An Odd Kind Of Wonderful

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO 

ONE DAY BEFORE THE NIGHT
(EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE INCIDENT) 
"I'm not like them, but I can pretend." (Nirvana) 

When my two brothers were really little, they went through a pranking phase. I think it was because of the shows on TV they watched, or something like that. But because of that, for a couple of months I woke up every morning to some type of prank. Once, my brothers stayed up all night making green jelly, and tipped it on top of my head as I walked through the doorway of my room. Can you visualize an entire nights' work's worth of green jelly? There must have been ten litres of it.

Another time, they pulled up the classic permanent marker-moustache prank. I didn't notice until I got to school and my teacher gestured vaguely to the area under her nose. I got detention for that, because apparently I was disrespectful and didn't own up to it. 'My brothers did it' was my version of 'the dog ate my homework'. Kieran, who is now nine years old, hid my school uniform pants on my first day of high school, so I was uniform-coded for wearing jeans on my first day. Harry, who is built tiny just like my mum, (Kieran is more like Dad and me: a bunch of skinny limbs stacked on top of each other in a way that sort of resembles a human skeletal system) once put old Chewy in the middle pages of my English study novel. They remind me a lot of puppies.

This morning, I wake to silence, par for the eerie tweeting of morning whip-birds and the odd big-city commuter zooming past in their tiny car. The puppies are nowhere to be seen, even when I concentrate; I can't hear their giggling. I get a sense of a weight, pressing the walls of my skull closer together, and my breathing acts like my ribcage is collapsing around my lungs. Are they ignoring me? Maybe Dad took them on a camping trip...Would he do that because of the incident? Does Kieran even know about the incident?

If there's anything the psychiatry hospital taught me, it was that it's probably not as bad as you're making it out to be. And if it is, then follow this advice: breathe in. Breathe out. It'll be okay. Breathe. Repeat.

Doctor Joseph taught me how to breathe—not how most people do it. He taught me different ways to breathe that calm you down easier, even though I never believed that was possible. But now I know he was sort of right—but only because 'breathing' is easier to concentrate on, rather than 'I've messed everything up'. So, I do that, following advice I refused to let myself take earlier.

I pull on a pair of jeans, the ones with the spaghetti stain on the left pocket, since it's the least stained of them all. The rest are splattered with paint or ripped in an unbelievably unfashionable fashion. I put on a t-shirt with a picture of the cover of Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly. I scrunch my nose up and try to remember a time when I liked Iron Butterfly. Five minutes later, when I've found my black sneakers, I stare at my reflection in the mirror on the door of my wardrobe.

I remember, in one of the group sessions, that Harley piped up her answer to 'how do you deal with stress on a daily basis' as "I put on some colourful clothes. I only have about two colourful shirts, but they make me feel more...bright." I open a drawer in my desk full of strips of fabric I'd taken from Mum, when she used to embroider and sew. I tie a particularly hippie-looking purple one around my wrist and hope that Harley was right.

-

"Where's Kieran and Harry?" are the first words I say to my mother that morning. She sips her coffee slowly in some kind of coded response. I wonder if she's heard me, but her head lifts and our eyes meet. Her voice sounds so tired, but I can still hear it over the Elton John she's got on the CD player.