“Is it all getting a bit much?” Audrey tried, getting an unwelcome insight into how her own parents must have felt when twenty-years-ago-Audrey would come home from school sad about friends, a girl, or homework and totally unable to communicate about it.
She felt Alanis’s head shake, but there was otherwise no answer.
“Whatever it is,” she tried again—hoping a more open approach might work better—“it’ll be okay.”
Alanis’s breathing deepened and, after a couple of moments steeling herself, she finally said, “You can’t possibly know that. You don’t even know what it is.”
“I mean, you could tell me. If you wanted.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“And you don’t have to. But…actually.” Audrey paused. “I don’t really have a good but. You don’t have to.”
“Don’t shame your butt,” said Alanis, with an echo of her usual spirit. “You’ve got a great butt.”
“Aren’t you a bit young for dad jokes?”
Somehow Audrey sensed she was getting a look, even though they weren’t looking at each other. “No. Millennials don’t own irony.”
It was the first time Audrey had heard someone use the worldmillennialsto describe an older generation, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. “I’m sorry. I stand corrected. Sit corrected.”
“Oh, Audrey,” replied Alanis, with indulgent teenage pity. “And…it’s Joshua.”
Sudden shifts in topic were something Audrey was very much used to. Unfortunately, the topic to which they’d shifted meant her immediate instinct was to say,Fuck, what did that hipster piece of shit do?Except that would have been unhelpful on many levels. Especially if the hipster piece of shit had, in fact, done something. “What happened with Joshua?” she asked carefully.
“I—” Alanis was still very much mid-sniffle. “I asked him if he wanted to…” She didn’t specify exactly what she’d asked him if he’d wanted, which meant Audrey’s imagination went to a whole lot of different places. “And he said I was too young.”
The sheer relief almost made Audrey burst out laughing. She didn’t, because that would have been an unbelievably awful response to have to an upset teenager. But now the moment had passed, she was realising quite how prepared for the worst she’d been.
“Okay,” she offered, trying to strike a balance between reassuring and minimising. “Well, that’s—”
“I’msixteen,” Alanis went on. “I’m old enough to make my own decisions.”
They were already on sensitive ground and it was only getting sensitiver. “You are,” Audrey agreed, because there was no point disagreeing. “But so is he. And I guess maybe he didn’t want to think you’d look back in a few years’ time and decide he was a prick?”
Alanis looked up, wide-eyed. “That’s what he said.”
“Is it?” Audrey was genuinely surprised. Joshua didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would have a sense of his own prickishness.
“Pretty much. He said, ‘I don’t want to be something you look back and regret,’ but basically.”
That seemed more like him.
Alanis was crying again. “I’m just so humiliated. I humiliated myself.”
Having, not too recently, removed her own underwear in public to score a point in an argument with a scary woman, Audrey wasn’t quite sure she was the best person to be giving advice on humiliation. Or perhaps she was absolutely the best person. “That’s not how it seems to me,” she said. “How it seems to me is that you put yourself out there, even though you knew you might not succeed. And it didn’t work out because not everything does, but that’s okay.”
With an ability to leap around different reasons to feel bad about herself that Audrey found deeply familiar, Alanis segued. “I just really thought he liked me.”
“I think he really does. I just also think he…”
“Doesn’t want to be something I’ll regret?”
Audrey nodded.
“Well, I hate it.”
Privately, Audrey hated it a whole lot less than the alternative. But she didn’t say that because at the end of the day Alaniswasentitled to her agency. So she just said, “Yeah, but you might hate it less tomorrow.”
