Very Impressive for Your Age by Eleanor Kirk - Extract

Allen & Unwin
Aug 28
8 min read

What happens when you discover that what you wanted to be when you grew up isn't quite what you imagined? Read an extract from Very Impressive for Your Age by Eleanor Kirk.

Very Impressive for Your Age by Eleanor Kirk

Twenty-six-year-old Evelyn is well on her way to becoming an international opera star. . . until one night, mid-performance, when she inexplicably loses her voice.

With no cure in sight, she's forced to put her dreams on pause, flying back to her hometown to wait out her recovery.

Stuck in limbo, Evelyn balances her time attending overpriced doctors' appointments and accidentally-on-purpose running into her ex on the street outside his apartment. Then she discovers that her old high school is hiring a debating coach (no experience needed!) and realises this might just be her ticket back to relevance.

While re-entering the gates of her alma mater is a welcome reminder of the glory days, being faced with a bunch of starry-eyed teenagers, who haven't had their dreams blown to pieces yet, makes clear just how thin the line can be between drive and delusion---forcing Evelyn to consider whether she could ever be truly satisfied living a life away from the spotlight.

Read on for an extract from Very Impressive for Your Age, a deeply funny and relatable novel about chasing your dreams and losing your ambition.

Ms Khatri was delighted when I emailed her to offer my coaching services for the Campbell Girls High debating program.

It wasn’t my first choice of employment, but several hours of scrolling through job ads had revealed that there wasn’t much demand for a music graduate who couldn’t currently sing.

I didn’t mention to her that it would be temporary; after confirming that it was, in fact, a paid position, I spun some story about taking a year off to give my voice time to mature, and the job was mine.

I caught a train over the bridge to the northside the following Tuesday, reminiscing about the last time I would have travelled this way, dressed in a stifling tunic and blazer, the backs of my legs sticking to the sweaty leather of the seat as we passed over the water. From the station, it was a short bus ride, and when the school came into view around the corner of leafy streets, I was struck by a nostalgia so severe that it was almost as if I had fallen back in time. Girls gathered at the bus stop, screaming and laughing and generally paying me no mind as I disembarked and moved past them. It felt illegal, walking through the front gates again, and yet nobody stopped me.

Ms Khatri met me at reception, whisking me up the stairs so quickly that I hardly had a chance to take in the various ways in which the school hadn’t changed: the same peeling

paint and stained carpet and notices stuck up along the walls, advertising bake sales and chess-club trials and head-shaving campaigns. There had once been a photograph of me dressed as Cosette, which they’d blown up and printed on canvas for Open Day to promote our illustrious creative and performing arts program. From memory, it was down in the music corridor, but there was no time for a detour; before I knew it, we had reached the upper level and I was being thrust straight inside a classroom.

‘Girls,’ Ms Khatri said, ‘this is Evelyn. She’ll be taking you from now on.’

For now, I corrected her in my head, as Ms Khatri handed me a clipboard and left again, leaving a ringing silence behind her.

Four pairs of blinking eyes stared at me.

‘Hello,’ I said.

The silence stretched on. The girls— seniors, by the looks of them, practically adults themselves— appeared generally unimpressed by my arrival; almost irritated, as if I had interrupted them in the middle of something.

‘You know, I used to go here,’ I told them, trying to keep my tone friendly. ‘I think I had this classroom in year eight. Or nine, maybe, I can’t remember. But I sat right over there.’

I pointed to the side of the room, where one of the girls sat alone by the window, fiddling with her jet-black ponytail, headphones hooked around her neck with the buzz of music droning out of them. Next door, there was a sudden explosion of laughter, and I jumped.

‘That’s the A team,’ the red-headed girl seated at the front told me. ‘They’re Isaac’s class.’

I didn’t know who Isaac was but presumed he was the owner of the booming male voice that followed, calling for quiet. This only seemed to exacerbate the laughter.

The two girls at the back exchanged a glance and began whispering. The one with the ponytail by the window put her headphones on properly.

‘I never actually did debating,’ I said, trying to raise my voice, only to find that my new vocal cords wouldn’t permit it. I lowered it again and leaned forward. ‘I was more into the arts. In fact— ’

The man next door— Isaac— loudly summoned someone called Courtney to the front of the room, and there was a groan from one of his students (Courtney, I assumed), followed by a cacophony of squeals. I cleared my throat and waited for the noise to pass so that I could continue.

‘In fact, we put on this musical— ’

'Are you going to actually teach us anything?’ the redhead interrupted.

Taken aback by her rudeness, I stammered a bit over my response. ‘I was just introducing myself.’

‘Oh, no, I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I just mean, Ms Khatri usually just lets us do our own thing.’ She gestured at her laptop, which sat half open in front of her. ‘I’m just saying, you

don’t have to, like, entertain us or anything. We have heaps of stuff to get on with.’

The two girls at the back were still whispering, and one of them giggled; I wondered if they were talking about me.

‘Obviously you can do your own thing,’ I said, annoyed. ‘I was just saying that I used to— ’

A burst of applause next door was followed by stamping and more squeals, and then by Isaac clapping, calling again for quiet. The back of my neck felt oddly warm and cold at the same time. It was strange; I was used to addressing audiences, obviously, used to commanding a room with my sheer presence, even before I opened my mouth to sing. But speaking felt different. I felt unusually small, made smaller by my new voice as well as the space these girls seemed to occupy. Sprawling in their seats with their pens and books spread across the desks, eyes sharp and scathing and expectant, they filled the entire

room. I looked down at the roll Ms Khatri had given me: Minh Bui, Francesca Esposito, Kate Hanson, Polly Zheng.

‘They’re usually pretty loud,’ the redhead (Kate?) told me. She sounded slightly sympathetic now, as if she could sense my distress, which I hated.

‘That’s okay,’ I said, ‘so am I. It’s just at the moment— ’

I was cut off by more squealing. I decided I could bear it no longer and marched next door.

Isaac’s class only had four students, like mine, although it had sounded like more through the wall. Three were seated, their exercise books open, pens at the ready, while the fourth stood at the front with pink cheeks. Isaac sat atop one of the desks with arms folded and legs wide, a grin stretched out across his hairless face. He couldn’t have been older than twenty.

‘Hey,’ he said, when he noticed me at the door. ‘Can I help you?’

‘My students— ’

‘What?’ he said. I tried again, unable to make myself any louder, and he swung himself off the desk and sauntered over.

I cleared my throat. ‘My students are struggling to hear next door.’

‘Did you hear that?’ he said, stepping back to let the girls in on our conversation. ‘They’re struggling to hear. We have to be even louder.’

The girls shrieked again with laughter, which I assumed, now that I was here, had less to do with the joke and more to do with the person telling it. Admittedly, he was the kind of

coach I also would have fawned over back at school: young, confident and cleanly dressed, in a pale-blue button-down shirt and camel chinos. He had curly hair and a birthmark on one side of his jaw that might have made him just insecure enough growing up that he’d had to cushion himself by building a better personality— and if so, it had worked; I couldn’t deny

that he was charming.

‘Sorry,’ he told me. ‘They’re just excited. The comp starts this week.’

I didn’t know what the comp was, or why I should care.

He touched the doorhandle and looked at me as if to say, Is that it?

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ he repeated, and he was pushing the door now, ushering me out. ‘But thanks for letting us know!’ The door closed and I stood on the other side of it, as stunned by his arrogance as I was my own meekness. Being unable to sing was one thing; not having the capacity to protest when I was being condescended to by some guy barely out of high school himself was another altogether.

Back in my classroom, any pretence about my authority had dissipated. Kate was typing away on her laptop and the pair at the back were deep in whispered conversation. Every so often, when something one of them said made the other cry out, the girl by the window would look over in annoyance and then make a show of turning up the volume on whatever she was listening to. I sat behind the teacher’s desk and retreated into my own phone, scrolling through London real estate listings and trying to remind myself that all of this would be worth it.

Later, I found Ms Khatri and the other coaches— including Isaac— in the English staffroom, passing around a timesheet and debriefing on their lessons. One of them had mediated

a debate about lowering the minimum wage; another had quizzed his class on the candidates running in the upcoming US primaries. Isaac had made his students deliver impromptu speeches on the situation in the Middle East, which I already knew, having heard the whole thing through our shared wall.

So much for what Ms Khatri had said about babysitting— it was abundantly clear I was the only one who had done nothing useful with their class. I sidled up to her and asked if I had

misunderstood the brief.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘The others just get tunnel-visioned in the lead-up to competition season.’

‘Competition season?’

‘Don’t worry,’ she went on, ‘the year twelve B team doesn’t compete— they just show up to training.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Then: ‘Why?’

‘Beats me.’ She shrugged. ‘Extra credit, avoiding their home lives, points on their scholarship applications, something like that.’

‘So none of them actually debate?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Is that a problem?’

I glanced back at Isaac and the others, who were still debriefing, and almost laughed. No, it wasn’t a problem— it was free money for my ticket back to London. I smiled and told her I’d be back at the same time next week.

Before going home, I wandered the corridors, trying to find the poster of me playing Cosette at fifteen, the one they’d had printed for Open Day. I walked down to the

music corridor, which ran along the lower ground level of the school’s east wing, but when I got there I found that the poster of me had been replaced by one of a student I didn’t recognise, her entire face and body painted green and clothed in black—Elphaba from Wicked. In the bottom right corner was written: Stephanie Chandra, Year 11.

I didn’t know if hers was the first poster to replace mine, or if there had been others in between, as there would likely be more in the future: infinite permutations of talent filling the void left in my absence, prodigies who were all still ascending towards their peak.

Evidently the statute of limitations on my own talent had expired.

I no longer existed.

Extract from Very Impressive for Your Age by Eleanor Kirk

Published by Allen & Unwin. Out 2 September.