Yellow (22 page)

His lips are as soft as they look.

Everything stops.

Time might not have ever started ticking again, the whole world could have stayed frozen, like it was nothing but painted scenery on a backdrop, except Willow's climbed back up the dune and she clears her throat.

‘Don't let me interrupt you two adorable face mashers . . .'

We pull apart, embarrassed, but the moment doesn't shatter. It just sort of flattens, then folds into itself, becoming dense and small and beautiful like origami, and I take that folded moment and I put it in my pocket, next to the periwinkle shell, and I know that I'll keep that folded moment next to me for always. Willow plonks herself down at the other side of me, happy as a bird.

‘Well that only took, what? A couple of years?' she chirps. ‘I swear the unresolved sexual tension between Ross and Rachel on
Friends
had nothing on you two.'

Noah looks over at me, and a small smile pulls at the edge of his mouth.

‘I would have said more like Superman and Lois Lane.'

Willow rolls her eyes and throws a tiny shell at his head.

‘Well, one of us has to pretend this isn't awkward, so I guess it's up to me, hey kids? On a totally unrelated note, K, I almost forgot. I swiped this from the principalsaurus's waiting room. It's vintage 1982.'

She digs through her bag and hands me an old school magazine. I thumb through it and I come to a picture of my mum in year twelve. She's holding a certificate, her hair fluffed and feathered and ridiculously big on such a tiny girl. Lark quit school in year ten but he's in the photo, too, in just his boardies, like he's dropped past to congratulate her on his way back from a surf. He photo bombs the picture and he's sticking out his tongue and making bunny ears with his fingers above her head. Despite their goofiness you can tell that the rest of the year wishes that they were them. They'd had that
something
. I wish I'd inherited it, whatever it is, but I guess it's one of those things that skips a generation.

‘I didn't know Lark used to have a mullet,' grins Noah. Willow checks out the photo.

‘Mullet or no mullet, I think I have a crush on the 1982 version of your dad, K, and I don't know how to feel about that.'

I ignore them and stare at my mum. At eighteen her eyes aren't so fearless as they were when she was fourteen, but the whole world was still there, dangling in front of her delicate nose.

‘She was voted
most likely to succeed
,' I say, faintly. ‘That was just before she fell pregnant with me, before she threw her future away.'

Willow looks hard at me.

‘Read her bio, Kirra. When it asks about her hobbies and interests, she says
Lark
. Seriously. Gross. When it asks about where she'll be in five years time, she says
with Lark
.'

She pretends to puke. I read it for myself, and after Willow's finished with fake puking she wraps one arm around me and pulls her hair behind her ears so I can see into both her eyes. She takes the magazine from me and places it on the sand, and I watch as the breeze tosses the pages back and forth so that all the kids from long ago look like they're dancing.

‘Here are my thoughts. It's easy for you and me, little one. We're nothing here, so there's nothing here to miss, but it'd be so much harder to find yourself suddenly a nobody in a big world when you're used to always being a somebody, like your mum was, or how Freckles here is. Sorry Freckles, no offence. But it would be so much easier to just stay.' Then she holds up an imaginary champagne glass and pretends to cheers me.

‘Here's to starting so low that you have nowhere to go but up.'

I grin and pretend to cheers her back.

‘Here's to starting so low that you have nowhere to go but up.'

‘Chink chink.'

I lean over to grab the school magazine from where it's flapp­ing by itself and I shove it into my bag while Willow turns to Noah.

‘So what are you going to do when you're older, Willis? Wait, don't tell me. Like every other guy in this town you want to be a pro surfer?'

Noah's staring out at the horizon and his forehead is furrowed and as rippled as the ocean and all I can think of is how his shoulder feels so warm and good against my own right now.

‘Maybe,' he says, as he watches the sea froth and tumble. ‘But, you know, there's a big world out there that I don't know anything about. A world that you never learn about in geography. Not really. I'm gonna see what's out there, and maybe there's a job for me that I don't know anything about and I won't know about it until I go and find it.'

He points out to the horizon. It's so many shades of blue. Blue on blue on blue. The only other colour is the splash of white that the occasional seagull silhouette daubs onto the sky.

‘See that horizon out there? It's infinite. That's what our future is, you know? It's infinite. And I'm racing towards it!'

He picks up his piece of cardboard and throws himself against the dune's edge.

Willow turns back to me.

‘How is your mum going?'

I pick and tear at my nails.

‘My mum's not so mad anymore,' I tell her, finally, and she squeezes my hand. Noah's reached the bottom and we get up to walk over to the dune edge and look down at him, so tiny down there. So tiny that if I closed one eye and pointed he could dis­appear beneath my fingertip.

And yet up close, he is everything.

He waves up to us.

‘Here's to infinite horizons!' Willow yells back to him as she grabs my hand.

‘Here's to infinite horizons!' I scream out towards the edge of the earth.

Willow and I grab our pieces of cardboard and we run to the edge, and we aren't afraid. We hurtle down the slope and we fly.

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First published by Penguin Australia Pty Ltd, 2016.

Text copyright © Megan Jacobson, 2016.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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Cover illustration by Marina Messiha and fox_industry

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ISBN: 978-1-76014-144-8