Not My Problem

MEABH

I can’t do it.

AIDEEN

U sed u owe me 1. U sed those xact wrds.

I sent her a screenshot of her own text like it was a legally binding agreement.

MEABH

I keep thinking about how you must have made your autocorrect recognize these half words and I don’t understand why you’d go to that kind of effort.

AIDEEN

You’r avoidin th questio.

MEABH

Oh my God. You’er just doing it to annoy me, aren’t you?

AIDEEN

Ha ha u spelled you’re wrng.

AIDEEN

Also u owe me.

I sent the screenshot again and hoped the message radiated the same smug satisfaction I felt.

MEABH

You’ll get in trouble. You’ll get caught.

AIDEEN

Will I tho? Wen I hve keys + door code? I no u no wat it is. How will ne1 no I’ve even been there?

AIDEEN

Hello?

MEABH

You promise it’s for a good cause?

AIDEEN

I sed dat alreddy

MEABH

Yeah, but how do I know your idea of a good cause matches with my idea of a good cause?

AIDEEN

I thought u had a gud cause, didnt I?

I waited ten full minutes.

MEABH

1:00 a.m. The front entrance.

Mam wasn’t home when I left the house in Holly’s puffy coat. She’d left for her trip with “Bernie” before I’d even got home from school that day. Honestly, it was kind of a relief. I’d had a sick feeling in my stomach on the bus home worrying that I’d run into Dad. I didn’t want to see them getting into his car, or even catch a glimpse of it turning the corner. She’d left me two twenties on the fridge door, stuck by a magnet. Definitely Dad’s money.

I wanted to be a person who had so much integrity that they wouldn’t spend it, but integrity is for people with other income streams, so I’d gone to the corner shop, bought a few essentials, and put the rest in the back of my pants drawer. I always tried to siphon off a bit of cash here and there and stash it for when a bill came. Even though Dad being around was bad news, at least it would help me build up my little safety net of cash. But as soon as I had the thought, I felt guilty. It wasn’t worth it.

That night my coat didn’t quite keep out the bite of the night air and my heart hammered as I walked out of my building past a car with its lights on, illuminating a group of boys maybe a bit older than me. I trained my eyes straight in front of me. I didn’t even want to notice what color the car was. The pub at the end of the street had people standing outside smoking and laughing with drinks in their hands. I thought one guy was pissing up the side wall but I tried not to look. No one said anything to me as I passed on the other side. I tensed up anyway. I didn’t want to put my earbuds in until I was in a quieter neighborhood. If someone got near me I wanted to hear them.

The buses don’t run at night, so I had to walk the whole way, but thankfully the closer I got to school, the less stressful the journey was. Streetlights were broken up with trees, flats turned into houses with leafy gardens, and drunk people were replaced with blissful silence. I took the opportunity to fill it with Taylor Swift. I know it’s basic to love Tay, but the girl knows how to write a bop. I’ve never even had a girlfriend, yet somehow I listen to one of her albums and I end up thinking wistfully of all my lost loves and feeling hope that I’ll find love again somehow.

When I got to the school gate I let the earbuds dangle round my neck and considered how to tackle the problem I hadn’t seen coming. The giant wrought-iron gates were locked with a chain and padlock. The sight of them made me realize what I was doing. I wasn’t sneaking into the kitchen for a midnight snack. I was breaking and entering. I tried to reach the padlock but the gaps between the bars of the gate weren’t wide enough to let me get my arms in and reach round. Even if Meabh thought to bring this key too, and let’s face it, she obviously would, I wouldn’t be able to open it.

I looked around. The gates were bordered on either side by half a stone wall topped off with wrought-iron fencing. If I could get on the wall bit, I’d be able to get over the fence, but I wasn’t going to be able to make it that far in the first place. It was almost as if the gate and wall were designed to keep people out.

Oh well, too bad. Better go home to bed and start my criminal career another time.

I took my phone out to text Meabh and tell her the plan was off. I couldn’t text Orla, for obvious reasons, but hopefully she’d figure it out when she arrived and I wasn’t here.

But what if she waited around in the dark for me? That didn’t sound safe. What if she waited for ages and something happened to her? I’m not saying it would be my fault—it’s not like I’d be the one who jumped out of the bushes and kidnapped her to sacrifice her to Satan—but I’d feel bad if it happened all the same. It would be better if none of us were loitering alone in the dead of night, even if it was in a nice area. I’d just have to loiter alone in the dead of night until she turned up.

AIDEEN

Plans off.

As soon as the whoosh of the message sounded, I heard a tut in reply. I looked up and Meabh was standing there with her phone screen lighting up her face. That meant I could see the disapproval clearly. I could also see that her sharp bob had been ruffled by sleep, or at least pretending to sleep before she snuck out. It suited her. She looked softer, less like a scary teacher.

“There’s an apostrophe in ‘plan’s off.’ It’s a contraction. The plan is off.”

So much for that.

“How is that you live a life of scheduled pee breaks and yet you still somehow manage to find the time and energy to correct my grammar?”

“I have loads more free time now though,” she said, and she jiggled her foot, showing off the space boot the doctor had given her.

“Well, you need to hobble back to the mother ship,” I said. “The gates are locked. From the inside.”

“I have the key.”

Of course you do.

“I can’t reach the lock, I already tried,” I said, feeling my cheeks heat up. I was glad she couldn’t see that in the dark. “You must think I’m really stupid.”

“I never said that.” She sounded surprised.

“You didn’t have to. Look, never mind that. How do these gates get open in the morning?”

“The caretaker uses the side gate, which you can only get into with a key card, and then he opens the front gates from the inside.”

“And you have the key card?”

“No, there’s only one. The caretaker has it, not Dad.”

“So we’re going home!” I checked my phone. I could get home and have a mug of hot milk instead of going to jail.

“I didn’t say that either. You need to go over the fence and then you can unlock the padlock.”

“And if my legs were six foot long, I would totally climb up there and do that. But you’re seeing the problem, right?” I said, waving an arm down the length of my body. There was no way Meabh could get around that.

“I brought assistance.” She shrugged off her backpack and opened it up, pulling out a plastic fold-up footstool.

I stared at it.

“If I’m going to do something criminal I’m going to make sure I do it right.” Meabh tsked. “Fail to prepare—”

“Don’t finish that.” I pointed my finger at her. “The last time you said that to me I almost killed you. Don’t tempt me.”

“What are you talking about?”

I could still hear her snotty little voice and I imitated it. “Fail to prepare.” When she didn’t seem to get it, I added, “The audition?”

Her eyes were blank for a second and then I watched as the memory came back.

“For the sixth-class play?” she asked slowly.

The last year of primary school, our whole class did a play in Irish and entered a national competition for Irish-language school drama. I’d memorized the whole audition monologue for the part I wanted: the narrator. The best part, because it had the most lines and you didn’t have to make a dick of yourself prancing around the stage. The day of the audition, the teacher gave us all a consent form that said if we got through to the finals we’d have to pay €30 to go to Galway and perform. I didn’t think Mam would be able to afford that. I didn’t throw the audition but I remember my heart was so heavy I couldn’t perform. I forgot a few lines and stuttered over the ones I remembered. When I sat down, Holly asked me what had happened and I whispered back that I didn’t have time to practice last night. I told her the truth later. She said she would have paid for me out of her savings. But Meabh overheard me anyway. “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,” she said, flouncing up to the stage to deliver her flawless audition.

“I forgot about that,” Meabh said, looking uncomfortable. “Hey! Is that why you put rose hips in my costume the first night?”

We had not got through to the finals. Some blamed Meabh’s itchy performance as the narrator.

“I forgot about that,” I said, grinning.

If Meabh was willing to go through with this, I certainly could. The milk could wait. Then I looked at the gate again and stopped grinning. Why hadn’t I thought of how to get over it? I should have known there’d be a lock and it didn’t take a genius to see how hard it would be to climb over the rails. Some help I was, if I didn’t even think of the basics.

I took the stool from her and tested my weight on it. It looked flimsy but it held out. With the extra height, my hands could reach the top of the wall, but I didn’t have the strength to pull myself up.

“Come on,” Meabh said in a Ms. Devlin tone of voice. “Use all your upper-body strength, not just your arms.”

“I’m trying,” I said through gritted teeth. “But I don’t have upper-body strength. I’d like to see you do it!”

“I could do it!” Meabh rolled up her sleeves. “I can do five reps of close-grip pull-ups.”

“Stop saying words that don’t mean anything,” I said, but I did at least understand with her sleeves rolled up that Meabh had proper guns. They were kind of impressive. Not that I’d tell her that.

She pushed me out of the way and tried to get on the footstool. The thing was, her boot was bigger than the whole step and when she tried to stand on it, it didn’t look remotely safe.

“You can’t get on that,” I said. Then I sighed. “Let me try again.”

“Maybe I could give you a boost?” she said, though she didn’t look convinced.

“You can’t put that much weight on your foot. You’re not steady as it is.”

“Maybe when Orla gets here she’ll be able to do it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her how many reps she can do.” Orla hadn’t struck me as a pull-ups kind of girl.

Meabh pursed her lips.

“I could give you a boost,” Kavi said brightly.

“What the actual fuck?” I clutched my heart.

“Why are you here?” Meabh demanded.

Kavi looked bewildered at our mixture of confusion and shock.

“Why is she here?” another voice chimed in. It was Orla this time and she was pointing at Meabh.

Meabh hmphed and drew herself up, apparently finding it galling that anyone would question her presence at anything, even a midnight break-in.

“I am the only reason you’re even getting in here for your little mission,” she said.

Orla rounded on me.

“You told her?” she asked, disbelieving. “Is this some kind of trap? She’s the principal’s daughter!”

“You’re Principal Kowalski’s daughter?” Kavi asked, seemingly surprised by this information.

Meabh rolled her eyes. “Kowalska is just the feminine version of Kowalski.”

“I know that. I don’t want to assume that just because you have a Polish name and Mr. Kowalski has the same Polish name that you’re related. I don’t want people assuming every Indian kid in school is related to me. I mean, that’s really offensive, and I don’t want to offend you.”

“The only other Indian kid in school is your brother,” Meabh pointed out.

“For now.” He shrugged. “Maybe next year there’ll be loads, and I don’t want people going round thinking they’re all my brother. Aren’t you the one who said the other day that Ireland is a country that has entered a period of racial and cultural diversification and that now is the time to address the issues of systemic racism and xenophobia embedded in our society? And then you spent like ten minutes giving out about that lady politician who keeps posting pictures of brown kids and Eastern European kids and complaining about there being no ‘Irish’ people left, until Mr. McCann promised that he would not use the words Celtic and Irish interchangeably again?”

Meabh’s mouth dropped open ever so slightly.

“I mean. Yes. I did say that. Exactly that.”

Kavi grinned broadly. Not an I-caught-you-out-with-your-own-words kind of grin. He looked genuinely pleased that he’d repeated word for word what she’d said and now they were on the same page.

Meabh eyed Kavi with new respect, even if he wasn’t smug enough to rub “winning” their exchange in her face the way she would.

Then her face lit up. “By the way, don’t say lady politician. She’s just a politician. And a dickhead.”

“Not a lady dickhead,” I added.

Orla huffed loudly, deliberately. The three of us looked at her. She was standing with her hands on her hips and tapping her foot.

“That was all very fun and everything, but you still haven’t explained to me why the hell you told Meabh Kowalska about my . . . problem. Or what on earth she’s doing here.”

“Chill your tits,” I said. “I have not told her what your problem is. But do I look like feckin’ Columbo to you? You wanted into the school. I needed a way in. And Meabh here owes me a little favor.”

Something occurred to me then. Call it divine inspiration. Call it a sudden spurt of genius. Call it the stupid idea that set me further down a path that had started with Meabh’s tantrum and would end up being either the best or worst thing that ever happened to me.

In the moment all I thought was that it had sure come in handy having Meabh owe me one. And Orla worked in the school office. Maybe she’d be able to doctor my attendance record. Or my grades.

“And so do you,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Orla asked suspiciously, glancing at Kavi. He was the one who’d brought her to me, after all.

“I mean, I do this for you, then you owe me a favor. Get it?”

“What about tickets to my modern dance class performance? We’re doing a Britney retrospective next month.”

“Uh . . . no. I pick the favor.”

“What if I can’t do it? What if you, like, ask me for a kidney or something?”

“I don’t need a kidney. And I’m not going to ask you for something you can’t do. What good is that to me?”

She bit her lip. Then she nodded.

“Do you want to buy tickets to the Britney thing, then? They’re only €15 a head.”

“All right, then.” I clapped my hands together, pretending I hadn’t heard that. “Let’s do this.”

“So you do want me to give you a boost, then?” Kavi asked, clasping his hands together in preparation.

“Are you kidding me? Kavi, you’re six foot ten. Climb the fuck over the wall and let us in,” I said, and threw the keys at him.