The Gaps by Leanne Hall (classic literature list .TXT) 📕

She leans over me and shakes a ziplock bag full of feathers. ‘It needs more colour. I’m trying to do this black, white and red thing.’

The scarlet feathers drift over my goose-bumped arms like light-falling snow. I close my eyes and hear the camera beep and click.

But too soon the shivering, the leaf-fluttering shakes return. I shake from head to toe, I couldn’t stop it if I tried, I’m a girl possessed.

Maybe this was what happened to Yin, or is still happening now: the cold, the bare skin, the helplessness. When we were little girls we would go everywhere holding hands, take baths together, sleep in the same bed. How could she be going through this alone? How did we end up so far apart?

‘Only a few more,’ Chloe murmurs.

I retreat further into my own head which is bare and calm, as empty as the meat locker. When the tears come, they’re silent. They come without announcement. Plain salt water, trickling down my nose and running over my cheeks.

I think I have it in check but then the stream flows stronger, the water rises and threatens to flood. I have to push against it. Enough. Let out just enough.

‘Sorry,’ I say with my eyes still shut. The shivers take over my body, becoming bigger and bigger, like I’m having a fit. The more I tense my muscles the more they misbehave, my body has a mind of its own.

Chloe’s feet shuffle on the concrete. I will my body to stop convulsing, ashamed for her to see me like this, but her hand comes down on my shoulder, heavy and reassuring and warm and she keeps it there, squatting by my side until the tremors have run through me and away.

If my mother were truly psychic about my bad behaviour as she claims to be then she would be able to sense that Chloe and I are currently eating our body weight in trans-fat-laden French fries and gluten-soaked burger buns and almost one inch of definitely non-organic meat slathered in corn-syrup-laced ketchup. Jeremy has gone to the enormous alcohol-barn across the road and left us to feed the empty hole that artistic genius has created inside of us. I might officially be a muse.

The restaurant is super-heated and I’m wearing every bit of clothing I brought and some of Chloe’s as well, but I still can’t stop the shaking that springs from somewhere in the middle of my body.

Chloe pulls the patty out of her burger and eats it first, and then eats the salad and then eats the soggy bun and it’s a really gross way to eat. I try not to look at what she’s doing but the upside is that she doesn’t mention how shaky I am, and we pretend like nothing out of the ordinary happened. I like that about her.

‘I want to eat these fries for the rest of my life.’ I demonstrate by putting five in my mouth at once. ‘What else are you doing for the hols?’

‘Pretty sure it’s going to be nothing but homework and this project,’ Chloe replies. ‘Dad’s letting me use the spare room at his house.’

‘Will you send me updates?’

Chloe’s phone beeps. She checks it with one hand.

‘Is that your secret lover?’

‘Ha! Nice try.’ She puts her pillaged burger down and wipes her fingers. ‘Actually, it’s my friend Katie. She’s worried that she’s pregnant. I have to go over to hers and watch her pee on a stick tonight.’

Her face doesn’t even change expression as she says this. If one of my group got preggers, you’d better believe there’d be an instant world summit. The disturbing image of Sarah, Ally, Marley and I wearing those dorky baby carriers on our fronts flashes at me, uninvited. It’s horrific.

Chloe laughs at my appalled face. ‘It’s a false alarm. She’s on the pill, but she’s a stress-head. Sometimes I think she wants it to be true, because then she wouldn’t have to finish school.’ Chloe finally lets one half of her burger bun rest in peace. ‘What would you do if you got pregnant?’

The question takes me by surprise so much I answer truthfully. ‘Well, I think I’d have to have sex for that to be an issue.’

‘What do you—oh. Oh, right.’ Chloe looks embarrassed. She suddenly pays enormous attention to her thickshake.

‘Yes,’ I confirm. ‘You may say it out loud. I am the sluttiest-looking virgin in town.’

‘No! I wasn’t thinking that.’ Chloe has flushed adorably red.

‘I’m joking,’ I say. ‘It’s not a precious gift I’m saving. My sister says I shouldn’t be so heteronormative and that I’ve done enough stuff with enough people to consider myself not a virgin. I’ve done everything but it—what about you?’

‘Everything but? Nah, I’m not into that butt stuff.’

It takes me a moment to catch her drift, and then I can see she’s barely holding herself together.

‘Filthy harlot!’

I throw fries at her and she grows hysterical. Finally, someone with their head as much in the gutter as me.

‘TELL ME, LITTLE CHLO-CHLO.’

Eventually she relents.

‘Okay, okay. I did it a few times, and I shouldn’t have. This guy Brandon at my old school really liked me, and I knew I wanted to. I wasn’t in love with him or anything. I thought it would be a good opportunity to…get it out of the way? That sounds awful, doesn’t it?’

‘No, I get it.’

‘Afterwards I didn’t know why I’d been in such a rush to do it. And I also figured out way too late that he’s got a thing for Asian girls. I felt…like I should have realised.’

‘Haven’t you heard? We’re teenagers. Apparently we’re supposed to be impulsive one hundred per cent of the time.’

We smile at each other and it’s this completely calm moment. My smile wavers when I realise this might be the first time I’ve felt genuinely happy since Yin was taken.

I’m a monster.

There were so many times today when I was going to tell Chloe about my history with Yin, how close