Tearing Myself Together by ANNA WHATELEY is a new YA coming-of-age novel. Hilzy has chronic pain and has recently lost her job, but she gains a found family. Read on for an extract.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Hilzy’s life is forever coming undone – and so is her body. Friendship is just one more thing she can’t count on … until she has to.
It’s Year Twelve exam time, and Hilzy has a lot on her plate. She’s just lost her job, she and her sister Max are struggling to make ends meet, and her childhood best friend Imogen recently dobbed them in to child services. The friendship is over.
There’s a new spark of joy when Hilzy grows closer to Dawn, the hippy girl who’s had a crush on her for ages. But when Hilzy ends up in hospital with a busted knee, it’s only Imogen who understands what it’s really like living with an invisible disability. Things are falling apart, but maybe it’s not all on Hilzy to put them back together again.
**********
EXTRACT
Death moves two millimetres an hour. Honest. Science watched. They measured how long death took to travel across an egg cell. I wonder how long until it takes me, and which part must die for me to stop thinking. How many cells will wither before my mind is quiet? Can your cells die a bit, and then un-die if the job is incomplete? Come back to life?
PROLOGUE
‘Hilzy?’ Imogen knocks on the window. Then my phone bleeps. Three messages:
I’m here
Open the window
?
I don’t reply. I don’t clear the messages, either. I stare at them. I was shutting down because of the fighting, closing my autistic mind to the chaos, but now I’m caught with these messages staring at me.
Yelling echoes down the hall. I twisted my ankle at school, and the dark throb is making it hard to ignore Mum’s latest drama. My room is not far enough from the kitchen, where she and my sister Max are arguing. Please Hilzy, Max told me she’s worried. Your ankle and then your mum. It’s a lot.
Mum doesn’t care. Max does. And Imogen’s here, even though I can’t let her into my space. I’m frozen in bed with nothing but a body full of sensations I can’t name.
I’ll just sit here, okay? Imogen sends from outside the window.
It helps, I type, and then delete. I wish I could let her in. Trust her again. She was the other point of our triangle. Like our adopted sister. My chest beats in time with the pain in my ankle.
She’ll sit there all night. I did this for her when her parents divorced. Imogen couldn’t always let me in, either. She can’t talk when she’s really upset, plus her dad would have lost it if he’d known I’d snuck around in the night time on the ‘dangerous’ streets of Capalaba. He cares.
The words push and push in my head. Why did you do it, Mum? Can’t you admit you’re an addict?
It’s no use fighting, Mum won’t change.
Why? I send.
There’s no reply as the bats screech from the gum tree. I plump the pillow underneath my ankle and dream for the thousandth time that I can stretch out fully and use my muscles with no fear.
Perhaps Imogen has left. I wouldn’t blame her.
Hilzy, I love you. You’re my closest person, even though we’ve
hardly spoken for two years. I hate that I hurt you. I never
meant for us to break.
I read it again and again.
I wake the next day with eyes crusted from tears. I don’t remember crying. Imogen is gone, and the sun leans over the horizon, turning the gum trees a baleful orange and red.
CHAPTER ONE
Sweat drips down my thighs, turning me from solid to liquid. The pizzas cook in less than five minutes on a conveyor belt through a long oven. I lift them out and slice them up, easy. I push away the intrusive thought of slicing my fingers and rock the cutter back and forth. Each minute working is money in the pocket. That’s what I tell my screaming muscles and light head. At least my ankle is holding up well. The months without a job while it recovered were tough.
I fold the box and move it to the dispatch counter.
‘Incoming!’ I call out.
‘Got it.’ One of the delivery drivers picks it up and heads out the back door to their scooter.
Lifting the next pizza off the grill with my unstable wrist causes twinges. I grab hold with my other hand for support and bring the tray through without a problem. I’ve stood here for so long I’m dizzy with the heat and all I can see is undefined meat products and stringy mozzarella.
My pocket vibrates with a text. I sneak a look after sending another pizza off, careful to turn my back to the team. Imogen, saying Dawn cancelled for tomorrow morning on the bay. Of. Fucking. Course. I barely know Dawn, and she’s already let me down.
‘Hilary!’ my boss yells, because a pizza is done and backing up the line.
‘Got it,’ I say, sliding the paddle under and lifting with one hand while the other shoves my phone away. My wrist gives way, and the pizza slides off the wrong side of the paddle, falling to the floor in what would – in other circumstances – be a comical kind of crumple.
‘Hilary!’ the boss yells again, her eyes on the hard-earned profit occupying the tiles by my feet.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. The feeling of failure starts somewhere in my chest and descends to my gut, then out to my skin with a tingle, and my sweat turns cold like the water in the bay. Every kid with ADHD is deeply familiar with this sensation. I hold my wrist and reach for the next pizza, thinking if I just keep going, they might…forget? I don’t know.
‘Stop,’ she sighs. ‘Just go a take a break, Hilary.’ My boss gets someone to scoop up the fallen pizza and calls for a remake, deftly lifting the pizzas like they’re weightless. She says nothing more. I’d prefer it if she yelled or even made some sarcastic remark. The silence has such an ominous tone.
The rest of the shift passes quietly. I sweep and answer calls, minimising the use of my dysfunctional body.
Fishing tomorrow will be weird as fuck. Dawn cancelling leaves me, Max and Imogen. Imogen and I are hardly on speaking terms, and Max hates being stuck in the middle of our silent argument. But Moreton Bay? Damn, I love it. The lure of the salt water and the freedom is too much. Who says we even need to talk? I can’t get out there without a boat, and Imogen has the boat.
Imogen’s autistic too, but her ADHD isn’t like mine. She’s all quiet and well behaved, inattentive when she doesn’t take her meds, which she always does. I could never take ADHD meds in a consistent way, both because I couldn’t remember to take them, and also because we couldn’t afford the script or the appointment with the paediatrician to get repeats.
Imogen also has endless skin cancer removals. And I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder with faulty collagen, and no cure, just pain. Imogen and I disagree on how to manage ourselves and our disabilities. I’m here just trying to get through each day with all these health issues, and she’s pretending hers don’t exist.
I’m worried hers will kill her. That mine won’t.
I’ll be living with this forever, and without the risk of death, they’ll never take my problems seriously.
But maybe Imogen’s changed. Even if we hadn’t had that epic fight, we were in different schools for grade eleven, so it’s possible I don’t know her that well anymore.
**********
By the time I get home, the smell of pizza on my clothes is overwhelming rather than pleasant. As usual.
My wrist hurts.
My ankle is loose, threatening to twist or sprain.
My social battery is at zero and my head is full of every interaction I stuffed up, and others that potentially went wrong without me realising.
I can’t say any of this out loud. No one wants to hear me whine, and it doesn’t help to.
With one foot in the shower, I get the call.
‘Fired? Like, for real?’ The phone is hot against my ear. ‘Yeah, I get it. Thanks anyway.’ I throw the phone onto my work shirt and deny any tears. I don’t want to tell Max tonight. She doesn’t need the disappointment. We’re going out on the boat at first light. I can make that happen, at least. No point dragging her down with me. Not yet.
Hot water courses down my genetically broken body.
Fuck Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and the zebra it rode in on.
**********
‘I’m sure that’s a brain coral,’ I say. I’m leaning over the edge of the boat, my whale’s tail necklace bumping my chin. I lift my polarised sunnies to check there is no trick of the light, making a mossy rock look special.
‘You guys could throw a line in and catch something, you know, not just spectate,’ Max grumbles from under her hat.
‘Who caught what we have so far, hey?’ Imogen says over her shoulder. She has on her beige sun-safe shirt and massive hat, protecting her ivory skin from the suntrap of Queensland rays reflecting off water and aluminium.
‘You got lucky,’ I snort.
‘Imogen, chuck me a drink?’ Max speaks over my snide remark to avoid any more bickering. I wish Imogen’s friend Dawn had come, to ease the weird tension between us all.
‘Look there,’ Imogen points, ‘see the wrasse?’ She says it like it’s obvious, so I pretend I’ve seen it, to save face. Imogen’s holding her breath. Her eyes are fixed on the fish passing under the boat, like it’s hard not to just dive in and swim away with them. I know this because it’s how I feel, and no one has ever understood that like she does. She still shares my love of the fish though, and my chest lifts at the simple joy of it. I’d love to be a marine biologist, even if I’m not great at the actual study. Imogen loves biology too, but she’s heading towards being a full-on writer. I guess you can love science and be creative. I don’t have her way with words, or her confidence.
I sit back and the boat rocks.
‘Hey, watch it.’ Imogen grabs the edge and glares at me.
‘Mind your balance, wouldn’t want an accident,’ I say, and deliberately rock the boat.
‘Hilzy, are you twelve? Quit it, will you?’ Max sighs.
I turn away and watch some pelicans bobbing on the water to stop myself from saying something snarky.
We haven’t said a lot, just fished and organised the boat, pretending it’s not awkward between the three of us. Pretending there’s no part of me that’s enjoying being the three of us again.
Imogen and her dads have been taking us out on the bay for years. Imogen’s dad worked for my nonna. My mum was friends with Imogen’s mum. Now our families are all scattered, the big boat was sold and this smaller tinny bought, and it’s just us teenagers scrambling to get out when we can. They prefer it when Max is with us because she’s older. They don’t realise she lets us do whatever we want. Out on the water is the only time I see my sister unwind. It’s been nearly two years though.
‘Remember that time we went to Horseshoe Bay? And you needed a dump?’ Max says to Imogen like I’m not even here.
Imogen pulls her hat down over her face in embarrassment. ‘Oh gross, that was so bad.’ March flies had swarmed her arse in seconds.
‘Your screams,’ Max chuckles. She’s changed her hair again, tied back to show blue streaks underneath. With her dark hair, dark eyes and fierce attitude, she’s a badass without even trying.
‘I swear, I will never do that again.’ They laugh and I don’t join in. I don’t feel like reminiscing about the good old days. Jealousy tugs, seeing how close they still are, because Max doesn’t know what Imogen did.
We’re further south than Horseshoe Bay now, at the Jumpinpin. The tides were good, and the extra distance can mean better fishing. The Pin is the unstable, unknown scatter of land and sand and sea between what were known as North and South Stradbroke Islands. The north island has got its original name back now: Minjerribah.
The Pin wasn’t always so unstable. About a hundred years ago, sailors on an exploratory mission got wrecked here, and those who lost their lives were buried in the sand. Later, the people handling the wreck detonated ship’s explosives on those same dunes. So of course, the dunes were like, ouch. After some more big storms, the channel here opened enough to un-bury the sailors and let the Coral Sea flood into the bay. I don’t remember if they ever recovered the six bodies. They’re probably just drifting about on the bay floor, checking out the coral and being glad they aren’t stuck in a sand dune anymore.
‘Did you know,’ Max says, ‘Italian missionaries went to these islands before anywhere else in Queensland? Before Queensland was even a state. Three of them, and a Swiss guy. They just set up a church on Straddie.’
‘Minjerribah,’ I correct her.
‘Minjerribah. They just up and thought, hey let’s go to the most remote place and tell them about some god.’
We say nothing. I hold a mix of shame and pride for my Italian heritage. Like, wow, they were brave; and also, gross. What the hell did they do to this land and these people?
‘So, when are they removing that mole?’ I ask Imogen. She’ll be pissed off I mentioned it, but I can’t help myself.
‘Hilzy.’ Max glares at me.
‘Why do you bring that up now?’ Imogen snips, releasing the edge of the boat. She packs the fishing gear away. The sky has turned an angry grey, and the wind is picking up.
‘Because you need it out and you’ll pretend you don’t,’ I say. Why am I having a go at her? She hates all the skin cancer shit she’s been through already.
She ignores my reply and prepares the boat to leave. Our frustration fuels the wind and angry sky. The Pin is throwing us out, like the bones of the shipwreck. Max raises her eyebrow and shakes her head, her eyes filled with disappointment. I push her off the esky and tuck the three keepable bream and one tailor under ice inside. Imogen’s dads will like them. Imogen frowns at the horizon and choppy waves, her hand reaching up to her lip.
‘Sorry, okay?’ I say to both of them, words lost in the wind.
One boat is hardly enough to contain three people and all their thoughts. The pain of the past weighs heavier than the anchor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna lives in Meanjin on Turrbul and Yuggera land. She has always worked in literature and education and holds a PhD in young adult fiction. As an author, Anna writes young adult fiction and has contributed to multiple anthologies on disability and autism.
Read more about Anna Whateley’s work here.
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