Chapter Two
Chapter Two
January 2017
‘’I’m telling you, this is a dumb idea.’’
Olivia Colton drove her old pick-up truck with one hand while she felt along the passenger side floor, trying to locate the pack of cigarettes she swore she’d tossed down there earlier. The truck moaned, requesting a gear change, and Olivia reluctantly moved her free hand back to the gearstick. Meanwhile, her passenger Rosie Dodd found the cigarettes and slipped them into her handbag.
‘’Your faith in me is overwhelming.’’ She said, zipping her handbag back up. ‘’You can’t tell me it’s a dumb idea before I’ve even tried.’’
‘’Actually, I can, because once you try, it’s no longer a dumb idea, it’s a dumb action.’’ Oliva corrected. ‘’And I saw that. Give me my smokes back.’’
‘’Nope. You’re quitting the cancer sticks, one way or another. If that means I have to physically take them off you every time I find them, so be it.’’
‘’Yes, mum.’’ Olivia flashed a mocking grin, exposing two rows of teeth painted in yellow stains. Olivia was still young but taking up smoking at the tender age of twelve had given her a ghastly smile beyond her years.
For a moment, the two girls were quiet. All that could be heard was crackling of the dying radio attempting to play a song and the whirs and groans of the old truck. Olivia had bought the vehicle for $800 from a strange looking man on Facebook with a beard so thick Rosie could hardly make out his face in his profile picture, and it had predictably turned out to be about as mechanically sound as an eleven-year-old’s homemade go-kart. It never bothered Olivia, though. She insisted the piece of junk had ‘’character’’.
‘’See, that’s the difference between you and me.’’ Olivia said after a minute. ’’Take the smoking, for example. I know I’m being stupid. I know my lungs are gonna look like a tar road by the time I’m sixty. I might make some dumb decisions, but I make them knowing very well that they’re dumb and being prepared for the consequences. You? You try to trick yourself into believing you’re somehow doing the right thing. Your black-tar lungs are gonna come out of nowhere and slap you in the face.’’
‘’I’m gonna get black-tar lungs because I got a job at a café?’’ Try as she might, Rosie could never quite keep up with her best friend’s quirky analogies.
‘’It’s a metaphor, Rosie. I mean, when this all goes to shit, you’re not gonna be ready for it.’’
‘’Well, that’s what I’ve got you for. You’ll be perfectly ready for this to blow up and you can tell me what I do next.’’ She offered. Olivia murmured something that sounded like an agreement and the topic was dropped.
Once upon a time, Rosie might have been offended by her best friend’s lack of support. If the roles were reversed, Rosie would never have been so brash and cold towards any decision Olivia made that seemed to be a positive move forward, like getting a job. But over the years since they’d ended up together, Rosie had come to realise just how different she and Olivia were, and how differently their minds worked. Olivia didn’t mean anything by her blunt comments – her brutal honesty was really just her way of trying to protect the people she loved. There were many bizarre things about Rosie’s friendship with Olivia, and one of them was that not only had she learned not to be offended by comments like these, but she’d actually gotten to the point where they kind of touched her.
Amongst all the odd elements of their friendship, the strangest thing of all was that they’d become friends in the first place. They were worlds away when they first met four years ago, in their middle school administration office during the ninth grade. Rosie had been sent up to see the nurse after an episode and Olivia had been sent up to see the principal after his car had been found vandalised and she’d been dobbed in by her accomplices. The girls had sat side by side in the plastic chairs in the dead silence of the waiting room, putting off conversation until not talking became more awkward than talking. With a heart still racing from her terrifying episode, Rosie was not in the mood for small-talk, especially not with Olivia Colton, whom at that point she only knew as the girl who was always in trouble and had habit of turning up to school drunk.
Everyone who’d known the girls before they became best friends could hardly believe it. People still questioned it to this day. How did the shy, quiet, ‘’weird’’ girl who everyone knew had some kind of ‘’mental issues’’ end up with the school’s resident badass? Even Rosie and Olivia themselves couldn’t really pinpoint how it’d happened. Only that after that day of chatting in the office, they’d both gained one more friendly face around school. That progressed to having someone to sit next to in the classes neither of them had any other friends in. Then they had someone they could actually talk to during breaktimes, instead of their respective friend groups that probably wouldn’t even notice if they disappeared from the face of the Earth and were never seen again. As mind-boggling as everyone else found it, Olivia and Rosie understood each other. They understood the way they were both misunderstood by everyone else.
‘’People think I’m a retard without social skills.’’ Rosie told Olivia during one of the first lunchtimes they’d spent together. ‘’I heard once that people think I’m autistic. I didn’t deny it. I don’t know if it’d be better or worse to let them think I have autism rather than tell them I have schizophrenia.’’
‘’I thought schizophrenics just saw visions and stuff?’’ Olivia had queried. Other people might worry such a question was crossing the boundaries, that you shouldn’t poke and prod at a mental illness, but rather just nod and pretend to understand. Rosie hated people who nodded and pretended to understand, and she loved that Olivia was the first person to try and actually understand.
‘’We hear things more than we see them.’’ Rosie explained. ‘’And there are other symptoms. You believe a lot of weird things, like you make stuff up in your head, but then you forget that it’s made up and you start thinking it’s real. Bitchy girl cliques where everyone keeps secrets makes it really easy to come up with crazy ideas about what people are hiding from you. It makes it hard to properly interact with people, you know, when you’ve got all these weird suspicions about them.’’
‘’So, what are your suspicions about me, then? Be honest – I won’t get mad.’’
‘’Actually… nothing.’’
‘’Hey, I said be honest.’’
‘’I am being honest.’’ And she was. Olivia was so open, so unapologetically herself, that even Rosie’s illness struggled to come up with any dark conspiracies about her. That was the first real sign that they were destined to be friends.
Olivia pulled the truck into the car park of Sugar and Spice, the downtown Melbourne café Rosie had recently been hired at. Rosie climbed out of the car and blew a kiss goodbye to Olivia’s still sceptical expression, before shutting the door and making her way up to the front door. Before going inside, she reached into her handbag, and pushed Olivia’s cigarettes to the side to retrieve a small perfume container. She gave herself a few short sprays, disguising the smoky smell that always seeped into her clothes whenever Olivia gave her a ride.
Olivia’s pessimism didn’t sway Rosie in the slightest. They both knew the statistics - 8% of schizophrenics in Australia who want to work are employed. The other 92% aren’t able to get a job. Olivia took that as a sign that any job Rosie tried out would end disastrously, but Rosie saw it differently. She figured it was all chalked up to discrimination, and that the cruel misconception that schizophrenics are ‘’crazy’’ meant people didn’t want to hire them. She was under no legal obligation to tell anyone about her condition, and she thought the unemployed 92% were crazy to have done so.
As her first week in the café went by, she came to the realisation they’d probably said jack shit about their illness. The statistics had little to do with discrimination and a whole lot to do with them. Rosie and her kind weren’t cut out for working normal jobs. The stress of working under pressure when the shop frequently got busy was something she couldn’t handle. She’d race back and forth, pinning orders up in the kitchen and answering the phone and bringing steaming cups of coffee to tables, and she’d become so overwhelmed that she’d make mistakes and then customers would get angry. She knew from her friends that working in customer service meant you were going to meet rude people, but her friends weren’t like her. They handled being yelled and cussed at by ranting about it on Facebook, or subtly flipping the customer off as they headed out of the store. Rosie, meanwhile, would go home to her apartment and ignore the way her mother told her to stop being ridiculous as she dragged her entire desk out of her bedroom and pushed it up against the front door.
She was convinced the customers were psychotics, and they were going to hunt her down and kill her in her sleep. To get so upset over her accidental pouring of milk into their meant-to-be black coffee, they had to be crazy.
It’s a funny thing, the fact that a deep part of Rosie did in fact know that she was being ridiculous. She knew she had an illness and that her beliefs of being a potential victim of slaughter for messing up a drink order were because she wasn’t well. But the acknowledgment that it’s all because of an illness didn’t stop the fear. It didn’t quiet that part of her brain that fought to be heard, that screamed out theories and conspires until she was forced to listen, and eventually, give in.
Walking through the shop, gathering up used cups and clearing milky stains off the glass top tables, Rosie would hear the customers mutter things under their breath. Sometimes they were sexual remarks, sometimes they were angry insults. She never caught any of them, and therefore, she never knew how often they actually were murmuring and how often she was hearing things. During her second week on the job, another waitress had to calm her down after she fell in to hysterics, recounting the story of a man who had whispered that he’d like to ‘’see what else those hands can do’’ after she’d poured his coffee, and that he’d ‘’see her in the alleyway’’ when she finished work. The waitress had gone out to confront the man, who’d vehemently denied it, and seemed to find genuine shock in the fact that they would think he’d do such a thing. Rosie had then had to admit to the waitress that it was possible that he hadn’t really said anything, and in turn, admit her illness. Rosie will never forget the meek way she smiled, trying to cover up the judgement in her eyes, trying to hide the way her expression was dotted with traces of ‘’I’m talking to a lunatic’’. Rosie had begged her not to tell their boss. She’d responded only with another very tight smile.
At the end of Rosie’s second week, she called triple 0 on the way home from work, reporting a stalker. She’d been convinced he was following her because when she’d taken his order, he’d greeted her by name and with what had seemed to her like a very sickening smile. When the police arrived at the coffee shop to question her boss about the incident, she’d said ‘’well of course he knew her name, the staff wear name badges’’. Rosie had to apologise, admitting that in her panic she’d completely forgotten she had a name tag on. She was lucky to avoid a caution for wasting police time.
After that incident her boss pulled her to the side and told her this probably wasn’t the best place for her to work.
Olivia always had the grace never to say ‘’I told you so.’’ She consoled her, promising she’d find another way to make money. Olivia understood how much the job had meant to Rosie, the idea of having her own financial freedom. She didn’t know any other seventeen year old girls that didn’t have their own money. Rosie and her single mother were never on the poverty line, but she never exactly had money to throw around either. She had a mobile phone for emergencies only, which her mother could afford to top with enough credit for a few phone calls a month. Without her own money, she was isolated from all your typical teenage things – movies, shopping trips, saving for a car, even simply being able to text friends. It was near maddening, a life confined to school and her apartment, and in the high stakes’ social world of a high schooler, it was a situation she was desperate to rectify. Then there was next year – she’d be out of high school and out into the real world. How on Earth was she going to manage taking her first steps towards being an adult without any money?
It was a few weeks later that she received a text message from the manager of a local Jay Jays, where she’d handed in an application a few months prior. They had an opening and she wanted to know if Rosie was still interested in coming in for an interview. She never bothered to send a reply. Rosie wasn’t one of the 8% that could somehow make it work.
‘’You’ll get to have your own money, I swear.’’ Olivia had assured, as Rosie had glumly deleted the message from her phone.
‘’Okay.’’ Rosie had replied, not bothering to even act like she believed her.
‘’I mean it.’’
‘’Yeah.’’
‘’Rosie, I’m serious. I have an idea.’’
Rosie looked up at her, eyeing her curiously.
‘’You’re not going to like it but hear me out.’’ Olivia said. ‘’I think this could work.’’