A short excerpt from my novel. On the woes of teenage girls.
December 2001, Sydney.
Irene and Esther had been bitches everyday that week. I had an ugly feeling they were trying to tell me something. At first, I thought Irene was bitchy on days she wore messy buns. But now she was bitchy too on days when she wore her hair down. I have a habit of looking for patterns, and the bun theory wasn’t holding up. She wasn’t bitchy because her hair was tied up too tight. She was bitchy because she hated me.
Irene and Esther were my only friends at school, and if they were gone, I’d spend the summer alone. It was the last day of school. Dread weighed down on me the whole day, made me feel sluggish. I felt my face droop. I imagined all my features melting off my skull. I was sure that I was going to cry.
I felt gross.
“She always looks sooo serious,” said Irene. They both sat across from me, white teeth gleaming, the white stripes of their uniforms gleaming too. Their mothers used bleach and made the whites of their uniforms glisten. I made a note to buy some for myself too.
“Did you know your nose flares whenever you get serious?"
I could feel Esther’s eyes looking at the side of my face, but I didn’t want to look up at her. Irene’s eyes were dark like pools and I was afraid of what else she might say. I didn’t even realize other people paid attention to nostrils. I thought that it’d been my own personal obsession, perversion. I’d developed an interest in them in Year Seven, when one day while feeling particularly anthropological, also wretched in History, I did a survey of everyone’s nose, and found, to my horror, that no one had a nose shaped like mine. I had a large hooked thing, fleshy at the tip -- “a meat nose” my father joked to my great suffering -- and then finally, flanked by two flaps that flared out like bells.
The disintegration of our friendship started earlier that week. Like all teenage girls, their blows were both subtle and deadly. This is not to say that they didn’t drop hints. I was simply too thick to understand. One time, they disappeared during lunch when I went to the toilet. I spent a good 25 minutes looking for them, and when I did, I was met with cold, steely looks. They didn’t say a word when we walked together to our next period. Then there was the time after school at the train station when they bolted, while cackling, down the platform away from me when the train came. I chased after them. “What are we running from?” I yelled after them, worried that it was in fact me.
I’d tried, in that week, to hold onto them. I made myself small in a variety of ways. I clowned around and made sure I was always the butt of every joke. I tried to be a pet and do what they wanted me to. I tried to be a benefactor, and bought us all our favorite snacks from the Canteen. I didn’t understand what had happened to us. A year ago we were so close, we’d eat our sandwiches in rotation. I would take a bite of Esther’s peanut butter and hand it to Irene, and take Irene’s Ham and Cheese from Esther and so on and so forth until all of us had gotten a fair third of each other’s sandwiches.
Susan McCarrick caught us doing this one day and ran back to the other girls, bursting about like a round bird. Her freckled face greedy to tell the others what she had seen us do.
The spit twins they called us even though we were three -- maybe they called us twins because we were all interchangeable to them — Chinese, quiet — even though Esther was Korean.