Chapter 7 #2
Inviting Fran to the party had not felt like a choice either, but for other reasons entirely.
If a day was to be about me, and what I wanted, Fran would be there.
And if I wanted anyone around, it was Fran.
A day without his company could not possibly contain all of what made me who I was.
He was the fragment of enjoyment amidst all of the expectation; he was the streamers and balloons and hydrangeas and daisies.
If he’d had any reservations about being the only boy at a high tea otherwise filled with thirteen-year-old girls, he never mentioned it.
But I don’t think he did. I think we felt the same.
The girls arrived in ones and twos, and although I was wearing my new lace dress, and Mum had not braided my hair this time but curled it, and the clock said 10 a.m. just like the invitations, I did not feel ready.
Breaths caught shallow in my throat, too buoyant to go all the way down, and I thought about dying, just a little.
It was the same feeling I had outside home class every morning at school, as I worked to steel myself for the onslaught of the day.
Death was always the ace up my sleeve if things got too hard, the freedom of the possibility removing any need for the grim eventuality of something so drastic.
Poppy and Mara, who had allowed me to stay in their group, but only just, always arrived at class before me, and having to infiltrate their conversations felt like trying to establish friendship for the first time, every single day, despite having known each other for so long.
It was better if one of the two was away, then the other would rush over to me and act far more familiar than they otherwise would, because they needed someone to stand in for the role of friend.
It just did not get any more comfortable, in all my years of schooling, not even a little bit.
That terror and ache from my first day of kindergarten stayed with me until graduation.
Nobody ever wanted to hear that, though.
Those making it want to quickly forget the struggles of the faking-it folk.
We muddy the waters they seek to keep clear.
When Fran arrived, I ran to the door and considered grabbing his hand and continuing right on through it and away.
If I had asked him, he too would have fled the party and come with me to our tree, where we could have laughed about the girls in lace dresses sipping tea on my deck.
We could have watched them from afar like twitchers in our bird hide.
Instead, I opened the door to see him in his best buttoned shirt, flowers from the garden in his hand, and I knew it had been a mistake to ask him to come.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said, smile wide and flowers extended in my direction.
I wanted to eat them. I wanted to tear out my hairclips and rip off my dress and beat my chest and turn so wild I might hit the boundary of our friendship.
It felt unknowable in a way that truly scared me.
I knew the boundary out there on the deck – if I liked the wrong band or even the wrong member of the right band, if I wore my hair the wrong way, if I had the wrong kind of drink bottle, if I acted too childishly, if I ever mentioned mermaids again, I would find myself beyond it, alone.
The girls ran a tight ship and there were many who would have been happy to be my replacement.
‘We don’t hang out with Nora anymore,’ they might say, and people would try to guess exactly where I had gone wrong.
‘There are a lot of girls here,’ I replied.
‘I know.’
‘They might not be that nice,’ I said.
‘That’s okay.’
Dad appeared beside me and welcomed Fran in, holding the door wide so he could walk around me. I did not take the flowers. Fran brought them outside to the deck and placed them on the table instead. Never have twelve eyeballs stared harder.
‘This is Fran – he’s our neighbour and a great friend to our Nora,’ Mum announced, and the eyes were not yet satiated.
‘You never told us Fran was a boy,’ Nicola, a new and named addition to the group, announced, placing her chin in her hands on the table, her eyes flashing danger and glee.
‘Was I meant to specify that?’
Mum laughed as she unwrapped the last platter from its clingfilm and left us to it.
My parents were far more interested in ‘leaving me to it’ than I would have liked.
The ‘it’ was never clear, but a guardian would almost always have helped, especially at parties.
I started eating sandwiches to fill the silence and could not seem to find a way to stop.
‘Mara kissed a boy on her street last holidays,’ Poppy announced, eyes darting from Fran to me and back again, a smirk crossing her symmetrical face.
By this stage, with her two ear piercings in each ear, Poppy tended to set the tone for the maturing group, and I did not like the one she was setting for this day at all. The twelve eyes bored deeper still.
‘Have you two kissed?’ Nicola asked, obviously deciding Poppy’s masterful subtlety might mean a missed opportunity.
‘No,’ I replied, trying to keep my voice neutral in a way that neither offended Fran nor made it seem as though it was something I thought about.
‘Would you?’ Poppy asked, taking her first bite of a cupcake, and looking as though the unfolding situation was just as delicious.
My brain was not moving fast enough. It could never move fast enough. Anxiety spilled like oil and I could not fathom how to pull myself out clean.
‘If Nora wanted to,’ Fran replied, as though it was as easy a question to answer as whether he wanted another glass of Coke.
Giggles filled the space, and my cheeks went red.
I remember feeling as though I was embarrassed, but not unhappy he had said it.
It dawned on me in that moment that I would have been upset if he had answered any differently.
If those feelings had existed prior, I had paid them no attention until then.
‘Well, come on then, it is her birthday,’ Mara added, feeling braver in the pack than she ever was alone.
The eyes looked and I wanted to gouge each one of them out with a skewer from the fruit kebabs topped with watermelon stars.
It was my fucking birthday and they were feasting on my carcass like a pack of glittery hyenas.
I decided it was time to seize back some of this collective energy, and I pushed down the shame their laughter had caused to spring in my chest.
‘Not in front of you perverts. We’ll do it later,’ I said, hoping they would not call my bluff.
‘As if you will – you’ve never even kissed anyone,’ Nicola said, utilising this sensitive information like a trip-wire, her arms folded and a smug grin crossing her face.
Violence filled my mind, and I thought about the times I had started fights with cousins and the children of my parents’ friends when we were young.
Always by surprise, always with disproportionate force for the situation at hand.
I hoped Nicola, I hoped all of them, would feel the hot threat of it even if they did not understand what it meant.
My rage was not something I often thought about, but there it lay in my body anyway, never far from reach.
It was long-tinted with guilt provoked by my mother, who could never abide little girls feeling dark things.
In this moment, however, I took comfort in the fact that it was a military-grade secret weapon I could deploy in this infant knife-fight at any time.
For once, I felt older than the rest of them, more adequately equipped.
‘Fine, but you’re not watching,’ I said, standing and holding out my hand.
Fran put his in mine without hesitation. This is how to be a friend, I wanted to shout back at them – take note. We went inside, and I led him down the stairs to my room, closing the door behind us. It gave me a few moments of silence to let my mind catch up.
‘You’re right, they’re not that nice,’ he said. ‘We can just say we kissed, I don’t –’
I will never know what Fran was going to say, or whether we would have found our way there in our own time organically, because I stepped forward and kissed him.
Perhaps the initial motive was silencing the teen coven on my deck upstairs, but they were gone from my mind the moment my lips touched his.
I had wanted to kiss Fran and so I did. And for once, my body and my mind were in the same place at the same time.
It was a chaste kiss, my first, and his too, but it felt more expansive than all of the world’s oceans and the whole wide blue sky.
I kept my hands on his face, holding it lightly as I stood in an electrical storm.
He hovered his hands in mid-air, then let them come to rest on the tops of my arms. We were frozen in time; we were perfect.
After what could have been minutes or hours, Fran stepped back, half a smile on his face.
‘Was it okay that I did that?’ I asked, suddenly horrified at the idea he might not have wanted to kiss me at all.
‘Yeah, it was definitely okay,’ he replied. ‘You wanted to, though, didn’t you? It wasn’t just because . . .’
‘I wanted to kiss someone so they would shut up about it,’ I started, and I saw his half-smile become a straight line. ‘But I wanted to kiss you even before now, I think – I just didn’t realise it.’
‘Okay . . .’
‘I would like to keep kissing you, actually, if you wouldn’t mind. Not now, but like, in general. In the future.’
Fran’s smile came back tenfold and a small laugh shot out of him like the crack of a party popper.
‘I think that sounds good,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to kiss you before today, too. Just so you know.’
We went back up to the party, and I do not remember what happened for the rest of the afternoon.
Girls giggled, cake was eaten, presents were opened.
Who even cares. It was all filler, delaying my chance to keep doing the thing I actually wanted to do for my birthday, and every other day after that.