Week three. Tuesday.
It has been two weeks since the start of school and Dad finally asks the dreaded question.
I knew it would come, eventually. It suits him to ask, which is a funny thing to say because i’m not supposed to know him at all, but it sits right with this guilt he has brewing inside of him. He’s a trope, now, the Guilty Absentee Father Reconnecting with His Child - he has the whole routine down to a T. The anti-depressants play a part in it, too. He couldn’t help me, he was forced to resort to chemicals that fuck with my brain, and so on, and so forth. I’m envious of the pained look in his eyes. It’s one that I couldn’t ever echo.
“Have you made some friends?” he asks, casually, over coffee.
My snort comes out less imperceptible than I thought it would. Fat chance, I think, not when I feel like an empty shell of a person. If you put your ear to me, you might hear echoes of the sea. That’s how the story goes, anyways.
Still, I humour him. “Some,” I lie. Whether it’s to alleviate his concern or to make myself feel a bit better about myself, I’m not sure. It does neither.
Dad doesn’t look convinced. He gives me a weak smile and offers, “Why don’t you invite one of them over for dinner? Katelyn can put together something nice.”
“I don’t think we’re at that stage, yet, Dad. It might make it, you know, awkward,” I mumble, looking down at my french toast, losing my appetite. I can’t say it’s entirely because of the medicine. I inch the plate away from me. “I’ve got to go. I’ll miss the bus.”
I lean back in my seat, looking out of the window - the leaves are morphing into shrivelling pockets of red and orange and brown - and contemplate Dad’s question. I mean, it is fairly obvious I don’t have any friends. The St Agnes girls are not contenders. They are too artificial for me. I feel like a spectator in a marionette show, watching them live out their glamorous lives of drama and wealth. They do it so convincingly, with such seamlessness that I almost expect them to leap down from the stage and speak to me and laugh and bring me back up on stage and tie little delicate strings to my hands and feet and jaw, and let their ventriloquist become mine.
But it won’t happen. I will not become a marionette, and my ventriloquist will not be that thirst for infamy. That’s not me.
I glance to the front of the bus. Remy is there, surrounded by her halo of orange curls and gaggle of fans, looking at something on her phone, laughing. Everything she does seems orchestrated, theatrical, intended to draw eyes to her. In my mind, I see her standing up and taking a deep bow, and the bus exploding into loud applause.
St Agnes is out, then.
And then, conveniently, Jasper’s familiar head appears in the staircase, adorned by a pair of headphones and the usual messy mop of brown hair. I cock my head sideways ever-so-slightly. Dare I think it? I think, and then tell myself: this is stupid. You’ve thought about this already. You’ve considered it: is Jasper my friend? Can he be? I don’t know anything about him, and he doesn’t know anything about me, and he’s been mostly rude and occasionally pushy ever since I’ve met him, and he makes my emotions fluctuate in a way I don’t need them, don’t want them to right now, or ever; and he may or may not be talking to me for the sole purpose of some long-due revenge on Remy, maybe a ‘haha, she’s friends with me, and not with you’ kinda thing, and then it occurs to me that in the two and a bit weeks we’ve spoken with each other, Jasper has never given indication he was petty.
Dare I think it?
And it strikes me that I could. That it’s within the realm of possibility. And the only reason I tell myself it wouldn’t is because I don’t dare define myself in terms of anyone else. ‘Friend’ is a connection I don’t let myself agree to. ‘I’m Jasper’s friend’ is a scary sentence; it is fucking terrifying. It is permanence. Except it isn’t, because it is like a patch of ground that can be pulled from under me and leave me alone falling into an unknown. No one sticks around to find out where it goes but me. Reaching the bottom is just a matter of time.
