Young Writers Society

When I pulled up, Olivia stood with her arms crossed at hip level as though she was guarding her belly button. That’s usually a bad sign.

She didn’t acknowledge me when I parked beside her, she just tore the door open stepped in then slammed the door closed.

“I'm sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“Do you want to know what happened?”

“It’s fine. I don’t care. I just wish you had told me that it was going to take you this long,” she said, ripping the seatbelt across her. When girls are pissed, they don’t look at you. All girls. Even girls who aren't your girlfriend. If they look at you, they know that you have a chance to make them smile or laugh so it’s safest to just stare ahead with a set jaw and slightly narrowed eyes. I didn't drive because I wanted to make it up to her. So I watched her face, preparing what I wanted to say in my head so I wouldn't upset her more.

“I had to stop in to see Anna. Look, Olivia, she’s not doing so great.”

She poked her bottom lip out, subtly and unconsciously then she nodded and continued to look ahead. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

I leaned over and kissed her. I left my lips there a moment feeling the coolness of her cheek. Then I sat back and pushed the car into gear.

“So, what’s the verdict with the braces?”

“They can come off next month,” she said. “What did Anna say?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I hope she feels better.” She finally moved her eyes to mine.

“Yeah,” I said, wheeling the car out of the park. “Yeah, I’ll tell her you said so.” The rain started to tick on the roof and cars headlamps were lighting up.

Olivia is refined. I mean everything about her beginning with the way she looks, the gentle slope of her nose with the hint of a flick at the end, the seamless curve of her jaw shaped as though it was sketched. I mean she was a cliché, beautiful but not necessarily pretty. Unlike any other seventeen year old girl I had met, she had found the sweet spot between natural and sophisticated. As soon as the braces come off, she was set to become a carbon copy of her mother, blonde, small bodied, eyes that seemed to always be smiling and if they seemed any other way, you knew you would be sorry for something.

I eased to a halt at the base of her driveway. She squeezed my hand on the gear stick.

“Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.”

The rain was coming down now, between strokes of the wipers it blurred the window. She opened her umbrella out the door and stepped beneath it. I beeped once as I u-turned and headed toward home. Let me tell you now that I’m not usually a bad boyfriend. I mean I do everything right, I buy flowers even when it’s not Valentine’s Day. I am polite to her friends and parents on a hint I had reluctantly accepted from my Dad, who was hardly a Romeo himself. It’s just Anna inadvertently throws me off my game.

I was twelve when I realised I had somehow become best friends with a girl. It was at about the same time Anna Clay’s intermittent absences started at school, like missed beeps on a heart monitor. As she took more time, single days began to couple and eventually she was missing for up to months at a time.

Eventually, Dad sat me down and told me. A girl at school had fallen sick, he said frowning in a way that made two exclamation points stand from between his eyes. He chewed his words before he spoke.

“I’m telling you this son, because the girl has a virus that cannot be cured.”

“And,” Mom cut in, “It can be passed on to children who are not careful.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dad said, “Don’t put things like that in his head.”

She went to speak again but dad hushed her with his eyes and looked back to me.

“Don’t change anything about how you treat Anna, okay?”

Simultaneously, this information was being passed onto our class mates and eventually it spread to the rest of the school. Every parent seemed to be sitting their children down and advising them to treat Anna Clay differently whilst treating her the same. I’m certain some parents were a little less subtle about it all than my parents. In fact, I know some parents had no idea what they were talking about.

Stan Owens, for example, voluntarily moved himself to the front of the class. When asked why, he peered over his shoulder at Anna and spoke in an even tone.

“I don’t want to sit next to Anna.”

“Now that’s not fair, Stan. You take your seat at the back of the class,” the teacher said, turning back to the white board, but Stand did not move.

He looked down. We all did. Collectively waiting for what happened next. She was a tall thin woman with lips that naturally pursed and blond hair that wrapped around itself in a high knot. She turned back to him and the dark pointed eyebrows slid up her forehead.

“Well,” she said it like a question.

“Well, she’s going to make us all sick,” the boy said sullenly.

“I beg your pardon?”

He drew a new breath like starting a new paragraph. “She’s not supposed to be here. We are going to get sick and die.”

She moved on her heels, taking Stan Owens by his elbow out the door, whipping it closed in a way that seemed to knock the air out of both the room and the collection of silent children within it.

A murmur rose cautiously. Girls smiled over their shoulders at their friends. Some smothered their giggles and chat with their palms and Anna Clay sat with the heels of her hands massaging each other and with her head skewed just slightly to one side so that her plaited pony tail hung one way and not the other. She seemed to be reading something that was not written on the whiteboard. Something that no one else could see.

The teacher returned without Stan Owens and told us that that was enough of the chit chat and to open our text books again. Sometime just before Lunch, I watched out the window as Mr Green, the principal walked toward the front gate. Beside him, a bald man with short limbs and a blue suit walked with one hand on his son’s shoulder. At the gate the figures stood close. The bald man karate chopped the palm of one hand with his other three times in quick succession then pointed back towards the school. Mr Green opened his palms out to the man and shrugged in a gesture which prompted from the bald man only a wide eyed look and a shake of the head.

Two things happened from that moment. Stan Owens started at another school and Anna Clay’s sickness was only talked about between cupped hands and at the back of the field where Mr Green had once found a packet of cigarettes.