a box with a lid on it. I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the balcony, staring up for a long time, knowing there were planets and stars and galaxies, but not believing in them anymore.
I like there being a line between the Rachel I was before Cal died – the girl with long blonde hair, the scientist, the girl who wore dresses because it was easier to strip down to bathers underneath – and the Rachel with cropped hair, the one who doesn’t wear bathers anymore and doesn’t care what she looks like.
‘I just want you to be you again.’ Rose taps her nails on the door and calls my name. ‘Do you remember that day,’ she says, and I know what day she means without her naming a date or a place or a time. She starts to describe it, and I want her to stop, but I don’t want to make a big deal about it. Nothing much and everything happened.
Rose had come to visit in the summer before I started Year 12. She’d arrived home from Chile, turning up in the early morning the way she usually did, appearing in the kitchen with coffee and croissants and the papers. It was summer. Hot by first light. We ate on the balcony, and Rose told us she’d visited Cape Horn, the headland at the southern end of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Chile. Beyond that are the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, separated by the Drake Passage. ‘The connecting point between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans,’ Cal said, reading from the screen of his phone, pushing up his glasses with his knuckles, scrolling through more information. While he read from the screen, Rose put her feet up on the balcony and said, ‘First trip. Wherever you go, separately or together, wherever it is, I’ll fund it.’
Rose didn’t make promises she didn’t intend to keep. Cal and I started planning. We’d go together, that much was certain. I’d wait till he finished Year 12. The hard part was deciding where.
‘The offer still stands,’ Rose says tonight. ‘Pick a place.’
I pick the past.
The bathroom is too small. Rose keeps tapping. The strange girl stares from the mirror. I think about how good it would feel to get in the car and drive again, to concentrate and not think.
I unlock the bathroom door and come out.
‘Can we at least talk about it?’ she asks, and I tell her sure, we can talk.
‘But tomorrow. Tonight I think I’ll go to see Lola’s band.’
I take the flyer, and Rose gives me a spare key to the warehouse. She looks worried, so I kiss her on the cheek. ‘Relax. You got through to me. I’m living again.’
‘I’m not an idiot. You’ll drive around all night to avoid talking.’
I think she’s about to yell some more, but instead she thinks for a minute and then relaxes against the counter. ‘Okay.’ She picks up an apple. ‘Go out. Good idea.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and I’m on the way to the front door when she calls to me.
‘But take a picture of Lola on stage. Text it to me,’ she says and bites the apple. ‘Show me proof of this life.’
Too smart for her own good is how Gran describes Rose: too adventurous, too honest, too unconventional, too loud. These are the qualities I love about Rose. Until now, when they’re working against me. I’ll have to go to the club, but first I drive around to old places, putting off the inevitable for a while longer.