But that was the past. Now she couldn’t ask. In those days she didn’t suspect Ash of having other lists: All the things I hate about Jo: fat, needy, boring…
In the three months since they returned to school for their final semester, this was only the second time Ash had visited on a weekend, and she was on the phone with Kevin. They’d only been out three times: for Jo’s birthday, to go to a new Latin American bar Laura’s father had a share in, and to Pink’s ‘Funhouse Tour’ concert, which they’d bought tickets for months in advance. Ash said she was busy studying, that if she didn’t do well enough she wouldn’t get into law, and then what would she do? But most Friday and Saturday nights she went out with Kevin. At school on Mondays, Ash avoided talking about her weekends.
Were they still friends? Still best friends? They only seemed to talk about school and homework. Their conversations were superficial, as if they were just classmates who happened to be caught behind each other in the canteen queue.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ Grandpa Tom said when Jo or Mandy asked too many questions. She’d only been four years old when he got sick. He lost so much weight all his bones were visible; when she hugged him he was all sharp edges. It took him longer to get out of bed, and no matter what her mother cooked, he couldn’t finish a full meal. Finally, Mandy insisted on taking him to the doctor. The diagnosis was cancer. He’d ignored several skin moles on his back for years, so by the time they did the tests, the cancer was at stage four and terminal. Tom said it pissed him off, them knowing. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie, why can’t women do that?’ But they were right, weren’t they, to want to know?
Jo’s friendship with Ash was a sore she picked and scratched. A journal was personal, full of private thoughts. You had to be invited in; reading another person’s journal was like breaking into their house while they were away, like rifling through their drawers, like peeking in through their windows while they were having dinner with their family. During all those years, Ash’s journals often within reach, she’d never considered reading them. It was invasive. It was voyeuristic. It was a kind of theft, and once done there’d be no going back.
Jo ran her hand across the smooth red cover. Ash was settling in for a long conversation with Kevin. She was talking and laughing, twisting strands of her long hair around her finger. As Jo slipped the band off and the notebook opened, sunlight and shade danced across the back deck, making patterns over Ash. Stealing glances at Ash, she flipped the pages of the journal.
May 11. Ash wrote in a print-like script, the lines surprisingly straight and even, like runs on a ladder. It wasn’t her usual scribble, the one she used for taking notes in class, for leaving notes in Jo’s locker, for leaving messages for her mother on the kitchen table. There was a lengthy description of Kevin’s face: wide, open, cute; of his voice: sexy and deep; of the way he held her hand, fingers intertwined; of their long discussions; of how she could be herself with him. I can be myself with Kevin. Who was Ash when she was with Jo?
Jo flipped the page over. May 12. A rant about Ash’s mother took up several pages — her voice and her rules and the way she told Ash off for spending money on clothes but went out shopping most weekends and bought clothes for herself, and how she forced Ash to do housework even though Ash was overwhelmed with study, and how she monopolised Kevin when he came over… My mother flirts with Kevin, it’s disgusting.
There were several paragraphs about Ash’s grandmother and how pale and sick she was looking, and how it made Ash sad to think she might die. Here the pen was heavier on the page, as if Ash had pressed down with all her weight, with rage. Jo flipped back towards May and April. Places I want to live. The ultimate playlist. Jo recognised all the songs on this list as Ash’s favourites. No surprises. The secret playlist. There were no surprises on that list either. Everyone had songs that they were embarrassed to admit they liked; Ash’s included a couple of ABBA and Milli Vanilli classics and even Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’, which they had played in their early teens during sleepovers at Ash’s place to annoy Ash’s mother. A condensed biography of human-rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson. The words to Eminem’s ‘Crack a Bottle’. A song so far away from Ash’s life, from anything she’d experienced, that Ash’s attraction to it seemed voyeuristic, like those people who gather around accidents or are drawn to reading about disasters.
At the sound of footsteps on the deck, Jo shut the notebook and put it back on top of the stack of other books.
For the rest of that afternoon, Jo and Ash worked on their essays. What is the nature of reality? They discussed Jed’s obsession with Joe, whether Clarissa believed him, whether the ‘hero’ John Logan, who died trying to rescue the boy, could be admired as a hero if he were betraying his wife by having an affair. All the time Jo was thinking, what about you, Ash? What about us? Are we still best friends?
There’d been no mention of Jo in the journal, not once. Not once in all the entries she read. Jo didn’t keep a journal, but if she did, Ash would’ve been there, on every page. When she planned moving out of home, it was with Ash. When she imagined travelling, going to Europe, to Paris and London, to Barcelona, it was with Ash. When she thought about what university to go to, she thought about where Ash would go. In Jo’s dreams of a big wedding and a white dress, in which she was floating down the aisle towards the love of her life — a man she hadn’t met and couldn’t evoke — Ash was there. Ash was the maid of honour, in a long lilac dress, flowers threaded through her hair. Was it possible to go from being central to Ash’s world to so much on the periphery that she was invisible? Were they in the process of breaking up?
The first person Jo broke up with was Max, her boyfriend in Year 9. At the beginning of their four-month relationship he was cute and funny, but by the end she hated everything about him, and the sight of him waving at her across the school ground sent her into a frenzy, causing her to escape into the girls’ toilets. One afternoon, in her desperation to hide from him, she tripped over a discarded cricket bat and broke her arm. When she told Mandy that she didn’t like him anymore, her mother insisted she break up with him. Mandy dialled the phone number for her and sat next to Jo on the bed as Jo said, I’m breaking up with you. I don’t want to be your girlfriend. They never spoke again. The second person was Craig, who she met at the café one lunchtime. They dated for a few months, and had sex three times. She was determined to lose her virginity. She was the last of her group — Laura, Mani, and Ash had all done it. It was almost as disappointing as she’d expected it to be. But not as bad. When she saw Craig around Yarraville, they waved and smiled but didn’t stop to talk.