It’s raining outside but I’m not cold. I’m serious. I’m not even shivering. Even though it’s like, the middle of winter. Maybe that’s because I’m inside, looking out. I laugh, and the sound bursts from my lips with spittle as its accomplice. I don’t think anyone saw. To be completely honest, at this point I don’t really care. Everyone spits. I want to shout it at the top of my lungs so everyone at the party will hear: everyone spits! This shouldn’t be a revelation to me. I’m eighteen and should know this by now. But it is. So it is.
I don’t like the taste of Malibu. It’s more potent than I thought it would be. The bottle was so inviting, with its white plastic and the sunset emblazoned on its rounded middle. Staring at it, I thought it would taste like a beach holiday in a cup and leave me feeling the way I do after a long day in the ocean, exhausted but exhilarated. But as soon as I tasted the thin, bleach-coloured stuff, I wanted to spit it out. I’m not even sure it was mixed with anything. Was it supposed to be? I can’t remember. I remember Emily screaming with glee, even though I was drinking from her cup, and tipping the stuff down my throat. I trusted her expertise. She’d know how much I should drink for it to take effect. She’s done this before. Most, if not all, the people here have. Except me. Call me a late bloomer or whatever. Anyway, I think this is what it’s supposed to feel like.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the rain. It looks inviting out there. Cold and calm. Sprinkling down in a fine mist, coating the street in a sheen illuminated by the moon. I’ve always liked the night. It’s comforting. I think that’s because the night has seen the worst of us and still approaches us at the same time every evening, when the sun falls. It doesn’t judge so much as watch—so unlike people.
I reckon we have a lot to learn from the moon. Not that we will, of course.
Some people are outside already. Smoking, or talking, or whatever. It’s weird to see people smoking. My mum made me swear to never do it, even though she hacks up half a lung every morning. She tries her hardest to stay on the nicotine patches, but she buys a packet of those little tobacco-filled straws every other month, thinking I don’t know.
Someone passes me a drink. I don’t even know what it is, but I tilt the red cup up—the kind you see in movies—and finish it. This drink is a lot nicer than Malibu. It’s fizzy, like soft drink. Hell, maybe it is soft drink—with a bitter twist. A sort of tang. I can’t decide which description is more accurate, to be completely honest.
Anyway, outside looks nice, so I’m going to go out and join whoever is sitting there, away from the hot compress of bodies that crowd this tiny house. There are framed photos everywhere of my friend and his younger brother and their matching, shorn haircuts. There’s also a lot of Lego, lost under couches and the kitchen table. Even hidden, I managed to step on it. Good thing I’m wearing shoes. I laugh again. I’m the funniest person I know.
I fumble with the door—not sure whether to pull it towards me or push it away from me—and step outside when I figure it out. I feel like I can finally breathe out here. Like I’ve never known how to breathe until now. I mean, the freshness of the air—what’s that word again, the one you call dust after it’s hit by rain? I heard it in a Doctor Who episode once. Petrol? Petroleum? Patroclus? I honestly can’t remember, but I know it’s none of those. It smells like that, but infused with the burn of cigarettes and something else, a slightly damper smell I’m not too familiar with.
I know some people out here. Well, I mean, I don’t know them well. I only recognise their faces. They’re people in my classes, in the school hallways, with lockers next to mine. One of them looks up and gives me a curt nod. The others continue on with their conversations. One of my friends sits on an old wicker chair. It looks uncomfortable. The ground—the concrete that makes up the balcony—looks far more appealing, drenched in a sheet of cold air and rain. It was hot inside. My body is warm and heavy and fleshy, as though the rum marinating inside me is weighing down all my muscles, clogging all my arteries until they sag like heavy powerlines.
I sit by Maddie’s feet like a cat and let her run her fingers through my hair. The touch feels nice, new, even though she’s done it many times before.
‘How are you going?’ she asks. I’d call the expression she makes a wan smile—thin-lipped but drooping like candlewax, as though happy, but in a weary sense. In the rain and the damp, her hair hangs like a solid curtain to her chin, the blonde making the white of her face look even starker.
‘I’m good,’ I say, and it’s the truth.
I feel fuzzy, which instils a happiness in me because I don’t have to think about all the things that usually plague me, like assignments, or what to pack for Dad’s on the weekends, or how much harder I have to work to get away from this dump of a suburb. I lie on the concrete by Maddie’s feet and look up, desperate to see the stars. Only, my view is obscured by an awning, green and black with mould. I wouldn’t know the first thing about cleaning something like that if I had my own house. Yet still, I judge. All houses around here are like this.
‘Come on, get up from the ground.’ She laughs, but it’s a close-mouthed laugh that indicates a more serious tone than she wants to let on. I know it, but she doesn’t know I know. I wonder how many times she’s been out like this. How many parties she’s been to. I wonder if she judges me like I judge the mould on the underside of the awning.
‘No, I like it here. It’s nice and cold.’
The concrete is hard against my head, but I like the feeling of stability it gives me. I plant my palms flat on either side of the ground beside me, as though I can absorb the cold and wet of the world if I really try to. When I was younger, I used to imagine that I had superpowers, that I could control the weather or transform into fantastical creatures. Now that I’m older, I’m starting to understand that transformation isn’t that easy. Especially if you’re from around here.
Wet cheeks. I’m not sure if it’s from the rain or from my own eyes. It’s okay. She won’t notice—she’s chatting with the group next to her. I wonder how they all became friends. We don’t really talk to that group much. The popular group. Mum told me I’d never be happy in a group like that, so I always stayed away. I always thought she told me to stay away because they’re petty and dumb, but maybe it has something more to do with the clothes they wear—always branded—or the sheen of their hair, or the glint of their smiles that indicate an even larger sheen inside their wallets.
Doesn’t matter. I’m on the ground and they’re not, so who got the better deal here? Me, obviously.
I didn’t even know he was here until he walks by. I should have recognised his voice: deep without being grating. A little jocular. I’ve crushed on this boy for about three years now and the most I have to show for it is one—maybe two—conversations with him that left me short-breathed and sweating like mad afterwards. It’s nearing the end of our last school year. He’ll forget me quicker than he forgets this party. I should have talked to him more. Asked him out. Done something. I’m pretty enough. He knows it. Everyone knows it. But people always say I’m too smart to waste my time on being pretty, as though the two aren’t compatible. I guess in this world, they aren’t.
He walks past me. Almost. But like Scylla, I reach out with a desperate hand and latch his palm onto mine. He’s rooted to the spot now, looking down on me like some kind of angel. The skin of his palm is rougher than I thought it would be. I know he plays soccer and lives in some big house with an even bigger family. I wouldn’t have thought him to be working anywhere. Not just yet.
He crouches down beside me. A few people behind him snigger, shifting their eyes to us, to me. They must be asking themselves, why did we never notice her before? Why is she holding Tyler’s hand like that? She must be really gone by now. Who cares? They’ll continue whatever conversation they were having before. I’m not interesting enough to captivate their attention for too long.
Tyler’s muted blue eyes swim before mine. Literally swim, dancing in the fog crafted by rum in by bloodstream, in my brain. I’ve been describing his hair to myself as feather-like recently. It was in a book we read for English. I wish I could brush the strands to the side just a little, just to see what it’d feel like. But for now, holding his hand is enough.
He says hello. I murmur it back. The balcony feels empty now, except for us. The rain patters against the concrete, slips into the mud below. I wonder what grows beneath its surface, which roots will thrive and which will curl in on themselves in an attempt to be free of the dirt. I guess I’ll never know. Not really.
I should have just talked to him when I wanted to. I shouldn’t have restricted myself from doing things when I felt they were unsafe.
‘I just don’t really understand why we never talked, you know? Because we’re in the same classes and you sit with me but I’m so weird and awkward and it’s weird,’ I say. I make sure to laugh at the end, just to make sure he knows I’m joking, but in a non-joking way.
‘It’s not weird,’ he says. His voice is soft, compassionate. It makes me feel safe, the same way that the rain-spattered concrete does, so I keep talking.
‘And you know, everyone says life is too short, like it’s a joke, but it’s actually true. The saying, I mean. That life is too short—not that it’s a joke. Because we all fuck around and do stuff because we’re told we have to or because there’s proper ways to do things, but I’ve lost track of some of the things I want to do and say so many times.’
He crouches down beside me now, instead of towering over me. I like the fact that he’s wearing a grey t-shirt in the middle of winter. Maybe he likes the cold, just like I do. We could have a lot in common.
‘I like your top,’ I say, ‘I spilled rum on mine. Or beer, or soft drink. I can’t remember. Ask Emily. Where is she, anyway?’
I’m met with a shrug. I would shrug, too, if I wasn’t lying on the ground. The image of me trying makes me laugh.
‘You have so many nice things. So many things, and all of them are so nice. We’re always told to appreciate nice things, but I guess we don’t really know what to appreciate when we have so much stuff already. Right? Am I talking too much? I feel like that’s something I apologise for but really shouldn’t have to.’
Maddie hunches over in the wicker chair to reach for my shoulder, the place where all my muscles tense and knot together, and rubs her fingers into it. Soothing my soul to quiet the quelling voice within it, maybe? I squirm from her touch.
‘And I’m still not sure if I like the taste of rum. Ask Emily to come back and bring me some more. Emily!’ I shout, raising my head above the ground as though being exorcized. I laugh. Like I said before, I’m the funniest person I know. My sense of humour is hard to surpass. Some might even say unparalleled. I am some. Some is me. ‘But you know someone who does like the taste of it? My mum. Oh yeah. I bet your mum isn’t like mine. She’ll have a bottle of rum and a slab of beers gone in just a couple hours. I’ve only had a few cups of the red!’
I meant to say rum, but the red sheen of the plastic cups being passed around distracted me and I got my words mixed up. Not to worry. They’ll all know what I mean. By they, I mean the audience that has formed around me: Tyler and Maddie and Emily and her friends and some random people I don’t even know. I feel a smile crack open across my face, revealing teeth I hardly ever show—especially at school, in front of all these people.
‘Hi everyone,’ I say loudly. They laugh along with me. They must think I’m the funniest person they know. ‘It’s so nice to be surrounded by so many people. Sometimes, I sit in my room with all the lights off and I think about what it would be like to not exist, and I wonder if that would be more peaceful than living. Just sometimes, though, you know?’
To that, more laughter. Some snickering and some shushing. I imagine the spittle coming from the lips of the people standing above me, imagine it falling into my hair, which is splayed out behind me like a furry fan. At first I’m repulsed, but then I remember that everyone spits, and that’s okay.
Maddie’s fingers grip onto my shoulder, hard. ‘Ow,’ I say, rubbing the spot, when I realise she isn’t massaging me, but actually poking me. It’s annoying.
‘What?’ I whine. I’m having an honest, good talk here. But then my hand feels limp and empty as Tyler seizes his chance to let go of it—of me—and walks off to wherever he was headed before I started talking to him. At him. He’ll remember this tomorrow and bring it up with all his friends: Remember the drunk girl at her first party who held my hand and wouldn’t let go?
‘Mum’s here,’ Maddie says, averting my gaze.
‘Oh, okay. Already?’ I ask. Her mum is dropping me home. Most parents offer to do this when they realise I plan to walk. No way would my mum come get me, or be able to, and I refuse to spend what little money I have saved up from the bakery on an Uber. No way.
We stumble down the balcony. Or rather, I stumble down the balcony. The railing is so slippery I think I might fall down the stairs. Mads carries me, though, holding me up. I wonder if she’ll always be the person to do this. If she’ll always be this kind of person. The look in her eyes a few moments ago suggested otherwise, but what do I know? What do I care? I’ve had too much rum.
We slip into her mum’s car. Mads in the front. Me in the back. The world is surging. I feel like I’m on a carousel, not in the backseat of a car. It smells musty in here, as though the old dirt from vegetables picked up at the grocer have tumbled out of their shopping bags and found their new home here, only to realise too late that this isn’t a place where things can grow. I slump in my seat. The seatbelt tugs against my chest. Why am I even wearing it? It’s too tight. Nobody else is on the road. No cops will see, no accidents will happen if I unbuckle it.
I suddenly feel very sick. The feeling doesn’t creep up on me, like it usually does. It just happens. In my stomach, my throat, my mind. Nothing is important now except for opening the car door and letting the sickness out.
‘Let me out,’ I say. ‘I feel sick.’
Her mum doesn’t say anything. At least, I don’t hear her say anything. As soon as the car slows, I wrench the door open and hurl my guts out onto the nature strip. The acidity of the vomit burns my throat. I hate the smell of it but can’t get away from it—it comes from me. I throw up twice more, my hands buried in the damp soil, weeds tracing lifelines across my palms.
I gasp, breathe in the air. Thunder shocks the quiet suburbs of the north, and then all I can hear is the car exhaust and my own ragged breathing.
I wipe the vomit and the spit from my mouth. It’s raining even harder now. I didn’t think that was possible. Another smell rises from the earth. The smell of dust after rain. That word I had forgotten before rises in my mind, as though it had grown there: petrichor. The rain falls and lands in the puddle of vomit. I can hate myself tomorrow, but I don’t have the energy for that right now. For now, there is just me, the sour damp of vomit, and the regurgitated rum.
Jamisyn Gleeson holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing from the University of Melbourne. Her prose has been published in Voiceworks, Room Magazine and F*EMS Zine. When she's not writing or reading, Jamisyn can be found drinking her body weight in coffee.