The Anti-Cool Girl (12 page)

After that conversation, obviously, things got worse. Nothing fuels a bully more than getting dobbed on but not actually being held accountable. The more I reacted, the worse things got, and I refused to accept the notion that my trying to force the school to punish him was just making things worse. I was constantly told not to ‘provoke' him by going to teachers about his behaviour, but I just couldn't accept that I was provoking him into being an arsehole by trying to protect myself. He was an arsehole because he was an arsehole.

I successfully lobbied to keep the boys out of the common area in the girls' boarding house, just so there could be one place
on campus where I could be sure I wouldn't have to face him. Given I was already of very fragile social standing, my changing the rules so that a bunch of hormonal teens couldn't watch TV together was hardly a smart idea, but I just wanted to be able to walk into one room and not worry about being abused or laughed at on the other side of the door. But time and time again, I would walk into the common area to find him sitting there, often with the teacher in charge talking and laughing with him.

I felt like I was losing my mind. This boy was torturing me on a daily basis and I wasn't quiet about it. I reported him, I talked to teachers, I stood my ground. And still, nothing was done. I was just treated like I was being a spoilsport, and Wayne continued to laugh in the face of the College's ‘no tolerance' bullying policy. It's amazing what a boy who's good with a football can get away with.

But then came a ray of hope.

The school counsellor, whom I started visiting just to get out of class, said that he was going to give Wayne an official warning. This meant anything he did after the warning would need to be met with official punishment. There wouldn't be any more of these ‘chats' with teachers; something real was actually going to be done. I was so relieved that someone was finally listening to me. I was at the end of my second year at the College, and someone finally seemed to agree that I didn't deserve to
be harassed on a daily basis. Maybe, I thought, if Wayne gets expelled, Year 12 will end up being okay.

I decided to wait for Wayne to do something particularly shitty before I reported it to the counsellor. I wanted to make sure that whatever he got in trouble for after his official warning, it was going to be worth it.

It only took two weeks for him to do something at the spectacular level of cruelty that I had been waiting for. And it was probably, up until that point, one of the most humiliating moments of my life (obviously not including the worrying amount of pants-shitting I had done as a child).

It happened while I was onstage, performing in a College production of
Lord of the Flies.
I was the student director, and had been tasked with playing the very minor role of the officer who turns up on the island in the last thirty seconds and finds the boys have turned feral. I hadn't really wanted to play the role, but we needed someone and there were only about five lines of dialogue.

By the end of the play, the young characters in
Lord of the Flies
have become obsessed with the idea that there is a scary beast on the island trying to eat them all, so when they hear the officer rummaging through the bushes, they mistake it for the monster and start yelling, ‘The beast! The beast!' Then the officer comes onstage, they realise it's an adult person and they all get in big shit for killing each other and losing their shoes. I
mainly just had to look horrified and shocked at finding a bunch of shoeless kids about to kill each other (not a huge stretch for me, given my time at Smurf Village).

Since the College was the College, of course the play was set on a massive outdoor sound stage, complete with a huge, actual plane wreckage that we bought from a junkyard (because ‘What's a budget?'). I had a great time doing that play. The cast was only boys in years 7–9, and I liked that I didn't have to worry about being bullied by them. They were just sweet, nice kids who thought I was a drama genius, and it was simple and nobody bothered me. We decided that I would dramatically walk down through the audience, and as all the boys pointed in my direction, screaming and terrified that I was the beast, I would step through lots of dramatic fog onto the stage and reveal myself to be a kick-ass female astronaut. I had a NASA jumpsuit and everything.

The show was great for the first two nights. The audience sat on a grassy hill watching the action unfold, and it was so incredible to see all the kids get that buzz that only comes from performing onstage. I was on a high for those first two days, finally feeling like I had something at the College that made me forget about Wayne. But on the third night, the night all the boarders came to watch, Wayne decided he would remind me he was there.

Everything went as it had the first two nights. I came down through the audience and began to emerge through a thick
haze of fog onto the stage. The boys did their usual yelling that the beast was coming to get them. ‘The beast! The beast!' they yelled, as I got closer to them. Then, as I stepped out of the fog and into the spotlight on the sound stage, the usual hush came over the crowd. It's a big moment – when the boys realise that an adult has finally found them. There are a few seconds of silence to let the whole thing sink in. It was my job to break the silence; to look at the boys in horror and demand to know why they're all running around in no clothes with a pig's head. And just as I was about to open my mouth to say my first line, Wayne beat me to it.

‘Yuck,' he yelled. ‘It
is
a beast!'

He and his hunting party, sitting somewhere in the darkness of the audience, erupted into laughter. The vocal assassin had just taken a shot at me, and two hundred people had seen him successfully hit his target. I stood onstage, under the spotlight, frozen in humiliation. I locked eyes with the young actor standing across from me; he looked horrified. I stood there for what felt like an eternity, the eyes of two hundred people feeling sorry for me burning into my face. Eventually, I managed to blurt out my few lines and rush offstage. I came back out for the curtain call, and could hear the word ‘beast' being chanted from Wayne's direction along with the crowd's applause.

It wasn't until I finally made it back to my room that night that I could let the full effect of the assassin's shot take hold. I
collapsed onto the ground and had what I only realised years later was my first panic attack. I could only manage to get up off the floor when my despair and humiliation turned to rage. How fucking
dare
he? Then my rage turned to elation. This was it – considering he'd been given an official warning, this was the thing that was going to get him kicked out. I may have just been laughed at while literally standing under a spotlight in front of a crowd of people, but it would be worth it if it meant I could spend my last year at this school not feeling like I was being hunted every day.

I went into action mode. I knew all the boarders had been in the audience that night, so I told the teacher on duty in the boys' boarding house what had happened. ‘That doesn't sound like Wayne,' he said, incredulous.

‘Everybody was there,' I said, defiant. ‘Everybody heard it. Ask them.'

So he did. One by one, boarders were pulled into the teacher's office and asked whether Wayne had yelled that I was a beast and burst into hysterical laughter while I was standing onstage in the middle of performing a play. And one by one, they all denied having heard anything. Or, if they admitted to hearing something, they said they couldn't be sure who had said it. I had expected denials from his hunting buddies, but not from the few people I considered my friends. I went to bed devastated, but not without hope. I still had the secret deal I'd arranged with
the counsellor. Wayne had been given an official warning about making my life a daily torture, and now he had fucked up. I fell asleep confident that as of the next day, Wayne would be gone, and I'd be free. And I was still holding out hope for that penis accident.

When I reported it to the counsellor the next morning, he said, ‘Oh, um, I haven't actually managed to catch up with Wayne yet.'

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘What?' I said, tears welling up in my eyes. ‘What do you mean? You were meant to have done it over two weeks ago. You promised you would be giving him a warning.'

‘I know, I'm sorry, I just haven't really had a chance to talk to him yet.'

‘What the fuck does that mean?'
I yelled. ‘You're a fucking teacher! You don't just wait until you bump into him in the fucking hall. You have him brought to your office and you talk to him whenever you fucking want!'

The counsellor just sat in silence, the look on his face making it obvious he thought I was deranged. And that's probably because I was. I was having relentless fucking fantasies about dicks in blenders, for fuck's sake. I was losing it. And I thought that it had all been going to end that day.

Instead, without the promised ‘official warning', and with no students willing to admit they'd seen him do it, the whole
thing was put down to another ‘boys will be boys' incident. Apparently, it ‘just sounded like someone was trying to be funny', and maybe I should ‘just laugh it off'.

I was defeated. I was done. From that day, I disappeared into a hole. The social anxiety turned into depression, which turned into suicidal thoughts. The toxic butterflies from my childhood came back, and sat in the pit of my stomach like a poison I couldn't get rid of. I started skipping class, stopped studying, never handed in homework. I was in detention more often than not. My uncle was becoming increasingly frustrated with my abysmal report cards. I was wasting his money, and he was pissed off, but I was too embarrassed to tell him the extent of how bad things were. I was stuck in a preppy nightmare, and I hadn't even met one damn person named Bitsy Carrington Hastings III.

I felt completely alone. I didn't feel at home at Uncle Ben's, with the expensive art and dinner parties and a room that I wasn't allowed to put posters up in. I didn't feel at home at boarding school, where I was tortured on a daily basis. And I didn't feel at home when I visited Mum and Rhiannon, who treated me like a North Shore princess who had picked money over them. I didn't fit in anywhere anymore.

I spent my last year at the College just trying to survive. I stuck to the couple of friends I had in the day school. I even started dating a boy in my last few weeks there. I finished my final exams and aced them, getting into one of the top universities in
the country. But my confidence was decimated. I was a ghost, and a ghost can't go to university. A ghost can't make new friends and get a job and speak up in class. A ghost can't live life the way everybody else does. I was still convinced I was being hunted everywhere I went. When I heard people laugh in the street, I thought it was about me. If I saw people whispering in university lectures, I thought they were getting ready to attack. Every corner I turned, I expected a verbal assassin to be waiting for me.

I had no idea how to socially function anymore, and I was exhausted. Fantasising about deformed ball sacks and elaborate penis accidents no longer helped. I was broken.

So, after a month at university, I went to a supermarket and bought a jumbo box of Panadol. The hunters had won – now I was hunting myself.

‘I peed funny!'

That was the first thing I said after losing my virginity. Once penetration had finally occurred (after weeks of trying, by the way), I got up, went to the bathroom, and looked on in fascination as my pee splayed out of me like someone was holding their finger over the end of a hose. I was mildly concerned I had broken my vagina – after finally figuring out where my tampon hole was, following years of sweating with one leg hoisted on the toilet, had I now stretched things so much that sanitary items would just fall straight out of me anyway? (It should probably be noted here that anybody who thinks tampons can fall out of a vagina because of too much penis-stretching probably shouldn't be having sex to begin with, but such is life.)

The lucky boy was Josh. He was a day student from the College, whom I had started dating during my final few weeks there. After having my confidence and dignity obliterated by
kids in the boarding house, I was pretty much left with a couple of friends in the day school, and Josh. I knew we were going to be together from our first drunken kiss at a party. It was one of those kisses that was just so perfect, your knees go to mush. At least, that's the way I felt after having only kissed maybe three other boys, all of whom had assaulted my mouth with their tongues and left me traumatised, confused and feeling betrayed by every Disney kiss I'd ever seen.

Actually, a few years later, once I had hit both my twenties and my threshold for putting up with terrible make-out sessions, I taught a clueless guy how to kiss. It is possibly one of the more selfless and heroic things I have ever done, and ever will do, for humanity. I mean, when you're kids, it's understandable – you're still figuring your shit out. But a grown man not knowing how to kiss a woman without making her want to regurgitate into his mouth? Something had to be done.

I met the random guy at a club (this was during the brief period when I tried doing things other than drink wine at home in my underpants), and it was one of those situations where it was obvious from the second we started talking to each other that we were going to make out.

We exchanged a few obligatory, drunken pleasantries, but as is the way with random hook-ups that take place on a seedy club bench at 2am, subtlety was not really on the cards. One second we were talking, the next we were lunging at each other's faces.

Now, I fully understand that kissing is a subjective thing. Not everybody likes the same technique and it generally takes a few minutes of awkward adjusting before you fall into an acceptable rhythm with someone. But that was not what happened here.

Nothing could have prepared me for the horror that took place in my mouth.

It was like a fat slug had rolled around in mucus and was now trying to mate with my tongue. And the poor little guy couldn't decide where he wanted to go. First he was trying to lick the back of my throat. Then he was trying to coat the entire circumference of my lips with saliva. Then he would somehow lodge himself between my teeth and the side of my cheek.

I had no idea that a tongue could be soft like an oyster and hard like a tampon at the same time. Just as I was trying to deal with my front teeth being attacked in some kind of frenzied stabbing motion, he would change the game on me completely and start trying to fill my mouth with the seemingly never-ending supply of fluid that was secreted from his sex-crazed mucus slug.

I was so thrown by what was happening, I think my brain actually shut down. It wasn't until he took his entire tongue, inserted it as far into my mouth as it would go and then just left it sitting there, perfectly still, that I had a second to think.

This guy needed help, and if I didn't offer it to him, he might subject some poor other girl to his oyster tampon. I couldn't let that happen.

I needed to provide an important public service. And even though I wanted to turn and run with every fibre of my being, I decided to stay. For women everywhere. I was a fucking hero.

I dislodged his mouth from mine and stretched my tongue out a few times.

‘Um . . . what's wrong?' he asked.

‘Yeah. We need to talk,' I said. ‘That was really, really bad.'

Keep in mind I was pretty inebriated/traumatised at this point, so I wasn't exactly swimming in tact. He seemed genuinely shocked.

‘What?!'

‘Yeah. Look. You seem really nice. And I can tell you're really trying. But I just can't let you walk away from this . . . situation thinking that was in any way enjoyable.'

‘What?!'

‘Have you ever had a girlfriend beyond a few dates?'

‘No.'

‘And can you think of a time where a girl has been willing to kiss you for more than a few minutes straight?'

It was starting to dawn on him.

‘Um . . . no.'

‘It's okay,' I said, feeling more and more like a saviour/Oprah as time went on. I put a hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes like the hero that I was: ‘I can help you.'

I then spent about forty-five minutes with this guy, taking things right back to basics. Literally – basics. I actually had to explain that noses are not a part of the face that need to be taken entirely into the mouth.

We also covered the basic functionality of the tongue, and explored the idea that just because you think yours can reach the back of someone else's throat, doesn't mean you have to prove it.

It was an informative and thorough lesson, and by the end of it he had the basic skills needed to kiss me without making me want to vomit in his mouth. Success.

We practised a few more times, and when I was confident that he was ready to be unleashed on the female population, I let him go. He no doubt remembers me as some kind of wise, selfless demigod. And rightly so.

But back when I was still seventeen, Josh was the first boy I'd ever received a perfect, Disney kiss from. Sure, we were both drunk and sitting in the dirt under the deck at some random kid's house party, but our mouths just connected seamlessly. It was the first time I ever felt that ‘Oh my god – nobody on earth could possibly understand that we are just two pieces of a perfect puzzle! Nobody but us has ever felt a love this strong!' kind of feeling. And after that kiss, we were pretty much inseparable.

We spent the next few weeks rubbing up against each other pretty aggressively. Soon the top came off, then the bra, and when we moved on to make-out sessions in just our knickers I knew
it was time. There was nowhere else to go but . . . in. And don't get me wrong – I really wanted to do it, but I was a little scared. Considering I still thought I only had one hole for wee and one hole for poop, I wasn't exactly well acquainted with whatever my situation was down there, let alone his weird-looking bits.

It wasn't particularly magical when we gave it the go-ahead. It was the middle of the day and we'd somehow transitioned from watching
Judge Judy
into some heavy, almost-naked petting.

‘Wanna do it?' I said. (Always the classy romantic.)

He acted sufficiently concerned about whether or not I was ready, although I'm certain that inwardly he was crying tears of joy for the balls that over the last few weeks had begun to turn blue in frustration.

So, having begun the beautiful journey of giving up my flower by asking if we should ‘do it', it was time to talk protection. I was on the pill already for my skin, but as sexual interns, we felt we needed more. I remembered seeing condoms in the upstairs bathroom, so we decided on that plan of action.

That's where things took a turn.

I think we both assumed that condoms were a one-size-fits-all situation. (Did I mention we were seventeen?) Anyway, after taking ten minutes to pry one out of its plastic-packet fortress, he went to put it on and . . . well . . . let's just say whoever had hidden these condoms in the upstairs bathroom was not as well endowed as the young man currently in my bed.

Josh had tried to put a tiny-penis condom on his massive penis, and it got stuck. Halfway down. It wasn't going any further and it wasn't coming back up. That thing was on tight, like rubber-band tight. But we both assumed it was meant to be tight and if we just . . . kept . . . forcing it . . . Bad move. The first love of my life now officially had a latex ring of torture stuck on his dick.

Panic took hold of the room. I suggested scissors. He suggested scissors would go nowhere near his penis. I felt helpless, watching him hop around the room naked with tears streaming down his face. My next mistake? Deciding this was the time to mention that my dad had once told me that cutting off blood flow like this was how farmers get lambs' tails to fall off.

He hurled himself onto the bed. I approached, not realising my naked body was only making the problem worse (you mean they can't control when it moves?). ‘Put your freaking top back on!' he yelled.

‘Just stay fucking calm!' I yelled back, struggling with my jumper.

We sat in silence for about thirty seconds, both staring down at his possibly-about-to-fall-off dick. Eventually, mercifully, as his boner went down, the killer condom loosened. As soon as it seemed safe, I reached down and yanked it off.

It was the most intimate I had ever been with a penis.

Clearly, we had experienced a false start, but that wasn't going to stop us from trying again. (Not that day, obviously, the
remainder of which I spent stroking his head while he lay in the foetal position.)

It actually took a few more tries – I think the initial scare had caused me to close up shop. And when it finally did happen, it was kind of by accident. We were in the midst of another make-out session when it just . . . slipped in. It hurt, definitely, but I think eventually, it gets to a point where the desire to make contact outweighs the fear of having a massive foreign entity jammed inside you, so you just do it.

I can't even remember the rest. The first thing I do remember is going to the toilet and laughing hysterically because my wee came out like a floodgate had been opened. And not yet understanding that a woman needs some mystique about her, I came running back into the bedroom screaming, ‘I peed funny! I peed funny!' A true class act.

After that, Josh and I were basically at it like rabbits on ecstasy. We tried everything and we tried it every which way. In the few months before university started, we pretty much just went to each other's houses and had sex. Sex, cuddles, movie, eat, sleep, repeat. It was heaven. He told me he loved me, and for the first time in my life, I started to have the disastrous thought that a boyfriend could fill the void that my lack of a proper family had left. Josh became my everything. He had a perfect family and lived in a perfect house with a four-wheel drive and a dog. His mum made spaghetti bolognaise and I played handball
on the street with his brothers. ‘Well, this is it,' I thought. ‘This is all I need. As long as I'm around Josh, I'll be fine.'

It was the first time I realised that I could use boyfriends like a drug. Why deal with that pesky depression slowly taking over your brain, when it disappears every time you snuggle into your boyfriend's shoulder? Why bother learning to feel strong for yourself, when he can be strong for you?

It was a dangerous attitude to have at seventeen, especially since my mental health was about to turn to fucking jelly. After a childhood of abandonment and three years at a school where my soul was ripped apart, I was dangerously close to a nervous breakdown. And instead of learning how to climb out of that hole for myself, I expected Josh to pull me out. At a time when I should have been learning to save myself, I appointed Josh my saviour. A really fucking unfair thing to do to a seventeen-year-old kid whose penis had recently been trapped in a tiny condom.

But he did it. No questions asked. And after a few months of dating, the nervous breakdown hit. I had been at university for about a month, studying psychology, living in a tiny room by myself on campus, and everything was catching up with me. My dad. My mum. The violence, the moving, the abuse, the neglect, the death. The fact that I had left Tayla alone. What I had gone through at boarding school. My brain began to completely malfunction, and I was terrified. I had no idea what was happening to me. Instead of going to class, I would sit in
my room alone all day and think about ways to kill myself. There were so many memories I couldn't get out of my head. I'd be taking a shower and all of a sudden I'd remember the blood from the night of the Olympics Opening Ceremony. I'd be watching TV and my brain would be taken over with the sounds of my grandpa screaming as my dad beat him. I'd go to spread Vegemite on my toast and see the flash of the knife my mum plunged through Rhiannon's and my bedroom door. I'd walk outside and hear people laughing, and become convinced that Wayne had tracked me down.

If I wasn't spending the day at Josh's house, I would lie in bed in my tiny campus room, staring at the ceiling, trying to get my brain to stop thinking horrific thoughts. That's the trouble with making a person your drug of choice – you can't control when you get a dose. Believe me, I tried. I started to become more and more demanding of his time. He began missing a lot of class, just so he could be with me. I would call him in hysterics, not being able to explain what was wrong except that I couldn't turn my brain off. I just wanted to turn my brain off. And Josh would come, as often as he could. He would take me to his house, where I would have dinner with his parents and seem normal and happy because I was all dosed up for the day. Then he'd drop me back at campus, the drug would wear off, and I'd be calling him within hours begging him to come back to me and make the thoughts stop.

Of course, he couldn't always be there. And that made me irrationally furious. I had spent a lifetime being abandoned, and now here was this boy, the boy I had chosen, the boy who said he loved me, and he couldn't be there for me every time I asked? Whenever he told me that he was sorry but he had class, or he had to spend time with his friends or family, I got the same feeling I used to get when my mum didn't come home.