She takes a bite of apple. ‘Good point. Could be a she. But with the fire thing, I’m leaning towards a dude. And the rose thing is totally a dude move.’
‘What “rose thing”?’
Elsie laughs, spraying a few chunks of apple. ‘Rey, what is the point of supplying you with hours of romantic dramedies if you fail to absorb even the most basic elements? Have you learned nothing from my movie collection?’
I snort. ‘I’ve learned that the only redeeming feature of any movie featuring Keanu Reeves and time travel is the dog.’
We walk through the double doors and head outside. This part of the school, with its covered walkways and maple-lined paths, is like a sonic funnel that amplifies the sound from the surrounding quads. It’s like being shouted at from all directions at once, and it always makes my brain feel squeezed. Not for the first time, I wish that industrial earmuffs were part of our school uniform.
‘It’s a grand gesture, Sophia,’ Elsie continues, picking up her pace. ‘And it’s clearly designed to impress someone. It’s ro-man-tic,’ she says, enunciating the word with an exaggerated eye roll.
I come to a dead stop. Elsie continues walking. ‘D’you think Jeremy Forrest finally decided to put the moves on Romy? Or maybe Oliver Osborn is ready to admit his undying love for Joseph Cheng? They have been dancing around each other for months –’
Elsie turns around, finally realising that I am not following. I make my legs move, even as my brain stutters and stalls.
‘How do you know so much about these people?’ I ask, to buy myself processing time.
People push past, jostling in and out of the building. For a moment, Elsie seems lost in thought. ‘Lots of stuff plays out here,’ she says, looking around us. ‘So many people who’ve hung out in the same place for years and still manage to stumble across someone they didn’t think could be … significant.’ She shrugs. ‘I know we’ve never been in the middle of any of it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention.’ She tosses the half-eaten apple in the bin and tightens her ponytail. ‘Anyway. We were talking about our mysterious Romeo. Any ideas who he could be?’
I’m not sure what happens to my words on their journey from my brain to my mouth. It’s the strangest compulsion; like the exhilaration of puzzling out half a differential equation, coupled with the almost superstitious fear that the answer might vanish if I voice it before I’m ready.
‘No. I have no idea.’
Elsie shrugs. ‘It’ll probably just turn out to be some wang trying to bunk on a test.’ She wraps her scarf tightly around her neck and leads us away from the crowds.
I feel guilty, and confused, and all kinds of wrong for hedging with Elsie.
And, for some unfathomable reason, a little bit energised, too.
Admittedly, I’m operating at half capacity in the afternoon. My brain, freed from the shackles of Drama-class anxiety, can’t seem to stop puzzling through increasingly more baffling and unlikely scenarios. But the morning’s brief reprieve is neutralised in the afternoon, when I’m forced to attend my after-hours session with the school counsellor.
Through some combination of my nondescript personality and, I think, sheer blind luck, I have suffered only fleeting encounters with Ms Shellburn for most of my high-school existence. To be honest – up until very recently, anyway – I’ve managed to handle my issues fairly successfully all on my own.
Today, we are working on strategies for coping with ‘anticipatory anxiety’. Ms Shellburn is nice and everything, but I find these conversations irritating to no end. I don’t know why my ‘catastrophic predictions about future events’ are presumed to be merely the product of some neat syndrome, a collection of diagnostic criteria, and not, say, a logical response to the statistical likelihood of future events sucking whopping great hyena balls. My breath always seems too shallow in her office, and I feel claustrophobic, like my skin is contracting with every minute I’m trapped there. Also, I might not be the most receptive person, but I fail to see how role-playing with puppets is supposed to help me.
I’m unbelievably tired when I’m finally set free. My body feels drained, too, which is mystifying, considering I have spent the last hour silently cocooned in an armchair. But everything is achy, like someone has taken to my body and brain with a mallet.
The grounds are wet, the black clouds ready to burst. But for a moment the rain has stopped, and St Augustine’s is as quiet and gloomy as a graveyard.
I’m scouring through my bag for my bus pass, wondering if ennui is a good enough excuse for a sick day tomorrow, when I see Joshua Bailey sitting near the school gates.
He’s perched on the wooden bench at the edge of the carpark. A wide wedge of grass and a tall iron fence borders the school, sequestering us from the world, like we’re uniformed exhibits in the world’s dullest zoo. A couple of cars are still in the carpark, but the school buses have long since left.
Joshua looks like he is attempting to take half his locker home. He’s wrestling a bunch of books, trying to shove them into his overflowing bag. He has a tweed cap on, the same hat he was wearing when I saw him on the weekend. I wonder if it’s a small act of rebellion against our draconian uniform policy. I wonder if the hat has some significance, if it’s one of his lucky talismans. Perhaps he suffers from an unusually cold head? I fear that I may be distracting myself from asking the right questions.
He looks up, but if he’s surprised to see me I can’t detect it on his face. He stops fiddling with his books, and the mess settles into his bag like it was waiting for a signal.
‘Hello,’ I say as I come to a stop in front of him.
‘Hello, Sophia,’ he answers. ‘You’re here late.’
‘Yes, well. So are you.’
He scuffs his feet on the bitumen. ‘History study group. The irony is that Revolutions is, like, the one subject I’m coasting in, but Mr Kilby had a bit of a tantrum after he got the results of everyone else’s practice exams and now – after some tears on his part, I reckon – bammo, compulsory once-a-week study session.’
‘Oh. Okay then. I usually have a … thing on Mondays too. I haven’t seen you here before, though?’
He smiles. It’s just a smile – the contraction and expansion of facial muscles that can be rearranged in thousands of different combinations, transmitting mixed signals and information, most of which pass me by – and yet it’s the oddest thing. I am almost certain that his smile is a little wistful.
‘Yeah. I know,’ he says.
I consider his face for a moment. But then I realise that I am staring at him, unblinking, in a way that Elsie has gently told me people find weird and creepy.