Yellow by Megan Jacobson Page A

and her bare feet; I think of Boogie, and what he said that made both our words crack with sadness. I think of Lark, playing with the dog who wasn’t Mitzy, and then the surf and being throttled by blue. I think of my mother, the drowning beetle. And I think of Noah. I turn my face up towards the showerhead and I think of Noah. I think of how he looks like he got caught in a shower of freckles. Our shoulders when they were almost touching. The way he smelt. How he wanted my opinion. How he thought I was like Piggy.
    Jesus, Kirra. He thinks you’re like Piggy.
    I turn the shower off and wrap the towel around me, then wipe the fog from the mirror so I can see my face. My hair, clumping down my back in a shade of dirty yellow. My small face with its pointed chin. My small nose. My regular-sized lips. And then my eyes. I squint to try to see if I’d be pretty if they were smaller. In this fuzzy, squinty reflection I do look pretty, in a way. But then I open my eyes properly again, and the size of them, the yellowness of them, scares all the beauty away. It chases it right from my face.
    I think of what Boogie told me. I wonder how I can draw blood with my words. What does that even mean? I think of Cassie, and Lou and the rest of them, and I think of the words they use on me, and I think of The Circle, and how it felt like their words were scratching me right up, except the scratches were all on the inside, and how it felt as raw and painful as it would have felt if they’d been using their fingernails to claw at my skin. Maybe more. Real scratches heal. Those words they used, they drew blood all right. I need to use those types of words, Boogie said, and I wonder where I can find them.
    My reflection stares back at me, and it almost scares me, how intense that girl in the mirror looks.
    â€˜Oh yeah, Cassie? Well at least the bleach hasn’t leached into my brain,’ I whisper to the girl in the mirror. The girl in the mirror nods back at me. I whisper a little louder.
    â€˜Is that foundation you’re wearing, Tara, or did a concrete mixer unload itself on your face?’
    The girl in the mirror can taste the blood. And she likes it.
    â€˜Hey Sasha, is your favourite colour beige? It should be, because you’re so generic.’
    The eyes staring back at me flash.
    â€˜Hey Lou, Cassie doesn’t like you, she just thinks of you as an attack dog who’ll lunge when she says sic ’em!’
    The eyes in the mirror aren’t flashing anymore, they’re on fire. They look like two yellow fires ablaze on my face. I look tough. I look fierce. And I scare myself.
    I look away, then I peek back at my reflection through my eyelashes. Do I really want to be a person who has claws?

The next few days pass by in a cloud of chalk dusk and the smell of old textbooks. Noah’s gone back to pretending I don’t exist, and Willow’s by my side, cracking dry asides while Cassie and the others eye us warily. I know they’re watching us, trying to figure out their next game plan. As two united targets, we’re harder to strike and I know this ceasefire is a temporary respite as they regroup and try to figure us out, but I appreciate it all the same. I know the lull won’t last. Even Damien has begun to call Cassie ‘Nipples’, and she’s exuding a hair-trigger intensity that Sasha and Tara are bearing the brunt of. I know the lick of revenge isn’t far away.
    Lunch breaks. We wander through the quadrangle and a chip comes flying through the air and bounces off Willow’s forehead. An ibis has wandered in from the bush to poke its long nose through a rubbish bin, having completely forgotten that it was once worshipped by Egyptian kings and it should be ashamed. Seeing the chip, the ibis flaps down to snatch it from her feet, and we jump back from the ugly thing. Cassie laughs.
    â€˜What’s the matter, Willow? I thought you liked taking our scraps? Maybe