Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“Yeah,” she said, pulling open the door and retreating backwards into the lobby. From behind the glass, she watched her mum nod, smile, wave.

The truth was, Jess didn’t know what had frightened her about a whole castleful of people falling asleep just because one girl had. She had no idea, and no wish to explore this fear. But with her mother, it always seemed to be about reasons. Why, why, why? Didn’t she know that knowing why didn’t make things any less scary?

The ridges in the carpet felt too big, like narrowly spaced islands. Her knees were crushing them, but they were denting her shins in a grotesque kind of revenge.

Jess shifted uncomfortably and licked her lips, then parted them in an O of slowly dawning dismay as her eyes settled fully on the row of books that she had spread out before her, cover touching cover. Shooting a frightened look around her, she dropped the green-and-yellow-handled scissors to the floor and hurriedly began closing the books, smoothing crumpled edges of torn paper back between the covers. She hadn’t realised, somehow, what she had been doing. No, that was wrong — she’d known that she’d been cutting the pictures out, but only on a detached level, like someone within a dream. She had gone into the book corner and picked out the books with lots of pictures, her fingers smoothing over the glossy encyclopaedia photograph of the girl with the short blond hair gazing into the mirror at herself. Two girls, two smiles, snub nose pressed to snub nose. It was like twins. She had to show TillyTilly. But she couldn’t take the book in her book bag: it was too big, and it was a class book, not a take-home book. Then the scissors, biting the paper into slim pieces — the paper had been stiffer than she’d expected, and she’d had to place a firm hand on the page so that she was able to cut out the girl properly. She had been dimly aware that she was humming under her breath, and the humming lengthened to deep pauses in her breathing as she had found other books with other twins, and soon she was sucking a fleshy paper cut on the pad of her index finger whilst continuing to cut with her other hand.

But now, now she was going to get in trouble. To her left was a small heap of thin paper cutout twins, waiting to be shown to TillyTilly. She glanced at the one on top — an illustration of a pair of woolly-haired black boys in blue shorts playing football— before she scooped the fragments into her cupped hands and poured them into the green-and-white-checked pocket of her school dress. Then with trembling fingers she quickly began gathering up the incriminating flaps and fringes of paper scattered around her. She was interrupted by Patricia Anderson— Call me Trish, saves time, hahahaha —who made her jump.

“Oi,” Trish said, momentarily pausing in the noisy chewing of her gum. “What’re you doing in here, man? We’re gonna watch Geordie Racer and that El Nombre video in a minute.” When Jess, her heart thumping as she crumpled the leftover scraps in her hand, didn’t immediately respond, Trish continued, “You know. . El Nombre/Writing numbers in the desert sand! ”

A few of the twin pictures fell from Jess’s overstuffed pocket as she stood, and, dread leaping in her stomach, she bent and scrabbled for them at the same time as Trish, laughing, bent and picked one up. Trish held it in the air and pulled a face. It was the picture of the boy twins and the football, stark against Trish’s hand. Jess stared at it, her mind working furiously, searching for escape routes.

“What’s this, anyways?” Trish asked, as if it was something simple that was answerable in a few words, a sentence.

As Jess’s palms began to sweat when she realised how peculiar this must look, a cramped thought began to unfold inside her. Something is really wrong with me.

Other kids didn’t do this sort of stuff, she was sure, even if they were twins.

She moved forward to snatch the picture away from Trish’s amused gaze, but Trish had turned it over. There was book print on the back; they both saw it. Jess fled the book corner and pushed past Jamie and Aaron, who were bringing in the TV and video for El Nombre .

In trouble again, she just knew it. Twin pictures fluttered out behind her as she raced down the corridors, hearing only her school sandals slapping against the floor and the sound of her laboured breathing as she mumbled almost incoherently, “No, no, no, no. .” Almost before she realised it, she had flung herself against the gate, her fingers scrabbling at the catch. Someone was coming up behind her, shouting

(roaring),

shouting, “Jessamy!”

“No, no, no, no!” She lashed out without turning around, kicking and swinging one arm out behind her. She heard a pained gasp as she made contact with cloth and flesh (an arm, a leg?), and her other arm curled itself tightly around one of the bars. Trouble . Oh, she was really in trouble now! It wasn’t her fault, it was Fern’s. Fern had taken her thoughts, because it wasn’t her—

There was a brief struggle as Jess was prised from the gate, still kicking. It was Miss Patel, red-faced, shouting at her.

“Stop this right now! STOP IT!”

The words and the face and Fern and TillyTilly and the pictures and El Nombre and the numbers in the desert sand were all hurting her, burning her. They were all tied to her with bruising string, and they would trail her wherever she went, even though she wasn’t to blame for any of it.

Jess allowed herself to go limp in Miss Patel’s restraining grasp.

Jess’s eyes were closed. She was trying to hide in the dark.

Of course, she knew that she was actually in Mr. Heinz’s office, but she preferred to pretend that she was somewhere else, somewhere drifting and quiet. She was on a big high chair, and Miss Patel was on the chair beside her. Miss Patel was wearing too much perfume, and both she and Mr. Heinz were waiting for Jess to apologise for her behaviour.

Mr. Heinz’s voice broke into Jess’s lovely dark.

“Jessamy? We’re waiting.”

He sounded annoyed. What, Jess wondered, could he have to be annoyed about? Then she remembered the books. She supposed they were sort of his property. Jess kept her eyes closed and tried to think how TillyTilly would sort this out.

“Jessamy, stop this at once,” Miss Patel snapped, from somewhere in the drift. “I really don’t know how much of your behaviour is precocity and how much of it is plain attention-seeking.”

Jess’s feet began drumming against the floor: tap, tap, tap.

“It’s like you’re playing some sort of game where you want some kind of control over us. Believe me, I’ve heard stories about you, young lady. And it’s all got to stop. You can’t keep disrupting the class this way, it’s selfish.”

Selfish . She didn’t know what she was supposed to think of that.

Jess’s eyes opened almost involuntarily, and she stared at Miss Patel’s face, at her mouth moving and the fading patches of eye makeup that clung to her skin. The skin beneath Miss Patel’s eyes looked fragile and nearly transparent, as if a finger brushing against it could puncture her. She looked, Jess realised, as if she had been crying. For some inexplicable reason, Jess began to feel very cross. No, cross was the wrong word. Cross was just stamping and shouting.

This was a little house, with a ceiling that kept getting higher and higher, a hot place with no windows. This was anger. Defiantly meeting Miss Patel’s eyes for the first time, Jess watched their constant, nervous sideways flick; Miss Patel’s hands kept twisting themselves in her lap.

Are you scared of me or something? You say you think I’m being attention-seeking, but you really think I’m WEIRD.