Two Fish

eleven || alaska

One car journey had been more than enough for Alaska, at least for one week. Though she was warming to Elver, she had no desire to get back in the cramped metal box. Her mother caught her before she got upstairs.

“Alaska? I was wondering where you’d gone. I didn’t know you were going out.” She stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded, a teacloth slung over her shoulder. Her hair was fastened in a messy ponytail and her face was bare. “Where’d you go?”

“I kind of had to say sorry to someone,” she said, scratching her elbow. “And you, too. I should have told you so, um, sorry.” A niggle in the back of her mind told her she was turning into Elver with her apologising and fumbling.

“You mean, you were seeing Elver?” her mother asked, straightening her poise.

“Yeah. I mean, I figured I owed him an apology.” She lifted one shoulder and squinted at her mother, awaiting an onslaught of disappointment for going away without leave: she was a woman who liked to know what was happening and when. Instead, she cracked a smile.

“Oh, honey, I’m so proud of you. That really means a lot to me,” she said, stepping towards Alaska and pulling her into a hug. “And how was it?”

Alaska smiled and tried to hide it, but her mother was an all-seeing woman. She touched her thumb to her daughter’s lips.

“What did I tell you? He’s a nice boy.”

Alaska nodded once, firmly. “He’s a nice boy.”

“Thank you, Lassie. And I do understand that you’ve done a big thing there, I do. I hope you know that, ok?”

“Ok. Thanks.”

“But next time, you really should keep your phone on you. I must have rung a thousand times.”

“Hyperbole alert.”

“Pedantic alert. Anyway, Minnie said she saw you in the park on her way home. I wondered.” She winked at her daughter and nudged her elbow. Alaska rolled her eyes. “You’d better keep me updated,” her mother added.

“Whatever, Mum. See you later.”

“Ok, hun. Are you eating with us tonight?”

Alaska searched for any bitterness in her mother’s voice: there was none. “Yeah, probably.”

“Good. Thank you, again.”

“God, Mum, it’s like you want me to marry him.”

Alaska’s mother shrugged. “You could do a lot worse. Anyhow, it’s nice enough to see you out of the house.”

“Yeah. Ok.”

She mounted the stairs to her bedroom and perched on her swivel chair, scooting it over to Gordon’s tank. He swam to the glass and she pressed her nose up against it, the shiny golden scales merging into an orange blob so close up. The glass was nicely cool, welcome after the stifling outdoor heat. That only added to the many reasons Alaska preferred being at home. Summer was the worst: everyone came out in throngs, trailing whining children and sticky fingers and monopolising the park.

“Guess what?”

Gordon said nothing. Obviously. He hovered for a moment in front of Alaska before disappearing behind a plastic bush.

“I went to see Elver today. He doesn’t have to know about you just yet.”

She pushed away to her desk where her phone was sitting, untouched all day. No messages, no missed calls but her mother's, so she rang her friend. Not Elver, no, but a girl called Hannah. She and Alaska had been friends since primary school, the kind of friend she just couldn’t seem to get rid of but wasn’t sure if she wanted to.

“Hannah?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Alaska,” she said, slowly turning in her swivel chair.

“Oh, hey. How’s it going?”

“Good, actually. I was wondering, do you want to come over tomorrow?” She turned to face Gordon.

“Sorry, Lass. I can’t,” Hannah said.

“Oh. Why?”

“I have a thing, at my grandma’s house.” Her excuse was poor.

“All day?”

“Yeah, we’re going tonight. Sorry, Lass. Maybe some other time.”

“Yeah. Some other time,” Alaska said. She ended the call and threw her phone on her bed, crying out in frustration. There was no thing. Hannah just didn’t want to be trapped in Alaska’s house when she could be out, having fun in town with people that liked the same things she did. It wasn’t even a good excuse – less than a week ago, Hannah had told Alaska that her grandmother (she only had one) was on a cruise until the end of July.

Alaska appreciated quiet fun somewhere with easily accessible exits, somewhere not so huge that she felt insignificant while not so small that she felt crowded. With Alaska came specifics; she was not an easy person to deal with and Elver had learnt that within a minute of their first encounter. She had shown him from the offset what she was like: there had been no sugar coating of her personality, no hiding of anything and yet he had been so desperate to see her again. While Alaska tried not to feel arrogant, her confidence was certainly boosted.

But she couldn’t complain for it was all her own doing: she didn’t see her friends because she’d spent so much time not wanting to that they had given up. They didn’t even need to make up elaborate excuses because they knew that the mention of a party or going to town would turn Alaska’s mind away from the matter. She would probably never want to go to a party and she wouldn’t be missing much, but was it too much to ask for her friends to set aside even half an hour for her? She had tried to be normal; her mother had tried to make her normal but it wasn’t worth the effort. Instead, she just blew off her siblings’ comments about her having no friends, their jibes at the sorry state of her inbox, because none of it was worth the effort.

All in all, she had given up.