Mika and Max Read online

  She wondered what Max was doing now. When she’d gone down under the house to find him after lunch he’d been wearing his father’s hat and a huge pair of gardening gloves, and was changing out of his shoes into gum boots. “Are you playing dress-ups, Max?” she’d asked, but he’d been completely absorbed in pulling on the boots, and acted as though he hadn’t heard.

  Mika looked around to make sure her mother wasn’t watching and took out her phone. She typed autism into the Google search bar and clicked on the first link that came up. “A person with autism may look as though they are feeling less than a normal person, but in fact they are feeling more. To experience what it might be like to have autism, close your eyes. What can you hear? What can you feel? Imagine there’s a volume knob inside you and turn your senses all the way up.”

  Mika closed her eyes. Her back felt warm and slick with sweat. The heat felt like a scratchy blanket on her hair and skin. She could smell flowers and sweat and hot concrete. Birds were calling above the hubbub of random sounds around her, which felt like the foam in the surf, buffeting her. She focused harder. Mika could feel the rough wooden slats of the wooden seat against her thighs and the grass prickling around her sandals. Her mouth felt dry. Her heart started thumping harder in her chest, or maybe she was just suddenly more aware of it beating. She gasped and opened her eyes.

  “Mika!” her mum was calling. “Come inside. They’re doing the group activity.”

  By the time she was finally set free, they’d named their puppets and done shadow work and about five other things Mika had already done before. She didn’t say so after the first time, though, because the puppeteer obviously didn’t like it.

  “Why do I have to do things that are too young for me?” Mika asked her mum as they were leaving.

  “There were kids who were seventeen and eighteen in that workshop. He’s quite famous,” her mother said as they entered the little hall where the performance was going to be held. Mika felt more awake after doing the autism exercise, but also more sensitive. Everything felt louder, now, and more crowded.

  They were already seated halfway down the back of the little wooden auditorium when Sam and Max and Colette came in, and Max chose to sit down next to Mika. They all ate ice creams while they waited for the performance to begin, and Mika thought the salted caramel tasted unusually intense. Max lounged in his seat, licking his ice cream and looking around at everyone, and when the lights went down he gave the rest of it to his father and folded his hands in his lap. He focused intently whenever the music was playing, she noticed, even though he seemed distracted the rest of the time. She liked trying to imagine how he might be experiencing it. She liked it when he laughed at the jokes with the other kids, and especially when he turned to smile at her. A woman came out to sing. Her voice was beautiful and Mika felt Max take her hand. She looked down at their hands clasped together and for a moment she felt the same way she had at the school concert – as if she didn’t know what her fingers were doing – and she almost snatched her hand away, but she forced herself to keep holding it there.

  Max’s fingers were warm and dry. He turned to look at her and his gaze was calm, as if he was reassuring her, and Mika relaxed again. She knew she shouldn’t mind if he attracted attention to them, but she was worried that in this crowded hall she would. She’d seen some of the kids and adults staring at Max when they’d all filed in, and she hated to be conspicuous for any reason. He just held her hand, though, for the rest of the performance, and it was nice.

  Max smiled at her when the lights went up, but Mika noticed a woman staring at them, and her fingers opened and dropped his hand instantly, before she’d even decided if she would. Wait, she thought, reaching for Max’s hand again, but he was already standing up to leave.

  “That was nice of you,” said her dad as they walked out into the sunlight. Even though it was early evening, it was still stiflingly hot and bright.

  “No it wasn’t,” said Mika, walking off to find her mum.

  “I saw you holding Max’s hand,” said Arlo, lagging behind to walk with her on the way to the restaurant.

  “So?” said Mika. She felt tears spring to her eyes. “So what?” she said, more loudly than she’d intended.

  “What’s wrong?” Mika’s mother’s voice was harsh as she turned around. She was sweating, noticed Mika, and her face was flushed. “Mika?”

  “Arlo is always so mean to me!” said Mika furiously, wiping the back of her eyes with her hand.

  “I just said . . .”

  “Shut up!” said Mika, her voice rising so that a man walking past them turned to look. “Shut up shut up shut up!”

  “Mika!” said her mum.

  Arlo was staring at her now and so was Franny. Everyone was, she was sure. Mika walked on, her eyes fixed on the road in front of her. She could hear her mother whispering to Arlo and then she heard his footsteps, running to catch up with her.

  “I’m sorry, Mika, if I upset you. I didn’t mean to.”

  Mika shook her head. She was still crying. It felt as if now she’d started, she couldn’t stop.

  “It’s this heat,” said her mum. “It will cool down once it’s dark,” she said, putting her arm around Mika’s shoulders.

  “It’s not because of the heat,” said Mika, shrugging her mother’s arm away and pushing her fingers into her eyes to try to stop her tears.

  “Then what is it?” asked her mum.

  “I don’t know,” said Mika, sobbing even harder and shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mika whispered to Max, as they waited outside the restaurant for a table. Max looked at her and Mika felt sure he understood. Seeing right down behind her words to what she really meant. That was the good thing about not having words, thought Mika, and not using them. He really got it. He heard the vibration of the words and how you meant them, not just what you said.

  Franny and Arlo had been doing the polka, but now Arlo banged into a table and he and Franny fell over. Was there a special boarding school where you could send unwanted siblings? Mika wondered, as all the adults crowded around. But of course she’d feel guilty if they did that, she realised. She’d feel responsible.

  “You’re lucky to be an only child,” she whispered to Max, and then she thought what a mean thing that was to say. Was this what it was like living with someone who didn’t speak? Where everything you said echoed back to you, so you had to be really careful to only say what you mean, and then to mean it all the way down to the bottom of the words? She looked at Max again and he looked back. Their eyes were locked now and Mika knew he was understanding.

  “I’m sorry I dropped your hand at the puppet show, Max,” said Mika. “I feel self-conscious and weird when people look at me, sometimes. Is that how you feel, sometimes, too?”

  He blinked.

  “And I’m sorry I said that about being an only child. What I mean is, I wish you were my brother.”

  He smiled. He smiled! Mika felt a thrill in her chest. He understood.

  They sat at a table outside on the footpath, next to a roundabout with a tree in the middle of it. The tree was covered in crochet, so it looked as though it was wearing a spider web. Sam said it had been there since Halloween. It was guerilla knitting, Colette said. Franny thought that meant it had been knitted by a gorilla, and even once it was explained to her that it just meant no one knew who had done it, she was still laughing hysterically when the waitress came to take their order.

  “She’s beyond tired,” said her mum. “I should take her home.”

  “I’ll come too,” said Arlo.

  “But that means you won’t have dinner with us,” said her dad, frowning. He’d brought a bottle of wine, and Mika knew he was looking forward to sitting around with Sam and Colette and her mum, talking. But her mum probably wanted to be on her own, thought Mika. She didn’t really like doing social things, and she was no good at pretending she was having fun when she wasn’t. Like Mika.

  “She’s going to laugh like that all evening if I don’t take her,” said her mum.

  “Okay,” said her dad, giving in.

  As Arlo and Franny and her mum walked away down the street Mika almost said ‘I want to come too.” Her head ached from crying, and they were probably going to have pasta with Parmesan and butter for dinner, which was her favourite. But Max looked lonely sitting there on the opposite side of the table with empty chairs on either side of him, and so Mika shook her head brightly when her dad asked her if she wanted to go with them, and said “Actually, I really want to try the sourdough pizza crust.”

  “That’s my girl,” said her dad.

  While he went inside to find the waitress, Sam took Max for a walk, leaving Mika alone with Colette. Colette asked her what year she was in at school.

  “Year seven, at an all-girls school,” said Mika. She should just record a series of answers on her phone, and that way whenever adults talked to her she could just press “play”. “I also do netball, debating, and the Maths Olympics.”

  “Mika’s a bit of a workaholic, actually,” said her dad, who had come back to get his wallet from his jacket.

  “No I’m not,” said Mika, but so quietly that maybe he didn’t hear. She just wanted to be a part of things, even though lately it felt more and more like she wasn’t a part of anything.

  “And tell me,” said Colette, once her dad had gone back inside again to pay. “Do you still have girls called The Popular Girls?”

  Mika nodded.

  “And are the only people who actually like them boys?” Colette laughed harder when Mika nodded again and took a sip of her wine. “Isn’t that amazing? I wonder if there ever won’t be Popular Girls?”

  It made Mika feel a bit better to think that there had always been girls like that, and that Colette hadn’t been one of them, either.

  “What kind of a girl are you?” Colette asked.

  “Just a normal girl,” said Mika. She hoped so, anyway.

  “Flying below the radar,” said Colette, with a sharp nod of her head. “Wise move. You know, in my opinion all that boy stuff can wait until you leave school. At your age it’s much more important to have friends.”

  But she had been at her new school for ten months now, and so far she hadn’t met anyone she’d call a real friend, thought Mika. She sat with a group of girls at lunchtime, but all they did was talk about homework and play handball. Chloe and Pearl hardly ever invited her to do things on weekends anymore and when they did, like this weekend, she was usually busy, and couldn’t come. Although that was partly why she’d signed up for so many extra activities in the first place, so it wouldn’t be so obvious that for the rest of the time she didn’t have anything to do. Except of course when she did have something to do, and then she couldn’t do it, because she was doing the thing that was meant to cover up the fact that she wasn’t doing anything. It was a conundrum. She liked that word. It sounded like what it was. A problem that you couldn’t find a solution for.

  Sam and Max had come back now, and the adults were drinking wine and talking. Max sat slumped between Colette and Sam. He had big circles around his eyes, and when the pizza came Colette began feeding it to him on a fork like a baby.

  “He can do it,” said Sam.

  “He’s tired, though,” said Colette.

  Maybe she just preferred the company of adults, thought Mika, as she ate. She liked the way they didn’t dig at each other with comments where you couldn’t tell if they were being sarcastic or not, and it was restful here, without Arlo or Franny. Or maybe it was restful without her mother, thought Mika, guiltily. She was glad she hadn’t been there listening to the conversation she’d just had with Colette. If she had she might have contradicted Mika when she said she was just a normal girl, or told Colette that Mika had lots of friends. It felt to Mika as though her mum was hanging over her sometimes, a bit like the way she thought Max might feel with Colette.

  He had finished his pizza and was playing with his fork, banging it lightly against the table.

  “Stop it, Max,” said Sam, interrupting his conversation with Mika’s dad to take Max’s fork away. Max reached for his glass of water and began drinking, but instead of swallowing and putting it back down again, he kept it pressed to his mouth and moved his head around, staring at them all through the liquid in the glass.

  “Stop it, Max,” said Sam, taking the glass away.

  “When he gets tired, things become stims,” Colette explained to Mika and her dad.

  “What’s a stim?” Mika asked.

  “It’s anything he can use to help himself relax,” said Colette. “Just as you might twirl your hair or bite your nails or look at your phone, Max spins things, or creates a rhythm with something – like his fork for example – or looks at water. The trouble is, sometimes we think doing those things is calming us down, but really they’re winding us up. Max!” said Colette, as, quick as a flash, he tried to grab his fork again. They glared at each other. Then Max leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the cheek, grabbing his fork at the same time. He sat back, and this time began tapping it lightly against his leg, like a compromise.

  “You’re outrageous,” said Colette, but she was smiling.

  “It works though, doesn’t it?” said Sam.

  Max leaned against Colette and closed his eyes, as though he were relaxing into an armchair.

  Mika smiled. Max could be funny, she thought, playing to the crowd – but also making sure things were the way he liked them, she noticed, especially with Colette.

  But she wished Colette hadn’t reminded her of her phone, thought Mika, as they all got up to leave. The only thing worse than no one being able to message you because you didn’t have a phone, she was beginning to realise, was finally having a phone and no one messaging you.

  Birds were calling loudly as they walked home, and the palm trees and the sky were all lit up as though they were about to catch fire. Mika wished that Max would hold her hand again, but he was leaning against his father and limping slightly. His legs suddenly looked too skinny, and his feet looked way too big. His face looked tense, as though he was working at making his features hold together, and he was flapping his hands and jerking his head as he walked. He seemed like a different boy from the one she’d been playing on the swing with this morning.

  “Max falls apart a bit when he’s tired,” said Sam, catching Mika’s eye.

  “Don’t we all,” said her dad, and they all laughed.

  This afternoon Max had walked into the theatre and eaten an ice cream and begun watching the show almost like a normal person, thought Mika, as she got ready for bed. But then the way he took her hand when that beautiful song started was completely different. He did it so casually, just picking it up and holding it, as though it was no big deal. And he was watchful and observant of everything, not just what was happening on stage. He gazed at someone’s shoe for a long time, and then at the crack of light coming through the door, and then back at the stage, as though they were all equally interesting. And this evening, during dinner, Mika kept catching him looking at her with the same expression, his eyes curious and watchful. Not friendly, but not unfriendly either.

  What she liked about Max, Mika decided, was that he seemed to be accepting of her, and that made it easy to be accepting of him. He wasn’t thinking how weird she was or how uncool she was, the way she suspected most other kids were. The way she was sure Arlo was, and even Franny sometimes, too. Max was curious about her, and that made it okay for her to be curious about him.

  “You know, I used to worry a lot when Max was younger about the fact that he would never be normal,” Colette had told Mika, before dinner. “But then I realised he was handling it, and that it was me who wasn’t. So now, whenever I’m feeling awkward, or as though I’m not fitting in, I just ask myself, ‘Why am I afraid of being different?’”

  “And why are you?” asked Mika, forgetting to be shy.

  “Because I’m afraid someone will laugh at me.” Colette shrugged. “Or even worse, that I’ll feel lonely. But the thing is, the more you try to fit in, the lonelier you’ll feel if you’re not being yourself.”

  She would try to be more like Max, Mika decided, lying in the dark after her parents had kissed her and turned out the light. She would try to be more accepting and curious. She would take risks and try things and not worry so much, just for this weekend.

  Mika opened her eyes, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. She was lying on a mattress on the floor and she could see sunlight coming in through the venetian blinds. She had dreamed about Matt, she remembered, telling her about something to do with Max and her piano, but now she felt it swimming away from her, like a silver fish down a stream. She opened her phone. Pearl and Chloe would still be sleeping, but she could still check on her favourite accounts.

  “Mika, I can hear you,” her mother said. Her face was covered by the doona, but you could see her fair hair, fanning out over the pillow.

  “Sorry,” whispered Mika, silencing her phone.

  She could hear Max singing inside the house somewhere, and the sound of his sweet voice going up and down the scale made her smile. He sounded happy and chatty, sometimes babbling syllables and sometimes singing a note. He was saying something interesting, if you could work out his language.