The Protected Page 4

  There are footsteps. ‘Hannah? Hannah? It’s Ms Thorne.’ Her voice is on the other side of the door. ‘Charlotte said something happened. Are you okay? I’m here with Anne, the counsellor. Sweetie, there’s no one else here. Can you open the door? We just want to help you out. Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I whisper.

  I hear Anne. ‘Hannah, we just need to see that you’re okay. Otherwise I might have to kick down the door and I’m not sure I’m up for that. I’ve got my good shoes on.’

  My legs wobble as I stand. I turn the lock on the door and let it swing open.

  ‘Good work, Hannah,’ says Ms Thorne.

  Anne puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘Come up and have a chat?’

  I nod.

  She makes me a cup of tea. ‘Chamomile,’ she says. ‘French for camel piss because, let’s face it, that’s what it tastes like. Better for you than caffeine, though.’

  I sip the tea.

  Anne sits down. ‘What happened?’

  Katie is there, of course. Yeah, Hannah? Because from my perspective, a cute guy giving you any sort of attention has got to be a good thing.

  I can’t get my breathing right. I close my eyes.

  ‘Hannah, can you open your eyes? Look at that picture on the wall. Tell me about it.’

  I can’t get the information from the picture to translate into words.

  ‘You don’t even have to use a sentence, just list what you see.’

  ‘Blue, um, water, sky, sand.’

  ‘Okay. Can you take a slow breath in, while I count? One, two, three, four, five. And out for five.’

  She counts and I try to do what she says.

  ‘We’re going to do that three more times.’

  I breathe while she counts and I can feel the fizz behind my forehead settle.

  ‘You were having a panic attack, Hannah,’ she says. ‘It’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with you. That’s what we’re programmed to do when we feel threatened, basic flight or fight response. It’s the reason humans still exist, it stopped us all getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers. That’s why you get chest pain, increase in heart rate, feel tingly in your arms and hands, it’s the blood moving to your muscles so you’re ready to run. That’s all.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You can override it. Next time I want you to take a few minutes, keep your eyes open if you can. Then you need to take some very slow deep breaths, breaths right into your diaphragm. Here.’ She lays her flat palm on her stomach and closes her eyes. ‘When you breathe in you should feel your hand move, that’s your diaphragm pushing your stomach out. That controlled breathing is going to help switch the adrenaline response off, help you think more clearly. Stop the panic.

  ‘I have to do a few things in my office. I’m going to let you sit here and practise slowing that breathing down.’

  She disappears for about ten minutes and then comes back with an armful of manila folders. She sits down and starts sorting through them, putting piles on the floor.

  ‘Can I ask what you like to do? Any hobbies?’ She keeps her focus on the folders as if it’s just a casual conversation and she’s not going to analyse my response.

  ‘There’s nothing really. Anymore.’

  ‘What did you used to like to do?’

  I swallow. ‘Swim.’

  ‘Good. Where do you like to swim? Ultimate destination: beach or pool?’

  ‘Either. Anywhere. I just, I like being in the water.’

  ‘Have you been swimming lately?’

  I close my eyes and shake my head.

  ‘No, Hannah. Open your eyes. Come on, stay with me. Open them.’

  I take a deep breath and do as she tells me.

  ‘We don’t have to talk about that. We’ll come back to it. What else do you like to do?’

  I shrug my shoulders and she smiles and shrugs her shoulders back at me.

  ‘What’s something you do a lot?’

  Another deep breath. ‘I like to make lists.’

  Anne widens her eyes. ‘Oooh good. What do you make lists of?’

  I look at the carpet. ‘Just … stuff.’

  ‘Stuff, hey?’

  ‘Do you think it’s a problem that I do that? Like, is there something … wrong with me?’

  ‘No, I don’t think there’s something wrong with you. Do you make lists obsessively? Like are you always listing things in your head? Do you feel anxious and making lists is the only thing that makes you feel better?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Then it’s probably a good thing. Maybe it’s helping you process things.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Now. It’s going to be the end of the period soon. I’m going to go and find you another shirt from lost property. Your job is to sit here and breathe. Then, when you feel ready you can go to your next class, okay?’

  I agree because I know today it won’t get any worse. And I am right. When I walk into Biology class Tara looks up but no one says a word about me. No one hands me a note with a drawing of something obscene. No one even makes a comment about me being in the girls’ toilets with Ms Thorne.

  Later my dad pulls the shirt out of the dirty clothes basket and holds it at arm’s length.

  ‘Han? What happened?’ he asks.

  It’s the first time something like this has happened since Katie died.

  ‘It was an accident.’

  That is true. It was an accident. The fruit wasn’t meant for me.

  ‘Did someone do this? Did something get thrown at you?’ He looks at the shirt. ‘Obviously someone threw something at you. Who? Who was it?’

  ‘Just some guy … He didn’t mean to hit me.’

  ‘I thought school was going okay.’

  ‘It is. It’s nothing, Dad. It was an accident.’

  ***

  I wish I could rewind and start high school again, go back and do things differently – just small, seemingly insignificant things. Details. I’m not talking about what happened to Katie, either. The worst thing that could happen would be for my life to go back to how it was before Katie died. That fact is a horrible silent thing that hangs in my head and seeps into everything like thick black silt.

  Before the accident it was nearly every day that I’d have to sneak into the laundry and scrub food or pen marks from my shirt. I would tell Mum I got paint on them in art class.

  But there’s always someone at the bottom of the pile isn’t there?

  From the moment you walk through the front gates of a school you are judged. Assessments of your worth are made by your peers and once they are made you can’t shift them. We are meat-eating pack animals, us humans. The weakest are identified and when food is scarce they are the first to be eaten by their peers.

  Both Katie and Mum gave me a pep talk the night before I started high school. Mum was first. She sat next to me on my bed.

  ‘Hannah, I know you’re nervous, but you have to think of this as the first part of a wonderful adventure.’

  She handed me a flat square box. I opened it and inside was a scrapbook that she’d covered in vintage floral fabric. She’d screen-printed ‘Schooldays’ on the front cover. On the first page, in her florid handwriting were the words: ‘The best person you can be is yourself’. I didn’t know there was an alternative. Each blank page had a stamped border, ready for me to fill with wonderful memories of high school.

  She put her arm around me. ‘I still keep in touch with my high school friends. Everything you need you will find in here.’ She pointed to my heart. ‘You just have to be willing to give. So proud of you, honey.’

  Next up was Katie. She closed the door after Mum left.

  ‘Hannah. You have to know it’s not personal, right? But from the time we leave the house in the morning, until we come home in the afte
rnoon, I don’t know you.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘Because, you will be a year sevener, as in automatic loser. Like, total toxic dweebsville loser. I have worked hard to establish myself and I don’t need you coming and screwing it all up. Like I said, it’s not personal. Oh and when you get to school, first thing you need to do is roll your skirt at the waistband to make it shorter. And make sure you shave your legs and pits.’

  ‘But it’s blonde hair, Katie. You can’t even see it.’

  ‘It’s not negotiable.’ She handed me a razor.

  I didn’t know how to do it. I certainly didn’t know you were supposed to wet your skin and use soap to lather it up. So I stood in the middle of my bedroom and dragged the razor over my dry skin. I nicked the back of my ankles, the back of my knees, the front of my knees. Bright red blood trickled down my pale legs. Fighting tears, I blotted at it with tissues and my skin got all raised and bumpy so it looked like I had a horrible rash.

  Mum drove Charlotte and me to school the next day, partly for the ceremonial aspect, partly because I spent the night throwing up with nerves. (Katie refused to come with us, saying she didn’t want people to know we were related.) Mum stopped amongst the clot of cars out the front of the school. There were parents fawning over their kids like they were marching off to war. She jumped out, holding the camera and made us stand in front of the gates while she took multiple pictures from various angles before she let us go.

  Despite our best efforts to appear as sophisticated as possible, the damage was already done by the fact that, as Katie predicted, my skirt was about thirty centimetres longer than everyone else’s (it did mostly hide the disaster that was my legs, however) and my backpack made me look like a turtle. My dad had insisted that I buy the school-issue backpack with its fifteen pockets and night-safe reflector patches. (Did it not occur to the designers that school finished at three in the afternoon?)

  I plastered on a smile and waved to Mum as she drove away.

  ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ I said.

  Charlotte must have heard the waver in my voice because she put her arm around me and steered me towards the girls’ toilets. I left my backpack with her and went inside. The smell of body spray was so strong it stung the back of my throat. There were girls clustered around the mirror, straining and leaning over each other, fixing their hair, smearing gloss over their lips. One of them was tall with long blonde hair like in a shampoo commercial and she looked over to me when I walked in. That was the first time I met Tara Metcalf. It’s actually stupid to say that I met her, because meeting someone is supposed to mean you introduce yourselves in a civil sort of manner. Tara didn’t introduce herself, she just looked at me as if I was some sort of alien that she found both repulsive and really uncool.

  I went into a cubicle and rolled my skirt the way Katie had told me. When I came out Tara and a girl with a pixie haircut were talking to Charlotte. It’s worth pointing out that Charlotte didn’t have to shorten her skirt because her mum had a way better idea of what was cool than mine. She’d also given Charlotte more detailed leg-shaving instructions. Charlotte was smiling and laughing like they were the friendliest people she had ever met.

  ‘Oh, Hannah! There you are,’ she said. ‘This is Tara and Amy.’

  Tara and Amy both made a face that looked as though they were trying to smile while someone was stabbing them with hot pins. They turned back to Charlotte and kept talking like I wasn’t even there. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood next to Charlotte like some stupid, loyal pet and waited for them to finish. Luckily the bell rang. I picked up my backpack and made to leave, Charlotte kept talking with them.

  ‘Um, Charlotte,’ I said. ‘We should probably go, there’s that assembly thing and …’

  Tara, who was mid sentence, paused and turned to me.

  ‘Is that your bag?’ she said, looking at my backpack like it was a dead animal that I had picked up and thrown over my shoulder.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. Amy started giggling.

  Tara looked down at my legs. ‘Oh my God! Gross! Have you got scabies or something? Amy, look at her legs!’

  ‘Um, no,’ I said. ‘It’s just from shaving.’

  Amy was in hysterics by this point.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ said Tara. ‘Good luck with that.’

  Tara Metcalf was crowned queen of our year that first day. She climbed to the top of the pile by scaring the crap out of all the other girls. She barely had to say anything to do it, she just flicked her hair and looked you up and down, or asked questions like, ‘Is that how you do your hair?’, ‘Don’t you wear deodorant?’ That sort of thing. Girls who were lesser variations of her own appearance became her ‘friends’: an army of perfectly preened Tara Clones. Everyone else was either ignored or subjected to random acts of cruelty in order to set an example to anyone who dared challenge her reign.

  Despite all of that, I wasn’t worried about Tara. I figured I would just keep out of her way and maybe get the hem of my skirt taken up. I didn’t care what Tara and her little posse thought about me. I had Charlotte.

  ***

  Seven

  Down the back of St Joseph’s, behind D Building is an agriculture plot. The ag students have to change into overalls and gumboots for class because they spend their time mending fences and chasing the small herd of goats that the school has bred. (A very useful life skill to have, I’m sure.) There’s one building with a classroom and another storeroom that houses an egg incubator and textbooks about crop rotation. A veranda wraps around the building and it is the perfect place to have recess and lunch. I sit there unseen, except for the goats who peer at me occasionally, shuddering nervously if I make a sudden movement.

  I have a very direct and discreet route from the Science labs across to the ag plot. Technically students are not supposed to be at the ag plot unsupervised, definitely not at recess. But it is one of the few hidden places that the Clones haven’t colonised for smoking.

  I am aware of someone walking right next to me, but I keep my eyes firmly ahead until he speaks.

  ‘Hey, Jane Eyre.’

  I don’t know what to do. I glance at him and keep walking.

  ‘Can I have a word?’ Josh ducks in front of me, walking backwards to keep a few steps ahead of me.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Can you slow down?’

  I slow.

  ‘I want to apologise. For the fruit. Totally didn’t mean to hit you.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘You are literally the last person I would want to hit with fruit. There are so many other people who are more fruit-hit worthy than you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good. Where you going?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘You walk pretty fast for a girl who isn’t going anywhere. You going to sneak a smoke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nice try, Jane Eyre. I know your type – smart, quiet, smoke like a chimney. All right, well, I’ll see you around. Take it easy.’

  And with that he wanders off towards the canteen.

  *

  In the afternoon I get home and my mother is sitting on the couch – an island in a sea of paper: junk mail, discount pizza coupons, bills, the local newspaper (complete with a fascinating headline about a ‘monster mushroom’ the local dentist has found in his backyard). She is examining a letter from the solicitor’s office. I recognise the letterhead. After a while she notices me standing there and looks up, her expression like I’m another piece of administration that needs tending to – and I’ve jumped the queue.

  ‘Um, I was wondering, were you going to go to the supermarket at some stage? It’s just, we’re kind of low on a few things … food and stuff. Nan bought some but there’s stuff we need.’

  She looks like she ca
n’t quite remember what food is.

  ‘Grab my purse, you can buy your lunch at school tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah. They don’t really sell toilet paper at the canteen, Mum. Sorry …’

  She looks down at the piles of paper around her and I’m nervous she’s considering them as a viable toilet paper substitute.

  ‘You can get the bus to the shops near Johnson Street.’ Her voice faults a fraction over the street name. ‘I’ll give you some money.’

  And once again my lifestyle merges ever closer to that of an eighty-year-old’s.

  *

  At four in the afternoon the sun is no weaker than it was at noon. I wear a jumper anyway. It’s a habit I have, like an extra layer of protection between me and the world. There is the faint smell of charred eucalyptus on the breeze. Back-burning, probably. All those tiny bush-creatures incinerated in place of our homes. Better to be safe than sorry.

  The bus is suitably furnished with a handful of nannas. They all sit up the front, clutching the seat handles, umbrellas in tow in case the sky should suddenly change from searing blue and inflict a nasty surprise on us all. Nanna used to take us on bus trips to the shopping centre near her house. Katie and I never caught buses before high school and the whole experience was as exciting as the shopping centre itself. Nanna would give us each a handful of coins which we would dutifully hand to the driver and deliver our well-rehearsed line, ‘One child to Eastways Shopping Centre, please’. My coins were always slippery in my palm by the time they got to the driver.