Short Stories 2nd Place: Opposite Day by Alexandra O’Sullivan

The teachers look like penguins, huddled together, all dressed in black. They’re glancing around like they don’t know what to do, like they’re waiting for instructions. But, who’s gonna to tell ‘em? Not us students that are here, we don’t tell them what to do, it’s the other way around. Least it is, normally.

Miss Brown’s face is kinda washed out and droopy. She’s pressed close to Miss Garrett with the collar of her big coat sticking up against her neck, like a dog with its ear flipped inside out. It’s the first time I’ve seen Miss Brown looking anything less than schmick. But nothing is usual, today.

They’re all standing up the back of the room, while we have seats at the front. Dad hovers behind my shoulder, the bulk of his body herding me towards the row where Jez, Sienna and Lib are already sitting with their parents. I look at the empty spot beside Lib. That’s where I have to sit, beside my ex-girlfriend. My ex-girlfriend who I dated for one day and never even kissed, but who is still my only ex-girlfriend. The seat is cold through the thin material of my suit pants. Lib’s mum turns to look at me, her face twitching.

“Oh Frankie,” she says.

Her hand waves in the air, like it’s deciding what to do, then she opts for reaching over Lib to give me a quick pat on the knee. I nod, cos I don’t know what to say. I can still feel the place where her hand made contact. There’s no one in front of us, unless you count him in the coffin. And, on the table covered in flowers, his photo staring at me creepily.

I hear a teacher coughing up the back, then trying to smother it.

Everything feels flipped around, like when me and Roman used to play Opposite Day. He came up with that game in year seven, and the thing is, he’d never tell me when we were playing it, he’d just start saying the opposite of what he meant. It took me ages, the first time, to work out what the hell he was doing.

“English is my favourite subject,” he’d said in a completely normal voice.

I’d looked at his page where he’d copied the question from the board: How does Emily Dickinson use metaphor to express hope? He’d crossed out the second part of her surname and then drawn a cock and balls underneath it, and he was carefully colouring in the drops of jizz shooting out all over his page.

I laughed.

“Nice cock.”

“It’s a vag, mate, what’s wrong with you? Didn’t your mum teach you about bees and the birds?”

“No, your mum did.”

I was pleased with my clap back, but only for a second.

“Why you learning about sex from my dad, homo?”

“I said your mum.”

“He obviously taught you wrong, mate. You don’t know what’s what.’

I still didn’t know why he was talking obvious cap. Annoyed, I started trying to draw a vag on my page. I thought it would be easy to draw but somehow, I got stuck with the bits at the bottom and then panicked about whether I should add hair or not. This must be why you only ever see cocks drawn everywhere. They’re easy.

“What’s that?” Roman said.

“This is a vag.”

 “Frankie’s drawn a cock, Miss! It’s a bit inappropriate don’t you think?”

Miss Brown shot us a look and put her finger to her lips.

I scrunched up my picture and launched it towards the bin, but it veered left, and hit Sienna who was sitting a couple seats over.

“Oi!”

Lib, sitting next to her, uncrunched the paper, smoothing it out on the desk.  

“The fuck is this?”

Sienna whispered something in her ear, and they fell into hysterical laughter.

“Dream on, mate!” Lib shouted across the room.

Miss Brown started clapping her hands, trying to get out attention.

We had to write our own version of the hope poem, using something positive like love or happiness, and Roman wrote:

Depresion is a bric that drowns u in a lake.

You had to admire his commitment to Opposite Day.

 

A woman has walked to the front. She’s old, like forties, and she’s wearing an ugly black pantsuit that is too tight around her thighs. Roman would be commenting on that, for sure. It feels like he is, actually, the way his blue eyes are slanted towards her, like he’s saying, ‘what a fat bitch.’

Pantsuit Lady goes up to the speaker at the side and fiddles with it. Then she starts tapping on her phone and ‘The Nosebleed Section’ by Hilltop Hoods comes on, loud, until she turns it down a bit. She’s trying to stay professional, like I totally respect this choice of song, she even does this nerdy little head bob thing, but I can tell that she hates it.

But I’m loving it. I’m remembering how Roman knew all the lyrics, and used to rap them relentlessly, and even made all the weird kccchnngg kcchhnng noises somehow with his mouth, like, perfectly in time and everything. It’s making me feel all wobbly, thinking about it, and the music is not helping at all with me trying not to cry. I look across the aisle to where his family are sitting in the front row opposite, and they’re all just crying and not caring who sees. His mum is absolutely sobbing, bent over and clutching her stomach, her hair falling everywhere. His grandma and grandpa are a bit more like, dignified, sitting all straight and patting their faces with hankies. His dad isn’t there, obviously, but I wonder if he’s crying too, sitting in his jail cell.

That does it. I’m gone. I’m wiping the tears with the sleeves of my suit jacket, but they have no soakage at all, they just make my cheeks feel sore. My nose is running, too. Dad shuffles in his seat and then pats me on the shoulder, gently, like he might pat one of his horses before a race. Pantsuit Lady comes up to me with a box of tissues. She smiles as I grab a bunch and I want to tell her to fuck off, but I look past her instead, to the photo. The way his eyes seem to be slanted at me now is like he’s saying, ‘stop being such a fucking wuss.’

Lib’s hand finds mine. Roman keeps staring at me. He never did like Lib, which is probably why we broke up last term. Even though we’d only gone out for a day, after we broke up Roman kept going on about her ‘stupid fake nails,’ as if she’d painted them just to piss him off. I mean, she did piss him off, for real, when she clapped back at him for dissing her on the basketball courts, then later, in the canteen line, me and Roman had a proper punch on after he put Lib in a headlock. It was by accident, no cap, I know for sure he’d thought it was me, not her, who slapped him on the back for pushing in. But Roman did stuff like that, pushing in wherever he wanted. I’d mostly learnt to let it go. It seems when you have a girlfriend, though, you can’t just let shit like that go.

As the song fades out Pantsuit Lady goes and stands behind the lectern thing. She clears her throat.

“Roman’s mum requested that song to introduce this celebration of his life.”

Lib’s hand squeezes mine.

“It was a song that Roman loved,” she continues. “So, it’s important that we are able now to listen, together, as people who loved Roman.”

What the fuck is Pantsuit Lady talking about? She keeps going, saying things like ‘seeing the light in the darkness’ and ‘after the storm comes the rainbow’ and that ‘it may not seem like it now but, the sun will come out again.’ All the while I’m looking at his photo and he’s eyes are slanted back at her like he’s going ‘that’s cap.’

Roman hated people getting ‘soppy.’ When we had to watch this movie in English about this boy whose dad died in 9/11, Roman laughed through all the sad bits, until finally Miss Brown sent him out. I was glad when he was gone, cos it was the bits he was laughing at that were actually making me feel wobbly. When I caught up with him, at lunch, he was still being a dick about it, saying how the boy needed to ‘just get over it,’ because ‘he’d be fuckin’ happy if his dad died.’

Sometimes it was hard to tell when he was playing Opposite Day.

I can see Roman’s mum out the corner of my eye and she’s still crying, but in a kinda frozen way, just water running down her cheek. It’s gone a sort of ugly yellowy colour, her cheek, where she must have copped a whack when it happened. Gosh, I hope she doesn’t speak, I don’t want to hear any details about what happened from her. Dad had told me some kids were gonna speak, and he asked me if I wanted to, cos I was Roman’s best friend, but the thought of speaking made me feel cold all over. I mean, what the hell would I say? What the hell can anyone say?

Lib lets go of my hand. She stands up, the frilly thing at the bottom of her black dress swishing against the edge of the seat. Then Jez stands up. Then Sienna. Now they’re going up to Pantsuit Lady who is waving them towards her and saying, “Now we’re going to hear from some of Roman’s friends.” I feel like a dick, the only one just sitting there. Lib steps forward first and I’m thinking, Roman fucking hated you. She goes to the lectern and picks up the mic. Her nails are bright pink, like lollies.

“Me and Roman didn’t always get on,” she says, her voice shaking. “But he was Frankie’s best friend, and I know he meant something to Frankie and that’s what sucks right now, thinking about the people who loved him, how they’ve lost him, and like, he was pretty funny sometimes.”

She puts the mic down and turns away, her blonde ponytail shining against the black material. Jez moves forward.

“Miss ya, mate,” his voice sounds too loud through the speaker, which makes a rustling sound as he puts the mic back down. He goes to stand awkwardly between the girls, then throws a ‘fuck you’ look my way, pulling at his suit jacket.  

Sienna steps up. She’s wearing a big-arse, black jumper over skinny black jeans. Her brown hair is out over her shoulders. Her eyes look heavy. She’s holding a book with different coloured butterflies all over the cover. She starts reading.

“Roman, I wish I could change what happened to you. I sometimes feel like I can, if I just think about it enough. I feel like if I think about all the alternative versions of how this could have gone, then maybe one of them will come true somehow. I think about these alternative versions a lot. I think about how it might have been if you’d told me more about your life, then I could have done something to help you. But you were always just mucking around, making jokes, it was hard for people to take you seriously… Roman, I would have taken you seriously. I did take you seriously, actually. I noticed you. It was hard not to notice you.”

 She looks quickly at the photo.

“With your golden hair and your blue eyes… you looked like an Angel, even though I know you didn’t always act like one.”

She pauses and stares at me. I feel all wobbly again. I thought not speaking would be okay. But it’s the opposite of okay, because right now I’d rather be up there standing behind Sienna, instead of here in the front row, eyeballing her in the most awkward way. She goes on and on, about all these, like, versions of what could have happened, like, if things were different. If Roman hadn’t kept things hidden. If someone, like a teacher, had stepped in. If he had a different dad.

If I had known what to do the night it happened.

Me and Roman were talking on the phone, the night it happened. Roman was joking again about Miss Garrett and Mr Rogers screwing each other and I was laughing. It felt good to be mucking around with him, cos things had been a bit weird with us since we had a punch on.

Then there was this loud noise, like a roar, and Roman wasn’t talking anymore.

Sienna closes the book with a loud sigh and lifts her hand to fiddle with whatever it is that is hanging off her necklace. Pantsuit Lady gently herds the three of them back to their seats and as Sienna walks past me, I can see she’s still fiddling it, a silver butterfly. As she twists it in her hands, the wings kinda catch the light.

There’s a different song playing now. It’s playing over the photo montage that’s on the screen at the front. The song is something about heaven crying and wondering if it’s gonna be the same, and the pics are baby Roman smiling and a toddler Roman eating an ice cream and a teenage Roman doing a bomb in his pool. The song’s still going on about meeting in heaven and I’m thinking that’s not where he is and also that’s not where any of us are going, either as I look at Roman with his mum, Roman giving the finger, then a peace sign, and then there’s me and him at the dirtbike track covered in mud and he’s got me in a headlock.

There are no pictures of his dad. It was his dad I heard, when Roman stopped talking that night. I know it was his dad, now, but when I heard it over the phone that night it was like some animal noise, like some wild animal had busted into Roman’s room and made him drop the phone. I kept listening, even though all I could hear after that was the rain pelting down, hammering on the roof of Roman’s house.

Pantsuit Lady is waving at me to do my bit now. The photo montage has finished. Lib, Jez and Sienna are already standing, and I stand up too. Even though my legs don’t want to, I make them walk with the others to the coffin. Pantsuit Lady directs us, me and Jez on one side, Lib and Sienna on the other. We grab a handle each. We start to roll it and it’s just a bit heavier than I thought it would be.

The song is still going, wondering if Roman will know us in heaven. I’m thinking that if things were opposite, if Roman was pushing me, he’d be doing it different. He’d jump on and ride it, or shove it into the crowd, or shoot it like a toboggan down the aisle. I almost start to laugh, thinking about what Roman would do. But I pull it together, cos we’re going past the teachers now. There’s Miss Brown, her jacket collar still flipped up, her red eyes staring at me. Miss Garrett is watching me too, but with half-closed eyes, and standing next to her is Mr Rogers, and his hand is out of sight, but I can see from her swaying that he’s rubbing her back. And she’s letting him with her half-closed eyes. Letting the married Mr Rogers. Rub her back. I grip the handle and keep pushing. I’m thinking about how Roman must have been right about them two fucking around like he was telling me on the phone that night. I’m thinking about how he was laughing as he told me, ‘Mr Rogers started rogering her,’ which was the last thing I heard him say before his dad …

At the graveside it buckets down. The teachers are gone. It’s only family and close friends, standing there getting fuckin’ drenched. It pounds on the heads of his mum and grandparents. It smashes down on the gravestones all around us. It hammers on the coffin as it’s being lowered into the ground. I’m glad it’s so loud, because I’m thinking that it’s like heaven really is crying. Or like Roman’s pissing on us all for being here. Or maybe he’s just taking the piss, like he always did, like he doesn’t know that the time for playing games is over.

 And for some reason that makes me piss myself laughing.