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Well, I wasn’t going to think about him at all. I had my own problems: lots of them.
Callie ran into me outside the door of my last class of the day and pulled me aside. “Look, let’s not let some stupid fight get in the way of things that are actually important. Not sure if Aileen is still around, but the two of us can go take care of that little… mission, if you’d like?”
I shook my head and shook myself out of her grasp. “Maybe another day.”
Callie was doing a bad job of keeping her jaw from dropping. “Tamara, you do realise there’s sort of a ticking clock on this, right?”
I grimaced at her wording. “Just not today, okay? I’m going to go home with Ryan and try to have a nice calm evening.”
“It’s because you had a fight with Steven earlier, isn’t it?” she said. “You need to put all of that out of your head and focus on what’s important for you right now.”
So the gossip had spread to her already. It was strange to think of Callie as an endpoint in the rumour mill.
I started backing away. “Just leave me alone, Callie, please?”
She called after me once as I turned to hurry off, but when I looked back she wasn’t following.
I got myself without further incident to Ryan, who never had much to say during these short lifts at least. He hated that he had to do them at all, but Mum had quite a lot to say about his suggestion that I could just take the bus like every other normal high school student who didn’t have a car of their own yet. I, apparently, was not ‘just normal’. But at least Ryan’s smugly subtle resentment gave me the space I needed to go within myself, to the place I needed to be to calm myself down.
By the time we were back at home, I was feeling quiet in my head again. It had been an upsetting day, but I had done what I needed to do and gotten through it. I’d done it mostly on my own too, no need for the variable support of my friends.
I looked in the mailbox once I was out of Ryan’s car out of habit now (there was a lock, but Mum never bothered to put it on) and pulled out a bunch of mail-order catalogues for Mum and something for Mike in a suspiciously nondescript envelope…
And a much more official-looking envelope for me. I didn’t see my name on envelopes very often. My bank statements twice a year, letting me know my funds were being slowly depleted. The occasional thing from school. This was very different. I actually struggled to catch my breath when I thought about the significance of what was held inside.
I picked up a couple of Mum’s things I’d dropped in my surprise, and headed into the house. I nearly tripped over Mum three steps in.
“Oh thanks, Tamara. I’ll take that now.” She held out her hands for the mail.
“Um…” I hadn’t thought this part of the plan through at all. I wriggled the bottom envelope out of the pile and passed over the rest, biting down on an urge to try explaining myself. I didn’t need to explain myself. I was an adult who lived here, just the same as Mum or Mike or Ryan. It was normal to expect me to sometimes receive mail.
Mum was paying that envelope a lot of attention, though. I tried to keep my fingers spread across it so she couldn’t get a good look at it. “How was your day, Tammie?”
“Not bad.” I made a big show of yawning. “Very tiring. I’m sorry, I think I’m going to have to go lie down for a bit.”
I could tell from the way Mum was pursing her lips that this was just awakening even more curiosity in her. If I kept going like this, I’d have her assuming I was pregnant. Especially if she happened to hear any of the gossip going around about me… and I was pretty sure she would hear something eventually.
That was the worst thing about living in Hobart: everyone knew everyone, or even if you were less important like me, everyone knew someone who knew you. In my case, Ryan seemed to have a lot of friends for a guy who spent so many of his daylight hours sulking at home. The time Callie, Aileen, and I managed to get in on a group who were trying out weed at someone else’s house, one of the older guys there blabbed to Ryan because they thought it was so funny I would do something like that, and of course Ryan went off, because he can’t just be a cool brother who makes his mistakes and lets me make mine too. My mother is probably never going to let me forget my ‘drugs incident’ even though the only scary part of it was when she found out. By that time we girls had all agreed we hated the whole experience and would never be trying it again anyway.
When I got into my room I sat down on the bed and tried not to let myself get lost in thoughts about my mother and her shit. That sort of thinking always just left me feeling upset and paralysed and kept me from getting anything done.
I settled on my plan for if she came in suddenly: I’d stuff the certificate under my blankets. It didn’t have to be in perfect condition, I just had to be able to read the name of my father.
My hands shook as I quietly opened the envelope and slid out the piece of paper. It seemed somehow less impressive than it should have, just an ordinary page with government logos printed on it and my name: Tamara Edith Hills, at the top.
I quickly found the section I wanted and felt my face screwing up as I tried to make sense of what I was reading.
Father: Bradley Thomas Ryan Chalmers. Chalmers was my mum’s surname. Her married surname, apparently. Where the fuck had ‘Hills’ come from?
My answer was a little further up the page: Susan Janet Hills. Ryan and I must have come along before they were married. It seemed strange to me that Mum had kept his name, knowing how much she hated him these days, but maybe it was just too much effort. Aileen’s parents had been divorced since she was a baby, and she’d told me her mother never changed her name back because she dreaded the paperwork and the probable resulting confusion.
Steven was smart to get me to look at this certificate. Even if it had been scary, I could never have gotten anywhere without it.
But I
shouldn’t have thought about Steven at all, because now I was feeling awful over everything that had happened with us. How was it possible to sleep with a guy one night and then so quickly after have everything ruined?
Sleeping with him so soon had been a mistake, but not because I was supposed to stay pure or get to know a guy before I did that or anything. The two of us just had too much baggage for such an intimate interaction to go well. I hadn’t been able to trust him enough to tell him the truth about my past experience… and there was no way I could judge him for not trusting me with the details of the restraining order so early on. We weren’t even dating, anyway. If he really had changed, like I suspected, he wasn’t going to want to just let every girl he was with see that dark part of his history. I got that. My family was the same with the whole situation with my dad. And it wasn’t too crazy for him to want to make sure I wasn’t pregnant, either. That was something I should have shown him I was taking more seriously.
