Stepping on cracks

This story was published in the New Zealand Listener, September 2004

Thrrrr-up, thrrr-up, thrrr-up go her fingers against the metal post. She's standing alone, stringy hair, corduroy skirt, scabby legs sprouting out of roman sandals. There's twenty more minutes of the lunch break to go, and her fingers are flicking out like the fan my uncle brought me back from Spain. Everyone else is in clusters, comparing hair clips, playing hopscotch, sweeping pine needles into the corridors and bedrooms of imaginary houses. But she's standing alone, and so am I.

I didn't use to spend lunch times by myself. I used to have a friend, Stacey. But Stacey went to the Philippines with her family for the year, and now I have no one to play with. Mum tells me I have to say hello to people when I get to school. I whisper it. Hi. He-llo. "No, Rebecca," my mother says. "You have to say 'Hello Monica, hello Kirsty, how are you?'"

I don't think so. Hello is enough. Hello is as hard as having my teeth drilled, harder than when I ran the school cross-country, across paddocks, past dried cow pats and scrawny cabbage trees, abandoning my left sneaker in a muddy swamp because I was too tired to retrieve it. Hi, I whisper to the people who sit around me. They don't hear me; I can't catch their eye.

Mum knows about the girl whose fingers cascade against the post. She's moved next door to her gossipy friend, who has collected an album of facts about her. The fact that her mother died of breast cancer. The fact that her father was knocked down by the truck he used to feed rubbish into, and now he can't work, now his words are muddied like green and red paint mixed together. The fact that she has a sister who's sixteen and had her stomach pumped of rum in the hospital, and that they are all looked after by her grandmother, who grows her string beans up the fence that separates her from Mum's gossipy friend. Mum's gossipy friend picks the beans that grow through the slats, handing them back to the grandmother in exchange for facts. Sometimes she eats them, still warm from the sun. "You should make friends with Dolores", Mum tells me. "She's just moved here; she doesn't know anybody. You could both do with a friend."

Dolores. I turn the word over in my tongue like a boiled sweet. There's nobody else at school with that name. Dolores. It's Spanish, like my fan. Her mother was Spanish, before the cancer got her. I see her mother, whizzing around a cul-de-sac on a scooter, hair flying in the wind, her cleavage brown against her daisy-print dress, a dent in her arm where she was vaccinated against tuberculosis. I don't see her breastless. I don't see her dying. Dolores. I finger a bag of raspberry drops in my pocket. The white paper feels soft like T-shirt cotton. Dolores hops from one tree stump to another in the schoolyard. I watch her, my bare feet plunged into the green grass, whispering he-llo. He-llo Dolores. I've had three bee stings this summer, and although I didn't need an ambulance like Theresa, my foot swelled enough to invite attention from the girls who never invite me to join them in four-square.

"What are you staring at?" she says.

"Dunno, it's not labeled. Do you want a lolly?"

"Thanks." Dolores steps off the tree stump to reach for one. "Do you want to play?"

"What do you do?"

"Leap across to every second stump; if you touch the ground, you turn to stone."

Dolores leaps, wobbling as she lands. She turns and grins, her front tooth broken. "Your turn," she says.

I climb up onto the tree stump. I leap - I make it. I'm glad for my callused feet. I leap to the next stump. The next, the next. Dolores leaps after me. I leap again - I miss. The bark scrapes my shin. I scream, then swallow it. I breathe through the gaps between my teeth, as the blood beads like droplets on get-well-card roses. Dolores looks pale.

"Come on, let's go to the sick bay," she says. "Which way is it?"

I point past the hopscotchers and the boys playing tag. I fix my eyes on a small hole in Dolores' T-shirt as I limp after her, the dribble of blood cooling my leg.