2
A FEW HOURS later I’m still staring at my ceiling, at that tiny crack, when my phone buzzes.
I find it down the side of my bed next to an open bottle of nail polish, the contents of which have become one with the carpet. It’s a message from Rach in the group chat, something about going to the movies next week, but I ignore it like always, even though a painful aching part of me wants to teleport into my ex-best friend’s house. To make our chocolate-chip spaghetti (gluten-free because she’s celiac) then devour it while we sign her brother’s uni email address up to weird mailing lists, or invent more membership rules for our two-person Cloud-Formation-Loving Girlies Club, or read the same book side by side in glorious silence. To dissolve into that blissful feeling of being Ugg-boot-level comfortable with someone who gets you. But that’s impossible now.
Instead, I message Jacinta.
Overpass? Let’s do a life bomb
Yes yes yes see you there
I get up and check the plains-wanderer, who is asleep, or dead. Fear seizes me, but when I touch her I feel the wild flutter of her heart like wingbeats, as if she’s dreaming of flying. She’s alive.
‘You okay, buddy?’ I whisper, hovering for a moment. Wondering if she might respond. Wondering if she understood me. Get a grip, Lucy.
I quietly slide open my bedroom window and climb out. My parents don’t know Jacinta, and I don’t think they’d approve of me hanging out at a freeway overpass at 11 pm at night. I army-crawl past Dad’s study where the light is still on, even though a part of me almost wants to be caught sneaking out so I can prove that I am, in fact, getting out of the house.
I walk to the overpass along suburban streets just like ours. Overzealous dogs bark, brave behind their fences. Sensor lights illuminate ugly Christmas wreaths hanging on doors. Front lawns are perfectly mown. It’s all the same, same, same, and I wonder if I’m actually going anywhere or if I’m walking on the spot. ‘You know, Lucky, you could be in a simulation for your whole life and have no idea,’ Charlie loved to tell me. ‘I mean, what makes you think anything is actually real?’ I feel myself start to freak out, but then I hear the freeway—a low hum, like the one in my veins that’s full of a hard-to-describe aching, longing, wanting—and I convince myself my life is real (or real enough). I turn a corner and the overpass stretches before me, a silvery concrete arc in the moonlit summer night.
Jacinta’s already there at our spot in the middle, in between the dick-and-balls graffiti and the GO VEGAN graffiti. She’s sitting, legs swinging, on the ledge on the other side of the safety rail. Traffic flows beneath her feet like a river of light. If you didn’t know she was there, you probably wouldn’t see her—maybe just a flash of blonde hair and a shimmer of cheap pink eyeshadow.
When I reach her I see she’s got her earbuds in, like always, probably listening to an audiobook she’s randomly picked. She rarely loves them, mostly doesn’t even finish them, but she’ll recite whole passages from memory to me. My theory is she’s testing her brain. Always reassuring herself it’s still capable of storing up words and stories. Double checking that she’s not fading away like her dad. Or maybe she’s just trying to distract herself from her own thoughts. Either way, I get it.
‘Hey,’ I say.
She turns, eyes bright, and pulls out her earbuds. ‘Hey!’ Jacinta’s generally pretty nonchalant, but not in the way some cool girls are—the ones who practically vibrate with the effort to be indifferent. Jacinta always makes me feel like she’s happy to see me.
I climb over the railing and lower myself down next to her, warm concrete on bare legs, and a thrill rushes through me. The ledge is pretty wide but there’s technically nothing to stop us tumbling to the road below. It elicits just the right amount of fear, perfect for when you need to override other emotions.
Jacinta gives me a warm, one-armed hug, then passes me a plastic bottle of homemade vodka mix. I haven’t drunk that much alcohol, and Jacinta generally doesn’t drink either, but liquid courage was part of the plan for what we’re about to do.
‘To summer,’ I say, holding the bottle to the sky.
She lets out a breath. ‘To surviving school.’
I take a long swig to drown my reaction to those words, tasting a familiar tart-sweetness on my tongue. ‘I love passionfruit. It’s like…’ I try to land on the right description. ‘It’s like a tattoo of happiness on your tastebuds.’
Jacinta wrinkles her nose. ‘Nuh. It reminds me too much of jizz. All gooey and full of seeds.’
‘Ugh! Cint!’ I fake-gag. Jacinta’s super open about sex. She lost her virginity when she was in year eleven. The last guy I kissed was Lockie, and that’s as far as I’ve gone with anyone. Now it feels as if everyone has outgrown me in the past year while I’ve been watching from a distance. A part of me wants to stay in my innocent bubble forever, but another part of me wants to run to catch up. ‘So why’d you get it, then?’ I ask, holding up the drink. ‘If you don’t like passionfruit?’
She looks at me like it should be obvious. ‘It was on special.’
‘Right.’ I smile to cover the hot guilt I feel for my allowance when Jacinta has to stack shelves at IGA. I take another sip and search for a question to delay facing the reason we’re sitting up here a little longer. ‘How’s’—I glance at the audiobook app open on her phone screen—‘ The Power of Now ? It sounds like a cult book.’
Jacinta leans back against the railing, denim skirt sliding up her leg. ‘I mean, I get it. Now is all we have and it’s the only time that really exists and blah blah blah. And, I mean, my dad does mostly live in the moment. I guess he seems kinda zen sometimes because of it.’ She puts her hand out for the drink, looking thoughtful. ‘Pretty sure he’d give that up for, like, remembering what happened yesterday, though.’
I nod, looking out at the light-polluted horizon. ‘Fair.’
Jacinta’s dad has early-onset Alzheimer’s and lives in a nursing home. After Charlie, I thought someone you love dying was the worst thing that could happen. Then I met Jacinta and realised there’s more than one way to lose someone.
I lean back, my bones soaking up the vodka like sponges.
I became friends with Jacinta after Charlie died, but I’d known she existed for years. She’s the same year as my brother, so she just finished year twelve. We didn’t go to the same school—I’m at Franklin Grammar; she was at Pymble High—but we all caught the same bus. Got on at different stops. Never spoke. Charlie let me sit next to him on the bus—even though he was almost always on his phone with earbuds in watching YouTube—because he knew I liked a familiar and comforting buffer between me and most other people (and because Lockie and Charlie’s other mates caught the train). Jacinta sat at the back, pretty much alone, uniform faded and too small compared to mine, a perfect fit and ironed.
Then, a few months back, I saw her outside the food court at Franklin Shopping Centre, which we all call the Frank. We were both alone. Her: floating around aimlessly and slurping on smoothie dregs. Me: dragging myself out of bed for a few hours so my parents wouldn’t book extra sessions with my grief counsellor.
‘Hey,’ Jacinta had said, pointing her chewed-up straw at me and making me pause mid-stride. She smelled like various kinds of perfume, as if she’d been testing them all in Myer. ‘You used to catch my bus, yeah?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, I think so.’
I’ve never been great at making friends, and I wasn’t in the mood to talk, so I started to walk off. But then she said something that chewing-gummed my feet to the floor.
‘Yeah, you did. You and your brother.’ She looked around. ‘Is he here? I’ve only ever seen you as, like, a single unit.’
I turned to her, ready to scowl at her sick joke, but she was serious. ‘What?’ I said, trying to buy myself some time while I formulated an answer that wouldn’t melt me into a sobbing puddle.
She looked at me like I might be a bit stupid. ‘Your brother. You know, the one who manages to look athletic and intellectual and broody? You guys stopped catching the bus this year.’
I swallowed hard. She didn’t know.
Finally, I unglued my mouth. ‘Yeah. Yeah, he got a car. He’s driving us now.’ I didn’t plan on lying so directly, but that’s what came out. Maybe I’d lost my communication skills after months of friendshiplessness.
Obviously I had friends at school. Had had friends. Rach Tailor and, in a lesser way, Stephanie Chew, Tina Strunk, and the rest of the group. But I mostly hovered around the edges, with Rach being the tether that stopped me flying off into deep, friendless space alone. This was a side effect of being pretty introverted, I guess—of never inviting the rest of the group to my house or going to their parties because, like desert tortoises, some animals don’t need complex social structures.
But Rach and I were close. We bonded over a mutual Kewpie-mayonnaise-on-everything phase when she started at Franklin Grammar in year nine, we’ve read the entire Game of Thrones series in our two-person book club, and we created our Cloud-Formation-Loving Girlies Club as a ‘screw you’ to our English teacher, who said us ‘girls’ always had our ‘heads in the clouds’. I mean, sure, we didn’t sleep over at each other’s houses every weekend and link arms at school or whatever, but she knew I’m not that type and, unlike the others, she understood that instead of taking it personally.
But when Charlie died, unwanted sympathy widened the gap between me and the group. By that point Lockie had already stopped replying to my messages, pretending we were never a thing, and even Rach, my one hope of normality, started treating me like this fragile thing she was scared to break. She made Charlie a third person in a friendship I so badly needed to be only the two of us. I couldn’t stand it, so I drifted away. Now everyone from school just puts their plans in the group chat, knowing I see them, and I guess they can tick ‘reaching out to the grieving girl’ off their to-do list.
In the Frank, Jacinta had shrugged, crunching on some ice from her nearly empty cup. ‘Shame. I miss the perving opportunity. Your brother’s hot, in an intense kind of way.’
‘Ugh! No!’ I groaned.
She made a face like she wasn’t sorry. ‘Anyway, I’m Jacinta.’
I hesitated, but only for a second. ‘Lucy.’
‘Cool. Well, I’m getting another smoothie if you wanna come. They’re doing a free refill promotion on banana.’
I thought about facing the upcoming summer alone and wondered if it might not be as much of a relief as I’d imagined.
‘I have a VIP card that gets us one extra topping,’ I said.
Jacinta smiled. ‘I knew there was a reason I talked to you.’
That afternoon we obsessed over golden retriever puppies in the pet shop and tried on tragic clothes in overpriced shops and I felt one per cent better than totally miserable. And just like that Jacinta became my only reason besides school to leave the house. We started hanging out—at the Frank, the chicken shop, the overpass.
I feel good around Jacinta. Like maybe I’m okay after all. Because, according to her, I have no reason not to be.
Now, on the overpass, we talk about famous cults and our favourite scenes from our latest Netflix obsession while we build up our courage. I tell Jacinta about the plains-wanderer flying into my window, but not that it’s a sign because that might be too weird, even for her, and I’d like to keep my only friend. We’ve finished more than half of the vodka mix when the moon emerges from behind a cloud, glinting off the plastic bottle as I raise it to take another sip. A truck shoots by and the concrete beneath our legs hums. A welcome swallow appears from its nest underneath us, darting around our heads before disappearing again.
Jacinta shuffles forward on the ledge and glances back at me, eyes flashing. ‘Okay. Life bomb. You ready?’
I put the bottle down. ‘Yep.’
We didn’t invent life bombs. They’re a trend started by this YouTuber we’re both into, Bella Darling. She’s an asexual American with an amazing wardrobe, a super cute Texan accent, and four adorable pet cats that constantly stuff up her videos. Jacinta loves her makeup tips and I love her life hacks. Anyway, life bombs, Bella says, are acts that explode your nerves with adrenaline. Shock you into this moment, like it’s all that matters. They’re supposed to make you feel completely free and outside yourself, even if it’s only for an instant. Jacinta got halfway through an audiobook on neuroscience once and reckons it checks out. The only rule of life bombs, according to Bella (and I admit this might be for legal reasons), is they should never put you or others in harm’s way.
Jacinta came up with the idea for our first life bomb when we were sitting up here the other night, explaining the ways it was actually kind of feminist if you thought about it. Reclaiming ownership of our bodies. I didn’t care about the justification. I’d said I was in, so here we are.
Another vehicle approaches in the distance. The overpass is low enough that, at a certain point, we know its headlights will catch us like a polaroid.
‘One,’ I say, suddenly unsure I can really do this.
‘Two,’ Jacinta says, loud enough to convince me.
‘THREE!’ we scream.
We lift our tops up, warm air caressing our bare boobs, just catching the shocked expression on the face of a bearded ute-driver below. A current runs through me, electric-bright. Then the ute’s brakes squeal and it swerves towards oncoming traffic. The driver only just corrects before disappearing beneath our feet. We yank our tops back down and stare at the fresh tyre marks below before looking back at each other, eyes wide and hearts thumping.
‘Holy shit,’ I say, as the acrid smell of burnt rubber reaches my nostrils. My nerves have exploded and for a moment, I am the moment. I’m alive. I’m free.
It turns out, there’s more than one way to feel transcendent.
‘Okay,’ Jacinta says, bringing me back to reality. ‘That might have been a bad idea.’
I glance at her, still dazed, but I don’t agree.
Jacinta crosses herself and looks up to the sky. ‘Sorry, Queen Bella. We meant no harm.’ Then she says what we’re both thinking. ‘We should probably go. Like, right now.’
But as I stand up I’m drink-dizzy, maybe even kind of drunk, and I sway slightly towards the edge of the overpass. Jacinta grabs my arm and pulls me back, hard. ‘Woah, watch it L!’
When I’ve regained my balance we lock eyes in a moment of relief, and the universe in which I fall branches off in the opposite direction. Then we pull ourselves over the barrier and go home.