Free The Accident by Kate Hendrick Page A

eyes. ‘It’s been a horrible, crazy month, Will. Go to sleep, we’ll talk about it in the morning.’

     
    Aunty Jen went back to her flat mid-May. I half expected everything to go pear-shaped within minutes without her around, but somehow we all just carried on. Lauren took over as boss, making sure we did our chores if Mum hadn’t swept through and done them first.
    I worked through the stack of Mum’s classics. In the playground or on a sporting field I always felt out of place and out of my depth, but when I read I felt like I had found a second home, a place without contemptuous laughter or disappointed sighing. War and Peace was a challenge, but even so I was inspired. My own suburban primary school life was mundane against the grandeur and drama of times and places steeped in bloody history.
    I wrote, too. I couldn’t help it. Snatches of conversations would just sneak their way into my head and go round and round until I released them to paper. I never got beyond the first chapter, never really built up any of my charac ters. It was all terribly clichéd, full of tragic heroes, vivid descriptions of places I’d never actually been, and unbe lievable dialogue. Yet, despite myself, the more I read, the more compelled I felt to write. I couldn’t help myself. In year seven I spent three weeks labouring over a short story for English. My teacher entered the story into a competition for me and I won.
    ‘Good,’ was Mum’s crisp response when I showed her the award, and she plied me with more books. ‘You need to give Shakespeare a proper go. I’ll see if I can hunt up some T.S. Eliot as well.’
    It was always about books. She sometimes used to quote Kierkegaard at me. ‘The whole age can be divided into those who write and those who do not.’
    I used to wonder. Did she see it that way—a few of us against the world? She had withdrawn from the world, deliberately, almost as a statement that they couldn’t understand her. I felt a sense of inevitable despair, knowing that I understood and shared that unquenchable need to write, but hating the thought of becoming the thing that I had loathed my whole life.
    Mum stands abruptly. ‘Back to work.’
    Something inside me cries out for her to stop, to wait, to listen, but I don’t know what I would say to her. For ten years I’ve been trying to find words to tell her to stop burning herself out for a worthless cause, that she’s got to make a choice to give up one or the other because she can’t have both, and it’s nearly too late.
    I do the hour-long loop, along Galbraith Gorge, then wind my way home again. I’m nearly done when I see a familiar lean figure approaching from the end of the street. Lauren. Headphones in her ears and eyes on the ground as she runs, determination on her face like she’s going to push herself harder and harder even if it kills her. Across the other side of the road, she doesn’t look up once. We pass each other without her noticing.
    Maybe it’s already too late.

before
after
later
     
    Monday after recess we get our marks back on our ancient history essay. I get 45. Percent. Even the Othello debacle a couple of weeks back didn’t end up that bad.
    Mr Hensley is new to the school. I thought he seemed easy enough to get onside. Looks like I was wrong.
    I go up to him at his desk and demand to know what was wrong with it. He doesn’t mince words.
    ‘It was lazy. You didn’t use anywhere near enough sources, and only cited half of them, and it was too short.’
    Yeah, it was. But that’s the way I’ve always done history essays. Always got away with it. As long as it sounds impressive, most teachers can’t tell the difference. The fact he’s right doesn’t make it any less irritating.

     
    Still stewing over the essay mark at lunch time. Izzy shrugs and keeps flipping through her magazine. ‘What does it matter?’
    ‘It matters.’ It’s hardly surprising she doesn’t understand but it still shits me.
    She