Not My Problem

An hour later I was in front of Ms. Devlin again. This time I had a slip of paper and she had a huge wooden stick. Okay, the technical term was a camán and it was used to play camogie. For those of you who, like me, think all sports are just sticks and/or balls, this is another stick-and-ball game. For Ms. Devlin and the girls on her team, it was life and death.

“I’m not reading that,” Ms. Devlin said. She was short, white, and sturdy, and she had a no-nonsense energy that I ignored.

“Okay.” I shrugged and put the note in my pocket.

“You’re playing today,” she said. Her voice had a very “this is an order, not a request” feel about it.

“No, I have a note,” I said brightly, and produced the note again, smoothing it out.

She closed her eyes and breathed really hard. With her free hand she snatched the note from me.

“Please excuse Aideen Cleary from PE today. She has bubonic plague.”

I coughed.

“You do not have bubonic plague.”

“I do though.”

“I could phone your mother.”

“You could.”

She’d threatened this a dozen times since September. But she hadn’t done it yet. I had a suspicion my last form tutor had warned her there was no point, that my mam didn’t care. Mam would absolutely eat the face off me if she knew I was skipping PE, but I had long since solved that problem. Unfortunately, I had a bad feeling about Ms. Devlin. Like sooner or later she wouldn’t be able to help herself from getting involved.

The rest of the class had changed into shorts and T-shirts and were messing around on the pitch even though it was the bloody dead of winter. I saw Holly stretching out of the corner of my eye, the hem of her jersey riding up and revealing a few inches of bare skin. Holly was one of those girls who took camogie very seriously.

Ms. Devlin narrowed her eyes at me, then threw her hands up.

“Whatever. Just do something productive. You haven’t done your last two English assignments and you have one due Friday. I told you next time it’s detention.”

“Wow, gossiping about me with the English teacher. I would have thought you were above that kind of thing.”

Ms. Devlin turned red, ready to explode. “I am your English teacher, you ninny.”

“Oh right, I thought you looked familiar.”

She sighed and rubbed her temples for a second.

“Is everything okay at home, Aideen? Is there a reason your work isn’t being done?”

A prickling sensation crept over my skin.

“Everything is fine.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to help unless you talk to me. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I want to see you get stuck into something. Anything. So you have some support.”

“You’re trying to make me play camogie to solve an imaginary problem. There’s nothing wrong. Except for my bubons.”

“Your what?”

“My bubons. I have bubonic plague. My body is covered in bubons. Under my clothes, though, obviously.”

“You could at least read a bit more about these illnesses, you know, instead of simply choosing one off a list.”

“Sounds like homework.”

Ms. Devlin shook her head at my back as I escaped toward the sports hall. I couldn’t see it but I knew she was doing it. I could feel the head shake of resignation.

I made a beeline for my usual spot. There was a sort of balcony that overlooked the main hall; it had great reception, and last year I managed to talk a substitute teacher into giving me her log-in details to the teachers’ Wi-Fi network when she couldn’t work out the system. During PE I liked to sit up in the balcony and get all Netflix and cozy.

I tried ringing Mam before I settled in, but she didn’t answer. She was supposed to be at work. She worked in a hairdresser’s and they opened around ten. So it was fine. Her phone was on silent, that was all. Just as I found the show I wanted to watch I realized I needed to pee and sighed, thinking of how I had to walk all the way downstairs again. I left most of my stuff behind me because I didn’t have anything worth stealing, but I put my phone in my pocket. Not that it was worth stealing either, but I’d still be annoyed to lose it if some waste of space nabbed it.

As I approached the locker room, where the bathrooms were, my ears picked up on some kind of unholy wailing. It echoed and bounced off the walls and the closer I got to the locker room, the louder it became. I blessed myself. This was it. There was some kind of ghost or demon in there. The school was an old convent and although the sports hall was a renovated building, it was definitely built on ancient ground. Although wasn’t all ground ancient technically? The most likely scenario here was the disturbed spirit of some girl who had died while undergoing an aggressive exorcism. Probably because she had unnatural feelings (a gay) or disturbing thoughts (an opinion) or had been possessed by Satan (was horny?).

I was almost disappointed for a second that it turned out to be a regular, real-life teenage girl having a shit fit.

Okay, that’s potentially misleading on account of how it’s a bathroom, but I mean like a tantrum. All the crying and wailing was less interesting before I realized who it was. Meabh Kowalska. I watched for a moment, curious like I was getting to see rare footage of a creature undisturbed in its natural habitat.

Here we see the Perfectionist maximus engaged in the ritual dance of her species. See how she flails her limbs? Soon she will progress to pulling chunks of hair from the head.

She must have noticed me mid-thrashing because she suddenly froze and then slowly turned her head and looked me dead in the eyes. Her blue eyes were red rimmed and puffy. I thought about how I must look to her now, in her moment of weakness, and I was very generous, picturing my out-of-control brown curls as lustrous waves and my blue eyes as sparkling and amused.

She let out a strangled groan. “You.”

“Yep.” I grinned broadly, and rocked back and forth on my heels. This was the best day of my life.

I have these two daydreams. One is catching my enemies in a moment when I have the upper hand and they’re embarrassed and I get to act cool and aloof. The other is doing something amazing with my life and coming back to a school reunion and rubbing it in everyone’s faces. I’d invent an app that everyone uses and I’d rock up to the reunion and people would be using it and they’d be like, Oh, Aideen, nice to see you after ten years. Are you on Flubberygiblets? and I’d shrug like I didn’t even care. I invented Flubberygiblets, I’d say. Everyone would think I was class and then I’d be like, Have you met my wife, Kristen Stewart? We’re flying on a private jet to Maui tonight to have lots of sex and lip biting. Fuckity bye, assholes.

This was obviously the first scenario, and for a second I worried that I’d peaked. Maybe it would all be downhill from here unless I could figure out what Flubberygiblets did and learn how to code. That wasn’t likely seeing as I was pretty stumped by the time we had to create budgets in Excel for Business Studies and my figures wouldn’t add the numbers together. I just kept getting this symbol a lot: Σ.

Calling Meabh Kowalska my enemy was kind of harsh really. Saying that I have enemies sounds like I have had epic showdowns with people and we’re involved in elaborate plots to take each other down, when really it’s a lot more basic than that. We’ve been in the same class our whole lives and “didn’t play well together” in teacher speak. This is definitely a nice way of saying it. The same way those “Good Effort” elephant stickers on my homework were the nice way of saying I was stupid when everyone else got “Excellent” eagles or “Very Good” gorillas. After a few years it doesn’t really matter why you don’t like each other, you just don’t. It’s not like I remember every detail of how she made me feel smaller than all those inept elephant stickers combined or anything.

But it was November 2013 at 11:00 a.m. and it was raining, not pissing rain, just spitting down, you know? We had this school project that was a shoebox model of a scene from a book and I had actually read the book and all. I really liked it and so for a change I was kind of into the homework. We split up the tasks. Meabh was going to construct the chairs for the auditorium scene and all the little people, and I had to make the background look like a stage. Well, I went round her house on Sunday night with my shoebox. I’d done my best trying to paint a stage and I’d cut a picture of a pair of red curtains out of a home furnishings catalog and stuck them to the sides. I thought this was really clever. Well, sure didn’t she take one glance at my creation and get a face on her like a smacked arse.

“What. Is. This?” she screeched, and picked up my box, holding it out from her body with her fingertips like she might be infected by my mediocrity.

I wish I’d told her to cop on to herself because it was only a school project, but I was shy and got embarrassed real easy so I looked at my shoes and swallowed hard.

“Do you think these”—she indicated a hundred tiny, perfectly constructed wooden chairs with real red velvet seats—“go with this?” She looked half possessed when she said it and waved my box desperately in my face. “These are 1:24 scale Victorian replicas and this has a picture of a pair of curtains taped on it. You didn’t even use glue.”

We didn’t have glue. I’d had to search the junk drawers for the end of a roll of tape and had been so relieved when I found it because I knew there was no way Mam was going to go out and get a new roll just for this.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot over the years. It’s the kind of thing that pops into my head when I’m trying to fall asleep, and even though I know that Meabh was the one being the dick, I always feel the shame all over again. It’s like a dormant creature living in my stomach and every now and then it wakes up and crawls up my throat to choke me.

In the changing room, looking at Meabh’s red eyes and blotchy cheeks, after all these years, I remembered something else about that day back in primary school: the way Meabh pressed all ten fingertips into her skull so hard it looked like the bones of her knuckles would break through the skin. I remember how her dad came into the room and Meabh winced when he took the box out of her hand.

“We don’t scream, Meabh,” her dad said, and she apologized. Mr. Kowalski told me to ring my mum to pick me up because Meabh had homework to do. He wasn’t the type to be cross or shout, but that made him scarier to me then. I didn’t know how to handle his quiet disappointment. I didn’t want to say I didn’t have a phone. Or that we didn’t have a car and that Mam had told me to get the bus. I didn’t want to say that Mam hadn’t given me enough money for the bus either, so I just walked home. Mam wasn’t there and I didn’t have a key for the flat so I sat on the stairs in the hall until she got home and hugged me with limp arms and kissed me sloppily on the forehead, her breath making my eyes water.

When we went back to school on Monday, Meabh had completely redone the shoebox. It had real tiny curtains and a cord you could pull to draw them open. The teacher went loolally over it, obviously, and Meabh never said that I didn’t do any of it, but the teacher knew. We both got an A and I finally got a stupid eagle sticker. I peeled it off the page and stuck it to the inside of my pencil case. I didn’t want to look at it, but I didn’t want to throw it away either.

But I don’t hold a grudge. Meabh is what she is. A hectic pain in the hole. I didn’t like her, with her speeches and her being a relentless know-it-all, but Holly hated her. They were always in competition. When they were six, Meabh tripped her before their gymnastics yoke and Holly twisted her ankle. Holly was convinced it was some Tonya Harding shit. I don’t know about that because I thought Meabh wouldn’t want to beat her by default. She’d want to beat her by being better than her. And then she’d want to rub it in her face that she tried her absolute hardest and still lost. Last year Meabh had a party after the exams and her dad made her invite everyone in the class even though she wasn’t really friends with anyone; I think the party was his idea really. So Holly invited a bunch of girls out the same night to the underage disco up at the hotel and her mam paid for us all to get in. It didn’t help that Meabh had made camogie captain over Holly three years running.

“This must be pretty embarrassing for you,” I said now. “I thought you stopped having these tantrums years ago but obviously you just stopped having them in public.”

“This is a school locker room. Technically that is a public place,” she said, heaving herself into a cross-legged position on the floor.

“I love how you’d rather correct me on a technicality than deny you still have massive hissy fits at sixteen.”

“I can hardly deny that now.”

“True. But you’re taking the fun out of this for me. I want to bask in your humiliation.”

Instead of sniping back, she just sat there as a tear snuck out of her eye and rolled down her face. I couldn’t help but feel kind of sorry for her. I was watching her sad little tear make its way down her face when—

“Did you—?” I pointed, aghast.

“What?” She looked confused.

“You . . . you licked your own tear. It reached your mouth and your tongue popped out and licked it.”

She shrugged. “It’s salty.”

I shook my head. “Uh, that doesn’t make the kind of sense you think it does. It’s salty does not explain ingesting liquid that came out your eyeballs. There’s loads of things that are salty but you don’t go round licking them all.”

“Like what?”

I scrambled to think of something.

“Um . . . ROAD SALT,” I finally said triumphantly. “Sand.”

“A sweaty armpit,” she said.

“A dick.”

“Oh my God, Aideen. Gross.” She groaned and wrinkled her nose. She was laughing though and I forgot that I was supposed to be reveling in her pain.

That brings me to one of the other reasons Meabh annoyed me. Even if it wasn’t technically her fault. In our first year at secondary school everyone called me a lesbian because I was always hanging around Holly and while she had lots of other friends from all her clubs and societies, I didn’t. I was never really comfortable with her other friends either. There was stuff about my life only Holly knew and that was how I wanted it to stay. But it did mean that it was really hard to ever feel connected to anyone else. I always felt like I was lying. Anyway, I told another girl who I thought was my friend at the time that maybe I was a lesbian, and she told everyone, and for ages there were a few people who gave me a really hard time about it.

Until at some point a couple of years later everyone turned super woke and a few other girls said they were bi and Meabh said she was a lesbian too and the same people who made jokes about me acted like none of that had ever happened. Even though Meabh wasn’t exactly Miss Popularity, no one was going to make fun of her for that now because being homophobic was no longer acceptable. Which is great, obviously. It just wasn’t great in time for me. It didn’t seem fair that it was easy for Meabh and Orla and Katia; I got all the hassle and they got to be brave and everyone else got to act like our school had always been this rainbow utopia.

“Are you going to tell me what you’re yapping about anyway? Did you get a B in something?” I joked.

Meabh pursed her lips. “I’m going to lose.”

“What, the election thing? You were junior president. You’re a shoo-in. Besides, no one else is actually running.”

“Yet. Some asshole is definitely going to. And I have so much to do. I have so many policies to write and I said I’d do all this stuff and I don’t even know where to start and I can’t do anything.”

Tears were streaming down her face. She was a hopeless case.

“It’s a stupid election. You don’t need any policies or initiatives. No one cares. Like genuinely nobody cares. And so what if you lose? You already have a lot going on, do you really need this too?” Aside from being camogie captain, Meabh always had her hand in something. She was forever fundraising or making a petition or entering some kind of competition. Not a week went by without her lobbying the teachers for some kind of change. Last week she harangued the old caretaker until he agreed to only order energy-saving bulbs in future.

“You don’t understand,” she said. Not in a mean way, like I wouldn’t understand because I’m a dope, although that’s true, but in a way like she really wished that I could.

“I don’t understand most things,” I said, “but sure, why don’t you tell me what it’s like to be a smarty-pants anyway?”

Meabh must have been disoriented by her tantrum because she actually started telling me. Me. The girl who cut curtains out of a catalog instead of sewing them from scratch. How the mighty had fallen.

“I already said I’d do all these things and I can’t fail. I can’t.” She looked genuinely distressed, and I didn’t understand. I dug deep into my empathy store and found a dried-up old raisin. Meabh had literally everything. She was a brainiac and her family’s house had two sitting rooms, for fuck’s sake. Still, I tried my best.

“Look,” I said matter-of-factly. “I fail at things all the time. I promise you nothing actually happens. It won’t kill you.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

“You’re worried it won’t kill you?” There was no pleasing this girl. “Tell you what, if you do lose, I’ll finish you off myself. How about that?”

She stood up, a scarily serious look on her face. The kind I assumed serial killers got right before they chopped your head off and wore it as a hat. I took another few steps back, but she stalked toward me. This is what you get for being a Good Samaritan. You die in a girls’ locker room at the hands of a deranged overachiever.

“Do you know what will happen if I fail? What I’ll learn from that?”

She kept walking toward me until I’d backed into the wall, which was damp with condensation from the showers. Her menacing expression was enhanced by the mascara dripping down her face. I would have laughed, but I was pretty sure if I did she’d unhinge her jaw and I’d be swallowed into the dark chasm of her stomach.

“I’ll learn that failure is not the end of the world.”

I opened my mouth to squeak out that this might not be a terrible lesson for her to learn sooner or later. It might cut down on the meltdowns. But she put her hand across my mouth.

“Then maybe I’ll start to relax. I won’t be so intense about my homework. I’ll think, Meabh, you can chill out. Wind your tits down to medium.”

I laughed into her hand, thinking that her tits were indeed currently wound up to high and I enjoyed the phrasing. She continued, ignoring my snicker.

“I’ll think, the worst has already happened and you survived it. You’ve wasted years of your life being a perfectionist.”

I nodded yes, her hand still over my mouth. She shook her head slowly, deliberately no.

“It’ll start off small. I’ll only spend two hours instead of three preparing my topic for the comhrá and Múinteoir Nic Gabhann won’t really notice because I already have excellent conversational Irish.”

Her hand shifted slightly so it covered my nostrils, and I tried to speak to tell her she was obstructing my breathing and I needed that to live, but her grip was clamped so tight that all I could do was lick her palm. She grimaced and snatched her hand away, wiping it on her skirt.

“Ew, don’t lick my hand,” she said, breaking the tension.

“What if there were tears on it?”

She didn’t even smile. She continued her weird rant instead.

“Complacency will lead me to more failure. I’ll start to think it’s okay to doss off. It’s only transition year, I’ll tell myself. It doesn’t count for anything. Then it becomes, It’s only fifth year. The exams aren’t till next year. It’s only coursework. It’s only a B. Hell, why not give myself a break and take ordinary-level Maths? I don’t need to get the full six hundred and twenty-five points.”

I didn’t think anyone needed to get 625 points. But Meabh was the kind of person who’d probably engrave her Leaving Cert results on her tombstone, so I could see why she’d want them to be good. She took a few steps back from me then.

“Maybe after I’ve given up on higher-level Maths I’ll think I have time to go to that party.”

There was no party.

“Someone there offers me crack. And I think hey, sure, I have a biology lab to write up but I can do it in the morning.”

“I feel like you’ve missed a step. Who do we know who brings crack to parties?”

“I’ve read Go Ask Alice!” she declared. Like that settled it. “Once you snort that meth, there’s no going back.”

I shook my head, realizing that Meabh thought meth and crack were the same thing and she also had no idea how you took either of them.

“Years from now you’ll wonder, what happened to that girl from school? She was going places once. Then one day you’ll pass a person lying in the gutter, a needle sticking out of her arm and a glazed expression on her face. You’ll think, that’s so sad. I wonder what happened to her. She’s so young. She’s probably the same age as you are.”

She trailed off, a faraway look in her eye.

“Is it you?” I asked.

She sighed, exasperated. “Yeah, obviously it’s me. It’d be a pointless ending if it’s just some random and I’m off finding a new renewable energy source or ending global capitalism.”

I thought for a minute.

“There are few holes in this,” I said. “One: I guarantee I’m not going to be wondering what you’re doing years from now.”

I’d be too busy making love to my wife, Kristen Stewart, on a bed of Flubberygiblets™ money.

“Two: you clearly don’t even know how to take meth and if you did, believe me, you’re middle-class enough to end up in some country club rehab, not the gutter. And three: you’ll die of a stress-induced coronary before any of this happens so I really wouldn’t worry about it.”

For a second she did nothing, and I thought she was considering my very reasonable points.

Then she burst into tears. Far too many tears for her to lick off her own face.

“FINE,” I shouted over the wailing and rending of garments. “I’LL FIX IT!”

She paused in her dramatics and eyed me up and down. “How?”

“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “what do you need?”

And that was how it started.