Points Of View

I met Garrett when I was eight years old.

It was during my transition from Barbies to Bratz, from zippers to buttons, and from play dates to sleepovers that the two year age gap I had with my brother started to seem less like a crack and more like a crevasse. It was back when I swapped corduroy dungarees for denim skirts, when I started reading Enid Blyton; when I didn’t want to play dinosaurs and when he didn’t want to play scrabble. Tom went from being my partner in crime to my pesky kid brother. It was then that we started fighting; whether it was what we watched on telly or who sat in the middle, we’d scream and scratch and slap til we were pink in the face.

The day I met Garrett was the third day of second term, a Wednesday, and I was the first to be dismissed from class. With my chair pushed neatly under my table, my posture tall and straight as my stubby little legs would allow, and my lips zipped into the straight line of silence, my teacher deemed me ready to leave and I was first out of the classroom. It was my perfectly formulated plan to leave early so I could sprint to the car and plonk my bottom in the middle seat of our green Nissan Patrol.

That miserable day in fall, when the leaves were more brown than crimson and the sun hid more than shone, my place in the middle was already taken.

“Who are you?” I frowned, eyeing the squat little boy with his buttocks in my seat.

He watched me curiously through kitten-blue eyes before jamming an index finger up his nose. I grimaced, hopping into the place next to him and squashing up against the door.

“This is Garrett,” Tom grinned, leaning forward so his head rested against the driver’s seat. “He lives in the Blue House. Mummy’s driving him home because his Mummy doesn’t have a car.”

I looked him over in disgust; wisps of blonde-brown hair, tulip lips pink from the cold, a small sprinkling of freckles over his nose, he was just a baby. There was a gust of frosty air as my mother flung the front door open and jumped behind the wheel, hair dishevelled beneath a thick, lilac beanie.

“Garrett,” I said sweetly, “That’s my spot.” I nodded at the booster seat holding his butt.

“Nah-uh!” Tom yelled, slamming his fist into the headrest in front.

“Shut up, pipsqueak!” I spat.

Tom glared, pouting his lips, his baby cheeks burning a fiery red.

“Pee-brain!”

“Geek-face!”

“Fart-breath!”

“Kids!” I shut my mouth, peering at my mother’s frazzled ebony gaze in the rear-view mirror. “I’m sick to death of you fighting! The middle is Garrett’s spot from now on.”

I growled. Little did he know, he’d also found a spot in my bad books. Yes, the issue at hand was insignificant and childish but I was, after all, an insignificant child.

Huffing, I sent Garrett my nastiest glare before turning around and pressing my face to the frosty windowpane.

“She used to be nice,” Tom assured him quietly. I glowered and sank lower in my seat.

*

Months past and Garrett’s mother still didn’t appear to have a car. I knew this because we were still driving him home. Then, when his mother got a job so she could buy a car, we stopped taking him home and he began staying at ours. He and Tom became good friends and soon he started staying for dinner and coming over on weekends.

As we got older, driving Garrett home became a constant part of our daily routine, his easy smile and kitten-blue gaze became a staple face in our lives. When I turned sixteen, Tom turned fourteen, and our crevasse shrunk back to a crack. I got my license, “the-middle” turned into shotgun, and shotgun turned into Garrett’s new spot. I banned Tom from sitting in the front because he always changed Death Cab to some deafening mathcore band from Finland and ate all my mints in one sitting. Garrett on the other hand, he liked Death Cab.
He also liked Incubus and Ivory, and understood the laxative effect that excess consummation of mints could have, and that, I guess, is how I started liking him.

At some point between junior and senior year, Garrett’s fingers found mine on the gearshift, and just like he’d slowly, unsuspectingly crept into our lives, he somehow crept into my good books too. Further, even. He crept all the way to fourth base.

When I finished senior year failing four out of seven subjects, it goes without saying that I didn’t have any immediate plans. Tom had dropped out of tenth grade and was training to become a mechanic, so I guess academic success was a recessive gene in the O’Keeffe pool. It wasn’t that we weren’t smart kids; we just weren’t too good at school. I’m not sure what Tom’s excuse was, but in my case, the rules, the behavioural expectations, the teachers and their preaching, it all stopped making sense around my fifteenth birthday, and I wasn’t one to self-motivate. Throw in my father being away all the time and how hard it was for me to take my mother seriously and that’s me failing nearly sixty percent of twelfth grade.

That was around the time Tom found out about Garret and me and the same time my mother threatened to kick me out unless I found a job and started paying her rent. I had to grow up and be my own person, she said. I was pretty sure that being my own person was what had me flunking high school in the first place, but I kept that to myself. She was still unaware of how many times I had bunked class to spend the day thrift shopping and reading Victorian novels by Tempe Town Lake.

Daddy O’Keeffe was spending nine months of twelve doing business in the Middle East by then, and I wasn’t completely convinced my parents were even still together. When New Year came around I’d found myself a steady job at Hoppo’s Inn, a bed and breakfast owned by Australian backpacker Gary Hopwood and his Tempe wife, Linda. I was becoming my own person, and that meant moving out. A little while later I started paying half the monthly fee for a studio apartment I shared with Garrett when he wasn’t touring with The Maine, much to the dismay of his mother. Garrett was a whole year and six months younger than me; he would have still been in eleventh grade if it weren’t for the band. He was too young to be living away from his mama, she’d said. He didn’t agree, and I heard her calling me a cradle-snatching puma from where I was standing outside on their front lawn.

“Cougar,” I corrected, yelling through the mesh door, “The term is ‘cougar’, and I’m really not that old Mrs. Nickelsen.”

So Garret moved in, and apart from all the time he spent on the road, I was pretty happy. Back then that was like four or five months of the year, and I could deal with that. It was when I started seeing my dentist more often than I saw my boyfriend that things started to get ropey. And, with my mediocre job and its chicken-shit pay, I started to wonder what I was doing it all for. I started to wonder where the fuck my life was going.

The morning I threw up on the Persian carpet in Linda Hopwood’s office, I was sure that was it. I was sure I would be fired, and I was almost grateful for it because I knew getting fired was the only thing that would encourage me to look for a new job and get me out of the mindless rut I’d lodged myself in. Three years later and I still hadn’t mastered the art of self-motivation.

It horrified me when Linda sniffed at the air and I thought I’d puke again. In fact, I did puke again. When I was done, she brought me a towel with which I wiped my face, before showing the way to her private bathroom and leaving me with a hotel toothbrush that was too soft and a tiny tube of toothpaste that wasn’t enough after I barfed for the third time that morning. When she came back she was holding a long pink box that I recognised from the Inn’s small kiosk, in between the condoms and the sanitary napkins and diagonally across from the revolving wire rack of dusty postcards. I threw up again.

When a little yellow smiley face appeared on the stick, I didn’t know what the fuck it was smiling about. I was a twenty-one year old high school failure, with a mediocre job and chicken-shit pay that saw her boyfriend on buzznet more than in real life. But, as the days wore on and the doctor clarified that yes, I was indeed a month knocked up, and Garrett was much happier than I thought he’d be, and Tom said he couldn’t wait to be an uncle, I started to think that maybe this was the motivation I needed all along. The lump of dividing cells in my cervix was where my life was going, and, hell, it felt good to finally know.

Then one January I gave birth to my daughter, Kadence O’Keeffe-Nickelsen, and I was happy again.

But we all know that can never last very long.