“Girl from school,” said Jaz, noncommittally.
“Friend?” I asked.
I took Jaz’s total silence as a yes.
“If you’d like to have her over for dinner one evening,” said Oliver, “she’d be more than welcome.”
“I’m not fucking six.”
I half turned in my seat again. “You know that adults have people over for dinner too. Oliver wasn’t saying we’d get jelly and Party Rings.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” put in Oliver, recalled to another of our adulting duties. “Jennifer and Peter can’t do first week of February.”
“Wemighthave to just accept that not everybody can make it,” I told him. “Priya’s already told me she’s busy—and I quote—‘any weekend where you’re throwing the kind of party that has canapés.’”
With a perverse teenage will—the kind that felt the only thing worse than having to talk to adults was having adults talk to each other about things you weren’t interested in—Jaz said, “Brian.”
“What?” I asked, and Oliver asked, “Pardon?”
“Bloke she nicked it off.”
I didn’t think my mum knew any Brians. “Really?”
“Yeah. Said she nicked it off him at uni.”
I also didn’t think Mum had ever been to university. “When was this?”
“‘Oh seven,’” Jaz quoted directly. “Apparently, he’d taken a really long break for work, then gone back to finish his degree. Then there’d been a party to celebrate, and she’d nicked one of his guitars because she figured he wouldn’t need it anymore if he was going to be an astrophysicist.”
Okay,thatwas making more sense. “When you say ‘a really long break for work,’” I tried, “do you mean ‘he spent thirty-three years as lead guitarist of Queen’?”
I was still twisted around enough to see Jaz shrug.
“Ithink,” Oliver said gently, “before we got distracted, you were about to explain to Jaz that even if Odile stole her guitar, stealing is wrong in general.” He paused a moment. “Also, for some reason, you were doing it through the medium ofLove Actually.”
I tried to spool my brain back to the state it had been in three minutes ago and, at best, partially succeeded. “Oh, right. I mean it’s like that bit where Bill Nighy is all, ‘Don’t buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free.’”
Oliver groaned. “Ireallydon’t think that was supposed to be good advice.”
“No, right, but I mean, like, some things are okay when you’re a rock star and not when you’re a normal person.”
Jaz didn’t seem to like that. “Not sure that’s fair.”
“It isn’t,” Oliver agreed. “Although I suppose you could argue that it’s indicative of a certain systemic hypocrisy at a societal level, so it’s probably to some extent realistic.”
“Is that just a fancy way of saying life isn’t fair?” asked Jaz, who’d honestly decoded that quicker than I had.
“And that therefore if you do want to get away with stealing,” Oliver continued, “you should make sure to become rich and successfulfirst.” Then, remembering himself, he added, “Although you shouldn’t be stealing evenifyou’d get away with it.”
“Because it’s wrong,” I added, probably too helpfully. After afew minutes of silence, I craned around again to see Jaz cradling the guitar. “So”—I attempted to sound super casual—“you think you’ll go back for lessons?”
I should have known better than to ask a direct question. Jaz, like always, interpreted it as a trap and clutched the guitar to her chest. It wasn’t until I’d turned back around and let her feel I was barely paying attention that she said, “She’s going to make me eat more of that shitty curry, isn’t she?”
I flipped down the sunshade to look at her in the little vanity mirror. It saved my neck and saved her from direct eye contact. “Hard to tell. She mostly only makes it for people she likes.”
Jaz visibly relaxed. “Oh good.”
“Then again, I think she likes you.”
