Evie.
“She’s your daughter,” I point out. “She needs you too.”
He looks me up and down. “She’s got you, by the look of it.”
No.
No!
“She’s in crisis,” I point out. “I promise if it gets too much, we’ll leave, but please try.”
He dips his head. Defeat. Then he nods reluctantly, pats me on the shoulder as if to communicate the elaborate mess we’re in collectively, and invites us across the threshold. “Probably should have been you all along,” he says.
age SEVENTEEN
34
Evie
I’m such a mess seeing Oliver and his parents off at Sydney Airport that I land on Drew’s doorstep at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning in a flood of tears. It’s been a whirlwind two months, and somehow I scrambled through both my driving test and the end-of-year exams with my mind partially in gear and mainly in a love-induced freefall. I’ve emerged with my license, thanks to Bree’s parents and mine helping me get my hours up in Sydney and with long drives back and forth to Newcastle. And miraculously I haven’t totally wrecked my grades this semester.
But Year Twelve will have to be different. I’m barely holding on to my rational mind! I might be in love, but I’m also determined to get into Sydney University and study forensic linguistics. Ihaveto get my head together, or the intensity of the relationship will do the one thing I always predicted. It will tear my life down.
For now, though, summer holidays stretch before us. Starting with me being totally bereft about Oliver’s family trip. It’s not just that he’s going away. It’s the way his parents acted with him in the departure lounge. Criticizing everything from the way hepacked his bag to what he was wearing, the music on his iPod, and how he slumped in the chair.
“We’re giving you a first-class trip to Europe,” his mother said. “Why don’t you ever appreciate what we do for you?” She was as put together as always. Brunette bob. Pearl earrings. Judgmental expression etched on her face. I’ve tried to get along with her, but my breezy Newcastle vibe just doesn’t seem to cut it in Lane Cove. “Do you see other families giving their teenagers this experience?” She glared at me then, as if I were Exhibit A of the less fortunate.
“Sit up straight and look like you actually want to go,” his father demanded.
“He’s gone for six whole weeks,” I explain to Drew without preamble, crying, when he opens his front door. “How am I supposed to survive?”
He stares at me like I’ve lost it. He’s in flannel pajama pants and a white tank. Bed hair. Dark, school-holiday stubble on his chin, like he’s an actual man. There’s a huge bowl of cornflakes in his hand, as if he’d starve in the time it took to answer the front door. Entirely unbothered by my predicament, he shovels an obscenely large spoonful into his gob and mumbles through it, “Do you need a GoFundMe?”
I want to tip the cereal over his head. Someone as unromantic as Drew could never appreciate that Oliver is the first thought I have waking up or that I drift off to sleep inventing romantic scenarios starring us both. In the mini-screenplay in my head, I take some classes at the boys’ school, so it’s all secret longing looks over the flame of a Bunsen burner, or heads bowed, wrangling quadratic equations in the library’s study nook at recess …
We’ve spent so much time together since the pool party, Oliver’s existence on this earth seems to have woven itself inextricably through my own. First love will do that. Particularly for someone who spent years with her nose stuck in literary romance novels, thinking this happened only in books.
“It’s six weeks, Eves,” Drew says, crunching cereal in a way that makes me want to murder him. “Pull yourself together.”
I stop crying simply because I’m now outraged at his lack of empathy. He and I might have become close friends, but he was my second choice of comforter. Bree has a work shift at the markets this morning, so I’m desperate—and the way he’s receiving me here, I’d have to be.
“Come on,” he says. “It’s fine. I’ll distract you.” We walk inside to the kitchen, which looks like it always does—a little worse for wear.
“Can youstop chewinglike that,” I beg him.
He smiles.
HeknowsI get enraged by the sound of unnecessarily loud chewing. It’s made worse by the way he’s tapping the metal spoon on the ceramic bowl between mouthfuls. And the fact that he’s leaning back against the kitchen bench instead ofleaning into the problem.
“I don’t know why I expected you to get it,” I say. “It’s not like you’ve ever had a girlfriend.”
He feigns offense. “How dare you! I’ve had girlfriends!”
He has mercifully finished the cornflakes but positions the bowl as if to slurp the remainder of the milk and looks at me like this is a challenge.
It’s a step too feral for me. I leap up and snatch it out of his hands.
He towers over me and smiles.
