Within the hour, I regretted not asking for that day off. Within three, I regretted so much as leaving my bed. I’d been nuts to think Mum wouldn’t understand! Just because she often let Charlie stay off school for stubbing his toe didn’t in any way mean she would fail to register my ankle cast. Something must’ve been wrong with my head after that smack from the door.
Things went from bad to worse, what with my inability to carry anything for myself without toppling. I couldn’t accompany my friends to the girls’ loos for makeup and chatting because anyone else who came in turned their nose up at me for taking up twice the legroom. Then the throngs of people jostling through the canteen doors had me over. Twice!
To top it all, Jordy seemed to be off sick. What could he possibly have been ill with to be more eligible for bed rest than me? The mind boggled, but every estimation made my heart go squish at looming thoughts of him unconscious in hospital or dead. So in my time of misery, there was no one worthwhile to spy on from a distance at break.
Sitting out in PE was hell as well, mostly because I couldn’t actually sit on the ground without it taking me years to get up. I spent the whole time leaning against the netball court fence on crutches while my classmates practised track and dove into the long-jump pit, getting sandy knickers. I’m not saying it wasn’t amusing, but it didn’t make up for a fractured ankle.
Keisha and Chantalle enjoyed this novelty for free, sunbathing on the grass with their school-crested T-shirts knotted up and their sweatshirts serving as pillows. Even in May, it was technically winter uniform time, not that old Frostypants gave a fig.
I frothed with jealousy seeing the way they were relaxing horizontally. Even lying down, they both had blatant boobs – I’d have nothing to speak of in a standing position and swimming costume. They probably didn’t care about exams, and because they didn’t care about any school stuff, they wouldn’t have any Level 7 predictions to disappoint. I should’ve been happy, thinking of how according to Rindi, Keisha had been just as smart as Chantalle in Primary school and they’d both simply lost all interest as soon as it became obvious that waitressing would always have them if no one else wanted to. Instead, I felt frustration at how they just sailed through life without a care in the world. They were both fit as well, despite never participating in PE – for Chantalle’s part, it was probably due to the swim team, but Keisha could only be explained by really good genes.
The rest of my day consisted of more squirm-making revision sessions and mock tests. By last lesson, my mind was completely cluttered, when I’d been hoping to keep pretty neighbourly to sane this late into Mum’s pregnancy.
That was when, in the very middle of Science, Devon turned to me and spurted these chilling words: “It’s my birthday next Thursday.”
“What, SATs week? Bad luck…”
“Oh, I don’t mind…”
“How come?”
“I just like springtime!” she gushed. “The daffodils I planted are finally sprouting, the sky stays blue, and everything is beautiful!”
Whatever she’d had for breakfast, I needed some. “Dev,” I said. “What on earth have you been putting in your cereal?”
“Milk and sugar – lots of sugar. But then I brush my teeth again…”
Coming from anyone else, it would sound obsessive-compulsive – but my messiest, most artistic mate had no regard for whether the glitter she immersed herself in was completely sanitary.
“Mmm…” I mumbled. I hadn’t had any breakfast, or lunch, mostly because of turbulence in the canteen and the many difficulties related to pouring milk or working a toaster with crutches while trying to conserve energy for my speedy hop to the bus stop.
“What’s up?” she asked. She was looking at me with her head on one side like a little dog.
Don’t tell her the dog thing, don’t tell her the dog thing, don’t-
“Dog. Um. You’re… kinda like a dog.”
“Whaaat?” she gasped. “A dog? Why?!”
Now why did I say THAT?
“Sorry, I meant… I don’t know what I meant…”
“Are you OK?” she rephrased, suspiciously.
“…Uh, yeah. Sorry. It’s just, the baby, and the… other baby, and all that.”
“What was the dog thing?” she insisted. “It’s no big deal. I always thought I was like a poodle – they can get all dolled up, but have a talent for seeking out rats.”
“Rats?”
“Love rats.”
“Oh.”
I clenched my fists and attempted to concentrate on the mock paper. How was I supposed to answer questions on electric circuits with the different sections of my brain barely linking up properly?
Mrs Newton had taken over our Science class this month, and had words with me about lateness upon entering her classroom – crutches or not. She was now on the other side of the room, calmly talking Asta through the difference between protons and proteins (well, maybe). Norma was cursively rounding off her third page!
“Omigod!” I groaned. “Norma’s on page three!”
All the boys looked up.
“Not like that,” I snapped, feeling utterly lousy and unable to explain what I’d meant without starting to bore myself. If things carried on like this, I would chain myself into bed to avoid coming back until the first exam…
* * *
Given that the school day had been mega-tiring, even with Devon carrying my bag and the sun coming out for once, this wasn’t really looking like spring.
As fast as I could manage to ditch my satchel and school shoes in the hallway, the chaos that is my home started to overwhelm me. Breakfast dishes piled up in the kitchen (Charlie’s week), coats strewn in the hallway where one of the dogs must have knocked them off their pegs… Was I having a midlife crisis?
I mentally did some maths – if I had a midlife crisis at thirteen, I’d be lucky to make it to twenty six!
My brothers were engaged in some sort of argument in the living room, Hendrix was chasing Layla about on the lawn like a dutiful pervert, and, well, that was about the extent of the chaos, but it felt much worse at the (exhausted) time.
“Harleeeeeee!” Kitty called, running into the hallway. She tried to help me off with my shoes, but this only served to unbalance me. “Hendy keeps falling off Layla. She’s a good fighter!”
Ugh. As far as I knew, Layla was totally up for it. The only thing noncompliant to the whole babymaking process was poor Hendy’s back legs. We’d noticed them starting to go, and he just wasn’t enough of a spring chicken to lope around mounting fertile young ladies. Where we’d used to have to pull him off her, he was starting to seem like much less of a threat.
I crutched my way into the garden anyway. It was a sorry sight, Layla strutting around with her tail in the air – Hendrix still slumped awkwardly as though he couldn’t get up.
He did get up, and padded towards me across the grass, hopefully. For some biscuit-addicted reason, he associated my face with free snacks.
“Sorry, Hendy,” I said, giving him a pat on the head instead. “No food here.”
“Fighting’s bad, Layla,” scolded Kitty. “You could get hurt.”
“She’ll be OK,” I told my sister. I wondered if it was possible for the day to become any more stressful.
Yes, it was.
“Harley, what’s the square roo-?”
“Please, Charlie,” I sighed. “Not right now. If you don’t know, find out how to work it out. Asking me won’t help you in the test. Anyway, I’m awful at Maths!”
“What about-?”
“Please…”
He wandered off, but no sooner had he gone, our other annoying brother had arrived:
“What did you get in your SATs in Year 6?” Zak asked. “Chuck won’t tell me, and-”
“I got two fives and a four, he got a two fours and a three, and Shelley got two fours and a five,” I rattled off.
“Oh, OK, thanks,” he said with a smile.
Amazing! I??
?d been smiled at today. Pity a smile couldn’t zap me to Timbuktu for a while. Or better still, zap everybody else there…
“Stressed?” asked Devon, psychic-stalkerishly from her own garden.
I groaned. I only wanted to be left alone. “It’s just my mum, and the tests, and this leg – it all adds up. If I could maybe just jet off to Timbuktu ’til this all blows over…”
“I’ve had a great idea,” said Dev.
Uh-oh.
“…if you can’t escape to Timbuktu, I’ll bring Timbuktu to you!”
#3 Why It Doesn’t Matter
So that’s how I came to be sitting in a deckchair in Devon’s nicely-planted garden, sipping a Spanner through a straw and wearing a sombrero. Devon admitted that she had no idea if Timbuktu actually existed, or what sort of place it was if it did, so she’d played it safe and merged half the Mediterranean together with a few outside elements.
It was a pleasantly warm afternoon, and I had one foot in Kitty’s paddling pool, with the other balanced on a teetering pile of magazines. She’d somehow convinced me to wear her sarong and Union Jack bikini-top (over a T-shirt; it was May), and one beaded sandal, but as mad as the whole setup would’ve appeared to an outsider, I was beginning to unwind.
I breathed in the scent of Devon’s daffodils, accidentally inhaling my Spanner. (If you were wondering what a Spanner is, that’s Devon’s name for a non-alcoholic Screwdriver. Yes, I know…)
“Don’t you just feel eighty times more relaxed?” She smiled, topping up my Spanner. (If you know what a Screwdriver is made up of, you’ll be aware that it was, erm, straight orange juice.)
“Mmm…” I mused – it wouldn’t be difficult to be eighty times more relaxed than I had been recently; you could achieve that in the middle of a blizzard during which you were being interrogated by the Timbuktuian Mafia. I then said as much.
“Do they have blizzards in Timbuktu?” she pondered, fanning me with a giant feather attached to a pen. (Only Dev would know where to get one of those.)
“I don’t know, Devon,” I sighed.
“I’m texting Rach!” She grinned.
About two minutes later, came the sound of a herd of possibly Timbuktuian elephants being chased by a lion. (Or whatever Devon’s “jungle” ringtone was supposed to sound like.)
“Africa.”
“What is?” I asked, thinking of the ringtone.
“Timbuktu. It’s in Africa.”
Maybe a GCSE in Geography on my part was needed…
“It’s important to get some You Time before the tests,” Devon told me, sounding very expert for a “dog”. (And speaking of doggy-style experts, our larger two were once again demonstrating their more-than comprehensive understanding of the canine Kama Sutra.)
“It just doesn’t sound the same when you’re on about someone else’s Me Time,” I mused. “It’s almost like the phrase was intended for nobody but the CosmoGIRL agony-aunt to refer to outside of their own head…”
“Harley,” she scoffed. “Do you even listen to yourself when you talk, or do you phase in and out?”
Devon’s wit was devalued in an instant – the instant that I realised that her comment had more or less been ripped from the episode of Family Guy we’d watched the previous night, and that it hadn’t even been the first time she’d asked me. To be honest though, I was feeling way too chilled to even fluster at the realisation. So what if Devon thought I rambled? She wasn’t all that original or interesting underneath.
“Oh, I do,” I sighed. “In fact; I think I might be phasing out right now…”
“That’s the one,” she soothed, her own voice seeming slightly gushy all of a sudden.
I wondered what that was all about, and opened my mouth to ask, but decided that I do talk too much, and quickly plugged it with my straw. I sipped the cool Spanner hard enough to get brainfreeze - an enjoyable sensation in comparison to the different pain I’d been feeling in my head for as long as I could remember.
Had I been stressed since before I’d posted the eighth letter, the one before this? Since before Christmas? Maybe since before Devon put in her appearance? Had I truly been stressed since the very day you left? Or since before that?
It seemed impossible to have been mad at the world that long – I wasn’t depressed. Although I almost liked the idea of it, I still pictured depression as a whole other plane of hurt. I resolved that I had to do something about this before I became an angry psycho like my father, or a wet dishrag like Mum.
But right now, it doesn’t matter, I told myself, sternly. Thinking like that will only get you even more worked up!
And with that release, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that I had a fractured ankle; it didn’t matter that the SATs were less than a week away; and it didn’t matter that my family was all over the freaking show.
“Devon….?” I mumbled, about to show her exactly the optimistic little soul I’d decided to be. “Dev?!”
I opened my eyes, and she was gone.
Now, where would a mad, yellow-boa-wearing girl with a fetish for frilly stuff disappear to, giving less than zilch notice? Apart from the art store or possibly the feather factory, I mean.
Then I spotted her in my garden (it appeared that we had swapped, and considering that I was the one in the Union Jack bikini-top, that made some semblance of demented sense), happily nattering to my twin brother.
I have no objection to them being friends, but if I am right, you don’t just dump a conversation with someone to bore somebody else for a few minutes/hours/decades. That’s not even the same as multitasking – it’s task ditching.
Don’t even get annoyed, I told myself. It’s not like you really wanted to talk to Devon, anyway.
Er, yeah – I may not have specifically wanted to talk to her, but maybe I wanted her to want to talk to me. I closed my eyes and attempted to enter back into last night’s dream about kissing Jordy.
I’d just got to the bit where he turned up on my doorstep in a total cliché, and told me that he loved me, then kissed me passionately-
Suddenly, the dream seemed way more real than I was comfortable with, and I found myself fighting for breath. I hadn’t fallen asleep in a necklace like Charlie, and I didn’t have Andy’s asthma - the kiss was becoming slobbery and washing machine-esque, and I opened my eyes to find Bilbo looking down at me.
I screamed. “Billy! Get off me!”
Devon turned and rushed right back into her own garden. “Billy! No! Leave!”
He whined and retreated, tail between legs.
“Dogs are alright,” I told her. “Until they are in your mouth.”
“Sorry about that; he’ll kiss anything.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said, wondering whether that was meant as an insult.
“No, I didn’t mean… he just likes tonguing people recently. Anyway, Timbuktuian enough for you?”
“Well, it’s a little hard to pretend I’m in Africa when it’s mid-May in the UK and I can hear my dogs and see my brother’s Bermuda shorts on the washing line!”
She giggled. “Pity we’re not trying for a doggy-daycare in Hawaii, then. One with air-conditioning.”
“Air-conditioning?”
“So it feels cold enough to be England in the springtime,” she explained.
I began to wonder if Devon had been conceived somewhere inside the Bermuda Triangle, after all, and somehow escaped – and accidentally started talking crap again: “Y’know some people are named after their place of conception?”
“Yeah… that’s a bit random.”
“Not to me, it isn’t – Charlie still thinks we were conceived in China. D’you know if he ever wrote that song: ‘Warning: Made In China’?”
“Oh yeah, he tried.”
“Well, imagine being called after a street or a hotel or a beach!”
“Yeah, ‘Mayfair Smith, Hilton Jones and Stokes Bay Simpson are coming to dinner’! But it gets worse – there’s being called after a random city or count
y. Do you think that’s what people think when I say ‘I’m Devon’?”
“Nah – it could’ve been worse. Maybe if you’d localised it to Sidmouth you’d get looks. America’s named after the place,” I laughed.
“Well, that’s being vague; I can handle that. It’s just gross when people want to tell you exactly where.”
“Like Airport Bathroom O’Leary and Backstreet Bagot!” Zak smirked, coming out of our garden with his skateboard. “Not to mention Playboy Mansion Parker and Treehouse Tyler…”
“So why did you suddenly go into a panic about that?” Devon asked me. “You didn’t say…”
“Well, I guess, because pretty soon, my mum will have her baby - and I’m a bit worried about the normality of the ideas she’s been putting out. We’re not even talking Tallulah and Thor, here – her ideas are past the slightly-imaginative-but-common mark, and they’ve hit boring. Jonathan and Joey and Bella and Bethany.”
“You’re joking!” she gasped. “I would’ve thought that even if she wasn’t going for eccentric, there’d be Rudi or Indigo. Or one of those names that you’ll only ever meet one boy called, if you’re lucky – like Leslie or Madison.”
I didn’t really fancy the idea of having a brother called either of those – not ’cause there’s anything wrong with them; just because they don’t quite go with Mahala, Chaziah, Zachary, Kitra and America. But then again, what honestly does?
“What would you call your kid if you had one,” I asked Devon. “Theoretically, I mean. ’Cause this is a bit more than naming a dog…” I added, looking pointedly at Bilbo, who was lying on her feet and snoring away, dribbling his hint-of-dog-food drool all over her sandaled feet.
“Darwin, probably.”
“After the monkey off The Wild Thornberrys?”
“No. After Charles Darwin,” she explained. “Or for a girl, I think… Scarlett.”
“Sounds interesting,” I mused. I mean, she hadn’t even thought of anything as off-the-wall as Mum had, and we’re talking about a girl with a disco inside her head.
“What would you call your kids?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said, thinking of the dream where I had kids with Jordy, called Angelica, Spike and Suzie (but it was a very weird dream).
“Go on!” she teased. “I told you mine…”
I sighed, and said, “Danvas-Hopalong, Ermine-Tito, Barnsley-Bitbit and Babushka-Boyakasha.”