I didn’t see Skye again for three years. I’m still not entirely sure why, but it seems my parents didn’t stay in touch with Skye’s parents. They all just drifted apart, as sometimes happens. Skye didn’t stay over at my house again, or come to any of the Chemistry department parties.
By the time I next saw her, everything had changed. I had changed. She had changed. It seemed to me as though the whole world had changed.
I was in the middle of a difficult period. I was thirteen, going on fourteen, but my problems had started much earlier. It was when I was around eleven that I first noticed a big shift in the other kids at my primary school. It seemed to me they were acting more and more like adults. The girls started trying out different hairstyles and wearing jewellery, like necklaces and bracelets. They discussed pop music and clothes and boys. They experimented with makeup. They followed the latest fashion trends, like leg warmers and fingerless gloves. At first I thought all this was ridiculous. My classmates weren’t adults. They were kids pretending to be adults. I thought they might get bored of all this and we could go back to how things had been before.
Only that didn’t happen. They continued with their act. They wouldn’t let up. I knew who they really were – they were the same kids I’d been playing with for years – but they wouldn’t stop behaving in this adult kind of way. It was as though they were possessed.
All of this really hit home when I next saw my cousins. Mum’s brother and his family stayed with us for a couple of nights on their way to Dunedin from the North Island. I knew my two cousins well as I’d met them several times over the years. But this time they’d changed. I saw it straight away. They had been possessed too. They were also play-acting at being little adults.
I was shocked by this and realised that I’d made a mistake. Instead of scoffing at my classmates, I should have been trying to be grown-up too. Now I was well behind and had to catch up.
But I found out it wasn’t all that easy to catch up. I did my best to copy the other kids at school, but I couldn’t seem to get it right. I was too nervous and awkward. The pretence didn’t seem natural. There was something not quite right about me, and my classmates could see it. They arranged themselves into cliques and shut me out. I was always left to one side, alone.
It seemed to me that everything I’d learnt from my parents was wrong. They had always taught me to be studious and to do my homework on time. They said it was essential that I got good marks. I also had to behave properly. I had to be quiet, respectful, dutiful and in every way a good girl. But none of this counted for anything with the other kids at school. I’d obeyed my parents’ rules, but now I realised those rules were worthless.
I was hoping for a new beginning when – at the age of thirteen – I started at Burnside High. It was such a large school that there were only a couple of kids from my primary school in my class. For most of my new classmates, I could be anyone. This was my chance to reinvent myself, transform myself from the dorky old Amy into someone shiny and popular.
I scoured through teen magazines, especially Dolly, trying to learn how I should look, dress and do my hair. I studied the most fashionable girls at school and noted all the ways they subverted the uniform rules by wearing things like mascara, lip gloss and earrings. Whenever I spotted any of my classmates in their own clothes – in town or hanging around the streets of Avonhead – I carefully observed everything they were wearing.
I also made sure I was familiar with all the latest pop music – my favourite artists at the time were the Thompson Twins, Nik Kershaw and Duran Duran. And I religiously watched the top-twenty chart show, Ready to Roll.
I pleaded with my parents to let me buy new clothes, and I also got a more trendy haircut. I bought de rigueur items like Nomad shoes to wear to school. At first Mum and Dad were bemused by my newfound interest in fashion. When I got my ears pierced and started wearing makeup to go into town, they grew concerned.
Mum sat me down one day and asked: ‘Is everything OK, Amy?’
I shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t seem yourself these days. Is everything all right at school?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You getting all your homework done?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know, you are quite young to be wearing makeup and things like that.’
‘The other girls at school do it.’
‘You don’t have to be like the other girls. You know that.’
Inwardly, I was full of scorn for my mother. What did she know? She never wore makeup and her clothes were frumpy and outdated. Both of my parents seemed to value only academic success. Books, ideas, thinking, analysing – these were the only things that were important to them. Anything popular – fashion, pop music, magazines – was a bit tawdry. To me, it seemed as though they lived in a dusty library and wanted to keep me locked in there with them. I longed to be outside in a world of colour and excitement.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0lgofNV2aX
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I think I would have had a lot more conflict with my parents if it hadn’t been for my grandmother’s accident. During my first year at high school, Nana fell over when she was out doing the shopping. She lay on the footpath in agony until someone spotted her and called an ambulance. When they got her to the hospital, the doctors discovered she’d broken her leg. And that leg never completely healed. From that point on, she was only able to shuffle around her house with a Zimmer frame, and couldn’t go out on her own at all. Her husband, my grandad, had died several years earlier. With few other people around to help, my mother increasingly took on the role of her carer.
Nana lived in Ashburton, about an hour’s drive from Christchurch. At that point, Mum was also still working as an English teacher at Papanui High School. She often had to drive out to Ashburton after work and would only get back home late in the evening. She also had to go to Nana’s most weekends and usually stayed the night there.
This meant that it was often just me and Dad at home. The dynamic in the house changed immediately. Dad had always been aloof and preoccupied with his work, but he seemed to become even more so during this period. He spent long hours in what we called the ‘spare room’, which mainly functioned as his study. He didn’t seem especially bothered with what I got up to, so long as I didn’t make a lot of noise. It was out of the question for me to play anything on the stereo, but that didn’t matter as I could always listen to my Walkman. I could watch TV if I kept the volume down low and shut the lounge door. Apart from that, I found I suddenly had a lot more freedom. I could go out when I wanted, so long as I let Dad know where I was going and didn’t get back too late.
Discussions about my new appearance dwindled. Mum didn’t have the time or energy to check up on what I was doing. Dad didn’t notice or didn’t care about what I was wearing. This all suited me perfectly.
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