Tori Brown
The old wooden supports nailed into the tree leave splinters in my hands as I climb higher and higher, the little handle of my CD player wedged in my mouth. I have to get to my nook in the tree quickly because there’s a moment in the song I’m listening to where Taylor, in the music video at least, sits in a tree. Well maybe it wasn’t a tree, but she was high up, like a princess. I push myself there just in time and belt out the words, hugging my CD player tight.
From up here at the edge of our backyard, I can see everything. It’s a humid day and our two-storey yellow house looks like melting butter in the heat. Mum wanted a cream white, but Dad brought home the pale yellow which I adore even though it’s an accident. I peek into the neighbour’s yard on my left and yearn for their large swimming pool. The parents next door invited me over once to play, but I haven’t been invited back since. I think their two girls didn’t really like me, which is fine because they’re much older and I didn’t really like them either. I spot their fat golden retriever lazing on their back porch. His dopey eyes spot me in the tree.
Ruff day? He asks.
Every dog has its day, I reply.
Below me the hens cluck and I hope that means they’re laying their eggs for the day. Some have stopped producing and we had to get Uncle Kev to deal with one a while back. I hated that day. I could hear the panic of the coop from my room inside. I buried my face in my pillow and tried to stop the world. Once we had a whole harvest of pumpkins just beside the coop, because we had fed them the seeds and nature has a funny way of recycling things. Mum made pumpkin soup and Dad made pumpkin scones. We named them after coffees and Mocha is the prettiest. They are excellent friends.
At the end of the branch, golden macadamias hang. Shimmying across the branch I reach out to grab them. My CD player falls, swinging by its cord. I reach out and the ground rushes up to greet me. I curl in on myself, ribs sore from the air rushing out, and try very hard not to cry. I’m not allowed to climb the tree and if Mum finds out I’ve fallen out of it again she’ll remove the ladder and my older siblings will kill me if that happens. When my ribs stop hurting and my palms start stinging, I stand up and brush the dirt off my palms and onto my jeans, dirtying the bejewelled butterflies on my thighs. I touch my hand to my chin and come away with blood. My poor butterflies.
Even worse still, lying in the grass beside me is my mangled CD player. The screwed in panel that protects the batteries has come loose. I’ll need a screwdriver to fix this, and I know just where to find it.
I race up the patio stairs through the teal door which begs for a paint, and head inside our yellow house. At the far end of the house is Ben’s room. Thankfully he’s off at cricket with Dad so this should be an easy treasure hunt. When I step inside the room sways, the blue walls and wooden floors, a pirate ship in the middle of the sea. I grab a sock from the floor and tie it around my head like an eyepatch and jump up on the wooden ladder of Ben’s lonesome bunkbed. The sun is shining and the sea promises adventure. I rifle through the captain’s desk but am soon disappointed, finding no notable treasure except for Dumbledore’s Wand which is only a replica. The ship lurches and I crawl to the home of the prized XBOX.
Ben and I have a contract in place for the XBOX. If I clean Ben’s room and do his chores, he lets me play Skyrim. Well, a part of Skyrim. There’s this hack where if you walk a certain path through the village, you can glitch through the floor of the blacksmith and steal his loot, with him and the guard being none the wiser. I wish I could play more of the game, but Ben says it’s too hard for me and I suppose he’s right. Whenever one of those massive spiders appears, I have to hide behind the couch until he kills it. I much prefer Minecraft anyway since the spiders in that are pixelated. Every once in a while, Ben, Kat, and I play our world and continue building our castle. Ben designs, Kat decorates, and I mine the cobblestone. It’s the only game we play together, except maybe cards which is a family affair. We used to play make believe together all the time but Kat and Ben are too old for it now, or at least that’s what Mum says. I hope to never be too old for games. I like playing alone anyway.
In the coffee table, third drawer on the left, there is the toolbox. Screwdriver in hand I fix my prized CD player.
I leave the room to see the front door open. Ben and Dad are home, bringing the smell of grass stains and sunscreen with them.
“What are you doing in my room!”
I have learnt that there are some questions that aren’t really questions. I leave the pirate to his ship and escape to my room.
Our room.
Inside, Kat plays her pink Nintendo DS. I’ve been begging Mum and Dad for one since Kat won’t let me play hers, at least not unsupervised. Down the middle of our room is a line of white masking tape that splits the room in two, cleaving the white IKEA table at the far side of the room in half. On one side is her single bed, her doona cover is a wolf against a snowy alpine background, and she has a poster of One Direction with hearts around Harry Styles, her favourite. I don’t understand the obsession she has with him, or boys for that matter. Boys confuse me. There’s a boy at school who follows me and swims too close to me when we are swimming in P.E. One time he bumped his legs against mine and wouldn’t stop. When I told the teacher she said he must like me. Which confused me further because if he
liked me, he’d stop when I’d ask him to and if he wanted to be my friend he could just ask. On my side of the room is my single bed. My doona cover is pink and covered with pastel butterflies – it’s her old one which suits me just fine. I like my sister’s things, which is great because she dislikes most things eventually, especially once I start to like them. At the end of my bed is a small bookshelf which is mostly CDs. I like to arrange them by colour instead of by name and my collection spans an impressive rainbow, putting the Rainbow Fairies series beside it to shame. I eject the Fearless CD from my CD player and place it into its special yellow and white case. In the second drawer of the desk is where my CD player resides. It’s my designated drawer since we couldn’t happily divide the drawers as effectively as the rest of the room. Kat’s side of the desk is covered in pens and papers, her school laptop buried under textbooks. The mess looks desperately at me, begging for order. I shuffle the papers into a neat pile and return the pens to their cup. As I reach for the textbooks, realising that sorting by colour will be difficult because they’re all differing shades of blue, Kat shoots me a withering glare.
I stop and she returns to her virtual dogs. One of them needs a clean.
“Can I please walk them?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes and moves closer to Harry on the wall. I snuggle up beside her and she passes me the DS, leaning her head on mine. The little black Labrador is my favourite, so I walk her first, around the block to the training centre. It’s always fun watching Kat jump the dogs over hurdles and leading them through tunnels. I’m not as experienced. I fail almost every obstacle and I feel Kat simmer beside me. She tries to snatch the DS back but I’m not done. As quickly as it started it stops and we’re yelling until Dad comes in.
“What is going on in here?”
I chew at my nails, the bitter taste of bark and dirt bites at my tongue. Kat argues until Dad tells us to both to apologise and then takes Kat out to bring fish and chips home for dinner. The door slams on their way out.
Alone in our room – my room – I hear the XBOX start-up in the other room and know that Ben is lost to the world. I step back out into the hallway. The door creaks as I tiptoe into my parents’ room. Mum snores quietly, sleeping off a migraine. She’s been sick a lot more lately. I spot a black bucket beside her and feel my stomach tighten. I hate vomit. The violence of its velocity. That acidic smell which lingers everywhere, in the air and on my skin. I have only ever vomited once – when I ate rich chocolate cake too fast at a sleepover – and I plan to keep it that way.
The afternoon sun glows through blue curtains, painting the room gloomy. Holes in the curtains shine stars across the ceiling, a spaceship lost in desolate space. The zero gravity pulls me away from the carpet, threatening to send me floating through outer space. I slowly move through the room making my way to the med station. Inside I depressurise the air, closing the sliding door. I grab the first aid kit from under the sink and spread the rich orange goo of Betadine over my scratches. I love the sting of medicine, that tells me I’m safe and clean. Dad says that that’s just my anxiety talking, that anxiety will talk a lot no matter what and I need to learn to look after it in other ways. That I can’t treat anxiety like a wound. There is no orange goo that stings enough for that. At the bottom of the kit are bandages which I wrap around my hands and legs, mummifying my injuries. In the mirror I realise my chin is fine. I open my mouth and find the source of the bleeding.
A wobbly tooth.
I shiver. I hate the unpredictability of this injury. The ticking clock. The pain. When my older siblings have a wobbly tooth, they wiggle and wiggle it until it hangs by a single meaty cord. Mum can’t stand when they do that, eventually she’ll pin them down to the ground and rip it out.
Under the sink, now exposed, is a black digital scale. I pull it out and step on top. As the numbers tick up, I feel myself grow heavier until I’m pushing down into the earth, pressure radiating from my feet. When I was a baby, I was eleven-pound-one, which I understand to be a lot. My parents like to tell the story of my birth every year, amping up to the punchline. The scale fragments into sharp cobwebs under the force of me.
Dad calls out dinner. I place everything back where it was and race to the dining room. My job has always been to set the table. I place four big plates around the table and set the fork the left and the knife to the right. I like using a small plate for myself. Dad sits at the head of the table, Mum to his right, Kat beside her, and Ben to Dad’s left. My spot is the butt, by choice. I often misunderstand people, normal conversation turning into an argument without caution. I like seeing everyone’s face and then maybe I can hear them better. Dad lays the fish and chips along the table, tearing apart the greasy butcher’s paper. Mum and Ben leave their rooms and join the table. Kat puts the sauce down in front of me but says nothing, pretending she doesn’t see me. So, she’s not entirely angry with me. At my grandparents we have to say a prayer before eating anything, which would never happen here. Instead, we all hurriedly tuck in, fighting for the best pieces of food. They all talk, Mum and Dad, Kat and Ben, voices louder and louder. I make my way through my plate quietly, saving the best for last. The potato scallop.
As I bite down, a large crunch.
The metallic taste of blood floods my mouth. I exclaim and clutch my hands to my face, fishing around half-eaten potato scallop with my tongue. I spit the small white tooth into the palm of my hand. I grin a bloody smile and look up at my family. They all laugh and applaud my effort. I mention the tooth fairy and my siblings giggle, which confuses me. My smile fades and the table falls silent.
“There is no tooth fairy,” Kat mocks. Her revenge.
Which confuses me further. Mum gives Kat a swift knock to the top of her head, flipping her hair everywhere.
“It’s only her third tooth,” Mum says.
Ben looks sheepish and Kat tidies her hair angrily.
“How do coins find their way under my pillow?”
From the end of the table Dad stares at me. His shoulders start to shake, and then he’s laughing. They all join in and their laughter bounces off the walls and into my head. My cheeks burn and I run into my room. I bury my face in my pillow to stop my stupid tears. The house vibrates and no matter how hard I try I can still hear them through my pillow.
The door opens and I feel someone sit beside me on my bed.
“Oh, come on now, they don’t mean it.”
I roll around and see my dad’s eyes glittering in the dim light of the room.
“We were just joking, you got to handle some ribbing from your family.”
“But they always only laugh about me. Everyone does.”
“That’s cause you make it so easy, don’t be so sensitive.”
I bury my face back into my pillow. He sighs.
“I don’t have any gold coins right now but here’s something your siblings never got from the tooth fairy.”
And he slips something crinkly under my pillow before walking out my room. I pull out my treasure, a pink note.
The old lady on it is laughing at me too.