When the World was Flat (and we were in love) (16 page)

I bit my lip, thinking about the pregnancy rumors. “And?”

“And he has a wife and two kids who he loves, thank you very much!” She shook her head, tears streaming down her face. “Oh my God. Talk about humiliation.” She grabbed her bag from me and fumbled through it, pulling out the bottle of Johnny Walker. “Want a drink?”

I hesitated for a second and then took a swig. I coughed as it scalded my throat. They say alcohol messes up your memories and I had a couple of memories I wanted messed up, like the one about parallel dimensions and the one where I died in my dreams every night. I took another burning mouthful and gagged.

Suddenly, a head appeared at our feet. It was Sylv, on her hands and knees, looking under the door. “I can see up your dresses. Nice panties, Jo.” Her expression hardened when she saw the bottle. Sylv may have been a wild child, but she was a teetotaler because of her mom, who drank like a fish – and when I say like a fish I mean like an alcoholic fish. She had been sloshed on the eight or so occasions I had seen her in the past year, including once when Sylv had faked a migraine and was picked up from school.

Sylv finished crawling under the door and the three of us were crammed into the cubicle like sardines.

“Ow. Watch it,” Sylv complained.

“How about you get off my foot?”

I took the bottle from Jo and sat on the toilet cistern, taking another swig and another and another. I had a sudden sensation of déjà vu and I searched my memory bank to see if the three of us had shared a cubicle before. Nope.

Sylv grabbed Jo around the waist.

“Damn girl. Have you been eating?”

Jo shrugged and shuffled backwards until Sylv let go. I noticed for the first time how much weight she had dropped over the past couple of weeks. Her legs were like candy rope under her skirt and her wrists looked like they would snap like twigs as she took the half gallon bottle from me with both hands. I also noticed her strawberry roots were showing, and her nose was bright red and flaky from being sandpapered with tissues.

“Spill,” Sylv said.

“There was no kiss. And definitely no sex,” Jo said. She shuddered at the memory, before taking another swig from the bottle. “What the hell was I thinking?”

“You weren't yourself,” I soothed.

“No. I was. I am,” Jo bawled. “I loved him. I still love him!”

Sylv rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to make a comment, but I gave her a shut-up-and-listen look.

“And now he has to leave Green Grove,” Jo continued. “He said he had to report it. Turnip called my dad. He said I would have been expelled, but Mr Bailey decided to leave school instead.” She choked for a moment on her words. “He got a transfer to Lincoln.”

“Did you at least get suspended?” Sylv asked.

Jo shook her head. “Turnip thought it would put a stop to the rumors if I continued on as normal.”

Normal? I suppressed a giggle at the thought. What the hell was normal about this? It was like being in another dream.

Jo sighed. “But the rumors will never stop.”

“Of course they will,” I lied.

“How stupid do you think I am?” Jo asked. “They feed off it, like vultures.” She nodded her head towards the gaggle of girls outside the cubicle. “And this is juicy meat.”

“Not as stupid as me,” I answered, thinking of Tom.

“Or me,” Sylv said. “Remember my modeling shoot? It turned out the guy was a sleazebag after all. He wanted me to go topless.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I took my top off.”

“What?”

“Just kidding! I told him to shove it and threatened to call the cops if he breathed a word to anyone. I lied and told him I was fifteen.” She clapped her hands gleefully. “He almost shat himself.”

Suddenly, Jo burst into laughter. And I am talking about proper belly laughter. It was a moment or two before we joined in, all laughing like our sides would split.

I was wiping the tears from my eyes when I heard Sylv say, “Cool tatt.”

“What?” I climbed down from the cistern and rotated Jo, so I could see behind her ear. She struggled as I pushed back her hair and there, hidden behind the cartilage of her ear was a string of numbers and letters. A formula, like the tattoo I had seen on Tom. “What the hell?”

“Come on. Give me a break,” Jo said, shaking me off. “You can poke fun at me tomorrow.”

My face crumpled with confusion. Did Jo like Tom? I guess it would have explained her makeover. It would also have explained her coldness towards me. And why she had thrown herself at Mr Bailey. To draw attention to herself. To make Tom jealous. I could understand all of that, but a matching tattoo? No. Not my Jo. But was she my Jo? I frowned at those skinny legs sticking out from under her miniskirt.

“How about we get out of here?” I asked, suddenly claustrophobic.

The gymnasium was claustrophobic too. The crowd pressed in on us from all sides and the music vibrated through the floorboards, like we were in the middle of an earthquake.

“Bleachers?” I asked over the music.

The girls nodded and we moved across the basketball court, giving a group of seniors who were dancing up an alcohol-fuelled storm a wide berth. A girl wearing a yellow maxi dress and a feathery mask collided with me, knocking the air out of my lungs.

I let Jo take my hand and pull me towards the bleachers, even though her feet were as wobbly as mine thanks to a combination of alcohol and stilettos.

Suddenly, a guy in a balaclava and a black suit that was a size too large jumped out at us from the shadows. I opened my mouth to scream, but the sound stuck in my throat. The moment had arrived. At least the alcohol would soften the blow.

“This is a stick-up,” he said.

“Jackson!”

I had been holding my breath and it whooshed out when I heard this exclamation from Jo. He put a finger to his lips and I remembered he had been banned from the ball.

As I scanned the crowd for Turnip, I spotted Melissa trotting across the dance floor with a silver mask in her hand. She was wearing a blue satin dress with a split up the side and sparkly stilettos. The crowd parted in front of her, as if she were Moses and they were the Red Sea, and suddenly there was Tom.

He was standing in the doorway, wearing a light gray lounge suit with a crisp white shirt underneath. He surveyed the gymnasium with an air of disdain.

Melissa pulled the silver mask over his head and moved in front of him to check it was on. She fiddled with it, tugging it to the left and then to the right, like a wife straightening a bow tie. My blood boiled. I imagined walking up behind her and grabbing her long black ponytail. I could hear her shriek in my mind.

Tom suddenly looked up, as if he could hear it too. I blushed and turned back towards my friends, following them to the bleachers. I am a good girl, I reminded myself.

Be. Nice. Be. Nice. Be. Nice, I willed myself with each step. Maybe I had finally hit puberty. That would explain my mood-swings. I looked down at my chest and giggled at myself. Yeah right. As if I would suddenly grow breasts four years after getting my period.

I was pulled onto the basketball court by the girls and Jackson. Sylv teased Jo, dancing sexily around her like a stripper around a pole. And I danced with Jackson, who had rolled up his balaclava until it looked like a stocking cap.

The alcohol had given me a buzz. I put my hands up in the air and shouted made-up lyrics to the song that was booming through the sound system. The ground swayed to the music and I swayed too, hitting the polished floorboards with a thud.

“Ouch,” I said, before breaking into peels of laughter.

Jo grabbed my hands, but she also fell and we both rolled around on the floor of the gymnasium, laughing hysterically.

Jackson finally pulled us to our feet. First Jo, who fell a second and third time before he propped her up against the bleachers, and then he turned his attention to my sorry self. “Come on, Lillie,” he shouted above the music, his hands around my wrists. “Up you get.”

I laughed again as he lifted me. “Upsidaisy!”

I threw my arms around his shoulders as I found my feet, and as I did, my eyes fell on a face in the background. Tom. He was leaning against the wall with his arms folded. His lips formed a hard line below his mask.

I smiled and turned towards Jackson. I was about to close my eyes for our first kiss when he stepped backwards. He was shaking his head and motioning with his hands.

“What?” I shouted above the music.

It could have been the red lights, but his cheeks looked like they were flushed with embarrassment. His eyes shifted to Jo and Sylv.

“What?” I asked again.

“You. Me. Friends,” he shouted over the music, as if I was a child and he had to spell it out. I guess he did.

My own cheeks began to burn like hotplates. It was hot. Too hot. I pushed through the throng, using my elbows as battering rams.

“Watch it!”

“Hey!”

“Ow.”

“Lillie!” Jackson called after me.

I walked past Tom. Melissa was tugging on his hands, begging him to dance. It took me a while to find our pile of belongings in the shadows and I kicked the shins of a few canoodling couples before I found my new best friend, Johnny Walker.

The fresh air swirled around me as I found my way into the quad and booked it to the Art Block, dodging a couple of teachers who were standing guard to make sure girls like Sylv were in the gymnasium and not in the bushes.

I sat down on the stairs. Stupid, I thought as I unscrewed the lid on the bottle of whiskey and took a swig. Cough. Cough. Cough. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I had screwed up my friendship with Jackson and my… whatever it was… with Tom.

I heard a footfall in the darkness and my mind automatically went to my killer. “Is someone there?” I asked.

My answer was the distant sound of Michael Jackson singing “Thriller”.

“Answer me!” I stood up, adrenaline rushing through my body like a flash flood in a storm water drain. “This. Is. It,” my blood shouted as it pulsed through my veins. The dreams had become reality. I was about to come face-to-face with the woman in the balaclava.

My muscles twitched in anticipation. It could have been the alcohol, but I decided I was going to kick her ass. Of course, my self-defense training consisted of a kick to the groin, but in my imagination I had martial arts moves to rival Jackie Chan.

I reached up to remove my mask, as a figure stepped forward into the circle of light.

“Oh,” I whispered and my knees went weak.

Tom caught me before I could hit the concrete and I rested my head against his chest before realizing that his body was as stiff as a board. “Are you drunk?” he asked.

I gave him a small shove as I stepped backwards. “Who are you? Turnip?”

“Lillie. This is not you.”

I gave a short laugh. “You think you know me?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Right. From another dimension.”

He nodded. “Right.”

I squinted at him, suddenly sober. “I thought it was a hallucination.” I said. “The theory of everything. Parallel dimensions.”

Tom shook his head. His fingers brushed my cheek, feather-light. I reached up to stroke his face in return.

“How did you get the scar on your chin?” I suddenly asked.

He chuckled, the sound making me smile, even though I had missed the joke. “An ice skating accident,” he said, his cool eyes warm for a change. “A friend of mine thought it would be fun to go ice skating on the lake.”

“At Rose Hill?” I asked, feeling like I had heard this story.

He nodded and rubbed his chin, his smile now sad. “We ended up having a fall.”

“I have a pair of ice skates,” I said slowly. “They used to belong to Deb.”

“I know.”

A memory suddenly burst into my mind, like sunlight flooding into a house that had been boarded up for a decade. I could feel the ice skates under my feet, wobbly and ten sizes too big, but hands held me tight, leading me onto the ice with small steps.

“Chicken,” a voice goaded good-naturedly. “You were the one who wanted to go ice skating.” The voice sounded young – a child – but the accent, a mix of British and something else, sounded like Tom.

I looked up and saw a boy about eight or nine years old. He seemed to radiate in the light that bounced off the ice, giving him an angelic appearance. A red scarf was wrapped around his neck and above it, his smile beamed, showing off his perfect teeth.

There was an innocence in his blue eyes, which sparkled like the lightest colored sapphires. An innocence that has long been lost, I thought as my mind returned to this dimension and the now grown-up Tom.

“Who am I?” I whispered, wanting answers for the past six months, the past sixteen years. “Please, Tom. I want to know.”

Tom reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a crumpled photo. “They say a picture tells a thousand words.”

I took it from him, a lump forming in my throat. “The girl in the photo is dead,” he had said.

I looked at the couple in the photo – first at Tom and then at his girlfriend – and as soon as I did, my chest tightened and my breath became short and sharp, like I had been kicked in the gut.

My head swam, as memories bubbled to the surface, rising from the depths of my mind. The girl in the photo is alive, I thought, as I blinked at her high cheekbones, her pointy ears and her dark circles. She looked back at me with emerald eyes.

I lifted my own emerald eyes to Tom. “The girl in the photo,” I whispered, “is me.”

We startled as we heard voices at the top of the stairs. It was Jo and Jackson.

“We thought you had been kidnapped,” Jackson said, looking at Tom pointedly.

Tom grabbed the photo and crammed it into his pocket again, before storming up the stairs. He watched Jo warily as he passed, like she was a wild animal about to attack.