Alex as Well by Alyssa Brugman Page A

know because one day the hair was gone and her upper lip and the space between her eyebrows was a little bit red.
    I wonder if I will need to do that. I can ask Julia. She will take me to the girl place for dealing with unwanted hair.
    Julia’s beautiful. Curvy. She has thick, unruly hairthat’s always escaping.
    Alex groans, but imagine her when she’s thirty with two kids, all hairy and with a huge arse, he says.
    You’re such a bitch. You’re not satisfied with her now because of how she might look in fifteen years?
    You were thinking it too.
    That’s a stupid argument. No one is going to be hot when they are sixty.
    Amina will be elegant and regal even when she’s sixty.
    We’re going to marry Amina and live with her forever and ever.
    Excuse me, are you saying that your heart will go on?
    You bet your arse it will!
    Mrs Barksdale puts up a picture of a snail on the electronic whiteboard, and I feel dread. It makes me sweat. We’re going to talk about hermaphroditic gastropods. It’s in the curriculum—we did it at Joey’s. Everyone is going to snigger and yell out about how gross it is. I can just tell, and I will throw up.
    ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Julia asks.
    ‘I hate snails,’ I say.
    But it’s ok. Mrs Barksdale’s taking a different tack. She’s talking about hibernation and suspended animation. Phew!
    I sit with Sierra in visual art. We’re making a hen out of clay. The teacher says my hen isn’t very good. Apparently Sierra’s is a masterpiece. I don’t understand why her hen is better than mine.
    This one kid didn’t even make a hen, he made the letters to spell out, squawk! When the teacher asked what he was doing, he said, ‘Subverting the paradigm’.
    You could see her frozen with indecision, because she wasn’t sure if it was really clever, or if he was taking the piss. She gave him six out of ten, a bet each way, the same mark as me, and I actually made the chook like I was asked.
    I think about reminding the art teacher about that gallery that literally exhibited the work of a two-year-old, but I don’t think that’s going to make her like my hen any better.
    ‘It’s stupid and arbitrary,’ Sierra whispers to me, but secretly she’s pleased. I can tell by the sparkle in her eye and the sly way she smiles at her hen when she thinks I’m not looking.
    My hen rocks, so I don’t care what the teacher thinks. And I’m subverting the paradigm in ways she can’t even imagine.
    We are art, says Alex.
    Clucking oath!
    It’s hard to talk much in art metal since I’ve been allowed to swing a hammer, but Ty is helping me with my letterbox. Now that I’m a girl, it’s ok to be incompetent with tools.
    He likes me. He comes into my space. He shows me how to use the tools and his hands brush against mine. He asks me stupid questions so that we’ll keep talking.He says to me, ‘you have a really long neck’, and then he blushes and looks away.
    I don’t really know what to say to that, so I say, ‘Yeah, you too,’ and then we laugh.
    But then five minutes later he starts laughing again, because he’s remembered how I said he had a long neck (which he doesn’t) and then he can’t stop giggling, and then I laugh at him laughing, and he laughs at me laughing at him. Susannah cocks an eyebrow at us, and I suck my cheeks in like a goldfish, trying not to laugh, which sets him off again.
    Then he says, ‘You could be a supermodel.’
    I curl up my lip.
    ‘What, you don’t want to be a supermodel?’ he asks incredulously.
    ‘What’s wrong with being just an ordinary model? Why do they have to be super as well? You can’t just be superhumanly tall, and supernaturally thin, you also have to be super .’ I lift up my leg and punch the air, as if I’m flying.
    He considers for a moment. ‘You could be, though. If you wanted to.’
    Ty’s going to hate you, Alex warns me. Ty’s going to punch your head in. He will be so filled with disgust and rage it will overcome him.