Endo/Symbiosis

The following is a story by Leyla Boztas in year 12 that was shortlisted out of 650 applicants for the 2017 John Marsden/Hachette Australia Prize for Young Writers.

You’re sitting outside the main building on campus, in a secluded spot under some trees, waiting. You’re going to tell him. This isn’t your usual spot, but it’s your favourite. Usually he prefers somewhere a bit more out of the way and says the front courtyard is too crowded. But there aren’t many people around today, you guess most students have skipped out on the last few lectures of the week, eager to avoid the last few storms coming, waiting to enjoy the spring. You are, too. The clouds are moving fast, and the wind is picking up. But the forecast said the storms would clear soon enough and it’d be sunny for the rest of the week. You like sitting here, seeing the trees in bloom. It’s a late spring this year.

You had waited. Too chicken to tell him, not before it’s absolutely certain, you’d said to yourself. A dozen days of deliberation, trying to run down the clock. Your clock. As each day passed without reprieve, you felt the dread building, your mind scrambling. It was like a balloon swelling up inside your chest, pushing against your ribcage and your lungs, expanding with every breath you took. Even further down, you felt a tension pressing along your belly, as if there was something pushing out. A hint of what was to come. Unless you did something. But you couldn’t. Could you? No, it’s completely out of the question. What would people think? Your parents, your friends? Him? Him.

There you were then, telling him, the first time around. And as you watched his face change, as the words were tumbling out of your mouth, higgledy-piggledy and stumbling, nervous and not at all how you’d rehearsed them in the mirror, you wished you could shove them all back into your mouth. You regretted it instantly - just like you knew you would. You remember how he turned his gaze to you, controlled and indecipherable. As usual. Your heart was pounding and pounding and you didn’t think it could get any faster, or louder. Your face was pulsing with warmth under his steady, incubating gaze. You felt sick. He asked how long you’d known.

“Six weeks.” It was closer to seven. The size of a blueberry, is what the blog you were skimming during your lecture said. Why didn’t you tell him sooner? You wanted to be sure, you said to him. It felt like you were sitting atop eggshells, with a weight pushing down on you. You tried to make yourself feather-light, as if you could be blown away with the slightest waft of the wind. You said you’d admittedly been slow to notice something amiss, having been preoccupied with classes. A blueberry is easy to miss. He asked if you’d gone to see somebody, if you knew how far along you were. Not yet. How big is a blueberry? You wondered if it was a little blueberry, like the shrivelled peas you had hanging around at home that you thought were a good idea for lunch which felt dubious later. Or maybe it was a swelled and robust blueberry, like the monster ones they sell at the supermarkets here, pumped with all sorts of things that surely can’t be good for you. He looked away.

“This has come out of nowhere...” No shit, you had thought. “I think we should go through with it.” As you waited for the relief to come flooding, your stomach flipped. A symptom? Of the peas, you’d decided.

Over that weekend, in between reviewing the lecture slides, you’d google your symptoms, read each of the ‘week by week’ summaries and try to imagine the coming weeks. Months. Years? Summarising symbiosis punctuated by Your Baby and You. Endosymbiosis, a mutually beneficial relationship where one organism lives completely within the other. At the first appointment, he insisted on coming with you. He held your hand in the waiting room, clammier than yours, and introduced himself as your fiancé. An eccentric proposal, you’d thought, so stunned you couldn’t pay the doctor any attention. When you confronted him about it afterwards, he shrugged it off.

Naturally you’d get married. But first you had to meet his parents. You were invited over for lunch. His family operated similarly to how yours had back home, a seemingly identical transplant of scenes from your childhood. Sisters, brothers, uncles, aunties, cousins, grandparents. Saturday lunch, a grand affair. A familiar scene, but skewed.

At your family’s lunches, the group ate together at the one table, squeezing chairs in here and there, managing to fit everyone in. Here at his family’s place, the group was divided and you were left stranded between aunties as he sat at the table with the men. Food was heaped onto your plate. The women whose names you’d learned moments ago and forgotten instantly, leered conspiratorially. Eating for two. Your throat lurched at the sight and smell of the customary spread. A meaty pasta dish, with thick layers of cream and spices, an old favourite now inspiring queasiness. A cold dish of pickled vegetables that pricked your nose. You’d never liked those. Homemade bread stuffed with an aromatic cheese, “just like made back home, we teach you soon!”. Back home, your lunches were loud and raucous. Here, you sat in silence unless spoken to, and ate and smiled and nodded through it all.

An aunty nudged your arm, “Your parents must be pretty... non-traditional.” She smiled, baring her teeth. “I can’t imagine my girl getting into this sort of a situation, although I raised my kids traditionally. I may be second generation, but I certainly did not let my kids absorb any of these Australian values. It is so important for a woman to remember her virtue.” You hadn’t spoken your language for such a long time, you thought you must have misheard her. You ignored the other women’s eyes glinting, licking their chops as they circled, speaking volumes with their eyebrows but saying nothing more. Gossip was a cultural hallmark. After your family’s lunches, the group would gather in the living room, regaling and chatting over coffee. Here at his place, the men went outside to smoke and the women cleaned up, sharing tales and promising the divulgence of domestic secrets, as the boys were ushered from the room to run around outside, and the girls were told to go offer their uncles tea.

Meanwhile, the blueberry became something more akin to a cocktail olive, and as each day passed, you could almost feel its force deep within your belly, somehow contagious, weighing the rest of you down. You’d always imagined it to feel natural and effortless, as if it had been part of you all along. Its growing would be merely an extension of yourself finally assuming its rightful place. The easy inflation of the lungs, a welcome progression that you held close and nurtured, like trees gently blooming at the beginning of spring. You soon realised it to feel closer to a foreign body growing into you and pushing you aside, sucking up the air from your shuddering lungs, frying your energy and making him crazy. Parasitism, a non-mutual relationship between species, where one organism benefits at the expense of the other. At semester break, he told you to put your studies aside.

“No need to study to become a nurse when you’ll be nursing soon enough, with no training required!”

Typically, a parasitic infection does not directly kill a host. The stress placed on the organism's resources can affect its growth and survival. It is possible for hosts and parasites to evolve together, but it’s really in the host’s best interests to get rid of their parasite, if they can. Here you are, outside the main building on campus, admiring the trees. The forecast warned incoming storms, but you don’t mind them so much anymore – you’ll embrace them, especially if it means the beginning of spring. Here he is, late, which is unlike him. You’re sitting tall, looking him in the eye, and sure of what you’re going to say, which is unlike you. You’re about to tell him.