I have been best friends with Margaret Kline since third grade, and my family is always too poor to give her a birthday gift. It’s become a slap to my face that her Princess Polly dress must be paired with a bracelet made of rejected fabrics. Our festival wrist-ticket must be proud that she has glued it on her journal, along with obscure love letters and receipts from brandy stores. This time, I want to create something that fits her class better.  Button bracelets are a current hit in an Australian teenager's life.

 

I use a string and put in some buttons. Maggie loves buttons, big and small, neon and pastel. Over the past months, I have been taking myself for a stroll around uptown Sydney, vast with people in suits and tailored shirts. I dare myself to go here because I would blur into the background anyway, as the city recedes and I never belong. I wanted to have a day in Maggie’s life just so I could know what she’s comfortable with, yet this has become a habit. If it’s a sunny day, I go to Wynyard because toddlers would play at the park and the buttons would be somewhere in the slide hub, or the puddles under the seesaw. If my parents work up late, I sneak to Surry Hills with my fake ID because if people there don’t mind making out with smokey breath, they wouldn’t mind losing a button from their clothes. I put all those buttons inside a pocket made out of organza Granny made me. “Put here your biggest secrets”, she said when I was seven.

 

I don’t ask for buttons from a tailor or a clothing store down the road because: 1) They don’t look like Maggie at all, 2) I’m too anxious to do so. I’m a social casualty without her, but she always says I pay attention to things that most people ignore. That’s supposed to be a compliment.

 

Her birthday is coming up this Friday, so I better have all my buttons ready. I need to collect the last three buttons because she got measles back in the summer and seriously wants to cover the scars on her wrist. None of my buttons is big enough for that. It’s time to return to the midtown, the nasty part of it, helping Granny at Quakers. My little brother, Luke, decides to drop out of high school to busk with his band. “College isn’t for anyone like me”, he says clearly, and as a cherry on top, she decides to work at the laundry. That’s just how poor we are. She doesn’t even want retirement. She pretends she doesn’t need it.

 

I feel bad to be relieved about this. At last, I can go back to “my roots” and exist. This is the most sensible circumstance where I can find “the perfect” buttons, obviously from the washing machine which is nonchalant about where people are from. The laundry is the meanest place you can be in because you can be excited about knowing a person in class and later that day, what you know about them would be somewhere else separated by fabrics. Linen and cotton tell more than said person.

 

For me, it’s even meaner that I need to make myself think I have spare money and only accepting buttons as a payment would make me the kind grandson.

 

I hate being cynical, but I’m not myself without it. Maggie thinks of it as my humor.

 

Working in the laundry on Wednesday after school would be something she posts on her streaks on Snapchat while folding T-shirts and predicting if they would end up in Vinnies Glebe a week later is another homework for me. I can’t mess this up. Much as I hate going to school, it is the only place where I don’t see our differences. We do the
same logs, and Maggie always needs my help with Algebra. “Charlie, please unload the dryer”. So I did, and I got my first button from a pink collared shirt they use to play bowling. I didn’t care where it came from, I just knew it was dying to be pulled out as the stitch was all over the place. I did it a favor, and whoever cared about this. Probably a boyfriend who hated this date, or a girl who was sick of being the register.

 

“Charlie, you’ll come to my party, won’t you?”

 

“Yeah, bet”, I answered. 16 is a very special age. We’ll get our own lives and see if we’re born blessed or cursed.

 

“Great. Eva will be helping me with my dress”. Eva Sycrause is the weird kid from her Arts class, with her Christmas Tree sweater or fringe jeans on a daily basis. I just hope her quirk doesn’t affect Maggie, I can’t see her in anything other than crop tops and midi skirts. I don’t think I have talked to Maggie this week, yet I noticed she’s been listing names I don’t know for her invitations. I can’t lose my only friend.

 

This is why I had been busying myself in the laundry with Granny on Thursday. It was surprisingly easy to deceive old people behind heaps of fabrics they’ve probably known for years. I made up reasons for handling cashmere and denim jackets, “It’s something my friends wear in school. There’s probably cheat notes in their pockets”. I knew nothing about the people behind them, I just knew the clothes that looked stylish and got glimpses of Maggie wearing them. Sometimes I would collect any buttons I found randomly, but looking at how Maggie’d been gaining new friends got me on my nerves. I obsessed over corduroys, and my favorite part of the day would be when the theatre kids pile up their baskets at us, and Granny would tell a story about  her high school production. She used to play in And Then There Were None and just like the story, odd things happened during the production. I used to think her stories were boring until I needed to have something that is not as stressful as crisscross and shiny tulle at work now.

 

“Simon Roberts got his jaw clenched by his braces in the middle of the performance and screamed as if a shark was about to bite him!”. We laughed because it is in the past, and Mr. Roberts is currently enjoying his retirement days as his grandsons come to play in his basement. “Amy Duncan got terrible perm four hours before our final rehearsal and the whole team had to throw rocks at her window!”. I want my Granny to tell her own story when she was young because teachers at school always say I would to my grandchildren one day. What she says strikes me like lightning, “Well, I used to steal gloves from spring and winter plays because I wanted to show my Mom and Dad what I could get from performing arts. I didn’t get paid, but gloves resembled wealth. That’s everyone’s secret”.

 

“How did you steal them?”, I asked in a polite manner.

 

“I used scissors I always bring everywhere, and cut the mat we used to bring our costumes to the laundry”.

 

“Did you ever get caught?”, I asked in all seriousness. 

 

Granny chuckled. “Heh. No. In high school you’re busy with pimples and dimples, and no one ever notices. There’s a price to pay to fit in”.

 

She hurried to iron crinkles, but my mind slowed down when I saw a flannel shirt from Assembly Label in front of me. “It’s just a button of a sleeve no one ever thinks about, they’re gonna roll it up anyway”. It was astonishing how little crimes were just one step away as I used my nails to chip it down.

 

A perfectly round, sun-shaped button with on it is now mine. My second one! I put it in my jeans pocket. This is a secret nobody should know.

 

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Today, Eva Sycrause is having an asthma on attack the bus when we arrive at school. She pukes, you can see she had Vegemite for breakfast. She cries, “This will be the shirt I wear to Maggie’s party tonight!”. She steps down and I follow her to help undo her tie until I see a beautiful button on her collar with teddy bears on it. The demons inside me tell me that it has been mine the moment I see it. So I say, “Hey, you can wear my sweatshirt. I’ll bring your polo to my laundry”. I’ll just cut that button with a scissors, and won’t that be a help for the sickly, always suffocating Eva? That is a plan well thought out!

Unless Granny decides that it’s time she has to raise her salary, and therefore has upgraded her service to sewing. The worst part of it all is that she uses my buttons in what she’s doing. “Charlie, my button! Luckily you’ve been keeping some extras!”, she says cheerfully. Trembling, I ask her, “Where did you get my buttons?”. I don’t know if I should play a good grandson or be honest to my anger.

 

“On the table of course! You’ve been taught well. All launderettes must always have an extra! That is a secret to a job well done!”.

 

I’ve been working on those buttons in secrets, and I should cry about this in secret too. As Granny leaves to deliver some school uniform, I break down in angst. This is the first time I’m grateful that Luke’s band is loud.

 

That is until I remember about Eva’s shirt I have to wash. Ruining more clothes feel like a waste now more than a sin, and I’m too drowned in guilt to go to the laundry, so I’m just going to hand wash it. I take a small chair to rub the detergent into this shirt, and feel something weird in my back pocket.

 

My second button and some threads that mean I need to sew my jeans. What a pathetic life I have. Maggie’s party is in three hours, and over disgusting bracelets I’ve made her, it is time for a last-minute gift. I cut down those threads and make a braid, then put the daisy shaped button on it. This doesn’t look like her.

 

I show up to Maggie’s party with the bracelet on my palm. I see both of her hands filled up with friendship bracelets. Wristband, beads, anything. “That’s really creative, you know. Putting all of your friendship bracelets up to your elbow”, Eva says as she puts on her cleaned shirt above her tank top. “Yeah. I don’t see any of mine. I wonderwhy is that”.

 

“Come on, don’t sweat it. She’s about to blow the candles”. 

 

“I hope she blows all of it and leaves nothing behind, because those ashes are my birthday gift in void and she must see it, and...”

 

"And then there were none.”. My head’s fully lifted. It should be coincidental what Eva replies to me. She giggles like I allow her to continue. “That's peace - real peace. To come to the end - not to have to go on... Yes, peace.”. Eva reads the infamous Agatha Christie work, and for some reason I decide to give my bracelet to her.

 

She smiles genuinely, and popped off the teddy bear button out of her collar. “This has been choking me. I might have failed my audition to the play today, but I can really get a new friend”. She picks up a straw in her sling bag, and ties it around the button. “It was for vocal rehearsals. Don’t worry, the straw is brand new”, she puts her bracelet on my wrist.

 

“I’ve never practiced on my vocals. It’s too... uptown for me. Expensive. You’re the first to know about this secret”.

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