I switch my gaze to my feet, scuff at a protruding paving slab with the toe of my sandal. “Mum, you’ve always said you and Dad are... soulmates, haven’t you? That you were meant to be.”
Down the phone, there’s a scuffling noise, as though Mum’s covering the speaker with her hand. But I can still hear her snapping at Dad—“Yes, allright, Gus!”—which kind of weakens the point I’m trying to make, if I’m honest.
It’s weird. I’ve never heard Mum bark at Dad like that before. This Tash and Max stuff must be getting to us all more than I realized.
“Did you ever think,” Mum says, her voice softening, like I’m six years old again and this is her umpteenth attempt to talk me through a particular times table, “that maybe Max sleeping with your sister means he isn’t the person you’re supposed to be with after all?”
And suddenly, I feel stupid, because of course, thisiselementary-level stuff. Max slept with my sister.Of coursehe’s not the man I’m meant to spend my life with.
Soulmates don’t cheat. They just don’t.
At least, that’s how everybody else—quite logically—sees it. And yet... I still can’t shake my feelings for him. Even after everything that’s happened.
“Please come to Dylan’s party,” Mum says again. “You haven’t seen him for two months. The time flies by so fast when they’re that age.”
But now a moped’s speeding up to the curb, which means I’m either about to be mugged or collect a pizza. Either way, I’m relieved to have an excuse to end the call. “I’ve got to go, Mum.”
The rider flips his visor and climbs off, balances the moped on its stand, and opens the box on the back.
“Just think about it,” Mum’s saying. “Please?”
“Okay, I will,” I reply, which is the most I can assure her of right now.
—
Seb tosses a pizza crust back into the box. “Okay, so we’re saying the twist is, the Ugly Ducklingisactually ugly. Because of the oil slick.”
Seb and I are sitting on beanbags in one of Supernova’s breakout spaces, our enormous pizza half-eaten between us. It’s almost ten o’clock, but the time has melted away, and we’re finally making progress on the core components of our campaign.
“Yes,”I say, scribbling away on my sketch pad. “And all the other birds stop migrating because... the winters are no longer cold, because of—”
“—climate change,” he says, lowering his index finger toward me before grabbing another slice of pizza.
I frown. “It’s pretty bleak, but...”
“But that’s what they said they wanted.” He flips through a pile of papers, then reads from the relevant page of the amends brief. “ ‘We need this to be more hard-hitting.’ ” He takes a bite from his slice and chortles. “Hey, bet you never thought working at Supernova would be this depressing. Last year was literally all high fashion and fast cars.”
I smile and shake my head. “Believe it or not, this is the opposite of depressing to me.”
I feel him observe me as he chews. “You really should have done this years ago, you know. You’re a great writer.”
Touched, I look up at him. “Thank you. Writing’s all I ever wanted to do, so... that means a lot.” And it does, especially coming from someone as talented as Seb, and when I’ve had so much to prove here.But now, for possibly the first time since I started at Supernova, I realize my fears about my lack of writing experience are starting to ebb away. I have earned my spot in this team—I contribute at least as much as Seb to our joint assignments, and whenever the entire creative team put their heads together on a brief, I’m never short of ideas, some of which get taken forward and worked on for major pitches and campaigns.
Seb shrugs, like he was only speaking his mind, which makes what he said even more meaningful, somehow. “So, what else have we got for this?”
I flip back through my sketch pad. “Jack and the Beanstalk—the beanstalk doesn’t grow because, global warming. And in Little Red Riding Hood—”
“—the forest’s being cut down by Big Agriculture.”
An idea begins to nudge the edge of my consciousness, some wordplay that’s been staring me in the face that, somehow, I’ve been missing. I tap pencil against paper. “Oh, hang on.” I look up at Seb and smile. “There must be something we can do withGrimms’ Fairy Tales.” I scribble it down, triple-underliningGRIMM.
We do a little fist bump. “Right. On that note, shall we call it a night?” He stretches his arms above his head and yawns.
“You can take the rest of the pizza.”
“Nah,” he says. “We’ll be back in tomorrow, won’t we? Let’s just leave it here for lunch.”
—
