Lucy

After Jazz kicks me a second time I stop asking questions. I’ve got enough information for now, anyway. If Shadow’s finished Year 12 and he never went to our school then it makes sense that I’ve never met him. I’d know if I had, I’m sure of it. A guy like Shadow would stand out around here.

Jazz catches my eye and drums three fingers on the table. Three drumming fingers mean this guy I’m talking to is gorgeous. It’s not to be confused with four fingers drumming, which mean get me away from this guy if you have to set my hair on fire to do it. Five fingers means I’m screaming on the inside, for good reasons. Jazz lays her five fingers on the table.

Leo’s screaming good-looking, that’s for sure. Five fingers to the power of ten. And tall, which is Jazz’s type. I once saw him from a distance and thought a tree was strolling towards me. An oak tree with a shaved head, soft eyes, and a tattoo. He’s trouble and Jazz knows it. She’s just happy to not know it for a night. I did that with Ed and it got me space-like quiet, a quick grope and a whole lot of vomiting. Mr Darcy he isn’t.

Mum told me once that she knew Dad was the right guy because he could juggle and talk about the impacts of globalisation at the same time. ‘All the boys I knew could do one or the other and neither very well.’

Sometimes I catch her looking out the window at the little camping stove that Dad cooks on and I know she misses him living in the house. I saw them standing at the mirror yesterday, brushing their teeth at the same time. There’s tooth brushing and then there’s significant tooth brushing. They took time to floss and gargle and they were laughing.

Some nights Mum eats out at his place. He cooks for her on his stove and they lie on the grass in the front yard under the pear tree. He makes her laugh like no one else makes her laugh. He does magic tricks for her, pulls coins out of her ear. ‘Now if you could just pull the mortgage payment out of there we’d be set,’ she said.

I catch Dad, every now and then, coming out of their bedroom. He looks at me like he’s a thief. ‘It’s your bedroom, Dad,’ I say when it happens. I push past him and sit in the toilet for a while till I know he’s gone. It’s weird to catch your dad sneaking out of your mum’s bedroom. It’s weird to feel weird about it.

On the plus side, they’re obviously still doing the deed, which is even more significant than tooth brushing. On the minus side, the pizza delivery guy knows exactly where to bring Dad’s order and doesn’t knock on the front door of the house anymore. On the plus side, Dad has a picture of Mum and me on his bedside milk crate.

‘Jane Austen would be turning in her grave,’ I say to Mum sometimes.

‘Jane Austen was a writer. She’d understand completely,’ she answers, and I can’t argue with that but it does not comfort me.

I have this picture on my wall, a photocopy of a drawing by the artist Michael Zavros. It’s of a horse falling, tumbling from the sky, legs to the clouds. There’s no way to right itself. It seems to me it doesn’t know how it got there, or where it is, or why it’s falling. The picture is called Till the Heart Caves In, and that title tears me open. I love the horse, how real it is; I love the fine lines of its legs and head. But that’s not why some nights I can’t stop staring at the picture. I can’t say exactly why. Only, it’s got something to do with how love should be. You should feel it like a horse tumbling through you. You shouldn’t be able to sleep knowing that the person you love is lying in the shed.

I look at Leo, playing with one of Jazz’s plaits. She gives me the five-finger sign again. I hope he really likes her. I hope he’s worth liking but I don’t think so. I have this urge to drag her back into the cubicle of truth and keep her there. She’s the psychic but she can’t see what’s coming up: the intersection of hurt and more hurt. The blind spot there is a killer. Maybe if she found Poet he’d be right for her. If Leo hasn’t had a girlfriend since Emma, there must be a reason.

‘Why do you want to find him so bad?’ Ed asks, and when I look at him I can tell he’s already asked me the question more than once but I haven’t heard.

I flick Dad’s lucky wristband a few times. ‘I just do.’