I take the list from her, just to get her off my back.
“You’re not sleeping.” Not a question, just a statement. She reaches over and touches my face and I flinch, moving away.
“Go make yourself something to eat and then get to class. You might be able to make second period.”
“I’m thinking of leaving.”
“You leave when you finish school,” she says bluntly.
“No, I leave when I want to leave and you can’t stop me.”
“You stay until the end of next year.”
“You’re not my mother.”
I say that to her every time I want to hurt her and every time I expect her to retaliate.
“No, I’m not.” She sighs. “But for the time being, Taylor, I’m all you have. So let’s just get to the part where I give you something to eat and you go to class.”
At times it’s like sadness has planted itself on her face, refusing to leave, an overwhelming sadness, and sometimes I see despair there, too. Once or twice I’ve seen something totally different. Like when the government sent troops overseas to fight, she was inconsolable. Or when she turned thirty-three. “Same age Christ was when he died,” I joked. But I remember the look on her face. “I’m the same age my father was when he died,” she told me. “I’m older than he will ever be. There’s something unnatural about that.”
Then there was that time in year eight when the Hermit whispered something in my ear and then shot himself and I ran away with that Cadet and the Brigadier brought us back. I remember the Brigadier’s hard face looked as if he was trying with all his might for it to stay hard. Hannah didn’t look at him and I remember it took a great effort for her not to look at him. She just said, “Thanks for bringing her home,” and she let me stay at her unfinished house by the river. She held on to me tight all night because somewhere in the town where the Brigadier found us, two kids had gone missing and Hannah said it could have easily been me and the Cadet. They found those two kids weeks later, shot in the back of the head, and Hannah cried every time it came on the news. I remember telling her that I thought the Brigadier was the serial killer and it was the first time I saw her laugh in ages.
Today there is something going on with her and I can’t quite figure it out. I glance around the room, noticing how tidy it looks. Even her manuscript seems shuffled neatly in a pile in one corner of the table. She’s been writing the same novel ever since I’ve known her. Usually she keeps it hidden, but I know where to find it, like those teenage boys in films who know where to find their father’s porn. I love reading about the kids in the eighties, even though I can’t make head or tail of the story. Hannah hasn’t structured it properly yet. I’ve got so used to reading it out of sequence but one day I’d like to put it in order without worrying that she’ll turn up and catch me with it.
She sees me looking at the pages. “Do you want to read it?” she asks quietly.
“I don’t have time.”
“You’ve wanted to read it for ages, so is it okay to ask why not, now that I’m offering?”
“That’s new,” I say to her.
“What’s new?”
“You asking me a question.”
She doesn’t respond.
“You never ask me anything,” I accuse.
“Well, what would you like me to ask you today, Taylor?”
I stare and as usual I hate her for not working out what I need from her.
“Do you want me to ask where you’ve been all night? Or do you want me to ask why you always have to be so difficult?”
“I’d prefer that you asked me something more important than that, Hannah!”
Like how am I supposed to lead a community? I want to say. Or what’s going to happen to me this time next year? Am I just going to disappear like our insignificant leaders did last night? And where do I disappear to?
“Ask me what the Hermit whispered in my ear that day.”
I can tell that she’s stunned, her hazel eyes wide with the impact of my request. She takes a moment or two, like she needs to catch her breath.
“Sit down,” she says quietly.
I shake my head and hold up the list she gave me. “Sorry, no time. I’ve got fragile kids to look after.”
When I get back, classes have just finished and everyone’s making their way back into their Houses. Jessa McKenzie is sitting on the verandah steps. Despite her being in year seven and in Hastings House, somewhere in my worst nightmare she’s become surgically attached to me and nothing, not anger, not insults, not the direst cruelty can dislodge her.
“Don’t follow me. I’m busy.” I keep walking. No eye contact because that will encourage her. That someone can want something out of another person who gives absolutely nothing in return astounds me. I want to say to this kid, “Get out of my life, you little retard.” Come to think of it, I have actually said that and back she comes the next day like some crazed masochistic yo-yo.
“They reckon the Cadets are arriving any minute and that this time they mean business.” Jessa McKenzie always speaks in a breathless voice, like she hasn’t stopped speaking long enough to take a breath her entire life.
“I think they meant business last year when they threw every bike in the school over the cliff.”
“I know you’re worried as well. I can tell you are,” she says softly.
My teeth are gritted now. I’m trying not to but they grit all the same.
I get to the front door, dying for an opportunity to shut it in her face, but Jessa McKenzie still follows, like those tenacious fox terriers that grab hold of the bottom of your pants and tug.
“The kids in my old dorm are scared, you know,” she explains. “The year sevens?” As if I’ve asked a question. “It’s because the older kids are going on about the Cadets coming and how bad it is. I think you should speak to them, Taylor. Now that you’re leader”—she leans forward and whispers—“of the Underground Community.”
My hand is on the door, almost there, almost…but then I stop because something lodges itself in my brain like a bullet.
“What do you mean ‘in my old dorm’?”
She’s beaming. Freckles glowing.
I look at the transfer paper in my hands and then back at her. I open it slowly, knowing exactly whose name I’m about to see there, transferred to Lachlan House. My House.
“You have no idea how much I can help,” she says. “Raffaela thinks I’ll be better off in the senior rooms than the dorms.”
“What would Raffaela know?”
“She reckons she can work out where the tunnel is,” I hear Raffaela say behind me.
“My father used to say…”
But I’m not listening to what Jessa McKenzie’s father used to say. I’m sandwiched between my two worst nightmares.
“Congratulations,” Raffaela says, “although I think Richard and the others are already organising a coup.” Raffaela always has this weight-of-the-world, old-woman thing happening.
“Congratulations from me, too.” Jessa McKenzie is still beaming.
“We’re going to work out where the tunnel is,” Raffaela says, “and get back the Prayer Tree and learn how to…”
I want to be sitting in front of my computer, where you can press a button to block out your junk mail. These two are my junk mail.
“But Taylor,” Jessa continues in that hushed annoying voice of hers. “You have to get to know the kids in your House because Chloe P. says they hardly know you down in the dorms.”
“Incoming!” This comes from one of our guys sitting in the surveillance tree.