Pink Read online

  PiNK

  Lili Wilkinson

  PiNK

  First published in 2009

  Copyright © Lili Wilkinson 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone (61 2) 84 25 0100

  Fax (61 2) 99 06 2218

  Email [email protected]

  Web www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Wilkinson, Lili, 1981—

  Pink

  978 1741 758 344 (pbk.)

  For secondary school age

  A 823.4

  Design by Bruno Herfst

  Set in Gentium Book Basic

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jen Forward, who convinced me to join

  stage crew in high school and is, to this day,

  still made of awesome

  And for David Levithan: I hope this one helps

  kill a few more vampires

  Gravitation is not responsible

  for people falling in love.

  — Isaac Newton

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Acknowledgements

  Lili Wilkinson

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  Chloe dropped my hand.

  ‘I know, it sucks,’ I lied. ‘My parents think I’ll get better marks at a new school.’ Another lie.

  ‘The fascists,’ said Chloe, which was kind of hilarious given that my parents met at the Feminist-Socialist-Anarchist Collective at university.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘Billy Hughes is a really good school.’

  ‘What’s wrong with our school? They’re all the same, anyway. All institutionalised learning designed to turn you into a robot.’

  I shook my head. ‘Billy Hughes is really progressive,’ I told her. ‘The school motto is Independence of Learning.’

  Chloe narrowed her eyes. ‘You don’t want to go there, do you?’

  Of course I did. ‘I don’t want to leave you.’

  ‘They’ll break you, Ava!’ said Chloe, her eyebrows drawing together in concern. ‘It’ll be all rules and homework and standardised testing. No creative freedom. There’ll probably be cadets.’

  I shrugged. How could I explain to Chloe that I wanted rules and homework and standardised testing? I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to be around people who cared about maths and structure and results. Not so much the cadets, though. The truth was, I’d begged my parents to let me change to a private school. I wrote letters and sat a scholarship exam and when I got the acceptance form halfway through first term, I danced around my room like a lunatic.

  ‘It’s not like I’m going to another country,’ I said. ‘We can still hang out after school and on weekends.’

  Chloe lit up a cigarette and took a long drag. ‘Whatever,’ she sighed, exhaling.

  Chloe was the coolest person I’d ever met. She was tall and thin and had elegant long fingers and pointy elbows like those pictures on women’s dress patterns. Today she was wearing a black pencil skirt with fishnet stockings and hot-librarian shoes, which she’d kicked off beside my bed. She had a black shirt on under a dark tweedy fitted jacket. Her dyed black hair was short and spiky and elfin. Two silver studs glittered in her nose, and four in each ear. Her fingernails were painted a very dark plum. The only lightness about her was her porcelain skin, and her white cigarette.

  Chloe read battered Penguin Classics she found in op shops and at garage sales. They were all by people like Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir and made her look totally intellectual, particularly when she was wearing her elegant horn-rimmed glasses.

  Chloe didn’t really care about school. She said most of the teachers were fascists, and sometimes even crypto–fascists, whatever that meant. She said that our education system made us docile and stupid, and that true education could only come from art, philosophy, and life itself. Chloe would rather sit on the low stone wall just outside our school and smoke cigarettes and talk about Existentialism and Life and make out with me.

  She was wonderful, and I was pretty sure I was in love with her.

  So how come I wanted to leave so badly?

  When I first told my parents I was a lesbian, they threw me a coming-out party. Seriously. We had champagne and everything. It was the most embarrassing thing that’d ever happened to me.

  They loved Chloe – possibly even more than I did. When Chloe came over, she usually ended up poring over some Ann Sexton book with Pat, or listening to Bob Dylan on vinyl with David. Ostensibly, I was there too. But I didn’t really care for washed-out poetry about wombs, and I thought Bob Dylan was kind of overrated. So I just sat there politely like I was at someone else’s house, until the phone rang or something, and I could finally drag Chloe away to my room. Then there would be less talk about feminism, and Chloe would read to me from my favourite book of Jorge Luis Borges short stories, and I would make her laugh by doing impressions of Mrs Moss, our septuagenarian English teacher. Making Chloe’s lips curve upwards in a smile, or her eyes crinkle with laughter, made me happier than just about anything else in the world.

  When it was finally time for Chloe to go home, she’d smooth her hair and rearrange her clothes, and we’d troop back out to the kitchen. Pat and David would always look so crestfallen that she was leaving. ‘So soon?’ Pat would say. ‘But we’ve hardly had a chance to chat!’

  Sometimes I thought my parents wished Chloe was their daughter.

  I got home and said hi to Pat and David and then went into my room and shut the door. I wished I had a lock, but there was no way my parents would approve of that. It would imply that I had something to hide, and they’re the most liberal and accepting parents in the world – so what would I possibly want to hide from them?

  If only they knew.

  I went to my wardrobe and dug through my old jelly-sandals and mouldy runners until I was practically in Narnia. And I pulled out a bag. It was one of those pale-blue shiny shopping bags with a ribbon handle. It was the kind of bag that people on TV have fifty of when they’re on a shopping spree that could fund a starving African nation.

  In the bag there was a bundle wrapped in thin lemon-yellow tissue paper, sealed with a pale-blue oval sticker with gold lettering on it. Holding my breath, I gently prised the sticker away from the tissue paper, and unwrapped the bundle, listening carefully for the sound of Pat or David busting in to offer me an espresso or a lecture on post-structuralism.

  At the centre of the bundle there was a jumper. A pink argyle cashmere jumper, to be exact. I
t was pretty much the softest thing ever, the pink and cream diamonds snuggling up against each other like soul mates.

  I rubbed the soft wool against my cheek, and then stood in front of the mirror, holding the jumper against my body. I didn’t need to put it on – I knew it fit perfectly. I knew because I’d tried it on at the shop. And it was so beautiful, so soft, so … pink. I just had to buy it. Even though I knew I couldn’t wear it, because Chloe would laugh herself silly.

  I never wore pink. Pink wasn’t cool. Pink wasn’t existential. Pink was for princesses and ballet shoes and glittery fairies.

  When I was five, I only wore pink. Pink everything, from my undies to my socks to my little frilly dresses to my Flik Flak watch. I refused to wear any other colour – much to the dismay of my parents, who were itching to dress me in miniature Che Guevara T-shirts and black berets.

  All my toys were pink. I only used pink pencils. I insisted on having my bedroom painted pink.

  Not now. Now my bedroom was painted a sombre pale grey, with charcoal skirting boards and architraves. Now, there was no trace of pink in my room. No more unicorn posters on the walls – instead there were black-and-white art prints. My parents must have been so proud. There wasn’t even so much as a rainbow flag; as Chloe said, we weren’t that sort of lesbian.

  As I’d grown older, Pat and David had worn me down. They explained to me that pink was an empty signifier of femininity, and pointed out that none of the other little girls at my Steiner school wore pink dresses under their art smocks. They showed me magazine articles about Britney Spears before she went off the rails, and shook their heads sadly.

  By the end of primary school, they were victorious. The pendulum had swung all the way over to black. Now, you’d be lucky to find me in a skirt, and at the end of Year Ten I’d thrown out my last pair of non-black undies. My hair was dyed black, and usually caught up in a messy bun. I wore a reasonably unchanging wardrobe of black jeans and black tops – black singlets in summer, and a grandpa cardigan in winter. Sometimes I wished I could dress crazy and eclectic and feminine like Chloe, but I knew she would always outshine me, so I stuck to what I knew.

  So now the pink jumper was practically glowing in my grey bedroom. It was like a tiny bit of Dorothy’s Oz in boring old black-and-white Kansas.

  I carefully folded it up, and rewrapped it in the yellow tissue paper.

  Pink was for girls.

  Girly girls who wore flavoured lip gloss and read magazines and talked on the phone lying on their perfect, lacy bedspreads with their feet in the air. Girls who spent six months looking for the perfect dress to wear to the school formal.

  Girls who liked boys.

  Chloe came to our school at the start of Year Nine.

  She was like no one I’d ever seen before. She was beautiful and sophisticated, in sleek black vintage clothes.

  She didn’t speak to anyone for the first week of school, and no one spoke to her. She was different. Cool. Unapproachable. She wore heavy black eyeliner and sat up the back of the classroom reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She fascinated me. She made me want to do grown-up things like drink coffee and talk about the meaning of life. She was everything my parents wanted me to be. So I watched her, waiting for my chance to break through her wall of icy cool.

  The chance came in Science, where we were split into pairs and assigned some lame experiment using copper sulfate.

  I pretended to be absorbed in my school timetable, avoiding the eyes of my classmates, who clicked off into pairs around me. Then I looked up, feigning confusion, and saw that Chloe was the only unpaired person left in the room. Success!

  I slid over to her table.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans.

  She glanced at me briefly and returned to her book without comment. Close up, she smelled like cigarettes and vanilla. It was an adult smell, dangerous.

  I measured out the copper sulfate powder and mixed it with water, swirling the blue liquid around in a beaker and trying to think of what to say.

  ‘How’s the book?’ I asked, lighting a bunsen burner.

  Chloe shrugged. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. Her voice was husky. ‘It’s a bit gratuitous with all the rutting in potting sheds.’

  I didn’t really know what to say to that, but I remembered something Pat had once said about Sons and Lovers. ‘Aren’t all DH Lawrence’s books really about how he wanted to sleep with his mother?’

  Chloe looked up from her book in surprise and frowned, taking in my T-shirt and jeans and messy ponytail. I felt like a big, oversized kid. Chloe was amazing and I wanted more than anything to impress her.

  And to my astonishment, I had. She raised her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth curved up in a burgundy smile. Her eyes flicked from my eyes down to my lips and back up again.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Ava.’

  ‘Like Ava Gardner,’ she said, approvingly.

  I nearly dropped the beaker, my hands were trembling so much.

  About a month after we started hanging out, Chloe said something that changed my life. She’d been twitchy and anxious all day. She’d had three cups of coffee, and reapplied her dark cherry lipstick five times. We were sitting on the stone wall outside the school, and Chloe was telling me about some Japanese film she’d seen on SBS the previous night. She kept stopping, distracted, and frowning at me.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ I asked her.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. She pulled her lip gloss out of her handbag, unscrewed the lid, then screwed it back on again and put it away.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Chloe looked at me, and there was something weird in her face. She seemed frightened, but also hungry somehow. I saw her blush through her pale foundation, and she glanced away, then frowned and looked angry with herself.

  ‘I’m gay,’ she said, all of a sudden. ‘I thought you should know.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt hot and cold and shivery all at the same time.

  ‘Are you okay with that?’ she asked defiantly.

  I nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good,’ said Chloe, and leaned forward and kissed me.

  I’d never really thought much about my sexuality. I hadn’t ever had a boyfriend (apart from Perry Chau in Grade Six, which only lasted four days), but I always just assumed that was because fourteen-year-old boys were gross. They smelled disgusting and spoke in monosyllabic grunts, and they generally had bad skin.

  Chloe’s skin glowed pale like the moon. She smelled mysterious and different, and talked about ideas and theories I didn’t understand, but found fascinating anyway. When we kissed, things happened inside me that had never happened before.

  I adored her.

  She lent me books and I read and read and read. We sat on the stone wall and talked about life and death and love. We read poetry together, listened to alternative radio, and saw French films that bored me to tears, but I didn’t care because afterwards we would lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and talk about mise en scène while Chloe’s fingers traced lazy spirals on my skin.

  I couldn’t believe she’d chosen me. I asked her why, once. Why me?

  ‘Because you’re smarter than all of those carbon-copy morons put together,’ she said, then looked down and blushed. ‘And because you’re beautiful.’

  She was the coolest, sexiest, most interesting person I had ever met, and she had chosen me.

  And now I was leaving her behind.

  The Billy Hughes School for Academic Excellence was like a castle, all brown stone fringed with white turrets and flapping flags.

  As I walked up the gravel drive, I felt like a princess. I was Cinderella, finally out of the cellar and off to the ball. I’d spent all my Christmas money on clothes, and wore new jeans and a fitted white shirt under my beautiful pink argyle cashmere jumper. After a long afternoon at the hairdresser’s getting the black stripped out, my
hair was as glossy and swooshy as a shampoo commercial. When I’d looked at my reflection in the mirror this morning, I’d barely recognised the pretty, brown-haired girl smiling back at me from under perfectly mascara’d lashes.

  The other students didn’t really seem to notice me as I climbed the steep stone steps to the ornate front door. They swarmed around the sides of the castle, laughing and chatting. They looked perfect, all clean and fresh-faced and well-groomed.

  ‘Ella-Grace!’ yelled one girl to another. ‘Why weren’t you at debating last week?’

  Ella-Grace shook her head, her long brown plaits swinging. ‘I had to drop out. It clashes with Future Leaders and the Alliance Francaise.’

  ‘Je suis désolée,’ said the first girl, in perfectly accented French. ‘Mais en se verra a le club du Japonais?

  ’ ‘Hai!’ said Ella-Grace.

  ‘Sugoi!’ said the first girl. ‘Sayonara!

  ’ ‘Au revoir!

  ’ I shivered with excitement. I had a feeling I would love this place.

  At my old school, form assembly was a cross between a dance party and a wildlife documentary. Kids threw food at one another and scratched and squealed. Girls sprawled on the desks singing along to their iPods and boys snapped bra-straps and grunted. Up the back, a couple of kids of indeterminate gender would explore one another’s tonsils.

  Chloe and I usually sauntered in after the second bell to sit near the window and look bored and aloof. Chloe’s fingers would twitch delicately, flicking ash from an invisible cigarette.

  Then the teacher would come in and go purple and scream out our names over the insanity and we wouldn’t bother to answer and he or she didn’t bother to tick us off his or her list.

  Form assembly at Billy Hughes was like attending a health spa. Everyone looked happy and relaxed. The girls and boys talked to each other as though they were actually members of the same species. Most of them had their hands wrapped around mugs of tea and coffee – I wondered if there was a kitchen they used. It was all so adult. The air smelled like coffee and subtle, expensive perfume, and boy-cologne. I breathed it deeply. It was the smell of knowledge, success, achievement.