Please Don’t Hug Me

by Kay Kerr

Genres: YA Contemporary

Synopsis

A funny-serious story about what happens when you stop trying to be the person other people expect you to be and give yourself a go.

Erin is looking forward to Schoolies, at least she thinks she is. But things are not going to plan. Life is getting messy, and for Erin, who is autistic, that’s a big problem. She’s lost her job at Surf Zone after an incident that clearly was not her fault. Her driving test went badly even though she followed the instructions perfectly. Her boyfriend is not turning out to be the romantic type. And she’s missing her brother, Rudy, who left almost a year ago.

But now that she’s writing letters to him, some things are beginning to make just a tiny bit of sense.

Kay Kerr is a former journalist and community newspaper editor from Brisbane, now living on the Sunshine Coast with her husband and daughter and working as a freelance writer. Kay was writing the first draft of Please Don’t Hug Me, her first book, when she received her own autism-spectrum diagnosis.

‘This book is beautifully intimate, and so authentic. You’re going to love getting to know its central character, Erin. I’m so thrilled this book exists.’ Claire Christian

‘A moving and insightful story about finding your place in the world.’ Nina Kenwood

 

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Release date: April 28, 2020

Publisher: Text Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

12 August

Dear Rudy,

Honestly, what were you thinking with that boat? It is probably the worst thing you’ve ever done. You might have thought it was just a silly prank but look what it led to. I’m so furious with you I can barely sit still. Someone paid a lot of money for that boat, someone probably worked really hard to be able to buy it and then one morning they walk out onto their jetty and what do they find? A complete disaster. I think you’re selfish and vulgar and immature. You can’t think about anyone other than yourself for even a second, can you.

Maybe you’re wondering what prompted this, or why I’m even writing to you. Let me start by saying it wasn’t my idea. I told them there’s no point. But I also want you to know I lost my job because of someone just like you today. Someone who cared more about having a laugh than about how they might hurt the people around them. I had an outburst. You call them meltdowns, but I call them outbursts, and seeing as I’m the one who has them I think I deserve to be the one who decides what we call them. I had one at work, and now I don’t have a job. Do you even know what it feels like to have an outburst? Of course you don’t. You’re the ‘normal’ one. Ha. You’ve never watched people’s eyes get wide as they slowly back away from you like you’re a rabid dog or the ghost of their long dead relative. You’ve never felt your senses screaming as the world becomes too loud, too bright, too strong, too close. You’ve never felt like you’ve lost control of your own words, as truths come bubbling out before you even have a chance to think about how they are going to land. I’m feeling a lot lately, all the time, and when I’m feeling a lot the outbursts come so eagerly. I’m not blaming you for that, I guess. But you can’t go around doing things like joyriding in boats and shitting in change rooms and expecting there to be no consequences, Rudy, you just can’t.

Maybe I should elaborate, even though I’d rather keep telling you off. It’s much easier to get everything out when you’re not in front of me. But, the job thing. So this is what happened. My shift started like normal; I was working at the register. I wish this one customer had come in an hour later, or if ten other things were slightly different, then maybe I’d still have a job. We have to thank every customer with ‘Thank you for shopping at Surf Zone, have a radical day’. I said that in as pleasant a tone as I could muster given that I couldn’t tell if the middle-aged bald guy hated me or wanted to date me. He held eye contact for an uncomfortably long time—eye contact, that game of chicken I always lose. When he finally turned to leave, I saw my manager ‘Great White Molly’ approaching at speed, coming in for the kill from the accessories wall.

You know why I have all these ‘wacky’ nicknames for people. I’m not trying to be cool or get attention. I know you think I do a lot of things for attention, but I can’t think of anything I 

hate more than people noticing me. I make up the nicknames because I have a hard time remembering faces and names unless I pinpoint one particular feature and remember that.

I would definitely have chosen a different nickname for myself if it had been my choice. Maybe ‘No Eye Contact Erin’ or ‘Book Hermione’ because of the teeth and hair situation that was erased when Emma Watson got the part.

Everyone says ‘I’m terrible with names!’ but I’m actually terrible with faces. Anyway my manager is Great White Molly. It’s easy to remember because we work at a surf shop and she looks like a shark, because of her big white fake teeth, pointy nose and black eyes.

Don’t worry, Rudy—you don’t have a nickname. I can remember your face just fine. And the family. And Dee. But there is so much to remember about a person, like their laugh and their voice and their hands and the way they say goodbye. A face is the last thing that sticks in my mind.

You know the way people sometimes ask questions they already know the answer to just to get you to give them the answer so they can tell you off about it? I think that’s what Great White Molly was doing when she said, ‘Did you ask that customer if he wanted to buy a two-dollar enviro-bag?’

You would have screwed up your face and had a calm, clever response for her. But I told her the facts. The customer was a forty-year-old dude, and the only bags we had left were the pink ones with frangipanis on them. He wasn’t going to buy one so I saved time not asking.

Her face went as pink as one of the bags she was trying to get me to offload. ‘I’ve told you before: every customer, every purchase. The bags are two dollars. If they can’t afford it they shouldn’t be shopping here. I am powerless in my own life so I get off on putting young people down.’

Okay, maybe she didn’t say that last part. But her lips curled up at the sides in this way that made her look like an evil clown. It will be hard to forget that look. She wasn’t finished either.

‘This is strike two, Erin. You’ve already received a warning for slacking off during stocktake last month.’

It’s probably a good thing I didn’t explain how my actions were based on the statistics I’d collected from eighteen months at Surf Zone. If that customer had bought a pink bag, he would be the first middle-aged man to buy a pink frangipani bag in the entire time I had worked there, and he didn’t strike me as the mouldbreaking type.

And about the whole ‘strike two’ thing, I hadn’t slacked off. I’d just needed to take breaks because the shop got so hot and the music was loud and no one was following the labelling system properly. I didn’t say that, though. Great White Molly’s voice and words sounded angry, even though the look on her face made me think she was happy, like she was somehow enjoying telling me off in front of customers and other staff members.

The most stressful interactions for me are the ones like this, where the person’s face says one thing and their words say another. Which one am I supposed to believe? Faces seem to be 

more truthful, but people always act as though their words are the only things that matter. Like when Mum says to Dad, ‘I’m fine’, and fine is the last thing she is. Dad has to act like she’s fine, while still trying to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. It would be a lot easier if she just said, ‘I’m mad at you for spending too much time and money at the pub this week,’ and then maybe he could stop doing that.

One of the best things about Dee is she tells me when she’s mad and so I never have to worry about where I stand. She’ll say if I’m pissing her off for not asking how her day was, and so I’ll remember to ask how her day was for the next whole week. I guess that’s why she’s my best friend. Oliver doesn’t so much tell me how he feels, but he cries when he’s sad, laughs when he’s happy and yawns when he’s tired. Kids are awesome like that. Adults complicate things.

Great White Molly was standing in front of me with her hands on her hips and I remembered we were talking about my strikes. And then I accidentally asked if it was even legal to lock underage staff members in the shop until 3 am with no food or air-conditioning. I definitely should have kept my lips shut on the whole stocktake debacle, but I could feel my ears burning and my mind swirling like an outburst was on its way and I always say what I feel instead of keeping my mouth closed when I’m having an outburst.

It’s not that I want to cause a fight or hurt people’s feelings; I just can’t control the truth at those times. It’s like I spend all my time and energy suppressing things and then all of a sudden I can’t do it anymore and I explode. I can’t explain it any better than that. So, no actually, I’m not just ‘being a drama queen’ thank you very much. If I had a dollar for every time you said I was, I wouldn’t have had to work at Surf Zone in the first place.

Anyway Great White Molly looked and sounded angry this time, so at least I wasn’t confused about that.

She said, ‘In case you’ve forgotten, Erin, I’m your manager and you have to do what I say.’

People who say ‘in case you’ve forgotten’ rarely believe the person they’re talking to has forgotten something, in my experience. I was demoted from the counter to change-room duty, but it suited me just fine. I am a lot better at tidying change rooms and fetching different sizes than I am at forcing a pseudo-environmental up-sell onto customers who have already been conned into spending way too much money on clothes made in a sweatshop where workers are probably paid five cents a week. Shocked that I know something about fast fashion and ethical consumption under capitalism? Surprise! You’re not the only one who has a conscience and pays attention in our family. I know a lot more about the world than you give me credit for.

There’s less face time at the change rooms, so it’s not as tiring as working the counter. I like to clean the left-side change rooms at quarter past the hour and the right side at quarter to. I keep the empty coathangers on the rack until I have twenty, and then I take them to the stockroom to be reused. I sort the unwanted clothes by gender, section, colour and size, and I 

return them to their places in the shop when I have five pieces for a section. Clothes can belong in:

1. women’s surf
2. men’s surf
3. children’s surf
4. women’s streetwear
5. men’s streetwear
6. children’s streetwear
7. sale.

There are also surfboards, skateboards and accessories, but those items don’t end up at the change rooms unless I confiscate them from someone trying to smuggle them into a stall.

At Surf Zone, if you have blonde hair you work in the surf section and if you are brunette you work in streetwear. That’s not really a rule, it’s just what happens. I’m starting to learn more about the rules no one will tell you but are definitely there. Rules like ‘when Rudy shouts it’s called “frustration” and when Erin shouts it’s called “acting out’’’.

I’d noticed the hair rule was happening when I first started working at Surf Zone and a girl was moved from street to surf when she dyed her hair blonde. So I worked in streetwear, never mind that my knowledge on skate hardware is zero; I was putting together set ups and gripping decks with next to no training and even less skill. I learned from watching a YouTube video. I feel sorry for the people stuck with me or eighty per cent of the other brunette, skate-illiterate girls in there serving them. A few of the brunette girls do know what they’re doing, but they always seemed to be working at the same time, which is bad rostering if you ask me. But Great White Molly never did.

I worked there for a year and a half you know—on average two shifts a week. Shifts are normally four hours long, so that’s 624 hours I’ve worked at Surf Zone. If only I could have lasted another ninety-six hours, and then I’d have worked right up until the end of school and had enough money saved for Schoolies Week. If only.

Schoolies has been on my mind since you started talking about it, way before I even understood what it was. Now it’s impossible to imagine not knowing about it, this prize every student gets for making it through thirteen years of education. It’s the big kahuna, the golden egg, the blue ribbon. If I can’t think of what to say to someone at school, I just mention Schoolies and we have a whole conversation around being excited about it. I like to think of it as a crash course in being a grown-up, because you try out living away from home in an apartment with your best friends, which is what I hope to be doing soon after Schoolies ends.

Like you need any introduction to Schoolies Week, Rudy. You WERE Schoolies Week, or at least that’s what it seemed like when you ended up on the news making faces behind the reporter. ‘YOUTH GONE WILD’ was the caption underneath. Were you trying to piss Dad off? He definitely thought it was personal. Mum told him you were just being young and 

thoughtless, and I agreed. Again with the thoughtlessness. And drunk, I added. That didn’t seem to help. Nothing has changed—Schoolies is still everything to everyone, Dad is still taking things personally, and Mum is still making excuses for you.

Change-room duty had actually been pretty perfect for me; my desire for organisation made sorting items to be returned to the shelves an enjoyable task and it meant I could avoid the torture of the random customer approach that was forced on the staff working the floor.

‘Welcome to Surf Zone, is there anything I can help you with?’ or something like that was mandatory as soon as a customer walked through the doors. A lot of them responded with the standard ‘just looking’, but others were more creative with their method of telling you to eff off. I don’t blame them; there is nothing that makes me more uncomfortable than insincere interactions with staff hoping to make a sale. The compliments, feigned interest in your weekend and insistence that no one has ever looked as good as you in that one thing that you just HAD to get. I don’t see the point in those conversations at all. If a staff member talks to me more than twice in the first two minutes I leave the shop. It’s a rule I made for myself.

I’m glad I don’t have to work on the floor at Surf Zone, because Great White Molly uses her most tanned and blonde employees at the front of the store. I think it’s because good-looking people make regular people feel like they could be good looking too if they just shop at the right place.

I didn’t love my job at Surf Zone, but I’d been there long enough to know the rules. The ones you could get in trouble for breaking, like those in the employee manual, and the important ones, like which section you are meant to work in based on your hair colour. Learning the rules is the worst part about a new job, and now I’ll have to do it all over again somewhere else.

I should have kept my mouth shut. That’s hard to do even when I’m calm though, and I was already building up to an outburst when I found the shit on the change-room floor. It was not like a little bit of poo had fallen out of a child’s nappy either, it was an adult-sized pile of faeces in the middle of a change room where the partition didn’t even reach the floor. I had been gone for maybe 120 seconds, returning items to their sections, and when I came back it was there, and the perpetrator was gone. An unimpressed customer brought it to my attention and I fled to the stockroom out the back.

Why on earth would someone do that? Is it an exhibitionist thing? An anarchist thing? A fetish? Was I supposed to clean it up? That didn’t seem like it should be a rule, especially not when I was only paid $16 an hour. ...