Page 6 of Unnecessary Drama

The new student was Jesse, and he stood leaning in the doorway waiting for me. He was tall, but lanky and thin, in the way of teenage boys who haven’t filled out or got comfortable in their bodies yet and seem kind of permanently surprised about it, like they’ve just woken up in a new stretched-out body. I knew the feeling. I’d had my growth spurt early. I was the tallest girl all through the last years of primary school, which made me feel oversized and on display, under pressure to be a good goal keeper in netball, bend my knees a little in every group photo and pretend I didn’t mind when people said ‘You’re Lauren’s little sister?’ with surprise.

I walked him around the school. He told me he’d just gone from living with his mum to living with his dad, but he said it in a way that didn’t invite more questions, so I changed the subject and gave him my ranking of the teachers from nicest to most likely to say something sexist.

A few weeks after that, we were paired up in English class for an assignment where we had to write a short story with an additional creative component. We spent all of the class talking about ideas and, on the bus on the way home, he sat down next to me, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if we’d always sat together. From the day he’d arrived, he’d been welcomed by the various groups that sat towards the back of the bus, so walking halfway down to my spot in the middle was noteworthy.

He said, let’s figure out the plot together, and then you could write the story and I could illustrate it with a map.

He showed me a book full of sketches—houses and castles and towers. When I saw the lines and details and intricacies of his work, I could suddenly see the fantasy world we were creating. I had that itch in my hands, a buzz in my stomach, almost a taste in my mouth, that I got when I couldn’t wait to start writing.

I’d been writing stories since I was little. Mum and Nanna have stacks of little booklets I produced when I was seven, eight, nine. Stories about animals, many about horses, a chestnut pony called Star, specifically, that I thought I could manifest into reality out of sheer willpower. Then, as I got older, I started getting more serious, self-importantly thinking of the stories as ‘short stories’, and plotting out potential novels. When Dad first moved to Perth and Lauren was busy with her high-school friends, I would spend whole weekends writing. I instinctively felt I was good at it but, despite this belief, I was too scared to ever show anyone my work. It was my private triumph, too fragile to be entrusted to others.

But planning this story with Jesse gave me confidence. When I showed him what I had written so far for our assignment, he said with real awe and sincerity, ‘You’re a really good writer.’ It sent a jolt into me. It made me feel like I mattered. His map was amazing, beautifully and perfectly detailing the world we created together. We handed in the assignment and got an A+. Our teacher pinned the map up on the class noticeboard for everyone to admire. Jesse was mortified, but I was delighted.

After that, we always sat together in English. Sometimes on the bus home, he’d wait until Frances and Lakshmi, the girls I usually hung out with, got off and then he’d come and slide into the seat next to me for the last fifteen minutes of the trip. If we passed each other during the school day, we’d grin. We texted all the time, jokes and memes and links and random thoughts. A few times, we walked his family’s dog together. Our friendship wasn’t hidden, exactly, but it felt like a little bubble of secret happiness in my day. I would sit in class and look at the map on the wall and smile.

Lauren teased me that I liked him, which made me yell at her but, privately, I wondered. The mechanics of crushes—desire, emotions, lust—were all still confusing to me. Lauren had her first kiss when she was eleven, she’d had three boyfriends by sixteen, and I had just turned fourteen and had never been kissed and it was not something I saw happening in my immediate future. Lauren was the kissable sister, I was the one who read about it in my sister’s diary. Did I like Jesse in that way? How did you know what was just friendship and what was more? No one had ever liked me, so I had no baseline data. I needed a pro–con list, a deep-dive YouTube series, a twenty-page quiz, a how-to guide and a relationship coach before I could work it out.

Feelings were scary. I knew that much.

One weekend in November, Gretel Morewell invited the whole year level to her fourteenth birthday party. She lived on a five-acre property, and her parents were there to supervise, but they holed themselves upstairs, and fifty or so of us spread out through her house and yard. There was a fire pit, and she’d put speakers in her windows so you could hear the music outside. There were endless boxes of pizzas laid out on the counter, and we had free rein until 10 pm.

It was the first real party I’d been to that wasn’t a sleepover with three or four other girls, and I went mostly out of curiosity. I knew everyone there, but the air crackled with the thrill of possibility of being with your classmates at night-time, away from school. I drifted from group to group, until I found myself sitting next to Jesse on the couch inside. We chatted for a while, and when there was a lull in the conversation, and I turned to him, about to tell him how much I loved the song that was playing (‘Sign of the Times’ by Harry Styles, which had come out six months earlier and I was still listening to it semiobsessively every night). Jesse turned to me at the same time, our eyes met and he leaned down towards me. It took me a second to realise he was leaning in to kiss me. I was about to be kissed. I sat up straighter, thrilled and nervous, ready for my life to change.

It wasn’t, by any definition, a good kiss. It was barely a kiss. He leaned down way too fast, then hesitated, then kept going at the same time as I leaned in too, so we almost bumped heads. Our lips fumbled together, and the angle of our heads was all wrong. It occurred to me as it was happening that I had no idea what exactly you were supposed to do when you were kissed. One of my hands hovered awkwardly in the air, because I was too afraid to put it down anywhere in case it was wrong.

But still. My first kiss. With a cute boy. While my favourite song was playing. This was the stuff dreams are made of.

After a few seconds, we broke apart. I blinked and looked up at him, willing him to do it again, but slower, so I could improve, or at least figure out what to do with my hand. I started to lean in towards him, then panicked that I looked too eager, so I jerked backwards just as he was moving in to meet me. His face went red and he mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.

A burst of laughter interrupted us, and I turned and saw Gretel and a bunch of boys from our class standing in the doorway.

‘What’s going on here?’ Gretel said, her voice both delighted and dangerous. ‘Jesse, do you like Brooke?’

The implication in her tone was clear. I was not worthy of being liked, as least not by Jesse.

Jesse’s face was very red now. He stood up quickly, without looking at me, which was my first clue as to what would come next. He looked at Gretel and the five or six guys standing behind her, and laughed and shook his head and said, ‘Do I like Brooke? No. No. Fuck, no.’

I stared up at him, shocked.

‘No offence,’ he said, looking back at me and quickly away again, rubbing his hand over his mouth. His eyes looked desperate, there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. My mouth was dry. I had no idea what to do or say. I felt like my insides were liquifying. I had emotional whiplash. Kissed and publicly rejected within the timespan of a Harry Styles song.

‘That’s harsh, man,’ one of the guys said to Jesse. ‘She’s not that bad.’ But then they were all talking about something else, complaining they hated the song, and Gretel picked up her phone to skip it. Jesse walked over to help her choose another song, leaning his head in extra close to hers, and I was left still sitting there, alone.

I pulled out my phone with shaking hands and texted Mum to come and get me. She would be at least half an hour, maybe longer, and I considered sitting by the dirt road in the dark to wait for her, which I calculated carried about a fifty per cent risk of murder, but still seemed better than being here. Gretel’s mother came downstairs to get more wine and took one look at me, sitting on the couch pale-faced and trembling, and brought me upstairs to sit awkwardly between her and her husband and watch Midsomer Murders with them until my mum arrived.

On Monday morning, I ignored Jesse on the bus. I had thought maybe he would text me over the weekend, but he didn’t. I had typed and then deleted so many messages to him that Mum and Lauren both demanded to know what was going on. I didn’t tell them. Later, I would let Lauren know that Jesse and I had had a fight, but I never gave her the details. It was too personal. It was too humiliating.

I was last one out of our homeroom after the bell rang for lunch that Monday, and I hovered at the noticeboard, looking at his map—our map. All the effort, all that detail, all those hours of work. I really loved the little world we’d created. I reached out, and I only meant to touch it, but something vicious came over me. He’d ruined not just my first kiss but my favourite song. I pulled the map off the wall and tore it in two. It felt so good, I ripped it again.

I heard a noise behind me, and turned. Jesse was standing there watching me.

‘Brooke,’ he started to say, running his hands through his hair. ‘Listen.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Do not talk to me. Ever again.’

‘I—’

‘I said, don’t ever talk to me again.’ My voice was as cold and hard as I could make it. I needed him to get away from me, fast, in case I cried. Or in case I changed my mind, because underneath everything, I already missed being his friend, and that made me angrier. I was determined not to show an ounce of weakness. I scrunched his map into a ball, threw it at his feet, and walked out of the classroom. And it felt good, so good, amazingly good. Anger, it turned out, was more satisfying than sadness or humiliation.