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“You sure you don’t want me to take you?”
“Sure. Thanks though.”
I left there, him, not long afterwards, and didn’t stop pedaling till I’d reached school and left the bicycle chained to a fence painted blue. The wooden building was small with a patio surrounding it. I looked down when I walked through the door and didn’t talk to anyone. Before, this had been my favorite moment of the day: getting to class, finding my friends, telling each other the latest gossip, and walking together to class. But I couldn’t do that anymore. I had tried it, I really had, but there was a barrier between them and me, something that wasn’t there before.
When I walked past Blair with my head low, hair partly covering my face, I wished she hadn’t gotten a job there. Probably that’s why I kept my hair so long, to avoid attention, to hide the feelings I knew everyone could see in my eyes. If I could have had a superpower, I would have chosen invisibility. That way I could have escaped those looks of pity, the ones at first and the ones that came later, the ones that seemed to scream that I was weird, that no one understood me, that I wasn’t trying hard enough to come back to the surface and breathe…
I spent the whole morning sitting at my desk, tracing spirals in the corner of my math notebook, concentrating on the ways the lines curved and on the soft movement of the black pen. When class was over, I realized I’d barely heard anything the teacher said. I was putting my books into my bag when Blair entered the room timidly and came over. Almost all my classmates were already gone. I looked at her restrained, wanting to escape.
“Could we talk a sec?”
“I…uh, I gotta go.”
“Just for a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
Blair took a breath.
“I heard your brother’s got to go to Sydney for a while and I wanted you to know if you need anything, anything at all, I’m still here for you. I always was, honestly.”
My heart started thumping.
I wanted that, I wanted everything to go back to the way it was, but it couldn’t. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the car turning over and over, a blurry green furrow that meant we were no longer on the road, a song that cut off suddenly, a frozen scream. And then…and then they were dead. My parents. I couldn’t forget it, I couldn’t get away from the scene for more than a few hours, as if it had happened last night and not almost a year before. I couldn’t walk next to Blair and smile every time we crossed paths with a group of surfer tourists or talk about what we were going to do in the future, because all I wanted to do was…nothing, all I could think about was…them, and no one could understand me. At least, that was the conclusion I came to after several sessions with the psychologist Oliver sent me to.
“It doesn’t have to be the same, Leah.”
“It can’t be,” I managed.
“But it can be different, new. Wasn’t that what you used to do when you painted? Take something that existed and interpret it differently?” She swallowed nervously. “Couldn’t you do that with our friendship? We wouldn’t have to talk about anything if you didn’t want to.”
I nodded before it was over, leaving a little crack open between us. Blair smiled and then we left school together. She waved goodbye as I got on my orange bike and pedaled away.
9
_________
Axel
Her bedroom door was still closed.
She had been in my house for three weeks, and every day when she got back from school, she would eat whatever I prepared for her in silence, without protests or objections, then shut herself up between those four walls. The few times I entered, she was listening to music on her headphones or drawing with a fine-point pen, nothing interesting, just geometric figures, repetitions, pointless sketches.
Probably the longest sentence she spoke to me was on the first night, when she told me tea had caffeine. After that, nothing. If there hadn’t been an extra toothbrush in my bathroom and I hadn’t started to go grocery shopping now and then, I would hardly have noticed her presence. Leah only came out to eat lunch and dinner and go to school.
Naturally, my mother came by a few times with food, even though I had dropped by the café several times to tell her everything was fine, eat a free piece of cake, and spend some time with Justin, who was supposed to take over the business if my parents ever gave up their addiction to work.
“How are things?” he asked me.
“I guess fine. Or not. What the fuck do I know?”
“It’s a tough situation. Be patient. Don’t do your usual thing.”
“My usual thing?”
“You know the kind of dumb shit that crosses your mind.”
I laughed and downed my coffee in one sip. I had never been close to Justin; we weren’t the type of brothers who go out together and hang or get drunk. We didn’t have anything in common, and probably, if we weren’t bound by blood, we would have been two strangers and would never have spoken more than a few words to each other. When I was little, it often struck me that he was stuck in the life we left behind in Melbourne, as if they’d jerked him away from there and dropped him in the middle of a place he didn’t really understand. For me, it was the opposite. This stretch of coast was mine, almost made to measure for me: the freedom, being able to go around barefoot whenever I wanted, the relaxed life, the bohemian atmosphere, everything.
