Free Lessons in Letting Go by Corinne Grant

watch and stretch their legs, which unfortunately made them witnesses to what happened next. I had parked right beside the turtle, so any cars coming along the same side of the road would have to swerve into the centre to get around me. And in the centre of the road was my new little reptilian friend. Where car tyres were once safely passing either side of it, they were now going to go straight over the top. I realised this about a second before a car did exactly that. The turtle took a direct hit and skittered across the road like a gruesome tiddlywink. Now it was my turn to scream. And then I cried. I’d never killed anything before and now, in what was supposed to be my shining Harry Butler moment, I had murdered a turtle.
    Perhaps I overreacted. I think I mentioned that I should go to the police station and confess. We all got in the car and drove back to my parents’ house. Everyone was stone quiet until Wendy started chanting, ‘Corinne killed a turtle, Corinne killed a turtle . . .’ Thomas laughed louder than anyone else. I lost my mind and yelled at him, ‘Shove it up your arse, fuck boy!’ Everyone laughed even harder.
    Now, back in Corryong again and talking to him on the phone, I was missing Thomas terribly. I was missing everything terribly. Thomas, Jamie, Adam, my childhood, everything. I was spiralling down into a vortex of sentimentality and I had to end the phone call quickly before I told him that I wished he was with me.
    This was all just to do with packing, I told myself. Along with all the dust, I was stirring up a whole lot of emotions. I just needed to calm down and focus on what I was doing. The problem was, what I was doing was making things worse. Moments of extreme emotion were coming thick and fast. How was I going to throw any of this out? I was sifting through it, cherishing it, fondling it and reminiscing about it. Everything, down to the woollen beanie with the pompom ties that my sister wore when she was three, was bringing tears to my eyes. Wendy was picking stuff up, shoving it in bags and throwing it out. She was making huffing sounds every time she looked in my dewy-eyed direction. No wonder. I was sitting in a pile of Fido Dido T-shirts and Cherry Lane singlets remembering my first ever Blue Light Disco and softly singing the lyrics to ‘Maniac’.
    The only things I had managed to turf were two skivvies, one maroon and the other bottle-green, and even those I photographed before discarding. And when Wendy wasn’t looking, I carefully rolled up her Bros poster, stuck it in a cylinder and secreted it away in the boot of my car.
    When we were kids, Wendy’s and my tastes were worlds apart and neither of us approved of the other. Wendy preferred the crass commerciality of a Mickey Mouse T-shirt or a pair of Garfield shorts. I, being older and wiser, shunned her fashion-enslaved sensibilities and instead preferred to wear whatever took my fancy. Consequently, I often wanted to wear pink trousers and team them with things with pictures of spaceships on them. Sure, Wendy may have looked stylish and hip and up to the minute, but I was comfortable and that was what mattered.
    I did once accidentally buy something fashionable, a ‘Choose Life’ T-shirt. Of course I was completely unaware that it had anything to do with Wham!, I just liked the pink writing on the front. (I was holding it again now, smoothing out the wrinkles and remembering the denim pedal pushers that had completed the ensemble.) But even when I was wearing that T-shirt Wendy was still far ahead of me, with a red crop-top and white plastic hoop-earrings that looked like the whites of a sliced boiled egg with the yolk popped out. She was a little Anglo-Saxon, pre-adolescent version of Grace Jones. She was the Skipper to my Barbie. She was the one who looked like fun.
    I snuck out to the shed where Wendy had made her pile to go to charity and reclaimed the red crop-top. Perhaps she was able to let it go, but I couldn’t.