After Zora Neale Hurston
Tima carried a long-legged ease about her, thundering strides of a leader, full lips and wide eyes and melanin. She would raise her hand like the switch in Adelaide weather, abrupt and sure, delivering answers in Maths like they were meant to come from her lips and her lips only.
So today’s Tima was a surprise to the gaping desks, wide-eyed lockers and whispering doors of the Year 12 wing. This Tima glided, wistful, wandering strides of a dreamer, set lips and closed eyes and chagrin. She raised her hand like a jacaranda branch buffeted by dust winds and turned her palm to the yearning sun’s caress.
Would Faro hold this hand?
#
After the last Economics class in her high school career, Tima had heard her name in the current. It ripped through the river of corridors, coursing through the crowded halls of the senior school in giggles and fragments. Tima felt it carrying her, pulling her apart and smashing her back together like the many times she had said good-bye and keep-in-touch over the years. She had clung to her parents as they lurched around the globe, tenure-less academics who chased new contracts with no hope of extension. Judging from her class notes on the gig economy, Tima saw herself also chasing work, pulled by whatever current would take her.
Setting aside those dismal thoughts, Tima latched onto her freckled friend Yasmin, who had sifted through all the whispers and found the source.
‘Faro said he likes you in front of everyone in Physics.’
The rumour shifted faces depending on who you asked. Some said that Faro had casually expressed that he wouldn’t mind dating Tima. Some insisted that Faro had compared some random law of physics to his attraction to Tima. One Physics kid even claimed that he’d written a song titled ‘My Heart’ after her name.
With exams coming up, Tima decided she didn’t want more uncertainty. She stomped over to Faro’s table. ‘Do you think I’m cute?’
Faro raised his eyebrows, sparse and shy compared to his grin. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then let’s grab coffee after school.’
Faro beamed. ‘My pleasure.’
Collective gasps and whispers ignored, Tima strode back to her table, unsure of her footing.
#
It was already a thirty-degree afternoon, sun brazing their skin like a prelude to summer. At least the flies hadn’t caught on yet, deciding to leave them mostly alone. Shade hung over them in leaf patterns. Tima basked in the cool respite, grateful for the familiarity of it. She exhaled and let go of six years’ worth of tension, of bracing herself for the next move. To the Bahamas, Canada, the States. The other side of the world.
Her family had trialled one parent leaving, the rest staying. Then both leaving. Once they had split in two groups. Tima had left with her mom and come home a year later to an older brother she no longer recognised. From then on, Tima had insisted on making all moves together.
Six years felt like trusting solid ground. Six years was keeping her friends for longer, forming bonds that would not break over disjointed messages. Now where she went depended on her ATAR.
Senior residents walked by and smiled their way, mistaking Faro and Tima for siblings heading to the shops. Faro strode with a slight smile on his face, looking far ahead. Tima had been watching him from afar since Year 9 when he moved in from Perth. The way he floated through friendship groups and expertly avoided quarrels reminded her of her older brother when he was in Year 12.
‘How do you have so many friends?’ Year 7 Tima had asked him.
‘I don’t,’ her brother had replied, absently twisting a finger around his locs. ‘I have good acquaintances. Last time I made friends was in Toronto.’
That’s where he lived now, interning at a software company. Like her brother, Faro carried himself like he didn’t need her. Tima could leave and he would still get that coffee. She felt alone while he could walk without yearning for someone to join him. He could make friends in Toronto and simply make other friends when they stopped responding.
Faro turned to her, as if he could hear her thoughts. ‘I’ve always wanted to get to know you better.’
Tima doubted that. She had watched him for too long. ‘Same,’ she said. ‘I’ve always had one burning question.’
‘What?’
‘Why did your parents name you “Good-bye”?’
Faro grinned and the sun flared with glee. ‘“Farewell” can be like wishing someone good health,’ he explained. ‘“May you fare well.”’
Faro enunciated each word, making it sound like even more of a good-bye than before. Tima anxiously glanced across the street, trying to spot more than the brief patches of purple on the skeletal jacarandas lining both sides. Of all the steady sights in Tima’s six years of high school, the jacarandas in full bloom were the most reassuring. They promised that everything would be alright, everything could settle.
Her parents were thinking of buying a house. Her laughing mother had finally started pooling savings now that she had become a Professor in Psychology. Her thin-lipped father received a grant for his research in Health Economics, his probation over.
It seemed like even Tima’s dream could happen: to run down a street bursting with jacaranda blossoms, hand in hand with someone she liked. Yasmin hated running.
‘Your name means “heart”?’ Faro asked. ‘Mu-Tima?’
‘Mutima,’ Tima corrected. ‘My parents wanted me to have a heart big enough to overcome all the challenges they’ve faced, and more.’
The Burnside Village doors swallowed them with a hiss, touchy about admitting hot air into the airconditioned shopping centre. Cool relief quickly turned cold as Tima remembered her Economics lesson.
‘It’s hard to compete out there,’ her teacher had said. ‘Having a PhD doesn’t guarantee a high-paying career as an academic or fancy consultant. I should’ve left the country for that.’
Her teacher had laughed about it, but Tima had heard the edge. She recognised it in her parents when they talked about what they should have done, where they should have moved, opportunities they had lost. In her father twisting a glass of whisky after a triple rejection from Turkey, Ireland, and Kentucky. Overqualified, they’d said. Her mom sighing over a pot of goat stew, wishing for the spices she had in the Bahamas.
‘Mutima?’
Tima stood at the front of the coffee line. Faro had his phone out, waiting. She processed the scene slowly: the ponytail barista, Faro’s order on the screen, the lady coughing behind her. She blinked, feeling like her brother’s old laptop struggling to load another page of a university website, her browser trying to cope with the twenty different tabs loading twenty different course pages.
Tima focussed. ‘I’ll have tea. Black. Any black tea.’
Faro paid for the order and refused her change. This was a date. Maybe she would hold his hand later. Maybe she would ask him about the jacarandas.
#
From the shops they walked to Burnside Library to study, but Tima struggled to concentrate. Faro was leaning in close to watch her solve a Maths problem. She could smell his skin, a sweet kind of warmth. Only her chair noticed how hard Faro gripped the back of it, fingers trembling.
He cleared his throat. ‘I admire you, Tima.’
Tima raised an eyebrow.
‘You can move forward, without relying on anyone.’ Faro lay his head on the table. ‘I want to know how you do it, how you can be so awesome.’
Tima blushed. ‘I just deal with moving a lot.’
The sun strained to see their expressions through the blinds: Faro grinning into his History textbook, Tima frowning at a Biology question. Gazing at the jacarandas outside, Tima wondered how long it would take for the sparse buds to reach full bloom. Faro noticed her sighing and suggested they take a break outside. They leaned back on the grass, enjoying an unexpected breeze.
‘Did you grow up in Perth?’ Tima asked.
Faro shook his head. ‘No, my family’s been moving around the Anglosphere for as long as I can remember.’
‘For work?’
‘Yep. Short-term contracts mostly.’
‘Same. My family’s moved around a lot because of work, too.’ Tima bit her lips. Of course. She was drawn to Faro because he was familiar. This was the first time she’d spoken to someone who truly understood what it was like to have to move lest an ocean of unemployment claimed them. Her family had almost drowned when her mother struggled through her Masters and her father sent application after application. Tima wanted to keep her head above water, wanted to stay on dry land.
‘I’m tired of moving,’ she said, ‘so I’m staying here for uni.’
Faro picked up a stick and dug into the grass with it. The sun held its breath, letting a droplet of sweat slink down Tima’s back. She almost didn’t ask. ‘What are your plans?’
Faro squinted at the sky, the way Tima often did when she was underwater, reaching for the light above the surface. ‘I’m moving back to Ireland.’
The sun exhaled. Tima ripped a patch of grass and let the pieces scatter in the breeze. She wasn’t shocked, but the revelation pressed against her lungs. It was like watching a current rip him away.
‘I see,’ she said.
Faro’s name really did mean good-bye.
#
They left at five when the library closed. Their houses were walking distance so they accompanied each other part of the way. The sun dipped lower yet loomed larger in the sky, as if it sensed the end but wished to absorb their last moments before they separated. Tima gripped her backpack straps, frustrated with herself. If only she hadn’t mentioned the future, then maybe she could have at least held his hand, the hand of someone who understood.
This way home took them along Portrush, where the wail of trucks and rush hour traffic made it hard to hold a conversation. They were two of the only students on the footpath, which made Tima feel even lonelier.
A large jacaranda loomed in front of them, the signpost at the mouth of a wide street that led back to the school. This was the street she wanted to witness with Faro, the street that would ease her worries when its rows of jacarandas reached full bloom.
Tima slowed her steps. Faro was going to Ireland. Leaving her. For the first time she wasn’t doing the leaving. It terrified her. More than her uncertain future, being left behind petrified her.
‘Faro, wait.’ Tima stopped walking. In her fear, she’d neglected to say exactly what was on her mind. ‘You know how jacarandas bloom all along that street before SWOTVAC?[1]’
Faro nodded.
‘They’ve been reaching full bloom later and later every year. SWOTVAC’s right around the corner and I’m worried I won’t see them at their best this year.’
Faro didn’t say anything, simply stepped closer so he could listen. Tima’s eyes did not waver. ‘When they’re in full bloom, I want to run all the way down and try to catch as many petals as I can before they fall.’ She rolled her lips. ‘Would you run with me?’
Faro grinned, relieved of their awkward tension. ‘Of course, but why wait?’
Tima blinked. ‘There are hardly any blossoms now, and it’s just prettier when they’re in full bloom—’
Faro extended a hand. Tima stared at it and broke into a smile, wrapping her palm around his.
Together they sprinted, hand in hand, looking like overgrown Year 7’s as they jumped for imaginary petals, caught fistfuls of laughs and sun.
[1] SWOTVAC: Study Without Teaching Vacation, a study period free of classes before exams.
