Page 14 of Unnecessary Drama

10

This is it. Today is the day I am going to start running. I will officially be a runner in about an hour, after I complete a lap of the Tan, the running track that is both conveniently near-ish to my house and the first result when I googled ‘best place to run in Melbourne’. I’m trying to keep my expectations reasonable, but there’s a lot of pressure on this first run. It needs to be my first step towards fitness. It needs to unlock all of my creativity. It needs to turn me into the kind of person I imagine a runner to be: strong, energised, arrogant but in an attractive, powerful way. I am also hoping it will cure my insomnia, expose me to enough sunshine to instantly increase my vitamin D levels, stop the weird ache in my lower stomach that I woke up with this morning, and squash the anxiety that comes with my new, all-encompassing crisis of the day: Dad is in Melbourne for work and wants to have dinner with me tonight.

Lauren said, ‘Don’t go, just say no. Tell him you’re busy—he’s only given you twenty-four-hours notice.’ But I haven’t seen him in almost a year—no wait, it’s been more than a year—and I’m not busy. And what kind of daughter pretends to be busy to get out of dinner with the father she never sees?

‘You’ll regret it,’ Lauren said.

‘I won’t,’ I insisted. The sun is shining, I’m about to go running, my life is full of potential, and maybe everything will be different. Maybe Dad and I will go out for dinner and we’ll laugh and bond and have a surprisingly great and normal time.

When I was younger, I would prepare a list of topics to discuss with him on phone calls, a minimum of ten, because several of them would not lead to anything beyond an ‘Oh that’s interesting, sweetheart’ from him and then I needed to scramble to the next thing when he asked no follow-up questions. Now I don’t bother with that, I just ask him about his favourite topics (wine, his fantasy football team, flying drones, paddleboarding) and nod along.

At worst, tonight’s dinner will give me some new funny stories to share with Mum and Nanna. Lauren and I like to give Mum little offerings of the most out-of-touch things Dad says, as a reward for raising us mostly on her own. At best, though, Dad and I might really connect. Despite all his flaws, I still love him. The fun I had with him growing up was not when he was socialising and having what he thought of as fun, but the times when we played chess together, or he taught us how to play poker, or pretended to be a monster and chased us screaming through the house, or when we watched movies on a Saturday afternoon and he set up a barrier of couch cushions that Lauren and I could hide behind in the scary bits. I hold onto these memories tightly, as proof. I secretly hope that maybe he’s the kind of person who struggled with the responsibility of being a parent to kids, but now that I’m eighteen and living out of home, an adult of sorts, there’s less pressure on him, and he could do better. He didn’t have to tell me he was in Melbourne, I would never have known. He wants to see me.

I walk from our house to the Tan, do some stretches, pull my shoulders back. The plan is: walk for two minutes, run for two minutes, and continue like that around the whole loop. Maybe even run for three minutes if I’m feeling good. Simple.

At first, it works well. Apart from a weird stomach pain, I feel okay. I push a bit on my two minutes of running, thinking, the harder I run, the faster I will find solutions to my life. Or the sooner I will feel the famous runner’s high. I could really do with that right now. Except my left hamstring starts to hurt, and two minutes is suddenly a very long time, and my right hamstring is also hurting but in a different way to the left one, I am sure I can feel two—no, wait, three—blisters forming, my bra isn’t really giving me the kind of support I want, and the stabbing pain in my gut is getting more and more intense.

I’m slowing right down, my face getting hotter and sweatier, when I look up and see Jesse running towards me. Fuck. He’s running fast, and smoothly, and no, there’s absolutely no way I can let him see me right now, death would be preferable. I look around for somewhere to hide. There’s nowhere, of course.

I can’t see anything clearly with sweat pouring into my eyes but I am certain he’s seen me and he’s probably smirking too, I can just sense it. Maybe I can still fix this, I can still look good. I start running faster, my legs feeling like wobbly sticks of butter, melting and shuddering with every step, my shoes gripping my toes like a bear trap, my pelvis crunching with pain, my face feeling three times its normal size. I have forgotten what I am supposed to do with my hands and arms while running—they feel like they are swinging too much. Despite all this effort, I might actually be going slower than I was before.

We’ve almost reached each other now. I’m going to visualise myself as cool and calm. Fake it until you make it, and, who knows, maybe I actually look really good right now. Maybe I look like the sleek lycra-clad women who keep flying past me. I really could be going much faster than I realise.

Is he going to say hi to me? Am I going to say hi to him? This is worse than the tram situation. Maybe just a head nod. That seems like something runners do. I am arranging my face into an expression of polite disdain, when the pain in my abdomen sharpens suddenly, like someone has slipped a knife into my side and now they’re turning it.

I swallow a yelp and stop shuffle-running and bend over, walking to the side of the track and then kneeling down. I don’t want to be kneeling. It feels very dramatic, and I especially don’t want to be kneeling in front of Jesse. I would almost rather die. But I don’t have a choice, the pain is bending me in two, and I very well might be dying.

Jesse is suddenly beside me, panting and sweating over the top of me.

‘Are you okay?’ he asks, sucking in air and pushing his hair back.

‘I’m fine,’ I say, suppressing a moan.

‘You don’t look fine,’ he says.

‘My stomach hurts a bit, that’s all.’ I say stomach but it’s lower. My ovaries, my uterus, my bladder maybe. Something in that vicinity. I don’t want to give him this level of detail. My pelvis is my private business.

‘Like a stitch?’ he asks.

‘Sort of. Not really,’ I say. I want to be magically transported home to my bed and not have anyone look at me or be near me while I crunch in pain under a doona and cry. Which is how I often feel on the first few days of my period, but this pain is sharper and more intense than anything I’ve ever had before, and my period isn’t due.

‘Do you know what a stitch feels like?’ Jesse asks, which I find to be a very condescending question.

‘Yes, I know what stitch feels like. I played netball for years,’ I say. He’s not the only sporty one here. He doesn’t need to know my chief contribution to the team was making sure we had substitute players when people didn’t show up and paying the team fees on time.

He blinks and makes a noise in his throat in response to this, or maybe in response to my tone, which was snappy, and for a second I think he’s going to turn and continue on with his run, and panic fills my chest. But he squats down next to me.

‘I’m trying to help you,’ he says, in a gentle voice. ‘I know you said you never wanted my help again, but I think you need it.’ Now he kind of sounds like he’s talking to a frightened dog.

‘It’s not a stitch,’ I say to him. I am trying to sound firm and authoritative, but my voice has an edge of desperation now.

‘Is it a sharp pain or a dull pain?’ he says.

‘It was dull when I woke up this morning and now it’s sharp,’ I say. Kneeling isn’t giving me enough relief, so I lie down and press the painful side into the grass, and the pressure helps a bit.

Maybe it’s a UTI. A kidney stone. A blockage or a rupture in the small intestines. I remember reading an article where a man swallowed an Airpod in the night and I panic for a second until I remember that I don’t own Airpods. But could I have swallowed something else? Every medical show I’ve ever watched comes screaming into my mind. Maybe I’ve given myself a stomach ulcer through stress. How embarrassing. I’m still in my first semester of my first year. I haven’t even had any exams yet.

The pain is getting worse.