Mollie + Chester

Chapter Eighteen

"Hey, you pushed me off!" Seth said throwing the controller onto the couch as me and Toby laughed. The bright glow from the TV lit up our faces in the dimming room as the sun set outside.
"It's because you're bad at this game," I giggled and drove my kart over the finish line at the same time as Toby's. The game stopped and the theme music played flashing up the scores and times of the race with Seth right at the bottom in twelfth place. Seth yanked the old, scratchy brown blanket that lay across mine and Toby's lap wrapping it around himself.
"I'm not bad, you guys all cheat!"
As Toby fought to get the blanket back. I started another race (the hardest course in the game) and our animated cars zoomed off, Seth falling off the edge of the track two seconds in.
"You actually have a real car and a licence! You should be able to drive," I said concentrating on driving around the holes in the track. I managed to Miss all the obstacles and shot off into first place in front of Toby.
"I'm great at this game, it's just because I chose the wrong car and you keep cheating..."
Toby and I looked at each other and smiled. Toby and I had played these harder courses so many times we knew every single difficult turn and pothole to avoid. Seth really had no chance.
I yawned, my kart staying steady on the TV and Seth looked jealous.
"You're not even looking at the screen, how do you do it?" He asked.
"Skill," I replied driving over the finish line and yawning again. We had spent the day sneaking out because we had been babysat by Seth and he had driven us to the field we had stopped over at that day in autumn.
The sun peeked out through the clouds and hundreds of tiny flowers opened up making the grass turn from green to yellow as daisies popped up all over the ground. Seth spread out a picnic mat and we had eaten peanut butter sandwiches and hot chips he bought at the café in town before we left.
You have peanut butter on you face, Toby wrote in his little book and I rubbed it off with the back of my hand before I then smeared it on Toby's face and laughed.
You do too, I wrote.
We ended up running around the field, daisies leaving pollen on our ankles. Seth found some pebbles near the road which we hurled as hard as we could across the seemingly endless space. I threw the stone, losing it in the long grass which had grown long in the spring. I imagined the stones were all the bad things that had happened to us and that it would all disappear, never to be found again. I realised that throwing all my problems away was just like burying them deep down inside, they would also be there in that spot in the grass never really gone. But it's like Seth says: that hope that things can get better, that hope that we have solved our problems just by throwing them away makes our lives seem better.
It allows us to survive.
When I didn't have the energy to stand anymore, we lay in the grass and flowers and looked up at the clouds.
Seventy-two days, Toby wrote and I took the pen and paper and scrawled my own note. It had been seventy-two days since I woke up and I had also had not one coughing fit. Apparently it was because of some new treatment they trialled that had worked, making the pause button last longer. I chose to believe it was because of Toby and Seth and even Chester not giving up.
Suddenly I was covered in flowers and Seth was laughing, rubbing pollen off his shirt. I pulled one from my hair and split the stem, threading another through to create a chain, and continued making a line of flowers long enough for a necklace. We had ended spending the rest of the day weaving together flowers, trying to make a chain taller than all three of us lying head to toe on the grass.
"Seriously!" Seth yelled shaking me back to reality. His kart had fallen off another time as me and Toby zoomed past him onto our last lap of the course.
"You're really bad at this," I teased as he fell off again.
The lock on the door turned and it opened as Mum came in, her face flushed from the cold night air that was setting in and a plate of leftover food from the housewarming she went to for one of the big nose society ladies who was moving into her hereditary house that had been owned by her family for years.
"Oh, have you been playing video games all day?" She asked taking off her coat and hanging it up. Her face was flushed with more colour than usual and her dress wasn't splattered with food or stains.
We all looked at each other, keeping the secret of our real day away from Mum who would freak out if she knew I had been out in the big bad world with the cold and the germs and physical activities.
"Seth's been losing at video games," I said watching him fall off again. I smiled at Toby as I said that and he grinned back, not even watching the TV as he raced over the finish line.
"They cheat, you know," Seth muttered throwing the controller onto the couch.
"Alright come in the kitchen for some snacks then." Mum pulled some sandwiches out of the tiny portable fridge which sat in the corner of the kitchen while it got fixed from the fire. The structure of the house had been done while I was in hospital and all they needed to do now were the tiles and the appliances. When I asked Mum how we could afford the renovations she looked at me as if I were a baby and changed the subject. I figured the cost had been added onto our growing debts.
We raced off the couch and sat in chairs around the fold up table, Toby and me winning and Seth tripping over in the doorway.
"You're even bad at running races!" I said laughing with Toby.
Seth flicked me on the ear. "Shut up, Doofus. You have to be nice to the cool big brother."
Mum set the tray of sandwiches and a wrapped box on the table that she had carried in from outside. It was covered in brown packaging paper like parcel sent through the mail.
"What is it?" I asked grabbing it to look on the label. "Can I open it? Please!"
Mum nodded and sat down in the spare mismatched kitchen chair. I ripped off the paper and pulled out two boxes, setting them on the table.
"What is it?" I asked again and Mum opened the first box and pulled out a tattered old book with a red leather cover.
"A book?" I looked at Toby who shrugged. "It doesn't even look cool, the cover has no pictures."
Not so exciting, he wrote and took another sandwich from the plate.
"Oh yes, a book," Mum said, "don't sound so disappointed, you haven't even looked inside."
I lifted the cover to reveal the pages and found an old black and white photo of a girl with pigtails so high on her head it looked like she had reindeer antlers on.
I looked at Mum who had her eyes opened wide as she stared at the photo on the page.
"Oh maybe it is a boring book..." She said trying to take it from me but I flipped through the other pages revealing more photos of the same girl. Mum held her head in her hands.
The smiling little girl with high pigtails turned into an older girl with braces and big circle glasses. Her hair was tied in a crooked very high pony tail and she wore a fluffy cardigan and poofy skirt.
The next photo was the same girl, older again as a teenager with even bigger circle glasses and a fringe that covered her eyebrows completely. She had her arm thrown around a boy with hair that almost reached the roof and was wearing high pants with his shirt tucked in.
Seth laughed. "That's Mum and Dad!" I flicked back through the book and now could see the resemblance.
"What were you wearing?" I asked pointing at a picture where she was wearing fluoro pinks, greens, oranges and yellows. This time her hair was bright red and she wore a big bow.
Mum peeked through her fingers and groaned. "I thought I burned those pictures!"
I continued flipping through the photos and found one with Mum in a hospital bed holding a tiny scrunched up baby boy.
"That's Seth," Mum said pointing, her finger covering her own face in the photo. I turned the page and found another picture of a baby up close. The baby wore a pink jumpsuit with flower buttons and held a pink baby rattle.
Is that Mollie? Toby asked. Mum shook her head.
"That's actually Seth..."
This made me and Toby burst out laughing again. We laughed so hard tears ran down our faces and my cheeks began to hurt from smiling.
"Why is he dressed like a girl?" I asked pointing at the pink clothes. He wore the same kind on the next few pages too, sometimes he even had bow headbands.
"Your cousin was a girl so we had hand-me-downs," Mum said laughing as well.
"Mum!" Seth exclaimed flicking the pages faster until he was a little boy with blue clothes and hats instead of headbands.
"Wait!" I flicked the pages back a few and pointed to another of four year old Seth who was dressed up in a fairy costume complete with a skirt and tiara.
"Oh, I didn't dress him then, that was all him. He cried until we bought him that at the shops."
"Okay, I agree with Mum before, maybe we shouldn't look at this..." Seth said trying to close the book.
"Hang on, you're eight there. Mollie should be in there soon," Mum said.
And sure enough, two pages later was a picture of Seth with his hair spiked up and smiling holding a tiny baby dressed in pink with a tiny patch of blonde fluffy hair. One of my hands was holding Seth's collar of his shirt (that had a picture of an alien on it) and the other held his ear.
You didn't like your brother very much, Toby wrote.
Nope, but I realised if I was nice, he'd buy me things and drive me places.
"You aren't very nice when you cheat at video games..." Seth muttered and I held my hand over the notebook.
"Don't read our conversations!" I yelled.
"Oh look!" Mum exclaimed interrupting our fight and pointing to a picture in the book. It was of Seth playing soccer for his school championships. While he had been running around on the field, I had wandered away on my three year old legs onto the field with my hands held out for him. The photo had captured me in a thick pink jacket that made me look like a big ball running around after Seth as he kicked the final goal before the siren. I don't know how Mum and Dad lost me in the first Place but apparently they were watching the big screen when I popped up.
Mum flicked through the rest of the book while I opened the second box and pulled out a handwritten letter:
I found this in my attic when I was cleaning it up. I thought you may have wanted to play with your own family.
Mum~
Mum? Toby wrote.
"My mother," Mum said, "and I think I know what this is..."
She pulled a board game made out of cardboard and paper that had been laminated out of the box. Mum unfolded it on the table and smiled.
"Your uncle and I made this when I was six," she said. "Mum didn't want to waste her money on 'such a frivolous game' as she said, so we made one."
I ran my fingers around the ruled boxes drawn with crayons. The boxes ran along the outside of the board and every few squares were coloured in. I recognised boxes with chance and a box that said go.
"It's Monopoly!" I said.
Mum nodded. "But we called it Heather and Jason's Chest instead of community chest and most of the properties are names after us or cartoon characters we liked."
Toby stuck his hand in the box and pulled out tiny handmade wooden houses and games pieces as well as hand drawn cards.
"Can we play Mum? Please!" I begged and Seth and Toby were already setting up the game board.
"Oh, alright," she said, her hand darting for one of the wooden pieces. She held the wooden replica of a rag doll in her hand. "But I'm always this one. Grandpa made the pieces for us."
We set up the game, Seth grabbed a pair of dice from one of his old games and we played.
We laughed when Seth pointed out spelling mistakes like how Mum had spelt jail as jayal and uncle Jason had spelt one of the chance spots as chanz because he thought it was cool.
And the game wasn't perfectly made by computers and played by a perfect family in a beautiful kitchen lit by the natural lit of the sun. In our half-finished kitchen with yellowing walls and no tiles was a tearful Mum wearing her stained apron again, a dying kid and her deaf friend and a teenager who should've been out at a party since it was a Friday night who played a homemade board game. But despite the differences, the moment was perfect.