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It rained again the next week, and on that Monday day Rachel followed Zoe into the library. “Hey,” she said, standing over Zoe who was sitting on the floor. “I come on too strong. I thought you looked like someone who could handle that. I just started here and it was either throw myself at someone or not talk to anyone.”
“I looked like I could handle it?” Zoe asked, leaving her book open.
Rachel shrugged. “And your letter was funny. And you just liked running because you like to run.”
Zoe shook her head. She just wanted to get through her last year of school without drama. And if that meant getting through without friends that was probably okay.
“Someone told me you were friends with the girl: Gloria Geinsburg.”
Zoe shot her a sharp look, and Rachel raised her hands. “No, I don’t just want to be close to you because of that. I’m not some morbid celebrity follower type person. But I guessed you might have some messed up ideas about death and things. I thought you might understand.”
Zoe softened a little as she remembered. “You said your brothers died.”
“I have this relationship with death,” Rachel said, lowering herself to sit with Zoe on the floor. “I don’t want to befriend a group of normals then have to try and hide it, or worse, explain it. I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work.”
Zoe just looked at her. She wanted to point out that bonding over a mutual messed-up-edness wasn’t the most solid of foundations for friendship. She wanted to point out that they might end up hating each other. But it felt like finding someone at London College who was so brashly honest was a rare thing, and not one to be lightly tossed aside.
“You marked me wrong,” Zoe said, instead of all that. “I got two half marks. I should have got 5/10 too.”
“You didn’t seem like someone who wanted pity points,” Rachel said.
“I think you’re just shit at counting.”
Rachel nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed, adding: “It’s shit being shit at math in this world where numbers are the only thing that really makes sense. Well – that’s what the teachers keep saying: that they make sense. I can’t see it. I can’t even-“ she spread her fingers out, curled down four. “I can’t look at a handful of things at a glance and work out how many I need to make ten. I have to count on my fingers.” She uncurled them. 7-8-9-10. “So, well done. Five out of ten.”
“And my father’s not an alcoholic,” Zoe said. “You didn’t get that right. My father is in America and I haven’t seen him since I was twelve. My mother too. I’ve been adopted by lesbians. I don’t hate them.” She didn’t add: my sort-of uncle is an alcoholic, though. And he’s near as you can get to a real dad.
Being around Rachel made Zoe super-conscious of all of the things she didn’t say.
Rachel was sitting opposite Zoe, copying her posture almost entirely so the pair of them looked like a black/white mirror. Rachel’s long leg kept jiggling, constantly, though, like she was about to leap up and sprint away. Behind them was the big rain-streaked window looking out onto the muddy field, lined in trees, covered with a heavy grey sky and left to simmer.
“I don’t do drugs,” Zoe said. She closed her book now. “I’m saying that because you said you do and I want you to know that I don’t.”
“I’m not supposed to,” Rachel said. “They mess up my meds and I have to be better at this school. I’m glad you don’t. Do you drink?”
“I don’t know, sometimes,” Zoe said, though it has been a long time since she’d drank anything. It would have been at a party with Rueban, who she didn’t see a lot anymore. She wondered what Rachel’s meds were for, but the words didn’t make it out.
“I drink too much, my doctor says,” Rachel didn’t look apologetic, but she looked like she wanted to be. She shrugged it off at the end, enough. “Sometimes it’s the only thing that makes medication work on my brain though. Which is kind of backwards but I don’t mind a few hallucinations, y’know, so long as I’m not mind-numbingly depressed.”
“Hallucinations?” Zoe worried.
“Mostly just things going zoom across my eyes,” Rachel tilted her head at Zoe. She didn’t look harmful, but you never knew. “Are you on medication?”
Zoe shook her head, which was less of a ‘no’ and more of a ‘this topic is causing discomfort’. “Why would I be?”
“I just figured. I mean, you haven’t seen your parents since you were twelve; that’s gotta fuck you up. For starters.”
Zoe swallowed. In all honesty, she hadn’t spoken about her biological parents for such a long time. It was surreal to be mentioning them now. “I’m not on meds,” she answered, instead.
“You’re scared cos I am, aren’t you?” Rachel accused. Zoe shook her head, though she was, a bit. “Heaps of people are scared of mental illness. Like it’s catching. Or like I’m going to do something to you. Or like you want to believe that my brain works in the same logical way as yours and hate me because it doesn’t. I’m just saying what I’m thinking. Do you know how hard it is not to say sorry for that? But secrets are so hard to keep and I don’t want to spend my whole life keeping everything quiet. And why should I? Just because I was born with my head screwed on different.”
Zoe tried to think of something to say to that. She wished she could knock off whatever cap was keeping her own thoughts locked inside her head, restraining them as thoughts never to become words someone would hear. “Have you really been on medication since you were six?”
Rachel smiled because her other option was a grim nod, and Rachel couldn’t bear to be the type of person who went around grimly nodding all the time. “It started with Ritalin but that was only till I was eight, and the cocktail just grew from there.”
Jesus, thought Zoe. “Do you remember ever not being on them?”
“Yeah, I’ve had a few of periods of not taking anything, mostly when I was younger and my mum wouldn't fill the prescriptions. But I don’t really remember them? So actually, that’s mostly a no.”
“That’s really messed up,” Zoe said.
“Yeah it is,” Rachel agreed. “One of Dad’s girlfriends started writing a book about me when I was eight or something. But then she found out my dad was still with my mother and they broke up so it didn’t get finished. I’m starting to think I was wrong about my first number ten. You know,” she added when Zoe frowned in confusion. “That you were as crazy as me.”
“I’m not-not crazy,” Zoe said slowly. Rachel tilted her head the other way, and waited. Her silence was a well with Zoe on the rim, both of them waiting for Zoe to cast something in.
Zoe didn’t say: I’m psychic. I’m haunted. I’m surrounded by demons, angels, by other things you can only hallucinate. I have these psychic epileptic fits and I’m afraid that if I take the medication to stop them I’ll miss something important and people will die. People have died before because I missed signs. I won’t let it happen again even if it means public fits. Sometimes I want to die from all the guilt I can’t get rid of. Sometimes I want to run right into traffic.
But Zoe had to say something.
“I can’t describe it like you can describe it,” she said, eventually. Her voice was low, aware as she was of the other people in the library, though mostly they were a few tables over and engulfed in their own conversations. “But I’m not a normal.”
Rachel smiled. “What’s living with lesbians like?”
“I don’t know, I only know what it’s like living with my lesbians.”
Rachel grinned. “Them then.”
“They’re really… they’re good people.” Zoe breathed in relief that the conversation had turned. It made her more willing to talk. “Actually good people. Emma is not as good as Liz, but she tries, you know? When she’s not doing stupid things. I don’t think Liz knows how to be stupid. She knows how to be bossy though. The main point of them is not that they’re lesbians.”
“The main point of everyone is never the one big thing other people pick to focus on,” said Rachel. “Like the main point of you is not that you were Gloria’s friend. Like the main point of me is not being crazy.”
Sometimes Zoe though the main point of her was that she had been Gloria’s friend, but this was another on the growing list of things Zoe wouldn’t say. She liked the idea of what Rachel said, though, so she smiled a little. “Yeah, exactly.”
“Brothers, sisters?”
“There’s Hope, who is adopted by Liz and Emma too. And Fiona, same deal. The biological ones are a long time ago and very far away.”
“Oh, my step-sister’s middle name is Hope,” Rachel said.
“Optimistic name,” Zoe said.
“Not as optimistic as Chastity.”
“I know one of them too,” Zoe said, and Rachel laughed so loudly she threw herself backwards, drawing looks from the others in the library. The librarian behind the desk raised his head, but Rachel stopped laughing before he came over.
“Who’s the person with the weirdest name you know?” Rachel asked. “Is there a weirder name than Chastity?”
“Yours,” Zoe said, straight away. “Is it really Elaine Eos?”
“Yup,” Rachel said. “When I was twelve my dad let me name myself. Let me change it officially, I mean. We both changed ours to Eos but Harley Eos doesn’t have the same magic, you know? I thought I was really clever. It was the biggest word I knew. I was ten.”
Zoe was forming a stranger and stranger picture of Rachel’s father in her head. “Where’d ‘Rachel’ come from, then?”
“That’s my real middle name. I kept it. I don’t know why. Glad I did, though. Escape my ten year old pretension.”
Zoe found her cheeks were feeling sore; she’d been smiling for a long time. “I changed my name too. It used to be Zoe-Jane.”
“Zoe is much better,” Rachel said.
“Better than Miscellaneous!”
“Ugh,” said Rachel. “My dad still calls me Misc when he’s making fun of me.”
“Your dad sounds weird.”
“My dad is a dick,” Rachel said. “He’s a life-controlling freak who can’t control his own. Total hypocrite.”
“What about your mum, then?” Zoe wondered. She almost didn’t ask – she could imagine the answer was a painful one and she didn’t want to trigger anything. But she did ask. The art of having a conversation was not entirely forgotten.
“She’s gone,” Rachel said. Her face was somewhere between a smile and a grim nod. “With my brothers.”
“Sorry,” said Zoe. She didn’t ask what happened.
A bitter but otherwise bright smile. “Death is a side effect of life,” she said.
The five minute bell rang, and Zoe who had a class about as far from the library as you could get, pushed her book back into her bag. “If you want to come over after school sometime, that’d be okay,” she said. Not today. She needed a quiet afternoon to digest this whole lunch hour.
“Okay,” Rachel said, with a smile that held no lingering trace of her life-is-a-side-effect bitterness. “That’d be okay with me too.”
“I looked like I could handle it?” Zoe asked, leaving her book open.
Rachel shrugged. “And your letter was funny. And you just liked running because you like to run.”
Zoe shook her head. She just wanted to get through her last year of school without drama. And if that meant getting through without friends that was probably okay.
“Someone told me you were friends with the girl: Gloria Geinsburg.”
Zoe shot her a sharp look, and Rachel raised her hands. “No, I don’t just want to be close to you because of that. I’m not some morbid celebrity follower type person. But I guessed you might have some messed up ideas about death and things. I thought you might understand.”
Zoe softened a little as she remembered. “You said your brothers died.”
“I have this relationship with death,” Rachel said, lowering herself to sit with Zoe on the floor. “I don’t want to befriend a group of normals then have to try and hide it, or worse, explain it. I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work.”
Zoe just looked at her. She wanted to point out that bonding over a mutual messed-up-edness wasn’t the most solid of foundations for friendship. She wanted to point out that they might end up hating each other. But it felt like finding someone at London College who was so brashly honest was a rare thing, and not one to be lightly tossed aside.
“You marked me wrong,” Zoe said, instead of all that. “I got two half marks. I should have got 5/10 too.”
“You didn’t seem like someone who wanted pity points,” Rachel said.
“I think you’re just shit at counting.”
Rachel nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed, adding: “It’s shit being shit at math in this world where numbers are the only thing that really makes sense. Well – that’s what the teachers keep saying: that they make sense. I can’t see it. I can’t even-“ she spread her fingers out, curled down four. “I can’t look at a handful of things at a glance and work out how many I need to make ten. I have to count on my fingers.” She uncurled them. 7-8-9-10. “So, well done. Five out of ten.”
“And my father’s not an alcoholic,” Zoe said. “You didn’t get that right. My father is in America and I haven’t seen him since I was twelve. My mother too. I’ve been adopted by lesbians. I don’t hate them.” She didn’t add: my sort-of uncle is an alcoholic, though. And he’s near as you can get to a real dad.
Being around Rachel made Zoe super-conscious of all of the things she didn’t say.
Rachel was sitting opposite Zoe, copying her posture almost entirely so the pair of them looked like a black/white mirror. Rachel’s long leg kept jiggling, constantly, though, like she was about to leap up and sprint away. Behind them was the big rain-streaked window looking out onto the muddy field, lined in trees, covered with a heavy grey sky and left to simmer.
“I don’t do drugs,” Zoe said. She closed her book now. “I’m saying that because you said you do and I want you to know that I don’t.”
“I’m not supposed to,” Rachel said. “They mess up my meds and I have to be better at this school. I’m glad you don’t. Do you drink?”
“I don’t know, sometimes,” Zoe said, though it has been a long time since she’d drank anything. It would have been at a party with Rueban, who she didn’t see a lot anymore. She wondered what Rachel’s meds were for, but the words didn’t make it out.
“I drink too much, my doctor says,” Rachel didn’t look apologetic, but she looked like she wanted to be. She shrugged it off at the end, enough. “Sometimes it’s the only thing that makes medication work on my brain though. Which is kind of backwards but I don’t mind a few hallucinations, y’know, so long as I’m not mind-numbingly depressed.”
“Hallucinations?” Zoe worried.
“Mostly just things going zoom across my eyes,” Rachel tilted her head at Zoe. She didn’t look harmful, but you never knew. “Are you on medication?”
Zoe shook her head, which was less of a ‘no’ and more of a ‘this topic is causing discomfort’. “Why would I be?”
“I just figured. I mean, you haven’t seen your parents since you were twelve; that’s gotta fuck you up. For starters.”
Zoe swallowed. In all honesty, she hadn’t spoken about her biological parents for such a long time. It was surreal to be mentioning them now. “I’m not on meds,” she answered, instead.
“You’re scared cos I am, aren’t you?” Rachel accused. Zoe shook her head, though she was, a bit. “Heaps of people are scared of mental illness. Like it’s catching. Or like I’m going to do something to you. Or like you want to believe that my brain works in the same logical way as yours and hate me because it doesn’t. I’m just saying what I’m thinking. Do you know how hard it is not to say sorry for that? But secrets are so hard to keep and I don’t want to spend my whole life keeping everything quiet. And why should I? Just because I was born with my head screwed on different.”
Zoe tried to think of something to say to that. She wished she could knock off whatever cap was keeping her own thoughts locked inside her head, restraining them as thoughts never to become words someone would hear. “Have you really been on medication since you were six?”
Rachel smiled because her other option was a grim nod, and Rachel couldn’t bear to be the type of person who went around grimly nodding all the time. “It started with Ritalin but that was only till I was eight, and the cocktail just grew from there.”
Jesus, thought Zoe. “Do you remember ever not being on them?”
“Yeah, I’ve had a few of periods of not taking anything, mostly when I was younger and my mum wouldn't fill the prescriptions. But I don’t really remember them? So actually, that’s mostly a no.”
“That’s really messed up,” Zoe said.
“Yeah it is,” Rachel agreed. “One of Dad’s girlfriends started writing a book about me when I was eight or something. But then she found out my dad was still with my mother and they broke up so it didn’t get finished. I’m starting to think I was wrong about my first number ten. You know,” she added when Zoe frowned in confusion. “That you were as crazy as me.”
“I’m not-not crazy,” Zoe said slowly. Rachel tilted her head the other way, and waited. Her silence was a well with Zoe on the rim, both of them waiting for Zoe to cast something in.
Zoe didn’t say: I’m psychic. I’m haunted. I’m surrounded by demons, angels, by other things you can only hallucinate. I have these psychic epileptic fits and I’m afraid that if I take the medication to stop them I’ll miss something important and people will die. People have died before because I missed signs. I won’t let it happen again even if it means public fits. Sometimes I want to die from all the guilt I can’t get rid of. Sometimes I want to run right into traffic.
But Zoe had to say something.
“I can’t describe it like you can describe it,” she said, eventually. Her voice was low, aware as she was of the other people in the library, though mostly they were a few tables over and engulfed in their own conversations. “But I’m not a normal.”
Rachel smiled. “What’s living with lesbians like?”
“I don’t know, I only know what it’s like living with my lesbians.”
Rachel grinned. “Them then.”
“They’re really… they’re good people.” Zoe breathed in relief that the conversation had turned. It made her more willing to talk. “Actually good people. Emma is not as good as Liz, but she tries, you know? When she’s not doing stupid things. I don’t think Liz knows how to be stupid. She knows how to be bossy though. The main point of them is not that they’re lesbians.”
“The main point of everyone is never the one big thing other people pick to focus on,” said Rachel. “Like the main point of you is not that you were Gloria’s friend. Like the main point of me is not being crazy.”
Sometimes Zoe though the main point of her was that she had been Gloria’s friend, but this was another on the growing list of things Zoe wouldn’t say. She liked the idea of what Rachel said, though, so she smiled a little. “Yeah, exactly.”
“Brothers, sisters?”
“There’s Hope, who is adopted by Liz and Emma too. And Fiona, same deal. The biological ones are a long time ago and very far away.”
“Oh, my step-sister’s middle name is Hope,” Rachel said.
“Optimistic name,” Zoe said.
“Not as optimistic as Chastity.”
“I know one of them too,” Zoe said, and Rachel laughed so loudly she threw herself backwards, drawing looks from the others in the library. The librarian behind the desk raised his head, but Rachel stopped laughing before he came over.
“Who’s the person with the weirdest name you know?” Rachel asked. “Is there a weirder name than Chastity?”
“Yours,” Zoe said, straight away. “Is it really Elaine Eos?”
“Yup,” Rachel said. “When I was twelve my dad let me name myself. Let me change it officially, I mean. We both changed ours to Eos but Harley Eos doesn’t have the same magic, you know? I thought I was really clever. It was the biggest word I knew. I was ten.”
Zoe was forming a stranger and stranger picture of Rachel’s father in her head. “Where’d ‘Rachel’ come from, then?”
“That’s my real middle name. I kept it. I don’t know why. Glad I did, though. Escape my ten year old pretension.”
Zoe found her cheeks were feeling sore; she’d been smiling for a long time. “I changed my name too. It used to be Zoe-Jane.”
“Zoe is much better,” Rachel said.
“Better than Miscellaneous!”
“Ugh,” said Rachel. “My dad still calls me Misc when he’s making fun of me.”
“Your dad sounds weird.”
“My dad is a dick,” Rachel said. “He’s a life-controlling freak who can’t control his own. Total hypocrite.”
“What about your mum, then?” Zoe wondered. She almost didn’t ask – she could imagine the answer was a painful one and she didn’t want to trigger anything. But she did ask. The art of having a conversation was not entirely forgotten.
“She’s gone,” Rachel said. Her face was somewhere between a smile and a grim nod. “With my brothers.”
“Sorry,” said Zoe. She didn’t ask what happened.
A bitter but otherwise bright smile. “Death is a side effect of life,” she said.
The five minute bell rang, and Zoe who had a class about as far from the library as you could get, pushed her book back into her bag. “If you want to come over after school sometime, that’d be okay,” she said. Not today. She needed a quiet afternoon to digest this whole lunch hour.
“Okay,” Rachel said, with a smile that held no lingering trace of her life-is-a-side-effect bitterness. “That’d be okay with me too.”
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