‘Oh, yeah. She probably did.’
I dropped my head to the table, mortified in advance but Lydia just laughed. ‘Don’t sweat it. Even if she did, Mom hasn’t blacklisted you. She’s the reason I’m here.’
Raising my head very slightly off the table, I gave her a quizzical look.
‘She wants to meet you,’ Lydia explained, sticking out her tongue to taste one of the leaves. ‘I told her you were stopping by this morning and when you didn’t show, she suggested we get a late lunch. Don’t think she’d invite you out to eat if she was mad at you for whatever you did or did not do with my brother. Unless she wants to know your intentions towards him.’
‘Lunch? With your mom?’
Alex Powell. My dad’s best friend. The one person I knew for sure he’d been in touch with for all the years we’d lived in hiding.
‘I know, what a drag.’ She half-rose out of her chair, pulled a tube of mango lip balm from her pocket and passed it across the table into my hand. ‘She’s cool though. Most of the time. At least, she’s not an old-fashioned nag like Virginia.’
Dabbing the balm onto my chapped lips, I asked what I hoped was a very breezy question.
‘Is it just us or will Jackson be there too?’
‘Why?’
Apparently not nearly as breezy as I’d intended.
‘No reason,’ I replied. ‘Just wondering.’
‘Any reason why he shouldn’t be?’
‘No.’
She stood up and came around to stand behind me, freeing my hair from the claw clip I’d grabbed on my way downstairs.
‘Are you avoiding him?’
I was absolutely avoiding him but I did not want to talk about it.
‘Why would I be avoiding him?’
She yanked on my hair a little harder than necessary and I scowled straight ahead.
‘You tell me.’
‘Nothing to tell.’
‘If I were a less trusting woman, I might think you’re not telling me the whole truth,’ she said, loosening some of the strands and tightening others then fastening it with an elastic band retrieved from her sling bag. ‘But I’m hungry so I’m letting it go for now.’
She flicked her eyes over my baggy T-shirt and bike shorts when I stood up and turned to face her. ‘But not so hungry you don’t have time to go change. My name is Lydia Powell and I do not approve this message.’
‘Give me two minutes.’
She appraised my outfit once more.
‘I’ll give you five.’
Rolling my eyes, I slipped back inside the house. Everything else might be changing but at least Lydia was always going to be Lydia.
‘Then I said, you’re so wrong you don’t even know how wrong you are, literally do not come to me with your theories until you’ve read every book in the series because you don’t know the characters, you don’t know their motivations, you can’t spell the dragon’s name right! Like, you are showing your whole ass and I’m embarrassed for you.’
Lydia’s arms flew around in the air, gesticulating wildly as we waited to cross Gaston Street to Forsyth Park.
‘Then what happened?’ I asked, anxiously tugging at the hem of my white linen tank. It was creased. I should’ve ironed it but Lydia had insisted there was no time and it was parental approved.
