“I have a feeling Waterfen’s going to be pretty wild. For me, anyway,” she says, laughing. “What’s next—fancy coming with me to Chile?”
She’s joking, I know that really. But being with Callie is the closest I’ve ever come to escaping life as I know it. Because even just getting to know her is like time spent in a foreign country. Somewhere I’ve often wondered about but never had the courage to explore.
We lean forward at the same time. Fall into a kiss, fly into orbit.
35.
Callie
It’s Esther’s birthday, and she’s invited me and Joel to a party at her house.
“I haven’t been to a house party for years,” he confesses, as we’re getting ready.
“How come?”
“They’re not really my... natural habitat.” He says it’s to do with the gradual sliding-away of friendships, his lifelong feeling of being an outsider.
I’m ironing my dress for tonight, the belted navy one that skims my hips just right and goes perfectly with peep-toe heels and a fearless lipstick. “Don’t worry. No one will know.”
He kisses me. “You hope.”
“Well, I don’t care if they do,” I murmur.
I have a feeling Joel and I turning up together is going to be the talk of the party, but he seems nervous, so I decide to keep that to myself.
•••
Esther greets us at the door wearing a badge that saysFORTY AND FABULOUS.
“Gav’s attempt at irony,” she says, kissing us both. “I’m thirty-six.”
“I’m Joel,” he says, extending a hand.
Esther beams like that’s the funniest thing she’s heard all year. “You. Are. Hilarious. Come on. Everyone’s going to love you.”
As we’re walking down the hall I keep expecting Grace to emerge from a doorway, bright-cheeked and gin-glazed, a full glass in each hand and unlimited kisses for everyone.
•••
The nice thing about Joel is that his outgoing warmth belies his hermit mind-set. We’ve barely got drinks in our hands before Gavin pulls him into conversation about sustainability in architecture, which eventually turns into a debate with Esther on attempts by the middle classes to raffle off their homes, and after that I don’t get to speak to him again for ages. Every time I glance over to check that he’s okay, he’s locked in conversation with someone new, and eventually I nearly lose him among a crowd of people I don’t recognize. But our eyes intermittently find each other, satellites across a solar system, and whenever they do, my stomach ripples with stars.
By the time I feel a hand around my waist I realize that one or maybe even two hours have passed.
It’s Esther. “Just wanted to say how proud I am of you.”
“Proud?”
“Yeah, for chasing your dreams. I should have encouraged you more, all these years.”
She did, I think. She always insisted I’d caved too quickly when my initial flurry of interviews and applications after uni came to nothing, refused to let me jettison my dreams.You’re the only person I know who can name a bird from its flight pattern, she would tell me out of nowhere on a crisp winter’s morning, when I’d pointed out the flock of pintails above our heads, a run of stitches against the sky’s puckered fabric.And who else can identify a tree just by looking at its bark? You should pursue your passions, Cal. Life is for living.
But by then my confidence had already taken a beating from that first round of rejections. Ecology was so competitive—it felt safer and less heartbreaking to suspend my ambitions, assure Esther I’d pursue it again soon. So, after a while, she stopped bringing it up.
“You did,” I tell her now. “I just don’t think I was ready to listen at the time.”
“Love that necklace,” she says, nodding at my clavicle. “I was with her when she bought it.”
It’s a tiny pewter acorn, a Christmas gift from Grace not long after she’d met Ben. She was trying to make a point, I think, about acorns and oak trees and getting off my backside.
