fiction by rebekah roma
The Shapes We Made in the Light
We reshaped ourselves that night. We had finally reached the door of adulthood and moulded our knobby elbows and puppy fat into the perfect keys. We walked into formal like we were made of satin and tulle and colors that fizzed in your mouth when you said them. It was still winter, but nobody wore jackets. It would have ruined the silhouette.
The school hall had been repainted for the occasion. The pastel blue of the ‘70s had been smothered in the carsick yellow of the junior uniforms that clashed with the red bricks and the orange plastic chairs. The principle said it was a happy color fit for a celebration, but the hall didn’t like being yellow. And we didn’t like it either, the fresh chemical fumes made us dizzy and the punch tasted like metal.
The school had booked a DJ to play songs with pimple pops of silence where the expletives should’ve been. To the tune of family friendly top 40, we snuck out of the hall to begin the real activity of the evening, getting drunk under the demountable light.
The light flickered in such a pattern that when we got drunk enough it made our eyes fuzzy and our stomachs tingle. Jason had stolen his brother’s weed and Ellie showed her boobs to BWS-Blake to get us two bottles of Bundy. She didn’t have the best boobs of our group, but Blake always had too much spit in the corners of his mouth when he passed us on his way to work and it made the rest of us feel weird.
To be under the lamplight was to be in a different, private world. Away from parents and teachers and the tradies that whistled at us when we were close to growing out of our skirts. And that night when we couldn’t hear the music and the rest of the school was blurry all we could see were the outlines of ourselves, in the sequined shapes we constructed. We were not the first to utilize the lamp’s dysfunction for our high-school highs. We had learned from Maisie’s older brother before he graduated, and we had passed down the knowledge to Finn’s girlfriend, Sarah, from the grade below who joined us sometimes. That was our group: Me, Ellie, Jason, Maisie, Finn, and Sarah. An even number, perfectly divisible into pairs for sports carnivals and Ipswich Show rides. But formal was exclusive to the year twelves and, without Sarah that night, our dynamic developed an uneasy limp.
No one knew when the streetlight started flickering or why it hadn’t been fixed. Maisie said the council had considered rewiring it, but short of ripping up the lights on the whole street there wasn’t anything fiscally proportionate they could do. Finn liked to scare his girlfriend with tales of bad things that happened in town and said the flickering was caused by their ghosts. The poor Mrs. Morrison shot by her husband in 1967, Stephen the kid in the 90’s who drowned in the lake, and—Finn’s favorite, probably for the scale of the horror—a frontier massacre at the mission a few kilometers away. We didn’t believe him about the massacre, though. If something like that had happened so close to us, we would’ve been taught it in school.
But Finn was right about the sinister energy of the flickering. Walking up to the lamp in the dark was to be disoriented. Consumed by irregular blindings. We had to crouch down, squeeze our eyes shut, and shuffle closer until we were underneath it. When we reached the sweet spot, the glow slicked over us like syrup. Gold reflected off puddles on the bitumen and we weren’t scarred, pocked teens anymore, we were shapeshifting atoms, humming with heat and light.
It wasn’t always so sweet. One time, after our term two exams, Ellie was convinced she failed ancient history. She hogged the bottle—I think it was peach schnapps that night—and drank so much she seemed to swig in time with each flicker. She only stopped when she noticed the sugar content and her panic switched from academia to her weight.
“Kick me,” she said.
“What?” I said.
She started to breathe heavier, ‘“Kick me, so I can spew.”
“Ellie, no,” I said.
“C’mon,” she said, face reddening, “you know I don’t have a gag reflex.”
It was true. Her favorite party trick was deep-throating paddlepops in front of the male teachers and seeing if she could give them a semi. Often, she could.
“C’mon,” she said again, “I’d do it for you.”
So I did it. And she spewed on the pavement, and everything continued on. Maisie said Ellie had a wicked bruise after, but Ellie never showed me. We were dizzy by the time BWS-Blake walked past us after closing the bottle-o. The girls huddled together to avoid eye contact, but Jason called out.
“Got anything good on ya?”
Blake grinned and jogged up to the gate quickly, immune to the light shuddering around him. He opened his jacket and pulled out a bottle of Bacardi 151.
“This is so alcoholic it’s what bartenders use to set shit on fire,” he said, “Tastes like metho but. . .”
Jason held out his hand. “Let’s see then.’”
“I dunno if I’m allowed on school grounds,” Blake said.
Jason looked at us girls for approval. We were curious about the 151 and besides, we needed another person to even out the group, so I shrugged.
“Nah, it’s fine,” said Jason, “Crack her open.”
Blake wore a Monster energy hat with a flat brim purple as bruise and a shirt that yellowed under his arms. He looked like every other boy from town, but smelled worse, and he reminded me why I was committed to going to uni in the city. I wouldn’t come back if I could help it, even if it meant no more nights under the lamp glow. Sometimes things were brought to light that should have stayed in the dark. For a while it was like every other night. Connected under the demountable, our ears hummed with a ringing that only we could hear. And Blake’s presence, as a new person with new stories about old teachers gave us a buzz that we chased with rum from the bottle. Waistbands and dresses stretched over our bloating tummies, and we jeered as Finn broke his seal behind the westringias.
The first time we’d come here, we all got headaches and vowed never to do it again. Surely it wasn’t good for our developing brains. And Ellie wanted to be a nurse. I didn’t know what I wanted to be yet; I only knew I wanted to be it somewhere else. But like we did with sex and smoking and all other things that make us feel better despite being bad for us, we pushed aside the initial pain and came back every Thursday night when Maisie got back from basketball. It was here that Jason told us about his parents’ divorce, that Finn introduced us to Sarah, and where Maisie saw a cattle truck drive past after too many shots and went vegan on the spot. I wonder if we would have stayed as close as we did if it weren’t for those nights, drinking and blinking ourselves into a stupor, until we stumbled back to our homes in the morning light still seeing stars.
We heard the screeching first. Everyone looked up like we had been jolted by the electric fence at Wacol Gaol. We all knew the statistics on youth road fatalities, every year we watched a video in PDHPE where a grieving mother sobbed out the tagline, “You don’t NEED to SPEED,” and everyone had at least one corner where they put flowers on a Sunday. But we couldn’t see anything outside our bubble of light, so we clambered over the fence and sprinted to the end of the road. A white Hilux skidded sideways passed us and corrected before turning down the street into town, with the boys from biology class hanging out the windows. Puffed, we sat on the gutter to laugh at the anticlimax and our own pitiful cardio levels.
“Bet we’ll see them on the news tomorrow,” Jason said.
“Prob’ly,” said Finn. “Who’s got the rum?”
When no one answered, I looked around to see that Blake hadn’t joined us on our run. I didn’t care. I was probably at my limit, anyway, and tonight wasn’t about him—it was about us. Shedding our small-town skin and reforming.
“Hey, where’s Maisie?” asked Ellie.
She hadn’t joined us either.
When we got back, Maisie was sitting under the lamp alone and blister white. Ellie and I picked her up and rearranged her skirt smacking the dirt out of it, hard. We re-pinned her curls and spat on our dresses to wipe away what Blake had left behind. Jason and Finn, oblivious, watched us fuss over Maisie’s appearance and rolled their eyes—“Girls,” they said. I snatched the last of the Bundy from Jason and gave it to Maisie to begin the burning away.
“We should head back,” I said.
“But it’s not even ten!” Jason protested.
Maisie recovered her heel from the depths of a lily pilly, and before I could contemplate how it had gotten there, she threw it at the bulb of the streetlight, showering us in the refracted segments of the last two years of our lives.
We walked back to the hall in the dark.
It’s been two years since formal, but I still have a piece of glass from the lamp. I found it the next morning knotted in my hair and I keep it in the drawer of my bedside table to remind myself that what happened at formal really did happen. I can still see the flicker when I close my eyes. I remember how we ran to the golden haze that night to reach adulthood only to find exactly what we were chasing. How the light reflected off our bejeweled shapes that we had meticulously constructed out of fuchsia and turquoise. And how for a moment, outside a yellowed school hall, we were glorious—before the party was over.
Rebekah Roma is a Sicilian/Australian writer and law student from Meanjin (Brisbane). Her work won the 2021 Allen&Unwin Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the Better Read Than Dead Short Story Prize. Her poetry and prose have been published internationally in the magazines Verses, Archer, Butch is Not a Dirty Word, Glass, and Scratch That, among others. She currently lives in Tulmur with her wife, Eirin and her cat/son, Robert.