Being Kalli(13)
“Want a bedtime story, Kallisto?”
Who calls me Kallisto? What’s wrong with him?
“I’m ten,” I say, thinking, no one should see my body yet. Never. It’s so embarrassing even holding hands with a boy.
“Never too old for a bedtime story.”
Mum hasn’t been good lately. All grumpy, and then lovey, and then jumping off the couch to cheer on a funny show on TV. She’s picked a boyfriend just as crazy.
While he reads, he seems to get closer to where my head is, but it’s too dark to really tell. I couldn’t smell him before but now a musky odour is in every breath I take, and I want to puke.
As I always do, I turn my head right over until I can see my violin.
I look.
I hum my latest song I have to practice for class.
I imagine the shiny wood, so shiny that I can see the flecks in my eyes in my reflection.
The shape under my fingers when I trace all around the edges, is smooth.
As he always does, he leans down and kisses my lips goodbye, but today he puts his hand on my shoulder, except that slips and he touches one of my nipples.
He must have slipped.
6
On Monday I wake up and remember exactly the undergrad uni student I am. I snooze eight times then run out the door with the first leggings, boots and sweater I can find.
Everyone said the first year is like a recap of high school and today, I agree. Scout and I walk in to our Psych lecture and the topic is part one of three lectures on disorders. Today: mood, anxiety and psychotic disorders.
With Mum, I should be an expert.
We learn that some disorders have higher diagnosis rates because of social factors, others substance abuse. Then there are genetics.
This I fear the most.
Mum told me my grandma was a depressed alcoholic. She had a lovely set of parents, apparently, and a nice brother who always looked after her. No one knew why she was addicted to being in a constant state of stupor. She’d start to drink at noon every day and not stop until she’d passed out at night. My grandfather? He is a lovely man from what I remember and have been told, who deserved better than what his wife was like. In her late forties, she contracted liver cancer, and died at fifty.
Mum must have sucked all her happiness because she’s a happy freak. She finds fun in anything, which is what’s concerning. She’ll stop watching Titanic as soon as Rose and Jack hop out of that sweaty coach. She’ll make cupcakes and bury random objects in there just to see what happens when they come out of the oven—this always garners a laughing fit when she scoops out the cupcake contents.
People just aren’t that happy, yet she claims she is, which is like saying the sun will never set.
The lecture reels me in every now and then. They mention three types of bipolar I never knew existed. I daze in and out.
Scout is wordless today. She didn’t get much sleep on Saturday night, and sleep catches up with you two days after. Dreary eyed, she stares at the projection screen, notes down stuff occasionally, and goes back to her I’m-looking-without-seeing gaze.
Birthed by a mum with mental issues, and descended from a grandma who died from her fucked up habits, where does that leave me?
By the end of class I’m left with a new thought about Mum. I’m not the type to get all dramatic and diagnose her from one lousy lecture, but maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know why it took a friggin’ psych class to make me think it, but maybe, there’s the tiniest possibility Mum does what she does with her irresponsible mothering, her crazy antics, the drugs and the grog because she needs attention. Maybe underneath she’s helpless and weak.
Maybe everyone thinks they know her: the Party Girl; the Entertainer; the Crap Mum. Maybe underneath she hasn’t had the opportunity to ’fess up and admit she’s sinking in the act.
Then again, that’s probably me. There’s always the high chance she is mindless Mary Jane, and I’m just hoping that she’ll stop being so reckless.
As class closes up, Scout chats, the general How are you? and That was soo boring stuff, and we head out. We have different classes in different rooms, so we part ways and I head to see Nate.
• • •
Our lecture finished early and Nate’s class must be finishing late since I’ve been waiting forever. So, I find a bench and scoop my legs up into my arms, my feet dangling over the edge. I sit with my chin propped on my knees and count the rocks in the pebble-mix path under me.
I’ve always counted stuff. When I saw a path I used to count the lines in it and debate which cracks were big enough to be included. At times, I had to slow my pace to keep up with my deliberations. Sometimes it made it hard to listen out for my friends talking to me.