HOW TO ESCAPE ONE'S POISONED TEENS
For the last time, I board my school bus and feel that I share in her lone, dreamy eye - blinking slow, windscreen-wiper lids that hardly scrape the sleep away. The bus driver wipes furiously at the glass with a rag as he wheels us one-handed through the paddocks. It rains bucketfuls through the split ceiling, so everytime we round a corner, all cover our heads with our school bags. Down comes the pour, and exercise books scatter.
We lean in the aisle, staring out the great front eye that clouds to white, and peering anxiously into the little rectangular mirror at the driver’s red face and drooping eyes, tearing us through the weather by instinct alone. One day he’ll kill us, an older boy prophecises, but I trust that old man with my life. In the mornings he has the face of the farmhand dragging kicking lambs to slaughter, but in the evenings he appears gentle and fatherly. He has always taken me home again.
The bush whistles by, and sheep are orange blurs in the green and the white. These windows fog over too, and there’s nothing to see. We are trapped in the stink of each other.
All that condensation, all our hot breaths and wet armpits, shoes and stockings flooded with the unholiest, oiliest, black water from the gutter when we splashed our way to the school bus’s long, tarry shadow. She is stood sighing behind the supermarket, seven-thirty every morning as long as we’ve lived - and hissing air out of her teeth, her acrid morning breath frizzing our hair from their plaits.
But we love her, our senile old thing, how she dribbles petrol on the asphalt, how she groans under our weight as the lot of us board, swinging our school bags into the damp dark. How she curses us through the radio, through the static voices of bitter old men, that drone we know so well. We hear on a bus, in a classroom, in our homes, and are only safe from the sound when we’re pressed close to one another. It is why we don’t mind the stink of each other. We are dirty, unloveable teenagers, loving the bus who so despises us.
She takes us daily from the farms and into the city’s arms, his sleeves pinned with factories and power plants with great rungs of metal ribs and a thousand coiling copper veins sprawling outward from a humming engine heart. As we pass, I think of my father, the electrician, and wonder is this the spirit he worships? He coaxes that thrumming force from the beast itself, and, shaping it with his hands, makes things bright and warm.
That is what a father is.
And a daughter is a sticky, smelly thing on a moulding school bus for hours of her life. This is the last time.
At school a daughter has awful, big feet in boy shoes, two sizes bigger for my orthotics - a poor excuse. Still, tuck them under the chair so they might not notice we’re the same size. I check by eye everyone I talk to. Staring at his shoes and feeling massive. Him, a big, football-kicking boy and me, a girl supposed to be small and meek, but I’m clumsy and oafish with these big feet. And pulling hair over my eyes, huge fringe to hide behind and tease this mess into a beehive with my pimple-puss face stuffed inside. And then in the teachers office,
Don’t come to school a mess, a mad thing.
What I am. A mess, a mad thing. Getting worse. Pull out the problem from its root. Shall we do it here, in your dark office? Pass me your scissors and phone my Mum. Then shutting me away in the sick bay because I said something strange. Wait here for the bus to take you back to the mud and the fog.
I try to remember which event marked the change in me, and my head takes me far, to a school camp - two months in a room shared with you, pretty as a star to wish upon. There, I kneel at your feet and wish. I beseech you, teach me how to be as good a daughter as you, and you teach me, lovingly, how you make your hard-working father proud.
Whisper me to sneak away and buy sweets for us to eat, to stuff them in my bra, and then ‘Family Sized’ is birthed as another nickname for tiny, starving, me. But you are tinier and more starving still, and I see myself how you see me. Like I am a bag of marshmallows, something sweet and fatty, and to be shared around - used, but not too much, or you’ll be fat and desperate too. It is catching, each time you send me on an errand, each time you laugh at me, your cheeks grow plumper.
I do what you ask of me, thinking that makes me another star in your constellation of good girls. I want to be good because I think I am tired of coming from somewhere dirty, from the smell of the farm and the mould that lines the bath I wash in. I’m ready to be one of you starry girls.
Girls who leave my underwear out in the laundry for the boys to find, and giggle at the window at the show of them, parading down the street like a pack of dogs, bowling each other over, over something dirty, hilarious.
And when their fun is over, I see my initials in sharpie on the tag, written bold in my mother’s hand and fluttering, a white flag from the swamp of the grass and fabric. I do not bend down to snatch them from sight, from the dirty, shamed crumple in the mud - to stuff them, gutter-soaked, under my shirt with the crushed wafer packets and gumdrop baggies hidden there. I denounce them as my own.
They belong to the earth, and are dirty in a way no washing machine could tumble clean.
They’ve been passed between boy hands, thrown at one another and stuffed into each other’s faces and then cast off to the ground, and this is where they belong now. They are no longer mine, and I will not claim them. My initials, marked by my well-meaning mother, mean nothing anymore. I am not that girl who has been defiled so, and I walk on.
Call after me - the dribbly nicknames you have for me, then the name the teacher calls me, then the name my mother scolds me with. And when I don’t turn around, you yell the surname I printed crisp and bold in blocks, on the cover of my NAPLAN test.
Which of these girls is me? The girl I have become is none of these, she has a name that hasn’t yet been spoken, but I’ve written it down in a diary. I don’t yet dare to speak it out loud. But if I did, it is a name that might sound like the scraping of a spoon in a cereal bowl, or the accidental tear of a page when I read too fast, too hungry. A name that, on paper, looks like the imprint of a body lain in the long grass.
I am a disturbance now, sometimes shocking and sometimes subtle, leaving only a quiet change. But I never leave anything as I found it. I make my messes and you walk around it, or glare at it, or shout at it.
You don’t know what to call it, how to name the change in me.
I come to no call, anymore.
I lived so frugally, before. I was good, I was bad, I was fine. Right for a girl. And for what I lacked, at least I let myself be hushed, as to hide what I did not have. And it was funny, even sweet, how my hands shook and my hair was never brushed. That is a girl biting down on her tongue, til it bleeds through her shirtsleeves and the thighs of her skirt, til there is not a friend she has not hurt in the crossfire between herself at sixteen and herself as a child.
But if I turn the hatred outwards a moment, I notice I may not be the thing that is wrong.
With my new eyes, wiped clear by the bus driver a final time, I see you, and you don’t look right to me. I see your dad as a cold, blank thing in a suit - you haven’t been fathered right, to me. That cold has settled itself from him and into you, and maybe I should pity you.
Your school buses here are sleek and stark, they’ve no leaks, nor have they paint flaking to the sky when they drive by, as ash from a burning bin of teens from the countryside. We stink and laugh inside. We are burning up, alive.
I see your clean, blank faces, your identical forms without the frayed jumper sleeves and skirt hems half-unpicked, I see cold and dead sardines lined up in pressed school shirts and blazers, emblazoned with scholastic awards. I see myself, a thing on fire.
Great job on the NAPLAN, on the clever, wicked things you did when you were not studying.
We are not the same thing.
I won’t come to your call. I won’t pretend to be you anymore.
No more school buses, I am getting on a train without my ATAR. I am catching it far from your smog sky, scattering pieces of my loathing around the countryside, until I can say I’m free of it.
But still I am foaming at my mouth with self-contempt, that I sat silent, being shouted at in his black office, that my heart is still reeling like I am skidding through paddocks, that my sister now wears my hand-me-down, blood-stained sleeves. That in my head I cannot leave, and this rotten time has sunk itself deep, deep into me. And because we are not the same thing, I am entirely alone.
I am typing into the search bar, crying out from a hill, into the trees,
How to escape one’s poisoned teens?
Jazmine Scopel, 19, rural Vic - Australia ✯ IG: @gumbootdance
"Jaz is writing from the cosiest bed in all the land, fending off sleep with stories."