9
LOCKIE MILLER APPEARED in my life like a sunrise, lighting the whole thing up. He started at Franklin Grammar when he was in year nine and, before he ever even came to our house, I noticed him hanging out with Charlie’s group. I loved his full lips and apricot-gold curls. I loved his faded, surf-themed laptop cover. I loved the way he wasn’t embarrassed to sing the school song at assemblies. I loved that he picked up a piece rubbish if he saw it on the oval or quad, quickly dipping to the ground even while he was halfway through a joke with someone as if it was second nature. I loved the blue tinge his lips sometimes had from his favourite Gatorade flavour and I loved the way his eyes seemed to flick to me whenever we passed in the corridor; how his cheeks turned a tiny bit pink as he said, ‘Hey’. According to Rach, the expression on my face after these interactions was consistent with my brain melting into a puddle of goo.
‘You would literally drool over his sneeze,’ she said, not unkindly.
‘I want to be a piece of rubbish on the oval,’ I told her. ‘I want to be blue Gatorade.’
Lockie at our house after footy practice with Charlie, in the kitchen eating toasted sandwiches, laughing at the jokes I made about Dad’s fridge-magnet addiction. Lockie passing me the PlayStation controller, our fingers brushing, nudging me when I saved a goal in FIFA and saying, ‘Nice work, Evans’. Lockie in our backyard playing classic catches with Charlie and Kenji and Charlie’s girlfriend at the time, Zara. Lockie joke-tackling me when no one was looking, smelling of grass and skin, the shadows of his abs as his shirt lifted. Lockie and me eating Weet-Bix in the kitchen while watching epic surfing moments on YouTube after he slept over, when Zara and Charlie broke up and my brother was too hungover to get out of bed until 4 pm, and the way Lockie looked at me, a bit self-conscious, and said, ‘Um, is it bad that I kind of don’t want Charlie to get up?’ Lockie, Lockie, Lockie. I knew it was cliched to like him, because every girl did but, despite that, I thought my liking was unique and special. It felt like there was something in him that was missing in me, some emptiness or defect only he could fill or fix, and if we were a thing maybe it would make me whole.
He slept over again after an end of year party, a few weeks before Charlie died. I was coming back from the bathroom in the early hours of the morning when he was getting up to go. My narwhal T-shirt covered about as much of my legs as his blue checked boxers did of his and he smelled like musky, sleepy boy. Wanting burned inside me.
‘Hey,’ he said. His voice was groggy and he was smiling like we shared a secret, which I guess we did, but until that moment I hadn’t let myself believe it. Suddenly the hallway felt narrower than it was in reality and I was pressed lightly against the linen cupboard door, handle pushing into my back. His soft lips brushed mine and I felt him growing against my hip bone, just a T-shirt and boxers between us, and I thought the fire burning in my pelvis might melt me into the carpet—a glowing puddle of liquid light. Then a noise down my parents’ end of the house made us pull apart, our breath fast and mouths glistening, my whole body tingling and Lockie looking out-of-character shy.
‘Shit. Sorry,’ he whispered. ‘We better not, hey?’ Then he groaned. ‘You’re killing me though.’
When I got back to bed I played the kiss over and over in my mind to keep it warm, happiness fizzing inside me.
Lockie messaged me the next day. Is it really bad to admit I have a massive thing for my best mate’s funny, hot little sister? I messaged Rach, the only person I’d ever told about my Lockie obsession, and made her promise to keep it a secret. She messaged back with appropriate excitement: LUCY ELIZABETH EVANS YOU SEXY PIECE OF ARSE I TOLD YOU!! Then I buried my grin in my pillow and tried to breathe.
The unspoken rule was that Lockie and I wouldn’t tell Charlie we kissed. Because despite my brother being mostly cool with me hanging out with him and his friends, I knew he’d flip out about this. But Charlie was too often glued to his phone or laptop, subconsciously chewing his lip, to notice anything weird. Besides, Lockie was away. Over the next two weeks he was down in Rye at his mum’s house. He messaged me photos of the ocean and the barely running car he was buying from his uncle, and I messaged him narwhal facts and photos of hideous fridge magnets I’d snuck into Dad’s collection. We talked on the phone once, awkward and exhilarating. I fantasised myself into being Lockie’s future girlfriend: him driving me to the beach to teach me to surf, me posting photos of us on socials, us holding hands during lunch at school. I lay flopped on my bed dreaming of exactly what it would be like when we had sex, picturing myself in that moment like I was watching a different girl. Someone better. Someone complete.
The day Lockie got home he messaged: Are you going to Kenji’s thing tomorrow? and I said I was, even though I wouldn’t have otherwise, and I had to half-beg Charlie to let me go with him.
Lockie was the one who drove me to the hospital from that party, following behind the ambulance, telling me over and over as he gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white: He’s gonna be okay. He’s gonna be okay. He’s gonna be okay.
In the days after Charlie died, Lockie didn’t reply to my messages. At the funeral he could barely look at me. Then he sent one message, four words that shattered me: I’m sorry. I can’t. By the time I finally got back to school he was laughing with his mates at lunch, and it was clear he wanted to forget what happened. Just like that we were strangers, as if we’d never kissed, as if I dreamed the whole thing, and every time we passed in a corridor I kept my eyes down and tried to forget what it felt like to care about anyone. To feel two kinds of heartbreak at once. Then he finished year twelve, went to the Gold Coast for schoolies, and I wondered if I’d ever see him again.
Until now. At the Frank.
So there’s Ben with his lovely eyelashes, and there’s Lockie with some 3D cinema glasses pushed back through his apricot-gold curls, and there’s the Dog-Mum-cap guy, and there’s Rach in the thick mascara she says distracts from her nose, which I’ve always tried to convince her she does not need surgery on, and there’s Stephanie Chew with her hair in that forever-bun so people know she does jazz-ballet, and there’s Tina Strunk, who is holding hands with Lockie . Jacinta is glancing between all of us curiously.
‘Hey guys,’ I say to the wider group, hoping my forced smile hides my racing mind. Lockie’s looking at me like he’s surprised to see me with a friend and, apparently, having fun. He subtly slides his hands out of Tina’s to rub the back of his neck.
‘ Hey Luce,’ Rach says, in that too gentle, too caring tone she’s been using in every single interaction we’ve had since it happened. The one that makes me want to either throw up or run. ‘I put that we were going to a movie in the group chat. Did you see it?’ she says. She glances at Jacinta and doesn’t hide her hurt. Rach is the kind of person who is brave enough to wear her entire vulnerable, messy heart on her sleeve and not even be embarrassed about it. I envy that.
Before I can answer, Steph chimes in. ‘You know she saw it, Rach. She just didn’t reply. Again .’ Tina makes a noise like ‘exactly’ before slurping the dregs of her drink and I think it’s safe to say they’ve both run out of sympathy for me. Either that or they never liked me in the first place.
Rach cuts her eyes at them like ‘leave her alone’, but I’m too distracted to pay that minor part of this whole situation much attention. I turn to Ben. ‘Um, how do you know’—I go to say Lockie and then my friends but think better of both—‘everyone?’
‘Oh,’ Ben says, glancing at the group. ‘Dinesh and Lockie are mates.’
Dog-Mum-cap guy smiles broadly at me, either completely missing or trying to make up for the tension crackling all around us. ‘We’re frenemies, really. Interschool Battle of the Bands. I shred guitar and Lockie picks at the strings like a monkey.’
‘Right,’ I say, at the same time Lockie says, ‘Ouch, dude. Last time I share my Maltesers with you .’
So, that means Dinesh and Ben must have just finished school like Lockie. If they don’t recognise Jacinta they probably went to Baker College, not Pymble High.
‘Are you mates with Ben?’ Dinesh asks me, polite but curious.
I try to think of an answer, but Ben gets in first.
‘No,’ he says, like a very accurate but hurtful knife to my chest, although he immediately looks guilty about how harsh it sounded. ‘I mean, we only just met. Lucy brought that plains-wanderer into the sanctuary the other day.’
Something comes over Dinesh’s expression that indicates Ben told him all about my escapades, maybe even my flashing. ‘Ohh,’ he says with a wide smile. ‘ That Lucy.’
Heat glows beneath my skin and I want to bury myself down into whatever’s below the Frank. An old toxic waste dump. Mesozoic fossils, maybe.
Now it’s Ben’s turn to look embarrassed and there’s a beat of uncomfortable silence. I hate myself for needing to fill it. ‘Plains-wanderers are super endangered,’ I say.
More silence.
‘ Anyway ,’ Tina says, checking her phone. The case has a quote from Mary Oliver on it: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? For some reason it makes me irrationally angry. ‘I have to be on the 12:40 bus, so…’ Tina adds.
‘Yeah, we’ve got to go too,’ Dinesh says, turning to Ben. ‘My punctual ethnic Dad awaits us.’
‘No worries,’ I say, then cringe, because as if any of them cares whether I had worries.
But then Lockie catches my eye for half a second and my pulse thunders. His lips part like he’s about to say something but can’t because we’re not alone. Then he shuts his mouth and the moment’s over. The group wanders off with awkward goodbyes, taking the smell of buttery popcorn with them. I stand there blinking, feeling nauseous.
Jacinta turns to me. ‘Two things,’ she says. ‘First: I like that Dinesh guy’s cap. Second: that was supremely uncomfortable.’
I let out a long breath. ‘Yeah.’
‘Thanks heaps for the intros, by the way.’ She only sounds a little bit sarcastic.
‘Sorry. There was just…a lot going on.’
‘Clearly. I’m guessing Ben is Swervey Pervey’s hot zoo son?’
‘It’s a sanctuary,’ I mutter, mouth dry. ‘But yeah.’
‘And that Lockie guy? The one who was looking at you like you have history with a capital H?’
He was? ‘We hooked up last year. Once. But I guess he’s got a thing with Tina now.’ I try to tell myself not to hate her for that. If Rach kept her promise, no one else knows about Lockie and me. But I still feel a hot spike of jealousy. ‘We all go to the same school,’ I continue, ‘but, ah, I’m not really close with those girls.’
‘Yeah. I kind of picked up on that.’ Jacinta purses her lips, like she’s trying to decide what might make me feel better. ‘Want to bitch about them? I promise to be on your side even if it’s your fault.’
I shake my head. ‘Not really.’
She nods. ‘Well, if it helps, you don’t have any passionfruit seed in your teeth for once.’
I force a laugh. ‘Yeah. Thanks.’ But it doesn’t help. I feel hollowed out. The resurfaced memories of last summer have cracked me open and now they’re stabbing at something inside me. ‘I’m over the job hunt,’ I say. ‘Let’s go do something else.’
‘Agreed.’
I dump my resumes in a bin and we head through the shiny, noisy shopping centre to the makeup section of Myer. Cases and counters of glistening glosses and compact powders are laid out before us. I try to focus on all the pretty things. I try to hold it together. Jacinta picks up some iridescent, limited-edition gold shadow that probably costs an entire IGA shift. She looks at it with longing and gushes about all the ways she could use it. I can tell she’s trying to help me forget the awkward run-in so I make all the right noises, but inside I’m starting to spiral. The party. The smell of chlorine. A sickening crack . Water droplets on Charlie’s twitching lip. Fluorescent hospital lights. Dad’s alien-sounding sobs. My brother: alive then dead. Gone forever, just like that. How?
And then it’s here: the black hole, the weight of it, a dense cosmic void in the middle of my chest. It’s sucking at me with a rushing sound in my ears so loud I’m amazed no one else seems to hear it, so loud I’m sure it’s going to turn the entire shopping centre into an airless vacuum, and I know this time the feeling won’t just pass. I glance around wildly at the other people in the Frank, looking for even a pinprick of dark matter near their chests that tells me I’m not alone. Surely I’m not alone. Doesn’t anyone else sense this gaping hole ? How can they not? And if they can, how is everyone acting so normal?
I try to swallow but my throat’s too thick. I’m starting to drown in what happened that day but also in something much, much vaster and deeper. I need a way to stay on the surface, with the Christmas sales and food-court smells and overpriced eyeshadows. I’m about to race to the bathroom in the hope of outrunning this thing, when an idea comes to me out of nowhere. It’s a stupid idea, a bad idea, but now I can’t unthink it. Because it might work.
I glance around. There are no Myer employees anywhere near us, and the only other shopper close by is busy trying to figure out what shade of foundation she wants. On a shelf underneath the display eyeshadows, the packaged pallets are stacked high. As if they’d even notice one was missing.
My breath shortens. Am I really doing this? Then an adrenaline-fuelled white noise starts up in my ears drowning out the black-hole suck, and suddenly I’m here, I’m now, and nothing else matters.
I’m doing this.
Before I can reconsider, I snatch one of the limited-edition gold eyeshadows and slip it down the waist band of my skirt, covering it with my T-shirt.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Jacinta hisses at me.
‘Life bomb,’ I hiss back, feeling like I’ve just done something very stupid but also very right because my pounding heart’s telling me I’m alive. ‘Don’t you want it?’
‘L! Seriously? ’ she says, looking extremely freaked out but also, maybe, a tiny bit excited. ‘Can we get out of here, please?’
We walk away from the makeup section as calmly as possible, but once we think we’ve got away with it we’re both running and giddy-laughing back towards the carpark. As we jump in the car and slam the doors shut, I breathe everything out. I’ve backed away from the edge of the universe and I feel better. So much better, in fact, I can almost forget what I saw when we were tumbling out of Myer: the leopard-print clothing shop owner on a break, the one with my resume, who I’m pretty sure witnessed the whole thing.