Fury (18 page)

“And me too.”

I squeezed Lexi’s hand as she joined my side and I looked Mr Chifley in the eye. On my other side I squeezed Marianne’s hand.

“I don’t know why I’m even doing Politics,” I said to Mr Chifley. “I know all there is to know about democracy. I’ve voted on
Australian Idol
every season.”

That definitely earned me that one-way trip to the Principal.

“I—I don’t want anyone else to see it,” Lexi said as the three of us walked the cold hall toward Hollerings’ office. “I feel so … ashamed.”

I thought about the drawing. The only defence I had for my actions.

“Don’t worry,” I replied. “No one is going to see it.”

“Does everyone think it was my fault?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. I could taste blood.

I’d faltered once. I doubted her; I failed her. The fury welled up inside me. It wasn’t going to happen again, God help me.

“Lizzie?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for not telling anyone. If I thought this was bad then I would hate to know how much worse it could possibly be.”

It was then that I saw how clearly Miss Bailoutte and Principal Hollerings and the Parents and School Committee and everyone in this entire bloody school had failed us. If they had done nothing and were still going to do nothing, then I was glad I didn’t just sit there and wait for nothing to happen.

I could feel Jeremy Biggins’ blood drying on my hand, and I didn’t feel remorseful. I felt satisfied.

I took the drawing from Lexi, and that night at home, I burnt it.

I guess it’s late. It’s only a guess. I don’t know anything anymore.

The doctor is pushing me hard, waiting for me to break.

But honey,
I want to say,
you can’t break something that is already broken.

If he is going to be mean, then I am going to be meaner. I know there is only one way to play the game. After all, I was raised by my mother;
I am my mother.

The doctor takes off his coat. He sits for a long time with his hands over his face. I watch him. I know he is tired; I am tired too. But I don’t want to go back to my holding cell. I just want to sit here. Caught between two moments. I can’t close my eyes. If I fall asleep now, I will either tip head-first into my nightmares, or I will wake up and find myself caught in them forever.

Eventually Dr Fadden lifts his head, sighs, and pushes his finger down on the record button.

“I said—”

“Be quiet, Eliza. I can understand what your mother goes through. You really are quite insufferable.”

My mouth makes itself into an
O.
But nothing comes out.

“We are going to talk about the attack on Alistair Aardant. You will tell me how Neil Fernandes is involved in all of this.”

“Neil is not involved in any of this.”

“So it is just you and your friends then.”

“Yes. Is that so hard to believe?”

Is it because we’re girls?
I want to say.
You think a bunch of girls are not capable of something like this?

When I punched that little prat, Jeremy Biggins, I saw Aardant there in his face. And, for a moment, I had never felt like I was doing so much by doing something so meaningless. It was so simple. And suddenly I felt so much better. Especially when
I saw the blood. I wonder when Neil hit Aardant whether he saw a monster in there. I wonder if he saw my dad.

“You understand that I can’t do much for you if what you did was premeditated,” says Dr Fadden and he sweeps his hair back with his hand. “Give me something to work with Eliza. Tell me that you regret what you did.”

“No,” I say. “I don’t. I’m sorry if his parents are upset, but I am not going to lie about it.”

“Come on, Eliza. Tell me
something.”

“I can’t.”

“Then I can’t do anything for you. Sorry.”

Dr Fadden is so mean. He is so good at hurting my feelings.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I say. “You have to promise not to bring Neil into this, and I will talk.”

“Eliza, it doesn’t work like—”

“Yes! Yes, it does! You make it work. You said you weren’t like all the shitty-touchy-feely others because you’re an anthropologist! You’re the man with the evidence. You make it work or I swear I will say nothing and you will have to jail me anyway. I mean it!”

I reach over and I turn the tape recorder off. Then I eject the tape, pull all the ribbon out of it and toss it aside.

“I mean it. I have never been so sure in my entire life.”

Principal Hollerings wanted to know what happened. I told him the truth. That I hated Jeremy Biggins and I wanted to punch him in the face, ever since I got the taste of karate chopping his hand all those months ago in History. Marianne said that she had asked me to do it. Lexi told him that she was the one that started the argument in the classroom. And you couldn’t say that we lied.

Principal Hollerings asked if we had any regrets, and if there were any reasons that we could give him to help him understand. I said no. It was my choice alone. Principal Hollerings said in that case, since we gave Jeremy Biggins no rights, he was going to revoke our rights to the school motto.
See Yourself. Reward Yourself. Punish Yourself.
He was going to enact a traditional method of punishment.

Marianne was to be stripped of her duty as Ball Committee President. She would be given the chance to resign gracefully, or else she would be dismissed in front of her peers. Lexi was to be disqualified from being in the running to be Belle of the Ball. As for me, I couldn’t be banned from the ball since my mother had already done that. I was to be given the thing I dreaded the most. I was going to be given canteen duty again. In the meantime, we were to be suspended for the rest of the year until the exams started.

When I was younger, I thought that if I ever did anything bad enough to warrant suspension, I would go out all guns blazing, like that movie
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid
before it all turned sepia. I would walk out of school in front
of all the other students while giving them a two-finger salute. But as Marianne, Lexi and I walked out those gates before it was even lunchtime, it was all deadly quiet. There wasn’t anyone around. We got out of there as quickly as we could.

Marianne’s parents were really angry. Even after they realised that they could do nothing about it, they couldn’t stop telling her about their disappointment. Marianne said she just bowed her head and took it. She said it would have been worse if not for her parents’ belief that she was going to be best in state and could still redeem herself. She once told me her greatest fear was not what her parents would do to punish her if she did something really wrong, but rather, how much less they would love her from that point on.

Lexi’s father didn’t say anything. Lexi stood there and told him what she had done and her father didn’t utter a single word. When she finished and bit silently into her lip, apparently the only thing he did was nod. Then he left the room. Lexi’s greatest fear is that she could never live up to her dead mother. She knows already she has as good as failed.

As for my own mother, she wasn’t even there. She’d gone interstate again. Principal Hollerings tried to reach her on her mobile, but no one picked up.

“I’ll be right looking after myself,” I told him. “I’ve done it all my life.” Principal Hollerings gave me a look that said he believed me.

When I got home I curled up on the shower floor and turned the water on hot. I sat like that for about an hour.
After my skin turned red and I felt like I was going to choke on my own rising vomit, I got out. The doorbell chimed. It was Lexi. She fell into my arms and I held her.

Marianne arrived about an hour later. Her parents had grounded her, but when has anything stopped Marianne?

“What can they do if I don’t listen?” she said. “Punish me?”

We sat huddled around on the floor of my bedroom, barely talking, barely able to move. When it got dark we crawled into my mother’s king-sized bed and we slept together like puppies.

The rest of the days in that week were pretty much the same. I don’t remember much about them. Lexi and Marianne would appear at the front door before daylight. We tried to study, suspended in air-con. I would leave the house before midday to do my detention at the canteen. Emotionless and mechanical, I would serve the snotty juniors. Then I would come back and study some more. I shut my curtains so I didn’t have to think of the water and the coast I could see from my bedroom window. Of hot sun and sweaty bodies and sunscreen lotion. Of blue skies.

“Tell me when you came up with the plan?”

“Please don’t call it that,” I say to Dr Fadden. “It’s not like we said to each other—
hey it’s getting pretty boring, I know, let’s go out and kill someone today, wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Then what do you call it?”

“I don’t know.”

Dr Fadden throws a folder at me. I jump.

“Coroner’s report. Came back very interesting. Sounds like a plan to me.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Then you explain it to me, Eliza, because I don’t quite get it.”

“I don’t think you can.”

Dr Fadden became quiet. He stretches his arm out and tilts my chin up with his finger. “Try me.”

Damn that doctor.

It started on the Monday morning. We were sitting around on the living room floor, trying to get ready for the first exam, the English Lit one that was on tomorrow. See what good girls we were?

“Question 3: Different devices are used to develop the characters of protagonist and antagonist. Discuss this in relation to your reference novel. Or—‘Bad guys are better than good guys’. Discuss in relation to your reference novel,”
I read from the trial exam paper.

“What if a character is a
bad
good guy? Or a
good
bad guy?” asked Lexi. She rolled onto her stomach and chewed on the end of her pen. “That question sucks, I don’t want either of the choices.”

“That’s too bad. It’s a compulsory question. Choose part A or part B.”

“It’s a
trial
exam question. Not
the
exam question. I doubt we would get asked something as stupid that.”

Lexi rolled onto her back and groaned loudly.

“I wish we could ask Mr Steele,” I said and I sighed just as loudly to emphasise my point.

“Look, would you both like some cheese with your whine? I’ve heard nothing else since we’ve been here. I’m sick of it!”

We both stared at Marianne. This was the first time we had heard Marianne speak the whole morning.

“I’m sorry,” said Lexi softly. “I’m sorry this is all my fault.”

“Oh God, Lexi, you know I don’t mean that.” Marianne got up on her knees, dropping the papers in her lap onto the floor.

Marianne tried to crawl over to Lexi and touch her hair, but Lexi turned away.

“Look, if it makes you feel any better, I’m suffering too. I got fired from the Ball Committee—and suspended. It’s not like I don’t know how you are feeling—”

“Marianne, in case you forgot, I was disqualified from being Belle of the Ball and I am suspended too, for no reason! I thought I was the victim here, but obviously not! No! You have
no idea
what I am feeling!”

“I—I didn’t mean that either,” stammered Marianne.

“Then say something you do. If all those words that are
dribbling out of your mouth aren’t what you mean, then just shut up.”

“Come on Mari,” I said and reached out a hand to touch her. “Let’s just go and have a break in the kitchen—”

Marianne reeled. And then she turned on me.

“If you had never roped us into going to that stupid Jane Blonde party, then none of this would have happened!”

“What? I didn’t make you go!”

“You were the ones who put our names down for it! Or do you not remember?”

“And what? I forced you into that attention-seeking dress you wore to make Gauntly notice you, did I?”

Marianne flushed red. Her mouth became a very straight line, but she was not done yet. Neither of us were. We were both standing and ready to go.

“You were the one who introduced Ellanoir Dashwood into our group! You changed something, Eliza—I knew she was bad news! I knew it from the start!”

“Oh! It wasn’t that ‘initiation’ or whatever it was you took Ella and us on,” I said angrily. “The one that impressed Jane Ayres so much she stole Ella from us! If that never happened then Jane Mutton wouldn’t have punched Aardant in the face and made him bleed!”

“And who was it that put Aardant in that condition in the first place!
Your
friend, Neil!”

“Please! Just stop it!”

Lexi was between us, a hand on each of our shoulders.

“Don’t say that, Marianne,” said Lexi. “You know it isn’t true. Neil is
your
friend too. He is
our
friend. And we don’t have that many friends left.”

Lexi bowed her head and looked at the ground.

“Don’t fight. We’re supposed to be closer than ever, aren’t we?”

“Oh Lex,” said Marianne. “How did it turn out like this?”

“Because it is Aardant’s fault,” I said glumly. “Come here.”

I stretched my arms out and Marianne and Lexi both fell into me. We quivered together. Like quicksand. Unable to let go and unable to get out.

It was me who suggested that we should pay Aardant back. I’d been thinking that maybe I did do something when I brought Ella into our group. It disturbed something that was fine before. I should try and make it better.

I had made too many excuses in my head—that Ella was new and didn’t know anyone, that she was funny and smart. That she was too good for the Jane Blondes to have. Did I even like Ella as a person? I shouldn’t have tried to mess with Fate. Ella ended up with Jane Ayres anyway. That is Fate.

I was thinking that if it really was my fault, if every reaction could be traced to an action before, then at the very beginning would be me at the canteen queue with my twenty-dollar note
instead of my packed lunch. In turn I could blame my mother for not caring enough and maybe I could blame my father for making my mum stop caring. Maybe all this was supposed to happen. It had been happening all along. It was too hard to try and stop it now. In a twisted way, there was cold comfort in that.

Look at us. We had nothing left. Aardant
raped
one of us, and we were the ones stripped of every last thing we had. We were the ones punished. I thought again of that lifeless girl in the ditch. No one saw a thing. No one cared. And I was angry.

“We have to do something. I am sick of sitting around and waiting. I don’t know what we are supposed to be waiting for anyway.”

I stood up and I threw my books onto the ground.

“We either do something and suffer the consequences or we do nothing and let this destroy us. Which is what it’s doing anyway. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. I am going to do something. Who’s coming with me?”

Marianne and Lexi stared up at me in surprise.

In my head, I thought this would be incredibly difficult, but it was easy.

“Yup,” said Marianne and she got up on her feet. Lexi did as well.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want Lexi involved in this—”

“Why?” asked Lexi. “Alistair started it. I will just end it for him.”

There was nothing I could say in response to that.

Brian, maybe you are right after all. It was a plan. It had a beginning, middle and an end. We knew what we wanted to do, what we were going to do, and how to do it. We never meant for it to turn out this way, but you’re right. It was a plan. We got up off the floor and for the first time in two weeks, and we put our school uniforms on.