Ribbons

On Sports Day, the sun is glaring.  Put something on your head, Mum cautions from the crowd, but I don’t have a hat.  I stand by the track with my two limp plaits and the long bows of my ribbons hanging down.

            Sports Day is the ribbons that are pinned to our collared sports shirts and the pump of too much sunshine in our heads.  Sports Day is, despite the random selection of students for factions, a red faction full of fast, tall girls with well-developed breasts, a yellow faction of brainy girls who couldn’t care less about running around, and a green faction of girls like me, like Alannah Nesci, whose uncle owns a hot bread kitchen, and Juliana Tsoukalis, who is big-eyed, and who is going to fail at everything she does, right from the beginning.  Alannah, Juli and me.  We are the girls who are struck first in poison ball, the first to feel the hard slap of the tennis ball against our legs.

            Our teacher is Leslie, broad-shouldered and cheery, but he says, never again am I going to teach thirteen year old girls, not after you lot, and he means it, history bears him out.

            Thirteen is the year of snarled hair brushes, fighting with Mum while she brushes my hair before school, plaits it in pigtails, and ties it back.  What are our arguments about?  I can’t remember.  They arrive in a furious tangle.  I am unable to stop the words that come, the nastiness that is suddenly and inexplicably there.

            (There is a photo on the fridge during these morning sessions.  It is of Benny and me.  We face each other, sway-backed.  He is helping me with the toggle on my school hat.  My hair, like his, if you could see it under the hat, crests and rises, caramel-tipped.  It has not yet lost the gold, given way to brown.)

            I watch us in the mirror, Mum and I.  Mum is pulling my hair so it hurts.

            “I’ll miss the bus,” I say.

            “If you won’t sit still I can’t go faster.”

            “I am sitting still!”

            I watch us argue.  I am thinking under all of this (like a little bird hopping on my hands) what would Benny think if he could see us now, what would Benny do?  Then I am not surprised he is not here, because if he was, he’d be out of here and running.  He would not recognise us anymore.

            I pull away from the hands that hold my hair.

            “One more minute,” says Mum.

            “I’ve got to go.”

            “I got you these for Sports Day.”  She holds up two green ribbons.  “Aren’t they nice?”

            “They’re too long,” I say.

            She ties them on my plaits.  “Take a hat, Tosca.  It’s going to be hot.”

            “You don’t have to tell me.  I’m not a kid!”

            She hands me my lunch.  “I’ll see you there.”

            I step out the door.  I forget the hat.

At the bus stop, the school kids stand in clusters, or sit and sway on the chains that border the park.  Boys in grey shorts emerge from the milkbar with Redskins and Cokes.  Juli is already waiting for me, but we talk small, have nothing to say, as the other girls seem to.  They stand in a group, bend in, giggle and whisper together.  They wear their skirts not much longer than their shirts.  They SMS with one hand.

            Alannah arrives at the bus stop in a car, with her brother Nick.  When Nick comes, the bus stop is different, a tune waiting to be played.  The girls who are in my class at school lift their heads and gaze at him, coolly, as if any moment they might own him.

            The girls in my class are first on the bus.   They sit down the back.  It is a game of dare, waiting for Nick and his friends to fill the seats around them.

            Alannah, Juli and I share a seat at the front.  My legs are squeezed out in the aisle under the armrest.

            Alannah says, “What did you watch last night on tele?”  She says, “I like your ribbons.”

            I turn to face the aisle.  I wish she would speak to Juli, not me.

            We hear the jangle of a dozen ring tones coming from the back end of the bus.

            “No mobiles,” says Barry.  “You’ll interfere with the navigation equipment.”  He is weary, but he still makes this joke every day.  “Move it,” he says to the boys in the aisle.  The horn groans under his elbow.

            The boys jostle to reach the back of the bus. Nick leads, his white teeth shine at the effort it takes.  We can’t help it; our heads lift to watch them go through.  There is a pause all the way down the bus as they come and the girls exhale, ahhh, the phones stop ringing.

            There is one girl, Samantha.  When I look back down the bus, I can see her shins, her legs stretched out in the aisle.  Her socks are folded low and tight.  Her legs are long and bare of hair.  They shine in the pale morning. 

            “You did that?” she says.  “What did he say?”  Only questions.  She herself will not offer anything.  

            By Lodden Avenue the boys have hooked their arms over the seats to talk to her.  This happens every morning.  I can hear them, even though Barry turns the radio up, I can hear them over the clamour, and clash and clang.  I listen for Nick, but unless I turn my head, I cannot tell if he is one of them.

            At Park Street, Alannah says, “Look what I got for us for lunch.”  She opens a paper bag.  Juli and I look in at the sweet white bread.  We sit like this, our faces looking in, and the bus stops outside our school.

            Samantha stands.  She shakes out her hair.  I hold my school bag and watch her bend into the seat where Nick is.

            “Coming to the sports?” she says.

            “I might,” says Nick’s voice.

            Oooh, go the girls, I feel them do it, and Alannah next to me whispers, “He’s coming to see me anyway, he said so this morning.”

            “Move it ladies,” Barry says.  “I’ve got to get these boys to their education.”

            The bus pulls out.  Nick winks at his sister out the window.  “Be good,” he mouths.

            “As if I could be bad,” Alannah tells us happily.  She grins and waves at her brother.

            “He’s going to come!” say the girls.

            “He’s coming to see you, Sam, he said so.”

            “He said he might,” says Samantha, as if she knows different.

            And I know something they don’t know, that Nick is going anyway.  It is a secret I hold close all day.

It is hot at lunch.  Alannah, Juli and I sit in the shade against the wall outside the gym.  We bite into the smooth soft bread from Alannah’s uncle’s kitchen.  What do we talk about, we three?  I don’t recall, only remember the hard skitter of tennis balls on the court.  The girls in my class are playing poison ball.  Samantha is there with her long legs running.  They have their own rules.  They bounce the ball high and hard against the wall of the gym.  All through lunch, the ball comes closer.  We ignore it for as long as we can.

            “Watch out,” Juli says to the poison ball girls.  She has soft sugar from the bread around her mouth.

            “I beg your pardon.  Did you say something?”

            The sun is shining down on them from behind the gym.  They stop the game and stand above us.  They are struck through with gold.

            “You could hurt someone,” Juli says.  Even down here, she sounds small and far away.

            “Did someone say something?” 

            They throw the ball again, gold and hard and Juli is caught at the top of her thigh, thwop!  We walk to the other side of the courts, me saying, “Don’t cry.  Don’t cry.”  We sit by the fence near the monkey bars, where the little kids whiz and whir.

            Juli squeezes out a few tears and looks at the mark on her leg.

            “Don’t worry about them,” says Alannah.  “My brother says they’re not worth it.”

            We stay by the monkey bars until the bell goes.  I do not know what we talk about.  I am looking all the time at the small children, looking for a boy, honey-haired, running.  It is like a spell.  If he is there, I know I will be there too, that will be Benny and me.

Sports Day is after school.  We change in the locker rooms.  I turn so I don’t see the backs of the other girls, the white lines of their bras across the skin. I wear a singlet because I don’t have breasts, only baby boobs, fat mounds a bra won’t fit.  We change into our faction shirts: red and yellow and green.  They crocodile us down to the oval; we move in a flutter of coloured ribbons.

            A bus has come from the boys’ school, for brothers and friends.  Nick is there.  He waves to Alannah.  She waves back.  The eyes of all the girls in their colours follow his white shirt, sure as a compass swinging.

            It is the hottest of days.  Mum gestures from the crowd: put something on your head.  She is wearing a hat.  She has brought a canvas chair to sit in.  I watch her nod to the other mothers, the fathers and brothers who have come to see us leap and pass the baton, and run.  Come to see red faction come first and green faction come last, because that is the way it goes.

            We are in one race only, Alannah and Juli and me.  The relay is compulsory.  Samantha and I are running against each other.  She waits in her lane, stretching her long legs slowly, flex and flex.  She stares straight ahead and at the crowd where Nick sits.

            “Are you ready?” says Leslie, like a drum rolling.  “Set.”

            The gunshot propels us over the starting line.

            I am pushing through air, and our faction is heavy against us, because it knows we are going to lose.  It knows this, although from the crack of the gun I have never run so fast, and the crowd blares like music on the bus.

            I run and run.  I listen for Benny cheering.  I look for his arms raised in the air.  Then Samantha is moving slowly past as if she could not be bothered with it.  I am looking for my brother but the sun is too bright, the people are glaring, all the families and friends.  I lift my arm, so tired, to pass the baton to Alannah.

            We lose the race.  I crouch on the track and watch Alannah running slow, and Juli, coming back towards me, running more slowly still.  The crowd cheers weakly.  There is nothing to see.

            Samantha, standing above me says to her friend, “Look at the fatties running.”

            They laugh together, the two girls.  My heels are hard in the grass on Sports Day, they are so hard in the grass that I think I am growing there, I am never going to move again.

            They make us go up for ribbons, blue for red faction, red for yellow, and green for green.

            “You ran well,” Leslie says to me.  “You ran well,” he tells Samantha.

            Juli is smiling as if she has won.  “Here comes your brother,” she says to Alannah.

            We watch him jogging towards us.  Samantha is tall, but she holds onto her ribbon, waiting for him.

            When he gets here, I will tell him: Nick, she called your sister a fatty.

            “Hi Nick!” she says, “I’m glad you came.”

            But Nick does not look at Samantha, or me.  He is coming to hug Alannah, to put an arm around Juli, to flick their ribbons with his fingers and say, “Well done.”

            In the crowd, my mother is sitting by herself.  When the wind gusts, her hat trembles.  The corners of my eyes are running in this hot, bright day.

            They want us to change into day clothes before our parents take us home. 

            “I’ll get the bus with Jules,” Alannah tells her brother.  “Tell Mum to pick me up from there.”

            There is only Mum for me, and I tell my mother, “Don’t wait.  I can get the bus.”

            “I’m happy to wait,” she says.

            “I am thirteen,” I say. “I have friends. I don’t want you to wait for me.”

The girls are pale-backed in the locker room.  The sun has made their long legs brown.  I stand behind my locker door, changing fast.

            “Only one ribbon?” they say to Juli.  “Was that for being too fat or too slow?”

            “Leave her alone,” Alannah says.

            “Oooh.  Nick’s sister says leave her alone.”

            “Nick the Dick,” one girl says.

            “Stop it,” says Alannah.

            “Nick the Prick.”

            Samantha for once is joining in, she is saying it loudest of all.

            I slam the door of my locker like a starter’s gun.  They stand in bras and skirts and look at me. 

            “He was going to come anyway,” I tell Samantha.

            “Did someone say something?” Samantha says.

            “He was coming to see Alannah.”

            They expel their breath, ahhh, now my secret is out.

            “Nick says that you’re not worth it.”  Thwop! I have hit her with it.  What are you going to do now? I think.  What are you going to say to that?

            Samantha reaches over.  She pulls at the ribbons tied by my mother.   

            Oooh, go the girls.

            “Green for last,” Samantha says.  “That’s all she’ll ever be.” 

            Alannah and Juli are standing behind me.  The ribbons lie at the floor at our feet.

            “Her hair is coming undone,” Samantha says.  “Do up your pigtails, little girl.  Or does Mummy still do them for you?   Watch,” she tells the other girls.  “Any minute now she will cry.”

            “Go to hell,” I say.

            They don’t turn and run.  Instead they stand and smile slow hard smiles.  We are caught like that.  The locker room is sharp with deodorant.  We are caught staring and smiling.

            “Fat shits,” whispers Samantha.  “Nick the Prick.”

            It is Juli who cries, not me, wet brown crying, opening her mouth as weak as a kitten.

            I open my mouth wider, and scream.  I point my face to the other girls and out comes this siren wail.  I point it at them until they are no longer there. 

            When I stop, the locker room echoes with the strangest kind of no sound.  I have blown every one of them, Alannah and Juli too, out of the school.

I walk out through the school tired as an old woman.  My bag has only my sports gear in it, but I can hardly drag it along.

            Alannah and Juli are waiting at the bus stop outside the school, two girls sitting together.

            I talk to them from a great height.  “We did it,” I say. “We got rid of them.”

            “You made a horrible noise,” Alannah says.  “We thought you were never going to stop.”

            “Of course I was going to stop.  I just wanted them to go away.”

            “You made Juli cry.  You scared her.”

            “Then Juli is a cry-baby,” I say.  “A little girl to be scared by something like that.”  My mouth is open again.  I tell Juli she is fat and slow and stupid.  No wonder everybody hates her.

            Juli ducks her head.  The hot wind breathes, makes a tremor in her shoulders.

            Alannah says, “Nick thinks Juli is beautiful.  He says he can’t wait till she’s sixteen.”

            Juli’s hair is curling dark around her face.  She looks at Alannah, large-eyed, and I see that Alannah’s brother is right.

            “Anyway,” says Alannah, “the bus is here.”

            They sit at the front.  I sit in the middle somewhere, in a seat of my own.

            “You’ve lost your ribbons,” says Mum when I get home.

            I think of them, curling on the locker room floor.  I think of the empty locker room.  “I don’t care,” I say.

            “It will get better,” says Mum.  “It won’t always be like this.”

The sun doesn’t set in the evening.  I shut my eyes against its brightness.  I lie in its still hardness all night.  In the morning I am as dry as old grass, as heavy as a tree.  I am too tired for the battle of the hair.

            Please don’t make me go to school today, I think at her tugging hands.

            Mum looks at me, straight in the mirror.  “I’m sorry, Tosca,” she says.  “It will be worse if you don’t go.”

            “What would you know?”

            Her hands tug my hair, divide it three ways for plaiting.  “What about your friends?”  

            “I don’t have any friends.”  I pull away from her hands.  I lob every word up at her, like tennis balls flying.  “It’s okay for Alannah,” I say.  “She has a brother.  He looks after her.”

            “Don’t,” she says.

            I think of Benny watching us.  Then I look at her face in the mirror.  I look at my own, whose chin goes softly round, just like hers.  She stands with her head bent down.  Her tears slide into my hair. 

            There is a moment, a pause between us. 

            I reach behind for the divided strands.  My mother brings up her hands to guide mine.