Wildlife (3 page)

sunday 7 october

All packed. Every item ticked.

Ask sadness, How about staying here, sadness?

I know. Dumb question.

Sadness packed.

Bags zipped.

Compose reassuring demeanor for last dinner at home before camp.

Small smile.

Parties are uncomfortable events for me. I do want to get invited. If I’m not invited, I feel sad, and it is horrible hearing befores and afters you’ve had nothing to do with. Smiling and pretending dog-eared experience is enough. But when I am invited to a party, I straightaway start dreading it.

As soon as I’m confronted with shrieking, giggling,
drinking, loud music, random hookups, uninhibited dancing—I feel glum. I don’t have fun. I’m not “fun.” I’m serious. I’m responsible. I worry about my friends getting drunk, getting their drinks spiked, getting hurt, getting messy, getting used, getting pregnant, getting sexually transmitted diseases, and drowning in their own vomit.

On top of that I
never
know what to wear.

And I don’t like drinking, but I have to pretend to drink, so I at least appear to be “fun,” and to be having “fun.”

I used to like dancing until a boy—Billy Gardiner—told me I looked like a spastic tarantula. So now I can only dance if it’s crowded enough and dark enough that nobody can see me.

So a typical party for me usually involves trying unsuccessfully to talk to people who are drunk, hanging around the food, speaking to the parents, visiting the bathroom, hoping that by the time I come out more people I know have arrived, not dancing, finding a kitchen or garden through-road position to prop so I get passing traffic conversation, and later on patrolling to check that my friends are okay to get home. Holly says I’m more like a party monitor than a guest.

But post-billboard, the script for this party ran differently. For starters, some people looked at me rather than around me when I arrived.

After Holly’s “hiiiiiiieee mwah mwah,” she pulled me into a huddle with Gab and Ava, and started making a big
deal out of the billboard thing. Usually it would make me uncomfortable being the center of attention, but because I’d told Holly everything and she’d had three cranberry vodkas, it was more like she was the center of attention, which suited us both just fine.

Hours later when Ben Capaldi, apparently off his face, staggered into focal range and said (to me!), “Your pulchritude defies belief,” I was—speechless. I may have lifted one sober eyebrow. I’ve perfected the one-eyebrow lift in the mirror, never in a million years thinking I’d get to use it in a social situation. I smiled and turned away. I could not think of one thing to say. But as my heart flipped like a hooked fish, I was wondering if a girl like me had
ever
turned away from a boy like Ben.

Was it wrong to feel a little thrill when I caught his look of surprise? This handsome boy? This boy the whole world loves? It might have looked like muscle-flexing on my part, turning away like that, but it was unadorned panic. A when-in-doubt-stick-your-head-in-the-sand move. Nice work.

And he thought I didn’t know what
pulchritude
meant? Naturally. It’s not like he would have noticed me in the Same Latin Class for the Last Three Years. Dud compliment anyway. It’s such an ugly word for
beauty
. Besides which, he’s the pulchritudinous one. He is the walking definition of boy beauty.

And I have now kissed that definition.

*     *     *

There is no hope of sleeping tonight. My wakey-dial is stuck up on super alert. I’m freaked out about going to camp in the morning, and I’ve got the kiss footage on a loop. I hate this. I want a more obedient brain. I want the brain that says okay when I say it’s bedtime. Now, brain, sit! Roll over! Play dead. My brain says, get stuffed, I’m having fun. Tonight it is like one of those lab rats that can’t stop going back for cocaine even though it needs the food.

Hmmm, food. An excursion into the parental worst-kept-secret dark chocolate stash, in the fridge, is definitely warranted. With a freezing-cold glass of milk.

1:47
AM
. Brain still disobeying owner. It happened. It can’t have been a dream: I haven’t been to sleep. How did it happen? A yelp of disbelief makes its way up from my solar plexus to the pillow I jam against my face.

Holly almost certainly had something to do with it. She is the keen social engineer who has been trying to persuade me since year eight that I need a man in my life. (Defense strategy: eye roll, say no, thank you, no way, never, not even interested, before you get scorned, rejected, ignored, not asked.)

No more than an hour after turning away, of ignoring him, of accidentally appearing to be unimpressed, I was kissing him.

Sibylla Quinn and Benjamin Capaldi?

You have got to be kidding.

Sib and Ben?

Surely not.

Heads turned. He tasted of beer and smiles and popularity, smelled of freshly danced sweat, and didn’t seem to realize it was the first time I’d kissed anyone. At least, he didn’t mention it.

So the earth must be spinning off its axis by now, plummeting headlong toward a new universe, oceans sloshing and spilling, ice caps sliding, trees uprooted Because somehow I’ve stepped over the line to stand with the popular girls. Only I haven’t. The line must have moved without me realizing. It’s disconcerting. And so was the way people looked at me post–kissing Ben. The look said
you?
Then it reassessed me. Shuffled the deck. And it was as though a different backing track started playing. I walked into the party with something like a
la-di-da
, but by the time I left it was more of a
ba-boom-chucka-boom-chucka
.

A text erupts from my phone, which is packed inside a boot. Holly. Unless it’s—it couldn’t be—Ben? I dig it out, heart jerking, and remember: Ben doesn’t even have my number. Of course it’s Holly:
biaaatch, are you in bed with him?

Me:
you are a freak.

Holly:
as if you don’t love him.

Me:
don’t.

Holly:
then you’re crazier than I thought, and that is lots crazy.

Me:
go to sleep.

Holly:
perchance to…

Me:
perchance to shut up.

monday 8 october, 4 am

No news is not good news.

I know it.

Anything might have happened, and the only true fact of life is death.

It is brief. But it is nonetheless a third journal entry.

The end.

Sex education used to be called the Facts of Life. It’s kind of appropriate, the stern, newscaster tone, the headline vibe. It does loom large; it is some kind of major event on the horizon.

If you read the statistics—our house is full of them—heaps of kids have sex super early, like early high school, but in my little middle-class world there are plenty of
kids, a lot more than half, who haven’t done the deed at sixteen, or even seventeen. I know that for an anecdotal fact. (I’m obviously one of them.)

Despite that, at sixteen, whether you have, or have not, had sex can sometimes feel like the Great Divide. It’s not like friends who used to be close are gone, it’s just that they’ve migrated to another country.

No matter how much you tell yourself that nothing’s changed, it has. You worry that all your dumb old secrets are about to be whispered on someone else’s pillow, or to be superseded by somebody else’s better secrets.

Just as wide as the gulf between “have had sex” and “haven’t had sex” is the gulf between my fantasy life and my real life, fantasy boys and real boys.

Until last night, when I kissed my fantasy boy. That was a particularly disturbing, worlds-colliding event.

It’s very frustrating, and seems illogical, that you can know everything there is to know about sex of all persuasions, variations, and deviations, in theory, and yet still you know zero if you haven’t done it. It. IT.

Being a virgin makes me feel inexperienced, childish, gauche, uncool.

It is honest to god like I’m sitting at the little kids’ table on Christmas Day, while other girls my age are over there sipping from champagne flutes and using the good cutlery.

Add to that the pressure to act like it’s cool… no big deal… my choice…

And that’s
me
, and I’m not even a very peer-group person.

My virginity does not feel like some wondrous thing I will one day bestow on a lucky boy; it’s more in the realm of something I need to get rid of, like my braces were, before real life can begin.

But annoyingly enough, while I am dead keen to cross “sex” off my to-do list, I don’t feel at all ready to remove anything other than a top-layer garment in front of a boy. That is the reason why, before I’m even properly awake, the challenge, and probable impossibility, of fully clothed sex with Ben Capaldi is occupying my thoughts.

What is it going to be like seeing him today? My lips still tender, chin scratched. It had to be a casual hookup, right? A party thing? Please, party-fling fairy, oh, please visit and tell me what face to put on this morning. Friendly but distant? Casual hello hug? Ignore him before he ignores me?

What was I
thinking
? We’re going to be in the wilderness together for nine weeks.

monday 8 october, 5 am

If you don’t want to write about feelings, you can write about facts, Lou.

I met Fred last year.

Our mutual friend Dan Cereill introduced us.

We saw a movie, ate boysenberry ice-cream cones, kissed, arranged to meet again.

I invited him to our year nine social at the end of term three.

It was a surprise.

I was not looking for a boyfriend.

We had five perfect months together.

He died in a cycling accident. He was dead at the scene, could not be resuscitated, is believed to have died instantly of head injuries.

There was a funeral.

There was scattering of ash.

I did not go back to school when the school year started. I was a basket case. Everything shut down.

This term I was to be part of a wonderful new French exchange program for government schools.

My three friends, Dan, Estelle, and Janie, are part of a wonderful new French exchange program.

When it came down to it, I couldn’t leave Fred.

I decided to stay in the same country as Fred.

I did not put it that way to anyone else but Dan.

It might have sounded a bit crazy, but it was what I needed to do.

Dan couldn’t wait to leave the city that killed Fred.

We understood perfectly well that each other’s positions sprang from the same place. The place where the floor falls out from under you and nothing can ever be the same.

I have seen a psychiatrist called Esther, who specializes in teenagers and grief, twice a week since Fred died.

I don’t sleep well.

I don’t wake well.

I have done distance education from home for the first three terms this year. My results have been excellent.

Today I am starting at a new school, in fourth term.

I don’t have to tell people about Fred unless I choose to do so.

This school is a private school called Crowthorne Grammar that sends its students away for a whole term in year ten. They/we go to an outdoor education campus called Mount Fairweather
for a whole term
to discover the real meaning of,
to experience
, independence and leadership.

It is a campus in the mountains.

This cushy campus promises to provide an authentic, rugged outdoors experience… resilience… core values… practical skills for… cocurricular… living… blah… educational adventure… foster… blah… connect… blah… challenge.

A quarter of the year ten class is at Mount Fairweather at any given time. I am part of the quarter who will be enjoying the camp experience during fourth term.

There will be lots of wonderful activities in which I will participate, including but not limited to hiking, cross-country running, group and solo camping, rappelling, canoeing, horseback riding, and environmental studies in situ.

Classes will run in a five-day week from Thursday to Monday. Inclusive. Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be our “weekends,” so we can have the run of the wilderness without us bothering weekend hikers/campers, or weekend hikers/campers bothering us.

It will be good for me. That’s an order.

Good to make a new start.

Good to get out of the house.

Good to meet new people.

Good to breathe some new air.

Good to be getting fit.

Good to have access to a fine counselor.

So good I cannot fucking believe my luck.

Parents were encouraged to say their farewells at home. Schools correctly believe hysteria to be contagious. So I get to have a whispered catch-up with Holly while everyone mills around looking excited or depressed or hungover and the sporty teachers help load the buses.

Ben is in the distance laughing with some of his jock friends, guys I really don’t like. Rowing and football star Billy Gardiner with his look-at-me tan, protein-supplement
muscles, and blond hair is one of them. But I guess when you’re friends with basically everyone, you’re going to have some quality-control issues.

“It was nothing, no big deal.” I’m trying to mean it.

“You were practically having sex, so it’s not nothing.”

“We weren’t. It was just a kiss. Can we move on?”

“Last time Ben Capaldi did that—well, the time before—it was Laura, and they went out—for a while.”

“Forget it. He’s not even my type.” I bite a shaggy cuticle. I’ve always wanted to say that—though in this context, it’s a big fat lie, and Holly knows it.

“Your
type
? Your type is nerd meets doofus, hun, and you don’t want to go there.”

“Thanks.”

“What? I’m being honest,” says Holly. I consider the mixed blessing of having such an honest friend, but there is stuff I’m clueless about, and she’s a good interpreter.

“No, you’re right—which means Ben Capaldi is definitely not the boy for me.”

“Don’t you get it? This is not about who you are. It’s about who you want to be. You get to decide. Because of the billboard. No one
knows
who you are anymore. The whole class is confused.”

“The billboard isn’t me.”

“You haven’t tried on enough ‘me’s to even know.”

“I’m Daria. I’ve even got the pain-in-the-arse little sister.”

“You
were
Daria. Now you can be Hannah Montana.”

“She’s not even a cartoon.”

We both reflect on the shortage of good female cartoon role models in mainstream media. Or at least that’s what I’m doing.

“Sibbie, you can go from drab to fab. You can be a babe—not everyone gets to do that.” Holly sometimes speaks as though she’s rehearsing for her planned career in the world of fashion journalism.

“Even that word—
babe
—I hate it. I don’t want to be patronized, or infantilized…”

Holly sighs, trying to keep her cool. “Think of it as a
visit
to babe-land. If you don’t like it, don’t stay.”

“I won’t like it.”

“You don’t know that because you’ve never been there. And Ben Capaldi is everybody’s type. If everybody wants brainy, funny, fit, handsome.”

“If that’s true, then I’ve really got no hope.”

“You’ve got a secret weapon that no other girl has.”

“What?” If she means the stupid billboard, I can hardly lug that with me everywhere I go.

She’s smiling. “Your best friend is me.”