Perelman is an arsehole. I mean, how hard is it to return an email? I briefly consider tearing down his photo, but after some reflection, I draw a pink Sharpie moustache on his beardy face instead, and leave it where it is – right next to the two of hearts that seems to mock me, but which I can’t find the will to discard.
I ignore my brother, and my brother ignores me. It’s like we have slid inexorably into parallel dimensions, passing each other with just the barest suspicion that the other exists. It’s fine. I bury my head in my work, powering through the extended reading in my university syllabus, which actually proves interesting enough to distract me from everything, including Elsie, who refuses to make eye contact when I see her at school. I don’t know what to do. I find myself frozen next to her in Bio, walking towards her in the corridor and then, at the last moment, fleeing in the opposite direction. I just can’t face her telling me again how badly I have let her down. But more than anything, I know how selfish I am being; the solid foundation I have propped my back against is suddenly absent, and its loss is more than I can grasp. It’s my problem to deal with alone, though. I may not fully understand why, but I do know that I have hurt Elsie enough.
And then there is Joshua. My unsolvable problem, my messy-haired mystery. I see him in the corridors, and in the back of the Biology lab, and after school, walking across the carpark that feels like it will be wet for the rest of eternity. Occasionally our eyes will meet; accidentally, or at least, I think accidentally. Sometimes he gives me a tiny half-smile; most of the time, he looks away. Sometimes I think he looks sad; sometimes, when Damien is yammering in his ear, he laughs, and the sound never fails to turn my head. But there’s something in his demeanour that’s different, too, something more serious, like his focus has turned elsewhere. I have no idea where his head is at. I guess I wasn’t prepared for how strangely … amputated that would feel.
Of course, the entire mess that is my life can be summarised by one irrefutable fact: I am still stuck in the hell that is Drama. I’m muddling my way through, still stumbling towards my exam, still convinced that my imminent failure will be the thing that sends my life spiralling from its dysfunctional state, to full hermit-living-in-the-storeroom-of-the-Maths-faculty phase.
Ms Heller is unrelenting. She captures me one day after class, just as the lunch bell rings, a firm hand on my arm. I pull away, glaring, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Ms Heller looks, if anything, like she has reached the end of her tether, too.
‘Sophia, stick around. Let’s chat.’
Damien pauses in the doorway. He gives me a look that I think might be sympathetic before Ms Heller shoos him away.
‘Sure. Whatever,’ I say, slumping into a chair. I don’t think I was ever a petulant kid, but I’m feeling decidedly irritable, and not in the mood for another futile pep-talk.
‘Okay,’ she says, taking a deep breath. She stands in front of me, hands on her hips, multiple bracelets jingling. ‘We are running out of time. I know you weren’t exactly thrilled to be in this class, Sophia, but I honestly thought I could help you. But now I’m starting to think that you’re so resistant – I’m starting to wonder if this was the best move.’
Oh, you’re only realising that now? And I thought I was bad at reading people.
I cross my arms. ‘So what do you want me to do?’
She twists her hair up on top of her head, squaring her shoulders like she’s preparing for war.
‘I want you to trust me. And I want you to try. Okay?’
She gestures for me to stand. I feel something brewing deep in my gut, something hard, something defiant. It’s not panic. I don’t know what this feeling is, but I stride up the stage stairs with a distinct frostiness gathering in my bones.
She makes me march from one end of the stage to the other, blowing air through my lips in noisy raspberries. She makes me hold an empty cup and saucer in my hands, pretending to sip invisible tea in various states of joy and suffering. I do it all, feeling further and further removed from myself. But then she hands me a monologue from A Streetcar Named Desire. (‘I took the blows on my face and my body! All those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard!’ Seriously, what in ever-loving Christ does this have to do with my life?)
I have had enough.
I come to a standstill at the edge of the stage, where a sole year eleven is practising the flute in the orchestra pit.
‘No.’
Ms Heller pauses. ‘Excuse me?’
I see her face, the growing confusion. It almost makes me backtrack, this awful sinking feeling that comes with the knowledge I am letting someone down.
But then she takes my arm again, heedless of the tension it so clearly generates in my body, and she ushers me to the back of the stage, where a giant mirror sits propped against a wall. It’s just me, my blank reflection, and Ms Heller’s earnest face over my shoulder.
‘What do you see, Sophia?’
I cross my arms again. ‘I see myself. I see brown skin. Teeth. Lips. Zygomaticus muscles. Eyebrows that my cousins are always trying to get me to pluck. What am I supposed to be seeing?’
Ms Heller closes her eyes. She exhales noisily. ‘Okay, let’s try this again. I am trying to light your fire, Sophia! I’m trying to get you in touch with yourself –’
‘Argh, stop! I’ve wasted enough time this year trying to touch myself!’ I grimace. I turn away from the mirror, Ms Heller narrow-eyed in front of me now. ‘Did you ever think that maybe I am in touch with myself? The things that make me happy – well, maybe they’re not the things that you understand, but – do you get that I never felt inadequate until people started telling me I needed to be fixed?’
My hands are trembling. But I feel my brain cracking open, like it has discovered proof of an equation that’s been eluding me.
I am not good at this. I am not supposed to be. The things that I am good at, the things that ‘light my fire’, might be narrow, and weird, and mysterious to almost everyone else. And sometime, someday, maybe I will suck at those things too. But at least they’re mine.
I am tired of hiding in my own shadow. I am tired of pushing aside the things that make me me, for some shinier version of myself that ticks everyone else’s boxes.
‘Ms Heller, I know you mean well, and I’m sorry I suck balls at this. But I don’t think you have anything else to teach me here.’
I push through the backstage curtain and descend the stage stairs. The flautist in the orchestra pit ignores me, lost in her own world as she blows a jaunty tune. I gather my things and walk outside. And then I keep walking, past the East Lawn and the old amphitheatre, past the main building and the carpark and the bench and the school gate and, heart hammering, I head home.
My house is, unsurprisingly, freezing. I dump my things in the kitchen and clock, with senses on full alert, the furious clack of a keyboard in the lounge, loud in the silence.