The Great Between

Frida to the Rescue

To: queenofstars@gmail.com

From: wheretheresawill@gmail.com

Subject: Re: Disembarking!!!

Dear Stella,

Thank you for feeding Ron.

The hotel room is marginally better than the ship cabin, but everything is still quite crap. Let's just assume everything is quite crap until I specify otherwise.

Our room is musky and dusty, which has set off Mum's hay fever. Every time she sneezes, she panics that someone's going to knock on the door and execute her to stop the spread of the Virus. Okay, so I don't think she's actually that worried about executions, but I am. I have a feeling there's some dodgy shit going down in this crappy hotel. Plus, there are guards outside that I'm sure are bored enough to get a little trigger-happy.

I'm sleeping on the foldout couch and my parents have claimed the bedroom. I have some degree of privacy now, but I can still hear them both stressing. Dad's struggling to write, so he's in a shitty mood most of the time and Mum has a dozen calls a day, trying to sort out her work and tell everyone we're safe. It's a fun time.

It's got to the point where I'm so homesick, I even miss my grandma's cooking. I love my grandma and she's brilliant and funny and only rarely casually homophobic, but she is also the worst cook I've ever encountered. Even though her ancestors colonised half the world taking spices and ruining civilisations, she refuses to use any seasoning at all in her cooking. She relies on butter and the nostalgic memory of delicious foods rather than actual flavour, so everything tastes quite bland.

Anyway, the food they're giving us is almost as bad as grandma's and it makes me miss her.

That boy from the ship hasn't contacted me at all and I can't get in touch with him. I think he disembarked when we did, but other than that, I have no idea where he is or how to contact him.

I hope they either burn that ship or sink it. Maybe I should've burnt it. He might have helped me do it. You should've heard him talk about the management and his bosses. The ship was screwed up even before the Virus.

Please promise me you'll never step foot on a cruise ship, Stella. Please. For your own sanity and safety.

Hope you're doing okay,

Will.

P.S. How's the Max/Leo situation? I love a good love triangle. All you need now is some mistaken identity and you've got yourself a Shakespeare play.

P.P.S. How's online school? I imagine it's like normal school, but twice as frustrating.

Online school is not going well. I'm considering dropping out entirely and moving to Canberra. I'd rather spend every day riding my bike through roundabouts and wandering around the Portrait Gallery than sit here with Max ignoring me and Gracie yelling into her video call in the next room (partly because her computer has a terrible microphone, but mostly because she's in a bad mood eighty percent of the day).

I'd rather anything to this. This is my house, my bedroom, but I feel like an unwanted guest. And Max being this quiet scares me. I can't gauge how here she is when she doesn't speak to me. I'm worried she'll succumb to the fog again, just when I thought being here was helping to lift it.

I walk with a cloud of worry over me to the bookshop and as soon as I open the back door, Pen wraps me up in a tea-scented hug and the nerves instantly melt away.