A card! My face went hot and my heart fluttered. Was this what it was like having a boyfriend? Gifts and cards?
I peeled it open. The front had a picture of a field of white flowers. Wow, he was so thoughtful. He was the perfect boyfriend. I opened the card slowly, savouring the feeling. His handwriting was sloping and a little irregular. Green felt tip.
Hey Evie
I’m really sorry, but something’s come up. I got a place in the Argentinian Open because someone dropped out last minute. My coach wants me to fly to Buenos Aires immediately so I can get as much practice as possible. My flight’s booked early morning so we won’t make the dance tomorrow night. I’m really sorry. We’ll do it another time.
Also a replacement for the flower I killed.
Hope this one survives. Just don’t let me near it.?
See you in the new year.
Osian
I sat down. Don’t know how. Just suddenly I was sitting down on the arm of the sofa.
“What’s wrong?” Tricia took the card from my fingers and read it. “Oh, that explains it,” she said slowly.
I looked at her.
“That’s the phone call. Why he said it was short notice to cancel. It must have been about the tennis tournament. His whole life is about tennis.”
“I don’t think so. He was planning to go to the dance.”
“Yeah, but that was just in the moment because he felt guilty about breaking your plant. That’s all.” She smiled. Her first smile for days. Her first smile since I told her about my date.
Looking back, I must have known in my heart she was upset and resentful that Osian had asked me out. At the time, I was too focussed on my date, on his words in that card. I must have read it a hundred times.
His words.
We’ll do it again.
See you in the new year.
Didn’t that mean he wanted to go out with me again?
Yes, of course it did.
When January came, I followed news of the Argentinian Open like a sports fanatic. Osian James, the youngest contestant, a last-minute entry. That’s huge for a player who hadn’t even been seeded. The school were uber excited and posted the results of every match on the board outside the head teacher’s office.
He surprised everyone and made it as far as the quarter finals.
I waited for him – probably held my breath for the whole of January. But when he came back, everything was different.Helooked different. Not just the tan that darkened his skin and bleached his hair so the golden highlights at his temples reallyshone. He just seemed older somehow. More confident. More gorgeous. More everything, in every way.
Although he came back into class, it was like he didn’t even belong there anymore – a visiting celebrity. Everyone treated him differently too, even the teachers.
Students followed him around wanting to touch him, to take selfies with him. He started hiding in the library where no one was allowed to talk, his nose in a book most of the time. At the end of the day, he slipped out the back through the delivery entrance to avoid the paps hanging outside the school gates.
And obviously, he never spoke to me again or even looked in my direction, like he’d totally forgotten who I was.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tricia tried to console me. “Like I said, he was just doing the polite act. He knows how to be charming and play the whole flowers-and-gifts thing; it means nothing. I tried to warn you.”
A week later, she saw him walking at night with Susan Wooley. He walked her home and they spent ten minutes at the front door ‘snogging’, with his hand under her jumper and her hands under his shirt.
From then on, Tricia told me about every girl he dated. Kissed. Touched. Spent the weekend with. Every week she had a new story with details that hurt so much, they took my breath away.
My sister when she came home for Easter tried to explain it: “He’s probably not in the right place for a relationship.” Matie looked up from painting black glitter on the tips of her nails. “Maybe all he can cope with is short superficial flings. And you are not that kind of girl, Angelina.”
