Outer Space / Carry On | Michael Clifford AU

1.

My Mum has been dead for an entire year.

It felt like this was stamped on my forehead for everyone to see. It felt as obvious as any of my physical attributes, as obvious as my blue eyes and dark brown hair and the freckles that danced across my nose and onto my cheeks.

And still, it didn't stop the doctor from asking me, even though he already knew my answer. "Do you know what today is?"

I was tempted to say It's Friday. Just to throw him off.  "Alice," the doctor said again. "Did you hear me?" 

The first time I came into this spacious white office, he asked me to call him Charlie. This is a safe space. You can say anything. Try to think of me as a friend, he'd said.  It didn't matter what I called him, it wouldn't make me hate these visits any less.

"Yeah, I heard you."

"Some might say it's quite alarming how relaxed you are today. Almost as if you're blocking your emotions out, not allowing yourself to process the grief."

"I have grieved. A year ago. I was fine yesterday," I reminded him. Charlie looked a little worn around the edges, patience wearing thin. Maybe he finally realised I had no reason to be here. I was only here because Dad forced me to come. "Why should I be any different today?"

Across the table between us, he slid a blue and white pamphlet towards me. PTSD, it read across the front. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"You're kidding me," I laughed hollowly. "The only traumatic thing I'm going to endure today is being half an hour late to my English class."

He sighed. Charlie sighed a lot. So did my Dad. It made me feel like I was really exhausting to be around. "That will be all today," he finally said with a nod. 

I practically bounced out of the cushiony red chair. I bet they put those chairs in here on purpose. They were comfortable, and the more comfortable someone was the more likely they'd keep coming back to fill the pockets of the doctors that worked here with money.

The third time I sat down in that cushiony red chair, I brought up my comfy chair theory. Charlie told me that I was cynical. I told him I wasn't, I just didn't expect people to be anything more than human. Weren't all humans motivated by our own selfishness? It seemed like a basic survival instinct, if you ask me.

Joan - AKA, my step mother - was waiting for me in the carpark.  She was flipping through a book of baby names when I climbed into the shiny blue minivan. "How was it?"

"Same old. Charlie grilled me like I was the depressed one."

"He's just trying to help," she said patiently. She was always patient. My new half brother or sister was lucky. She was going to make a good Mum. 

"Did you pick out any names for the Little Monster yet?"

Joan laughed, rubbing one hand over hand pregnant belly. "Your Dad's latest suggestion is Jagger."

"That's an improvement from Rocky."

Joan laughed again. "That's true. We've still got four weeks to decide."

I'd only been living with Joan and Dad for a few months when they'd told me Joan was pregnant. She spent weeks puking non-stop in that first trimester and so the nickname Baby Monster was born. So far Dad and Joan hadn't agreed on a single baby name.

"You've probably got so much baby stuff to worry about. Next time I should just drive myself."

"I like driving you."

"Dad likes you to drive me."

Joan gave me a small smile. "He loves you. We both do, Alice."

"And that warms my heart, but you don't need to treat me like I'm a child. I'm okay." 

I'm not her, I wanted to say. I wasn't depressed. I was not sick. And as much as my Dad and Joan, and even Charlie, liked to treat me like depression or psychosis was something I could have caught from Mum, it just wasn't true.

I wasn't depressed. I was just a seventeen year old girl who missed her Mum.

Joan dropped me off at school and I promptly went to the front office to get a late slip. Prescott Grammar had a way of making me feel like a rusty coin in the bottom of a money box. Everything was shiny and expensive, from the new iMacs fitted in the library to the students; the girls with their shiny hair and designer shoes, and the boys with their black SUVs and family heirloom watches.

And yet every day I walked through those black gates relishing in the escape that school had become. No one looked at me like a crazy girl with a dead Mum. No one gave me concerned looks as they secretly wondered if I'd leave the world the same way she did.

No one knew the truth. When I'd transferred here, it was bad enough being The New Girl. I didn't want to be The Girl With The Dead Mum as well.

As I waited for my late slip, I spotted him straight away.

His tall frame leaned against the wall outside the guidance counsellor's office. He had blue hair and wore a leather jacket. Even though his back was to me, I smiled at him sympathetically. That'd be gone tomorrow, the jacket. They'd have him in the schools required navy blue blazer just like all the other boys. It would be a miracle if they let him keep the blue hair, too.

But for today, for this very moment, he got to be different from the other clones that wandered the hallway, and there was something hopeful in that.

this story does address some issues in what i hope to be a realistic way, but it is not a sad or depressing story. quite the opposite, i think and i hope you all enjoy reading it x