Me: And my UAI is…wow.

Mum: What is it?

Me: Almost ninety-five.

Mum: Well that can’t be right!

Dad: Maybe you should give the Board of Studies a call?

My mother has tried and failed pretty much every diet ever conceived by man, and she feels better when one of her friends tries and fails with her. However, the day she decided to do Weight Watchers, all her friends were either already on other diets or content being fat. Mum still needed a wingman, so she asked me if I would join the program with her.

“Are you serious?” I asked, looking up from my grade ten homework.

“I think you could stand to lose a few pounds,” Mum said, nodding towards my belly. Then the clincher: “I’ll pay for you.”

“Fine, but I’m not giving up alcohol,” I conceded.

“Oh god, me neither,” Mum said, grimacing, “You should though, it’s illegal for you to drink.”

“Do you want me to do this or not?” I asked.

“Okay, okay,” Mum said, “I’ll sign us up tomorrow.”

And so, for the next four months, I attended weekly meetings in a community hall with a group of overweight house-mothers. I counted points and took my measurements and wrote down goals. I pumped my fist and yelled “Yeah! We can be thin!” I adopted the Weight Watchers argot, and used phrases such as removing weight (because when you “lose” something, that has connotations of regaining the lost item.) I made muffins using apple sauce instead of oil. They tasted like shit.

During the twelfth week, I reached the bottom of the healthy weight range set for my height by Weight Watchers (somewhere around 55kg.) After this, I lost an additional 5kg. Then another 3kg. At this point, I was weighing pieces of fruit and vegetables so that I could calculate their exact caloric content. I was also taking my coffee black and going to the gym 6 days a week. My hair began to come out in clumps in the shower and my fingernails were slightly blue. Meanwhile, my mother had lost roughly 3kg and was yet to graduate from Class I Obesity. I made sure that I sat next to her at every meeting so I could lean over and look at her progress chart. “Is that a plus sign?” I asked her loudly, “Did you count your points right?” I wore my pants low and let my shirt slide up so that my hip bones were visible. I turned my nose up at anything Mum cooked and began making my own dinners, which consisted primarily of edamame and salsa. I would not eat bread or rice or pasta or red meat or eggs or butter or sugar or bananas. I was perpetually cold.

At my next Weight Watchers meeting, one of the ladies pulled me off the scales and took me to the side of the room. “We don’t think you need to be here anymore,” she told me, “You’re looking a little…slim.”

“But I can lose more?” I suggested.

“No, you can’t,” she said. “Do you honestly think you need to remove more weight?

“Not really,” I replied, “But my mum’s a bitch and I want to piss her off.”

“I see,” she said, “I don’t think you should come back next week. We’ll refund any membership fees you’ve overpaid.”

“Fine,” I said and walked outside, embarrassed.

When I got home, I ate a piece of frozen banana cake in front of my mother. Then I ate another one.

“You’ll make yourself sick,” she warned.

“Good,” I said, and went to bed.

When I was fifteen, I worked in the créche at my parents’ church. This meant I had to look after other people’s whining children and sometimes take them to the toilet and wipe their bums, but at least I didn’t have to listen to the sermon.

One Sunday, there was a new kid in the créche who seemed to take a liking to me. We played for half an hour and read some books together, then she said she wanted to draw a picture of me. I was flattered and sat on a beanbag in front of her, posing for my portrait.

“Now you have blue eyes…” she said, selecting a sky-coloured crayon. “And then brown hair… and a yellow t-shirt… and a BIIIIIG belly!”

“Church is finished,” I told her, holding in a scowl. “I’ll mind your picture until your parents are leaving. You can come back and collect it then.”

After she left to find her mum and dad, I scrunched her picture into a ball and threw it in the bin. Then I walked down to the takeaway shop and bought a large tub of hot chips. I decided I would not have children if they all turned out to be such nasty little shits.

When I was in year nine, every weekend I told my parents, “I’m staying at <insert friend’s name>’s house tonight.” Then I got drunk in a park and passed out on somebody’s couch or in the backseat of a nearby car.

One week I made the error of including a movie in my lie. “Bye, Mum,” I said, walking out the door, “I’m going to see Panic Room with my bible study group.”

Then I went to a school friend’s boyfriend’s share house, smoked bongs with a bunch of uni students, and built a tower out of empty UDL cans.

When I got home, my parents asked me if I’d enjoyed the movie.

“It was okay,” I said, not wanting to rave about it too much in case they decided to see it. And then, on a roll, I proceeded to fabricate an entire synopsis of the film. My rationale behind this was that if I told my parents everything that happened in the movie, they wouldn’t bother going to see it. I hadn’t even seen the preview prior to this, so my account of the movie was inspired by the title alone and was about as accurate as a James Frey novel. I gave extensive descriptions of the characters and made sure to detail all the plot developments, and then I re-enacted several scenes, using a set of Babushka dolls my aunt had given us for Christmas.

“I heard there’s a big twist at the end,” my mother said, “What’s the twist?”

“Jodie Foster is a robot,” I answered confidently.

“Well, that sounds like quite a film,” my dad said when I had finished. “And if you didn’t smell like a grow house, I would probably believe you.”

“Am I grounded?” I asked, leaning against a book shelf to steady myself.

“No, that was entertaining enough to redeem you this time,” Dad said, “But if you come home this stoned ever again, I will enrol you in aqua aerobics classes with your mother.”

When I was in highschool, there was a group of boys four years above us who were all blonde and hot. They never showed the slightest interest in us during school, but after graduation, I became visible.

One night I spotted the group’s ringleader, Ryan, at a local nightclub. I caught his eye, then looked away and smiled. He approached me and asked, “Can I buy you a drink?” and thus began a brief sort of relationship.

Ryan was attractive, friendly and smelled nice. However, once we got to know each other a bit better, I realised that he was painfully boring. I didn’t really care about any part of his personality because it was all so mundane and ordinary, I wanted to stab out my eyes with a dirty chopstick. The sex was good, but when it came to conversation, I would have preferred a homeless person. The issue was that Ryan was too normal and well-balanced for me. I need to date men who are tortured and neurotic and irrational, otherwise I lose interest after about eight minutes. So whenever Ryan talked, my eyes would glaze over and I would fantasise about being with somebody less average. Every time he suggested we go out for dinner or a movie, I would panic at the thought of being forced to endure hours of his conversation. “Why don’t we just stay at your place and fool around?” I would suggest, trying to reign the relationship back to its shallow, physical roots.

After a month or so of this, I met somebody more interesting and stopped answering Ryan’s calls. I then successfully avoided him until roughly a year later, when I bumped into him at the same club in which we met.

“Hey!” he cried, scooping me into a hug.

“Hi,” I said, pulling away from him.

“Gosh, I haven’t heard from you in ages!” he said.

“I lost my phone,” I lied.

“Can I take you out for a drink sometime?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t think so. No, thank you.”

“Hey, Neek,” he said, beginning to look downcast, “I don’t know if you heard, but my dad had a heart attack a few months ago and he… he died. My dad died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said, scanning the bar for my friends.

“I could sort of use someone to talk to right now,” he said quietly.

“Well you’ve still got your mum, right?” I reminded him. “Listen, my ride’s about to leave. Take care.”

In 2001, my highschool tragically lost two of my classmates on a Duke of Edinburgh hike at Crosslands. The group encountered a violent storm mid-hike and was forced to set up an emergency campsite in a nearby clearing. The wind grew strong and knocked over a tree which fell on top of one of the tents, crushing both girls who were sheltering inside and killing them instantly. I was at an orphanage in Thailand at the time, building dormitories and singing hymns with some Christian missionaries. I checked my email one night when we went into town and saw a note from one of my friends back home:

“Samantha and Tara died on duke of ed. I twisted my ankle. We got to stay home from school and eat tim tams. You’re gonna miss the funerals.”

I dealt with this in my usual way: almost entirely physically. I went to bed for three days and didn’t eat or shower or speak to anybody. After this, I was very sick for a week, and then by the time we got to Chiang Mai, I was somewhat okay.

When I returned to Sydney, most of the formalities were over. However, the faculty wanted to do something special to honour the memory of Samantha and Tara. During class one morning, my English teacher put out the call for ideas.

“What can we do that is special and will carry on here at the school, even after you guys have all graduated?” he asked.

“We could name one of the buildings after the girls,” one student suggested.

“We certainly could,” the teacher agreed, “Any more ideas?”

I raised my hand. “We could plant a tree? Like, in memory. One with strong roots, obviously…”

They went with the building idea.

This morning a girl who I was once very close to died. I’m not going to pretend to know the particulars of the situation, because I haven’t had contact with her for years, but something about Crohn’s disease and the latter stages of liver cancer, etc, etc, she didn’t make it, please pray for her family.

I’m sitting here trying to come up with some memories of this girl. Pick the pieces out of my brain, look at them with renewed perspective, type them out and embody one small part of her life: the impact she had on me. She and I spent a significant amount of time together during highschool, and in theory, I should be able to recount specific anecdotes, quote directly, dig up old notes and emails and photographs.

But sadly, my brain has wiped most of my memories from early adolescence, and I have thrown away all the physical evidence over the years.

And so, digging deep as possible, all I can put together is the vaguest of pastimes, but a stronger sense of her spirit:

The memory is blurred and non-specific, but I do recall the intense camaraderie I felt from the day I met her. And I remember that at every church-related event our fascist parents dragged us to, she and I snuck away, without fail. We stole biscuits and ran down the street. We hid in parks and bitched about every single person in that church. We condemned their hypocrisy and ridiculed their sensitivity. We were ruthless and nasty, delighting in which one of us could shock the other the most.

Believe it or not, she was a lot more cynical than I am. She was more negative. Less ethical. More bitter. And that’s exactly what I liked most about her.

Friend #1: So, any goss?

Friend #2: Jennifer Chapman from school is engaged.

Me: Who the hell would marry that piece of shit?

Moment of silence.

Friend #1: You’re kind of a bitch when you’re stoned.

Me: So’s your face. Fuck you. I’m going home.

I went to my 5 year highschool reunion last weekend, and I was really excited to see how all my old class-mates had grown and matured into well-adjusted young adults. Apparently nothing really changes though.

classmate, finishing up a boring story: “…but that was when my license was suspended, so I didn’t drive anyway.”

me: “How did you lose your license?”

classmate: “High range DUI.”

me: “How embarrassing.”

classmate: “Nah, it was fucken great. Mum dropped me at the pub every night so I could still get pissed!”

me: “I’m so glad this experience has humbled you and made you wiser. The legal system should be proud.”

Somewhere around grade 10, my friends and I started hanging around a particular group of guys. They were mostly apprentices who’d dropped out of school and they hung around our local shopping centre when they finished work in the afternoons. We caught the bus there after class and smoked cigarettes on the loading docks in our private school uniforms while these guys tried to source pot and mooch free pizza. They were the type of guys who considered taking a dump on somebody who was passed out at a party as “witty.”

When I stopped going to house parties and got drunk in bars instead, I fell out a little with these guys. I still saw them around, but when I did, I pretended not to know them. But after uni, our circles started overlapping again and I decided to give one of the boy’s house parties another go. Maybe they had grown up, toned down their behaviour and learned not to be so silly?

The party was going well. Nobody had spun a bottle or stuck their hands down my pants, the bathroom didn’t smell like vomit, and the police hadn’t visited. Then around midnight, the boys began passing around glow sticks.

“Are we going to a rave?” I asked.

“Not quite – wait and see,” somebody named Willo winked at me.

Each guy pulled down his jeans, cracked open his glow stick, and rubbed the contents onto his penis. Then they ran in a line down the dark street and shouted out to all the neighbours. Bleary eyed citizens shuffled to their bedroom windows and looked out to see a trail of bobbing wangs lit up and making their way past their rose bushes.

The boys then ran back to our yard and threw themselves one by one into the pool, screaming, “IT BURNS! FUCK, IT BURNS..”