Adelaide

‘Hi, my name’s Zahra. My mum’s got cancer. Want to be my friend?’

I was only seven at the time, and felt the need to send every potential friend a snapshot of my life, a glimpse a picture I didn’t know they didn’t want to see. I didn’t notice the other girl, the other seven-year-old, perfect blonde hair stripped back in a neat plait, wrinkle her nose and writhe in discomfort.

‘What’s cancer?’ One of them asked, with such an inflection that it seemed like she thought it was contagious, a disease that could be passed on by word of mouth. Another just scoffed and walked away, long hair swishing behind her head.

‘Try not telling everyone I have cancer, dear,’ Mum said, cold, spindly hand on my back. I used to like it when she did that. Now, it just felt like a hawk’s talons, bloodless and sharp. ‘I don’t think they appreciate it.’

‘Okay, mum,’ I said diligently, because Dad had told me not to annoy her.

‘Pardon?’

‘I said okay.’

She pasted a weak smile on her lips and waved her hand, leaning back in her bed. Her eyelids, almost translucent, no longer weighed down by thick eyelashes, drooped shut. That meant it was time for me to go. I hesitated a moment, inspecting the fleshy pits beneath her eyes, so dark that they looked like bruises. She once had honey-brown hair that sat in waves by her shoulders, but all that was left were a clump of strands tucked beneath her beanie. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could picture them: dark blue, edging on grey, like swirling pools of a cloudy day.

I hopped off the edge of her bed and walked away, listening to the faint whistling of her breath in and out of her nose. It was soft, too weak to even move a rose petal. What would happen when it stopped entirely?

I heeded to her advice, until it began to drift from my mind, her words becoming fuzzy and melting into one another. But I did, in a way, listen to her, boldly approaching another girl in my class, a new introduction this time: ‘Hi, I’m Zahra. My mum is dead. Want to be friends?’

I didn’t understand death, or funerals, until I had been to one. There was something so fragile about her body in the casket, hands neatly clasped in front of her, bony fingers intwined like fine wool. Her skin was waxy. Her chest, which shallowly rose and fell like waves of the ocean, was still. And my dad, hands still oily from work, a shadow across his chin, was crying. It was in that moment I knew something was very wrong.

He saw me watching with a blank expression on my face.

I stared at her hands, wondering how cold they were now.

‘It’s okay to cry,’ Dad told me.

I didn’t.

Amazingly, the girl smiled. She had full, rosy cheeks with a tiny indent in one, a dimple. Her chestnut hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, and she had misty blue eyes. I could see my reflection in them.

‘I’m Adelaide,’ she replied, with an openness that made me feel instantly at ease. ‘I think we’ll be best friends.’

I heard Dad crying again that night. I padded softly into his room, gently nudging the door open.

‘Zahra. Hi.’ He said, dabbing his eyes with a tissue. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

‘Why are you crying?’

Dad just grunted. He wouldn’t look at me, as if that would stop me from seeing the redness that had engulfed his face, leeching into his skin, creeping into the corners of his eyes.

I tiptoed back to my room. My foot nudged against the bin on the way back. It was a cloud of white, crumpled tissues.

When I woke up the next morning, Dad was already gone.

Adelaide was mystical. She lived alone at home –both of her parents were gone, and her older cousin took care of her, but was never around.

‘I just do what I want, when I want to,’ she said proudly. ‘I can watch T.V. however late I want.’

‘Huh,’ I said.

Adelaide grinned. Her eyes were spell-binding, but icy, and goosebumps rippled across my skin.

‘My dad spends a lot of time at work,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t come home until late. He doesn’t care what I do.’

It wasn’t a complete lie, I reasoned. He’d been preoccupied lately. And my mum was gone. She was in that overly-oiled wooden box beneath the ground. I watched them cover her up with dirt.

She would have hated it.

‘So, your house is free?’ Adelaide asked.

I nodded.

‘Okay. I’ll come over after school then.’

I arched my eyebrows, but didn’t have it in me to object. She was enchanting, like an exotic drink, one that fizzed on your tongue but left a bitter taste behind. I ignored the unease gnawing at my gut. She was my friend. Friends had play-dates all the time.

The house was messy when Adelaide came over. Clothes were strewn across my bedroom floor, unwashed, the beds were unmade and Dad had tracked oily footprints across the carpet. They still looked wet.

Adelaide didn’t seem to mind. I watched her expertly navigate through the dirty dishes piled high in the sink, grab herself a juice box from the fridge, plop herself down on the sofa, and prop her legs up on the coffee table.

‘Careful,’ I murmured, but with not enough vigour that she would hear.

‘Pardon?’ Adelaide turned to face me, straw still in her mouth. As she turned, her foot brushed against the picture that was on the coffee table. It fell in slow-motion, remaining vertical for a split second on the floor before it tipped back and collided with the leg of the table. There was a splintering crack. My heart leapt into my throat.

‘Oh, the picture –’ I stammered, my stomach plummeting. Adelaide picked it up, brushing away broken glass. ‘Don’t –don’t touch it –’

‘It’s broken.’ She said it matter-of-factly, but I could see the corner of her lip quivering. I took it from her. It was a photo of Mum and me, sitting by the pool a few summers ago. It was back when my hair was still blonde-streaked before it had darkened to an ugly brown. I was perched beside her in a squat, and she had a hand on my shoulder, too-large sunglasses pushed high on the bridge of her nose.

The photo was fine, but the frame was broken. The glass plate across the front had shattered, sprinkling tiny fragments of glass across the carpet.

‘Yep.’ I said gravely. ‘Definitely broken.’

Suddenly, Adelaide burst out laughing. I joined in. The photo was forgotten between hiccupping gasps for air wiping tears from the corners of our eyes. At some point, it slipped between my fingers, like sand in the wind, dropping to the floor among shards of glass as big as my thumb.

Mum had always made me leave when there was glass on the floor. When I broke something.

‘Go to your room, Zahra. Don’t want to step on any pieces of glass. I’ll have to dig it out of your foot with pliers!’

She was wrong. Blood from my knees smeared against the carped where I was kneeling, but none of the glass got under my skin.

We kept laughing.

I never cleaned up the photo. A day later, I heard the vacuum running late at night and saw tiny chips of glass in the bin in the morning. The photo appeared on Dad’s nightstand, propped up by a book.

Dad said nothing to me, but I could see the crease between his eyes deepening, the patches of waxy flesh beneath his eyes growing more purple.

Adelaide pressed a walkie-talkie into my hand at school.

‘So, we can stay in touch,’ she said simply, at my widening eyes. We saw each other every day at school. But she seemed intent on talking with me more.

I didn’t have a phone. Mum had never let me.

‘You’ve got no need for one, dear,’ she had said. ‘Live your life without one. You’ll see when you’re older how empty those screens are.’

Adelaide had a phone. She told me if I got one we could call after school. I told her my dad wouldn’t like that idea.

She didn’t like that response.

‘Just convince your dad,’ she said bitterly. ‘I thought we were friends. Don’t you want to text?’

She brought the walkie-talkie the next day. It had a range of three-point-five kilometres. Adelaide didn’t tell me where she lived. But she said it was ‘in range’.

‘I can hear you,’ I hissed into the machine after school.

‘You need to say “over”,’ she reminded me. Her voice crackled and popped, like an open flame.

‘Oh, right,’ I mumbled. ‘Over.’

Suddenly there was a knock on my door. My dad was home –how had I not heard his heavy boots thudding down the hall?

‘Zahra,’ he said. His voice sounded deflated, and there was a smear of grime leading from his forehead through his hair. ‘Who are you talking to?’

‘Adelaide,’ I said. Dad’s brows knitted together, and at the same time, I heard Adelaide sigh on the other end. I held up the walkie-talkie and pressed the button. ‘Say hi to my dad, Adelaide.’

The radio hissed. No voice came out. Adelaide was silent.

‘Huh,’ I said, my cheeks flushing pink. Why hadn’t she said anything?

‘I’m making dinner,’ Dad grunted dismissively. His lips were drawn into a thin line, and his hand lingered on my door a moment longer than it needed to, like he had something else to say. But he didn’t.

Then he was gone.

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ I said, my mouth up against the microphone. I felt a knot forming in my stomach.

‘I have to go,’ Adelaide said suddenly. She didn’t wait for a goodbye. The walkie-talkie clicked and her voice vanished like it had never been there at all.

‘You’re spending a lot of time with your friend, these days.’ Dad remarked. There was a twinge of something beneath the gravel in his voice –accusation, maybe, something cold and hard. It made my skin crawl.

‘Why can’t I?’ I retorted. I shovelled more pasta noodles into my mouth. They seemed to be both hot and cold at the same time, fire and ice, a battle raging on my tongue. ‘She’s my friend.’

Dad said nothing. The words were in his mouth, I could see, but he swallowed them, his face slacking in resignation.

‘I’m going to her house tomorrow,’ I continued. ‘After school.’

Dad looked up sharply. I could hear his teeth clench as he hissed, ‘no. You are not.’

‘Why not?’ I shrieked. I dropped my fork, and it clattered loudly in my bowl. The noise felt good. Adelaide always said I needed to stop being so quiet.

‘Because I said so, Zahra.’ Dad said, his tone clipped and exasperated. ‘God’s sake.’ He picked up his half-eaten bowl of pasta and dumped it in the bin. Oil from his hands had stained the fork.

‘No.’ I said, testing the word. I hadn’t said it before, not to my dad. But Adelaide had told me to stand up for what I wanted. Somehow, she knew this would happen. Maybe her ice-blue eyes could see into the future. ‘I’m going.’

‘No, you are not.’ Dad growled.

‘Why not?’ I was yelling, now, voice cracking, splintering, rage seeping through the cracks, injecting my words with venom. ‘Why won’t you let me go? Why are you keeping me from seeing Adelaide?’

‘Because she’s not real!’

His eyes blazed. I felt my throat bob. My mouth was a vacuum, suctioning all the words away.

‘She doesn’t exist, Zahra, she never has.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

‘Yes, she does,’ I said. But my voice wavered. It was thin paper, easily torn, whipped away by a strong gust of wind.

‘No. She doesn’t.’ He sighed, collapsing back into his chair, sagging into it like there was nothing holding his bones together. He fished his phone out of his pocket. I waited, a strange throbbing pulsing through my mind, like electricity. My ears rung.

He scrolled. Then he turned his phone to face me.

‘Is this her?’ His voice cracked. ‘Is this what Adelaide looks like?’

It took a second for my eyes to focus. The colours looked mottled and bleary, like they were just waking up.

It was an old photo.

The girl was wearing a chequered dress that reached just below her knees. She had brown hair, the colour of fine wood, and a dimple in one cheek. Her eyes were slate-blue and staring directly at the camera. A caption beneath it read, Addy, 1984.

It was Adelaide, though maybe a year younger.

‘Yes.’ I confirmed. Where did he get this photo?

Dad took his phone back. ‘This is your mother,’ he said fondly, ‘when she was young.’

I could hear my heart pulsing in my ears. I reached for my walkie-talkie –instinctively, to talk to Adelaide –but I had left it in my room.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I,’ Dad mumbled. His gaze was unfocused, unseeing, softly drifting over to the rubbish bin in the corner of the room. I could see the corner of the picture frame Adelaide had broken jutting out. The photo was missing; Dad had salvaged it.

Adelaide had broken that photo. Hadn’t she?

‘I saw you break it,’ Dad said, reading my thoughts. ‘You thought I wasn’t home. You started laughing, as if there was someone there.’

No. It couldn’t be true. I remembered Adelaide breaking it –but I also remembered clasping the pieces in my hands, a growing sense of dread gnawing at my gut, right after nudging it off the edge of the coffee table. Those felt like two separate timelines. Reality merging with the dreamworld. A bubbling cauldron mixing certainty with fiction, truth with lies.

It was a tangled ball of string. I could unravel it, if only I could find the end. I wasn’t wrong. Adelaide was my friend.

‘The walkie-talkie –’

‘You were talking to no one,’ Dad said. He didn’t sound angry –more like exhausted. A bone-deep weariness, a resignation. ‘I heard you.’

‘No, Adelaide is real,’ I said. But there was nothing behind those words –they were made of paper. Origami, like Mum and I used to do. Fold it nice and sharp, dear.

‘Come, Zahra,’ Dad interjected. He placed a warm hand on my back. I tried to shrug it off, but he didn’t let me. I had an urge, then, fleetingly, to talk to Adelaide. She’d know what to do. She always did.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked in a small, resigned voice.

He didn’t answer. I knew the answer.

I felt tears bubbling in my eyes, hot and spiky. A single teardrop, a jewel, slid down my face and clung to my shirt.

I didn’t flick it away. It had every right to be there.

That one was for Mum. The one after was for Adelaide.

‘Was she really never real at all?’

Dad chewed the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. He was taking me to the cemetery now, I knew.

‘She was,’ he conceded. ‘A long time ago.’