No one at school has asked me how I’m doing since it happened. Mum and Dad have, but they don’t count. Maybe no one remembers who I used to be, and I did work hard to make it that way. Junior School is distant enough to seem like a dream.
Liv looks younger close up, all her tattoos and piercings and spikiness blur out at the edges. We’ve got identical eyes, and would have the same colour hair if she didn’t dye hers black.
‘Why do you have to make yourself look so bad, Liv? You could be so pretty.’
A wheezing laugh escapes from her, that turns into a racking cough. ‘Crap. I’ve gotta give up the smokes.’
She flips on her back and thumps herself in the chest, which actually makes it worse. ‘You sound like Mum.’
‘Don’t you dare—’ I start, and bash her with my pillow.
When I wake it takes me a few seconds to remember that I’m on the downstairs couch after Liv hogged my bed and snored too loud.
My book is steepled on my chest and something is scraping at the front door.
I sit up. The lounge is awash with moonlight from the back windows. The lawn is empty, peaceful. It sounds like a possum is trying to get into the house, but possums don’t normally use doors.
I shuffle towards the front of the house and nearly walk into the corner of the hall table. There’s a heavy vase on it that I could smash over someone’s head. A person-shaped blob hovers behind the glass panels on the front door. The security door has been opened. A pink hand slaps against the frosted glass, fingers spread.
I hold my breath and wait. My senses are so alert I could hear a mouse’s footstep. A key scrapes in the lock, the door clicks and swings open. Dad sways on the doormat. He straightens as soon as he sees me, but forgets to stop the screen door banging when he enters. You can tell how messy he is by how far his tie has wandered around his neck.
‘Thought I’d lost my keys.’ He holds them up, then drops them. I can smell the booze vapours from three metres away.
‘Where have you been, Dad?’ He pushes past me. It was only a few days ago that he and Mum had a massive fight about him coming home at all hours, every day of the week. It’s always work, or mates, or work mates.
‘Gary,’ he mumbles.
Figures.
Big Man About Town Gary, Head of the School Board Gary, Golf Gary. Sarah’s dad, Gary.
‘Gary—not too good,’ Dad says and continues unevenly through the house. He’s not looking crash hot himself. He stopped drinking for years, but now he’s back on it, and I don’t know what that means.
After he’s gone upstairs I do a full circuit, checking the locks on all the doors and windows.
DAY 7
The house feels empty when Liv finally leaves on Saturday afternoon. She’s good at leaving spaces emptier than they were. The pantry hangs open, its contents ravaged, and there are dirty dishes piled up in the sink that no one can be bothered putting in the dishwasher.
Dad is playing golf, leaving Mum bored and desperate to interact, so I duck upstairs, saying I’ve got homework to do. It’s not a lie, I do have homework, but I’ve got no intention of doing it.
I lock my bedroom door and light my candles. My phone is going off, everyone trying to get me to say what we’re doing tonight. I put it on silent. The smell of liquefying wax relaxes me.
Standing on tiptoes, I can barely reach the storage shelf at the top of my wardrobe. A garbage bag of shoes I’ve grown out of falls first. My fingers latch onto a handle.
The green leather suitcase is a time machine.
I almost threw it out when I moved from my old bedroom to this one, but something made me keep it. I slide both clasps to the side, and the case springs open.
There’s a lot of junk inside, photos and badges and broken necklaces, my old school diary and bits of paper that contain a forgotten world. Forgotten people. Notes passed in class, invitations to birthday parties.
Here’s a photo of me and Yin, in matching t-shirts with our arms linked, goofy grins. Ten years old, major dorks and joined at the hip, as we had been every year of Junior School. Yin’s thick black hair kicks up at the ends and I’m in the first year of braces. We’re on a summer camping trip with the Mitchells; I remember Yin still wasn’t sure about her new stepdad.
It hurts to see her baby face. All the breath leaves my body.
You know who I could always rely on to tell me the truth, to warn me before I went too far? Yin.
She’d tell me to stop eating cupcakes or I’d spew, she’d turn the volume down before I got in trouble, yelled at me to stop climbing that tree, told me when I needed to apologise.
I try to see something ominous in the photo, dark shadows or figures in the trees or mysterious streaks of light, something to show that things were going to go very wrong for one of these girls, but there’s nothing. We might be the happiest kids in the world. Dirt smudges on our cheeks and twigs in our hair.
I dump the contents of the case onto the bed.
A photo of our graduating Grade Six class, ribbons from school athletics days, a certificate to say I’m allowed to write in ink. And then there are other things.
Plastic ‘gemstones’ imbued with magic powers. Silk flowers in colours that show which clan we belong to. A rubber rabbit from a farm animal set that travelled to earth from the moon. Yin’s mum used to tell her stories about the moon rabbit coming down to earth so we wrote it
