“Of course you do, darl,” Aggie claps her butternut orange hands together. “It’s not every day one of my girls bags an All Black.”
5
Ada
“Last order up,” Aggie bellows through the kitchen pass. “Spag-bol for Benny!”
I groan extra loud from my playpen, making sure she can hear me. Aggie’s spaghetti bolognese resembles my mother’s as much as the boots on my feet; the passata sauce comes from a jar and is loaded with garlic powder, carrot chunks, green peas and more mince than pasta.
Aggie ducks her head, glaring at me through the kitchen hole. “What was that? More criticism from the peanut gallery?”
“Mate, can you at least not call it ‘spag-bol?’”
She gives me a look, and I turn my face to the ceiling. “Eh mannaggia!What have the Italians ever done, besides Mussolini, to deserve this?”
Aggie cackles. “I’ve been looking up Jake Graves-Holland. He’s six-bloody-four. Surprised he didn’t crush you.”
“He tried.”
Aggie cackles harder as Cece rushes to the window to collect the bolognese. She’s practically floating. And all because Will Sharpe’ssingle. But that’s not a problem—she’s not hooking up with that afterbirth. Only I can’t tell Cece that. She’s deep in delusion, and the best laid plans take time, money, and deceptive ability. Lucky for me, I’ve got all three in spades: no job, Christmas earworm royalties, and a ninety-eight percent masking capability on my Autism assessment.
No one pretends to be a normal person like Ada Renaldo pretends to be a normal person.
I sip my tequila, the burn in my throat mirroring the rage twisting my insides. I’ve agreed to go to this reunion. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. It’s lucky Cece’s caught up in her fantasies of marrying one of the biggest twats in our year. If she wasn’t, she’d know better than to bring me anywhere near this reunion.
Then again, maybe it’s not luck. Maybe it’s fate.
I didn’t have friends at school. Not even Cece. She did her best, but Pukekohe’s a small town, and its roots go deep. Local families are entwined through generations of marriages and grudges. A network that I, a fifteen-year-old virgin, had no idea how to navigate. All that’s to say, the friendship ranks had closed long before I arrived. A foreign man in a foreign land with a bad attitude and a flute case in hand.
Cece and I met working the Saturday shift at the newsagents. It was an instant friendship. We bonded over YA romance novels, indie rock, and surviving the sleazy old guys who bought plastic-wrapped porno mags off us. Cece loaned me her clothes and laughed at my jokes and taught me how to put on mascara without blinding myself. She was funny and clever. The first Kiwi I met who made me feel like I wasn't a complete freak. Behind the news agency counter, we could dance and gossip and laugh until we cried, but at school it was a cold war, and we acted like strangers. Cece had the same group of mid-popular friends since kindergarten, and they were not fans of me. Her loyalty could only go so far. Behind the newsagency counter, we could dance and gossip and laugh until we cried, but at school we acted like strangers. Adults forget how deadly serious teenage politics are. How your world turns on what your peers think of you. Cece’s forgotten. She remembers me getting picked on, but not the grinding, daily terror of it. She resentsbeing born into her brother’s shadow, but back in the day, I would’ve killed for Tristan Taylor’s protection. I was hauled into the white-hot glow of teenage brutality and flayed alive for eighteen months.
It started my first morning at Pukekohe High. Sidelong looks and snickers about the flute case I’d been told to bring with me. No one introduced themselves or offered to show me around. I sat beside Hayley Dean in homeroom, and the first thing she asked was if I was from Afghanistan.
“My parents are Italian,” I told her. “I’m from Melbourne.”
She giggled like I’d said something funny, and Shannon Strom pushed the toe of his dirty boot against the flute case I'd parked under my desk.
“What’s that?”
I told him it was a flute, and he grinned. “You ever go to band camp?”
I wasn’t allowed to watch movies with a PG-rating, let alone one where a dude fucks a pie, so I said, “Yeah, lots of times,” and Shannon, Hayley, and everyone within a four-desk radius laughed so hard the teacher had to stop taking attendance to tell them to shut up.
My parents said I’d make friends. That kids would be nice to me because I was new. As I sat there, trying desperately not to cry, the final years of my education flashed in front of my eyes like a sped-up nightmare. My parents had lied. I was going to beexactlyas trapped and lonely as I thought I’d be.
The only person who’d talk to me at lunch was Rhys, a burnout who chain-smoked Alpine Ultra-Lights he stole off his mum. The two of us hid behind a big tree at the edge of the front field, and I listened to him explain Taekwondo moves while he ripped cigs. I wanted to join him, if only to piss off my traitor parents, but my lungs were still pristine and full of flute-playing potential back then.
After lunch came English. I was seated in front of Jenny Wallis. The future Mrs. Will Sharpe was gossiping with her friends, and she wasn’t being quiet about it.
“I heard Rhys fingered that new girl at lunch,” she told Hayley Dean. “So foul.”
My whole body went numb as I wondered if there was maybe some other new girl who was getting openly shit-talked. But Jenny went and cleared that right up for me:
“You’ve seen her, yeah? That immigrant girl? I can’t believe she likes Rhys. His fingernails are, like,black. She probably has a disease now.”
I turned as though in a dream to face a beacon of blonde Kiwi beauty. Jenny Wallis was no ugly duckling. She looked like a TV teenager with her glossy lips, sparkly pink nails and perfect skin. Our eyes met, and she screwed up her nose like I stank. “Can I help you?”
“Uh, yeah? I can hear you?”
