julia laurie

Conversations With Rowena, Aged 12-16

12

We sit high above the school, regal in our fortress of wood rubbed smooth by generations of small hands and bodies. We drape ourselves nonchalantly over the bars that dig uncomfortably into our thighs, surveying our realm. This is our spot.

We don’t mind the little kids hanging off the monkey bars, as long as they don’t get in our way. But we fend off Trevor and Sanjay, runny-nosed boys whom we can’t stand because they inhabit the same “uncool” space as we do, except that we are in fact cool and enigmatic and simply above the mainstream herd, whereas they are really uncool with their skinny necks and snotty noses and giant fantasy books.

“Gettoff, Sanjay! This is our spot, go find your own!”

“Hey, it’s free real estate. This is a free country,” Sanjay says infuriatingly, while Trevor silently cracks up.

“Go away!” I shout. “Go away,” Trevor mimics.

“Oh, wow, so mature,” smirks Rowena. She has a way of shrinking these boys right down into their grubby shoes, that I have never mastered.

“We are mature. Thank you for acknowledging it!” replies Sanjay with mock pleasure, but they retreat. I don’t know how she does it so effortlessly when I become red and flustered and angrily confused, even with such bottom-of-the-social-barrel adversaries.

I roll my eyes. “Ugh, why do they always do that?”

“Forget about them,” says Rowena, “Let me show you the CD.” The CD is the new Good Charlotte, Rowena’s latest obsession, which means it’s about to be mine, too.

“Such a cool cover,” I murmur, looking at the sketches of skulls and dark red background.

“Billy made it––he does illustration,” she says in a grown-up voice. She begins to page through the thick, shiny pages of the CD insert, her dark hair falling across her face as she bends her head.

“Okay. It’s time for you to pick your crush. Which one do you like best?” This is a custom I am familiar with from previous band obsessions. My crush will go on to adorn my bedroom walls and dominate my diary entries, which I will read to Rowena.

My heart thuds all the way up to my throat and makes my mouth dry. I study the tattooed and spiky-haired figures on the page. They all look pretty similar to me. I glance up at Rowena into her ocean-wide eyes that know all but reveal nothing. I choose one with a nice-looking face and point at him, careful not to touch the pristine page with my smudgy fingers. “He looks kind of cute?” I hazard.

“Nooo! Joel is the worst!” she crows. “He’s dating Hilary Duff! He’s the least punk one of them all. I think he’s only in the band because of his brother.” Her voice drips with contempt. Dating a mainstream pop star is a grievous sin. My heart sinks.

“You’re right, he does look pretty mainstream,” I say quickly. I try again, this time going for the one that is reedy and hollow-faced, with the spikiest hair of them all. “This one looks pretty cool.”

This time she grins, her eyes looking up in a private dreaminess. “Billy is so the coolest. But you can’t have him, he’s mine! We both play the bass anyway. AND we both do art.”

“Oh ja, you’d be good together,” I agree. I have chosen the coolest one and it’s somehow still wrong. Now there are only two more to choose from. “Actually, I think this one might be the coolest, in my opinion.” I point to a slightly thicker-set version of the first one.

“Benji? Ja, he’s pretty cool,” she nods, casually approving. “He’s Joel’s brother, but he’s definitely the cooler one.”

“Oh definitely, WAY cooler.”

She looks at me slyly. “Don’t lie, you were so gonna choose Joel!”

“No I wasn’t!” I can feel my neck getting hot. “I just couldn’t see properly at first. I didn’t notice how lame his tattoos were. Benji looks way more original.”

Rowena is laughing now, the corners of her thin detached smile poking their way into my insides. I have yet to hear any of Good Charlotte’s music.

13

We are huddled together on Rowena’s bed, the remains of our peanut butter sandwiches littering the plates at our feet. Rowena never eats the crusts, which is one of her very few childish habits.

“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” Rowena asks while examining her fingernails and scratching at the bits of paint that fleck her pale hands, revealing her artist-hood to anyone who cares to look. The only thing that my hands reveal about me is that I chew my nails.

I consider. This is not a particularly odd or unusual topic of conversation for us. We like the dark, the dangerous, the subjects that feel like tiptoeing along a thin fence with a dark chasm on one side. Ones that shock teachers and make parents furrow their brows in concern. “I think I’d do that thing where you get in a car and run a pipe from the exhaust and close all the doors and windows. You’d just fall asleep, maybe even feel high. There would be no pain.”

“Would you even know how to do that, though?” Rowena has stopped paying attention to her fingernails and is looking at me through narrowed eyes, head cocked to one side. The light from the window filters through dust motes to caress her long eyelashes, sharp chin and downy hairs on her cheek. Her slender, milky neck is cut across with a choker.

I shrug. “I’m sure I could find out. Why, what would you do?” What is the right answer?

“Probably just cut my wrists,” she says without hesitation. “Simple but effective.”

“But people who do that often fail,” I counter.

“That’s because they don’t know how to do it properly.” She takes my darker, stubby hand into her pale, slender one. “Most people do it like this,” she speaks softly, tracing her fingers in a horizontal line across my wrist, “but you won’t cut the correct artery doing that. You’ll lose a lot of blood and probably go unconscious, sure. But if you really want to die,” she flickers her lashes up at me, “you have to do it like this.” Her fingers move to the top of my wrist and draw a sharp line down. She grins. “That’s how you do it!” she finishes in a brighter voice, as if she has just shown me how to thread a needle on a sewing machine or make a serve in tennis.

I can feel my heart beating in my throat. Her touch still fizzes on my wrist. “How do you know that?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Oh, you know. I read it somewhere.”

I focus on regulating my breathing. I pray she doesn’t touch me again and, yet, at the same time I wish desperately that she would. I am used to this feeling. It happens to me every time one of us sleeps over at the other’s house, top to toe if it’s at my house, side by side on Rowena’s double bed if it’s at hers. Either way, I anticipate the actual going-to-sleep part of the night with a mixture of excitement and dread.

Going to bed is not going to sleep––we can talk for hours until Rowena eventually drops off. Then the night stretches and expands, blurs and softens, becomes undefined and infinite and all mine. I feel our legs brushing up against each other, or her hip softly jutting into my stomach, and my skin burns with the contact. I am ravenous for these moments of endlessness, slurping them up like slippery mango slices, sinking deep into the velvet dark. But at the same time it makes my skin itch and whatever’s underneath boil and fills my head with irritation. After a while I try to move as far from her as I can on the bed because all I want to do is sleep, but I can’t, not with her burning body right beside me. I wish she would just be gone so I can relax, but then the next night, alone in my bed, I crave her presence.

14

We are in high school now, and we no longer sit in the jungle gym at break time. Instead, we sprawl in the shade of one of the big oaks that line the soccer field, except that we sit at the back side of it, facing the wall. We like to squirrel ourselves away like this. One heavy summer’s day, Rowena shows me her fingertips, which are covered in straight little flaps of sliced skin, tiny cuts that streak across the pink flesh in various stages of healing.

“What happened?” I exclaim, aghast. She laughs loudly, like she always does when I betray my innocence. “I did it with a pencil sharpener,” she says with a vague smile, as if it’s no big deal. I’m not sure whether I am supposed to be horrified or impressed.

“Why?” I ask. My heart is beating hard but not in the way I’m used to with Rowena. It’s not the feeling I get when her hair falls across her eyes, or when she gently touches my face to apply eye makeup. I feel sick and confused and I want to go back to talking about our terrible maths teacher or which of our classmates has done a blowjob or movies or music or anything else.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. It kind of felt good.” She is staring at me with a level gaze, chin jutting out, almost daring me to disapprove. But there is something else in her eyes that I can’t place.

“Look, I’ll show you.” In a moment she has whipped out a pencil sharpener from the folds of her cardigan. It glints as she holds it up to show me.

“Ro, I… I don’t think you should do that,” I say lamely. She just laughs. She brings the index finger of her left hand to the small blade, and wrenches down decisively. She winces briefly, and as the blood pearls on her finger, a dazed expression dulls the piercing blue of her eyes.

“Do you want to try?” she asks softly, holding the sharpener out to me, shiny now with blood as well as metal. “Come on. It would make us real blood sisters,” she grins.

“Rowena, I’m not doing that.”

“Oh, don’t be such a baby. It’s not even that sore.”

“Um, have you forgotten about AIDS? No thank you.” I try to sound authoritative, but the words come out as shrill.

She rolls her eyes. “There’s no way I could have AIDS, but whatever. Be a scaredy-cat if you want.”

I ignore her, and for a while we don’t speak. She examines her slowly dripping finger and I focus on ripping out bits of grass. We don’t return to this topic. Over the next few weeks, I notice that the cuts on her fingers heal and no more appear. I also notice that she continues to wear her long-sleeved cardigans despite the rising summer heat.

15

I sit down gingerly in the visitor’s chair and am confronted with Rowena’s back as she lies facing the wall. I don’t think she’s asleep, but I can’t be sure.“Hey Ro. How’s it going? I’ve brought you some books. And flowers. I know it’s stupid, but I couldn’t think of anything better. At least they’re nasturtiums, so you can always eat them if you don’t want to look at them…” I trail off. Inwardly, I curse my awkward attempt at humour.

“Rowena? Are you awake?”

Silence.

“Well, if you’re asleep, I’ll sit here until you wake up. And if you’re awake, I’ll sit here until you want to talk to me or until my mom comes to fetch me.” I am aware that the tremble in my voice reveals too much of the anger I am trying to clothe in concern and kindness.

Rowena’s blankets are rumpled. Because her back is to me and because she’s wearing the regulation backless hospital gown, I can see the nape of her neck and the bones of her spine all the way down to the middle of her back. Despite my anger and the sordid situation, I imagine drawing my fingers down it, caressing each vertebra. I keep my hands folded in my lap. Is it possible to hate someone and love them at the same time?

I try out various questions for Rowena in my head. Why did you do it? No, too clichéd. What’s wrong, Rowena? She would never answer me honestly. Did you know that every choice I’ve ever made, I’ve made to please you? That should make her sit up and notice. Do you know how much you could––can––hurt me? Did you do that on purpose? Did you know that you shrunk me down, throughout our friendship, kept me small enough to fit neatly in your book bag, folded up around the history and biology textbooks, too small even to speak?

I look down at my hands with their peeling cuticles. “So…” I have to clear my throat; it’s like I’ve forgotten how to speak. “Which direction did you do the cuts?”

For a moment, nothing changes. I wonder if she really is asleep. But then, slowly, she shifts and turns around. Now she is facing me, wisps of escaping hair sticking to her puffy cheeks like cracks in a wall. Still, she is silent and it’s as if I can see waves of resolve passing over her face, hardening it, then crashing and disappearing. Eventually, her face crumples and tears leak out onto the pillow. She squeezes her eyes shut. Instinctively, I put my hand out to cover hers, which immediately clutch onto me, gripping tight.

“I would be a failure either way, right?” Her voice is so soft I have to lean in to hear her. “Either I tried the proper way and failed or I was just seeking attention, which is pointless and stupid.” She turns her gaze to me. Her lashes stick together into points. She lets go of my hand. “So what’s the point in even telling you? You can wonder forever. Either way I fail, so leave it at that.”

A familiar sick feeling is beginning to creep into my stomach. For the first time, I notice the faded white lines of scars and more recent red ribs that lash across her arms. I try to focus on the softness of the skin around them. I take her hand again and force myself to look into her eyes. “Hey, remember how obsessed we used to be with Good Charlotte?” I smile. She rolls her eyes, but lifts one corner of her lip ever so slightly.

“God, their music was awful. What did we see in them?” She is smiling now in a kind of hopeful relief. It’s a look I’ve given her a million times.

“You know how Billy was your crush and Benji was mine?”

“Oh my goodness. Didn’t we used to like re-enact the interviews they did?”

“We did all sorts of stuff. But there’s something I never told you––I actually never liked Benji. I never liked any of them really. I didn’t even like their music!” I tell it like a joke and Rowena laughs, too, but she’s unsure. It’s a kind of magic. I know I could say anything right now. But then guilt washes over me and I remember why we’re here. I think of the big house with its empty beige walls that awaits Rowena on release from hospital. I remember something my mother said once when I complained about our noisy, cramped house full of brothers and dogs and things to step on scattered all over the floor. I compared it to Rowena’s expansive house with its flat-screen TV and endless couch and fridge full of treats and no rules. To me it was a fairytale, but my mother had said, “Poor girl”.

“I’m sorry,” I find myself saying.

“You’re sorry?” Rowena laughs again but with a ragged harshness. “I’m the one who should be sorry! I’m the one who’s treated you like shit all these years.” She shakes her head as her voice begins to tremble. “I think you should go. I’m not a good friend to you and I don’t know how to be. We need to just stop.”

A hot poker sears through my chest. I want to say, “No, I’ll always be your friend. Just tell me what to do. I’ll do anything. Instead I say, “Okay.” Before leaving, I sit down on the bed and put my arms around her. She’s slow to respond at first, but then she tightens her arms around my neck, hanging onto me, crying in great ugly gulping sobs. I can’t remember the last time I saw her cry.

16

Although she looks completely different now, I can tell it’s Rowena the moment I see her on the other side of the room. It’s the way she stands leaningly, head cocked to one side. It’s her sharp chin and laugh that carries all the way to where I stand in a huddle with my awkward friends.

I am only here because this is the party of one of my friend’s brothers. Another friend and I have rallied for moral support. We are generally not party people. We are sit-in-the-dark-watching-anime people. We are no-friends-outside-our-clique people. We are never-been-kissed, never-been-drunk, awkward and timid people in oversized jerseys. And yet I am so grateful for these friends. They make me laugh; we enjoy each other’s company. I still can’t believe how easy it feels.

Rowena looks like a party person. She was never that way before, but she appears to wear it well. It’s unsettling how familiar she looks and yet how completely different. Her hair is still its natural ebony, but she’s wearing it in a high bun. She’s also wearing skinny jeans and a little top that shows off her clavicles. I guess she doesn’t mind showing her arms anymore.

She notices me and bounds over. I’ve seen that energy before, but she used to cloak it in performative lethargy. Her face is all smiles. I haven’t seen her since she changed schools almost a year ago.

“Jess, hi! How are you?” She exclaims and snakes her arms around me for a hug.

“Oh, I’m good. How are you?” I look into her eyes, searching for something, but she doesn’t hold my gaze for more than a second. She bounces up and down on her Nike sneakers.

“I’m really great. It’s so good to see you!” I can’t stop my eyes flicking to her arms. The white lines are still there, but I can’t see any fresh ones.

“It’s good to see you, too. You look… great.”

She laughs. “You look just the same!” She appears harder and sharper somehow, more angular, though of course she is still beautiful. Maybe it’s the clothes - I don’t think I’ve seen this much of her body since we were twelve and used to shower together.

“Anyway, we should catch up sometime!” she bubbles. I have no idea who this new Rowena is, this one who uses phrases like “catch up,” who wears skinny jeans and spaghetti straps and laughs and bounces and is a party person.

“Totally, let’s do that,” I smile. And just as quickly as she appeared, she has vanished back into the party. She commands attention; people orbit her like she has gravitational pull. I wonder if she is okay.

I turn back to my friends. “Who was that?” asks Cath.

“Oh, just someone I used to be friends with.” I stare for a second at her long neck with wisps of hair escaping down, then someone comes up from behind and I can’t see her anymore.