Chapter 5
Ada
“Last order up,” Aggie bellows through the kitchen pass. “Spag-bol for Benny!”
I groan extra loud from my playpen, making sure she can hear me. Aggie’s spaghetti bolognese resembles my mother’s as much as the boots on my feet; the passata sauce comes from a jar and is loaded with garlic powder, carrot chunks, green peas and more mince than pasta.
Aggie ducks her head, glaring at me through the kitchen hole. “What was that? More criticism from the peanut gallery?”
“Mate, can you at least not call it ‘spag-bol?’”
She gives me a look, and I turn my face to the ceiling. “Eh mannaggia! What have the Italians ever done, besides Mussolini, to deserve this?”
Aggie cackles. “I’ve been looking up Jake Graves-Holland. He’s six-bloody-four. Surprised he didn’t crush you.”
“He tried.”
Aggie cackles harder as Cece rushes to the window to collect the bolognese.
She’s practically floating. And all because Will Sharpe’s single.
But that’s not a problem—she’s not hooking up with that afterbirth.
Only I can’t tell Cece that. She’s deep in delusion, and the best laid plans take time, money, and deceptive ability.
Lucky for me, I’ve got all three in spades: no job, Christmas earworm royalties, and a ninety-eight percent masking capability on my Autism assessment.
No one pretends to be a normal person like Ada Renaldo pretends to be a normal person.
I sip my tequila, the burn in my throat mirroring the rage twisting my insides.
I’ve agreed to go to this reunion. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.
It’s lucky Cece’s caught up in her fantasies of marrying one of the biggest twats in our year.
If she wasn’t, she’d know better than to bring me anywhere near this reunion.
Then again, maybe it’s not luck. Maybe it’s fate.
I didn’t have friends at school. Not even Cece.
She did her best, but Pukekohe’s a small town, and its roots go deep.
Local families are entwined through generations of marriages and grudges.
A network that I, a fifteen-year-old virgin, had no idea how to navigate.
All that’s to say, the friendship ranks had closed long before I arrived.
A foreign man in a foreign land with a bad attitude and a flute case in hand.
Cece and I met working the Saturday shift at the newsagents.
It was an instant friendship. We bonded over YA romance novels, indie rock, and surviving the sleazy old guys who bought plastic-wrapped porno mags off us.
Cece loaned me her clothes and laughed at my jokes and taught me how to put on mascara without blinding myself.
She was funny and clever. The first Kiwi I met who made me feel like I wasn't a complete freak. Behind the news agency counter, we could dance and gossip and laugh until we cried, but at school it was a cold war, and we acted like strangers. Cece had the same group of mid-popular friends since kindergarten, and they were not fans of me. Her loyalty could only go so far. Behind the newsagency counter, we could dance and gossip and laugh until we cried, but at school we acted like strangers. Adults forget how deadly serious teenage politics are. How your world turns on what your peers think of you. Cece’s forgotten.
She remembers me getting picked on, but not the grinding, daily terror of it.
She resents being born into her brother’s shadow, but back in the day, I would’ve killed for Tristan Taylor’s protection.
I was hauled into the white-hot glow of teenage brutality and flayed alive for eighteen months.
It started my first morning at Pukekohe High. Sidelong looks and snickers about the flute case I’d been told to bring with me. No one introduced themselves or offered to show me around. I sat beside Hayley Dean in homeroom, and the first thing she asked was if I was from Afghanistan.
“My parents are Italian,” I told her. “I’m from Melbourne.”
She giggled like I’d said something funny, and Shannon Strom pushed the toe of his dirty boot against the flute case I'd parked under my desk.
“What’s that?”
I told him it was a flute, and he grinned. “You ever go to band camp?”
I wasn’t allowed to watch movies with a PG-rating, let alone one where a dude fucks a pie, so I said, “Yeah, lots of times,” and Shannon, Hayley, and everyone within a four-desk radius laughed so hard the teacher had to stop taking attendance to tell them to shut up.
My parents said I’d make friends. That kids would be nice to me because I was new.
As I sat there, trying desperately not to cry, the final years of my education flashed in front of my eyes like a sped-up nightmare.
My parents had lied. I was going to be exactly as trapped and lonely as I thought I’d be.
The only person who’d talk to me at lunch was Rhys, a burnout who chain-smoked Alpine Ultra-Lights he stole off his mum.
The two of us hid behind a big tree at the edge of the front field, and I listened to him explain Taekwondo moves while he ripped cigs.
I wanted to join him, if only to piss off my traitor parents, but my lungs were still pristine and full of flute-playing potential back then.
After lunch came English. I was seated in front of Jenny Wallis. The future Mrs. Will Sharpe was gossiping with her friends, and she wasn’t being quiet about it.
“I heard Rhys fingered that new girl at lunch,” she told Hayley Dean. “So foul.”
My whole body went numb as I wondered if there was maybe some other new girl who was getting openly shit-talked. But Jenny went and cleared that right up for me:
“You’ve seen her, yeah? That immigrant girl? I can’t believe she likes Rhys. His fingernails are, like, black. She probably has a disease now.”
I turned as though in a dream to face a beacon of blonde Kiwi beauty. Jenny Wallis was no ugly duckling. She looked like a TV teenager with her glossy lips, sparkly pink nails and perfect skin. Our eyes met, and she screwed up her nose like I stank. “Can I help you?”
“Uh, yeah? I can hear you?”
“Oh,” Jenny said sweetly. “Sorryyyyy.”
A hot ball formed in my throat, and I was microseconds from crying when Jenny did something she shouldn’t have. She smiled wide enough to reveal the huge gaps in her front teeth.
I saw a fork in the road before me. The second path was twisted and dark, but it was a second path. And fifteen-year-old me dove onto it like it was a free ticket to Paris.
“Why don’t you have braces?” I asked, scrunching my brow in concern. “Do they not have dentists in Pukekohe?”
Saying it felt like landing a knockout blow. My timing, the acid in my delivery, the fake sympathy, everything about it was perfect. So was the way Jenny’s friends, no doubt trained from years of petty callouts, burst into shocked giggles.
Jenny’s face crumpled, and hot triumph exploded in my chest.
“Bray-cessss,” I said, dragging each letter until it screamed. “You put them on fucked up teeth? So they don’t look like Stonehenge?”
Jenny’s friends let out more shocked laughter, and she started crying. Big fat tears welled in her big, blue eyes like she wasn’t the one who started all of this.
“Sorry,” I snapped. “But I didn’t hook up with Rhys, and it’s fucked up you said that right in front of me.”
She didn’t respond. I watched her push back her chair and run from the room, sobbing.
Within a week, she had braces, and I had my own personal Stalin.
She spent the rest of my high school life calling for my head, and as much as I hated her, part of me always felt like I deserved it.
Making fun of her teeth was a low blow, and I knew it even back then.
But I paid for that low blow a thousand times over.
I bounced from abusive encounter to abusive encounter like a pinball and the only thing that kept me alive was knowing it wouldn’t last forever.
I’d get into the furthest university I could find and leave it all behind.
Bullying can be quite motivational. At least it was for me.
I played the flute every minute I wasn’t at work or school.
My fingers wore down the steel pads so quickly that my parents had to shell out for two replacement flutes.
But as long as I was first chair in youth orchestra and not actively crying, they put up with me.
I was accepted into Juilliard the winter of my final year in high school.
I took two correspondence courses and managed to graduate without sitting exams. I still have no idea how my dad swung the academic exception, but I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now.
As soon as I handed in my last paper, I started packing for New York.
Cece and Rhys were the only people I said goodbye to.
I was at school on a Wednesday and in Manhattan by Thursday, vanishing the way I’d wanted the second I stepped into Pukekohe High.
Only now I’m going back.
I look at the glittery, spiral-bound notepad lying innocuously beside my tequila. The first few pages are full of plans for Cece’s makeover, but the back twenty hold my plans for everyone else. A shadow scheme.
The seeds of that scheme are many and yet to blossom; I’ve got a month to bring my retribution to bloom.
It might be petty, seeking revenge after all these years, but fuck it.
The moral high ground is an illusion that people give victims. The meek don’t inherit the earth, they get shit-kicked until they disappear.