Say you love me every waking moment, turn my head with talk of summertime...
Another one of my long-winded entries re. The Girl. On no account am I pressuring anybody to comment or even to read it... it's just some things I needed to get off my chest.
On Wednesdays at my school we have assembly, always a terminally boring affair. It's been made slightly more exciting by a fresh routine The Girl and I have gotten into these past weeks: where I will blend into her form class so that we can sit together in assembly. I arrive at the place where the Year Twelves line up to make their way up to our designated area in the school hall, and we always spot each other and grin.
"Hi, Emily," she'll say, waving and grinning.
"Hey," I'll return.
She always beckons me. "Come here..."
I always shoot over to her and lose myself in her form group, trying to avoid her classmates' eyes, trying to avoid her eyes. We giggle together at our own 'rebelliousness' before starting up a conversation.
So this happened on Wednesday, right, and we'd just gotten to the part where we begin to climb the stairs up to the gallery where the Year Twelves sit. I saw her form teacher, who is a bit more on the ball than most of the other teachers. I tried to duck my head down as we walked past The Girl's form teacher, but this teacher's eagle eyes picked me out of the straggling snake of blue-clad girls pretty much instantly. “Emily, you’re not in my form!” she admonished me loudly, making all the teachers in the area turn to look at me.
I reddened slightly, sighed in a long-suffering way, threw up my hands in defeat and said irritably, “Fine, then!”, stepping out of line.
It’s crazy how anal the teachers can be about the forms getting mixed up. I got ticked off again on the stairs up to the Year Twelve gallery, by a teacher who demanded to know what I was doing with his form. Geez, it wasn’t like I was bothering anybody. I was just walking along, minding my own business, and the teachers take offence. What would they have done if I’d been attempting to talk to people, had me executed by firing squad?
I had a pleasant surprise when I reached the gallery. The Girl had saved me a seat beside her. God, I love her. It’s scary to think that when my friend Sophia leaves school in a little over a week I’m not going to have any really platonic good friends at my school. After a double period or a lunchtime spent in The Girl’s company, it’s always a relief to go and find Sophia, to enjoy being around someone I’m close to with no painful romantic longing whatsoever. When Sophia is gone, I won’t have that relief any more. I’ll just be around people who annoy me in varying degrees, or people I like well enough but can’t relax around. And The Girl, who is in a category all by herself...
I manoeuvred my way down the row of seats, climbing over about eight people, before I reached the seat she’d saved for me. We launched straight into a conversation about music and school and other such things. I noticed The Girl's form teacher giving me a long, pointed look as the command came from the front of the hall for us all to stand, sing the opening hymn and then sing the national anthem, but she decided to let it slide, or so it seemed.
After assembly The Girl and I made our way back down into the foyer, two lone specks among a swirling tide of girls. I was just contemplating the prospect of another lunchtime spent up in the library when it happened.
“Do you want to go to the music room?” The Girl asked me. “I could teach you to play something. Or maybe we could do some singing today?”
My heart started thumping faster. Singing... that would mean she might sing to me. And it’d also mean I’d be expected to- to open my mouth and let sound come out. The idea of being alone together in the music room all lunchtime was tempting and scary all at once.
“Yeah, that would be great. I mean, I don’t have anywhere to be or anything.”
The Girl seemed to sense my discomfort. “Are you sure that’s OK? We don’t have to sing if you don’t want, I could just teach you something on the piano...”
“No, I’m sure. I’d love to go to the music room with you, really. And we can just do whatever, it doesn’t matter what we do.”
She had to go into the hall briefly to talk with one of the teachers about this trip she’s going on with the school, to Canberra, so I waited out in the foyer and studied the call sheets for the school musical as well as the pennants and trophies in the trophy cabinet. When she emerged she peered around briefly, frowned and walked straight out without seeing me.
This happens a lot, me being so quiet and inconspicuous that people just don’t register my presence. I’ve learned not to take offence. I hurried to catch her up. “Heya, wait for me!”
“Where did you go?” The Girl rebuked me.
“You kind of- walked right past me. Just shows how conspicuous I am!”
She gave me a commiserating look. “No, it shows how oblivious I am,” she corrected me.
We separated to go to our lockers, met up again at hers and began to cross the quadrangle. She was holding a big pile of books in her arms, whereas all I had was my lunch. I would’ve offered to take something, but she looked quite capable. “You look smart, with all those books," I commented finally. "I always carry about twelve fiction books around with me because it makes me feel smart, but that just makes me look like a tool. You look smart with all your books, though.”
The Girl laughed. “Remember last year, when you got caught reading in History? I was just like, ‘Go, Emily!’”
I nodded, grinning. I had been reading a biography of the Mitford sisters, and when our History teacher had chided me I’d held up the book and claimed it was relevant to the Nazi Germany topic we were studying, because it was rumoured that one of the Mitford sisters was going to marry Adolf Hitler. He looked so stunned, it was great.
We giggled together, and she caught sight of the school chapel. “Is the church open today?” she asked, peering at the open chapel door.
“Dunno. Isn’t it only open on Thursdays?”
“I’ll just see...” she said, and walked right in. I waited outside for her, my jaw tight, my mind whirling. I think she’s praying. That’s so nice and so damning all at the same time. I mean, she’s religious. That is not well-boding in the least.
I prayed my own prayer then. To any deities who are listening: can you please just make it so I’m- decent around her? I don’t have to be supercool or anything, just as long as I’m decent and I don’t let my mouth say things that my brain hasn’t fully processed yet...
She emerged after a minute, maybe two, and we continued on to the music department at my school. All of the little rooms with pianos in them are basically underground- you have to descend a flight of stairs to reach them. They’re all bunched together like subterranean chambers. She made the rounds of them before finding a vacant one and leading me inside.
Like an idiot, I got all embarrassed when she shut the door so it was just her and I, all alone together in this small room. Please just let me be decent! I yowled silently.
We got straight into the music. She riffled through her song sheets before laying out three of them. “D’you know this song?” she asked.
It was Wouldn’t It Be Loverly. I shrugged. “Well, sure I know that song. We did My Fair Lady at school when I was twelve.”
“Want to sing it? I’ll play.”
“I, um, uh, er, OK,” I mumbled reluctantly.
So she played the introduction, and when it got to the bit where I was meant to sing, I... stayed silent. I stood, biting my lip.
The Girl asked me, “What’s the matter, Emily?”
“I- can’t sing,” I told her. It’s a miracle that I’m even able to talk, really- I never use my voice to express myself. The only way I express myself is through my writing, and nobody ever sees that. I’m not really used to... letting people hear me, letting them see me. In basically every friendship I’ve had in my life, my role has always been that of the listener.
“Yes, you can. I’ve heard you sing!”
I squirmed. “I- can’t-”
“God gave you a nice voice, Emily. He wouldn’t want you to waste it,” The Girl said matter-of-factly. “It’s just you and me here, and you know I’d never make fun of you.”
... Screw the anorexic-looking blonde girls in my year, with their diamante-covered crucifixes tagging their scrawny necks, whose religion tells them to treat others the way they want to be treated while they bitch and backstab with all their might! The Girl should totally be the poster child for religious teenagers. Mostly because... she just seems so peaceful and contented and utterly assured that someone up there likes her. She never seems hopeless or helpless or afraid. Even if you weren’t raised to be religious (like me), it’s still a really great thing to see.
(And now I’m remembering that time on The Simpsons where Mr Burns said, “Eeeeexcellent. Somebody up there likes me, Smithers.” and Smithers says, “Somebody down here likes you too, sir.” *snickers*)
She played the introduction again, and hesitantly, haltingly, I started to sing my androgynous approximation of the song. “All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air, with one enormous chair. Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?”
As I sang the line, “Someone’s head restin’ on my knee, warm and tender as he can be, who takes good care of me. Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?” I remembered a part from one of my stories where a young, mute girl named Briony fantasises about one day living with the girl she secretly loves- how Briony thinks to herself that she would do the housework and such because it’s all anybody thinks she’s good for, but in the evenings she and her love could sit together by the fire, and if there was only one chair Briony would let her love have it so that she could kneel on the floor, so that Briony’s love could hold her head in her lap and sing to her.
A girl who can’t confess her love even if she wants to, who falls in love with a great singer. I often find that I write weird little metaphors for topical issues in my life into my stories. Helps me deal with things, I think.
Turned out The Girl had an ulterior motive in inviting me down to the music room. She has a performance with her acapella (sp?) group coming up on the Friday where she was singing a duet with one of the boys, and she felt she was in need of some more practice.
“Would you mind singing the male part for me?” she asked me. “All the notes are quite low, so you should be able to hit them.”
I gave another trademark noncommittal shrug. “Yeah, uh, sure. I’ll give it a try.”
I picked it up almost instantly, and surprised myself by actually reading the notes. I couldn’t tell what the notes were actually called (whether they were A's or B's or sharps or flats), but from following them I could see where I was meant to pitch my voice higher and lower. So therefore I didn’t come across as a total idiot.
The song was All I Ask of You from The Phantom of the Opera. It’s a duet between these two characters called Christine and Raoul. It’s a love song. A love duet. So for the duration of the song she basically had to pretend like she was in love with me, and I had to say over and over again that I loved her. We sang it through a few times, and every time she sang her first line as Christine, “Say you love me every waking moment...”- it was just like quiet, blissful agony for me.
The full power of her voice in that small white room was incredible. It was like getting knocked off your feet by a wave at the beach- but in a nice way. In a heart-fluttering, oh-my-God-I-think-I-love-you, I’ll-die-if-you-go-on-but-I-can’t-bear-for-you-to-stop kind of way.
I was standing behind her as she played, reading the song over her shoulder. Whenever she sang I closed my eyes, a pained expression on my face and frantic thoughts rushed through my head, things along the lines of, I love you, I think you’re wonderful, and I know you don’t even like me that way but I just wish- I wish-
Then would come the time where I would have to sing Raoul’s bit. I ordered myself desperately, Stop it, stop it, stop it... I was so scared, every time, that when I opened my mouth to sing my own words of love would come pouring out instead of Raoul’s.
Her back was to me, so she never saw that pained look on my face. She never saw. I’m so relieved about that. ‘Cause she might have asked me what was wrong if she had seen, and the way I was feeling then I might have told her the truth...
I had a few seconds’ relief when we ate our lunches. When she finished her sandwich, she gave me a mischievous grin and said in mock-solemnity, “Want me to sing in Italian, really badly?”
I said yes, so she sang and played. I read the translation written underneath the song lyrics silently, feeling pleased with myself for sussing it out.
“Did you understand any of that?” she asked when she finished.
I blinked. “What, the Italian? Well, I was reading the translation underneath, so...”
She shook her head. “That’s not the correct translation.”
I deflated. “Oh.”
“I just thought, seeing as your mother is half Italian...”
“My sister was the one who got all the Italian genes in our family. I got the English-all-the-way-back-to-the-Stone-Age genes from my dad’s side of the family. It’s so annoying, ‘cause when Mum and Lucy are talking about something they don’t want me to understand, they talk in Italian!”
She smiled.
I continued, “And when my mum is telling me off and she’s so annoyed she can’t articulate what she wants to say, she randomly starts yelling at me in Italian, and I always tease her by going, ‘Honestly, Mummy, you know I don’t speak Greek!’”
The Girl laughed then, all shiny-eyed and pretty. I was really proud of myself for making her laugh.
After we’d been talking and singing together for a blissfully long time, she looked at her watch by chance. “Lunch is over!”
I frowned. “What, already?”
“Yes! Crazy how fast it goes, isn’t it?”
“Guess time flies when you’re having fun,” I said, perching my hat on my head at a funny angle because it never wants fit right over my ponytail, and clutching the remains of my lunch in my hands. I watched as she picked up her huge pile of song books and schoolbooks, and opened the door for her as we left the room.
As we reached the top of the stairs she squinted at the school clock tower (only just visible from inside the music department) and then laughed. “... We’ve got so much time! I can't believe it, my watch was wrong!”
“How much time?” I asked.
“Ten minutes,” The Girl turned to me. “What would you like to do, leave or go back down? You decide.”
“Well... I would like to go back down to the music room, but it’d mean you’d have to put down all those books again.”
She made an instant about-turn and clattered her way down the stairs, back to the little room. “Oh, I don’t mind about that,” she said airily. “Music is my life, Emily!”
I stepped into the room behind her. I was the one who had to shut the door, and once again I was thinking thoughts I would rather not have been thinking, and telling myself sharply to stop it stop it stop it... “Well, it’s good we’ve still got ten minutes. I mean, I like hearing you sing,” I said casually, and I got all warm in the face when she looked at me for a long time before thanking me.
We spent the last ten minutes of lunchtime singing through All I Ask of You again. “You’re going to have it stuck in your head now, aren’t you?” The Girl laughed.
I feigned outrage. “I know! It’ll be like, one AM and I’ll be lying in bed with my head under my pillow groaning, ‘Damn you, The Girl!’”
Probably the most profane thing I’ve ever said in front of her. She doesn’t curse, so I don’t curse around her. I don’t curse much around other people. I used to swear a blue streak when I was younger, but I’ve grown out of it now. I use more colourful language than I do foul language these days.
It’s funny how I adjust my behaviour around different friends, mimicking the way they speak and such. I’ve noticed that no-one ever seems to feel compelled to mirror the way I talk in my presence. But I guess they’re not insecure like me.
The Girl beamed at me then, and said, “Thank you for being my Raoul today.”
Well, honestly, what can you say when a beautiful girl tells you that? Except maybe for what I said, which was, “You’re very welcome.”
We separated then, making our way to our respective sixth period classes, and I ducked into the toilets to calm down. I wanted to melt down into the ground with embarrassment when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrors over the sinks. I was blushing all the way up to my temples. I didn’t even think that was humanly possible.